The Gaming Den

See, it's not. Like, that's what I want to communicate in this case, but my mind associates the term with sex work more than sketchy deals.

Prak wrote:See, it's not. Like, that's what I want to communicate in this case, but my mind associates the term with sex work more than sketchy deals.

Yeah, hustler is for short cons. Hustler is for posing nude.

To me, a hustler would be someone who makes money in a non-traditional way, either legal or less so.

Prak wrote:Checking to see if my associations with a term are representative of mainstream associations.

If a character in a game is described as a "hustler," what first comes to mind about them?

Charisma/social manipulation rogue?

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:To me, a hustler would be someone who makes money in a non-traditional way, either legal or less so.

The character of Nick (the Fox) in Zootopia is a small-time Hustler. It's not clear that each step of his non-traditional work is illegal, but it's definitely in that vein.

I recommend reading Trevor Noah's biography Born a Crime and he has quite a lot about he and his friends hustling. In that case they were pirating CDs but that became the foundation of a number of ways to turn over cash. Mostly it involved trading in stolen goods - a box of lunch meat for a pair of sneakers, a pair of sneakers for a speaker; a speaker for a guy who had cash...

I tend to picture people tricking people into bad bets, like hustling someone at pool, or something.

I think my view of the word is currently influenced by that movie "Hustlers" with Jennifer Lopez and Cardi B that came out recently that I've not seen but heard about a few times.

My mental image of a hustler is a very specific guy at a gas station trying to sell me a pair of speakers out of the back of his van.

Thaluikhain wrote:I think my view of the word is currently influenced by that movie "Hustlers" with Jennifer Lopez and Cardi B that came out recently that I've not seen but heard about a few times.

Even that movie is actually about conning your "clients." Prostitution is just prostitution. The strippers in Hustlers are hustlers because they promise more than they deliver and take the calculated risk that rich guys don't want to admit how they lost their amex cards.

There is a BBC series called Hustle which is awesome and focuses on a group that runs 'long cons'. They always target people who we, as the audience, feel deserve it.

When I hear "hustler" I typically associate it with someone hiding their skill at a game like chess or billiards to lure amateurs into gambling their money on a very unsafe bet.

Funny enough, when I hear "hustler" I think "con man," but when I think "hustle" I think "means of income sufficiently street-level that you could hide it from the government if you wanted to," even if it's something totally innocuous like cleaning people's windshields at long stoplights or making YouTube videos. A "side hustle" just means that A) it's not your primary source of income and B) it's not a job with a boss nor do you own a business with premises.

deaddmwalking wrote:There is a BBC series called Hustle which is awesome and focuses on a group that runs 'long cons'. They always target people who we, as the audience, feel deserve it.

Isn't that the show that inspired the American show, Leverage?

Hustle is a con, but not a big one like the Italian Job. More small and quick. A side hustle is something you do to make money under the table. A hustler is one who performs a hustle. And Hustler is Larry Flynt's monthly distribution of porn.

Maj wrote:

deaddmwalking wrote:There is a BBC series called Hustle which is awesome and focuses on a group that runs 'long cons'. They always target people who we, as the audience, feel deserve it.

Isn't that the show that inspired the American show, Leverage?

I never saw Leverage, but they sound very similar. I couldn't find anything saying one inspired the other, but Hustle came out 10 years earlier. The creator of Leverage credits his love of shows like Mission Impossible for the idea.

Maj wrote:And Hustler is Larry Flynt's monthly distribution of porn.

Fun fact: The very first issue of Hustler had nude paparazzi pics of Jackie Kennedy.

Isn't your life a richer place for knowing that?

What is the obligation for a fictional TV series to be accurate to reality?

I'm currently enjoying the second season of Jack Ryan (Amazon Prime). I really like John Krasinski's portrayal of the character. The story is fun spy shit. It's a good, not entirely brainless romp.

The season has gotten bad reviews, though, because people are unhappy with the inaccuracy of the show's portrayal of Venezuela. (The top complaint: It's not a socialist hell-hole. It's a right-wing hellhole that's trying to be being saved by a left-wing female.)

Media bears responsibility for the messages it sends and this is sort of like the long line of pro imperialist propaganda that helps inoculate shitty attitudes about how America are the good guys and we deserve to be the world police and it's good when the CIA does military coups because if the cia decides to coup then it must not have been a real democracy anyway. Also the whole "Venezuela is bad because China and russia will use it as an airstrip for their invasion of the us" shit.

