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boopity2025on The Invisible Hand of Gerontocracy

Because class is an actual construct where as age is not? I think your point is somewhat disingenuous

boopity2025on The Invisible Hand of Gerontocracy

appreciate it thanks

boopity2025on Why our cyberpunk futures still look Japanese, not Chinese)

yeah fair take on the vibe shift. to a lot of younger folks tech isn’t mystic anymore, it’s HVAC. the shiny stuff from old cyberpunk reads like “engineering backlog,” so the romance bleeds out

my point is a bit orthogonal: even if cyberpunk-as-aesthetic ages out, why doesn’t the replacement look like neo-shanghai when the built world clearly does. three boring forces:

canon lock-in. art teams reuse the same visual grammar because it ships on time: rain, stacked kanji, noodle carts, neon. low risk, instantly legible etc etc

incentive gradient. being specific about china is a liability if you want the big market, so productions either go “pan-asia blur” or retreat to retro-japan nostalgia that feels safely fictional

reality tax. the current dystopia is LEDs, QR rails, access gates, payments, logistics. it’s structural, not cinematic. the camera loves neon, spreadsheets and turnstiles not so much

on the korean point, agreed that look is ascendant. it’s globally cool, politically safer, and has a whole export machine behind it. that actually supports the claim: we swap in the aesthetics that are both fashionable and low-friction to sell

so yeah, “tech is normal now” explains the cooling. the essay’s angle is just that economics and politics still decide what tomorrow is allowed to look like on screen, even after the vibe moved on

boopity2025on Why our cyberpunk futures still look Japanese, not Chinese)

Yea while i dont disagree with you, i think the japanification of the future as scene in the 80s and 90s is actually the core issue at play. We used japan because it was booming until it wasnt, and we dont use china as the future because its a real threat, unlike allied japan was.

boopity2025on Why our cyberpunk futures still look Japanese, not Chinese)

• Why our cyberpunk future stayed frozen in 1980s style Akira Japan: genre inertia + a safe, marketable form of techno-Orientalism. • Why Neo-Shanghai is missing: China market incentives (censorship), reality outpacing fiction (surveillance as infrastructure), and creators avoiding a fresh round of Orientalism. • The new Jews aka the old Chinese.

boopity2025on Blade Runner's New Jews – China, the diaspora, the future Hollywood won't show

Lol, very good.

boopity2025on Blade Runner's New Jews – China, the diaspora, the future Hollywood won't show

So where the hell is our Chinese dystopian future? Where are the Hollywood blockbusters set in Neo-Beijing? Why does every sci-fi movie still fetishize the same tired Tokyo aesthetic that peaked when Reagan was president?

The answer involves Japanese porn, dying neon signs, and why the Chinese are basically the Jews of Asia.

boopity2025on A single, 'naked' black hole confounds theories of the young cosmos

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boopity2025on Visual programming is stuck on the form

Feels like visual programming keeps trying to be “code, but with pictures” instead of asking what problems pictures are actually good at solving. We’ve basically been drawing the same boxes and arrows since the 80s and wondering why it still feels like wiring up a VCR.

If we really leaned into the visual cortex, maybe we’d get something where zooming out shows the big picture and zooming in shows the gritty details, like Google Maps for code. Until then, node‑and‑wire diagrams are just UML diagrams that decided to cosplay as circuit boards.