Posted by trevin 7 days ago
China is a concrete jungle anywhere you have a mass of cameras.
That about sums it up. Not whatever US-based fashion trend that you hate this week.
NVM, I think that's a Fiat, not Austin.
Basically had culture shock driving down a wide north american road.
It's not just the colors. It's the emptiness.
The clearance of everything in north america is insane. It's just so boring.
For the percent of colors in photos, i m not sure. Older technologies oversaturated colors and probably underrepresented greys (or turned them to red/green) , but maybe newer photo technologies allowed more blues and greys.
The cinema thing is real and very annoying to the point where i have to oversaturate all my screens in order to stop seeing actors' faces as corpses.
This worship of color is how you end up with Gen Z who paint over beautiful bare wood furniture and cabinets. Enraging.
In this class of games, it's common for a game to be printed, possibly have several printings, and then go out of print. For particularly sticky games, they may come back with a reprint or redesign years later. And I've noticed going back decades that the redesign almost always replaces bold, functional, high-contrast designs for low-contrast, "realistic", "pretty' designs. Examples:
- Brass: original [1] vs redesign [2]
- Titan: original [3] vs redesign [4]
- Saint Petersburg: original [5] vs redesign [6]
I don't know why this is but part of it comes down to people wanting to add "value" by changing things rather than just reprinting them. But why go "realistic"? I think there's a pervasive idea in this space that "realism" is good. So that's a trend.
Cars go beyond color. Cars become a white or other neutral color because it's the least potentially "offensive". Car makers want the largest possible market. Plus companies like Hertz want this kind of car. But look at cars from the 1950s through 1980s and on top of color you have a lot of cosmetic design choices that we don't have now because they're less aerodynamic but, more importantly, cheaper.
In a way, the car ceased to become an object of expression. Instead for many people it's just pure utility. So the designs became utilitarian. You may disagree because people are very opinionated on what cars they prefer but I think that just expresses brand preferences not aesthetic choices.
Chain restaurants also exhibit this trend. Compare McDonald's from the 1980s vs now. A lot of fast food restaurants are now much harder to distinguish.
[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/4265429/brass-lancashire
[2]: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1278376/brass-lancashire
Either way, I'd never even consider buying 1 (the redesign?), it's nearly impossible to "read" that board, while 2 (the original?) looks immediately inviting, without being at-all ugly.
https://culture.ghost.io/cultural-stasis-produces-fewer-chee...
He writes about incentives since the 1990s that have pushed artists to shy away from making bold aesthetic choices that might seem dated a few years later.
The result is more stability and a longer shelf-life for culture, but less experimentation and fewer ways for new styles to break out.
