KingOfTheBailey
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User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
How does one get a Google account these days that isn't tied to an existing identity?
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
Civ 4 is the mechanical peak of the series (especially with community QoL mods like BUG), but Alpha Centauri is the best setting.
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
Here is an extremely thorough guide that is very sex-focused, possibly more than you might want. But having some sexuality in your profiles seems like a good idea, and you can dial it up/down depending on what sort of women you're looking for. The guide's got 2023 edits in it so hopefully it's still relevant: https://killyourinnerloser.com/tinder-guide/
I found the messaging section quite useful - there are scripts to start off with where each message progresses towards a number and from there to a date.
It's unclear to me whether the paid features mark you as a "sucker" and the apps' algorithms try to keep you on the hook, or whether they work as advertised. Probably a bit of both. I know that if I don't open the apps for a few weeks Tinder starts offering premium subscriptions at a discount. Pretty sure that running out the daily swipe/like limits applies an Elo penalty if you do it too often.
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
The steak is completely immaterial. They wanted a pretext and anything would do. If you'd set no header image and left it as a white background, they'd still find a way to get mad about it. Picking the fight alone is asking to be squashed - a better play would be to build useful parallel infrastructure and a network of supporters, then defend it from being taken over in a plausibly-deniable way (like how some establishments have dress codes because that's a legal proxy for excluding the riff-raff they want to keep out).
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
Then why has language had this turn towards terms like "birthing parent" and why do we have a "pregnant man" emoji? I'm not being flippant: enough people cared enough to try and change common language and/or shove a new pictograph onto everyone's touch keyboards.
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
Please also spare a thought for those who want children, but so far have failed to find a compatible romantic partner.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Back when I was dating (online or no), I had the most success with (once we'd got to the point that a date was on the table) suggesting place, time, and activity all at once. "Let's get a drink after work at [place]. How's Wednesday at 6?" It's not clear from your post whether or not you're trying that, but I found that it opened up better "yes" and "no" responses — fewer flakes on "yes"es, as well as "no, but I can do [other day]", "no, I'd rather not do [activity]", "no, I'd rather go [somewhere closer]".
The average woman on a dating app has like a zillion unread notifications and a full schedule, so batching that stuff up is more respectful of her time and there's less chance for you to fall out of her loop of guys she's talking to. Win-win.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Laser printer and a proxy-making website. Pick up chaff left over from drafts for free, slip your proxy in front of the card using a sleeve, and you're golden. Once you start playing, you won't notice that the cards aren't "genuine", and you won't get into awkward conversations about "counterfeits".
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
It is unfortunate that so much of the debate is driven by bad actors, and not by reasonable people like (I assume) yourself who just want to live your lives and be left in peace. But the fact that even the reasonable people will generally refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of bad actors means that ...
I could have said this, word for word, re: Islam during my Internet Atheist years. And the fact that this epistemic rigor was not observed by the people I argued with really opened a lot of cracks in my old, blue-tribe worldview. (Charlie Hebdo and the reactions to it opened those cracks into fissures, and from there it's been rabbit holes all the way down.)
I don't really have a point here, but I found the historical resonance startling.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Scott had an old LiveJournal post about this, where he likened dating to Russian spies trying to identify each other while undercover in the US. On the one-hand, Scott is a pretty neurotic and anxious person who has stared too long into the CW; on the other, it's not exactly wrong. Anyone else remember this? I couldn't find it in the best archive of squid314 that I was able to unearth.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
It kills me how woke the blues scenes became. I have many years of treasured memories, but my political positions stayed fixed while everyone else's moved, and it's hard to express oneself freely while also biting one's tongue all the time.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
What's a good place for wiki-ish writing to share with a community like this one? I am disinclined to go with something like Substack, as I'd like the chance to have collaborative editing, not just a comment section.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
The way euthanasia has broadened runs disturbingly parallel to the way trans and abortion slid down their respective slopes. Legal euthanasia was legislated on the back of activism asking that terminally-ill old people be allowed a dignified release from unbearable suffering, while they still had their ability to consent. Trans activism used sympathetic cases of deeply dysphoric individuals whose transition alleviated life-long suffering. Abortion activists spoke of desperate young rape victims needing a safe, legal, and rare option for a truly horrible situation.
And now we have young people committing suicide with government blessing, as well as Canada's health system telling a veteran "maybe you should KYS"; irreversible medications, surgeries, and everything you see on LibsOfTikTok pushed with very little care or safeguards; and up-to-birth or even partial-birth abortions. "Oh, that's just the slippery slope fallacy" no longer cuts it with me - I need to see the left make a credible commitment to a limiting principle before I even think about supporting their next cause.
I too am a programmer, and am horrified by Copilot and friends. I write code to solve problems and release it under copyleft so that people can modify it for their own ends and share alike. I don't release it for it to be bundled up into some training set for a system that will accelerate the generation of non-free software.
Whatever an artist's goal in developing a skill, I think it's fair for him to be utterly crushed at the thought of his artistic career and personal style being reduced to an "by artist X" prompt to an image generator.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
Clearpill is a reference to https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-clear-pill-part-1-of-5-the-four-stroke-regime/ but damned if I'm reading a five-parter of Yarvin's to remember what it actually means.
