MartianNight
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User ID: 1244
MartianNight
14d ago
I'm not sure if you needed an account for that, but at least that was optional, and you didn't miss much if you ignored it.
What was dumb about it was that Ubisoft couldn't even be arsed to keep their site up and running, making that part of the game technically unfinishable in recent years, if it wasn't for fans reverse-engineering the encryption algorithm (luckily, they used a symmetric algorithm instead of something harder to crack). And of course, the fan-maintained websites are still up and running: https://darkroom.bgemyth.net/, because apparently fans can do what billion dollar multinational companies cannot.
Let me highlight this part:
Arguably, Ubisoft has been fighting the good fight. I make fun of Ubislop titles, and their super generic, open world, casual action adventure mechanics. But they are still ostensibly offline big budget single player games.
I recently bought the remastered edition of Beyond Good and Evil, and the launcher doesn't allow me to play the game without creating a stupid Ubisoft account. Why the fuck would I need to create a Ubisoft account to play the single-player game I already bought and paid full price for? (Incidentally, I bought this game three times: once on PC, once the updated version on XBOX 360, and then again the remastered version.)
To be clear, this is a 100% offline exclusively single-player game with no online components whatsoever! There is absolutely no need for online accounts!
The only way to circumvent this asinine garbage was to put the console in offline mode, which is a hassle. And the only reason that works at all is that Microsoft put its foot down and didn't let hell-tier companies like Ubisoft block their games from running offline. Fucking Microsoft is the hero in this story! Let that sink in. MICROSOFT! I cannot emphasize this enough. How the hell do you fuck up so badly as a gaming company that a longtime gamer like me thanks Microsoft for not letting you ruin the gaming experience even worse for your paying customers?
This fucking shit make me hate Ubisoft with a fiery passion. A company that fucks its customers over this badly doesn't deserve to survive. I wish they went bankrupt yesterday, just to discourage this bullshit.
MartianNight
17d ago
Sure, that's why I started my comment with “If I put on my conspiracy hat...” At the same time, it's naive to assume that an attack on the opposition couldn't possibly be politically motivated because there is some friendly fire.
MartianNight
18d ago
If I put on my conspiracy hat, I would say that this is exactly what you would expect from a group that wants to get rid of certain politicians without making it look like their actions are politically motivated: throw a few of their allies under the bus too, to make it look like the actions are politically neutral, while knowing full well that the impact on your enemies is much more severe than on your allies.
This gives your actions the veneer of neutrality while still achieving your political aims.
MartianNight
21d ago
This interpretation makes no sense in the context of the story, though. The evil queen is the second-most “fair” person in the entire kingdom, but decides to murder her innocent stepdaughter out of jealousy, which is pretty obviously not morally virtuous.
You cannot become a morally virtuous person by murdering all the innocent children who are more virtuous than you, except in the trivial sense that if you murder literally everyone else, you are “most virtuous” by default (which isn't what happens in the story). However, you can become the most physically attractive woman by murdering all the women who are more attractive than you.
So the story only makes sense if (at least the evil stepmother) thinks of “fair” as meaning “physically attractive”, not “morally virtuous”.
It's essentially the 1994 video game Quarantine, if anyone remembers that.
Maybe the offensiveness of what Darone did becomes more obvious if you remove the trans issue from the topic.
Imagine you have a support group for parents whose children have a terminal form of cancer. These really exist and are important to the people involved. One day a member posts a sad story about how his kid has died recently, obviously getting lots of expressions of support and sympathy from the group, because that's what support groups do. Then later it turns out that his kid is alive and well, wasn't even sick, or maybe doesn't even exist.
Could you then imagine some of the people who were in the process of actually losing their children to cancer would find the behavior of the imposter deeply offensive? Wouldn't it be more than a little “weird” if the group administrators responded to the controversy by kicking out the offended parents with actual dying children (i.e. the target demographic of the group!), to kowtow to an imposter that wants sympathy for his imaginary grief?
And I know you might say: well, maybe the imposter cannot help it! Münchhausen syndrome is a thing! Let's be empathic and inclusive! But even if I agree that Münchhausen syndrome is real and that people with this condition deserve help, it's not clear that that help must come in the form of being admitted to a support group they do not qualify for. I think it's reasonable to keep the support group for actual parents of actual dying children, and give the imposter support in the form of psychiatric treatment separately.
Similarly, I cannot understand why a group specifically for pregnant women would prioritize the needs of a male imposter over the safety and comfort of actual pregnant women in the group.
Note that none of this depends on proving that the male acts out of malice or indulging a sexual fetish. It's perfectly plausible that some transwomen are legitimately sad that they can never become pregnant, and perhaps they need support to deal with that grief, and maybe that support involves LARPing out a miscarriage, but that still doesn't imply they should be entitled to join support groups for pregnant women, on the simple basis that they are not, and never will be, pregnant women.
