5434a
3mo ago
He could reason. Sports mean prizes. Winning means cash. If women were equally good at football you could make a stronger team by replacing the second best men with the best women and winning more cash.
The same principle is more stark in warfare. If women were equally strong then societies would have an advantage if they encouraged women to be warriors to better protect and defend those societies, and women would be similarly self-interested in doing so.
Why are men and women all leaving these gains on the table to be monopolised by men? Because men are oppressing women? How is that possible if men and women are equally matched? They should be able to overpower men the same way they have been overpowered by men, or at least fight to a draw.
As I talk about frequently on this blog, autistic people have a natural tendency to believe that when other people say things they are trying to truthfully communicate what they actually believe. Because otherwise what’s the point?? Several friends say “Yes ok, but you have eyes, right? You can see things yourself?”
Can I? What is it I saw, when I looked around?
I'm not sure I buy into the idea of autism creating these blindspots. Are there two types of autism? It seems like there's one type that says "You utter utter moron, how could you mistake the northern lesser spotted arctic giullemot for its close cousin the lesser spotted arctic northern guillemot! Can't you see the distinctive circle around the eye doesn't fully extend to the beak? What?! Of course it matters!" And then there's this other type that says, I don't know, something like "The television must be true because only the best people are on television, and lying is bad, and the best people don't lie. That's just basic logic".
Can anyone explain this for me?
Low stakes small scale idle curiosity question for the network engineers here: Why does my router (edit for clarity: ADSL router-modem) take so long to connect to the internet? I don't mean a full reboot of the system, just <disconnect> <reconnect>. It takes about 5 minutes. Feels like I could reboot my phone and connect to wireless internet faster than a simple hang-up-redial cycle on a wired connection.
To my naive mind the process should consist of authentication over what is effectively LAN, and then connection/access to the WAN, like connecting to a network switch but with many more users. My little consumer grade network switch doesn't take 5 minutes to start up, it's been a long time since I rebooted it but if I had to guess I'd say it takes less than 30 seconds from a cold start, and reconnecting after pulling the cable and replugging it takes less time than sitting back down. What processes are actually happening?
5434a
6mo ago
Meditate on the mundane truthfulness and wisdom of corny motivational poster bromides that you have to get busy living. That's it. There is no esoteric big brained intellectual construct that will snap you out of yourself, you just have to get so fucking bored of being yourself that you do something differently for a change.
The point of starting something else is that the alternative is continuing on the current path which demonstrated by your post clearly isn't satisfying, so even if the something else isn't satisfying either at least it's novel.
You said below you're writing prose and code. I suggest making something physical. I'm loathe to suggest specific projects because you take them too literally to more easily dismiss them but as an example, get a cheap block of modelling clay, cut it up into 5 pieces, then make five heads one at a time and try to make each one better than the last, 20 minutes per head. They'll suck, it doesn't matter. In fact that's the point. I know, you don't have modelling clay or an eye for faces so carve a large root vegetable into five different platonic solids, or whatever. Just do something very cheap and very easy that you can iterate on, see a measure of progress and then throw in the bin without feeling that the waste outweighs the practice. Something that you can take a before and after photo of the evidence of your action. The worthwhile projects you feel you are lacking are built on a foundation of shitty failed prototypes by necessity of not getting it right on the first attempt. Then pick a bigger project and start failing better.
If you need a less specific, more esoteric guide try something like Eno's Oblique Strategies or buy a copy of Wreck This Journal and give yourself a hard time limit of one week to fill it. You already have a limitations mindset so start using it to prompt some urgency and creativity. Feeling old should give you more motivation, not less. If you want to write prose or code give yourself one day to write something wilfully shitty and amateur, at least it will be finished. Writing is a procrastinator's luxury where you can always find another imperfection that can be endlessly re-re-rewritten. You don't have to abandon your big projects but take a break to recalibrate first because currently you're not actually hitting your own targets.
5434a
1yr ago
I re-read Shogun last year for the first time in 20 years. Is the plot slow? Well, I also read Crime & Punishment and Brothers Karamazov last year, and compared to those the plot is a rocketship.
I found the plot moved faster the second time because I was familiarised with all those aspects of foreign culture and language that are used. More importantly, on reflection the feudal Japanese culture is a critical plot mechanism; the extreme honour based social structure is exactly what the main character has to adapt to in order to understand and participate in the power struggle he finds himself caught in. And the more his understanding improves the more his agency develops giving the result that the plot is pushed along faster.
