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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.)
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 think you're suffering from selection bias here. Unless you live in the American South yourself, you're likely coming in contact with the people from there most likely to lose or downplay their regional dialects.
There is some loss in dialects with stigma attached like this, but I think you're overselling it. The main contributor imo is the stigmatization of such regional dialects, not the existence of the internet. And as for the generic "normal", you're getting tons of great influence from and exposure to AAVE in people who would likely have barely encountered it otherwise.
I actually grew up in Atlanta, though I don't live there right now. I'm sure there's areas where there is more pronounced accents, that are more rural likely, but in general, especially in metropolitan areas, accents are much more smoothed out in my experience.
In the end, that is anecdotal, although there has been some linguist writing about this. It's less that there are less accents, and more that they seem to be moving together. To an untrained ear, it may as well be on the same, though.
Lots of mobility is a thing too. I was in Boston recently visiting a friend, and man, I did not hear a single "Boston" accent.
Oh I definitely agree that there has been some leveling of dialects in the US (and probably also in the UK), I've got a linguistics background. I just think it's common for laypeople to over-attribute this to technological advancement rather than other factors.
Mobility is definitely a factor. My own speech has "leveled" as I've moved away from where I grew up (for instance, my parents and siblings say "pop" but I now say "soda", much to their chagrin). But among those who do remain in the regions they grew up in, like many of my family members, a lot more regional traits are retain.
I will say I work remotely with a couple of Bostonians, and they definitely have the accent.
The book Language Myths, a collection of essays by linguists that's a mainstay of intro to linguistics classes, contains an esssy titled "T.V. Makes People Sound the Same" by J.K. Chambers that addresses this. The book came out in 1999 so it doesn't do much with internet language but cable television already existed. I confess it's been ages since I've read that essay so I don't remember the evidence put forth in enough detail to summarize it here. It's a very affordable and readily-available book though (print edition's $16 on amazon) and I highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in language.
I’d say that TV started this trend, it was definitely well in motion before the rise of the internet, but it’s certainly accelerated. One issue is that in some regions, the regional accent is seen as a mark of being lower class or less educated. Seems to be the case around New England where not so long ago we had a president with the accent.
I think the disappearance of regional accents is a real shame. It’s something that brings fun and character to real life interactions. I appreciate anyone who doesnt try to unlearn their accent.
That's pretty awesome :D
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!
Safest time in human history.
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.
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.
The only thing I know about Kingdom Builder is this comment right here and it already sounds really intriguing.
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.
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.
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.
Obligatory Parks and Rec.
It does help that in many (not all) cases you can innately understand a big chunk of the rules by categorizing the game. Dune: Imperium, for example: if you tell someone familiar with games that it is a deckbuilder and a worker placement game, all that's left to really explain is the icons and phases.
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.
My god that last sentence was a gut punch. I wish your buddy well and hope things improve for him.
I'm not gonna elaborate too much on why. He's had a tragic upbringing, loads of home/family issues, spent a few years homeless, has been through multiple failed relationships, is on pretty strong antidepressants and antipsychotics, is a functional alcoholic, and he's now at that age where his dream of having a stable nuclear family is unattainable.
I think what truly broke him was his mother passing away two years ago and the fractured relationship he had with his siblings completely falling apart.
I think few among us would not be broken after going through all of that. I had a friend a while back that was dealing with similarly tragic circumstances - all you can do is be present and offer support when appropriate. All the best to your buddy and I hope things improve for him.
Jesus...
Tabletop Simulator feels like Surgeon Simulator a lot of the time.
BoardGameArena, however... it boggles my mind how many, good, and well implemented games there are. For free and then more almost free. Some are a pain to play on a real table, too. I don't quite imagine playing Fluxx without computer assistance, too many rules changing too fast to even remember.
This is neat because I just got my brother Wingspan for his birthday and he was so excited.
He is constructing a room for boardgames and DnD and this was his first "real" one, me and the rest of our friends have been bringing ours over (because he has the best space) but I'm not getting him started on his own "collection".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting that you say that because having watched a YouTube video in which the argument is made that due to the world becoming smaller (so to speak), certain artists could never have become famous. It was due to the isolation of the market that they were released on that the artists were able to grow so big. The example used in the video is Aphex Twin.
