MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2hr ago
I mean, sometimes the race/gender flipped version never actually happening is a part of the reason people are pissed off. There is not, nor will there ever be, a story in which a white male attacks a bunch of brown people in Germany and the cops defend the white guy while arresting the brown guy who tries to stop the mass stabbing. That is part of the story which is the quiet part out loud: the cops are so concerned about looking racist that they will assume the white guy is guilty before even bothering to realize that the brown guy is actually the perpetrator.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I think it’s usually the reverse. The kids starts it, then they start making money and the parents push the kid to continue even if they don’t want to.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
My advice would be to start out doing short stories. They have a couple of advantages.
First, they have a quicker turnaround. You can get a first draft done in a week or less. This means that you have more time on the back end to rework what you have into something that works. A lot of good writing that you see in books is actually rewritten, and often several times. If you have a story that’s ten to fifteen pages, you can easily rewrite the bad prose, or fix the plotting or see where the characters are doing weird things.
Second, the level of detail you need to get started is a bit less. You don’t have the space for a long detailed plot, or fifteen pages worth of world building information. You don’t have the space in the story to worry about what happened to your main character in the fifth grade and all the trauma it caused him. In all of that, you have time to hit the highlights and move on. This removes the temptation to follow Tolkien in the sense of spending large amounts of time building an entire universe and not writing the story.
Third, they’re easy to put out into the world. You can just put it on a blog, or a website. You can submit to short story contests, you can print them at kinkos and hand them out on street corners. Thus the need to worry about gatekeepers is less.
As far as characters, I personally use the type descriptions from personality tests (MBTI or Socionics or Enneagram) simply to get a sense of how the character might think. That helps me because if I don’t make a point of giving each character a different personality, they all end up sounding like me.
I’ll also recommend looking up the Brandon Sanderson lectures on either podcast or YouTube. He’s dealing with a more advanced level of writer, but it’s helpful. You can also find podcasts about the technical skills of writing like characters and descriptions and so on.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I think a lot of the “more/better” thing is that it is often stuff that’s easy to recommend, has few explicit costs, and provides an easy way to avoid blame. TBH it’s a cop out, and really if someone isn’t communicating a concept properly, you can always ask. And second, because the answer is talking about the problem instead of figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it, no accountability happens and thus nothing changes.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
Even if you’re cribbing notes off the Internet forums that incels use, you still need to craft a character that is more than just a collection of ripped quotes.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
most popular sport would end sometime within the next fifty years, and nobody would notice or care.
I think most of our sports will eventually go that way. Football has the disadvantage of being expensive to play, expensive to attend, and thus really only works as a TV show. Add in that there are more commercials than playing time and that really nothing much matters between the 35-40 yard lines of the respective teams, and you have a problem.
Baseball will probably go first, as much as I like the sport. The games are too long for TV and Internet, especially when you have innings of play where nobody does anything. When you need to put a guy on base to shorten the game in extra innings, you have a problem, namely that your game is long enough and boring enough that overtime is a problem for you.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I agree. Up until the modern era this was how stories worked. The characters and plots belonged to the people in the culture. Robin Hood or King Arthur, fairy tales, and so on were stories with lots of different versions and regional variations depending on where the stories were being retold.
And I wish this was how things worked now. I’d absolutely love to see what Mickey would be like if you had stories written by contemporary artists.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
The thing that sealed it for me was that Caroll never really provided any concrete information until Kavanagh provided it first. The date — down to the year, the location of the house, the people at the party, etc. she knew nothing until she was fed the information. And there was never to my recollection any contemporary evidence that the two had met. No mention of this party to other people, no journals, no police reports, no anything until he’s up for the Supreme Court. She never said anything at any other point of his career.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
This would be my guess. I’m very concerned that the Petrodollar is going away, and hyperinflation will result as we can no longer maintain our standard of living and certainly not our generous welfare and social programs. This probably means that civil unrest will happen. The people who suddenly don’t get their welfare benefits for months are not going to give up peacefully, especially if prices are also inflating by double digits.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I’m not sure what they’ll be if they achieve sapience. I’m hoping for Spock, personally.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I missed @FtttG post about Dave, and while I’ll agree that Dave is likely porn sick, I don’t think that’s what happens all the time. My impression of most trans people of either gender is that they rarely understand anything other than what media or social media tells them their desired sex is actually like. They tend to, for want of a better term, “LARP”. Trans women tend to suddenly wear makeup and frilly dresses and take up interests in things that media holds as traditionally feminine interests. It comes of as the gendered equivalent of a white man deciding that his soul is that of a black man and proceeding to go out wearing dreadlocks, fake gold teeth, flashing gang signs and tattoos, and eating fried chicken and watermelon. No one would think of such a thing as a serious attempt to live out the life of a black man because that’s not remotely the way most black men live. It’s a stereotype, tropes, and are generally things that whites or at least racist whites think black men are like.
