Testing123
2d ago
I think that (monogamous) couples have an obligation to maintain their attractiveness, within reason***. When you entered the relationship, you gave up the ability to have sex with anyone else on the pretense that that you will get your sexual satisfaction from your partner, and part of that satisfaction comes from their physical attractiveness. If they choose to erode their attractiveness, they are hurting you and violating their relationship obligations. IMO, like sexual fidelity, this should be made explicit at the start of relationships, but should otherwise be considered implicit unless the obligation is explicitly waved,
***"Within reason" = within the ordinary bounds of aging, illness, and unexpected events. Obviously people are not going to be as hot at 50 as at 25, and obviously we can't completely control the course of our aging.
Which is to say that I think you should consider yourself in the moral right here. You have a moral right to be dismayed by your wife's fading attractiveness. This doesn't make your wife a horrible person or anything, but you shouldn't feel bad for wanting to nudge her back in your preferred direction.
Testing123
16d ago
I recently watched the Paraguay episode of Parts Unknown, and he said that he was (IIRC) 57, and that he was already the longest living male member of his family in many generations.
Testing123
30d ago
IMO, Javier Bardem "passes," but now that he mentions it, it is weird that there are no obviously Middle Eastern cast members. The Fremen are all either black, Mediterranean, or mixed race (like Zendaya).
Inspired by a few Reddit threads: why is there less sex and nudity in movies and television today than in the past?
I don’t have any raw data to back up the claim that there is less sex and nudity these days, but that’s my sentiment and it’s shared by many others. The best concrete example I can think of is Game of Thrones. The early seasons were (in)famous for the amount of gratuitous nudity; Saturday Night Live did a sketch mocking the “guy has sex while another guy getting a blow job watches him through a peephole while another guy watches him through a peephole” scene. Yet, the final two seasons, when it became this massive international phenomenon that everyone on earth watched, had (IIRC) no nudity at all and very little sex.
The second best concrete example I can think of is Marvel movies. There have been 30ish of them and (IIRC) there are no sex scenes at all, and maybe even no make out scenes (I think there’s one in the first Captain America). Sure, they’re PG-13, but so is 007, and they still have sex scenes.
Compare this to the 80s and 90s when every action-oriented movie ever had sex scenes, if not also completely gratuitous nudity. For instance, in Commando, Arnold Schwarzenegger throws a bad guy through a motel wall, and just happens to reveal a naked lady with giant boobs having sex. Or if there was any romance, it would inevitably result in a sex scene, even a clothes-on PG-13 sex scene. These seem to be nearly dead in the modern day.
So why do modern movies have so little sex and nudity? My guesses:
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Internet porn has lowered the value of movie sex and nudity. In the 1980s, getting porn was expensive and annoying, so getting to see boobs in an action movie was a legitimate draw. These days, everyone has infinite internet porn, so who cares? (Counterpoint – celebrity nudity still has a special appeal over porn nudity, ie. the Fappening, or people going to see No Hard Feelings to see Jennifer Lawrence naked)
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MeToo, combined with the backdrop of Jonathan Haidt’s thesis in Coddling of the American Mind, have made (young) people very squeamish about sex. We are in a new low-tier puritan age where men are terrified of being accused of sexual assault and women are terrified of being sexually assaulted, so sex is now a much heavier subject and gratuitous nudity has lost its appeal
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here seems to be a new stratification in culture where everything is either hardcore sexual or has no sex at all. Everything is porn or innocent. People are either kinky a f or extremely shy around sex. Tv shows either show no nudity or they’re Euphoria with tons of sex and nudity. Movies are either porn or puritan.
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lockbusters are now designed to appeal to overseas audiences more than ever, particularly to China. Non-Western audiences (particularly China) are more sexually conservative than Western audiences, so film studios are reducing sex and nudity. In some cases (like China), literal censors might intervene against a movie if there is too much sexuality. Any other ideas?
