Monday, December 6, 2021

Misc. Drone-Inspired Thoughts

Does anyone know which country this building is in?
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBb_kSO3vTo

It occurs to me that graffiti exists because it's comprehensible without a guide. Men want to be grammatical subjects, affecting the world. They wish to do things which have effects. Americoid style combines pulling the ladder up after you and feminizing everything, locking out men from as many ways of affecting the world as possible.

I have to imagine a real school system, which taught men how to put a useful mark on the world, instead of allowing themselves to be relegated to vandalism. Pulling up the ladder is largely illusion. It's not only possible, but easy to do real work, it's just that the ways and means are non-obvious. Need a guide. A sherpa. (Or a genius.)

 

Speaking of school, what is the history of drones? Why couldn't they make these in the 70s? Are there material advances? Did incremental innovation make something sufficiently cheap? Did they just not think of it? The broken window fallacy is a hell of a drug. There's an enormous amount of real history they could be passing on, and instead they offer intentional distractions, which are fundamentally a kind of attack and even feel like an attack. The fear adds to the distracting effect. 


That guy flies pretty darn good. Did you notice the drone had to do elaborate flips sometimes because torque is super weird and counter-intuitive? Nevertheless I have to wonder how much better it would be if he had spent all that effort on something with a return, rather than something that makes ultimately fluffy videos using the ruins of decaying Empire. 

(Basically, I continue to admire the Amish.) 


Someone needs to tell drone designers that beautiful things are more sacred. Those engines sound like absolute shit and if they focused all their attention on making them sound better, they would accidentally make it vastly more profitable. 

You can change the sound by using better bearings and by almost-insignificantly varying the shape of the blades. Although nontrivial - might have to change the bearing paradigm - it's very far from impossible. 


I especially like that he included a crash. How many times did he crash learning to fly that well? But it's okay, the drone doesn't exactly die. Just get up and keep going. If you never crash you're spending too much time in airports. It also reveals he's taking real risks. It's not something that looks risky and is in fact super easy. (Ref: nearly every "hard" videogame.) 

Speaking of videogames, here's the broken-window-fallacy-breaking low hanging fruit examples. Art: Cuphead. Gameplay: Cortex Command. (Art on that one too.) VG doesn't have to be anywhere near as degenerate as it is.Further: imagine a 3D shmup which exactly copied drone flight mechanics. It's obviously not beyond human reaction time, but you can't feasibly shoot things IRL, so it needs to be in game form.

2 comments:

GC said...

Germany. The warning signs dotted around are in German and there's graffiti of Merkel on the wall at 4:05-4:06.

Alrenous said...

I see, thanks.

Guessing it's somewhere in the periphery of East Berlin?