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
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
This does not seem like a serious or useful standard, as even assuming there is anything like an objective standard of greatness, we don't really know if a work is great until after it is produced and read.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
I'm even more lost than before I asked.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
This came piece came out in 2021, 2 years after the follow-up reaction piece and almost 4 years after the original story. In this essay, a woman named Alexis Nowicki claims that "Cat Person" was actually inspired by something that happened to her. And not just "inspired" by, but with enough specific details matching that she had dozens of acquaintances contacting her to ask if she had written the story herself under a pen name.
While I enjoyed the drama like a car wreck on 95, I never found Nowicki's actions to be believably altruistic. She was either fame-whoring, or she was score settling regarding something off camera. But there is no way that her actions could have done anything to help avoid any of the problems she claimed to have, and would almost certainly make them much worse.
She claimed that her friends recognized her and her bf based on details in the story. Bullshit. There are 34,000 undergrads at UMich Ann Arbor at any given time, you're telling me she's the only freshman to ever fuck a 30-something? The precise details may have been bang on, sure, but call me antisocial but there are like five people I would recognize at the level of detail we're talking about here. Her best friend may have recognized her, maybe a dozen close friends, but not everyone in Ann Arbor or something like that. There just wasn't sufficient detail to connect the fictional story to a real person based on past events!
But of course, once she chose to publicly out herself, it became known to everyone. And everyone who was aware of her relationship to her dead bf, but hadn't guessed the connection, suddenly became aware of this supposedly deeply embarrassing fact about the late man. That is much more disgusting and libelous than the original short story! That's really outing the guy! It's taking something that was maybe a problem you had with a handful of people in your immediate social circle from college, and turning it into a problem that comes up if someone googles you.
The generic-ness of the story is what gives it its power, it feels like something that happens to everyone. One can picture oneself in either role. I actually looked it up to cite a particular scene to someone recently to explain a feeling I was having.
But accepting your premise, that at some level thinly-fictionalizing someone else is wrong, where do you draw the lines?
Are memoirs ever ok? How many details does one need to change before one can write a novel? Is bitching about your wife on TheMotte ok because it's all under pseudonyms? What if she reads what a mottizen said about her and kills herself out of shame? What about twitter under a pseudonym? What about a blog under a real name? If Kulak writes a little tweetstorm about some "feminist bitch" he had to deal with, and she reads it and recognizes that it was her, is he in the wrong? What about the "blankfaces" that scott aaronson decried? Or is it the ideological agenda that makes the crime? What details is one obligated to change to conceal identity, and which are immoral to change because one is no longer telling the real story?
Under rules designed to minimize harm to subjects of stories, is literature possible? Is journalism? Is essay writing? Memoir?
If one likes books, it seems like one has to offer freedom to the author. I've no doubt that many acquaintances of Hemingway or Hunter S Thompson or Bukowski felt some kind of way about some of their characters, there's a cottage industry to identifying the "real" abc in the classics, and we all accept that as the cost of doing business.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
People kill themselves for all kinds of reasons, many of them wildly insufficient, and nearly all of them inconsistent. There are virtually no life events that consistently lead to suicide, in the sense that there are more people who have the same experience and don't kill themselves, from even the most traumatic events. Most suicides are for much less.
When we attribute one person's suicide to another, we are engaging in an extreme form of eggshell plaintiff.
What do you think the suicide rate is among the subjects of viral MFA-type short stories?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
I wanted to discuss this article and what it misses.
The core thesis of the article is this:
It’s actually really simple to get jacked. That’s not to say it’s easy- just that the complexity of the challenge is trivial, requiring only time and energy to succeed.
Think of getting jacked as something like this formula: GettingJacked = TIME * (.6X + .3Y + .1Z) X is your adherence to primary concepts, y is your adherence to secondary concepts, and z is your adherence to tertiary concepts. Primary and secondary concepts are a collection of just a handful of relatively simple ideas that require little financial investment. If you just focused on these, you would find getting jacked to be relatively straightforward. But tertiary concepts, predominantly supplements, are innumerable, complex, and require tons of money.
His primary concepts are progressive overload, training to (near) failure, eating enough protein, and cutting a low body fat. His secondary concepts are Compound lifts, optimal set numbers, and following a lifting program. The tertiary ones are essentially everything else, calling out trends or minor issues.
I think the article itself is kind of confused, why is following a lifting program a secondary concept but going to a class or working with a trainer is a tertiary one? But those are minor quibbles.
The real term in the equation I want to talk about is TIME. It's the unexamined assumption underlying the whole article, and a lot of "common sense" lifting/workout advice you see online. I want to examine that unexamined assumption.
Time as the author looks at is really combined with the word "adherence" used later, so it's something like "time adhering to a plan/program." Adherence is almost never 100%, even professional athletes don't always do every written rep of every written set in every written workout they planned across a multi-month program. Things happen. 70-95% program adherence is pretty typical informally for people who say they "completed" a program block. Anything over 60% adherence is pretty much "doing" the workout plan.