Testing123
1mo ago
The game works best in unexpected moments of chaos. Like, you and the squad will be running to the next objective when suddenly an enemy horde side swipes you out of nowhere, so you start sprinting away with lazers flying over head, and you dive into cover, and you start fumbling with stratagems to get an eagle cluster out there but the fucking arrows are weird, and then a robot gets around your cover and you have to switch back to your weapons and you start shooting wildly and then your idiot friend died and he's calling for a reinforce but fuck fuck fuck youre barely surviving. Stuff like that.
Testing123
1mo ago
I have to rant about a particular incredibly stupid plot point in the finale. SPOILERS if anyone cares.
It's revealed that the scientists at the lab are studying a life form in the permafrost and that they are better able to access the life form due to pollution created by the local mine which melts the permafrost. So not only does the lab publish fake reports about the pollution levels to protect the mine, but the lab actually asks the mine to pollute more to help its research along. This pollution causes deaths, birth defects, and other problems in the local town. The lab claims that their research will revolutionize the field of health in some unspecified ways, and that their work will eventually be unfathomably valuable.
Ok, so...
- Permafrost is just frozen ground. You can melt it with any heat source. You don't need special pollution to do it. But ok, let's say that for sci-fi reasons, only the pollution melts the ice the right way.
- The pollution that mines give off is stuff like mercury and industrial chemicals. You don't need to get that stuff just from mine pollution. You can get it on its own without polluting a local town. And if the end product of this research is so valuable, I'm sure the lab can afford to import mercury or whatever.
- Also, it appears that all of the lab's research is conducted right near the physical lab building. So... why don't they just get a bunch of pollution and dump it right near their lab? Why do they need to pollute the whole town?
- Or why not just use machinery to cut away permafrost and ship it to a place where you can safely and cleanly expose it to the pollution? Yeah, that's expensive, but the end product is insanely valuable and surely worth it.
- Ok, fine, let's concede that for sci fi reasons, only the pollution can melt the permafrost the right way, and the permafrost can only be melted by polluting the entire town. The pollution conspiracy is still so fucking stupid. They reiterate that the end result of the research is WORLD CHANGING. I'm sure it's worth bajilions of dollars. So if it's that valuable, just tell people what you're working on and what it's worth. Then your corporate overlords can build a giant fracking-style concrete basin to contain the pollution, or even pay off the few thousand local townspeople, or use some other big engineering solution. Surely anything is better than risking jail time, massive lawsuits, and the closure of the entire project by knowingly killing and poisoning thousands of people.
God, I know Hollywood hates corporations, but why does it think they are so stupid?
Testing123
2mo ago
Sometimes I forget that the presidents of other countries (outside America) can't just order troops to go wherever for whatever reason.
Testing123
4mo ago
So I am willing to bet that even today Catholics and protestants know that it was mostly political strife. As were the other major Christian schisms and fights. If you look it is very often some inter elite fight.
I can maybe believe that the elites were primarily motivated by real politik, but masses and mobs really did murder each other on the streets throughout the era. I find it hard to believe that their true motives were stuff like decreasing regional tax-kickups to the Holy Roman Emperor.
Testing123
4mo ago
The Persecution of the Internet Historian
Internet Historian is a popular YouTuber whose best content is retelling interesting, fairly obscure stories with janky animation and luscious voice over. He’s an excellent storyteller and the videos are insanely easy to watch.
Left wing breadtuber Hbomberguy recently released an almost 4 hour video about plagiarism on YouTube. One of the subjects of the video was Internet Historian, and I think Hbomberguy credibly shows that IH was in the wrong. For his most watched video, Man in Hole, IH heavily copied the story and format of a Mental Floss article, as well as directly quoting entire paragraphs. IIRC, IH did cite the Mental Floss article in the original video, but it would be fairer to say that the entire video was an animated telling of the original article, and IH should have described it as such.
Furthermore, after Man in Hole was DMCAed, IH seemingly purposefully concealed what he had done, made excuses, and never fully acknowledged the extent to which he plagiarized, even after reuploading the video with heavy edits.
