PropagandaOfTheDude
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User ID: 726
PropagandaOfTheDude
1mo ago
The upthread discussion about male role models reminded me of a web essay that I can no longer find (damn it). The author was a male English professor for undergrads. His course satisfied a general requirement, so his male student population broadly represented the student body. In the essay, the author observed that when his male students were given an opportunity to select a text or topic to study, the most popular subject was always power.
I don’t recall the author proposing any reason for that preference. We can come up with a couple.
Broke: They know that power is the ultimate aphrodesiac.
Woke: They are already toxically masculine. The professor should focus exclusively on books by queer women of color, who hate power.
Bespoke: They are thinking about the Roman Empire.
I’ll have to expand on that last one.
Ages ago, I came across someone asking why 19th Century Britain seemed to be so obsessed with Rome. One responder said “Britain found itself with an empire unexpectedly. The 19th Century British culture was looking to ancient Rome to give it context. How should they act? What is it like to have an empire? What can they learn?”
That sprang to mind as I was reading the essay. Those teenage boys knew that they were on the cusp of having power, over themselves at least. They should, at least. What does that mean? How should they behave?
My question, then, is: What would you recommend for those boys, to help them understand the power that they will eventually wield?
PropagandaOfTheDude
5mo ago
Only downside is that I went in with a particular playstyle that I enjoy from shooters, and its sometimes been hard to get the cyberpunk leveling to play well with my preferred playstyle.
How well does it handle stealth? I have been a first-person sneaker fiend since Thief.
I recently finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution as...a stealthy hacker.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
and also I guessed by the end of the first Mistborn trilogy that the author was a Mormon without knowing anything about him
What prompted that?
I've been playing cyberpunk 2077 Resident Evil: Village. It's the first time that I've played anything labelled "survival horror", and I'm trying to calibrate my expectations.
I'm getting flashbacks to playing Dragon's Lair and Space Ace in the arcade. (Yes, I'm old.) The designers really like to take over your controls so they can show you an "exciting" cinematic, then hand the controls back suddenly to you. (The one indicator is a "[S]kip" prompt at the bottom right corner of your screen.)
Is this an RE:V thing? A Capcom thing? A survival horror thing?
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
Dysphoria is not the issue; gender is. Remove gender entirely from the equation, then there is nothing for dysphoria to latch on to.
What would you remove from the equations for weight and muscle dysphorias?
The Motte automatically converts Twitter/X links into Nitter links, right?
Nitter is dead, and its replicas will die in less than 30 days.
Nitter currently relies on the mass generation of guest accounts, a weird anonymous form of account that was only supported by old versions of the Twitter app. Creation of them was totally disabled today, so every nitter instance will be dead in under 30 days (when they expire). Scrapers apparently also relied on this, as every public nitter instance was being hammered by scrapers earlier. Instances will probably shut down quite soon unless someone finds another way to create tens of thousands of accounts in an automated fashion for free.
(Note: This is a per-account setting, in the "Content" section.)
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
What's the occult significance of the hedgehog?
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
(Let's not quibble about the fact that Urdu and Hindu are pretty much the same language with a different script, that's beneath us)
Not knowing either, my mental model is that the spoken languages map in the same way that American English and British English map. Different vocabulary for various things, but once you internalize the truck/lorry pairing (for example) you're okay. Is that the case?
PropagandaOfTheDude
4mo ago
Some hard-core of people exist who, for whatever reason, will always want to transition to living as the opposite sex and will be happier if they do so; but there also exist today people who transition for reasons of social contagion or to take advantage of policies, who would be happier living as their birth-sex.
I found this Tumblr screencap a while back, it stuck in my head, and then it turned up again recently:
i went to go pick up my HORMONES from the chemist today and the guy was quite sweet and very well intentioned but clearly way out of his element... when i was leaving i did the standard "thanks have a nice night" and he responded with "you too enjoy your... (very very quietly obviously realising what he was saying was highly insane) gender..." and tbh i haven't stopped thinking abt being a gender enjoyer since
For me, that's a useful way to view matters. Is a given person a gender enjoyer? Or someone who isn't enjoying anything?
PropagandaOfTheDude
9mo ago
Set up some location where you can put your awake, active child down, and safely not pay attention to your child for a while. Maybe that's one of those plastic fence things in the middle of the room. Maybe it's a dedicated room. (Move all grabbable items out of reach. That may even mean moving electrical outlets up to your eye height.) You have some time before this becomes important, but now's the time to plan.