Popularity is not a good benchmark for how good any particular song or artist is. If you think about how many of the highest selling albums are actually made, the people who are most responsible for the creation of the actual music on the album - the composers, producers, etc. - are given so little credit they might as well be uncredited. What I’m trying to get at here is that there are a lot of extremely talented musical artists out there, but in the past they were always limited in popularity to their local area. Even after the advent of audio recording, the industry was not ever big enough to give everyone a chance to let their music speak for itself.
One of the things that I love about it is that there are so many artists making music that I couldn’t have ever dreamed of. Go look up Patricia Taxon and tell me that they are making music that could have found an audience 50 years ago.
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.)
LibGen had a name change? What have I been using lately, then?
Anna's Library was apparently made in response to Z-Library being shut down, so maybe that's what @petrichor was thinking of?
Yes, also, LibGen is scattered and practically not maintained. I believe uploads are still working but the database is fragmented across a couple of forks.
Thanks to Dr Who, I know what petrichor is. Useless info (except if I'm meeting Amy, then I'll totally suprise her with that information), but good to know nonetheless.
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.
One of my favorite old short stories, Parnassus Unbound, tackles this perception in a kind of fresh way. Basically, person who created an infinite AI storyteller has an encounter with an unusual bookseller who offers him a fresh perspective on the damage, or lack thereof, of his creation.
I do still worry about the rise of LLMs turning everything into a firehose of pedestrian takes that remove a lot of the incentive for people to create original ideas, but the story definitely added some context to my thoughts around the matter.
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.
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.
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!
I'm really loving that Fantasy and SciFi seem to be getting more and more popular, and things that would have been a movie 10-15 years ago are now being turned into dedicated series.
Making/Tinkering. Access to software and tools to facilitate creatives has gotten cheaper and easier to get into. 3D printers and keep getting cheaper, and other technologies like CNC and laser cutting are now entering a hobbyist price point. You can find a YouTube tutorial to learn almost any software or hardware tool. And many of the professional CAD and coding tools of the day offer "community" versions of their software that can be used for free.
I'd like to add to this with my specific hobby: radio control. I'm into aircraft specifically, and with a hot glue gun, dollar tree foam board, and less than 80$ of cheapo chinese-made electronics you can have a very capable rc airplane! I love it, and I've built cheapo planes for family, friends, and even the neighborhood kids. When I was a kid, getting into the hobby meant investing hundreds of hours (and dollars) building and covering frail balsa wood models, putting a small gas engine on it, paying registration fees to a club, and inevitably destroying the thing first time out.
Now with Cheap electronics and foam board you can crash, glue, tape, and get back in the air a few minutes after that crash. And no clubs or fees. It's truly a great time time to be this kind of hobbyist.
Absolutely, flitetest has really transformed the hobby!!
This is the golden age of accessing foreign pop culture. As a kid and a teen, anime was gradually becoming more accessible, but you still had to deal with heavy censorship, limited releases, high prices for media, and some works just never getting an official translation, or being dropped midway.
Not only is anime more accessible than ever, but if I'm curious about any other country's media, I can find it on Netflix or other streaming services easily. I could watch the latest episode of One Piece soon after it airs in Japan, then binge a Korean drama like Business Proposal with my mother, check out a Bollywood movie for the heck of it, play Genshin Impact on my Samsung smartphone, and leave the room so my gran can watch her Telenovela.
Great time to be a language learner too, because you can access any media you want in nearly any language for listening practice.
That’s an amazing story! I saw you’re a new user, welcome and I hope to see more comments like this from all y’all!
Your story is very similar to mine. Grew up mostly between Louisiana and Alabama, and was miserable most of my time there, but thanks to getting into anime, and pouring into learning Japanese, it gave me a destination to escape to, and goals for the future. I'm on my 8th year in Hokkaido, and only now am I thinking about returning to the states. I probably would be dead or in prison if it weren't for the inspiration I had gained from the medium.
My mother has sunk super hard into Korean pop culture, and it's been a joy seeing her go through the same "weeb" phase I did, and inhale every aspect of the culture she can. She's doing her everything she can to convince my dad to come travel to this part of the world lol.
What I observe now in my country is that kids are learning less and not more English. That is because back in the day almost nothing was translated and you had to learn English to understand songs, movies, RPG books, or anything on the internet really.
