FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
You know, I've also gone back to Reddit a bit recently, and find that even beyond the normal "Redditor complains about Redditors" complaints, AI chatbots have basically killed it for me as a concept
I started playing World of Warcraft Classic recently, which is more videogaming than I've done since, well, I raided on World of Warcraft fifteen years ago. And starting up again, I had a lot of questions about things that I needed answered. Both mechanical questions, like "What stats should I prioritize for a leveling fury warrior, what's a good rule of thumb for comparing the dps from dual wielding 2 1h weapons versus using a single 2h weapon as I level?" and more social questions like "What's good loot etiquette in a leveling PUG 5 man group for needing stuff for a main spec if I'm playing an off-spec for the group?"
These are questions that Reddit is naturally great at answering, but they're also questions that in the late stages of a twenty year old game, nobody wants to answer on Reddit, and Reddit's search function remains intentionally trash for the purpose of avoiding questions being easily answered. If you ask the question, you might get a couple dismissive non-detailed answers ("Just use the standard arms build moron") ("It's a twenty year old game don't you know this already!"), you might get a recurring argument among powerusers that doesn't really answer your question, you most probably get low engagement and nothing at all. Chatbots aren't good at answering these questions on their own, they tend to get lost and make so many mistakes that you would get kicked out of any group if you made mistakes like that ("A lot of Rogues need on Corpsemaker because they want to try out 2h axes for a while!"), and hallucinate things that don't exist ("Hunters should farm Herod in Scarlet Monastery for the Scarlet Rifle rare drop gun").
But combine the two and you have a stew going! Ask ChatGPT or Grok or Deepseek to simulate a /r/classicwowtbc discussion on a scenario like "I was tanking RFK and Corpsemaker dropped, I needed on it because that was the only item I was running for, I won the roll but the Ret Paladin ragequit and tried to wipe the group by pulling adds, was I wrong to do that?" and tell it to simulate it as though there was a lot of engagement, and it will do a good enough job simulating all the replies from different angles and help me understand how players view the question. It's actually a lot of fun, it lets me simulate Reddit if everyone on Reddit cared about what I cared about.
The problem is that whenever I go on Reddit now, DeepSeek does such a good job simulating Reddit comments, that reading Reddit comments, I feel like I'm just reading Deepseek. Even when I write a comment, I feel like I'm just writing Deepseek simulations. What's the point? We're all just going through the motions so predictably, why even bother?
This does present obvious future ecological problems, what are the bots going to simulate if everyone stops going on Reddit because it's too easy to simulate? But that's not really my concern when I'm asking "What are good guidelines for which dungeons to run as a leveling priest?"
You need really weird nonsense to make a forum non-predictable and immune to simulation. Which this place sometimes achieves.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
I was actually thinking of Whitney Houston when she died like fifteen years ago, and I remember going to an Abercrombie and Fitch and hearing an A&F techno-dance remix of I Will Always Love You in the dressing room trying on a pair of chinos, and thinking to myself: Jeez suddenly she's everywhere. And joking about with my gf, now Mrs. FiveHour, that you just can't get away from her since her death while I hadn't thought about her at all beforehand, and neither had anyone else in an Abercrombie, teenage customers or teenage staff.
Which is probably a good example of the dynamic in that, on reading her wikipedia, my assessment of Whitney was kinda incorrect, she was a Big Deal when she was big. It just happens that she wasn't big for me, and as such the whole situation struck me as humorous and over-cooked, even though it made perfect sense to the people doing it. For me at 19, it seemed like they were way overdoing their tribute to a mid-tier diva, to boomers who knew her from her peak, it seemed just and fair for The Voice to be so honored. And both things can be true for each of us in our own perspective.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
because being a war POTUS would fundamentally change why we voted for him.
How have you been recovering from the coma you've been in since March?
I would have to think Trump would do something because while he doesn't always have great foreign policy instincts, he understands viscerally that you can't get cucked like that and let Russia kill your friend.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
You certainly seem quite muddled, so I clearly didn't communicate clearly!
OP seems mainly concerned about the public, rather than the media, with specific call outs to social media and to real life. A public made up of people who just watched as Joe Biden fell apart publicly after years of being told he was fine.
I think we can play some motte and bailey games if we want to define what exactly is ok for the government to keep secret and what isn't, but I think we can all agree that the government has repeatedly been on the wrong side of that line. I don't think anyone can dispute in good faith that the American political class has routinely lied to the American public, in ways that were easily and publicly proven to be lies quickly enough for people to notice, and that people notice this. It matters that Trump tweets out extremely clear things that he later backs off on. People learn not to trust their government.
