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What are we in the golden age of?
What areas of human activity are currently experiencing a time of great advancement or a remarkable surge in quality?
This is a call for positivity, if possible please refrain from irony or backhanded pessimism such as "We are in the golden age of assholes" or something.
Thanks ;)
O wow, I love this question so much it triggers me to stop lurking and type my first ever response on Tildes. Thank you!
I would say we're in the golden age of voices. I heard it said by Sonya Renee Taylor on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast: never before have we had access to so many different voices. I looked it up, because she phrases is so beautifully, so here's her exact quote:
Src: https://momastery.com/blog/we-can-do-hard-things-ep-168/
(Of course, that means a lot of voices I strongly disagree with are also more prevalent, but I love the positive focus of your question so I happily refrain from elaborating on that front.)
That's pretty awesome :D
I find this quite beautiful and true. Watching old media, the predominant US accent in media then was that old-timey transatlantic (white) accent.
But now we have a beautiful rainbow of voice and accents. I myself have an accent that has a mix of influences: Taiwanese, Midwestern American, West Coast American, and more, resulting from a diverse upbringing.
My favorites:
Although, there has also been the a complaint in a similar, but opposing, vein: that the internet has caused a collapse in American regional accents. Because so many of the voices you hear are not from locals, but people on TikTok, youtube, and so forth, there's become a somewhat generic "normal" american accent that permeates through all americans, but especially the generation that grew up with the internet, with some regional variances, perhaps manifesting more in vernacular choice.
And in observation I find that somewhat true. I know many people from the US southeast, but literally none of them have any kind of "southern" accent. If you weren't a linguist with keen ears to hear minute differences, they could be from anywhere in the US.
I love this perspective. I think we spend so much time wrestling with the worse impacts of voices at scale that we forget how much it has enabled. Thanks for sharing!
Board games. Remember when people sat around and played Monopoly? Now there are so many excellent games out there, we're spoiled for choice. And if you can't decide which one to buy, try something out for free on Tabletop Simulator.
Coincidentally the latest episode of The Simpson has a bit lampooning board game culture.
I’m going to use the phrase “It’s so complicated!” every time I talk to people about board games from now on. Especially because I don’t think anyone else will get it.
That joke does uncover a downside to that golden age.
I've noticed board game players tend to be a fickle bunch, often only playing a new game < 5 times before moving on to the next. And for causal players not doing that, it is fairly obnoxious having to learn a new rule set every time.
My friends would certainly be frustrated if instead of weekly Fortnite, every 3 weeks I insisted on switching to a different FPS.
There's a reason chess and checkers havve persisted so long.
lol, about a year and a half ago I started playing board games regularly with a new group of friends. We've played more or less weekly since then, and I can probably count on one hand the games that we've played more than one time. It's been pretty wild, but it's certainly been a brain workout for me to learn a new game almost every week.
I vaguely remember some satire out there about a hypothetical board game where the point of the game is to learn the rules of the game. 😛
But yeah, as much as I like board games, having to spend 30–90 mins reading the manual, setting up the board according to the manual, reading the rules aloud to everyone, doing a play test, and then reconsulting the rules when we hit the many gray areas is such a slog.
One of my favorite new age video games - Kingdom Builder - is actually so complex that I am the only person I know face-to-face that actually understands the rules. It doesn’t help it that the goals can change from playthrough to playthrough.
This is actually one reason I stopped going to a 'board game night' I used to have with friends. Learning new rulesets (which in some cases takes half the night on its own)- or playing from start to finish, often many hours, sometimes multiple playthroughs, then finding out things were done very incorrectly- all of it gets mentally exhausting after a while- to the point where I started actively avoiding it because of the mental investment necessary.
I have a similar feeling. In theory I'd be the ideal board games nerd, but my ADHD doesn't agree with it.
Also, many modern games have deceit and betrayal mechanics. I can't read people or differentiate between in-game pretense and real life contempt. I get extremely paranoid.
Obligatory Parks and Rec.
Last time I played Arabian Nights... it took nearly an hour just to explain the rules. Recommended game time was 2 hours for 4-players. More like... 2 days.
A board/card game I'd really like to see is one based on competitive Pokémon.
Build a deck with a roster of 6 monsters and various item/move cards (the deck would effectively act in the same way as your PP.) Monsters have different stats and can use different move cards depending on their elemental typing. Simplify the rules so that it can be played with just a deck and a single d6.
Add in multiple strategies like poison decks, paralysis decks, card burning decks, freeze decks, burn decks, tank-centric decks, sweepers, etc. Allow support for both Smogon-style 1v1 and VGC-style 2v2 battles.
Don't Pokemon have a card game already?
