Skulldrinker
No bio...
User ID: 1874
Skulldrinker
11mo ago
based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures
These statements would be way more compelling with some more detailed examples that would indicate that anyone with some degree of scientific literacy is in the loop. I'm not quite clear on if "Unique Atomic arrangements" are referring to novel chemicals or novel elements or novel isotopes of elements. I'd love examples of what kind of vehicle morphology would prove non-human intelligence. A fucking rough sketch from this guy of what vehicles he's seen isn't even forthcoming. Any of this stuff would massively change human understanding of physics and materials tech, the fields there haven't been real theoretical breakthroughs in in forever.
Skulldrinker
5mo ago
I remember when a recent whistleblower or leaker or whoever said that a crashed captured UFO was found to contain "Unknown Elements," with no further explanation of what that's supposed to mean, and it very much killed all of my interest in UFOs. We know what an element is even if we haven't seen it before. All the elements on the periodic table are known, or theoretically known. There's no room on the table for an element that isn't an rapid-decaying ultra-heavy metal. Unless we're talking about an incredibly exotic isotope of element 325 that somehow exists for more than 2 seconds and isn't hideously radioactive. Or Element Zero, in which case, I guess we should head to the Charon Relay in the outer system. Is the unknown element he describes a tiny sample in some sort of larger mechanism, like the Freon in a refrigerator? Or is the hull of this thing made of 70% Glorkium? Or did the guy mean elements as in elements of construction? Then I'd love a cursory description of the novel metamaterials that this thing is made of; whatever nanotubules or gels or frictionless fluids or super-conductors it's made of would be super-interesting to just have a cursory description of. Or is this guy just a 'tard that knows "Element" is a science word?
Also, your top-level post is bad and you should feel bad.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
Except that female writers also write female characters as one-dimensional Mary sues, because yaaas queen slay.
The dynamic I notice in media today is that there's lots of Representation, but none of the minorities being represented are allowed to have negative character traits or be unsympathetic antagonists (for the same reasons as above), so straight white male characters wind up as sinks for all the narrative negativity.
Skulldrinker
3mo ago
Isn't that a bit of an absurd leap? Both towards cutting off power to the rest of the country and assassinating governors. Neither Biden nor Abbot are tryhard fedposters fantasizing about the Boogaloo, they're elected officials with investment portfolios and re-election campaigns.
but but it's worth noting that the 2017 Wonder Woman did well despite obviously having a female lead.
Wonder Woman is a girlier Rosie the Riveter and Gal Gadot has a desirable personality. There's a lot more basic appeal there than a film that inexplicably shouts "black girl magic."
The problem isnt putting a chick in it, it's the making her lame and gay.
Edit: And doing it all the time while pretending that it's daring.
Skulldrinker
7mo ago
That's because D&D is (was) really a Western dressed up in an anachronistic pseudomidieval setting. And it's settings and monsters owe more to Conan and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser than to Lord of the Rings.
Now it's become an alice-in-wonderland tea party for non-binary tiefling warlocks.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
Didn’t this just happen to the creator of Rick and Morty?
Yes, but in the course of the legal proceedings for domestic assault and kidnapping (technically, preventing someone from leaving by blocking a door or taking their keys counts as attempted kidnapping, so it sounds like a drama-filled domestic spat), there was a bunch of fishing around and apparently he made some joke about a 14-year-old fan being Jailbait while interacting with said fan. Which also turned him into a groomer and a pedophile according to Reddit. So legal exoneration now doesn't do much for him. Plus he generally has a drunk-texting habit, which provides additional examples of being "creepy," the ultimate sin.
In the course of this, there were also claims that he hadn't actually done any in-person work apart from voice stuff on any of his shows or projects since Rick&Morty Season 3, which I'm slightly skeptical of; it sounds like all his friends and co-workers distancing themselves and claiming they never liked him anyways and none of those projects should suffer cancellation because they don't represent his work. Buuut, you can tell on the Season 3 R&M commentary that he's less involved; there's a lot more guest writers and randos and vapid LA circlejerking; and there's no Season 4 Commentary, which is consistent with less engagement from him. It's also consistent with someone who was muscled out of his own show by Dan Harmon. Genuine shrug here, the evidence is ambiguous, everyone involved has motivation to lie or elide.
My own hypothesis is that guys who luck into fame and success (and the sexual opportunities that come with it) later in life often don't know how to handle it, they're the eternal underdog who finally caught the car. Famous men who haven't lived through decades of sexual deprivation before becoming famous have better OpSec and don't fall for Crazy so easily.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
They've gotten their fear of social danger mixed up with their fear of physical danger.
