Malazan Empire: D'rek - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

You spent 2 whole llamas on that?

And like 8 million other fantasy books. The whole "warrior guy in the middle looking away from the camera at bigger thing looming on the horizon" layout has been done to death and Malazan definitely wasn't the first.

Cause, on 26 August 2024 - 07:54 PM, said:

There's a paragraph or two somewhere in the appendices that say when Helm Hammerhand ruled Rohan the leader of the Dunedains tried to forcefully arrange a marriage between his son and Helm's daughter, which was refused and lead to a war between Rohan and Dunland. So that basis for the story of the movie does come from canonical lore, but then all the details are newly made up.

Cause, on 13 August 2024 - 09:25 PM, said:

Personally, I see no reason why not when the Olympics has plenty of other sports that require judging and/or officials carefully orchestrating it like synchronized swimming, figure skating, judo, equestrian dancing, gymnastics, fencing, etc, that have been part of the Olympics for a loooooong time. I can definitely understand the idea of wanting to have a sports competition that consists entirely of only purely athletic events that are won by racing, intangible scoring, or knocking another person unconscious first, but the Olympics simply isn't trying to be that and hasn't for, uh, centuries I guess?

I could totally get behind reorganizing the Olympics into a yearly event that cycles through the types of sports, so like one year it is all the races, track-and-field events, and swimming. But then the next year it is all the artistic judging events like diving, gymnastics, and breakdancing. Then the next year is all the big team sports like soccer, volleyball, etc. Maybe even have a chess and e-sports year, why not. Then after 5 years it loops back to the races and track again, and so on.

Specifically on the Australian breakdancer stuff

I don't know anything about the "meta" side of it like what she has said or any of that, but purely in the context of "this athlete at the olympics wasn't very good let's laugh at them" I think it is all a bit sad. The Olympics is trying to stay modern(ish) by introducing new events that aren't the same old 20 largest sporting traditions in the world for the last 50 years, and as a consequence of that some of these sports are going to be ones where a handful of countries are way ahead of any other countries. But because it's the Olympics every country is allowed to participate. If Jamaica wants to send a bobsled team by god they should be allowed to do so.

I'd never particularly expect Australia of all places to be a powerhouse in breakdancing in the first place... so is this not somewhat like laughing at the Angola badminton team for not being on the same level of competition as China and Korea? (Except that it's seen as "ok" to do so here because Australia is a "western" English-speaking developed nation or whatever.)

Maybe the argument people would make then is that if Australia doesn't have a breakdancing scene "on par" with the most competitive countries they shouldn't have sent someone at all, but I'd disagree with that, too. I am a big fan of every country sending at least 1 rep to as many events as they can, even if they don't expect to place particularly high, it can still be part of growing the sport in that country, and the small community around that sport in that country can still feel the achievement of getting 80th place one year, then 70th place the next Olympics, then 58th the next Olympics, and so on, until eventually decades later it becomes the story of how after decades of growth they finally won the first gold medal for that country in that event.


Now, if it turns out that Australia *does* have an incredible breakdancing scene and the Australian version of Morning of Owl got snubbed in the selection process in favour of sending this woman... well then yeah, Australia (and/or the IOC, however it works) needs to take a hard look at how they're running their qualifications selection and improve THAT.



On "what is a sport"

I don't think you'll ever find a good straightforward definition for the word at this point. It is already such a commonly used umbrella term for all sorts of diverse stuff and you can't unclog it from that usage. In a perfect world you'd see more of those, er, disciplines(?) making a compound word out of it like motorsports, but that just hasn't happened.

I think you *could* try to break down all the things that are commonly called "sports" into a series of categories and try to give *those* things simple definitions. Something like:


Traditional sports - competitive athletic endeavours where humans perform difficult physical feats, with intangible victory criteria - Pole vaulting, football, weight lifting, javelin throwing, swimming, running, tennis, basketball, hockey, etc
Reflexive sports - competitive endeavours where humans perform a physical task with precision - Gun shooting, archery, darts, bowling, golf(?), etc
Mind sports - competitive endeavours where humans perform difficult mental challenges without any significant physical challenge - Chess, scrabble, puzzle competitions, Microsoft Excel championships, Geoguessr competitions, etc
Artistic sports - competitive endeavours where humans perform physically challenging tasks in a artistically pleasing way that is scored by judges more on its artistic expression than on being the most difficult physical feat - synchronized swimming, diving, figure skating, breakdancing, most gymnastics, etc
Cavalry sports - competitive endeavours where humans ride biological animals that perform athletic feats - Horse racing, horse jumping, elephant polo, etc
Motorsports - competitive endeavours where humans operate mechanical machines - car racing, motorcycle jumping, sailboat racing, etc


Of course many sports would be hybrids of these categories - Equestrian dancing is a Artistic-X-Cavalry sport, Starcraft fans who insist that fast reflexes and how many clicks you can make per minute are just as important as your strategies would say it is a Mind-X-Reflexive sport, and so on. And that's fine.

I think a categorization of "sub-sports" which together all encompass the overall concept of "sports" is about as close as you can reasonably get to defining sports without dismissing one or more of the ways that the word "sport" is already commonly used today.

Cause, on 12 August 2024 - 05:38 PM, said:

done