I have a close buddy who probably owns about £5000 worth of board games. I have played a few good ones with him, like Arabian Nights, Smallworld, Settlers of Catan, and a few others.
Sadly he's planning to give away and donate his collection soon. They're not seeing play (our friend groups have diminished since COVID) and he's planning to end his own life in a few years, partially due to depression, also due to hereditary medical issues.
Music.
There is so much incredible music out there right now, and a lot of the barriers that prevented people from accessing it are getting smaller and smaller all the time. Even hard to find and nearly forgotten recordings are available if you include extralegal means. You are no longer limited to the selections at your local record stores: you have a worldwide library to select from.
Sometimes there is so much it feels like there's a paradox of choice going on: I sometimes feel I just don't know where to start! So far the most fertile ground for new music is Spotify 'Made for you' or, to be more specific, KHRUANGBIN VIBES YouTube channel.
If there's anything that's grabbed your attention recently, please share!
I right now I am discovering a lot of music on battleofthebits.org, which I mentioned on a different post. I would suggest going to their songs list, filter by major battles to get the more polished work, and just go to town.
Services like Spotify and the like have pretty terrible discoverability generally speaking. They tend to only focus on mainstream music, and that is a minuscule segment of the music being produced today. You are better off aimlesssly wandering band camp and SoundCloud.
But the best place to ask for music recommendations is in music-loving communities. There is a reason why so many “sounds” are known by their regions; it’s people having ideas bounce off of each other that creates good music. So if you want the best music recs, find a community that has tastes like you do.
I put on a "Bands that sound like Alvvays" playlist on YouTube and it was over 100 different girls that all sounded like Molly Rankin. It's mind blowing how much music there is out there.
That's an amazing playlist ngl, and kinda endearing in a way. I'll need to put a pin on the 'Bands that sound like ___' idea if I ever want to create an extended stream for my favorite artists.
Khruangbin radio on Spotify is really great, too. I pretty much only use Spotify for the 'xxx radio' these days.
Very much so. Even in just a single top-level genre like metal- there is so much good music coming out that it's almost too much to handle- to the point where you nearly end up with FOMO where you feel you're missing out on artists X and Y by listening to artist Z. I have difficulty keeping my collection small and then I end up with option paralysis.
While I wholeheartedly agree with this I feel like music discovery has not kept up, or maybe it's myself that hasn't. I find myself mostly listening to old stuff, I feel like having so much music makes finding things I like harder nowadays for those with more specific (Maybe niche?) tastes.
If anyone has any music recommendation engines or other way to discover music they have success with, I'm super keen to check them out.
I don't know your age, but people tend to favor revisiting already established tastes and preferences more and more as they age.
Is it possible that this is not just a matter of music discovery tools?
Yeah, could be. There's also artists I used to love but don't really like their more recent stuff.
Fiction. There are an incredible number of stories being written and accessible for free online, even setting aside all of the published books. It would be an unbelievable profusion to the poor teenager who shoplifted books because he couldn't possibly afford as many books as he wanted to read.
Alas, I fear chatgpt (et seq) spells the eminent demise of this medium. I have already seen some horror stories from fan-fiction enthusiasts and short-story competitions and sharing platforms...
Why would GPT be the end of fiction? I would expect it to vastly increase the amount of fiction available.
It might truncate the number of truly interesting and novel things. Think of it as cutting off the pipeline. GPT pulls from the existing corpus, which for now is based on humans writing. Theoretically, it'll be more robust if it continues to get new writing from people. But if it's better than beginning authors, how do they get the attention and motivation to keep writing? If new writers don't get those reasons to practice, how do they become experienced writers who'll create truly new and transformative art? If we cut off the beginning of the pipeline that leads to experts creating great things, then what?
It’s not better than existing authors. That’s like worrying Photoshop will be the death of visual art.
Agreed that if gpt is like Photoshop it will have a strong influence on writing. But not necessarily a bad one.
I agree. I think AI is going to do this for a broad range of professions. Lots of entry-level work will be taken by AI, cutting off the pipeline people use to develop expertise. I think it's a serious problem, and I don't know what's to be done about it.
I'm watching Microsoft's developer conference this week. Microsoft says that large language models are too unreliable to be used unsupervised and are better used as "copilots" that work under direct human supervision. I think that's a good way of doing it, but that won't stop greedy bosses and literary spammers from misusing the technology to the public detriment.
Yea with the democratization of music and software, we already see that curation is a hard problem.
Making it easy for any hack to plagerize and self publish, mostly limited by ability to puppet accounts...You're talking outpacing good writing 1000 to 1 or worse.
Music will likely suffer the same fate in some fashion. Maybe it'll bring back the local scene as a form of curation to avoid the AI haystack.
