- REGALIER
- Posts
- 02_04
02_04
REGALIER
February 04, 2024
In this issue:
PRESENT
-How some believe Taylor Swift to be a government psy-op-
-What the fuck is kiddieland? Why graphic design trends are schizo-
-PalWorld hits 19 million online users, Nintendo weeps in silence-
PAST
-1800s: The story of the artist behind history’s darkest art-
-700s: An archangel visited him in his sleep with building instructions-
-70s: Finding the essence of nature with math-
“As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend.”
― King Solomon
✦ PRESENT ✦
Conspiracy and Politics
The Taylor Swift psy-op
Europeans are microwaving their popcorn as American right-wing internet accuses Taylor Swift of being a “liberal psy-op” to generate votes for Biden.
Supposedly, even her relationship with Travis Kelcee is fake. The all-American couple’s romance is manufactured to swing the election in Biden’s favor with their influence on young white men and women. Again, supposedly.
Said operation is expected to climax at the Super Bowl in 2 weeks. There, the stars will figuratively align: Kelcee will be playing, Taylor will be cheering, Biden will be speaking, and Usher will be performing.
Okay, but seriously… Could Taylor affect the public opinion?
Yes actually, she’s done it before.
Primo: If Taylor fans like something, they love it. A lot. No questions asked. Her billion-dollar tour causing inflation to rise wherever she visits is not the only testament to this.
Since Taylor started dating Travis Kelce, it’s been estimated that the relationship is worth $331 million to the Kansas City Chiefs and the NFL, increasing the female viewership substantially. Right after Swift’s appearance last September at a Kansas City Chiefs game, sales of Kelce’s No. 87 jersey reportedly soared nearly 400%.
Secundo: The “Taylor Swift strategy” has been tried and works, as she has successfully endorsed Biden before. Last year, a single Instagram post from her generated 35,000 new voter registrations. This means that fund-raising appeals from Swift are potentially worth millions of dollars for Biden.
Supposedly, Biden is attempting this strategy again, but at a larger scale. One idea that has been tossed around: sending the president to a stop on Swift’s Eras Tour. The right is most likely in fear of this cause it’ll work.
Why the Super Bowl is a prime opportunity:
Non-Americans might be surprised to learn that 23 of the top 30 most viewed American TV broadcasts of all time are Super Bowls. Last year’s Super Bowl amassed an average view count of 115 million, sitting just under the 1969 moon landing. Some are predicting that the upcoming Super Bowl will dethrone the moon landing, which makes it a fantastic opportunity for political marketing.
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Vivek Rawaswamy says:
Twitter says:
King says:
“Celebrities are used to swing elections. Nothing new. The right is doing their argument disfavor by using words like ‘psy-op’ and inflating the argument to the authenticity of the Travis/Taylor relationship.”
Design
The schizophrenia of graphic designers, with Elliot Ulm
Have you heard of these?
Brutalism 2.0
Ai.assimilation
Maximalism
Kiddieland
Y2K
Bento Grids
Retro Vintage
Serif+
Nostalgia
Botanica
Petty Bohemian
Bart Deco
These my friend, are design trends; the latest investigation subject of Elliot Ulm, the man behind the YouTube channel elliotisacoolguy Elliot makes hilarious, clever, and very, very stylish videos about graphic design.
First, if you haven’t heard of him, a serious disclaimer:
If you do not care about graphic design, get ready to care suddenly and immensely.
This week Elliot posted a video about the design trend predictions on YouTube that happen every year. Ironically, these videos have become a trend themselves.
Subsequently, these videos fall into one or both categories:
Repeating the same trend every year (maximalism has been trending for a decade),
Making shit up to not repeat your predictions from previous years.
“You can’t just turn on the camera and talk about minimalism for 20 minutes, because you talked about minimalism in your 2014 trend prediction, buddy!”, Elliot says. “So, what do you do when you’ve run out of trends to talk about and you can’t just list popular design styles anymore? Well I reckon you just make shit up.”
And that’s how you end up with freak terms like Kiddieland, Brutalism 2.0, and Maximalism, the third of which has been some weird trigger word that describes anything remotely cluttered.
If you like funny, passionate, and skillful people; go and watch Elliot's videos, he’s that type of person. Here’s a link.
Other hits of his include:
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YouTube says:
King says:
“I like Elliot. But his home looks like a plastic-y piece of shit. Not a trace of timelessness.”
