5434a
3mo 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.
The "assigned at birth" is another rhetorical sleight of hand from the TRA camp. It applies to intersex babies because assigning them a gender is a pragmatic approach to an imperfect world that doesn't make accommodations for intersex individuals. Trans adults weren't assigned a gender, their sex was observed. They want to retcon the idea that sex and gender are the same thing in this instance and in this narrow interpretation because it serves their ends to conflate this aspect of intersex conditions with transgenderism. They want the right to edit their documentation. That's all. If you ask them if sex and gender are the same things in a broader interpretation of an other instance that would nullify a transgender identity they'll deny it. It's a waste of brain cells to think it through. Does editing their documentation render them the other sex, or even the other gender? No. It's just another point in their fuzzy cloud of subjective signifiers that conveniently proofs (sic) that they always were what they became (because that's what they want to be (...which they weren't (...)).
We could talk about cars the same way. There are right hand drive and left hand drive, and there are converted handed cars. Intersex are like a single-seater - they don't get to drive down the centre line and they don't compare to either handed type. Typical handed cars have no use for the handed conversion, the qualifying prefix, or the need to edit or amend their paperwork unless they're being transported to a country where they drive on the other side. Editing the paperwork doesn't mean the car has or hasn't been converted or has or hasn't come from another country. It's a fiction, and a fiction that is only worth pursuing for the convenience of the car owner. The single-seater faces no such issues. It wasn't made with mandated lanes in mind. It was assigned a lane, not a side for the steering wheel. No paperwork is going to make it more or less suited to one lane or the other or reassign something that wasn't there to be assigned. (This analogy is not great and so I won't defend it but I've spent the brain cells on writing it now and it serves the point: the mandated lane is not the steering wheel's position, some tiny number of cars don't embody those organising principles, and the documentation is not the car).
5434a
2mo ago
I've got a couple of things housemates who worked in similar sectors have left behind but honestly most B2B swag seems kind of shitty, although that might have been due to their entry level positions. Stationery. Toys. T-shirts. Nothing you'd really miss (so you leave it behind), and more like a grown up version of the stuff you would have found included directly inside every box of cereal. I suppose it's a different affair if you manage a multi-million dollar budget.
I refuse any loyalty points scheme more complex than "collect 10 stamps to claim a free coffee".
5434a
2mo ago
That's close, but I mean more along the lines of:
Packet of branded food item (coffee, cereal, yoghurt, soft drink, snack, etc)
"Collect X proofs of purchase and get a free Y!"
And the free Y is something durable and/or worthwhile, and the X proofs is realistic, not triple digits. Or if it's triple digits the Y has real monetary value like a games console. The branded items running the promotion were available in every shop, so it was designed to cultivate brand loyalty rather than loyalty to a chain of shops. Stamps were more agnostic about what you purchased and tend to be limited to one chain or a small consortium.
I suppose most marketing campaigns have transferred to apps, loyalty schemes and other sign up lists, but I get the impression those are focused on discounts and other volume sales promotions rather than straight up material freebies.
5434a
2mo ago
Beat them to the punch and send them a brief message on the day-of to cancel.
I'm joking of course but psychology and dating is so counterintuitive it would probably work.
5434a
7mo ago
The same reason I said no to the guy who pulled up alongside me while I was walking down the road and offered to give me a Cartier watch: it reeks of bait.
I still don't know what the attached string was in that instance because I told him I already had a watch and walked away, but I'd guess it would get parlayed into helping him out with something that involved me handing over a sum of money on the basis that he'd already helped me and besides I'd still come out quids in so why not, fair's fair, thought you were a friendly person, is this how you treat people who want to help you, etc.
So yeah, he gives them $500. But he's still using them as a means to an end, so they're still at least half right in their scepticism.
5434a
2mo ago
Indeed. I've never seen the original TV show but I've read Shogun twice now.
I thought it was time to try out a second Clavell Asian Saga book, and choosing the next one by internal chronology made sense.
5434a
2mo ago
It's not like being drunk and having patchy memories, or remembering the dumb things you did and wishing you couldn't remember, or needing to be prompted and then remembering. All three times it's happened to me the last thing I remember is taking my nth shot of vodka in x minutes on an empty stomach. Then waking up.