I've spent lots of time around women who actually have been physically assaulted, and they don't pull this "I feel unsafe" crap. They have some idea of what dangerous men actually look and smell like, and don't regard all men they meet as incipient rapists.
My own theory is that women get told constantly to Be Afraid, but don't actually know what it is they're supposed to be afraid of and thus their Danger Sense isn't particularly well-calibrated.
Skulldrinker
6mo ago
My objection to ethnic swaps is also related to the use of race in (semi)original works; my best recent example is the The Last of Us HBO adaptation, which was overall very good. But I still noticed that no diverse person is ever allowed to be bad,. The closest we got was a reasonable Asian FEDRA school administrator who's technically a fascist, and Marlene, a character that is worshipped by 1/3rd of the cast, is a romantic revolutionary, and who's mild badness is part of the show's entire grey/grey moral choice thing re: Ellie. In "bad" settlement #1, everyone is a beardy Midwestern type you'd see at a MAGA rally, with guns and trucks, and they're obsessed with hunting down one particular guy, who appears to have been the only black man in town (and who has a great moral excuse for ratting on his neighbors, conveniently. In the game, he and his brother weren't being specifically hunted by white people, they were just survivors like the main duo). "bad" settlement #2 is also mono-ethnic. They run into one "good" settlement, which of fucking course calls itself communist and is run by a black woman. It's like Stephen King; black people are so good they're magic. You can always tell who's good and who's bad by where the African-Americans are. The game itself has this too, but it's pretty tame by comparison and I don't have issues with it beyond Noticing.
When you have to have diversity but also can't depict anyone diverse as "bad," all the antagonistic roles get concentrated in the non-diverse characters, and any diverse antagonist that sneaks in has a maudlin excuse that makes them tragic and sympathetic, only the straight white male is capable of just being evil.
Skulldrinker
3d ago
Because every time I tried meeting anyone, I ran into the full Covid gauntlet of Bubbles and Taking It Seriously, stuff that women mysteriously stopped caring about once it stood in the way of fucking him.
And because he had become a hollow skinsuit of upward-mobility who spoke entirely in progressive talking points, to the point where it reminded me of the guy from Nightcrawler. And had a pathetic fucking meltdown where he tried to hold his girlfriend hostage by locking his door with her keys in his room, plus all the emotional abuse before. And he tried to steal the lease out from under his roommates. And he'd poison people against his roomates by calling us racist. And he collaborated with the landlords (to steal the lease), and simped for them massively despite them calling him racial slurs behind his back, which we informed him about in our bid to convince him that they were bad people whom he should not make deals with, especially with him valuing his Blackness so much. So he was a Queer (straight but wants to fuck leftist chicks who hate straight men) Black (ish,) Feminist (who abused women) Communist (who sold out his prole roommates). Eventually he had some sort of psychotic break and attacked me with a fire axe, I maced him and got a restraining order to get him removed from the place. And to this day I have former mutual friends who won't talk to me, because he's Black and Leftist and I'm a straight white male who called the cops on a Person of Color. And wherever he is now, he's undoubtedly balls-deep in some chick he met at a pro-palestine protest, while I still can't get anyone to fucking turn up for fucking coffee after getting my heart mutilated in 2019. Because people are so fucking retarded that they misinterpret me as some kind of monster, while he's the Jesus of their new religion.
That is why I hate the world.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
This seems like another example of someone having a personality disorder, but no one noticing because they express it by shouting political slogans. You can see Borderlines acting as attack dogs for political activism all the time.
"Smithers, release the crazy bitches."
"Bitches do be crazy, sir."
Skulldrinker
2mo ago
It's not ugly women and pathetic men that makes the score go up, it's just interacting with SBI, and corporate decision-makers see no reason NOT to chase ESG, since to them "quality" is a vague untrackable nonsense term uncorrelated with the financial success of a product, but ESG rating IS trackable and legible
Skulldrinker
5mo ago
I could have put this in Wellness Wednesday, but I'll phrase this as a question:
When am I allowed to mace a hobo?
The story: I'm working at a food stand at a winter market festival downtown for a month. It's over $25/hr after the copious tips, and short 6-hour shifts, but my ulterior motive is about getting an In with the bar running it, and just to network amongst the Hospitality Folk.
But, this means I'm taking the CTA for a change, and thus keep seeing things that can't be unseen. The other day, there's a ranting man on the opposite platform, wandering up and down it, shouting nonsense. Not old, bent, or decrepit, cheap clothes that are still in one piece. I'm waiting for my train, and see him eventually fixate on a woman and start leaning in to her and gabbling. She stands there frozen and ignores him as he shuffles around her like a giant annoying pigeon. There's a bunch of back-and-forth of this guy wandering away, coming back, going down the stairs, then back up, then looming over her and gabbling at her. I'm staring the whole time with what must have been a thunderous expression, the woman meets my gaze a few times and mouths something once. Both of them are black, incidentally; she looks like a nurse or something adjacent: South-Side Respectable. I'm trying very very hard to control my temper and not escalate the situation, actual physical harm in these situations is pretty rare, this is just emotionally harrowing for the poor woman.
