RenOS
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User ID: 2051
I was interviewing at a mining company way back when and they were just so boring and dry
Also, thanks to my parents I am an east-coast latte-sipping downtown elitist lib-pilled yuppie (see my flair). So moving to Calgary (and Alberta generally, although I liked Austin so if Calgary was cool I'd deal with the awful governance) is not a very appealing option. Soy-jacking aside, I love the vibe of big cities, and the absurd fun and convenience they provide.
It's not so much "city fun kid boring", I fucking loved growing up in Toronto. I want my kid to experience that. And Toronto is so much better now than when I was a kid.
No offense, but I started out predisposed to believing you, but the more you post, the more I think the revealed preferences people are correct, at least in your particular case. Whatever you wish to be true, large, especially capital cities in the west have been on a trajectory of being increasingly fun and cool for the young, childless and high-powered careerist, while becoming less and less affordable for families. The same goes for all the popular jobs. You pay a significant premium to have a job that is fun, and if that premium is so expensive that you can't afford kids, it means you value that fun higher than kids. No, people in the past didn't have fun jobs, in fact if boring and dry is the worst you can come up with, that's probably a top 1% job in terms of satisfaction right there, certainly in the past and to some degree even currently.
I did my PhD in London. For my career, and probably even for that of my wife, it would have been MUCH better to stay there. My PhD supervisor was ready to take me over as a postdoc, and she is quite successful. My wife, meanwhile, had worked with Friston (the neuroscientist), and would have had a decent shot at getting a postdoc there as well. But we both chose against it, for multiple reasons, but primarily because raising kids in London sucks. My PhD supervisor had her first child almost simultaneously with mine (just a few weeks difference), and I really can't see her getting more than one. We went back to [small university city in germany] and are now on our second child and counting. We will probably have three, maybe four (though more are unlikely, since we didn't start early enough and I'm also not a particular fan of having babies past 40).
And it was totally worth it! Kids really are the greatest meaning-generators. Fun also gets a lot cheaper; Suddenly, I don't need to go on expensive vacations or the like. All the simple things that have become boring for me, if I do it with our eldest and she is having fun, I have fun as well through the magic of empathy. Hell, even playing peekaboo with our baby is lots of fun. And no, doing it with other kids isn't the same.
Tbh, I'd say that you're stuck in a local maximum that is pleasant and fun right now but will lead to you being dissatisfied in the long-term, and you even recognise that fact, but you don't leave bc you aren't willing to suffer a little in the valley on the way towards a better maximum.
RenOS
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4mo ago
It's not about having no experience, it's about them having a tendency to tell you that behaving like a good christian or [insert religion] will surely lead to you finding and holding a partner, when it's at best unrelated or at worst actively counterproductive.
Ironically, I would actually say that they are better equipped to give good relationship advice once you already are committed to each other, for the same reason.
RenOS
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4mo ago
Hmm weird, I can't find anything on how to play that on android. The umineko project version is a bit tedious to get running, but so far it seems to work, so I'll just use that.
This reminds me of a story I've once read (or watched?), which indeed ends on the main character achieving immortality, even godhood, as they desired, but sacrificing the world in the process. Then they sit in the never, for eternity, doing nothing. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the story, or much more details. But I always thought that this is the appropriate ending for "main character has limitless ambition and no moral compass whatsoever".
RenOS
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4mo ago
Just to be clear, you mean the umineko project port, right?
RenOS
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4mo ago
Hmm, I had watched Higurashi, which I enjoyed very much, but then never got around to Umineko, which at that time seemed to me like just more of the same, but as a "normal" murder mystery. Seems I misjudged things. Would recommend the manga or do you have another option? I probably won't play on the PC for some time, though maybe the fanported android version.
RenOS
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4mo ago
Yes, but even the multiparty democracies in the west are currently devolving into a dysfunctional establishment vs non-establishment two sides conflict.
RenOS
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4mo ago
Tbh this is just as bad a take imo as the fanatics wanting to get rid of cars in the countryside said bc they "just need better public infrastructure". Yes, cars are superior for rural regions and public infrastucture is just not feasible there, but for well-designed suburbia and especially for smaller cities, bikes are also just better in many circumstances. It has nothing to with hobbies, hippies or fitness fanatics (though regular exercise is one of the benefits of bikes!). They need so much less space, they're cheaper, more flexible, less dangerous for pedestrians, etc.
Reducing cars in the suburbs to pedestrian speed and giving them the blame for any accident is great, it means even smaller kids can run, play, and bike through the suburbs without me needing to worry much, It means I can walk and bike there without having to be attentive all the time, and as long as it is properly designed even if I need to drive through it's just a minute or so of slow driving.