I've drunk the same amount of alcohol on an empty stomach many times, often much more. I think the critical factor is drinking high strength alcohol much too quickly. Much easier to do when it's just a little shot instead of a big glass of cold gassy beer.
I also used to think blue balls and jaw-dropping were merely colourful euphemisms for sexual frustration and surprise.
5434a
2mo ago
I'm content to attribute it to a glitch on my end. Just checked and I do indeed still have an unposted draft reply to another topic in a different tab that was unaffected.
5434a
2mo ago
IIRC from seeing your previous feedback it seemed to happen to you quite often. This was the first time it's ever happened to me, but on the other hand I don't post much.
On the other other hand I sometimes draft long posts that I never submit and leave them for days and they're still sitting there waiting in their tab.
The screen scrolled without me touching it and then when I got back to where I was the comment was gone. Bizarre.
5434a
6mo ago
The Lego Movie plays to the strengths of 3D CGI on account of the subject being made of countless tiny pieces of uniform rigid 3D shapes. I imagine it was a huge effort to make in CGI, never mind trying to do it freehand.
5434a
2mo ago
Other than fees and the technical know-how what's to stop someone swapping from an open blockchain into Monero or another privacy coin and then back again to sever the links? The blockchain might indicate money went into Monero, and came out of Monero, but Monero says "...".
5434a
4mo 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
1mo ago
A slightly less practical one but a good mindset to aspire to nonetheless is the "touch it once" principle.
I generally bundle this and the thirty second rule into just mentally taking the piss out of myself that "I'll do it later, there'll be a better time" is a stupid lazy lie when I'm standing right in front of a task that already has my attention.
5434a
3mo ago
I don't know Sargon's style but I assume it's a drily ironic joke that the world didn't change, the people who say it did did.
5434a
2mo ago
Going okay but currently hampered by my lack of adequate tools and workspace. Slow but steady progress.
5434a
6mo ago
I totally agree with the broad thrust of your post, just pointing out that The Lego Movie is the rare example that justifies its use of 3D and CGI where something like Toy Story, another genuinely good 3D CGI film, could quite conceivably have been rendered freehand in golden era 2D style without any great loss, and probably faster and for a smaller budget - it's the script, the characters and the top tier voice actors that make Toy Story good, the CGI was a technical novelty.
You can't render complex mathematically accurate physics in freehand - and I'm not saying I'm certain they did in TLM - and that's okay because 99% of the time you don't need to to tell a story. But if you want a convincing effect of a tidal wave of tiny Lego pieces crashing over a Lego city, a box full of loose pieces being exploded, or a Lego model that accurately models the qualities of the real product then CGI is going to give a "better" result, and faster. I'm not actually sure it would be cheaper though, 3D rendering is notoriously intensive and the credits for that film are vast.
A talented artist certainly could draw something that looks like a lot of Lego pieces interacting, but the emphasis is on like. CGI will be more immersive for that use even if perhaps it's less graphically expressive in its line-work and frame advances. A hand drawn Lego Movie would give you the "what if you could draw Lego coming to life" feeling where CGI is that much closer to "what if Lego could come to life". The artificial plastic-ness of Lego is an ideal match for the blandness of CGI where something like The Jungle Book or Lion King remakes will fall into the uncanny valley by trying to make singing animals look realistic (I assume, I haven't watched either of them).
In short putting aside cost, speed and effort I think The Lego Movie really would be at the very best no better if it was made without CGI.
5434a
3mo ago
The [short] Stories Of Ibis is turning out disappointingly girly.
So far I've had a story about a woman who rescues/redeems the morality of a bully victim turned killer using the power of Star Trek fan fic, one about a blind girl who is chatted up in a VR chatroom by a boy who likes her for who she is, and one about a girl's relationship with her best friend character AI who lives inside a vanity mirror toy.
This is tied together with intermissions about a man who has been captured by a caring and enlightened yet powerful robot who knows that she's sexy but is quick to pre-empt the man by letting him know she doesn't have a vagina.
