3 ms·

there's a few religious/historical assertions in there (this piece, not the talk itself, which I recommend without reservation) that are pretty contentious for

there's a few religious/historical assertions in there (this piece, not the talk itself, which I recommend without reservation) that are pretty contentious for various thorny reasons but are kind of just presented off-handedly as fact.

jiggawatts 4y ago
With no references, not even hyperlinks to most of the Wikipedia articles that are mentioned in the text..
- ccooffee 4y ago
  Agreed. The gist seems...rambling and unfocused. Other than "collapse" being very zeitgeist-y, I'm not sure what people are finding in this gist.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    I think people are reading the title of the submission and assuming it's a link to the actual talk (which has been around for awhile and people like it), instead of a gist written by someone else entirely, and upvoting accordingly
joe-collins 4y ago
Jonathan Blow made a couple of neat video games. He also tweeted this while wrapping up development on The Witness. https://web.archive.org/web/20160318053101/https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/690327260109283328 https://web.archive.org/web/20160318053101/https://twitter.c... Whatever the actual contents of the bottle, its intended interpretation is obvious, and it features in the secret ending video to that game. He's a clever designer, but I'm not going to accuse him of being a well-grounded individual.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  this "article" was not written by Jonathan Blow. the "pee jug" is a prop in the FMV secret ending of The Witness like you said. the tweet with the "pee jug" photo seems to have been made kind of off-handedly as a joke, given that nobody would know about the FMV secret ending of the game at release. (the joke being that he really did pee in a jug during development of the game.) none of this has to do with the "article"'s author making offhandedly controversial to the point of being offensive assertions about the history of the Jewish people.
  - pxc 4y ago
    > none of this has to do with the "article"'s author making offhandedly controversial to the point of being offensive assertions about the history of the Jewish people. You mean the part where he briefly paraphrases Wikipedia on the consensus view of modern scholarship on the historicity of the Exodus narrative, namely that there isn't much? It's not even like he brings it up to make some point about Judaism, just outgrowing his own religious upbringing which also involved the Exodus narrative. I get that dismissing the Exodus narrative as historically false can fit into a wider project to deny the persecution of Jews more generally, and that the denial of religious foundation myths can sometimes be tied into genocidal or colonialist projects of other kinds. But that is so obviously not what is going on in the OP, and the general expectation should never be that anyone else takes one's religion's narratives as fact, or even anything close to it.

jiggawatts 4y ago

With no references, not even hyperlinks to most of the Wikipedia articles that are mentioned in the text..

ccooffee 4y ago
Agreed. The gist seems...rambling and unfocused. Other than "collapse" being very zeitgeist-y, I'm not sure what people are finding in this gist.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  I think people are reading the title of the submission and assuming it's a link to the actual talk (which has been around for awhile and people like it), instead of a gist written by someone else entirely, and upvoting accordingly

joe-collins 4y ago

Jonathan Blow made a couple of neat video games. He also tweeted this while wrapping up development on The Witness. https://web.archive.org/web/20160318053101/https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/690327260109283328 https://web.archive.org/web/20160318053101/https://twitter.c... Whatever the actual contents of the bottle, its intended interpretation is obvious, and it features in the secret ending video to that game. He's a clever designer, but I'm not going to accuse him of being a well-grounded individual.

adamrezich 4y ago
this "article" was not written by Jonathan Blow. the "pee jug" is a prop in the FMV secret ending of The Witness like you said. the tweet with the "pee jug" photo seems to have been made kind of off-handedly as a joke, given that nobody would know about the FMV secret ending of the game at release. (the joke being that he really did pee in a jug during development of the game.) none of this has to do with the "article"'s author making offhandedly controversial to the point of being offensive assertions about the history of the Jewish people.
- pxc 4y ago
  > none of this has to do with the "article"'s author making offhandedly controversial to the point of being offensive assertions about the history of the Jewish people. You mean the part where he briefly paraphrases Wikipedia on the consensus view of modern scholarship on the historicity of the Exodus narrative, namely that there isn't much? It's not even like he brings it up to make some point about Judaism, just outgrowing his own religious upbringing which also involved the Exodus narrative. I get that dismissing the Exodus narrative as historically false can fit into a wider project to deny the persecution of Jews more generally, and that the denial of religious foundation myths can sometimes be tied into genocidal or colonialist projects of other kinds. But that is so obviously not what is going on in the OP, and the general expectation should never be that anyone else takes one's religion's narratives as fact, or even anything close to it.