FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
6hr ago
True. From paintings, Cleopatra doesn't look like much to write home about, but her seduction skills are the stuff of legend.
he got caught up in a Chinese Honeypot
Awhile ago, someone had a post talking about feeling oddly disappointed by the bribes people associated with the Trump administration had been caught taking, as many of the dollar amounts seemed pitifully small. Scott made a similar point in Too Much Dark Money in Almonds: when you consider the power and influence afforded to the executive and legislative branches, the amount of money invested in campaign donations and PACs seems impossibly small.
I feel the same way looking at photos of the Chinese honeypot in question. I'm not saying she's ugly or anything, but she seems decidedly... mid? And this is coming from someone who has a thing for Asian women! There are plenty of Asian women who aren't even famous for their looks who are more attractive e.g. Tiffany Fong, Yvette Young, Jia Tolentino. I've personally met Chinese women who were hotter than her.
FtttG
8hr ago
For reference, I voted in favour of legalising abortion in Ireland. This is one of those "there's nothing I hate more than bad arguments for views I hold dear" situations.
Regardless of whether one believes a fetus is "alive" – unlike a tumour in one's lungs, it has the potential to develop into a sentient human being. Removing a malignant tumour presents no moral quandaries even if the presence of the tumour is the direct result of actions you freely undertook. You can't escape the moral quandary associated with abortion just by saying you never consented to getting pregnant.
Maybe lung cancer is a bad example. Supposing Alice has a lot to drink and knowingly gets in the driver's seat of her car, fully cognisant of the fact that she's too inebriated to drive safely. Predictably, they have an accident in which a pedestrian, Bob, is killed. Upon their arrest, Alice defends herself by claiming that, while she did drive drunk of her own volition, she never consented to hitting Bob with her car, so she can't be held responsible for it.
No one would be persuaded by this reasoning: the entire reason drink-driving is illegal is because it makes motor accidents vastly more likely. Choosing to drive drunk entails choosing the likely consequences of driving drunk. Choosing to have unprotected sex entails choosing the likely consequences of unprotected sex. As a society we might still determine that abortion should be legal, but the idea that we can just dissolve the ethical dilemma by announcing "I never consented to getting pregnant, so you have to let me do whatever I want" strikes me as exactly insane as letting Alice off the hook because she never consented to hitting Bob with her car.
FtttG
10hr ago
No. My point is that it's meaningless to say you didn't "consent" to the entire foreseeable, biological consequences of pursuing a particular course of action. You might as well legislate against the tide.
So what if you didn't consent to getting pregnant? You are pregnant.
FtttG
14hr ago
If you sign up for baby-making, then you can't act shocked when you make a baby.
I once saw someone on Tumblr (who, in their defense, was probably a teenager at the time), try to square this circle by arguing "I consented to having sex, I didn't consent to getting pregnant".
Pregnancy is a foreseeable consequence of sex in much the same way that lung cancer is a foreseeable consequence of smoking. If you're an adult who smokes a cigarette, you are consenting to the increased risk of lung cancer that might result.
FtttG
18hr ago
This is closely related to the distinction between conflict vs. mistake theory.
FtttG
1d ago
This is probably the most frequently requested feature request for Substack. I'd love if they had a credits system where you could buy €10 worth of credits, and pay €1 to unlock one article in perpetuity.
FtttG
1d ago
I love that his name is Peter Magyar. Imagine if the POTUS was called Joe America.
FtttG
1d ago
Seconding archive.is or archive.org. Smry.ai works really well for certain sites.
I think about this a lot. In purely abstract domains (mathematics, music), people tend to produce their best work at a young age. Basically every notable popular musician in this century and the one before it produced their most recognisable work in their twenties: there are precious few examples of a rock band whose seventh album is widely considered their magnum opus. No one in the world would take Lennon or McCartney's solo material over their Beatles material. The Fields Medal is awarded to mathematicians under the age of forty, in part because there has basically never been a mathematician producing valuable maths when they were older than that.
For less abstract domains like writing fiction, a certain amount of life experience seems to be necessary to composing something that really works (Douglas Coupland once said that almost no one is prepared to write a novel before the age of thirty). Unlike in music, there have been cases of novelists producing what is widely considered their best work in their forties or fifties.
From a personal perspective, while I still consider myself musical, I know that I'm far less musically creative than I used to be, and think it's increasingly unlikely I'll ever top the mathcore EP I recorded when I was 24.
FtttG
3d ago
Ludonarrative Harmony
On TV Tropes they call this "gameplay and story integration" as opposed to "segregation".
FtttG
3d ago
It became more apparent to my more experienced eyes that a few of the levels in the second half of the game are pretty sloppily, borderline amateurishly put together
TV Tropes has a YMMV trope called "Disappointing Last Level" for when the end of the game doesn't live up to the same standard as previous sections. The ending of Half-Life where Gordon travels to an alien planet called Xen is such a notorious letdown that this trope used to be called "Xen Syndrome".
FtttG
3d ago
I do legitimately think Half-Life is a groundbreaking shooter, and fun and engaging enough to be worth playing through to the end. I loved Half-Life 2 on release, but a lot of that came down to novelty: it was the first successful video game with an even passably realistic physics engine, and the facial animation was (if you'll pardon the pun) jaw-droppingly impressive – it still looks better than plenty of games released 10 or 20 years later. But the way the game introduces a whole new mechanics set every two hours is a bit gimmicky. I rather think it peaks early on in the fourth mission on the riverboat.