5434a
5mo ago
wiki:
Schettino said he left the ship when it turned over, and that he fell into a lifeboat
[...]
the on-duty Italian Coast Guard commander told Schettino, "Vada a bordo, cazzo!" ("Get on board, for fuck's sake!"), but Schettino did not do so and was one of the first to reach land.
lmao
5434a
7mo ago
I think the problem is your message was so straight forward that it rushed to the objective which removed any ambiguity and plausible deniability from the interaction and explicitly cemented it into the frame of a capital D date. You were probably also too comprehensive with the if/else conditions.
"Doing anything this weekend?"
[response]
"Fancy [social activity]?"
[response]
"No big deal, maybe another time"
...and then there's nothing to have to pretend didn't happen, which is going to be challenging now because you went meta at the end.
On the plus side at least you tried, and shared it for open feedback, and now you can move past it with the benefit of hindsight and others' perspectives. Make a mistake and learn from it. That's better than passively wondering what if. Better luck next time.
5434a
11mo ago
It might have made more sense for the mods to switch to work-to-rule instead of the 48 hour lock out. One of their main objections was that without API access via third party apps their work would be made harder, so show what the effects would be by modding using only the Reddit app. Submissions take longer to get approved, spam slips through, reports go unmodded, trolls go unchecked, duplicate posts proliferate, custom scripts stop posting whatever special features the subs use them for, admins get more tickets from mods asking for support and missing features, and the invisible janitor work begins to become more visible in its absence. If mod work is valuable and the Reddit app makes mod work less effective the result ought to be that Reddit gets worse. What's Reddit going to do, complain that they got what they wanted?
Just finished W. David Marx's Status And Culture. Interesting and expansive without tediously reiterating the same points over and over to reach the magic 350 page count as so many pop intellectual books do. A little too blinkered though; yeah status plays into and undergirds a lot of society, but it's not literally everything*. Most of it will be familiar material to everyone here but it's still good to see the theories fleshed out and not just used as stick to beat on the outgroup de jour.
About to start The Stories Of Ibis.
*Edit: What I find frustrating about the typical analysis of status is that it treats status as an end in itself. I see status as a means to reach/achieve/reflect the underlying concretely valuable objectives and avoiding the suffering of being deprived of the same.
5434a
4mo ago
I've read most of the replies and I wonder if it doesn't boil down to unwillingness to entertain anything short of a perfect case. If a vegan can't provide a watertight case for how turning vegan will generate ideal outcomes on all aspects under consideration then their argument is irredeemably flawed, and if their argument is flawed it can be rejected wholesale and we can all carry on as we were. And of course The Motte is a filter for people who live to pick holes in arguments (cue "no we're not!").
What if vegans could show some net benefits at below net cost to you? Would you/we recalibrate not to eating a fully vegan diet, but simply eating less meat? Or does it have to be the once-and-for-all slam dunk that settles the matter for ever?
5434a
5mo 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.
Ah, I was going to suggest something small scale to reduce costs (electronics, crafts, etc) but motor issues rule that out. Gardening might have been a good substitute but if you live in an apartment in Alaska then that's probably not going to work either.
Still if you can think of something that suits your situation I think it can help with the "why get out of bed, what's the point" problem. Seeing something that makes physical progress, that you direct, that presents discrete problems to solve, and that you can point to whether to show other people or just to yourself provides hard evidence that you're making an impact on something. It also gives you a clear objective where upon completion you can make a judgement of whether you've succeeded, failed, or can improve. I think all those aspects are valuable to mental wellbeing and not half as legible in areas like religion/community, exercising, or creative-aesthetic-intellectual activities.
Edit: Reading more of your replies (not much money, government hand outs) maybe consider starting a cash-in-hand pressure washing business? The equipment is cheap enough to make it low risk and small scale, the work isn't fine skilled, you can earn some money, you leave things noticeably better for your efforts within minutes, you can work alone part-time or build it up into a legit business, and having seen a few pictures of Alaska it looks like all the slush makes everything constantly flithy meaning repeat business. Sure it's not a "higher" purpose but keeping things clean and getting paid is a positive sum contribution and should be sufficient for basic self/social esteem. If you're really savvy you don't even have to buy any equipment to start, just make some flyers and see if there's any interest before you lay out any cash.
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