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FlyingLionWithABook

Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.

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joined 2022 October 25 19:25:25 UTC
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User ID: 1739

FlyingLionWithABook

Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.

1 follower   follows 0 users   joined 2022 October 25 19:25:25 UTC

					

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User ID: 1739

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In my experience the base game by itself is usually just fine: there is no need to buy DLC unless you really want it. I play a lot of Stellaris, and after several years I've only bought two DLCs. The game works just fine without the rest: it worked just fine without those two, really. Same thing for CKII, which I haven't bought any DLC for: it's still fun. If you're a skinflint like me, just don't buy them.

But definitely wait a few months to buy it, you know it's going to be buggy as all get out on release.

Might be a particularly British thing. It reminded me of a relevant passage from C. S. Lewis's autobiography Surprised by Joy, in which he describes his experience at British boarding school:

As we sat round our clamped table, silent for the most part and speaking in whispers when we spoke, the door would be opened at intervals; a boy would look in, smile (not at us but to himself) and withdraw. Once, over the shoulder of the smiler there came another face, and a chuckling voice said, "Ho-ho! I know what you're looking for." Only I knew what it was all about, for my brother had played Chesterfield to my Stanhope and instructed me in the manners of the Coll. None of the boys who looked in and smiled was a Blood; they were all quite young and there was something common to the faces of them all. They were, in fact, the reigning or fading Tarts of the House, trying to guess which of us were their destined rivals or successors.

It is possible that some readers will not know what a House Tart was. First, as to the adjective. All life at Wyvern was lived, so to speak, in the two concentric circles of Coll and House. You could be a Coll pre. or merely a House pre. You could be a Coll Blood or merely a House Blood, a Coll Punt (i.e. a pariah, an unpopular person) or merely a House Punt; and of course a Coll Tart or merely a House Tart. A Tart is a pretty and effeminate-looking small boy who acts as a catamite to one or more of his seniors, usually Bloods. Usually, not always. Though our oligarchy kept most of the amenities of life to themselves, they were, on this point, liberal; they did not impose chastity on the middle-class boy in addition to all his other disabilities. Pederasty among the lower classes was not "side", or at least not serious side; not like putting one's hands in one's pockets or wearing one's coat unbuttoned. The gods had a sense of proportion.

The Tarts had an important function to play in making school (what it was advertised to be) a preparation for public life. They were not like slaves, for their favours were (nearly always) solicited, not compelled. Nor were they exactly like prostitutes, for the liaison often had some permanence and, far from being merely sensual, was highly sentimentalised. Nor were they paid (in hard cash, I mean) for their services; though of course they had all the flattery, unofficial influence, favour, and privileges which the mistresses of the great have always enjoyed in adult society. That was where the Preparation for Public Life came in. It would appear from Mr. Arnold Lunn's Harrovians that the Tarts at his school acted as informers. None of ours did. I ought to know, for one of my friends shared a study with a minor Tart; and except that he was sometimes turned out of the study when one of the Tart's lovers came in (and that, after all, was only natural) he had nothing to complain of. I was not shocked by these things. For me, at that age, the chief drawback to the whole system was that it bored me considerably. For you will have missed the atmosphere of our House unless you picture the whole place from week's end to week's end buzzing, tittering, hinting, whispering about this subject. After games, gallantry was the principal topic of polite conversation; who had "a case with" whom, whose star was in the ascendant, who had whose photo, who and when and how often and what night and where. I suppose it might be called the Greek Tradition. But the vice in question is one to which I had never been tempted, and which, indeed, I still find opaque to the imagination. Possibly, if I had only stayed longer at the Coll, I might, in this respect as in others, have been turned into a Normal Boy, as the system promises. As things were, I was bored.

...I cannot give pederasty anything like a first place among the evils of the Coll. There is much hypocrisy on this theme. People commonly talk as if every other evil were more tolerable than this. But why? Because those of us who do not share the vice feel for it a certain nausea, as we do, say, for necrophily? I think that of very little relevance to moral judgement. Because it produces permanent perversion? But there is very little evidence that it does. The Bloods would have preferred girls to boys if they could have come by them; when, at a later age, girls were obtainable, they probably took them.

Definitely a different outlook than modern "homosexuality". It definitely matches the BBC interview you brought up: the "bottoms" are Tarts, but there is no special word for the tops.

I don't know if it's economical, but I find the whole thing (delivery and pickup) to be frustrating and unappealing.

The first time I tried delivery for groceries, they didn't deliver several of the items I ordered and (a much worse sin in my books) they replaced several of my items with similar ones. This angered me: I didn't want those ones, I wanted the ones I ordered! I don't like that brand! I don't like trying new things! I don't like paying for items I did not select!