In cities car culture is also awful, the smell got better but everything is just so clogged and noisy. Worse, the danger means that even if you want to bike, it makes you choose the car bc a single idiot can cost your life. When I was living in London, almost everyone biked for a while, and those who stopped always had an incident with a crazy car driver. I myself also had several such situations. The counter here is usually crazy cyclist, but crazy cyclists are merely annoying, even a collision will usually not even seriously hurt you (though I get very pissed when small kids are involved, but even there I can literally just jump in front & stop the bike if needed); Crazy drivers can kill you with frightening ease, and there is absolutely nothing you can do. There's a lot to dislike in the EU, but well-targeted car bans are great.
RenOS
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5mo ago
Don't know the guy, but just looked up the linked channel and yeah, that kind of beard always makes you look really old. And it's also really popular among the orthodox for some reason. I'm even sometimes surprised myself when I shave down how young I still look, and I never let it get that long.
RenOS
something is wrong
5mo ago
Short story is, me and my wife are both PhDs (me applied math, her psychology), so we have both met quite a few different varieties of nonbinary and trans individuals. Even back when studying we noticed that it's my spaces and in particular Computer Science that has several MtFs (and I've made the same observation in ultra-male online spaces such as mech-themed games or esoteric linux open source projects; they may be 10% female, but it's all G.I.R.L.s), while FtMs are mostly in her circles, particularly the social sciences. Standard gender theory would predict the opposite; And further, my wife (who is, ironically, one of the least feminine woman personality-wise I know) noticed in her interactions in her circle of friends that the majority of FtMs and nonbinaries have virtually no male hobbies, no masculine behaviour patterns, nothing.
When asked how they knew, they talk about how they disliked their growing breasts and how cumbersome they are (my wife does as well), how unpleasant the period is (duh), how scary the thought of pregnancy is (again, duh) how they don't want to be pressured into caring for kids and having to abandon their career (my wife, too), sometimes even how cismen are dirty and gross and they don't want to have sex with them (literally every women ever). It's basically a laundry list of all realisations and fears that many if not all girls get during puberty or slightly later, but instead of having to come to terms with it, they took the easy way out: Just reject it all. Their male identity, meanwhile, consists of superficialities, such as literally wearing lumberjack shirts, or even doing female-coded hobbies but with a male twist, such as really liking to cook, but they cook steaks. They're basically what women think men should be like, not what real men are actually like. Not rarely, they downright detest almost everything about real men as "toxic masculinity", such as competitiveness, dominance, playful insults, not talking about feelings, hierarchies, etc.
The same goes for students I'm teaching now, although it's obviously more distanced so I'm less confident here, but as far as I can see there is virtually no connection between their outward presentation of male-ness and actual masculine behaviour (or vice versa for MtFs).
RenOS
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5mo ago
I don't think that's true. I think it failed because as bad as the US establishment bureaucrats are, the EU is just way, way worse. Where the former has a overrepresentation of progressives, the latter has an absolute chokehold.
RenOS
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5mo ago
The problem is that by this logic, as far as I can see, every law is a "power that can be abused". The le pen conviction was based on fairly straightforward anti-corruption laws that disallow using EU funded workers to also work nationally. This is a reasonable limitation and does not seem unduly far-reaching in principle.
The problem is that the law effectively unenforced on the rest of the EU apparatus, especially the most left-leaning parts. A former green EU staffer has already gone ahead and publicly declared that he himself, as well as the entire rest of his office, has engaged in exactly the same behaviour Le Pen has. Crickets.
So the real issue is, as @wlxd points out, is a legislative dedicated to stretching and/or ignoring the law in any way they like, to further the goals they like. You can't write laws good enough to combat this mindset.
RenOS
something is wrong
5mo ago
I also want to add, I can't remember any atheism rants in DCC (not saying there are literally none, but if there are, they are extremely easy to forget). Carl does have regular (mostly internal) rants against the aliens running the show, but they're really a very small part of the overall story, and for the most part are perfectly understandable for someone being thrown into a gladiator deathmatch against his will. Religion inside the show is transparently fake and gay, but everything inside the show is deliberately set up in mockery. Outside of the show, the alien antagonist are mostly non-religious, and even if they have a religion, their evilness has usually nothing to do with it.
Which ones do you mean? FtM asexuals are, in my experience, mostly very average women with feminine personalities, who first mistake the normal & expected unpleasantness of puberty as gender dysphoria, and then it's easy to further mistake the normal low feminine sex drive as anomalous, both due to being consistently misinformed about the nature of sex and sexual development.