"People Think Lying Liars Might be Lying" is kind of a non-headline.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19hr ago
The Hormuz Strait is OPEN, and will remain OPEN, with or without Iran. We are reinstating the THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE, so named because it is only stopping Iran’s ships or customers from entering or leaving. All other countries will have fair and open use of the Strait. The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World. The process and formation will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
So...yeah.
I don't even know what to say at this point. Are we just doing memes? Are we trying to make a deal work by making the mullah's demand for $1mm/ship look reasonable by comparison?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20hr ago
To pick one example, men secularised first and fastest over the 20th century.
I think the argument here would be that religious men are mostly pretty similar to secular men, while religious women behave very differently from secular women. It's higher impact on women than it is on men.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The second cliche I reach for when discussing war (the first obviously being Clausewitz) is the old saw: "Athens recovered quickly from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Sparta was destroyed by its victory."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The frustrating thing to me is that this is all so tied up in American electoral politics.
It's also tied up in narrow legalism. The Trump admin claimed they had legal authority to wage war for 60 days without talking to Congress about it. The ceasefire leading to the MOU came at 60 days. Now they're claiming that war was concluded and this is a brand new war. Expect a similar result if we make it another 60 days.
What's frustrating to me is the failure to think about the world that is reflected in so much of the analysis of the war.
Trump chose to start the war the way he did, with no warning and no lead up. This delivered certain advantages to the United States and Israel, allowing them to kill the former Ayatollah and replace him with his gay son, along with various other high level regime figures who were behaving normally and not under threat of assassination.
The cost of this was that there was no sale to the American people. No effort to convince the American people that the sacrifice was worth it. The assumption from the administration was that the US public was so used to being at war with some ragheads or other that people would just accept the war, like my wife getting a Poshmark package and assuming she must have bought something and forgotten about it. And for the most part they seem to be right, the American public will just accept that I guess we're in a war now and deal with the consequences. What they won't do is pay the bill.
Support for the war in public polling peaked at net -10 right at the start of the war, and currently sits at net -21. For comparison, approval of Iraq at this stage was flipped, with 56% in favor. What can we expect when the war was never justified publicly, when the aims have shifted constantly, when it's been over or won or subject to a ceasefire so many times already?
Foreign policy "Realism" is increasingly revealed as Idealism with the serial number sanded off, the realists idealize a world where "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must," and throw tantrums whenever real life gets in the way.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The decline and fall of Joe Biden has essentially permanently broken any public trust that might have existed around the health of older politicians. Every news consumer and voter remembers when the entire establishment, including many Republicans, lied to us about the mental state of the president for years. There will be no charity for elderly politicians for some time.
The political hit from having been caught lying about this would be high (well for Republicans, anyway). The benefits on stalling are murky. The amount of family and other people you'd have to keep in the dark was high.
What makes you say that? What politician has actually faced consequences for lying to the public in the Trump era? I guess Biden, but he mostly just aged out, and only a handful of his immediate Bidenworld cohort have been banished from public life. As Jung said Hitler was the incarnation of Wotan, Trump is the incarnation of Loki. We live under the reign of the trickster god and are surprised when people suspect dirty tricks. In the Iran discussion just one post away, we have Trump's defenders arguing that he was lying the whole time about his intentions and that the lies are what justify signing the MOU, which was just a dirty trick against Iran all along.
We live in a post-truth era. Why would any elderly politician have earned the benefit of the doubt?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Plenty of women will reject you, that doesn't matter. Nobody cares about efficiency metrics in picking-up-girls, least of all Mormons. Your true-shooting-percentage doesn't matter. Just the number of points you score.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Jay-Z and Nas are still alive. Kanye is still alive, if crazy. Rakim is still alive. Big Daddy Kane is still alive. When I glance at Billboard's Top 100 rappers I only count three or four dead in the top 30.
Like OK boomer bias is a big thing, but why is Taylor so high then?
I could equally point to an anti-country bias on the list, but that's a bit different and outside my current thoughts.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I get that. That's exactly how I felt at 17-18, then all of a sudden everything "clicked" with girls and I went from being dateless from roughly 2004-2010, to rotating through four different girls the summer of 2010 before going to college. For me, the inciting event wasn't actually going to college, but primarily when I got into a horrible car accident on my way to a college visit. T boned by an f350 at an intersection, essentially unconscious for a week, out of school for the better part of a month. I'd been texting with four different girls beforehand, all of them were likely to friendzone me later on based on history, but then I just disappeared. And that was the trick, reappearing weeks later with some scars ultimately closed the deal with all four of them. That was the sudden change of perspective that changed my luck.