Purple pill is also important, I think.
KingOfTheBailey
2mo ago
Your comment was a big part of it starting, yeah.
I'm very sorry.
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
game theory reasons
Until you consider the iterated game, and realize that you're not going to be invited back if you order obnoxiously expensive meals and drinks.
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
That's the motte. The bailey is that it's one side of a strategic asymmetric rule similar to Dreher's law of merited impossibility ("that's not happening and it's good that it is"). Not a big deal if you comply, but a massive deal if you push back. @WhiningCoil had a great post about it in the why-is-it-always-vidya arena, talking about game mods which remove current-year stuff:
... all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.
I haven't seen a pithy summary of this strategy. It doesn't really fit under кто кого. Maybe "it's not a big deal except that it is"?
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
But there’s a also a finding-religion confound in my case.
Would you mind writing more about this, when you have a chance? Religiosity among Motteposters is very interesting to me, as I've been wandering a bit down that path.
Back then, I don't remember there being any sort of centralized modding sites.
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames ?
Less about rationality concepts themselves and more about my perception of the community. A feeling like watching my intellectual heroes not just stumble, but faceplant: first, a sense of enthusiasm and a sort of pride that there were people (dare I say, "my people"?) looking to transcend their flaws and start looking seriously at the hardest, most important problem in history — how to align a superintelligence. HMPOR is one of the most engaging works I've ever read; despite EY's often odd prose and the weirdness of the characters, it rewards close reading and sets out both a vision and a warning. And with the sequences (not just EY's, but other writers as well), you get a pretty inspiring offer: learn all this stuff, it will teach you how to win, and then deploy that to win the most important problem in history. Then dismay and disappointment as I learned that even these hardened epistemic defenses were no match for Berkeley, that rationalists ended up more interested in polyamorous group houses than solving the most important problem in history, and only slightly less vulnerable to the woke mind virus than the average normie. @zackmdavis' writing on the trans question takes a long time to get to the point, but it's an important one: there is a reality, and even the most ingroup members of what's meant to be the most reality-connected community threw out all of their epistemic standards just to let their friends claim an alternate sex. This seems to me to mean that even if we succeed at AI-don't-kill-everyone, any AGIs/ASIs we do get will be unacceptably decoupled from reality on at least the woke and trans questions, and anything connected to those. Since if you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy, solving the "AI-don't-kill-everyone" problem becomes harder if you don't even allow yourself to see reality while you're solving it.
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
Last time I tried, I couldn't dodge the "provide a phone number or another email" bit. Will have to try on a VPN.
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
Some follow-ups, now that I've had the chance to read some of the books. Much of "The Problem of Susan" seems to collapse if its author had read more of the series, instead of considering that final scene in isolation. This locks your counter-analysis into working from scraps, when there's stuff about Susan's attitude in the other books. Even in Prince Caspian, Susan starts to turn away from Aslan and deny what she sees:
"But I've been far worse than you know. I really believed it was him— [Aslan], I mean — yesterday. When he warned us not to go down to the fir wood. And I really believed it was him tonight, when you woke us up. I mean, deep down inside. Or I could have, if I'd let myself. But I just wanted to get out of the woods and — and — oh, I don't know. And what ever am I to say to him?"
At the start of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there's something which looks like the first signs of the invitation-chasing Susan you've been discussing:
It would have cost too much money to take the other three all to America, and Susan had gone. Grown-ups thought her the pretty one of the family and she was no good at school work (though otherwise very old for her age) and Mother said she "would get far more out of a trip to America than the youngsters".
At the end of your post, you write:
There’s no harm in Susan either, even as she is no longer a friend of Narnia. She can always come back.
But at the end of Prince Caspian, Peter tells Edmund and Lucy that it's probably his last time in Narnia: "At least, from what he said, I'm pretty sure he means you to get back some day. But not Su and me. He says we're getting too old." I'm still working through the books so I don't know if that's the last word on the matter, or whether "too old" means something other than chronological age.
I feel like I've stepped into a time warp and come out in /r/MensRights circa 2012. Yeah, men have it rougher. Yeah, women have a glass floor as well as (sometimes) a glass ceiling. Yeah, you can't say this to anyone without being perceived as low status (this is why The Red Pill provoked such an immune response - it was being presented by a cute, blonde, former feminist). Who cares? At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. It's the world, we have to deal with it, and it is very hard to teach people rational overrides to their visceral responses unless you control culture from top to bottom. IMHO, a large part of this problem comes (as do many others) from childlessness. At least some number of online feminists I used to get mad about had changes of heart once they realized how their rhetoric impacted their sons.
Regardless of the unfairness and its causes, at least we men are always assumed to have agency. No matter how bad things get, there is an action a man can take towards a path up and out. It might be a long and twisty road with low odds of success, but there's always something to do. Don't expect the world to be fair, don't expect anyone else to care that the world's unfair, and don't expect anyone else to notice the unfairness runs counter to the egalitarian principles that you were probably taught (I was, and it threw me for years). You'll be a lot less disappointed, and then you can start to build with clear eyes. Build yourself up, build a space for those you trust, build a space for your family and close friends, and maybe you can shelter some of those people from the unfairness.
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