07mk
16hr ago
That is certainly one dimension along which that particular type of person will benefit according to her own desires, as intended. I suspect that this, even moreso than other typical decisions which are already filled with them, is the kind of decision that has a lot of unintended consequences with significant impact in one's quality of life.
07mk
17hr ago
From my perspective, it seems pretty obvious that a lot of FtM types in particular are far less interested in becoming men than they are afraid of becoming women, and so their "dysphoria" is driven more by a desire to prevent adulthood. It's less about what they transition to ("boys"), than what they don't transition to (adults).
Given the memes separating "women and children" from "men," there's something deeply ironic and perverse and even darkly hilarious about this. Of course, an FTM doesn't transition to becoming a man, but rather a transman, and I have to wonder, once we remove all the ideologically-based praise and support from being trans, if a typical FTM's experience as an adult in society is closer to that of a masculine/low status woman or that of a median man.
07mk
19hr ago
Could transgenderism — for the ones not seeking sexual gratification — be caused by the mind being “stuck” in the age where one learns about their body, due to some obscure early life trauma or a lack of social affirmation, and their mind tries to rekindle the feelings of that age through the artificial rediscovery of their body via “coming out” and hormones? This is something to dwell on, because there does seem to be a sub-expression of transgenderism which is obsessed with nostalgic things but which is not sexualized, and this is a distinct from the other subexpression which craves its own sexual humiliation (eg that Canadian teacher with the enormous boobs who sent her one sextape to her HR lady; the Matrix-dominatrix brothers…)
I see a lot of potential insight in this. One pattern I noticed is that the way that some transgender people's understanding of being the opposite sex appear almost nostalgic, certainly childish, and naive. Namely, MTF appear to see being a woman as akin to being a nubile, young, attractive woman, while FTM appear to see being a man as akin to being a high status man. Which are pretty likely and reasonable misconceptions for someone to form at adolescence.
Now, these are common enough misconceptions among non-trans people that it's possible that there's nothing particularly going on there. It's also possible that these misconceptions being so powerful play into making identifying as trans appear much more attractive. It's unfortunate that we lack a credible social science institution with resources to research something like this, since it's had such huge, transformative effects in our society just in the past decade.
Pronouns being, much like many/most things to do with trans/gender ideology, sacrosanct, is pretty mainstream in my experience in progressive/"woke" culture in America. I didn't pay much attention to it, but the few times I ran into it on Twitter and such, it was common to see people being berated for not using Chris Chan's preferred pronouns, and in general it tends to pop up whenever there's some news of some trans person doing something most people agree is wrong. I also recall seeing a scene from some CW Batman show where a cop berates another cop for misgendering the suspect they're interrogating and kicks him out of the interrogation room, followed by him telling the suspect something like how they might be on different sides, but that doesn't mean he has to be an asshole to him, or something.
Of course, opinions tend to vary, as always, but one of the core tenets of this ideology is the relationship between someone's position on the progressive stack (i.e. oppression Olympics or the oppression totem pole) and the truth of their words or justice of their actions. As a result, in practice, the most extreme views espoused by some individual at the highest point on the totem pole with the least scruples about exercising social and physical acts for enforcement set the agenda. Straight men/lesbian women not discriminating against transwomen in dating/sex or including transwomen as full, undifferentiated members of women's sports teams and their lockers are other fairly extreme positions that seem not that commonly held when talking to individuals in private, but in practice, there's rarely more than some non-committal mumbling and foot-dragging when the extreme true believers demand all of society submit to these things, resulting in everyone having to behave in public as if they agree with those things.
07mk
20hr ago
No it it isn't. The causation is completely reversed. There's nothing in the comment to which you're replying that indicates that the commenter believes that his ability to believe something implies anything to do with anything, including how bad his enemies are. The commenter is explaining why he has the ability to believe something, and that it is due to his enemies "sources like the BBC and the UK police" having established themselves to be bad as dependable information sources. You can argue that they have not established themselves to be such, but there's nothing in the comment indicating that the commenter's ability to believe this is proof/evidence/argument/etc. for the notion that these sources are bad sources. That they are bad sources is already part of the premise, not something being argued for.