Most women, unless they’re feeling fancy, are not wearing dresses in ordinary life. Unless working in a field that requires it, most women aren’t wearing skirts. If they’re just hangout wyother women, it’s jeans and a cute top or something. And most women are not just doing things TV decided was feminine. Lots of women like sports and play them regularly. They go hiking and fishing, they play video games, they read science fiction and fantasy (and not all of us like romantasy).
So whatever is actually happening in the brain, I think it has less to do with a feeling of being a woman and more of a desire to be treated like a woman. They know what the media tells them women like, but they have no other source of information.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
I’m not convinced anything less than 5 years is long enough. It’s extremely short when the buildup to the election takes about a year and then you need at least half as long again to raise the funds to run. That makes, at current, the term of the house members of 24 months with 18 months of “reelection related activities” and 6 months of everything else. 6/24 is 1/4 of the term with 3/4 for running for the next election. Make it 36 months, and you’ll only have half of the term for actually doing things. Make it 5 years and it’s 60 months, and thus 7/10 of the term is for doing things and 3/10 is devoted to winning office. At this point it’s long enough that you can’t simply be good at running, you have to get things done. And at 5 years, you have long enough lead times that the results of the changes you make are going to be known and thus affect your ability to win (imagine having the effects of taxes or tax cuts coming known before we voted on whether or not to re-elect the guy who voted for it). It’s also long enough that longer term projects with upfront costs (especially infrastructure projects) become plausible.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
I can understand the idea when it comes to disabling content in a game that the player owns outright and has the ability to either be played completely offline or to be played on player owned servers. In both cases, you’re taking something away even though it would still function perfectly fine even without outside support. I don’t think it’s reasonable to try to force people to keep their servers running in perpetuity. That forces a cost on a company that might make them think twice before starting an online service simply because they can’t get rid of it later.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
My thesis, for what it’s worth is that this is a function of democracy and especially democratic systems with short terms of office. The way to get and keep office in any democratic system is to become really good at winning elections and doing the work is at best a sideline and at worst a problem. Having short election cycles makes this worse, as the time between elections isn’t long enough that a person can “get away” with doing the work. If you had elections once a generation, you’d have very little of this problem, because you get 20 years between campaigns and this is plenty of time to do a lot of good deep work for the people of your district or state or country without having to worry about whether or not the people are happy about it. If you were appointed, as we used to have governors appoint the senate, you’d never have to court public opinion, and therefore your ability to keep office relies on whether or not you impress the guy who appointed you or maybe those who can fire you. You can thus ignore public opinions and do what you believe is best for the country.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
I think it depends. Yes a lot of it is “high end” stuff going higher, but I think the general point is also valid that if I want my groceries to cost about what they did a year ago, im only going to get there by downgrading my purchases. And I don’t blame people for complaining that a budget that a year ago included fresh chicken and beef is now downgraded to frozen chicken and ground beef. Or that a budget that could include the occasional treat of bakery cookies is now downgrading to Oreos.
The general point is valid for most people is absolutely true — most people are being forced by inflation to downgrade their lifestyle. Travel is definitely taking a hit as well. People who a year or two ago were flying to Florida and maybe booking a cruise are now looking for cheap local things to do because they simply can’t afford that anymore. Restaurants are definitely feeling the pinch when people look at the cost of living and realize that they don’t have the same amount of discretionary money they did last year.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
It’s not just college, but finding work after college, paying off debt, and earning your way to either owning a home or at least renting a nice enough apartment that you’d feel comfortable having a child in. This takes a while. So if you’re doing the typical 4-5 years post high school, then an internship or two or a shitty entry level job that you’re working insane hours to get up the ladder from.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I think there a lot going on that doesn’t get mentioned. First the advance of technology— in 1940, a state of the art entertainment system was a radio. In 1980, it was a color TV and maybe an Atari or later a Nintendo game system with a couple of cartridges. By 1990, you have cable, vcrs, better game systems, and so on. Food is much the same. In the early twentieth century, mustard was spicy, and now it’s like not even comparable to the mild spicy food that you eat all the time. The sheer amount and variety that we expect is different. They felt rich if they had a nice family car, a color TV, and simple food in a fridge that didn’t automatically make ice cubes was plenty. We’d consider that poverty, but they felt rich because technology was moving fast and they could afford to partake. We see a decline where things that used to be things the average person could expect are gradually becoming unaffordable. The mid century saw people able to afford to eat out more, and in the 2020s people can’t afford to eat out as much as they could have 20 years ago. The same is happening with other stuff. The standard of living for most average people is declining.