Leaving aside the merits (or lack thereof) of works produced by such a technology, surely you can see why the commodification and automation of an art form is effectively a death knell for its function as a social phenomenon, which, as the sibling says, also has clear rippling effects. (Whereas, it seems most likely that it will continue to do no more than spew drivel, but still outcompete the real artists by way of volume and extreme specificity.) And though I do mourn the written word, I thank my lucky stars that my medium of choice—live performance—seems to be in no danger as yet.
I agree that it will get a lot more difficult in some ways. It will get even more difficult for authors to find an audience (for one author's take on this, see "Eager Readers In Your Area").
I don't think it will end every part of the literary social phenomenon. People will still want to discuss their favorite stories. Also, curating stories will be both more challenging and more rewarding; I expect that to be an important part of literary culture going forward.
Information. All that one could hope to know and more is freely accessible and available on the internet.
This is a new phenomenon and was not the case even a decade back. Wikipedia did not exist to the same level of comprehensiveness it exists as now, Sci-Hub launched 2011, Library Genesis (now: Anna's Archive) really took off around 2013 or 2014. Libraries began to shift into eBooks around 2010. Scientific papers were digitized early, granted (arXiv was 1991), but still only a few decades ago.
I find it remarkable that in order to know something one only needs to sit down and learn it. Individuals all throughout history would have killed for access to what the internet provides today, and yet, people broadly do not appreciate or even oppose this access. It's a damn shame that so much knowledge has to be scurried around illegal channels thanks to universally broken copyright systems - but nonetheless, accessible it is.
Also, oddly enough, disinformation.
It's never been easier to spread lies, fake audio and visual evidence, and limit your interactions with like minded people.
I'd perhaps disagree: I think it was about as easy for lies to go around, and to stay in a bubble, back when it was hard for anything to go around. Certainly though for faking information.
That is such an odd thing for you to disagree with. How can you explain the increase in US political polarization without understanding that it is based on disinformation?
The internet makes information more freely available. It doesn't really discriminate based on accuracy. It allows for greater global reach of both information and disinformation. It encourages bubbles and echo chambers. So presumably it makes disinformation more freely accessible, just like it does information more freely accessible.
In the past you had two sources of information. What someone told you, or what you read or viewed. While there was no way to fact check one on one verbal disinformation, anything written or recorded was held to a much higher standard than today. Simply because anybody can write, record and publish anything today... anonymously.
The bubbles people had in relation to verbal conversations are a harder thing to quantify. But it's worth noting that the conversations you had in the past were based on your circle of acquaintances. People in the US were more likely to be exposed to different view points politically speaking, as we have measures that show a clear increase in US based partisanship based on geographical boundaries.
Today people complain when they are exposed to different political view points, because the disinformation is so extreme republicans and democrats in America can't even agree on simple facts around who is the legitimate president.
There are several sources for the increased polarization due to disinformation, the increase in social media, the resulting online echo chambers, malicious foreign and domestic actors and rapid information cycles with decreased media literacy.
There are clear studies that show how people actually prefer lower quality information, for instance peoples distrust in news organization have been falling, while preference for lower quality social media conversations remains relatively flat....
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/11/social-media-adults-information-news-platforms/
So lets just posit that you are just as likely to be told something crazy by your co-worker or relative or school chum, but the amount of disinformation in their heads and the certainty it is true are increased because a good part of our lives are now online, where echo chambers will echo the same questionable facts as truth. This is as true for democrats as republicans, just less so, as democrats seem slightly more willing to follow less biased news sources.
For instance, most Republicans are convinced the election was stolen by Biden (totally false.) Most democrats are convinced that Raegan is responsible for the lack of care of the mentally impaired homeless (both parties can be blamed for this.)
Video games.
There's a retro renaissance happening with pixel-driven games, boomer shooters, and even fully featired anthologies from IP holders that make playing games of yesteryear, or conceeptual extensions of historical genres, easily accessible and even more enjoyable to play today
Game development has become just another creative niche with people churning out RPGMaker games, writing their own game engines, and everything in between as an expression of who they are.
You can play the last 50 years of video games for surprisingly cheap because the data is out there and the emulators are precise. I'm playing Tears of the Kingdom and only have issues with dynamic shader compilation, but I will only have an issue with any shader once. (I also bought it).
Games are finally adjusting marginally but, considering inflation, have decreased in price from the 80s and 90s when Pokemon Red and Blue cost $45, but Sun and Moon did as well. I can get a much better experience for $20. A $70 game is still cheap compared to 1990's cost. And internationally companies, and even (especially) indie devs care enough to do market-based pricing.
Yes and no.
The AAA games industry is crooked and for every masterpiece like Tears of the Kingdom, you have probably 50 other games that are blatant cash grabs.