He wanders away a bit and she makes a move for the stairs, I see him start to follow, and I've finally had e-fucking-nough. I go down the stairs and meet her sheltering by the turnstyles. He sees me and stops on the stairs, starts going up and down them, in that attempt to be nonchalant that the mentally ill always fail at. My train is a minute away, she's crying, I say it's okay, and shout to the attendant "Hey, there's a ranty hobo that isn't leaving this woman alone. She needs help."
With my train arriving and my shift starting soon, I go back up to my platform, get on the train, and see though the window that same woman, standing on the platform, crying, while the hobo stands behind her gabbling. She's got her own train to catch. This is what I'm left with as my train leaves the station.
After, of course, I realize the optimal move would have been to being her up to my platform, get on my train til the next hobo-free platform, then continue on her way. My presence alone would probably have dissuaded him. But I didn't want to be late, I didn't want to escalate the situation, and I didn't want to be tempted to beat up a brain-rotted hobo.
Cut to work.
Background: One of my fellow döner-kabob-slingers is a early-30s woman that I was initially a bit taken with; she introduced herself to me as recently-divorced, asked me if I had a partner or not, and just generally paid way more attention to me than I'm accustomed to (which felt good, because it doesn't happen much, which made me sad. But also made me uncomfortable, because of the unfamiliarity of it, which also made me sad.) There's a bit more incidental physical contact from her than necessary. She's skinny and wide-faced and granola-y, we talk about nature and wildlife stuff; she's involved with urban ecology project planning and...equity. Dang. Also, I later overhear her talking about Polyamory or some shit (Polyamory as practiced by women is just laundered Friendzoning/Cucking, Polyamory as practiced my men is just laundered Playa-ing. She wants to fuck around but needs a buzzword for it). So my interest is...reduced. The woman who mutilated my heart in 2019 was also a recently-separated devorcé, fool me once and all that.
Anyways, I arrive at work all bent out of shape and want to talk about it. So I ask my not-crush, as someone who's lived in Chicago for a while, and as a woman, if stuff like that ever happens to her and what bystanders can do to help without making the situation worse. I narrarate the story pretty much as I do here. (I leave out the part about them both being black, it isn't relevant). I'm genuinely looking for advice, but I also want to untangle my feelings, and, yeah, I want to convey to her that I'm the sort of person that struggles to not White Knight.
The first thing she says?
"I think you're trivializing that poor man's mental illness by calling him a gabbling hobo."
The walls go up inside me. She's Orthodox Woke. "Yes, I should have been more technical: Bum, Gabbling Stalker Variant, Able-Bodied."
"You don't understand, access to mental health services has been reduced because Republicans-
"I'll go tell that woman to not cry, then, it's Ronald Reagan's fault for kicking him out of his mental hospital."
So that's the story of how I stopped being attracted to someone.
Just to quickly double-check, I ran this story past a close female friend who moved here from Nebraska, and an apolitical Chicago native bartender, and both had different flavors of "What the actual fuck?" Reactions. She was speechless, he laughed.
Because of stuff that's happened to me, I carry a can of mace on my keys. But I notice my hand going for it in situations like this, where I'm almost looking for an excuse to use it, and I'm worried I'm eventually going to spray a particularly-annoying panhandler in the face.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left.
I'm not sure this is the case anymore. They've been pulling the "There are starving trans people of color being hunted by Republicans while the ocean is rising, and you want to spend money on SPACE that could have gone to my non-profit for hunted trans POCs?" card for a while, and demonizing space travel as a way for rich (white) people to escape earth. I don't hear much futurism from them anymore.
Buuuut, I was surrounded by particularly-inconsistent leftists for way too long.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
you only have 7-9 years when it requires 10, and this concerns you? I get that it's an actual nerd (,who might be similarly autistic) you're dealing with and not an HR gremlin, but come on.
That's an excessive degree of scrupulosity you're exhibiting. Go for it with zero guilt. Pretend your time studying at uni counts as "experience" if you must.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
Because kids are great? It's a hard sell these days, but kids actually can be a fun, rewarding life project.
One thing that's changed about having kids is that it used to be more fun. Your friends had kids too, the kids could be left to their own devices for most of the day while the adults hung out. You were allowed to have a life and identity outside of your children.
