HalloweenSnarry
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User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
I'd have thought that the more poignant counter would be "imagine if the British did something similar pre-independence."
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
We've seen both sides break out some fucking old hardware (Maxim guns with Holosuns!), you really think a WWII-era vehicle that isn't a tank or a troop carrier is getting into Fantasyland territory?
HalloweenSnarry
19d ago
To summarize: guy makes a popular window manager for what will be the new standard for Linux desktop window display software, the community around it is composed of half "programmer socks" trans people and half toxic 4Chan shitposters, the toxic parts of his community prompt a Linux dev with more privilege to get him declared persona non grata from working within the "mainstream" of this tech.
HalloweenSnarry
4mo ago
Was the life you had in Venezuela really that much worse than sitting on the frozen streets of a foreign country begging for money?
Genuinely, the answer is probably "yes."
HalloweenSnarry
8mo ago
I kinda don't miss the flame wars of old, personally, but I really wouldn't say that modern-age online beefs are any improvement.
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
The anti-doomer's flowchart, courtesy of Ross Scott.
You may remember that, a while back, Ross Scott (of Civil Protection, Freeman's Mind, and Ross's Game Dungeon fame) hosted a discussion with Big Yud himself over AI risk. I couldn't finish the video, but I gathered that Ross was not impressed by Yud's arguments from the premise of AI gaining consciousness and thus wasn't really grasping what Yud saw as the problem. For the many of you who are averse to long videos, the above image lays out Ross's positions on AI risk, with reasons for why.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
I hate to dogpile this, but to echo the other replies with a twist, I would say that your statement would be true if this was still the 90's/early-to-mid 2000's. 90's civics with their colorblind idealism, however, are dead and rotting.
Eh, I'm under the perception that Blue Tribe is pretty damn split on alternative medicine and pseudoscience. On the one hand, large swathes of Blue Tribe go all in on it, but on the other, the rest are kind of horrified at the harm it can cause. The Blues are lucky that the political polarization over COVID shook out the way it did, because now they can jettison anti-vax from their memeplex (where previously it was an alt-medicine mainstay that was causing Measles to resurge).
Similarly for the Red Tribe/conservatives, I have to wonder if anyone even pushes Intelligent Design anymore; am I wrong for saying that it always seemed like a way to smuggle God into the secular realm? But now that Christianity has been on the backfoot for so long, conservatives and the like don't really care for whitewashing their beliefs like that.
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
It's not the will of the LEOs, it's the will of the confiscators giving them orders. There will be enough LEOs who won't push back on their orders.
I don't really put much stock into this in a post-Floyd world. I imagine that, in your hypothetical scenario, by Week 3 of the Great Gun Confiscation, officers will start conveniently calling in sick.
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
True, but the saying goes, "there's a lot of ruin in a nation," and the USSR made for a pretty big nation at the peak of the Eastern Bloc.
HalloweenSnarry
7mo ago
Makes sense why John Riccitiello sold a bunch of shares before making this announcement!
Just seeing this man's name makes my blood boil a little, even now. I know that EA has been bad for years, no matter who the CEO is, but his tenure had some real sore spots to it (specifically, I believe he was CEO in the same era when EA killed so many beloved studios like Westwood and Bullfrog).
HalloweenSnarry
10mo ago
The Court is always and altogether--albeit willfully, like a moviegoer whose suspension of disbelief is essential to the process, like a wrestling fan whose kayfabe is the lifeblood of the art form--deceived.
Is there not a reason why we symbolise Justice with a blindfolded angel/goddess, though?
HalloweenSnarry
9mo ago
I think the conception of racism as "hate" was still present to a strong degree even into the 90's and 2000's, where only then did it start to be about mere sensitivity (i.e. not making casual race jokes). For some reason, I'm thinking about the Static Shock episode where Virgil gets thrown back in time to the 50's/60's and brings MLK to his time (before having to put him back because MLK not being around in his own time caused racism to still be strong).
HalloweenSnarry
9mo ago
But aren't Asians also good at vibe-cultivation? Some of those very same successful black entertainers are also really into anime and video games, even if, as RandomRanger notes below, they may tend to be less-represented in nerdier media where there are less barriers to entry. Now, granted, Asian-Americans haven't been quite as successful at injecting contributions to the global-culture-public-consciousness as Asian-Asians, but still.
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
Nowhere in the parent comment was legal compulsion to go against the 1st Amendment mentioned. The signal-boosting the media gives to mass shooters is very much voluntary, as with most media coverage in the first world.
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
Quick thoughts: the American "optimal life path" in the 50's depended on a number of other conditions (economic and such) that no longer obtain today. We can look to certain Southeast Asian countries (South Korea, Japan) and see that their life scripts are also crumbling to dust because of changing conditions.