My learned friend in argument @sapph (no o) talked here about this comment discussing the idea that life is about doing 100 things every day that you don't want to do. Sapph says:
I have no idea why ideas like "Life is about doing 100 things every single day that you don’t want to do." became so popular in the culture. Of course people don't always follow the advice but people most do accept that success is largely about enduring hardship...There is a logic to all of this but other points of view used to be more common. In Rock Climbing you still see people talking about the importance of "being psyched". Being excited and energized, having fun. Its a lot easier to put in the time if you don't actually need to expend much effort. No one thinks it wont hurt sometimes. You are gonna fall and your fingers will bleed. But its just a completely different way of relating to your goals. The most important thing is to stay psyched.
And that's my jumping off point for what I think is missing: for the formula above for GettingJacked, or for any other similar goal, it's important not to treat time and adherence as black boxes, that just need to be brute forced through. ChaoticNeutral views the world in that way: lifting is simple, and maybe or probably unpleasant, but you need to apply willpower to it so as to maximize time and adherence and thereby achieve the goal. At this point in my life, I can reasonably say I've been lifting for the better part of 15 years, and more and more I react against that style, instead choosing like Sapph to constantly chase a new thing I'm stoked about.
I don't seek to optimize my program around adherence to the xyz principles at all, but instead on maximizing the TIME I put in by choosing a workout I'm stoked about. For some time like Sapph that was rock climbing for me, lately it's been new sports like jiu jitsu and long distance bicycle rides. But often it's just a matter of picking a new lift, or a new program, or a new implement like a heavy kettlebell or landmine. Picking a new game for me always ends up looking like having four or five new ideas, and trying them all at once until I see which one sticks.
And while I'm not a competitor in any sport, I'm reasonably proud of the shape I'm in. More and more I notice my friends falling off, and I think a big part of it is that attitude that places fitness and athletics in that "100 things you don't like but have to do" category.
The irony that I think causes the disconnect is that for a certain mindset, what gets them stoked about a workout program is exactly the thought that they are following an optimal program, or the minimal effective dose.
But I think a lot of people get stuck on that simple-but-difficult formula, banging their head against the wall, because they think that the only way to solve the problem is to apply more willpower. There's a tendency to refuse to try other things, or pay for other things, out of a kind of ascetic sense that it isn't necessary. But that's wrongheaded: the thing that makes you stoked about working out is nearly always worth it. The value of being in shape is nearly inevitably higher than the cost, and if being stoked is what you need it is what you need.
Or maybe I'm completely wrong. Maybe I'm weird in that I do enjoy working out in a reasonably-decent way, and most people don't, no matter what they try.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
I don't think it's at all responsible for the results I'm talking about, in Pennsylvania.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
This comment is giving me strong Buffalo bills energy
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
I want to hear it from Shapiro and Weinstein.
There's a reasonable argument that Israeli dual citizenship is no more disloyalty to the United States than being a fan of AJ Brown is disloyalty to the Philadelphia Eagles.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
It amazes me that the dual loyalty argument is never answered by "Israel should listen to America," only by "America should listen to Israel."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
Without doxxing myself too aggressively, holy shit this was a blue year around here.
We had a Court of Common Pleas election in which the Republican was more qualified, spent more money, put more effort in, sent out more mail, put up more signs, contacted more volunteers. In the primary, where judicial candidates traditionally cross-file to both the R and D primary ballots, she was just a few percentage points from beating the D candidate on the D ballot, while winning the Republican ballot with Saddam Hussein numbers.
She got wrecked today, lost by a large margin. Just four years ago, in a three-seat judicial race, this same county elected three Republicans.
Zohran seemed like styles-make-fights to me. I don't really care about New Jersey or VA. But this one has me spooked. By all rights he should not have won that election, all the local political so-and-sos didn't think he would. His whole campaign was getting on the ballot as a D and hoping for the best. The best happened.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
The successive loss of the second and third Romes defaulted leadership back to Rome.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
Lockdowns went from unimaginable to obvious thanks to large efforts from powerful media machines. Without claiming lockdowns were pushed as part of an anti-Trump agenda, or that Covid deaths were fake, we can say in retrospect with certainty that Covid deaths were below the level at which we as a society could have ignored the bodies if media wanted them ignored.
A hypothetical Hillary or Cuomo admin does the math and decides the marginal deaths are no big deal compared to the cost of lockdowns, and they lean on the American media. They tell social media companies that any effort to spread pro-lockdown propaganda will be considered inciting panic and will lead to the government acting against the social media companies in a regulatory capacity. They lean on the news media to keep the story on how we all need to keep going to main street small businesses to keep the economy humming. They focus on masks or ivermectin or some other bullshit to stop the spread.