Now, children demand all things they see advertised at them, subject everyone around them to their obnoxious media habits, expect the adults to entertain them, or sit like a lump on an ipad and scream if it gets taken away briefly. All your childless friends don't want to spend time in a child-safe house full of child-friendly media. If the children do actually go outside, it must be in the form of organized events with signed waivers and fees and disciplinary talks when one kid makes physical contact with another kid. Kids have become a thing that you buy ipads for that resents you for being straight and white and killing the planet.
There'd be no harm in making up a ton of new Magic characters who just happen to be black, instead of changing already beloved characters from who they are.
"Mirage" was an MTG set from the early 2000s that was heavily african-inspired; most of the humans on the cards were black, and the ones who weren't were swarthy north-africans. Teferi originated in this set, a good-hearted trickster wizard.
Jammura (the africa-analogue continent on the main plane, Dominaria) has been almost completely untouched since then, apart from the small, unbeloved expansion Prophecy and a few random mentions, and characters like Kaervek getting timeshifted cards. Oh, and in the set where they go to the Egypt plane, lots of people were very black, because Kangs and Sheit.
Instead of making anything resembling a fantasy Africa plane or doing a nostalgia-trip or re-make of mirage (like Coldsnap for Ice Age or the Brother's War flashback set) they've just been throwing in random black vikings and froofy-haired planeswalkers like Kaya.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
It could be less acceptable than it currently is to casually vilify men.
I have a suspicion that women are over-exposed to media and memes that shit on men for cheap hurrahs, and the young ones in particular never actually get the firsthand experience of men that might justify the shitty attitude; the equivalent would be a bunch of 16-year-old boys who think their female classmates plan to marry them then divorce them and take away their money and children that they don't actually have.
But women aren't magnetically, viscerally attracted to men the way men are to women, and women also dictate what status IS; if you tell women that men are low-status simply for being men, they'll believe it, and enforce it, and then be confused as to where all the "good men" are.
Skulldrinker
2mo ago
Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.
D&D geeks have been writing nothing but in-jokes and sci-fi references since before MCU films were good, and WAY before they were bad. I'm surprised you didn't use the boo-word "capeshit." Being incredibly derivative and tropey are would be an improvement over woke writing.
Skulldrinker
2mo ago
One morning at a farmer's market, in front of our families and newborn babies, I said I didn't like the new Star Trek and another liberal father there started yelling at me at the top of his lungs in public about the importance of punching fascist.
I remember the day I said The Last Jedi wasn't very good and some 40something mom said I was just against strong role models for girls. I told her to go back to the internet and take her opinions with her. It was a big moment for me, because politics intruded on one of my favorite hobbies; bitching about film and TV.
Skulldrinker
9mo ago
I didn't realize pretending to be hetero-queer to get college-educated pussy was such an old tradition.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
I used to think “nice” was an insult
Years ago, I got so sick of being called "Nice" by women around me I eventually had a Do Not Call Me That moment. I now feel slightly vindicated.
Skulldrinker
4mo ago
You're a fucking idiot. I threw away my first love for the same reason, and regret it to this day.
Skulldrinker
6mo ago
Why do you expect consistency from social posturing? The college kids chanting River to the Sea are just making mouth noises that they've been told are the mouth noises non-excluded, invited-to-parties people make. They wouldn't know what to do with a Jew even if they caught one.
I use these sorts of bikes occasionally. They cost x¢/min, starting when you unlock and totaled up when you relock. If you don't re-lock the bike, the meter just keeps on ticking. I'm not sure what happens eventually, maybe the rider who's account checked it out gets billed for the "stolen" bike. But the way the QR system works, it isn't particularly possible to grab someone else's bike by mistake. It is possible to be grabbing the last bike (or the last "good" bike, all the rest having flat tires or rusty chains or the like) and someone else to take issue with that. I don't think that happened here. I think a group on young men wanted to grab a free bike, and were expecting to get it through some combination of the target's niceness reflex, confusion as to how the unlock system works (while the target is trying to figure out how the "misunderstanding" happened, the bike is already gone), and the implicit intimidation of a group of agressive youths. In this case, it didn't work, she froze up, got confused, knew something was wrong, and tried to attract bystanders. Then a helpful person re-locked the bike, completely ruining the young men's intent to get a free bike that someone else will be billed for.
Lots of people, (Midwestern Americans and Canadians, in particular) have a niceness reflex; when you, say, trip on someone else's foot, the kneejerk assumption is that you were being inattentive and just stepped on a person's toes; you say "sorry" and yield to them, it taking a moment or two to realize that you've been intentionally tripped. Other people do not have this reflex, either because of their cultural background or because they're dicks; either way, these people notice the niceness reflex of others and try to exploit it.
I also see these bikes left in yards in my (shitty) neighborhood. Now I know how they got there and why the rider doesn't care about being billed for them.
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