I'm perhaps sympathetic to those who might say that we don't need to follow a pre-made script for how to live our lives. You can't find yourself grousing about being sold a false promise if you never commit to following in your predecessors' footsteps.
I, personally, don't necessarily wish for a very flashy lifestyle, but I would like one where I don't have to worry about as many things as I currently do--but maybe that's not possible without considerable sacrifice on my part.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I watched Silence of the Lambs a while ago, and I remember that Lector expounded that Buffalo Bill wasn't necessarily trans, he just hated his own identity--which, sure, these days, that might be more of a distinction without a difference, but it doesn't seem like the movie is as anti-trans as one might think.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
Oh boy...
To try and defend the vibecession a bit: we can bemoan the prevalence of vibes over data for the next three Presidential terms, but I think we have to accept that vibes simply rule the day, and perhaps they always have. Pinker jinxed the world, entropy only ever increases over time, etc. Right now, it does feel like things are getting worse and the world as we know it is perched on a cliff looking over one long fall, and every other day, we can hear the little tink-tink of tiny pieces of rock breaking off of the cliff face underneath us and falling into the abyss.
If anything, I think waving the data as a weapon might only entrench the vibes. Everything looks good, which can only mean that things are about to get bad if they aren't already. An example, for the sake of narrative: everything was probably all peachy-keen and boring on the morning of September 11th, 2001. President Bush was reading to schoolkids. People were at work like any other day. If you'd tried to tell people on that morning, or the day before, that 9/11/2001 would be the harbinger of decades of death and ruin for many, they'd have probably walked away, muttering under their breath about how you should be in the loony house.
Even now, there are two newsworthy wars happening right now, and multiple other, lesser-known conflicts (as documented in the excellent Transnational Thursdays threads), with any single one carrying the tiny potential to spill over into something greater. So far, we've dodged the bullet of WW3 starting, but being lucky is not a vindication of rationalism.
Sure, maybe it's all purely psychology, and you can't reason the sheeple out of a perception they never reasoned themselves into, but again, entropy (i.e. chaos) always increases over time, and betting that things will get worse is probably a safer investment than actual financial instruments right now.
HalloweenSnarry
8mo ago
Your read sounds fairly accurate to me, actually, as someone who did not go on a Mormon mission and disconnect between 2010 and 2012. That period sounds about right for when the "online" world started colliding more frequently with the "real" world.
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
Yeah, reading this post and encountering the section about the HRE, I'm surprised that Kulak did not simply predict that the US would devolve into a patchwork of "tollbooth kingdoms" just like what the HRE became.
Fundamentally, I think the challenge for the US in the future, and the solution to said challenge, ultimately comes down to culture, cf. the Noah Smith complaint about us not being a culture that builds. I think where I diverge with Kulak on this whole concept of "US dying of DEI globohomo" is that I think it eminently possible for culture to shift and for the US to get on some sort of "healthier" path of governance, of ditching unproductive ideas and ideological frameworks, before the US has to ditch them the hard way via total collapse.
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
You made this point the last time, and just like last time, it's still wrong on multiple facets. I'd like you to list what games you think clear the standard of "good writing," because when I think of games lauded for their story or writing, I can think of a fairly deep list, and that's mostly limiting myself to computer games (Half-Life, Deus Ex, the "Shock" games, Myst, Command & Conquer, Ultima, Spec Ops: the Line, Max Payne...)
Your post also seems to discount the large number of impactful Japanese games, a number of which I'd imagine are lauded because their storytelling or writing struck a particular chord with people (Metal Gear, Zelda, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, most any FromSoft game from like Armored Core 4 to today).
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I think Van Damme is also remembered for his leg splits, incidentally. His ability in that regard is almost a meme unto itself.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
The "lived experience" thing made me realize something, which I guess I'll put here:
I think it's actually a bit of a cheap trick by the OP to bring up the term "lived experience," as used by The Hated Woke, and try to equivocate it to the "Republican vibecession." The thing that makes the term "lived experience" noxious is precisely because it was often a lazy, vague justification presented by progressives for the idea of Massive Systemic Changes to Society. If Hlynka and others were vaguely citing their lives and pairing that with "therefore, we should change the order of things," that likely would get my hackles up, but they haven't really done that.
Dispatches from the War on Horny/Payment Processors: the other shoe has dropped for Pixiv.
A year and a half ago, Pixiv made signs that they'd be clamping down on content on some of their services to appease Visa and MasterCard. Today, Pixiv announces that US and UK users will face restrictions on content they can upload. (Specific details here.)
Currently remains to be seen how much this affects the Western artists who are on Pixiv, but it doesn't bode well. Some think this portends a coming era of digital pillarization, and while I won't rule out the possibility that things will get so walled off that VPNs become a necessity, it's hard to say how likely that actually is.
EDIT: This may be the rationale for the change.
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