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I don’t think that you should have two different people on the same bills, as it introduces the threat of fraud as people cannot tell at a glance whether the bill is real enough to consider as real. If one bill has a person no one recognizes, they’d probably treat the bill as potentially fake. It also opens the weird political situation where MAGA types accept only the Trump bill and Blues only accept the other bill.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I think what Kony and Harambe did was mark the rise of the social media based reaction to news as the primary way people interacted with the news. Before that, they might talk about the news on social media, but the news came from other sources like CNN or local news. Harambe and Kony started online and were talked about online. It was the beginning of everyone being able to be sort of not only journalists but commentators, and that they not only could but should influence the outcome of the story.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
That problem matters as well, but my main issue with over-educating is that it basically means that by the time a couple is ready to settle down and is financially stable enough to think about having kids, they are too old to have said kids, or at best one or maybe two. Add in the much longer dependent stage means committing to a much longer project that’s actually quite resource intensive, which means that parents need even more resources to devote to their children. It’s actually insane how many obstacles we put in front of the couple who might want to have kids.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I think the education issue is part of the story as well. A teenager in 1600 could just start adulting at 14-15 and be just fine. You didn’t need to be able to read or do high level math, or even geometry. You just became a blacksmith, or a farmer by following dad around. Modern people need an almost absurdly long education in highly complex skills that massively cut into prime boot knocking years that happen in the teenage years. A 16 year old male and 16 year old female are biologically the most horny humans around. But, those kids are not free to indulge even if they want to. Instead, we make them sit in classrooms learning about mollusks in preparation for taking the SAT with a view to going to college where they will learn higher levels of skills that hopefully within 5-7 years after graduation will have them earning enough money to get a two bedroom apartment in which, by the time these humans are ready to have children in the financial sense, they have much lower libido and the woman has missed half to 2/3 of her fertility to the education system. Then everyone is like “wait, why no kids?” It’s because by the time a person stable enough to have kids, they’re too old to have kids. Hence fewer kids.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
See, I think it’s computers and communication. In 1726, an event happening in New York might not be known in Los Angeles for months. In 2026, an event happens in New York and the news reaches Japan within 10 seconds. As such, the amount of information is much much higher, and the time you have to react to it is much smaller. Waiting a week in 1726 isn’t slow because the time between you doing a thing, putting it in motion, and seeing a result is longer. In 2026, waiting a week is waiting an eternity. Your ability to do things quickly is much bigger, and the news cycle is so much shorter that everyone is like “it’s been three days, we must be losing the war, because we haven’t won yet.” Wars in the past lasted for decades, yes in part because of transport, but also because the computer age allows you to do things faster. I can order a strike in the time it takes me to answer a text. The order reaches the front instantly. The order will be executed in seconds.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
You can in the sense that a country can simply decide not to have an army. You will end up losing to those who refuse to abide by the restrictions. You won’t campaign for 6 months, okay cool. The guy running against you is, and so he gets his name and message out there, he gets the eyes of the public, and probably wins. It’s an arms race that’s really hard to stop and it’s getting worse because of the media landscape that leads to very short attention spans and memories of what you actually did.
Most congressmen will seek reelection. It’s also part of the system that no, or very few congressmen actually serve only one term.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I mean civilization itself runs in cycles and greater cycles. Not just the concentration of power eventually leading to a Uniate system, then dividing, but the cycle of rising and falling empires, civilizational collapses. Honestly, history is very cyclical and it’s really pretty clear to anyone who read it. I think the cycles are much faster now than in the bronze and Iron Age because technology makes things move fast enough that the breaking down happens in decades instead of generations because things change that fast.
I mean near term, the most important thing for anyone to remember is that if he can’t see your hands empty in a situation, he assumes that you have a weapon. If you make a move with your hands into a place where he won’t be able to watch what you are doing with your hands he assumes you are reaching for a weapon.
The most important thing to do when dealing with police is keep your hands where he can see them, Do not have anything in your hands, and do not move your hands to any place that your hands would be hidden from view. So if you’re at a traffic stop, you put your hands either straight up or on the steering wheel, and do not move until the cop is there and can see your hands. Do not reach for your license, your insurance information, your proof of ownership or anything else until the cop can see you and has directly told you to do that. If you need to reach into your glove box, a bad or a purse ask him if it’s okay, or hand over the bag.
The main thing here is that cops are trained from day one with one fact in mind: if you miss the guy going for a weapon, you’re probably going to get seriously injured.
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