Gaming
PalWorld hits 19 million players, putting Nintendo to shame
Palworld has made a mockery of Pokémon, all because it did what Nintendo never dared: add a little bit of violence.
The game is more or less Pokémon infused with the latest Western gaming trends: guns, multiplayer, crafting, base-building, and stat-tweaking.
It’s not genius, it’s not innovative and it’s not masterful in any way. PocketWorld, the developers, simply supplied a demand by taking two popular things and merging them. But that, in and of itself, is a very competent thing to do when people with the resources (Nintendo) refuse to.
The “Pals” designs are obvious renditions of already existing Pokémon, the 3rd person shooting and movement are obviously from Fortnite, and the building/crafting/surviving are obviously from Ark.
And that’s awesome, in a sort of Robin Hood, “I’ll help the starving since the king won’t”, type of way.
As this story garners clout and fans get to learn more about PocketWorld, rumors are circulating that the project was quite literally strapped together by a group of guys with a budget of $10,000 who knew nothing about game development and who added guns because “Americans like to shoot things”. Talk about salt in the wound. Check out this leaked screenshot:
“Most models and gun stuff done by some middle schooler who was working part time at a convenience store the devs went to”. Wow.
What we’re really talking about here is a consequence of the democratization of technology. As development tools get more accessible and humans get more technologically literate, companies that do not supply consumer demand will have gains stolen from them by the techno-literate consumers themselves!
For a decade, fans have been begging Nintendo to take a step to maturify the Pokémon IP in some way. In Nintendo’s defense, it’s hard to know what direction to take when your fanbase is split up between literal children and grown-ups who have lived with your products for about 20 years and are now looking for something a little more mature.
Nintendo has tried to meet that demand, ish; look at Detective Pikachu. The movie skillfully toed a careful line in its creative direction: The world, plot, and the sometimes offputting real-life representations of the Pokémon had a darkness that demanded seriousness. This was dressed down with a family-friendly Pixar-esque humor, for the yout dem of course. This formula of satisfying both poles of the Nintendo audience proved to be a huge success and might be a big part of why the movie grossed $433 million worldwide.
But obviously, making Detective Pikachu and not a shooter was the safe move. Being big has its downsides. Still, one can’t help but feel like PalWorld rug pulled from under them.
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Reddit says:
King says:
“Pocketworld got paid and Nintendo got a reality check. I see a win-win.”
Quick hits.
Elon Musk is (temporarily?) no longer the richest person in the world. A Delaware judge struck down his $55 billion Tesla pay package for being excessive. Musk, who can appeal to the state’s Supreme Court, is worth a measly $154b without the package.
$112 million XRP Ripple was stolen in a hacker attack.
The Joe Rogan Experience is no longer a Spotify exclusive.
Meta/Facebook is doing very well. It turned 20 years old on Saturday, and its stock jumped 20% on Friday based on Q4 earnings, adding $197 billion to its valuation. Happy birthday!
Universal Music Group is pulling its song catalog from TikTok.
Volvo is cutting funding from Polestar.
Larry David confirms that Curb Your Enthusiasm will end with season 12.
Arcteryx and Salomon owner Amer Sports raised $1.37 billion ahead of their U.S. stock market debut.
PAST
Art History
The Black Paintings of Francisco Goya.
On entrance, visitors of old man Goya would not be greeted at the door. Rather, you’d have to find Goya yourself. Not a difficult task, but a nervous one; simply follow the flicker of candlelight in his pitch-dark house.
Whichever corner you’d find him in, the old deaf man would be facing the wall, obsessively painting directly on it with a crown of candles on his head.
This story is considered a folk tale more than historical, but it’s a fitting supplement to the wicked story of the famous Black Paintings.
At the age of 72, Francisco Goya, a respected and famous royal painter, left the Spanish crown court to live alone in a two-story farmhouse. Located outside Madrid it was fittingly called Quinta del Sordo (Deaf Man’s Villa), after the previous deaf owner. In that house, between 1819 and 1823, Goya painted some of the darkest, most haunting art in art history.
The paintings are believed to depict old Goya’s worldview, a consequence of the psychological torment that he suffered. As a royal painter, he became famous for stunning, colorful depictions of the king and the bourgeois. But throughout his elderly days, his idea of rulers, the church, and authority had been tainted by the atrocities of war that affected innocent people.
