The Off Topic Topic

[Gaijin de Moscu]

My wife and I have been doing a major clean-up in our house. I've taken 5 or 6 massive bags of old-yet-wearable clothing to the collection point, hoping it'll still serve those in need. We've lowered the back seats in the car and are now shuttling to the local recycling point, taking out what feels like a ton of old furniture, electronics, toys, video cassette and DVDs (didn't even realise we had those!)... I burned several shelf-fulls of old documents...

Off to finally sort out the 2.000 emails hanging in my inbox which have been a major source of stress.

I'm now feeling a massive surge of fresh energy.

Highly recommended!

[Josquius]

Today in "Boy, that escalated quickly":

Is osman a thatcherite or something?

[Tamas]

Pretty cool: Albert Apponyi was a Hungarian aristocrat and an important political figure from the 1870s, even up to the 1920s. If you are a Hungarian you surely can recall if nothing else his name from history class, street names, etc. I had no idea video and audio footage of such a 19th century stateman has survived, but here he is giving an English monologue to some camera crew in America, 1929: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yuy7ttFyK0&t=25s

[The Brain]

Pretty cool: Albert Apponyi was a Hungarian aristocrat and an important political figure from the 1870s, even up to the 1920s. If you are a Hungarian you surely can recall if nothing else his name from history class, street names, etc. I had no idea video and audio footage of such a 19th century stateman has survived, but here he is giving an English monologue to some camera crew in America, 1929: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yuy7ttFyK0&t=25s

Very cool.

[Josquius]

I vont to suck your blood.

[Sheilbh]

Video game industry now far bigger than the movie business. It's really weird to me how this is still not seen as a major industry/creative sector by governments - loads of countries (including the UK) will make lots of attractive tax deductions and rules to encourage the film/TV industry. It seems odd that no-one seems to be doing that with video games yet and that I suspect video game lobbying in the way other big industries do would still be seem as nerds and hobbyists:

[Josquius]

I guess it helps/hurts that games employ a lot fewer people and they don't do much to support people outside the industry - work being done in an office in a fixed place rather than travelling location to location.

[ulmont]

Video game industry now far bigger than the movie business.

Than the movie business...in movie theatres.

The global entertainment market topped $100 billion for the first time ever last year. The Motion Picture Association released a new report on the international box office and home entertainment market showing that the industry reached $101 billion USD in 2019.

The report states that the box office made $42.2 billion globally and that home/mobile entertainment accounts for $58.8 billion worldwide.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosaescandon/2020/03/12/the-film-industry-made-a-record-breaking-100-billion-last-year/

[Sheilbh]

But even then that's just above mobile games alone and almost half games across platforms.

[Admiral Yi]

Interesting that it's all mobile.  That means they're making 93 billion off of Angry Birds type time killers.  I get a lot of Youtube ads for that kind of shit and they all look incredibly stupid.

[Syt]

Video game industry now far bigger than the movie business. It's really weird to me how this is still not seen as a major industry/creative sector by governments - loads of countries (including the UK) will make lots of attractive tax deductions and rules to encourage the film/TV industry. It seems odd that no-one seems to be doing that with video games yet and that I suspect video game lobbying in the way other big industries do would still be seem as nerds and hobbyists:

Considering how Rockstar hardly pays taxes in the UK in the first place I'm not sure how much more incentive you want to give.

[Jacob]

Video game industry now far bigger than the movie business. It's really weird to me how this is still not seen as a major industry/creative sector by governments - loads of countries (including the UK) will make lots of attractive tax deductions and rules to encourage the film/TV industry. It seems odd that no-one seems to be doing that with video games yet and that I suspect video game lobbying in the way other big industries do would still be seem as nerds and hobbyists:

Plenty of places give incentives to the video game industry. Maybe they don't in the UK, but there are plenty of incentives floating around across the world.

[Sheilbh]

Oh okay - I'm wrong.

It was just from my impression that I don't see it talked about very much in business-y media while you do about other sectors that are far smaller.

[Josquius]

Is there a term for the 1984 phenomena of history being rewritten?
Orwellian tends to be used more for the surveillance state stuff but I find this other side far more interesting and scary.
There's the intentional stuff of course. The modern recasting of Blair as the devil responsible for everything bad. But then there's the stuff that just happens. Warping of the public memory of how things were.
I increasingly grow frustrated at it in the sense that so many just don't grasp that history worked fundamentally differently. That cultural differences aren't just a question of watching different TV and speaking a different language.
A big place I see this is for instance with the British empire people just see it like all these parts of the world were part of Britain rather than a varied collection of weird entities.

[The Brain]

Sounds like someone doesn't want to keep China British.