For a lot of Americans that is college, because you're suddenly in a whole new social ecosystem and your old status isn't important anymore. I remember in high school we had one buddy, Jerry, who was kind of the butt monkey of the group. The dre of the group. We were friends, but we all kind of made fun of or denigrated him, he was a dork, a naif, a loser, nebbish, unable to seize the initiative in any situation. At the poker table, he was the fish. At basketball, he was bait despite being 6'2". He wasn't dumb, but he wasn't top of the class either.
Then we went to college and a year later he was a frat star. Because he made new friends who didn't treat him like shit, and met new girls who didn't see him get treated that way. There he was just a 6'2" blond beast of a man, and he asserted his rights like anyone else.
So, take heart, have hope, It Gets Better.
FWIW if we're doing male-lifetime-hotness, your absolute hotness will probably peak around 22-26, when you have a lot of potential but you won't be expected to have done too much yet, and your body is in its prime. Your relative hotness might peak later, but your true prime is right in front of you.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I feel as if all my dating prospects are behind a glass wall that I just can't shatter.
Yes it's called being a teenage boy. Dan Savage used to have a stock response to teenage boys who wrote in complaining they couldn't get a date, which was to say yeah you probably can't get a date at 15-16-17 and there's nothing you can realistically do to get yourself laid at that age because teenage boys are inherently malformed and disgusting; but what you can do is build yourself up now to set the foundation to be the kind of guy who gets laid alot later, be more interesting and in better shape and going somewhere etc.
Most young men go through this kind of transition at some point in their lives. It's not comforting now, but it really is just something you have to wait out. I certainly did.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I'm using it in my comment as an intentional anachronism to fit the period of Million Dollar Quartet and the period when music made by black people became culturally dominant across the United States and thus the world, and to signal a degree of irreverence can be maintained while still acknowledging the absurdity of having Taylor Swift ten spots ahead of any representative of the dominant cultural mode of popular music for the past twenty years.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Kirk having niche popularity with a subset of the population, but not mainstream notoriety of the type I would be aware of, still creates the cognitive dissonance and room for a punchline I'm talking about, among the subset of the population that wasn't really familiar with him.
If Jalyx Hunt were suddenly in every Gatorade advertisement on TV, and "who the hell is Jalyx Hunt?" became a punchline online, that every serious Eagles fan knows who he is (a beloved local event planner for the city) or that he's actually a pretty underrated edge rusher doesn't alter the situation for people who have no idea who he is beforehand.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Evidence of the Vibe Shift is surfacing.
I'm a reflexive contrarian. I'm a libtard when I'm at a megachurch picnic, and a superfascist at a liberal arts college. When I watch a biopic, I tend to try to critique and read-between-the-lines so much that I walk away with the exact opposite of whatever opinions the filmmaker was trying to impart about the subject.
And lately, I'm running into stuff and feeling wokeness rising like bile in my stomach.
I took my father and mother to see Million Dollar Quartet for Father's Day. Which was good for them, it's boomer-candy, barely a play and more of a cover-band night with four performers and an mc all pretending to be from 1950 or whatever. My parents had a good time, which is what matters for filial piety. But the whole plot, such as it is, the conflict revolves around who gets "credit" for songs. Carl Perkins wrote Blue Suede Shoes but Elvis got it on TV first so now it's an Elvis song and Perkins gets told he's a cover artist! But throughout the play the artists play covers from black artists of the time, Long Tall Sally and Who Do Ya Love? among others, and don't acknowledge it; the play isn't clever enough to be doing that intentionally. Black people, who still owned Rock and Roll at the time of the setting, and they're just erased from the story here! RnB was still considered "race music" at the time! Most of the great artists were negroes! There's no way that they hung out and discussed what rock and roll music was and didn't talk about that! And I'm not asking for some woke-confession speech where they talk about stealing rock and roll, but the play would be 1000% more interesting if they did a little bit of Mad Men where they used period accurate attitudes to race to make the viewer think about the issue.
Then I saw the NYT list of greatest living American songwriters, and sweet suffering Jesus, where is the melanin at the top? Are you kidding me? Taylor Swift makes the list just even with the first negro? The highest ranked rapper is Kendrick at 17, and that just seem so wrong when hip hop has been the artistically dominant pop music form for at least twenty years. Kanye at 72 while Dolly Parton is in the top ten? I realize this is mostly boomer bias here again, but to deny the unique cultural contribution of American blacks to modern popular music is just...odd.