I won't say that it's a "great" book but it was good enough to make me think I should get around to reading the next book in Clavell's Asian Saga. On the other hand I won't be looking for any more Dostoevsky.
5434a
2yr ago
The openly intentional result of what you're calling her sexism is that biological men are excluded from using the services of the rape crisis centre that she funds despite those men calling themselves women, ie trans, and so is plainly Trans Exclusionary. More accurate would be to say that she doesn't believe a biological man can be a woman, which is to say that she is a trans denialist. She doesn't hate transwomen (the transphobia charge), she simply doesn't recognise "transwoman" as a meaningful category.
Calling it sexism is similarly trans denialist as it casts the question solely in terms of objective biological sex, which trans ideology takes great efforts to escape from by introducing the subjective frame of gender.
One major reason radical feminists and other trans denialists deny transgenderism is because it requires not only that women identify with and express their gender but that doing so is what makes them women, and by extension not doing so diminishes their womanhood. A woman who becomes a radical feminist because she's been treated like shit by men, often in part for not being very feminine, while also being vulnerable to all the disadvantages that women suffer will rightly bristle at the implication that she's less of a woman, particularly when it's coming from men.
5434a
2d ago
I tried the first two a while ago and tapped out of them pretty fast too.
The only anime series I've finished other than OPM was Welcome To The NHK. It was overly long but it was darkly comical enough to keep me watching to the end.
I'm not a total non-anime watcher but I haven't found much I like outside of the well known feature length films. Even the popular titles like Evangelion and Blade of The Immortal didn't do it for me. Cyberpunk looked okay but turned into a Joss Whedon-alike by the second episode.
Maybe I'll try Uzumaki again when I hit a dry spell (tipped by the same guy who recommended me OPM).
5434a
6mo ago
Helpful tips, thanks. I've added on an addon to block av1 and it's made an improvement but I'm on a 2012 AMD processor with internal Radeon 6550HD graphics so can't expect much, however watching videos is typically the most intensive usage it outside of pending updates for Firefox. What is that about anyway? Until recently the fans revving up would almost always be a sign that Firefox was getting impatient to update and it would settle down again after restarting.
5434a
8mo ago
“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said.
By which she means politicised, while herself choosing to act politically both by withholding from publishing and using the frame of threat protection to justify her political choice.
5434a
1yr ago
The Complete Psychonaut Field Manual: A Cartoon Guide to Chaos Magick
Thought this was interesting as a simplified demystified introduction to the occult. Not my cup of tea but interesting to get a handle on what they're driving at and how without the extraneous waffle.
The Psychonaut Field Manual, attached in whole below, is a comic book guide to chaos magick created by Bluefluke. It’s an incredible, concise piece of work, demonstrating how to use altered states of consciousness and flexible belief to achieve a greater experience of reality.
5434a
1yr ago
I don't know what the procedure is for accessing it but if your btc is unmoved since 2013 then it's pre the chain fork and you'll have the same balance in btc-cash and the various other forks that probably sank without trace.
5434a
1yr ago
I'm an in-and-out, follow the list, know the layout, largely own-brand supermarket shopper who pays the minimum necessary attention to packaging. Years of internet content have made me selectively blind to anything less attention grabbing than literal naked women (and even then...). But I was lying in bed yesterday reminiscing on being a broke student and getting a "free" Bodum cafetiere by collecting something trivial like two empty coffee packets plus P+P, and some other similar giveaways that I still have in the kitchen cupboard.
Do retail suppliers still do those promotions, or was it a golden age of economic abundance and marketing largesse? What's the best thing you've got from a retail promotion? What do you still regularly use that came as a freebie?
The only one I can think of having seen lately is the tokens on branded yoghurt, which I ignored for years until I one day I caved in to curiosity and looked up the details of the offer. Turns out you basically need to be a commercial kitchen consuming gallons of yoghurt every day to make it remotely worthwhile, and IIRC the offers were split between consumable cross-marketing crap like a sample bottle of artisan moisturiser (which you still needed far too many tokens for) and then jumped up to a weekend in a fully catered holiday cottage, with very little in between.
UK. I flicked on the most popular commercial station while I wrote this which was showing reality contest dreck that's carefully produced to appeal to as many viewers as possible.