After the panic, terror, fear, and hysteria that came with the bloody Peninsular War, old man Goya had a new bitter attitude toward mankind. His art got darker and darker, and more and more controversial.
In his house, he put himself in cavernous isolation from the world. His wife was dead, and most of his children too. And so, all alone with his mind and memories, he painted 14 violently dark and distorted paintings on the walls of his home; these are the Black Paintings.
Here’s an image of where historians believe that the paintings were painted inside the house:
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The works are predominantly composed of symbolic depictions of authority in a diabolical light, as they prey on hopeless humans. As one might expect, Famous pieces include Witches Sabbath, where Satan dressed in clergy robes is seemingly initiating a white-clad nun in front of a group of people. The most famous entry is perhaps Saturn Devouring His Son, which is Goya's take on the Roman myth where Saturn eats his sons to ensure that none would overthrow him.
Depicting the ruling class in such an unfavorable light was very taboo. Most likely, Goya never intended for the Black Paintings to be shown to the outside world. Regardless, the process of transferring the murals onto canvas began in 1874. Today they’re seated in Museo del Prado in Madrid and are not only considered some of the greatest European art of all time, but also an early trace of modernism taking shape.
Hungry for more? Here’s a fantastic video 15 min by Great Art Explained detailing the life and work of Goya
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King says:
“My type of human.”
Architecture
When God gives you a blueprint, you build the Mont-Saint-Michel.
On three separate nights, the bishop Aubert of Avranches had the same dream. In it, the archangel Michael served him specific instructions to build a church on the Mont Tombe in Normandy (that’s the power of following up for you).
That was in 708. What started as a lone monastery atop a mound has after some 1300 years evolved into a fortified abbey that looks like something straight out of a Miyazaki flick. The whole thing is a hobglob of buildings atop a mountain rock, together stretching up 150 meters and forming a satisfying cone of French medieval excellence.
Depending on the tide, Mont-Saint-Michel is either an island or part of the fast land; meaning sometimes you can walk to it from any angle and sometimes you have to take the beautiful arching bridge.
But in the 1300 years since Aubert’s dream a lot happened. Besides fires, bombardments, and collapses, the Mont has been subject to many political ebbs and flows.
During the French Revolution, the monks were ejected and the splendid building became a prison for political prisoners. Ironically, the name changed from Mont-Saint-Michel to Mont Libre (Mount Freedom).
The prison remained til 1872 when the French government began restorations to make it into the national monument it is today. Other than the Tour d’Eiffel it’s probably France’s biggest tourist attraction with 3 million visitors per year. Its 29 inhabitants must really, really like that.
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King says:
“The Mont has what they call a ‘microclimate’. Meaning the weather can rapidly change. It can easily go from sunny to foggy to rainy several times per day, which adds to the mystique.”
Mathematics
Finding the essence of nature, with math.
The 70s were trippy: music, art, fashion, drugs, and spirituality were all honed in on psychedelia. And at this point, it’s kind of a cliché.
Here’s what people don’t talk about though: Math had a trippy phase. What you see above is the “Mandelbrot Sequence”, a mathematical marvel discovered in 1979 that changed our understanding of geometry and nature's patterns.
Benoit Mandelbrot, a Polish-born, French-American mathematician, was a maverick. Unlike his peers, who were busy doing lame nerd shit like crunching numbers and solving equations, Mandelbrot was fascinated by something much more... abstract.
He had an affinity for the rough, irregular, quirky, and imperfect patterns of nature. An unfortunate disposition as it doesn’t quite fit as neatly into conventional mathematical boxes.
But that did not matter for Benoit. With the help of (very early) computers, he tinkered with a simple, yet bizarre mathematical equation:
z → z² + c.
Sounds innocuous, right? But geometrically generating this equation on a computer summons the stunning, infinitely complex shape you see above. Later, Mandelbrot named this sequence after himself (if you discover something this cool you get bragging rights too).
Why it matters: It wasn't just a mathematical curiosity; it showed how fractal geometry could be found in everything. It’s like a 20th-century Fibonacci sequence, it occurs everywhere in nature: coastlines, nervous systems, clouds, architecture, galaxies, broccoli florets, etc. This work opened up a whole new angle on the world’s complexity and beauty.
Good job, Benoit.
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King says:
“The equation is very simple, yet lends to infinite complexity. I think this is Benoit’s most profound discovery. It says something about the dual nature of the world.”