I think IH did a bad thing by committing plagiarism. Then he did another bad thing by trying to cover it up. I don’t think his life should be destroyed, but I think he deserves some score for this and my opinion of him has been lowered.
But if you ask some very online leftist people what’s wrong with IH, they won’t say plagiarism, they will say he is a literal Nazi - https://old.reddit.com/r/youtubedrama/comments/18dotzf/internet_historian_is_a_nazi/
That thread is by far the most popular ever on that subreddit, and lists evidence that IH is a Nazi. I’d summarize the evidence as “IH has a 4-chany sense of humor, has made some edgy jokes, and follows mainstream conservatives on Twitter.”
What I find most interesting about this affair is how difficult to convey to the breadtubey online leftists how vapid and dumb I think this evidence is. I think that’s because there’s actually a lot of cultural complexity here tied into some big gaps in moral intuition.
For instance, many of the evidence points are that IH has made jokes in his videos about Nazis and the KKK. In one video, he put 14/88 in the background, in another he uses a KKK caricature, and he has also sarcastically listed his birthday as 4/20 (Hitler’s birthday, though this might also just be a weed lmao thing). To the OP and most of the commenters, this is strong evidence that IH is a literal Nazi. Even if they acknowledge that these are edgy jokes, they can’t comprehend why someone would make light of something so awful unless they were secretly sympathetic to it. Or they just say that IH is straight up “dogwhistling” to align himself with all the Nazis watching his videos.
These arguments strike me as so divorced from reality that it’s difficult to bridge the gap. These jokes are not actually making light of Hitler, Nazis, and the KKK. They are making light of online lefties being pathologically obsessed with speech. Referencing Hitler isn’t funny; what’s funny is watching online lefties think that referencing Hitler indicates a deep seated hatred of Judaism and a real desire to exterminate non-whites. It’s the overreaction that’s funny. Or another way to put it – edgy Hitler jokes are shibboleths indicating that the speaker doesn’t buy into the predominant lefty internet culture. The speaker signals that he has such little concern for the culture that he considers stifling, censorious, and ridiculous, that he invokes the greatest taboo possible. IMO, this is the essence of edgy 4-chan humor.
Is this an accurate take? Or am I being too nice to IH?
Testing123
4mo ago
Can you elaborate your thoughts on the Internet Historian? I though the Hbomber video convincingly demonstrated that he committed plagiarism, albeit not as badly as the other subjects in the video.
Testing123
4mo ago
Seriously. Go to the Philippines or Thailand or almost anywhere somewhat touristy in Central America, and this guy is guaranteed to get a decent looking girl. He can even try Eastern Europe if he’s willing to deal with a higher rate of rejection.
Testing123
5mo ago
I have used OTC corticosteroids on my hands and have found it very effective. But the reputation of corticosteroids in the face is that they work in the short term at the detriment of the long term. They thin your skin, and thin skin is already the reason why facial skin tends to be so much worse than regular skin.
Have you been prescribed facial corticosteroids by a dermatologist?
Testing123
5mo ago
I told my allergist about my hot shower response and she diagnosed me with cholinergic urticaria, but didn't say much else except recommending Claritin when I shower. On its own, it's annoying, but not a huge deal. Hell, hot water is generally considered bad for facial skin anyway, so it served as a little extra incentive to embrace cooler showers.
However, on the off chance this allergic response is connected to something bigger, I'm going to press my allergist during my next appointment. Maybe it's worth getting one of those mega antihistamine injections just to see what happens to my face. Honestly, HOPE my facial skin problems are related to my allergies, because that's so much easier to solve. Wouldn't it be amazing if the root of my problems was an allergy to some random fucking environmental thing that I can avoid or crush with antihistamines? But that's probably wishful thinking beyond the rosacea.
I had stress related psoriasis once that went away after dealing with the underlying cause. Is there a possibility that the sensitivity is psychosomatic (in other words linked to stress or other mental health issues)?