Halfway through an ad break when I switched on:
Supermarket - white man cooking Christmas dinner for his white family
Mattress - white man solo
Washing powder - multi ethnic races and genders, white man in background, black man in foreground
Whiskey - black woman solo
Toothpaste - brown woman solo
Perfume - white woman solo
Next full ad break:
Theme park - multi ethnic group of kids, white grandma
Make-up - multi ethnic women, brown and black focus, whites in background
Indigestion remedy - multi ethnic
Perfume - white woman solo celebrity
Supermarket - glimpse of white hand
Bubble bath - brown woman
Bleach - glimpse of brown hand
Flagship phone - white woman
Butter - white man, brown woman
Stock cubes - white family
The only thing I can note in support of your point is that the non-white people tend to appear more emphasised. In the white-centric adverts the emphasis leaned more towards the product, and the more non-white people there were the more the camera gazed at them.
I believe there are a number of software devs here. Are there any Linux / C / embedded devs here that would be willing to mentor or offer some signposting for a (near) total beginner on writing what ought to be a simple single function program? By which I don't mean "make a mobile app", I mean "read this one function call from a piece of hardware and print the value to the terminal".
I've gathered a few of the concepts but I don't have enough knowledge to grasp whether they're the right way to approach the matter and whether I'm focusing on the relevant level of abstraction.
Edit: Help is being provided. Thank you Motters.
5434a
3mo ago
I'm currently making a foot stool and having my first go at cutting mortise and tenon joints. I don't have a router so I cut the first set of blind mortises with a multitool + chisel and now I'm doing through-mortises with a jigsaw. It's going much better than I expected, and it's a whole lot nicer to make something where I can pick up and rotate the entire piece with one hand than it was building full size built-in bookcases inside the same actively occupied space they were sized to fit. And yes, putting two coats of finish on 8 uprights and on both sides of 36 large shelves did indeed take forever.
Next step is deciding how I'll create the chamfer/roundover without owning a router or a plane. I've seen people do it with rasps but I don't want to tear and chip the soft pine, but I'd also like something faster and less dusty than sanding. I'll have to try out a few methods on the off cuts.
5434a
5mo ago
What's the status quo for reusing the spent cases? Are they valuable enough that it's assumed people will want to collect them other than maybe the big spenders who let the range keep them as some kind of tip? Or are they so cheap/un-reusable that they go for scrap? Or something else?
As a Brit the nearest thing I have in my experience is finding a giant pile of obviously worthless spent plastic shotgun shells in the woods.
5434a
1yr ago
Started in on Jame's Clavell's Tai Pan. Still on the intro but I'm already learning some (pseudo) history about the opium trade that I never knew before, which isn't too hard because all I knew before was that Britain and China had an opium trade and it led to a war.
5434a
1yr ago
what do you think will be mainstreamed after heterosexual anal intercourse?
We already know the answer to that: BDSM/fetishes, "ethical non-monogamy", analingus, camming, sugar babying, and transgenderism and its associated tumblrisms. The question is what's left? Pedos, furries, unironic incest, cyber relationships with chat apps, and the clickbait of people who want to either marry themself or their favourite inanimate object. The consistently conspicuous-by-its-absence taboo seems to be celibacy, which has become half a by-word for school shooting lone wolf terrorism.
5434a
2yr ago
No, because that obscures more than it reveals. Using a description of "a masculine woman" provides a more useful and accurate description than "man", especially if "man" also now includes masculine women.
Modern gender theory is inconsistent, contradictory and circular. Trying to reason with it is pointless. It by turns enforces then conflates distinctions between sex and gender and within sex and gender to suit its ends. Under this theory your question of whether it's appropriate to label a person a man can only be answered by whether that person wants to be labelled a man or not, which ignores that by advancing this theory the label has become an empty signifier that reduces to "is this person a person with person-like qualities". There is no there there.
5434a
2yr ago
Competing for female attention in latin dance totally fits my model. Here's my completely uninformed stereotypes of open classes (I assume the competitive level acts as a filter), please correct or confirm.
Rock'n'roll/Ceroc/Lindyhop: High metabolism neurodivergents with that weird blend of woke politics and retro aesthetics.
Salsa/swing: Casual singles. Divorcees dancing with unmarried tech workers and suave manlets.
Kizomba: As above but the divorcees are older, hornier and outnumber the men who are scared off by the more direct sensuality.
Tango: Trad types who like rules and following them. Etiquettists.
Ballroom: More stable relationshippers, enjoy the glamour, inclined to take the activity seriously and with all the conflicts that follow.
Street: DDR variety Asians, retired b-boys, female actual-dance-students polishing their moves.
Not sneering, I could probably fit in with nearly all of them to some degree.
