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It was probably so successful precisely because it was seeing the world through the eyes of a 50 year old Japanese biker with the face people expect in influenc
by DoreenMichele 6y ago
It was probably so successful precisely because it was seeing the world through the eyes of a 50 year old Japanese biker with the face people expect in influencers.
Most young people aren't that interesting. Older people tend to be more interesting, but no one wants to look at them.
It's like when movies show Charlie's Angels or James Bond fluently speaking multiple languages and efficiently wielding various weapons and skiing like Olympic skiers. You know that's not real. Any one of those things takes all your time to master. But it makes for a cool movie to bundle them all together.
And maybe people fell for it in part because we watch nonsense like James Bond. So it hit that note and didn't immediately set off alarm bells.
- Alex3917 6y ago> You know that's not real. You can definitely do the James Bond semester at college if you're so inclined, which iirc is: wine tasting, handgun safety, cross country skiing, swedish massage, and ballroom dancing.
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- martinflack 6y agoSigh. Where was this wisdom when I was an undergrad...!
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- djmips 6y agocross country skiing? Shouldn't it be downhill?
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- a4isms 6y agoBoth movies and books agree it's downhill. Also what we would call "skeleton" today. And if you go by the books, a course in Bentley repair is not necessary because James "has a guy."
- CoolGuySteve 6y agoWhat college are you people going to? I never saw any of these, not even as clubs, at Waterloo.
- Alex3917 6y agoCornell. The specific classes are: Introduction to Wines: https://sha.cornell.edu/admissions-programs/undergraduate/academics/courses/food-beverage-management/hadm4300/ https://sha.cornell.edu/admissions-programs/undergraduate/ac... Introduction to Handgun Safety: https://courses.cornell.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=31&coid=493657 https://courses.cornell.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=... Cross Country Skiing: https://scl.cornell.edu/coe/pe-courses/spring-pe-courses/snow-sports/xcskiing https://scl.cornell.edu/coe/pe-courses/spring-pe-courses/sno... Swedish Massage: https://courses.cornell.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=31&coid=493634 https://courses.cornell.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=... Ballroom Dance: https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP20/class/PE/1153 https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP20/class/PE/1153 Of course the advantage of going to Waterloo is that you can probably pass the Google coding interviews.
- phillc73 6y agoI clearly wasted my time with English Lit, Modern European History, Linguistics and German in my first year at University!
- reaperducer 6y agoDon't feel bad. I wasted my time with Soviet Studies. Oops.
- jascii 6y agoSomething tells me that that is still pretty relevant...
- 908B64B197 6y agoI mean, Cornell is an Ivy, not a regional school.
- jmgrosen 6y agoNot sure whether I'd prefer to be Bond, or a pirate: archery, fencing, pistol, and sailing.
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- reaperducer 6y agoBond. Simply for the hygiene.
- aksss 6y agoI think Bond is good with a sailing yacht, pistol, and fencing. Just missing the archery unless some Bond nerd wants to point to some Bond archery (and I'd believe it).
- kbenson 6y agoCompletely ignores political science, economics and physics? Checks out. ;)
- antonvs 6y agoJames Bond can't afford to worry about physics when he's skiing off the edge of a mountain onto the top of a plane.
- cobookman 6y agoWouldn't that require an understanding of physics to properly make his landing :D
- frenchy 6y agoUnderstanding physics wouldn't cut it, what you really need is a generous dose of plot armor.
- jnsie 6y agoAbsolutely not! If he understood physics he would understand that the landing is impossible, and would therefore die in the attempt. That he doesn't know the landing is impossible is what makes it possible, and he lives. Simple.
- a_t48 6y agoAhh, the Hitchiker's Guide method.
- samatman 6y ago"Is a Mongolian horse archer applying physics even though he has no idea what physics is and it hasn't even been invented yet" is a pretty deep philosophical rabbit hole.
- aksss 6y agoIn the same way that one can appreciate good wine without having memorized the names of all the world's grape varieties.
- tablespoon 6y ago> You can definitely do the James Bond semester at college if you're so inclined, which iirc is: wine tasting, handgun safety, cross country skiing, swedish massage, and ballroom dancing. Pretty sure James Bond's handgun use is more on the unsafe side of things. I mean, he does have a license to kill and uses it frequently.
