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
1d ago
Whatever Putin is thinking, it's a fair bet that Russian commanders and soldiers on the ground are going to have no problem putting Arab adventurer mercenaries in higher risk roles with worse equipment compared to Russians serving their country.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Point number two is even more dire for Ukraine than Russia, especially manpower-wise. There's really no solution for it other than getting Western countries to send troops, and I don't see that happening.
The solution is actually pretty easy, and Russia is already doing it. Based and trad white Russia is importing thousands of Arabs on the promise that they can settle in Russia if they survive the war. Go to various third world shitholes and promise citizenship for service, an EU visa is vastly more valuable than a Russian one. EU/USA visas would of course have to use oblique language regarding "Ukrainian freedom fighters" in credible fear of "Russian atrocities." But as long as one is as brutal as the Russians have been, you don't end up with many of them leftover anyway.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
It gets buried under the general mythology, but WWII was full of war profiteering and corruption within the US Armed Forces and on the homefront.
I'm not sure that individual incidents of corruption are all that strong a signal. We'd need to really have a strong idea of what the base rate of corruption is.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
who takes orders from a badass girlboss captain of course
Trek had that during the good years, Voyager remains my personal favorite in the series as it is the one I grew up with.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
There's an interesting dynamic to this kind of thing in fantasy universes.
The original Star Trek was revolutionarily progressive in having a multiracial crew. There was a presumption of American leadership (Kirk), but it also featured a Japanese crewman twenty years after Hiroshima (Sulu), a Russian during the height of the Cold War (Chekov), and a black woman during the civil rights era. Trek unites all of humanity by creating an alternative "other," the Klingons. The displacement of the kinds of stereotypes that we used for the Other and the Enemy, the Russians/Japanese/Blacks, onto the Klingons inevitably leads those who feel othered to identify with the Klingons. So then we have to reform our views of the Klingons in TNG, and so we need the Borg to be the new absolute villain.
Same thing happened in WoW, the Orcs go from bad guys to misunderstood victims.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Ok do you have any counter examples of arguments? "One time there really was a wolf" just seems like a fully generalizable argument to panic over everything.
If anything the failure of the Sydney Sweeney thing to catch fire strikes me as evidence that we're past peak woke.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
No.
It's not really a very good example. Everyone's bubble varies, but I don't know of anyone who really cares about it.
The people who are trying to gin up controversy around it feel like culture war dead-enders who are trying to produce content. The media outlets reporting it are dying clickbait legacy outlets like Rolling Stone or GQ, not even dying but-still-important legacy outlets like the NYT or New Yorker.
All the natural reactions to it I've seen, even online, have been some variety of eye-rolling at the whole thing, or making fun of Sweeney for the movie flopping because she made a feminist movie, it's all meta-commentary that assumes someone else cares about it all. The film itself looks to be Sweeney's Hard to Watch, an overly serious film from a hitherto unserious actor.
So I see where you're coming from, but it ultimately just doesn't have the juice to get anywhere. People don't care. American Eagle isn't a big enough brand, Sydney Sweeney isn't a big enough actor, the whole controversy feels like going through the motions.
Now if the movie were to become a hit, then we'd get something out of it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Writing twelve year old characters for adult readers is a different thing
I don't really think this is true. Natasha in War and Peace is 13.
(particularly if you're using those characters as didactic puppets to get your message across).
Bingo
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Trump can still be a starmaker for three years, he can still endorse and attack, he can still appoint to sinecures and fundraise for. Any Republican would-be titan can be easily placed in a position of power by Trump, and that won't entirely evaporate upon his death, Sauron like.
Plus, somebody is going to get his dying endorsement, and that will count for something. I don't think enough that it can win anyone the presidency, but probably enough that it can keep any other Republican from winning it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
If you want to read about MIT freshmen, then read about MIT freshmen.
What's weird and often disgusting to me is the practice of writing a story about middle schoolers and making them think/talk/act like college freshmen at MIT. You're writing fiction, you can choose what age you want the characters to be!