PropagandaOfTheDude
11mo ago
"Screed".
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
Like how Kameron Hurley and Seanan McGuire and Ann Leckie are all decent writers but such insufferably hateful harpies that, like Scalzi, I can't stand to read them anymore.
Without going into too much detail, Seanan McGuire appeared on my radar recently. What informs your description?
PropagandaOfTheDude
1mo ago
as well as contractual poly families as described in Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land
You're thinking the of the line marriages and so forth in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?
PropagandaOfTheDude
1mo ago
That's not how the game works at all!
How does it work?
PropagandaOfTheDude
4mo ago
We have 2 dogs and 10 cats in my condo right now. This isn't normal right? She also teaches kids math as a data scientist so she is obsessed with helping people. But I feel like there is a certain point where it's insane. Should I crack down and tell her how crazy it is with how many animals live in our condo, or should I just let it go.
You've heard of or read those news stories that pop up, about people who have lots animals, in filthy conditions?
One of the paths that leads to this is that the person or family can foster four pets. Then eight pets. Then twelve, sixteen. It works, for a while.
Eventually some other crisis happens. The household can't take care of them all. But having a dozen or more pets is normalized. Stress accumulates. Quality of care drops, and drops.
Right now I don't think you folks are in a position to cope with a life downturn.
Maybe?
I recall playing the original Deus Ex with a stealth assassin. The game took care to provide killphrases for two of the minibosses. And then—whoops!—I had a devil of a time trying to deal with Walton Simons(?) at Area 51 armed just with a sniper rifle. Apparently if I had just spent a moment to knock him unconscious in the previous mission he never would have appeared...
I think the key frustrations for DE:HR boss fights boil down to a couple of things.
- You have to carry along weaponry on mission after mission so it'll be available during the four boss fights. For most of the game, that meant a fully tricked-out revolver, based on wiki advice. Then I added a grenade launcher. They take up room, especially when added to a tranq rifle and a stun gun.
- You'll find the usual game designer trope where your weapons don't really do much until you've dealt with some precondition.
- Pretty much every time I save spammed and retried and then looked on the wiki for hints and then won, I explored the area after the fight. Lots of weapon/ammo caches, and other rooms and corridors besides the main "arena". So maybe they did design them to support hiding and sniping. (Your non-lethals won't work.) But when the cut scene ends and the mini-boss is in front of you, there's a very strong tendency to just start unloading.
There's a DLC The Missing Link where the final boss is just a guy, and sneaking over and doing a takedown works just fine. That was nice.
PropagandaOfTheDude
9mo ago
My beef with revolutions in particular is that the war stuff is fucking BORING. The mechs the humans use are stupid designs with exposed cockpits, and there's only the one mech unit, and the machine forces consist of squids and a giant drill.
Yes, I remember thinking "They replaced special effects martial arts with this?"
PropagandaOfTheDude
10mo ago
Hlynka confusing extroversion with intelligence once again.
The extroverts are the people that you'll interact with when you go to east Africa, so there's some selection bias.
PropagandaOfTheDude
10mo ago
I'm not sure that the movie is supposed to be set in 1996: the jury selection in particular only really makes sense either before Batson or in an alternate universe where it never happened.
Per the novel's Wikipedia page, the events are set in 1984, two years before Batson.
...and I see that you sort of mention that with "plausible for 1984".
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
Really? I recall BCAA powder tasting like death.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
Sometimes it was just easier to do than put it back on three minutes later at your next stop.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
That is: adults were banned from taking vaccines until the FDA had satisfactorily hemmed and hawed over the trials
Entities were banned from testing people for COVID-19 while the CDC spent weeks coming up with and distributing their own, broken test mechanisms.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
What should I do if I got Janitor Duty but the post was "Deleted by author"?
Oops, found the conversation below.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
For the leg workout: split squat, or split squat, or split squat.
How are deadlifts on your back?
Six years ago, Sarah A. Hoyt coined "roll hard left and die".
In his December 15th newsletter, Josh Barro wrote the following about Elon Musk:
The difference here is that I can't see Musk's root motivation as "not being able to find a job" when all is said and done.
And if that's the case, it makes me reconsider how much of "roll hard left and die" really does boil down to Hoyt's lifeboat theory, and how much is "losing money for a cause".
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