The fact that no one talks about the dead people anymore indicates that we could have ignored them at the time.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
I didn't realize it lasted that long either. TIL
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
I'm less sure. Part of me thinks that if a neoliberal ghoul of a Democrat were in the white house, an HRC or a Cuomo, we would have been bullied by the mass media into ignoring all the dead elderly folks as "within natural seasonal variations" and told that everything was perfectly normal and that any other countries behaving otherwise were panicking and overreacting and that even thinking too much about COVID was racist.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
I think it's more fun if we don't allow the decision! Now you have weigh a 50% chance of landing on the wrong team.
WWII American is an easy pick, but WWII Japanese would be terrible.
But then the wars that have more even distributions of forces tend to be worse for everyone involved.
I think I'd pick something pretty antique. One of the Greek city state conflicts, or the a mercenary in one of the sets of Italian wars.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
You know, I have a friend who is a born-again virgin, who was of sometimes questionable sexual morality prior to meeting his now-wife. My understanding from him is that she was similar, though I have never talked to her personally about it. They understand this about each other, but other than that they don't speak about it and operate as though they were each other's firsts.
I wouldn't have guessed that would work, but it seems to for them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
The question is can you pick a side. The Pacific was no picnic for the Marines, but it was much worse for the Japs.
Did you recently listen to the new MartyrMade podcast episode on WWI? He makes this point at length, mostly summarizing Junger et al on the topic.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
How do you train a longbowman? Start with his grandfather.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
There are also a great many people who, after being told that xyz group is on average inferior, will not accept a meritocracy.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
Trump has so far been no worse than Biden/Harris, though there's an opportunity to be much better or much worse coming up.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
She recently started hooking up with a French postdoc who is cheating on his long-term girlfriend with her...she responded by saying that she "had to" pursue this relationship because she didn't know when she would "feel this way" again and that he was a "special guy".
The West has not fallen. The French are still the French.
I will say I've been shocked to find several relationships, adult successful ones, in my social circle who are the result of long term cheating gone legit. It's not completely unheard of. I'm oddly old fashioned on one point: marriage washes out all prior sins, once you get married whatever ethical lapses you committed in dating no longer matter.
The Enhanced Games appear to be a real thing this time. They've successfully taken a past-his-prime Olympic swimmer who never finished better than 5th in the Olympics, and drugged him up scientifically and taken him to break the 50m record. As a kind of proof of concept.
Which is fascinating to me in that, having been a huge baseball fan and seven years old in 1998, I've been massively cynical about drug use in sports. While there are obvious differences between sports and time periods with open and unconstrained drug use versus tested and hidden drug use, I pretty much assumed that all top level athletes were likely pushing the rules a little bit.
And what we're seeing here is Gkolomeev, who never medaled in the Olympics, drugging up openly and within a short period breaking the record. What this tells us is that swimming in the Olympics is pretty clean. Because otherwise, someone else would have already broken that record, there wouldn't be any margin left for the enhanced games to enhance. Reading about in the WSJ, it didn't even sound like a "crazy" cycle he was on, nothing that would get him good odds in the old T Nation bodybuilder Death Pool. So if just a decent open cycle gets you a world record, then we know there's not a ton of drug use in olympic swimming.
The Enhanced Games might in an empirical sense actually be a great thing for the Olympics, an effective proof that the Olympic athletes remain clean. If the Enhanced Games' break the records, then we know the olympic record is clean. If they don't, it's suspicious.
Though either way I hope the Enhanced Games bring back Tug of War.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
A Middle Earth setting that is true to Tolkien lacks an essential element for an MMO: morally grey factions.
40k is the perfect setting for tabletop gaming because there are no good guys, so you don't have any problem running any two races/factions against each other. It's not even hard, from a lore perspective, to come up with reasons why two guard units or marine chapters or demon cults or orc waaaaghs are fighting. Everything is pure gameplay.
In Middle Earth, humans and elves and dwarves can only fight orcs, unless it's a big misunderstanding and huge tragedy that we will mourn for a thousand years. There's no lore-natural PVP aspect. There's limited lore-natural small scale events. Everything is the big stuff.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12d ago
Depends how specific you think a lot of things are to particular presidents and timing.
Does COVID still happen in 2020? Does Russia still invade Ukraine? What happens in Israel, we don't get the Abraham accords because we don't get Trump so we don't get desperate Hamas launching 10/7; but it's not like everyone would have just sat still in the meantime?
Does a more technically competent president ban or regulate Bitcoin in 2011? Does a bloodier minded president get more entangled with ISIS? What happens with Epstein?
Then you get into who follows Clinton. When does Mitt Romney run? When does Barack Obama come off the bench?
Weird, I'd forgotten it was discussed here, and I commented then, and said like mostly the same things, but with some details shuffled.
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