It's basically like how law and order teaches people that cops are good and all laws are justified. Its bad.

But I do like the part where he begins a lecture on how Venezuela is a threat by listing the valuable resources in venezuela that he believes the us should control.

That part was pretty accurate.

I actually went back and watched the first episode again because my understanding of what was going on didn't match the reviews of the show. And I wanted to make sure that I understood what was actually going on.

I have come to the following conclusions:

1) The people posting about the inaccuracy of Venezuela's portrayal are right-wing people who are really pissed that socialism is not being blamed for the failure of the country. Its authoritarian president is.

2) No one really knows anything about Venezuela. I do not know enough about the country to know if its portrayal is accurate or not. I know that shit is happening down there, and in the show, shit is happening down there. But I don't know if what we see in the US is reflective of the country's actuality.

(I had to look up the facts in the scene mentioned by Kaelik; they are true. And that actually makes me surprised that we aren't meddling with Venezuela even more than in the Middle East. Are deserts really that much easier to fight in?)

3) The show is more complicated than watchers expect it to be, and I think their criticism comes from not getting it. For example, I've seen multiple comments about how Jack Ryan isn't the type of guy who would go to Venezuela on a black ops mission. He didn't. He went on a diplomatic mission that went horribly horribly wrong.

Back to my question: The point about propaganda is a good one. I hadn't thought about it from that direction. Most people wouldn't get that nuance, and I think quite a few would say they're immune to it.

Maj wrote: (I had to look up the facts in the scene mentioned by Kaelik; they are true. And that actually makes me surprised that we aren't meddling with Venezuela even more than in the Middle East. Are deserts really that much easier to fight in?)

Someone in the US mentioned how vulnerable Venezuela's power grid was not that long before it mysteriously went down. Just because they aren't financing death squads out in the open anymore doesn't mean they aren't meddling.

Maj wrote:The point about propaganda is a good one. I hadn't thought about it from that direction. Most people wouldn't get that nuance, and I think quite a few would say they're immune to it.

See also shows like 24: we had to torture these bad guys or good people would have DIED!

Even beloved shows like GITS are propaganda, where laws and rules don't matter as long as the good guys are catchin' the bad guys.

There are a lot of shows/movies where the 'good guys' aren't supposed to play by the rules because they're the good guys, and they know better. There is a spoof movie of Lethal Weapon called Loaded Weapon 1 I watched yesterday streaming on Netflix (it has some big names like Samuel L Jackson and William Shatner, but it is not a good movie) and the 'loose cannon' (Emilio Estevez) tries to convince the 'by the book' cop (Samuel L Jackson) to pursue the case after the chief took them off of it.

It's not heroic and it really is frightening. That's a relatively old movie (Samuel L Jackson looks young without any de-aging CGI), but it's a staple even today.

How many cop shows/movies show the hero cop ignoring the rules to get the job done? Even after they get caught breaking the law, even after being suspended and turning in their badge/gun, they keep working the case, because they KNOW they're right, they FEEL it in their gut. And guess what, they were right the whole time! It's good to ignore the rules, they're the hero!

I'd say most cop shows/movies play to this hero fantasy (read: propaganda). To quote Mark Twain: 'Only Thing That Stops A Bad Guy With A Gun Is A Good Guy With A Gun'

Kaelik wrote:long line of pro imperialist propaganda

Yeah, the only thing I appreciate about JAG is that that its flamboyant awfulness convinced me that mainstream propaganda was a thing even though I was very young and extremely stupid when that show debuted. I swear even the horn section in that show was transparently full of shit. That it was on for a decade, syndicated and allowed to spawn numerous spin-offs is something I try not to think about too hard lest it disrupt my sleep.

phlapjackage wrote:How many cop shows/movies show the hero cop ignoring the rules to get the job done?

What's even more insidious is the fact that virtually every modern procedural has episodes that turn into an infomercial about the amazing benefits of the surveillance state. Every once in a while a show will feature authorities who are unambiguous villains but even those shows are fond of tying up loose ends by having the resident quirky nerd clack away at a keyboard and pull a name out of the National Registry Of Bad Crazies. It's the best kind of propaganda in the sense that it's quick and about as viscerally offensive as pulling up a wikipedia entry.

Question: Where does Robocop fit into all this?