- aksss 6y agonit: "deadly" is not "unsafe". You can be perfectly safe in your firearm handling and still wield the power to kill other beings. "Unsafe" presents the risk of being unintentionally deadly, but being intentionally deadly is perfectly compatible with being safe in the gun's handling.
- WalterBright 6y agoYou're not going to learn ballroom dancing in a semester. By learning it I mean being proficient with it that you're smooth and comfortable with it, and can make your partner look good.
- usehackernews 6y agoThe point of the James Bond semester is more so about the lack of learning
- nerdponx 6y agoWaste of school tuition perhaps, but certainly not time wasted learning any of those skills.
- edmundsauto 6y agoAre you really learning the skill, or are you sampling it? One semester is maybe 40 hours of instruction. Even twice that in practice puts you at 120 hours. I hardly think that is enough time to become a good skier, etc.
- nerdponx 6y ago40 hours of skiing is 10 4-hour sessions. For a young adult in decent physical shape and with good instruction, that's enough time to establish a base of technique and confidence. That's pretty much all you get in most undergrad courses anyway. It's usually an intro to, or first taste of, a sophisticated subject that would take a long time to master. It's only after many such intros (i.e. many hundreds of hours of study) that the student will begin to develop a more sophisticated understading of their chosen field. In that light, is a 1-credit skiing course any different from a 1-credit astronomy course?
- saagarjha 6y agoI’m a decent casual skier and I’ve probably skied about that much in total.
- katmannthree 6y agoTo be fair, a very large chunk of old people are likewise uninteresting. Aside from the general dulling of the mind that comes with age, you have to actually do things with those years for them to mean something.
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- omgJustTest 6y agoAnd you need opportunity to do it, and other people need to find it appealing. You could do 1 of the 10 old / young people tropes and get clicks. "Meaning something" personally and "being interesting" are not the same. Also there isn't that much wrong with just exploiting popularity machine. So a bunch of people thought you were a young girl, and you're not... who cares! If anything you are teaching people to stop putting so much credence into the SM sphere... which can only be good.
- unishark 6y agoAhem they said "older", not old. 50 is middle aged. Even if a person is a simple product of their times, as one gets older that gets increasingly interesting. Because the times change so much over the years.
- nullsense 6y agoMiddle would depend on life expectancy. The lower and upper bound is probably 30 to 50 respectively. 50 feels straight up old though. I thought 40 was considered to be the "middle"
- superfrank 6y ago> It was probably so successful precisely because it was seeing the world through the eyes of a 50 year old Japanese biker with the face people expect in influencers. I can't read Japanese and I used Google translate for the post text (so maybe there's more depth that's lost in translation), but the pictures look to be pretty "generic influencer". None of those pictures look any different than what you would expect from a random 20 something influencer. Additionally, the text on the tweet is pretty much "I like motorcycles" along with "her" age and height. Everything here seems to be pretty much the same "here's a pretty girl in front of something" post that instagram is full of. Again, I'm only going off the pictures and Google translate, so if someone who understands the culture better wants to correct me, feel free, but until that happens, I'm going to believe there's nothing more to this than a bunch of people wanting to look at a pretty girl. Edit: Ran the tweet in the article through DeepL at the suggestion of some replies. Here's the translation so you all can come to your own conclusions: ٩ Everyone! Do you have a bike? Spring will be here soon Age: Showa era Height:166 Lives in Ibaraki Kumamoto I love to tinker with motorcycles Comment: Life is once, play this world
- DoreenMichele 6y agoI don't know anything about motorcycles. I wouldn't trust Google translate because one of my son's hobbies is looking up the original Japanese (and translation notes, etc) for anime and other works to figure out what in the heck went wrong with the translation because Japanese culture has all these honorifics that English lacks and that goes weird places, along with the gender neutral pronouns, among other things. If you know nothing of the language, culture, motorcycles, motorcycle gear, etc, I am going to guess there are a lot of really important details that are utterly lost on you.