MartianNight
2mo ago
Related: almost every subreddit now has a post “Should we ban links to Twitter/X?” with the majority of lefty subs predictably clamoring for more censorship to oppose nazism (because nazis were known for their dedication to free speech apparently?). It all feels extremely astroturfed, or maybe just a consequence of the echo chamber reddit has been cultivating for the past decade.
MartianNight
3mo ago
Presumably the implication is that marriage is most stable when the man out-earns the woman.
Let's be honest, there are dozens of possible confounding factors for these kind of statistics. Age-related effects, urban-rural divide, religiosity, socio-economic groups, ... I would need to see a really rigorous analysis before believing any specific claims like “interracial marriage causes higher/lower divorce rates”.
MartianNight
4mo ago
OK. So how many members of the public must complain before she is deemed nonpassing? Is it like a percentage of a quorum? What percentage of what quorum? Is a single complaint sufficient? In that case, how is the rule different from banning transgenders entirely, just with the caveat that you won't face penalties if you don't get caught, which is essentially how all misdemeanors work?
MartianNight
4mo ago
Potentially related: Elon Musk just claimed xAI will start an AI game studio to make games great again!. Not sure if it's a serious announcement, but it came in response to another tweet by Dogecoin creator Billy Markus:
i don't understand how game developers and game journalism got so ideologically captured
gamers have always been trolls, anti-greedy corporations, anti-bs
gamers have always rejected dumb manipulative bs, and can tell when someone is an outsider poser
why lean into the bs?
MartianNight
4mo ago
The problem with this logic is that it doesn't generalize. If you allow males into women's spaces so long as they pass well enough, who is going to be the judge of who passes well enough? What rule would you propose that allows Sarah McBride in but keeps Jessica Yaniv out?
You can have a “don't ask, don't tell” policy, which is mostly how things worked before the year 2000, but once the cat is out of the bag, you have to revert to some objective rule about who is or isn't allowed.
The whole point of the Congressional bathroom rule is to keep a passing transwoman who is not a threat to anyone out of the ladies' room in order to show Republican's disapproval of transgenderism.
I don't think that's the entire point. The point is also to keep men out of women's shelters and prisons, men out of women's sports and dressing rooms, and men out of women's spaces in general.
If Republicans cannot even keep men out of women's bathrooms in Washington DC, how can they expect to accomplish any of those other tasks? So even if the McBride issue is itself not important because McBride is likely harmless (with which I tend to agree), the case is important because it is at the fulcrum of a broader issue.
MartianNight
4mo ago
They, at least figuratively and sometimes very literally, cut off the part of their body that makes them capable of being a sexual threat- they're no different than a 3 year old boy
Bizarre and patently false claim.
All evidence suggests trans-identified males have the same level of criminality as other males, i.e., much higher than females and much higher than 3 year old boys (the main source is a paper by Dhejne et al, though generally gender activists taboo this kind of research for showing undesirable results).
And besides, over 90% of trans-identified males opt to keep their penis and testicles. So unlike their female counterparts, trans males are almost always physically intact. They are very much capable of raping women and have done so on many occasions.
MartianNight
4mo ago
"Can people who have official government documents that document them as women, involve non-consenting members of the public in their use of spaces for women?" To which the obvious answer is: yes.
My answer is no.
Males do not belong in women's spaces.
Whether those males identify as transgender is irrelevant, because my view is based on sex, not gender identity.
Whether those males have government-issued certificates recognizing their gender identity is also irrelevant, because my view is based on sex, not gender identity.
The only way government records could be relevant if they accurately record a person's sex, but governments of all developed countries have decided to stop doing that.
Just like my driver's license is valid whether you think I should have one or not.
Your government-issued driver's license mostly prevents that same government from putting you in jail for driving a car on the public road. Nobody else is compelled to accept it as proof that you are a competent driver.
In practice, driver's licenses are widely accepted as evidence of baseline driving competence, but that's because the government requires you to prove it before issuing your license. If anyone could get a license simply by self-declaration, even contradicting a professional's judgement, then the value of that license to determine driving ability would plummet.
MartianNight
4mo ago
Why is this such an issue? Restrooms have stalls. I couldn't tell what gender was in one if I tried.
This is a fully-general argument against having women's bathrooms at all. Which is fine if you want to argue for unisex bathrooms, but it's not an argument for keeping bathrooms nominally segregated while letting males into the women's bathroom.
MartianNight
5mo ago
Okay but that was like 10,000 civilian deaths, a rounding error for a country of 40 million.