07mk
1d ago
I had a heated 3 month fling with FTL back when it came out before I went somewhere for vacation and quit cold turkey. It was first roguelike (and one of my last - definitely not a good genre for me), and adjusting to the expectations of extreme punishment plus cruel RNG took a while. I remember it took me dozens of tries to win the game for the first time, and then I beat it immediately on the next run. And from then on, it was like a 50/50, which really surprised me, because of how utterly wrecked I used to get, and it's not as if the challenge had changed by leveling up or something.
In the middle of it, it felt to me like roleplaying in a very pure way, creating a narrative of a desperate ship captain in this scifi setting who needs to pull on all resources and luck to barely edge out survival for one more node. I don't think I've gotten quite the same experience from other games. And, unfortunately, I think I'd prefer to keep it that way, given how much time I'm likely to waste if I found something similar.
07mk
1d ago
Nick Fuentes is probably the second most important person to watch on the Republican side after Trump himself. He has a lot of "energy", and has the benefit of being extremely online. People keep making the mistake that the "real world" is more important than a small fringe of online crazies, and they keep getting proven wrong over and over and over (e.g. with woke, the alt right, gender identity on Tumblr). The arc of MAGA is long, but it bends towards Based.
I know very little about Fuentes himself, but the analysis here seems wrong. The alt-right, as best as I can tell, has had pretty much no impact in actual policy and very little in terms of national discourse around politics and ideology. Which is as expected from a small fringe of online crazies.
The "woke," and gender identity on Tumblr (subset or, at best, nearly fully overlapping set with "woke"), on the other hand, have obviously had immense and consequential influence in both, and this is due to the fact that they weren't a small fringe of online crazies. Rather, by the time this sort of argument was created to shut down the people trying to bring attention to the anti-liberalism of the ideology that would go on to evolve to something called "woke," ie around early 2010s, it had already been hegemonic in academia for at least a decade and nearly ubiquitous for multiple decades, with plenty of signs of mainstream journalism and mainstream entertainment getting bought in.
So things correctly labeled as a small fringe of online crazies had little impact on real world politics and the everyday life that it influences, while things incorrectly labeled as such did have big impact.
Maybe this Fuentes character's ideas will break into the mainstream over the next 3 years, but so far, him being just a big fish in a small, fringe, online, crazy pond doesn't make me think he's particularly worth paying attention to with respect to national politics.
07mk
2d ago
There are some people that treat advice as a full on gift giving process. They expect accolades for giving the gift. They expect the receiver to at least pretend that they liked the gift. And the gift they'd always like in return is for the receiver to act on their advice. This seems like a toxic approach to me.
As an aside, this seems like a toxic approach to gift-giving, not just advice-giving. The entire point of a gift is that you're giving it to someone without expectation for anything in return; that's the very nature of the gift that makes it a gift, as otherwise it would be an implicit bribe or payment. The gratitude and pomp and circumstance can be pleasant and even appreciated when they're there, but expecting it in return for a gift means that it wasn't a gift in the first place, it was a payment, in order to get the receiver to play-act the part of "grateful gift recipient" for the gift giver's satisfaction.
07mk
5d ago
I saw on Twitter someone comment that the idea that the company that owns Marvel, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones would need to look for a new IP to help draw in young male audiences in their teens & 20s is pretty hilarious and absurd. You could probably have put any random 8th grade boy in charge of any one of these franchises back when Disney acquired them and turned them into at least good draws for that crowd, if not great. Yet the actual executives in charge appear to have less competence than that (or, perhaps, different incentives than making the best product or most money).
Makes me think there could be a modern remake of Big where he becomes a studio exec instead of a toy store VP and greenlights hits over the adult execs. Would have to be a longer timeframe and also, I'm guessing Big probably won't get a remake anytime soon given the implied statutory rape.
07mk
5d ago
I beat Stellar Blade recently, with all the achievements, collectibles, etc. It caused a minor culture war kerfuffle in the video game community due to having a conventionally attractive female protagonist being highly sexualized in costumes and camera angles and such. It was also the first 3D action game of this type by Shift Up, which is better known for Goddess of Victory: Nikke, which is a gacha game definitely on the "gooner" side of the spectrum, so it was actually reasonable to wonder if it was just going to be shallow eye candy, but it turned out to be right up there with the best action games I've played recently, like Elden Ring or Lies of P (latter of which was also the 1st 3D action game by that dev, IIRC).