- superfrank 6y agoI agree with you about Google translate not being perfect. I actually wrote most of my comment up before running it through translate. Even without the text, none of those pictures seem especially deep, so even taking the text out of the equation, I still stand by my comment. That being said, this is the Google translation of the tweet in the article: Minasan ٩ (ˆoˆ) ۶ Do you have a motorcycle? Spring is coming soon Age: Showa ○○○ Height: 166 Living: Ibaraki I love: messing around with bikes Like I said in my last comment, I know Google translate is far from perfect and I'm very open to being proven wrong, but I have a hard time believing that there's some deep insight in this post when that is what Google translate put put out. The translation seems pretty "influencer" to me.
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- bshimmin 6y agoI like to think James Bond is terrible at DIY and cooking, at least.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoActual reality: James Bond is like The Dread Pirate Roberts and gets played by someone new every few years. Only the name stays the same.
- stopping 6y agoHe certainly doesn't know how to operate an espresso machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3UQmKiVH9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3UQmKiVH9E
- bredren 6y ago> Most young people aren't that interesting. They are not, but I think people will get better at realizing this the way many now know what it means for something to be "photoshopped" whether they can identify it and subsequently dismiss it or not. I believe that physical "good" looks, analytical and social intelligence, trade and athletic skill, and artistic talent will eventually converge as our future "stars."
- seph-reed 6y agoI worry that the norm is moving more towards specialist and away from generalist. Things have been pretty stable for a while. And people who invest ridiculous amounts of energy in stuff like the stock market or social media tend to get serious returns. Those are not truly useful skills anywhere except this one ecosystem.
- bredren 6y agoThis could be because Of the relative concentration of these ideas. We’re at the stock market has gotten competition from cryptocurrency’s, and social media becomes less service oriented and more of a layer. Sort of like photoshop enthusiasts knew about and admired skill in the tool but the public generally had little familiarity. As photo manipulation became common “photoshopped” as an idea was more commonly understood.
- justicezyx 6y ago... Maybe this Maybe that This type of argument is toxic. Adds little to the conversation. If you can back any of these maybes that would be great...
- ce4 6y agoExactly. The one thing I immediately noticed was the ~30 year old vintage Yamaha TZR 2-stroke model complete with pics of open engine etc (check the small diameter exhaust pipes). Which youngster would ride such a bike, let alone touch its internals? This stuff is very niche, maybe not so much in Japan but over here in Europe you would have to search for it or pay some decent money to get it in that condition. The owner probably has bought it in his 20s :) Edit: the power output curve is also not for the faint of heart and there's no electronic helpers, overall very different to ride compared to a current 600cc model with all the bells and whistles :-)
- cbozeman 6y agoIn the Ian Fleming novels, James Bond is clearly intended to be in his late 30s / early 40s. The same seems to hold true for all the movies. Bond is not a young man by any stretch of the imagination. He is a world-weary traveler well-versed in high culture, espionage, elite military tactics. His cultural knowledge is explained by virtue of his upper class birth and upbringing; its likely he served in the military before being recruited by MI:6, and of course the espionage is the hallmark of the latter agency. That said... when Jonathan Goldsmith was auditioning for part of The Most Interesting Man in the World, the ad agency called his agent and said, "We really like him, but we think he might be too old," and she replied (quite masterfully), "How could the Most Interesting Man in the World be young?", implying it would take a lifetime to acquire the achievements. So I guess the answer is, be old and good-looking, like Goldsmith, or Sean Connery.
- MisterBastahrd 6y agoThis is why Batman and Superman are perpetually 35ish in the comics. Young enough to be in their physical prime, old enough to have a clue about the world.
- nanoscopic 6y agoEfficiently wielding weapons is not terribly difficult. It just takes practice. My parents bought a number of guns and became quite proficient at firing them accurately within 2 years. I have many relatives and friends who are amazing at skiing. My cousin posts pictures every winter of the sick lines he skis down. I'm neither an excellent marksman nor skier, but I don't think it would be difficult to become excellent at both given an excessive amount of free time within a few years. I can though drive a manual very well, own a sports car, and have no fear of drifting it. A coworker of mine was a pro skydiver, and recommended it to everyone. I've met other skydivers as well; it's supposedly easy and affordable. Another coworker owned his own plane. Planes are costly but he wasn't James Bond rich... My brother-in-law owns a few hundred guns including fully automatic weapons. Being James Bond is a bit idiotic in real life as he engages in a lot of high risk stuff, but it is certainly doable.