DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
On the unflattering side for my psychology (actually I'm pretty sure these are all unflattering sides for my psychology), there's definitely an artificial cliff where my mind exaggerates the significance of age 18, just in the opposite of the direction it's "supposed" to, like crossing that threshold, despite doing nothing biologically whatsoever, transmutes a woman into socially-endorsed safe-horny that makes me feel like a cuck if I pay too much attention to it. And of course I'm not stupid, so I know that a girl who's 17 and 364 days is barely any different from that, and at that point we're kind of playing the unexpected hanging paradox until my interest gradually fades back in somewhere earlier.
But on the, uh, other unflattering side for my psychology, the center of my attention is definitely "hebepilled", with girls generally getting less interesting to me the further they get away from that. Again, not completely uninteresting, just less interesting, but it is a palpable difference. In middle school my crushes were generally age-appropriate, sometimes even older than me, although I'd occasionally really creep people out by expressing interest in, like, someone's nine-year-old sister or something. For the first half of high school they remained age-appropriate but the average trended younger relative to me (and I chafed as social pressure tried to do the reverse), but for the back half of high school the objects of my affections were all in middle school (no I never got anywhere with them, I was a big gawky weirdo), and after graduating, now that I don't have adolescent hormones raging and I don't spend my time in a prison for minors, I kind of gradually passively gave up on a sexual life and just ruminate too much about it instead.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
My personal interpretation is that the One Wish Willow cared more about screwing over Bear than Ian, because he had more to work with psychologically, but also it knew that Ian was doomed anyway because he'd wander into Bear's house minutes later. But it wouldn't be in-character for the One Wish Willow to kill Ian by dropping money on his head, anyway, because it's demonic, it cares about corrupting the soul; if it's going to corrupt a wish for money, it's going to do it by provoking further doubling-down on avarice.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
This is the same bullshit way of thinking about the movie that your opponents use; they dismiss One Wish Willow as an agentic force that deserves part of the blame for the film's events because it's "just an allegory for" men controlling women. You've gotta handle stories at least a little bit literally.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
For many reasons, I'm inclined to say that Barker is simply lying about this, which is unfortunate because it's a great movie; fortunately, the lie doesn’t survive contact with the film itself. It's a classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for story, and also a classic deal-with-the-devil story; these archetypes classically go together and the film telegraphs both of them hard. Bear makes an evil wish and it is granted by an evil power; its interpretation of his wish is malicious, but the whole point of that malice is to damn him, and it can't do that with a cheap trick unrelated to his intent in making the wish. So Nikki is possessed by another personality (a demon, because this is basically the devil granting the wish) because Bear wouldn’t actually mind his wish being granted that way in principle; that personality is fucking crazy because that's the level of intensity Bear initially envisioned. And the Willow made its way into Bear's hands in the first place because he was the sort of person to do that, because he was the sort of person to wander into a random shady New Age magic shop and pick up some tacky shit with purported magic powers.
TBH I think a large part of Barker's motivation in making these implausible claims about his film is just that he's scared of Hollywood reading it as religious. Which gets lost in a lot of the normie social media discourse on it, which thinks of demonic possession as a stock horror movie trope like vampires or zombies and not as a phenomenon a lot of the world believes in as part of their faith.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I'd personally put the peak a little later than you (16 rather than 13, to give more time for breasts and hips to develop,
Yeah, it really says something freakish and unsavory about me that I don't see "breasts and hips" as that much of a draw. Like, at best I'll aesthetically appreciate them but I know it's not to nearly the normal extent, like I'll go "oh, nice, those are neat" and maybe if I'm really smitten I'll start thinking objectively about their practical utility in motherhood. And at worst they're immediately uglifying and I'm left thinking "wow, she kind of looks old and fat and like her mom now, she was way cuter a few months ago before those grew in", which is a position I've only fully found myself in once but it still left me feeling like enough of a creep for a lifetime and then some. But it mostly just doesn’t enter into consideration for me; my cluster of prioritized traits looks more like "short, thin, neotenous, healthy, happy, vulnerable, innocent".
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Yes, agreed. The "broken world" bit was more about the public conversation on all of this being confused by taboo/signaling/etc concerns than about any particular outcome for me personally.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
The classic case is Emmet Till. He was accused of raping a white woman but didn’t.
That's not my understanding of that specific case; my understanding is that he was accused of sexually harassing a white woman and it's disputed whether he did or not (some claim that the accuser admitted years later to making it up, but this claim itself seems to have been fabricated) but it doesn't matter much because it's not an offense that anyone sane thinks merits capital punishment.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I don't think he intends it as hyperbole.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I usually try to say 'LLMs' or 'bots' because I don't think the systems we're currently talking about are 'artificial intelligence'. Unfortunately 'AI' is the term that the companies themselves use and which the media seems to have accepted, but from where I'm standing, calling these systems 'AI' is a kind of marketing gimmick. I think I would reserve the term 'AI' for something that's genuinely intelligent.
This is an inane but weirdly popular talking point that would have been a lot fairer (if lower-stakes and off-puttingly pedantic to normies) to bring up literal decades ago when "AI" was commonly being used to refer to simple single-purpose algorithms in charge of a vaguely anthropomorphic object, like "enemy AI" in a video game. I think it would have been fair to object that those aren't actually AI. But at this point, with the LLMs, people trying to invoke the same argument are dealing with an increasingly clear invisible-unicorn-in-the-garage situation, where the actual underlying belief is that they can't be AI because AI is inherently impossible, but they often know on some level that that's silly because materialism, so they try to launder it through asserting that actually, the essence of real intelligence is the ability to pass whatever specific tests we haven't managed to get the AI up to human level performance at yet.