Nowadays there are good translation tools and a lot more things are translated and localized, so there not as much incentive to learn English.
I bought my first English dictionary when I was 12 because I wanted to read the books inside the videogame Alone in the Dark.
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?
After reading all the comments and trying to come up with one thing to contribute myself, I can only arrive at one conclusion. My answer is everything. We are in the golden age of everything. Yes, that's hyperbolic, but it also makes sense so that's my answer.
Food. I can visit any Walmart and find thousands of different ingredients from every corner of the world. TikTok has exposed the masses to different cooking styles. I could make a different meal from scratch every day and never run out of recipes to try.
My pantry has soy sauce, coffee, parmessan cheese, and bananas, which all started on different continents.
Supermarkets don't feel novel to most of us, but ask your grandparents how many spices were in the their cupboards.
I didn't see AI and space yet.
I know AI is a bit of a buzzword right now but I remember playing with "kidpix"(?), clip art, early photoshop - that kind of stuff.
I want a tree here! click click click, now I have 3 trees and everything looks kinda janky and the exact same. Now something amazing could be "created" by just describing it. I really do think the next 10 years will be mind bending for how we use computing power.
and then space - 3D printed rockets, private space companies going into orbit (or almost orbit), moon base?, MARS BASE?!
all of the above yes please.
Physical media; 4K movies, Blu Rays, and even some DVD releases. It may be out of mainstream discussion, but for physical media collectors it's a pretty amazing time right now. There's a solid number of boutique labels releasing so much every week. Large catalog of stuff getting 4K transfers these days.
I’m slowly building my collection of 4K disks, but I have to say that some of the releases are extremely frustrating. Classics such as Lawrence of Arabia (the remaster is incredible by the way) are being run as super limited prints or included as part of extremely expensive box sets. I am currently struggling to find several I really want and I refuse to pay sky high eBay prices.
That said, I don’t intend to buy a streaming movie again. It’s almost reassuring that you own the disk and it doesn’t matter what you’re currently subscribing to or what company just went under, taking your library with them.
I do agree about some of the unnecessary limited releases and Lawrence of Arabia 4K is a very good example. There's always a balance between producing enough copies for the market and creating some sense of scarcity for collectors. That one took it a bit too far for a major label release.
I think this is debatable, but content.
Every traditional medium - TV, movies, books, games, music - has been made more numerous, more accessible an with far more variety than before.
It's good because even the most obscure of tastes can find something to enjoy. It's not so good because we're also suffering from content bloat. There's simply too much choice, and all of it trying to grab your attention. It's so hard to find something to actually consume that you spend most of your time just reading synopses or watching trailers.
Star Trek! There are more shows running right now than ever before, and even the worst series (Discovery) is still pretty good! The best series, Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks, are the best Trek ever made, by most peoples' reckoning.
Motorsports! Formula 1, while always popular, is becoming increasingly so with Drive to Survive, more races in the US, a wider media presence, and them being picked up by big TV networks by ESPN. Alongside that, Indycar is also seeing a surge in popularity, likely due to F1 drawing in new racing fans and then those fans seeking out similar products, Nascar is still somewhat in the dumps, but on a road to recovery, potentially, WRC is using hybrid cars now and they're fantastic, IMSA and WEC are becoming increasingly accessible, both on TV and for in-person events, and the list goes on. You can watch some good racing every single weekend of the year, it seems.
It's definitely a far cry from the days where the race is maybe broadcast in your country and the newspaper maybe has results posted.
I'm a nerd, ARM SoCs.
my first "content" on here as well!
I get that AI is a buzzword but I do think we are in a sort of golden age of AI (or at least the AI industry is) never before have we had so many high performance models to choose from and use all completely for free. Multitask models have never been easier. Even if you aren’t an AI researcher you can get in on it by just empirically experimenting with prompts to large language models.
I do think it’s a golden age because we are reaching an inflection point where things get much messier from here on out—Models locked behind closed doors are becoming the norm when originally it hasn’t. We’re learning less about how the most powerful models in the world work. The legality of IP and ownership of generated content is being called into question. We’re approaching human-like or beyond-human performance in probably just a few years time. All these are good things for AI but will ever complicate how we use it.