Indie games are where it's at. Used to rag on indie developers a lot but some of my favourite video games like Undertale, CrossCode, Minecraft, Cthulhu Saves The World and Omori are indies.
Even in AAA the greatness of this era comes from how much good stuff there is. Shovelware and crap have always existed but we have alternatives now if there's, say, a slow/bad release season. But yeah, the churn of shovelware has become a regular annual plod, made worse by stale, long-running series. As it isn't a zero sum game anymore, especially with digital distribution and online stores carrying more than Game Stop used to, I think it's fair to make the call simply based on the best, because we can more easily ignore the worst.
Honestly I haven't seriously browsed games journalism regularly for decades because so many of the publications pay so much lip service to the big guys that I couldn't trust their opinions. They've gotten better in recent years, but it's mainly because there's growing awareness that the indie studios are the ones producing the best games instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars making pretty clones of what the other big studios are making. Nowadays I'll be a lot more interested in a project if it's got backing by smaller boutique publishers like Devolver Digital or Annapurna Interactive than if I see one of the big ones like EA or Konami.
Heck, a lot of the time it feels like most of the big AAA studios and publishers seem to forget that artistry and novelty are important aspects of what makes a game so desirable and memorable.
Have they solved the analog crt color blend issue yet?
Better games designed in the 80’s amd early 90’s took advantage of crt’s tendancy to bleed color signals resulting in smooth transitions and new colors. Emulators on modern digital displays interpret these signals “literally” and the result is janky pixelations and clashing colors. If memory serves, Outrun was a good example of this.
Many more modern emulators have CRT filters, from Higan to RetroArch, which seem to do a good enough job of it. Retroarch's crt-royale is considered to be one of the best.
The MiSTer project has a number of filters, including several that were made to mimic the look of specific CRT monitors/TVs. MiSTer has optional analog output, but these filters in combination with a relatively large OLED display (alongside the low latency and high color accuracy) feels nicer to me than plugging it into an aging, whiny, and relatively hot CRT TV.
I wrote up a quickstart guide to setting up crt-royale with Reshade a couple of years ago. It's a little outdated in terms of the menu layout of cry-royale itself but otherwise should be accurate.
I still apply this to almost every single pixel-based game. Even many designed for modern screens see some interesting benefits from this treatment. One of my favourite games I've applied this to is Baba is You.
Oooh that sounds fun. I'd definitely like to try CRT-Royale with Baba Is You and even some other games.
Despite headlines and birth pains, I see us entering a golden age of inclusivity. For all there ills, major corporations are making efforts at including diverse people, along appearance, gender, and abilities axes. There’s plenty room to grow, but the leading organizations efforts appear to be genuine and effective.
I see it a lot on my iphone, too, where real strides in accessibility are being made.
Anyone that is closer to 40 than 30 years of age is likely to agree. No one's saying everything is perfect now, but the progress is tangible.
It's been a long time since I've last participated here, but I too love this question so much I'll trot out the long list of current things that strike me as exemplars of a "Golden Age" right now:
Molecular biology: CRISPR and its refinements; immunological discoveries; vaccines for things we'd never dreamed of controlling before (cancers, fast-mutating viruses, immune diseases); epigenetics; precise neuromodulators; DNA-based archaeology; synthetic biology; precision biochemical manufacturing; tissue engineering; protein modeling and design; imaging technologies that allow watching single active molecules; and more every day. This is not your parents' future. I don't even know of any fiction or futurism that's fully realized the implications of what we can or might do with it.
Sustainability technologies and eco-engineering. We're actually starting to do things that can mitigate our impact on the planet.
Social communication platforms (not quite a Golden Age yet, but we're on the verge). Twitter's decomposition and the general decline of ad-based revenue have accelerated the spread of alternatives that don't depend on advertising and data collection.
Alternatives to laissez-faire capitalism. On the political economy front, even the Georgists are having a revival.
Podcasts, or so I've heard? My squirrelly brain doesn't do listening to them well, but people I trust say there's more genuinely interesting and important content than was ever available via radio or YouTube.
Nuclear fusion research. Still not at commercial-scale production, but we'll probably see it within our lifetimes.
Television. As movies have plummeted in overall quality, television has more than taken up the slack. In all genres there is great, long-form stories being told on television from movie-budget-level shows like Game of Thrones (GoT took a nose dive but the early seasons were incredibly high quality television on all sorts of levels) to cheap but excellent sitcoms like Ted Lasso. I don't have enough time in my life to watch all the good TV. It wasn't that long ago that it was a struggle to find enough good TV to fill the time I wanted to watch TV in!
Is Insurgency still going strong? That used to be my favorite FPS for a solid year or two.
Sounds awesome! What kind of mods do those servers use?