If you want to write a story with mature, rational, scheming characters who talk frankly about sex; then you ought to place them at an age where it makes sense for them to be mature, rational, scheming, and have frank conversations about sex. If you want them to be eleven, write them as eleven year olds. Game of Thrones is an unfortunate example of this, of course, though I think GRRM is bright enough to have recognized the problems and that's one of many things keeping The Winds of Winter from ever being publishable.
There's no rule saying you go to Wizard school at 11! Wicked has seen plenty of success making magic-school a college level endeavor, with Elphaba beginning school at 17 in the book and 20ish in the play (and played by comically old actors in the unfortunate film)! HPMoR could easily have started by having McGonnagall say "We start wizarding school at 16 here. Starting at 11 would be quite irrational!"
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
It seems very unlikely to me that everything works in a sufficiently mechanistic or rules based way that 1) photos exist of Donnie snuggling a teenage girl, 2) they are in the possession of the federal government, run by Donnie for some time now and by his sworn enemies for years before that, 3) We've never seen them before, meaning that his sworn enemies were too principled to leak them, 4) they haven't been destroyed, meaning that Trump is either too principled to have them destroyed or in some kind of power struggle with someone within the federal government.
This all just seems to be way too much "playing by the rules" on all sides to be credible for me. The theoretical FBI agent who is too principled to leak it under Biden, and too principled to destroy it under Trump, while also being too powerful to be fired by either, doesn't strike me as a realistic character in our drama.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Good luck!
Almost everyone I knew in law school had at least one exam that they thought they failed that they actually did really well on. Your feelings coming out rarely have much to do with how you did.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
There's an epidemic of people who want to write within the YA/Coming of Age paradigm, but don't actually want to write a story with child characters doing child things and thinking child thoughts.
Say what you like about JK Rowling's writing*, her eleven year old Harry Potter reads like an eleven year old. Hermione is smart, but she reads like a smart eleven year old who reads a lot. The trio are brave, but stupid. They're scared of minor things, irrationally. They lack incredible leadership or organizational skills. Draco is a bully, but he's a middle school bully.
Yudkowsky's Harry Potter reads like an MIT freshman, or maybe a dorky high school senior. He does not think or act like a child. Draco talks frankly about rape in his introduction.
This makes sense in that Yud was 30 writing his Harry Potter fanfiction, and I doubt that Yud spent a lot of time with kids.
A similar problem infects a lot of media made about kids. Big Mouth suffered from this increasingly as the show went on. The characters were supposed to be just hitting puberty, but talked and acted like college kids.
It tends to destroy my willing suspension of disbelief, and also lead to off-putting situations where a story really starts to become about kids having sex.
*Introducing a new macguffin because you realize that the party is going to get the old set of macguffins out of the way too quickly is, like, a classic rookie dungeon master error.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Wow. I don't even remember writing this comment. I don't even remember thinking about it. Don't drink and post.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
It was an amazing experience. Everyone in Wisconsin was incredibly nice. People stopped in the street to ask me about Philly. They treated us like uncontacted Amazon savages. Drank together, talked trash, had a great time.
I mean, why are we scared to say that the bike and ski helmets are inherently unaesthetic, dorky, and weird looking? Riding a bike is already fairly unaesthetic, but riding a bike with a helmet is basically doomed to dorkiness, and the more the helmet is optimized for any functional purpose the worse it tends to look. I do typically wear a helmet when I ride any considerable distance, but I'm under no illusion that I look at all cool doing so.
That said, seatbelts I remain a fan of. The numbers simply are what they are, and I don't think avoiding a seatbelt is really any improvement in comfort in a modern vehicle. I do occasionally drive classics that feature no or minimal seatbelts, and I suppose I'm taking a risk there but there's a corresponding benefit. My favorite tuner car modifications to see young guys drive around with are the addition of aesthetically obvious safety features. The fire extinguisher ostentatiously anchored to the floor in easy reach, the two strap hanging off the bumper, the four point racing harness in the driver's seat.
More options
Context Copy link