And I don't feel like I ever had room to think something like that a few years ago. So the vibes are shifting.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
All I can tell you is that I read two newspapers a day, see probably three or four hours of varied cable news a week thanks to boomer parents, I'm politically active in the local R party, and I'm active on Twitter and here, and I barely knew he existed. It's possible he was this niche icon in my blind spot. But that would still create that contrast I'm pointing to.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I wasn't entirely sure Charlie Kirk was a real person or what he really looked like before he died. I was vaguely aware of someone named Charlie Kirk and something called Turning Points, but I had knew nothing about him and had no real opinions on him or his organization.
Then he got shot, and suddenly he was everywhere. Conservatives were passing around hadiths of things Charlie had told them before he died as authoritative statements on any given topic. His name and his face were all over. He was the leader of the future. People were on here saying that his assassination was an effective strike against the Red Tribe because he was irreplaceable.
The whole phenomenon reminds me of nothing so much as when a singer with three top-40 hits in the 80s dies, and suddenly everyone is telling us how they were "the voice of a generation" and "meant so much to so many people." And every radio station is playing her two hits over and over. And it's like, nah bro she was pretty good, but there were a dozen other singers in the 80s on her level, and she was mogged by Madonna throughout her career.
The result of the Charlie mythos being so rapidly built and so thoroughly overshot was that the gap between the myth and the reality created opportunities for humor. This can occur even with a really serious tragedy (9/11, the Holocaust, the Soviet purges), but it's even easier when the gap between the publicity and the tragedy is bigger.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
"Destroyed" is... a tremendously strong word. It's not like FORD went full BONHOMME RICHARD.
Reports have varied, but we're looking at a return to service in 2027 on the optimistic government timeline. While "destroyed" is perhaps aggressive, "damaged sufficiently to be removed from operation" is infelicitous, and anyway we're being weirdo skeptics so we're rounding up and assuming the damage is worse than we were told.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Real weight bearing "almost" in that last sentence.
People voted for Platner despite/because of all of the above, and now he's being driven out by unresolvable accusations from his ex gf. That looks less like "straw that broke the camel's back" and more like "trap card activated."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
So select for people with exes with moderately bad things to say about him.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Sure, you're correct, I don't think it's good to pin anyone's suicide on anything in particular. Suicide seems to be caused mostly by some kind of outside-factor separate from life-story, probably genetic in some way.
But if mental health factors impact the decision to commit suicide, then they impact the whole work of the person. Mental health isn't well-modeled as a debuff in a video game that comes in and changes them, especially when we're talking genetics.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I haven't followed this story closely enough to assess the facts or Platner as a person.
But I worry that a system of "Your ex-lover says bad things about you and now you are toxic waste" is basically a system that bans normal people from running for office.
The vast majority of exes have bad things to say about their former partners. Crazy, bipolar, abusive, violent, lying, cheating, scumbags all of them.
And the only way to be sure you never have a crazy ex is to never date. Crazy ex girlfriends might seem sane when you meet them, or they might be sane when you meet them and suffer a mental break later*.
Per a quick Grok, 90-95% of ever-married Americans have premarital sex. The median partner count is about six for a 42 year old man. That's six rolls of the dice, and if you roll under 5 on a d20 you can't ever run for office. And you can't really know how you rolled until you've already staked your whole life and fortune and reputation on the run.
That's not really any way for a country to function. Normal people have to be able to run for office. Otherwise our only politicians will be freaks, people who have lived their whole lives in a kind of asceticism designed to protect their future political careers.
Sex and romance are a full contact sport, and we want to issue lifetime bans to anyone who commits a foul.
*Growing up my father got letters from a woman he dated some time in the 70s before meeting my mother. She went through a mental health crisis after moving to a foreign country and marrying a man there, and sent FiveHour the elder hundreds of letters making up dozens of stories to...idk maybe get him back or something? She actually died at one point, at which time her "sister" started sending the letters, then she came back and sent the letters herself again. I suppose this experience informs my views.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I need someone to list all the Looney Toons accidents that happened in Iraq I & II, Vietnam, Korea, WWII, etc. Because I'm starting to turn Schizo from the fact that the USA is claiming all these losses of men and material from ridiculous mishaps ("A clothes dryer caught fire and destroyed a carrier" "we landed the planes in a mud puddle on a rescue mission that just happened to be right next to the nuclear supplies we were planning to Mission Impossible" "Plane crashed in the middle of nowhere"). I'm even looking at the two recent civilian skydiving accidents a little crossways, and they happened in Missouri and France.
Kendrick is an interesting cultural figure to me, in the he's a black man who self-consciously makes music for and about black people, but I associate him primarily with white fans who love his (in their view) sophisticated view of black culture. There's a weird tension there, as Immortal Technique put it:
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