Looking at trailers, I remember wondering if it was going to be a DMC-like or Ninja Gaiden-like, something sorely lacking in the industry these days (we'll see how NG4 does soon). Turned out to be a Sekiro-like more than anything, with a similar perfect parry-based posture system, except it's discrete perfect parry counts, and it doesn't recover automatically over time, and it's not a deathblow but rather big hit like a visceral in Bloodborne. It doesn't feel as natural as, nor does it incentivize aggression quite as much as Sekiro's, but it also had its own quirks that I appreciated, like being able to count to set up for viscerals right after boss phase transitions. It also had perfect dodges, which slowed down time during the dodge like Witch Time in Bayonetta, though that didn't extend to giving you time to punish.
These mechanics only work if the enemies are designed properly for them, and that's where the game really shone. The bosses were the highlights, but for every enemy, it was clear the devs thought carefully about how to communicate timings to the player via animations and attack patterns. It wasn't as well executed as From Soft's best work both in terms of telegraphing attacks and pushing the player to really tight openings, but it was only a step or two behind.
I found Normal difficulty too easy after the 1st 2 bosses and restarted the game on Hard, which was originally not available until NG+ with an upgraded health bar. It took me 1-2 hours of sometimes dozens of deaths for most bosses like this, but the design of the bosses was such that it was a fun learning experience the whole time. Regular mobs in the overworld were also 2-shotting me, so exploration was slow and almost souls-like in pace, so it took me about 70 hours to beat the game with all side quests, but played normally, I've heard it's about 20-30 hours.
Like Sekiro, it had skill trees instead of stat upgrades using souls, and also you didn't drop your Exp when you died, so the souls-like "enemies revive when you rest" system didn't really mean a whole lot. Besides weak and strong attacks on Square and Circle which could be chained in different ways for combos, there were special attacks called Bursts and Beta Attacks used via L1 or R1 + face button, which used independent but related resources that recharged through actions during combat. I think what made the combat so satisfying, besides the parries, was the managing of these special attacks and their unique abilities, like i-frames, self-heal, or attack speed-up.
So recommended highly to anyone who enjoys 3rd person action games. Especially on PC where the mods are aplenty, and also, it's incredibly well optimized and bug-free. Zero crashes in 120+ hours and solid consistent 60fps+ on my 4090. I'm glad they decided not to contribute yet another souls-like to the flood of them in the industry right now. Again, it's heavily souls-inspired, but it also draws from many other games, creating its own thing. I just wish it drew more from the crazy action games like DMC, since crowd control and 1-on-many combat in general was mostly not great.
I've heard people criticize the story for being too predictable, but I thought it was exactly right for this kind of game, which almost feels like a throwback to mostly straightforward action games from 360/PS3 era. I found it funny just how much the game took inspiration from Nier: Automata, what with the sexy woman flying down from space to the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is Earth to fight off the beings that took it over from humans, but then discovering the deep dark secret of what really happened, etc. They even hired the same composer to do a lot of the soundtrack, so I'm pretty sure they knew what they were doing.
I mean, it's hard to gradually groom someone who's attacking you with an axe, isn't it?
More to the point, pre-/low-teen girls (or boys, for that matter) aren't known for great epistemics or rationality. It's possible for a 12 year old girl to incorrectly but reasonably, by 12-year-old definitions of reasonable, to believe that an axe would provide her with some significant amount of extra protection against grooming gangs.
After all, even fully grown adult women with brains that have had time to develop often take inconvenient steps to protect themselves against the stranger-jumping-you type of rape, despite the fact that those are quite rare. I think it's the viscerality/salience and availability bias, like how people often get more paranoid about flying than about driving, because plane crashes are severe and usually fatal to most people involved, and the news tends to report on them more than any particular banal car crash.
Now, these specific girls? Not having seen the video, I cast no vote, but my default presumption is that, outside of what's directly seen on video, there's no meaningful wider conclusion that can be made just from a brief out-of-context video that takes place as part of a longer interaction. Too many unknown unknowns.
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