FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
15hr 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".
FtttG
1d ago
my response to them
Your response to whom?
my response to them is the same
... which is?
New year's resolutions check-in:
- Went to the gym three times last week, although I was getting over a cold so I only did cardio on two of those. Went again this evening, but was feeling a bit run down so only imagined deadlifting and some treadmill. Can deadlift 1.8x my bodyweight for 3 reps, squat 1.1x for 7 reps and bench press .85x for 6 reps.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
How goes it, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @falling-star, @Tollund_Man4 and @self_made_human?
Lesbians aren't sexually or romantically interested in male people, regardless of how they "identify".
Funny how so recently you were speaking so dismissively of the "cotton ceiling" people and how they don't represent all trans people/all trans activists. Now you've just outed yourself as one of them.
FtttG
3d ago
Blastbeats get stale unless used sparingly. For album #2, I've had lots of ideas for things I want to do, and early on I decided that I want the first song proper to feature blastbeats right out of the gate, to grab the listener's attention. Then the next three or four songs will be slow (or at most mid-tempo), followed by a song which starts off slow but steadily builds to an explosive blastbeat at the end. This will either be the second-last song, followed by another slow song, or it'll be the last song and the blastbeat will be the last thing you hear before the album ends.
I haven't started writing this album in earnest, but yesterday I thought of a riff which will be the riff playing over the second instance of blastbeats. It's gonna cook.
In January I recorded a guitar arrangement of a piece of modern classical music, but never got around to mixing it. Going to start mixing this evening.
The belief that American police officers are gunning down unarmed black men willy-nilly led to the 2020 riots (causing something like a billion dollars in property damage), and the subsequent police pullback (resulting in an additional ~10,000 murders, mostly young black men).
FtttG
3d ago
Has he ever used profanity in a public communication before?
One incredible thing about Trump's continued insanity is how much of a natural loyalty test it creates.
It will come as no surprise to you that I think there are many progressive beliefs which serve a similar function as loyalty litmus tests.
FtttG
3d ago
Hold on, are you saying JD Vance personally commented on one of Scott's articles?
The impression I get from him is that he's a corrupt bureaucrat who leaned on a medical organisation to manipulate their recommendations of best practices for political reasons, not to conform with the best medical evidence available.
The impression I get from him is that he's a shameless hypocrite who wants to prevent young children from ever having children of their own while freely admitting he can't imagine life without his own children.
The impression I get from him is that he's an autogynephile whose wife predictably divorced him shortly after his "coming out", as she had no interest in playing along with his delusions/roleplay/whatever.
FtttG
4d ago
Third example: "lit bro", a stereotype of a man who's very interested in fiction but whose reading is limited to the oeuvres of uber-masculine powerhouses like Ernest Hemingway and, um, David Foster Wallace. Freddie deBoer is convinced it's a category with no members, a literal empty set.
FtttG
4d ago
It's interesting that certain professions are seen as intrinsically high-status. Doctors are presumptively taken to be morally upstanding individuals, to the point that "he's a doctor, but he treats everyone like shit" is seen as such a surprising twist it can power an entire TV series for eight seasons. More darkly, I wonder if this presupposition might be the root of the Lucy Letby truther movement: perhaps these people just cannot believe that a trained nurse could be this spectacularly vicious. I was once speaking to a former veterinarian who complained that, whenever she reads a novel in which a character is a veterinarian, it's always used a shorthand for that character being of good moral character: "aww, look at him, he cares about teh animals!!" But in her experience, most vets are dickheads.
FtttG
5d ago
She was a very prominent journalist when she wrote for Jezebel in its heyday. My understanding is that a previous memoir she wrote was adapted into a TV series, although I haven't heard of either before the recent kerfuffle.
FtttG
5d ago
I'm legitimately surprised that, to the best of my knowledge, no one made a top-level post in any of the CWR threads about Lindy West's latest memoir, Adult Braces. For the last few weeks it's all that certain corners of the internet have been able to talk about.
FtttG
7d ago
42% German, 24% autistic. The fact that the two figures are mirror images of one another is pleasing to me, which probably means I should be awarded an additional 5 autistic points.
FtttG
7d ago
I first came across it when Scott linked to it in "Radicalising the Romanceless". I think it should be required reading for anyone training to be a GP, social worker, psychotherapist etc..
FtttG
7d ago
As ever, I'm reminded of this immortal piece by Theodore Dalrymple.
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".
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 like 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 unnecessary padding. Just as the AAQC comment suggested, I recognised myself in some of Liam's destructive habits of mind. (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.In a drunken, jealous rage, Liam confronts Jonas and forces him to show Liam all the memories he's collected of Ffion. Included among these is a memory of Jonas in bed with Ffion eighteen months prior. Liam confronts Ffion, who admits to the affair. Their marriage collapses, and Liam elects to remove his microchip, unable to bear being confronted with happy memories of Ffion whenever he walks through his home.
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, specificallyconvincing him that he's being cuckolded when he isn't. But in point of fact, he really had been cuckolded, and he was entirely right to be jealous and suspicious of Jonas! If not for this technology, he never would have discovered he'd been made a cuckold. The episode even floats the idea that Jonas may be the biological father of Ffion's baby. From Liam's point of view, there really is no downside to this technology: without it, his wife would have gotten away with cheating on him, and he might well have invested resources into raising a child which wasn't his own without his knowledge. So, I'm a bit confused about what the takeaway was meant to be here. It certainly can't be a story about Othello syndrome if your wife really is being unfaithful to you.
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.
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