Like, people know that par-human capability in everything wasn't ever how people defined AI, right? That's closer to a definition of ASI.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
This doesn't strike me as a serious argument at all; I simply think better of China's psyop capabilities than to expect that they'd get distracted blatantly signaling that it's them by tying in their personal shoulder chips.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
We might as well drop your framing here and note that the thing you're suggesting they "should" be doing is bribing various local power players to discourage them from raising a stink. That isn't even ineffective altruism, it's just classic old corruption.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
by opponents to get supporters to claim weakman arguments
This is a dynamic people don't pay nearly enough attention to, yeah. People are plenty capable of being stupid on their own, but there are also a million different actors playing the pied piper strategy in miniature, thinking of it as anything from a satirical social experiment to a well-oiled psyop.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Are you asking if I consider myself one? (Yes.) Because I don't think that really provides any more information than what I already said. I'm not completely unattracted to adult women, although I think the incel concept of the wall is misplaced and has really already started to hit by the time they're adults; the more attractive ones look more childlike. I think my ideal life path would have been marrying well and young, but at this point I'm sort of content as a foreveralone.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Surely the mark of a successful astroturf campaign is getting normies on the bandwagon.
Okay, just further expounding upon the grim point I made about myself in a comment below:
Whenever I'm considering the relative attractiveness of actresses in movies and shows, I always like to check their dates of birth and when the project was actually filmed. It's like my equivalent of checking the early life section. It doesn't always turn out how I expect when I think to look it up, but it certainly does most of the time.
And of course most people know that 22-year-old Megan Fox in Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen mogs all subsequent Megan Fox. But IMO, she is herself mogged by 19-to-20-year-old Megan Fox in the first live-action Transformers, who is in turn super mogged by 14-to-15-year-old Megan Fox in Holiday In The Sun. She's maybe slightly mogged by the slightly younger 14-to-15-year-old Olsen twins in the same movie, but the three of them are all super mogged by 12-to-13-year-old Emma Watson in Prisoner Of Azkaban. Is she mogged by her 11-to-12-year-old self in Chamber Of Secrets? Maybe, I would need to go refresh my memory to say, but I think I've dug myself deep enough at this point.
And sure, a significant contingent of the world's entire male population got a celebrity crush on Emma Watson growing up because she was put in the spotlight, and I'll readily admit that she was above-average attractive. But not that far above average! Not top percentile, maybe not even top decile. If she'd been a bit closer to my age and gone to my school, she'd have just been another physically attractive girl, somewhere towards the upper end of a vaguely-sorted pool that included basically every girl who didn’t have something extremely wrong with her. Because at the end of the day, I don't really intuitively believe in Helens of Troy. I just don't think there are girls all that much more beautiful than a normal baseline girl's lifetime peak, which is around puberty. Now, I'm aware that my personal opinion is both deeply socially unacceptable and not representative of the typical man, but - you see how those two things pull in opposite directions, right? Like, you've seen all those studies where men list what age of women they're attracted to and the graph mysteriously starts at 18 and immediately plummets? Really broken world we've got here.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
normie-straight-male-bait named Madison Beer
Simulation confirmed.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
How bad exactly does the state of AI need to get before you start reading "don't worry, we can totally handle it" as the dishonest part and not "now, we'll need to be careful because this is really dangerous"?
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I wouldn’t consider those to be "fans".
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
At the time I would have spouted off some not-particularly-self-aware shit trying to hype up the importance of the physical presence, the personal familiarity, the chance at a relationship, blah blah blah, but with the dubious benefit of hindsight, NEET years, introspection, etc, I feel comfortable saying that no, actually the "younger" part was basically sufficient. Which is a much more troubling thought now than it was then, when it could be charitably/optimistically phrased as "an age peer".
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Although it would also be a contrarian argument, I think it might be fair to say that rape in the modern sense was only made illegal when marital rape was, which was even more recently. That's because it completed a framing shift to ongoing consent; ancient rape was a major crime but a property crime, and the shift to the current understanding was a gradual one.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
They surely target locals, but:
most of them are not sexual predators within their own families
How sure are you of this?
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
The Watchmen film was infamously too faithful to the graphic novel and suffered for it.
I don't trust the taste of anyone with this opinion. The problems with that film were all the opposite; things it misunderstood or outright trashed from the comic.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Mostly specific classmates I don't remember and you wouldn’t know, but in terms of celebrities the ultra-stereotypical examples are Megan Fox or Pamela Anderson, whose popularity I always thought of as a statistical curiosity but not something particularly relatable. I found my bottom-quartile female classmates significantly more attractive just on the basis that they were younger and physically present in the room with me.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I will say that it's always struck me as sad sour-grapes-ish cope to talk as though the median woman was as unattractive (to men) as the median man is (to women). Although then again, my tastes in women have always been slightly off-center, so it's possible that when other guys showed me their concept of a ten I was always just shrugging at the idea that it was anything special.
Yes, and I feel like that rather poisoned the well for that type of criticism, as Roald Dahl is indeed a great children's author, but also, Willy Wonka is just about a perfect movie.
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