I learned that you have to manually un-select the option to replace items with similar ones if the ones I ordered aren't available. The next few times I did delivery I made sure to turn that off, and inevitably on every order 1-4 items would be missing because they weren't available. Which made it impossible to plan meals, since I couldn't be sure I'd have all the ingredients. I'd much rather go to the store, pick out the ones I want, and adapt to shortages while I'm there and can change meal plans.

I recognize that my feelings on this are a bit "Old Man Yells at Cloud", but I liked things better the old way! When people had fewer options!

The problems with Total War's strategic AI are real, and always have been a problem. As a player the main issue I would run into (not as bad in more recent games) is that the more powerful I got, the more likely people would declare war on me. Which made no sense: tiny kingdoms on my borders, instead of looking at offers of trade deals and non-aggression pacts with their superpower neighbor with relieved enthusiasm would instead spit in my face and boldly declare that they would crush me beneath their boots! After I inevitably rolled them up into my empire, the tiny kingdoms that neighbored my now expanded borders would do the same. It made no sense, but it did keep you in a constant state of warfare through the late game. Since the focus of the game is on battles, I could see why it stayed broken in that particular way for so long.

In more recent Total War games they've improved it a good bit, but more importantly they revamped the diplomacy system to make it transparent: you can not only see how much another power likes you, but also see exactly why they feel the way they do: disliking Great Powers is -X, you fighting their enemies is +Y, etc. The transparency means that you have less moments of saying "What in the world is wrong with these people? Why are they acting this way?!" Now you know exactly why, which means you can make more interesting diplomatic decisions.

Since my second kid was born, I haven't been able to do much gaming at all so I empathize with you. My oldest is now just old enough that she can play games with me, so I've started playing Stardew Valley. It's good for her (nothing scary, and if you stay out the mines they're no enemies to worry about), and it's good for me because she likes to watch me play. We take turns, at her direction: a day with my save file, a day with hers. It's been nice.

Personally, I believe the greatest rock song ever performed is Like a Bat out of Hell.

I also recognize that I have no idea what I'm talking about. Still, that album sold over 14 million units in the US alone, so I think some people out there might agree with me!

Out of the options you listed, I think Johnny B. Goode is the best contender.

I made it a personal policy a year or so ago to never downvote anything that doesn't break the rules. Even if I absolutely hate it. It's a good, Motteian kind of policy to have. I think it's possible that there any many here, potentially newcomers, who just don't understand what etiquette is appropriate for the site. I wonder if there is an effective way to orient new users to the mores of the community? I'm not sure how it would be done, other then people generally making it known that downvoting someone is an ill-mannered faux pas in this community.

Some thoughts about online political ads:

For the last couple months pretty much all of the ads I get on YouTube have been political. I figure this time of year must be a ripe harvest for Google in terms of ad revenue. Maybe it can buoy them through the recent drop in tech stocks.

Interestingly enough, every single ad I've gotten that mention abortion has been strongly pro-choice. I've strongly pro-life myself, and for most of these ads the effect is that I now know who to vote for (namely, the person they're warning me against). This is a very useful service because all the Republican candidates are keeping their stance on abortion on the down low. It often isn't even listed as an issue on their official campaign website, I have to google around until I can find some interview where they were asked about it in order to learn their stance. The Democrats are definitely making this an abortion centered campaign, and the Republicans are trying to keep their heads down. For someone like myself, who will not vote for a pro-choice candidate, it means I have to do a lot more legwork.

Also interesting is that I saw the same ad more than a dozen times (which is normal) when I suddenly realized that the names in the ad were different every time. Turns out they are cycling through every Republican running for the state legislature, slotting each name in for "If X gets elected, women will have to travel out of state to access reproductive healthcare." It occurred to me that online it can be difficult to tell what district a viewer is in, so I guess you have to have a shotgun approach.

Though for all the abortion focused ads, I did notice none of them actually say the word "abortion": it's always "reproductive rights" or "women's health." The most notable euphemism I heard also happened to be the only time I think I've seen genuine "dog whistle" in the wild: a candidate declared (along a list of other issues) that they would preserve our "constitutional privacy rights". Excellently manufactured so that anyone who cares about the abortion debate will hear "I am pro-choice" while the average voter who doesn't care about abortion doesn't hear it at all. So, ads are big on abortion but mostly wants to talk to the base.