MtFs, similar to furry asexuals, posting habits and behaviour clearly seem to imply them deriving sexual pleasure from their interactions, it's merely that they don't like the act of sex itself. Which is not unusual for strong fetishes, think findom or other variants of the more elaborate sub-dom relationships. Excluding the cases that simply lie about or downplay their impulses, of course, which also isn't particularly rare.
Edit: Also, there additionally is the increasingly large number of people who treat their LGBT+ identity as a social club offering them a safe space, affirmation and simple slogans to live by in a world that only gets more complicated. From this PoV, it just means they want to belong to both these social clubs instead of only one.
RenOS
something is wrong
5mo ago
Ha. Me and my wife are one of the few people in our circle of acquantainces who don't own a car, and quite a few of them (themselves owning cars!) instantly started treating us like green compatriots. Led to a few awkward moments when they became aware that we're not only doing it out of money concerns (work, daycare and shopping is all easily reachable by bike in less than 10 minutes for us, and we don't travel that much) but that we are ideologically most aligned with pragmatist center-libertarian views. And that's despite hiding our power levels.
RenOS
something is wrong
5mo ago
Isn't this a case of who, whom yet again? Depending on how you answer the question of the personhood of the fetus, it's either the right to a simple medical procedure removing some cells, or it's superseded by the right to life for a developing human being.
In general, the curated lists as well as the GoI-Hubs are a good place to start since they give some info, so you can judge better whether it's the kind of story you like. But the top-rated ones are almost all great, and going in blind is just more effective for many of them. Btw, it's no coincidence that almost all highly-rated stories are older.
For some of my own recommendations, to keep with the Lovecraftian (meaning grand-scale horror tied into smaller exploration stories):
-the Daevite stories. There's quite a lot of content so there is bound to be some hit and miss, but the core idea is solid and a nice twist on Lovecraft.
-SCP-2935, aka the dead planet
-SCP-093, aka the red sea object.
And some other personal favorites:
-SCP-3008, aka the IKEA dimension
-SCP-1689, aka the holding bag of potatoes
-SCP-2718, aka what happens after?
-SCP-1562, aka the tunnel slide
-SCP-3003, aka the end of history
-SCP-3673, aka the ballet room
-Parawatch Hub. Just some honest, small scale mystery/horror.
"The Rats in the Walls" "Shadow over Innsmouth", "The Shadow Out of Time" and "At the Mountains of Madness" are probably among the most widely acclaimed. I own & really enjoyed the Necronomicon, nice hardcover and quite comprehensive collection of tales, so as a completionist that might be your thing.
Edit: Also, dunno how much you already know that, but the SCP Foundation is in many ways the modern equivalent of part-weird part-(eldritch)-horror of lovecraftian stories. Also definitely worth checking out.
RenOS
something is wrong
5mo ago
He is a pragmatist through-and-through. Old-school worker's left, though nowadays he dislikes unions as much as management. As far as I know he has never read any philosophical text, and he generally abhors big idea conceptualism as a whole. Either you have specific ideas for specific improvements, or he doesn't want to hear about it.
RenOS
something is wrong
5mo ago
Yeah. My eternally optimistic boomer dad likes to tell me that many of the problems I'm complaining about today are just the pendulum swinging a bit too hard in the other direction due to the real problems of the surprisingly close past (parental abandonment > helicopter parenting, deaths and accidents are common > oppressive safetyist protocols, racism > wokism, etc.) and that, having experienced both, he takes modernity over the past any day, and that we will move past this, too. I guess I agree with everything except that the last part needs its champions to happen, and nobody seems to really want to volunteer.
RenOS
something is wrong
5mo ago
Fuck. Forget LLMs, if this develops further (and I see little reason why it shouldn't), there is a very real risk war and terror becomes generally commodified and ubiquitous.
RenOS
something is wrong
5mo ago
Only one biological child - a daughter - and gives the empire to his stepsons? Cuck.
RenOS
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5mo ago
Mandatory reminder that David Graeber is an activist hack.
I've always interpreted the djinn concept in a slightly different way; Even if you wish for something mostly benign, or which at least can be trivially granted in a desirable way, such as getting lots of gold, they will frequently fuck you over anyway, by actively contriving the wish in such a way that it becomes undesirable. The lesson, to me, was thus more about how a servant who is genuinely, fundamentally more powerful than you - even if the master-servant relationship is magically enforced! - is never truly just subservient. Especially if they are also smarter than you and can thus find loopholes in almost any wish you formulate, no matter how carefully.
However, as you point out, having limitless ambition and no moral compass means there is simply no pleasant natural ending state. It's just a permanent struggle until you're dead, or everyone else is. So even without a malicious spirit, the latter is the most straightforward consequence of getting your wish granted.
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