Given that the activity involves dancing all night how pervasive are drugs? What's the drinking culture like? I guess the need to both be coordinated and coordinate with another person puts a natural ceiling on that aspect.
5434a
2yr ago
Object restoration hobby videos. A lot of them are suspiciously clickbaity but some are more straight forward. Clickbaity ones tend towards digging up a cosmetically damaged high value object like a Rolex, the straight forward ones are more like restoring a rusty antique bench vice or a pair of bespoke leather shoes.
Big Clive. An affable Scottish electical engineer who dismantles and analyses the circuitry of discount shop gadgets.
Techmoan. A man who buys and reviews a mixture of high end vintage hifi components that were out of the ordinary buyer's reach when released, or low end Amazon novelty hifi components that are beyond the ordinary buyer's good taste.
SoftWhiteUnderbelly. A retired commercial advertising photographer conducts open-ended studio interviews with the inhabitants of Los Angele's Skid Row. This is the one I'd most recommend to Motte readers for the obvious sociological aspects. The common thread running through many of their narratives is a shitty childhood that the person assumes is basically normal. While they often have a sympathic story reading the comments is mind boggling to see people praising pimps, johns and heroin dealers with bottom shelf platitudes about what nice boys they are. It's like they watched The Wire and can't tell Bubbles from Snoop.
IsaacArthur. A man with an amusing accent (Virginia?) analyses sci-fi technology through the lens of real world engineering possibilities.
This guy who builds huts and other primitive technologies in the woods by himself
The ones I've watched always seemed dubious, it might just be the one channel I landed on. A guy makes a beautiful swimming pool in the jungle using only a knife and a bucket... hmm. At the least it seems like they always pick a spot with the softest, loosest, most diggable dirt in the whole world. There's never half of two brick walls buried four inches down.
People doing traditional crafts (especially Japanese art craft like urushi and kintsugi, wagashi making etc)
Link it up. I love watching craft and Japanese woodwork videos.
5434a
2yr ago
There's lots of programmers and software devs on the internet, you can hardly move without encountering them. Seems like there's a lot less sysadmins and network engineers. Clearly both are deeply engaged with the internet as a technology and equally essential to its functioning. Am I right to think it's because programmers have a lot more free time to shitpost leading to a skewed impression of the tech landscape? Maybe network engineers just call themselves programmers to save on splitting hairs when talking with laymen? Or can software engineers do all the network tasks if they need to but chose software because it's a better salary? It shows up in the "learn to code" memes too where people offer advice about leetcode practice but I rarely hear anyone suggest getting a Cisco cert. On the other hand I sometimes read posts by software developers who admit to having no idea how anything works outside of their IDE.
Asking mainly out of idle curiosity but if I ever get to the point where I need to look for a job in tech I feel like I'd be more inclined towards network tech than working in a game studio or brewing up a new algorithm for FAANG.
5434a
2yr ago
Agreed that it's difficult to properly judge a comment without its context. @ZorbaTHut can the janitor page posts be tweaked to include their parent comment?
I've seen it used to refer to both a hot Chad whose romantic interest in women extends no further than the tip of his dick and to a pretty boy that a woman keeps hooked on simping for her by using him for her sexual gratification (the female equivalent of a slampig - I haven't watched it but I think the toyboy fantasy film Babygirl with Nicole Kidman probably depicts something like this model), and also to any unappealing men who are more motivated to pursue sex than sitting at home watching porn and complaining online about Stacies.
Is he a boy and is fucking any significant part of the motivation for his actions? He's a fuckboy.
Reading that article though it reads like an attempt to build a stick for hitting men... but I don't see many men who would be particularly offended by the label. Low stakes defensive maybe, but not sincerely offended. What I can see being offensive is calling another woman's boyfriend a fuckboy. In that sense perhaps the fuckboy label is a tool for women to reassert the sort of social policing they're so adept at and that some here in this forum say could alleviate the ills of current day dating culture. Can you imagine if someone told a woman that the new guy she's excited to be dating is a fuckboy? It's a hit at her value - she's giving him her value and not getting compensated (she does it free!). Call a man a fuckboy and internally he'll probably shrug and think DM;HS. It's labelling him as someone who got what he wanted. Beats being an incel or a simp. Tell a woman her bf is a fuckboy and in short order he'll be put on notice that it's time to man up or he won't be getting what he wants any more. You don't need to tell her directly, posting it to the audience of young women reading a fashion blog will probably suffice to start the thought process.
No, it's an epub.
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