Which is the other odd thing: ads like this are meant for pro-choice voters. It does nothing good for them for a staunch pro-lifer like me to see them. Yet I did see one openly pro-life online ad this election season, and it was on my wife's computer! My wife, who is much more moderate on the issue than I am. Even curiouser, this ad was on a probably-not-quite-legal manga scan-lation site. How and why are pro-life ads ending up on a manga website? Don't manga readers skew female? Doesn't YouTube's audience skew male? I had assumed I was only getting pro-choice ads because most people online lean left, but now I'm not so sure.

The election here will be on November 8th, so it's pretty close. They can definitely geotarget the ads well enough that all the one's I've seen are relevant to my state, but they can't seem to figure out what district I'm in so I get a lot of ads for state legislators that I won't even have the opportunity to vote for.

I'm in a mostly red state, but one that is more strongly pro-choice than you would expect for a Republican state. That must be coloring the ad decisions: it's a red state, so be tasteful about the abortion thing! That must be the thinking.

Over at ACX item 38 in "Links for June" was a breakdown of reviews on Goodreads by genre and sex. The original link is broken, but here is the chart.

"Sequential art>Manga" is pretty far on the female side of the chart. It matches my experience: the only kind of comics my wife reads are manga, and she reads them daily. Unlike western comics there are a lot of manga that are aimed at a female audience: heck, based on what my wife keeps reading there seems to be an endless amount of manga that are just isekais where the protagonist is reincarnated as the villain of a visual novel! There's a lot of content for ladies in the world of manga.

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That makes significantly more sense! Thank you.

Ads are how the Youtubers I like to watch make their money. They're already giving me the content for free, least I can do is deal with ads.

Which is the moral gloss I put on top of the fact that I dislike fiddling with things so much that I can't be bothered to spend five minutes to figure out what adblockers are legit and set them up.

Goodreads is definitely skewed female: given that, the Manga reviews are significantly more skewed female. Definitely not a perfect measure, but I think its illustrating something real.

I couldn't possibly comment on "best" as there are far too many and it's not really my genre. My wife did ask me to watch Hamefura with her, and it was fun. Some of the manga she's shown me are better, but it's hard to compare a manga and anime since they have different constraints.

Yeah but then I have to pay them the money. My money grubbing, skinflint heart just won't allow that.

Spoken quite sensibly by someone who clearly doesn't have what it takes to be a world class miser! Take John Elwes for instance: now there was a miser! A member of Parliament and extremely wealthy, he would go to bed at sundown each day so he wouldn't waste money on candles. He wore ragged clothes everywhere, and was noted for regularly eating spoiled food rather than throwing it out. He would walk in the rain rather than take a coach, and often sat around in wet clothes rather than waste coal or wood starting a fire. Now there was a miser! Skinflints like me can only aspire to be that pointlessly frugal.

Even if I wasn't a so tight with my money, it would be quite a task to donate to every YouTuber I watch. And where does YouTube get it's cut? I feel like YouTube presents me with an excellent deal: it provides free entertainment in effectively unlimited quantities, and I watch ads. Everybody wins. Putting on an ad-blocker and then using YouTube anyway seems like an act of anti-social defection.

I know that evangelical missionaries have been working hard in South America since the the turn of the century: apparently the number of protestant missionaries in South America increased 690% between 1910 and 1969, much more than in other regions. So a lot of this is not a recent phenomenon, but the result of efforts made many decades ago by a lot of mission organizations. As far as I can tell, Africa and Asia were the primary focus of protestant missionaries during the 19th century, primarily because the people there were "unreached" (that is, not any variety of Christian already) while the South Americans were at least Catholic. Why convert Catholics when there are so many pagans who've never even heard of Christ? In the early 20th century, the collapse of China meant it was a much more dangerous mission field, which only got worse during WWII. So apparently a lot of missionaries pivoted from Asia to South America. After WWII the PRC made it extremely difficult to be a foreign missionary in China and Southeast Asia was collapsing into a variety of armed conflicts, so South America continued to receive more focus than it had previously. Notably, while different brands of protestant sometimes butted heads in Africa and Asia, they generally decided that none of them were as bad as the Catholics and tended to work together in South America instead of in competition.

The real story is the rise of Pentecostalism. Pentecostals are a variety of evangelical that is very much "charismatic": that means speaking in tongues, faith healing, prophecy, miracles, etc. It's taken off like wildfire in South America, particularly among the poor. Pentecostalism can be particularly appealing to the poor because generally in order to become a leader of a Pentecostal church you don't need to go to seminary, you just need to be chosen by the Holy Spirit. What that comes down to is having enough people believe that you were chosen to lead the group. It means they have a lot more trouble with problematic theology, but it also means you can start a new churches very quickly.