MartianNight
5mo ago
If it's like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then it will result in mostly men dying, which affects birth rates much less.
MartianNight
5mo ago
Let's say the TFR stabilizes at 1 so that population halves every 30 years or so. Then it takes 90 years to return the world population to 1 billion, which is about what it was at the beginning of the industrial revolution. But the industrial revolution was very localized; it certainly didn't depend on millions of rice farmers in China existing. It started with 10 million people in Britain and spread to 100 million people in Europe.
So it takes like 300 years to get the world population back down to 10 million. Unlike the 10 million who lived in Britain in 1800, who were mostly illiterate farmers, people in the future will still have computers with the internet and Wikipedia, so they are much more capable of maintaining industrial society.
Of course if the population keeps shrinking the situation does become problematic at some point. But 300 years is a long time. Lots of things will change during that time. I would worry much more about the near future, for which we can make better predictions and over which we have much more control.
MartianNight
5mo ago
Two years ago, AOC didn't have pronouns on her Instagram profile, and when called out on it by rabid wokeists, she quickly apologized and put them in. It will be interesting to see if she will make a similar about-face here or if the pronouns are gone for good.
It's worth noting that she also changed her job title from “Representative” to “Congresswoman”, which could be viewed as either a return to sanity (it's okay to call women women again, rather than forcing gender-neutral terminology) or as a way of doubling down on her gender identity as a way to distinguish herself from the evil male majority. We'll see.
MartianNight
5mo ago
The O. J. Simpson case comes to mind. He was acquitted of murder in a criminal trial, but was successfully sued in civil court. Copying from Wikipedia:
In 1997, the jury unanimously found Simpson responsible for the deaths of Goldman and Brown. The Goldman family was awarded damages totaling $34 million ($64 million adjusted for inflation), but as of 2024 have received a small portion of that.
So if actually murdering two people only results in a $64 million fine, how in the hell is Alex Jones liable for $1,1 billion for spreading admittedly-hurtful conspiracy theories? He didn't do direct harm; he just said stupid and hurtful shit on the internet.
MartianNight
5mo ago
There is an AI track in the Meta Hacker Cup this year. I don't know exactly how it works, but it might be helpful to check which techniques the more successful participants used.
MartianNight
5mo ago
He also doesn't need to make any more appearances in front of large crowds until the inauguration, which will presumably be covered really well because it involves lots of important people besides Trump. I'm fairly certain he'll survive until January.
MartianNight
5mo ago
I'm not sure that's saying much, statistically.
The premise seems to be: for some store owners the expected amount of damages exceeds the cost of boarding up windows. Going with the implied assumption that damages occur only if Trump wins, the expected damages are the product of (probability Trump wins) × (probability angry Democrats smash in my windows) × (cost if they smash in my windows). (It's a little bit more complicated because there are also probability for smashing in windows, smashing in windows + looting products, smashing in windows + looting products + setting the store on fire, etc., but that's not really important for the argument.)
My point is that (probability Trump wins) is not super variable. It's almost certainly between 40% and 60%. But that means the expected damages can increase by only 50% from the absolute minimum. The expected damages and the costs of boarding up windows have to be really close for a difference in that probability to affect the decision to board up the windows. For most stores the decision is going to be the same whether the probability is 40% or 60%.
In short, while you could argue that there would be more stores boarding up the higher Trump's chance of victory is, the mere fact that some stores board up windows does not tell you much about Trump's odds. Most of those stores would be boarding up if Trump's chance of winning were 40% or even less, too.
MartianNight
5mo ago
I wonder if he got the idea from the Demon Core.
Links to:
(Am I the only person who finds it maddening that in the year 2025 newspapers still don't bother to link to the easily-findable publications that they base their reporting on?)
I think that's a fair criticism, but I think there are at least three strong points arguing against your interpretation, which are also mentioned in the judgment:
The Equality Act 2010 was meant to replace the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and Sex Discrimination Regulations 1999, which predate the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and obviously intended to use the biological definition. There is no evidence to suggest the lawmakers intended to change the definition of man and women.
The Gender Recognition Act creates a distinction between legal sex and biological sex; it does not abolish biological sex (how could it?). Interpreting the EA as referencing biological sex is not inconsistent with the GRA, especially since this is the most common interpretation. You could argue that if the EA wanted sex to be interpreted as legal sex, it should have defined this explicitly, and since it doesn't, it could be reasonably assumed to default to biological sex.
The EA only refers to “pregnant women” and never “pregnant men”. This implies the word "woman" refers to biological sex, because it would be unthinkable for a law to exclude biologically female legal men (trans men) from protection of discrimination on the basis of pregnancy.
I admit I'm biased because I oppose genderism in most of its forms, but I think the judgment is defensible.
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