FtttG
3d ago
For years, my favourite video game ever was the game Bungie released immediately prior to this one, Oni, a Western spiritual adaptation of Ghost in the Shell. I believe Oni and Halo were developed concurrently, to the point that many art assets, sound effects and musical cues are used in both. Other overlaps in storytelling (e.g. AIs who have rebelled against their owners are said to have gone "rampant") imply that the two games are set in the same universe, to the point that Oni may be a stealth prequel to Halo.
Oni's art design, soundtrack and storytelling still hold up. Alas, I can't say the same about the gameplay. Double-tap the W key to run? What were they thinking?
FtttG
3d ago
I always took for granted that
the creators are Euro-establishment-progpilled enough to believe that infidelity isn’t a big deal, the protagonist is unsympathetic for being unwilling to suck it up and ignore it, and he would obviously be better off if unable to confirm his suspicions.
I don't want you to be right, but you probably are.
It's been a slow week in work, so I've been binging the master AAQC roundup of the last ~8 years. I haven't been reading the posts exhaustively, but just clicking on any that sound interesting to me. I happened upon a comment explaining the difference between good and bad satire, and arguing that good satire doesn't just attack the outgroup but also forces the audience to confront things about themselves they don't like. To illustrate his point, the commenter cited S1E3 of Black Mirror, "The Entire History of You" as an example of satire done right.
For those unfamiliar, Black Mirror is an anthology sci-fi series created by Charlie Brooker. Each episode imagines some hypothetical near-future technology and the societal impacts thereof: the results tend to be bleak, if not a bit darkly amusing. I had previously seen "Nosedive", "Playtest" and "Arkangel": of these, the latter is the only one I could really say I liked without major qualifications. The premise of "The Entire History of You" (and the context in which the comment above brought it up) sounded intriguing, so I watched it this evening.
The episode's premise is very similar to Ted Chiang's short story "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling", although this episode came out two years prior. In the near future, a technology has been invented called "Grain" which entails installing a microchip in one's brain which records audiovisual inputs from your optic nerve and ear canal. This allows you to revisit objective records of your own experiences (which the characters refer to as "re-dos") and even cast them to smart TVs.
Our protagonist, Liam, is invited to a dinner party of some of his wife Ffion's old college friends. Almost immediately, Liam becomes suspicious of Ffion's friend Jonas, a brazen cad who has recently broken off his engagement with his fiancée. After the dinner party, Ffion admits that she had been romantically involved with Jonas years ago, but that she'd omitted key details for the sake of Liam's feelings. The confession only provokes Liam's jealousy further, and he spends the following day getting drunk and obsessively re-doing memories from the dinner party, hunting for micro-expressions or body language which might indicate Ffion still holds a candle for Jonas.
Right off the bat, this episode was a very different breed from the previous episodes of Black Mirror I'd watched. The first few seasons were produced by the UK's Channel 4, after which the show migrated to Netflix: this pre-migration episode features an entirely British cast and a distinctly English approach to social awkwardness and discomfort. (Hardly surprising that this episode was written by one of the creators of Peep Show: if Mark Corrigan had access to this technology, this is exactly how he'd behave.) It's also wonderfully concise at under 50 minutes, when my understanding is that later episodes have been criticised for being unnecessarily padded. Just as the AAQC comment suggested, I recognised myself in some of Liam's harmful mental habits. (Even more shamefully, I recognised myself in Jonas a little bit too.) For the first two acts of the episode I was on the edge of my seat, eyes fixed to the screen. I thought it was making a clever point about how technology enables and aggravates our most neurotic and obsessive tendencies. Liam's endlessly re-doing of the last night's dinner party, even forcing the babysitter to express an opinion on whether Jonas's joke was funny enough to warrant such an uproarious reaction from Ffion, is pathetic and destructive – but it's only a difference in degree from people rereading WhatsApp messages and hunting for subtext in the emojis, not a difference in kind. Sharply observed.
That is, until the climax.
Whew. As I said above, I thought the point of the episode was to highlight how this near-future technology aggravates and exacerbates Liam's negative character traits, specifically
Mixed messages aside, an exceptionally well-made, well-acted, thought-provoking piece of TV, and the best episode of Black Mirror I've seen by a country mile. Highly recommended.
FtttG
4d ago
I have spent far more time on this website than can possibly be healthy. I'll edit this comment when more tropes come to mind.
- Delusion Conclusion put into words something I'd been thinking about for years.
- Environmental Narrative Game a.k.a. "walking simulators".
I think, once again, you're interpreting me as making an anti-abortion argument when I'm really not. I'm not saying that every woman who gets pregnant should be forced to carry to term. I'm simply saying that it's dumb and facile to argue "I may have consented to sex, but I never consented to pregnancy" as some kind of automatic get-out-of-jail-free card. If Y is a likely and foreseeable consequence of X, and you know that Y is a foreseeable consequence of X (i.e. you are informed when you make your decision), then voluntarily consenting to X entails voluntary consent to Y. Abortion is the only case I'm aware of in which people claim otherwise. I would genuinely love to see a second example of a situation in which consenting to X is not taken to consenting to Y where Y is a likely, foreseeable consequence of X. Actually, even "foreseeable consequence" is underselling the point I'm making: pregnancy is the purpose of heterosexual sex! It's like claiming you consented to aiming and pulling the trigger, but never consented to firing the gun.
If pro-abortion activists argued "when I had sex, I implicitly consented to getting pregnant, but I didn't fully appreciate the gravity of that decision until after I actually got pregnant, and now I've changed my mind", I would find that line of reasoning perfectly coherent. When they argue "I consented to unprotected sex but never consented to pregnancy, therefore abortion should be legal", this just strikes me as a complete non sequitur.
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