The Pentecostals are also the fruit of all those decades of protestant mission efforts: one the the first things protestant mission organizations did was set up schools to teach people to read and distribute millions of Bibles. Once enough poor people can read the Bible themselves, they're going to end up attracted to denominations like the Pentecostals that are very egalitarian with little hierarchy. The kind of church where anybody can stand up in the middle of worship and start preaching.

I think you’re right, most of the dog intelligence lists you’ll find are based off of trainability and willingness to cooperate with humans. Which makes sense, since that’s the main reason someone would want to know how smart a dog breed is. For instance, Beagles are usually ranked near the bottom of intelligence lists. I have a beagle: she is very clever, but stubborn as a mule and extremely focused on food. Training her was difficult because unless you had food, she usually wouldn’t cooperate. Once you were holding food, she’d “remember” how to roll over, sit, whatever. Stupid? Not at all. Independent and focused on “what’s in it for me?” Very much so.

I agree. In cases where people call hypocrisy like this, I find this Tolstoy quote is helpful:

“Attack me, I do this myself, but attack me rather than the path I follow and which I point out to anyone who asks me where I think it lies. If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side! If it is not the right way, then show me another way; but if I stagger and lose the way, you must help me, you must keep me on the true path, just as I am ready to support you. Do not mislead me, do not be glad that I have got lost, do not shout out joyfully: ‘Look at him! He said he was going home, but there he is crawling into a bog!’ No, do not gloat, but give me your help and support.”

I don't have any relevant training or education, but if I had to guess this is most likely nothing. There have probably been lots of unusual blood clots of this variety that occur normally from time to time and are typically not noted as anything worth investigating further by morticians. People have been very concerned about COVID and about vaccines for years now: in such an environment a weird blood clot that would have been ignored otherwise might now become an object of interest. There's a lot of seemingly random noise and variation in existence: if you're not worried that vaccines could secretly be causing problems, then you don't notice odd things that might point in that direction. When you are worried about it, an atypical blood clot becomes a red flag lending evidence to your concern.

I mean it could be something, but you'd need a proper study. More compelling Anecdata than this has proven to be nothing before.

I agree: I've seen too many video of angry American drivers getting out of their cars to cuss out protestors blocking the way, often taking their signs and destroying them and otherwise escalating the situation, that I imagine most protestors will be hesitant to embrace a style of protest where you cannot run away.

Or maybe some Pan de Muerto. They could even have had fun decorating it different ways. Lots of varieties of pan dulce they could have picked.

I saw one person doing what you suggested, and it looked like she was having fun: she had set up a metal fire pit in the middle of her driveway that had a cheerful fire burning, and naturally everyone was drawn to her. I'll have to try something similar myself when the kids are too old to trick-or-treat. Sounds a lot more fun then constantly being interrupted by the doorbell. I'll probably set up a little speaker with "Grim Grinning Ghosts".

I too noticed that (for the limited number of kids I handed out candy to) many of them didn't say trick-or-treat. I made sure to coach my little girl before every stop. About halfway through the night she got the idea and didn't need prompting. Where will we be if we fail to pass on our sacred traditions?

Edutainment games for teenagers aren't there because teenagers buy their own video games. As a child you play whatever games adults allow you to play: so if your parents (or teachers) provide you with an edutainment game, you'll play it. Once you're picking out your own games you pick what sounds fun or interesting, not what is "good for you." At that age if you want to learn something (say, playing piano or Spanish) there are a lot of computer programs that will help you learn those things, and if you want to have fun you pick out a game that looks fun.

Now there are still games that are fun and educational: I learned a lot of history from Paradox and Creative Assembly games, for instance. Factorio teaches you a lot about process engineering. The Cold War scenario from Rise of Nations helped me better understand why the Korean War ended in a truce without much land changing hands, and why the Bay of Pigs was a disaster, and why the USSR and USA kept building more and more nuclear weapons, all by putting me in a game situation where I faced the same incentives (the Korean War scenario was a slog after Chinese reinforcements show up, and when given the option to ceasefire with South Korea intact or hammer it out for the next couple hours I choose ceasefire; the Bay of Pigs scenario requires you to make a risky fast supporting attack with aircraft: if you hesitate to try to get better prepared then the rebels all die pretty quick and then you have nothing but regret; and the game incentives nuclear parity or supremacy enough that I spent a lot of resources on it). All educational, but none of those games are billed as educational. They're billed as interesting and fun, just as the educational computer programs are billed as educational. Nobody is trying to get adults to eat their peas by promising them dessert.