I won't say a psychosomatic role is impossible, but I tend to be skeptical. Besides, I beat my psoriasis with cortisone (that stuff kicks ass).
Testing123
5mo ago
I checked Amazon and saw glycine is 10 cents per pill, but then I checked my collagen supplement and I see there's already glycine in there. But thank you for the tip.
Testing123
5mo ago
hyper realistic silicone mask
Lol, reminds me of Vanilla Sky - https://youtube.com/watch?v=PZ5Eab3Na_E
Testing123
5mo ago
Based on the extensive list of treatments the obvious "See a dermatologist" I suppose has already been covered?
I've been to many dermatologists, as well as two plastic surgeons, one of whom is considered one of the best laser surgeons in the world. On the whole, my experiences with them have been fairly negative. Not that their advice is bad, just that it tends to be very typical (retinoids + sunscreen + moisturizer), and they seem to lack the means or inclination to seriously deal with extremely bad cases like mine.
I don't really blame them, dermatological responses to treatments are incredibly varied on an individual basis, and there isn't really much derms can do about it at a certain point.. There are people who have dry skin and put on an OTC moisturizer for a few weeks and then they're fine. Then there are people with dry skin who will spend literally years juggling multiple moisturizers, toners, cleansers, and serums trying to find the right combo that properly protects the skin barrier without causing break outs.
Usual medical treatments for acne vulgaris include...
I've used azelaic acid and dapsone, both work decently well, but always seem to loose effectiveness for me, and of course, both cause irritation for me. I've considered oral antibiotics, but I'm scared of their long-term side effects, IIRC there isn't a lot of good research on what happens when people take daily antibiotics for months and there are plenty of horror stories of people developing IBS from them.
What's up with the hot showers? Cholinergic urticaria is when you break out in hives from contact with hot water (but also an increase in body temperature and sweating), but is that what you experience?
The experience is exactly that. If I take a hot shower, I get hives on my chest. If I put my head under the water of a hot shower (which I haven't done in years), my face turns red and swells up. Even with lukewarm showers, I get some redness in my face and chest, and if I make the water a little too warm, I get hives.
Testing123
5mo ago
I watched both documentaries, and IMO the vast majority of the cult members were unattractive, a few were exceptionally so (I'd rate at 2/10s). The only two attractive girls were redhead sisters, both of whom were very targeted by the cult probably for exactly that reason, with one ending up as CEO and the other as a poster child for relationship success.
Testing123
5mo ago
Interesting, my current diet is 150* grams of protein per day, mostly for working out, but there is some evidence that heavy animal protein diets are better for skin due to collagen consumption. Plus heavy meat is generally better for combatting inflamation, which is linked to rosacea. What mechanism would make high protein worse for rosacea?
Testing123
5mo ago
Yep, I've tried going full caveman mode where I use nothing but a light moisturizer, and I've tried going hardcore "throw everything at my face and see what happens." I'm one of those people who is constantly caught in the see-saw between the two extremes. If I go minimalist, I get back acne; if I go maximalist, my skin gets irritated and worn out. I've never been able to maintain a good balance between the two for more than maybe a 6 month period.
I have recently started to explore autoimmune issues as a causal mechanism. Reasoning: I had bad eczema on my legs as a kid, have had psoriasis in the past, and my mother has a ton of weird allergy issues (allergic to penicillin and aspirin, was on daily antihistamines for 10+ years, now goes in for monthly antihistamine shots). I went to an allergist for the first time a few weeks ago and confirmed with tests that I'm allergic to cats and tree pollen, plus based on my description to her, I'm certainly allergic to hot showers (make my whole face turn red and swell up). The doctor speculated that I was allergic to dust, but my tests were negative. Next month I'll do a skin test where they put thingys on my back for 4 days and I can't shower.
But I don't think autoimmune is the central cause. My skin looks more like it's been put through the ringer by standard acne, with underlying irritation exacerbating it.
If you want to add another random item to your list though, some people report good results with dandruff shampoo. Like regular 2-in-1 classic head and shoulders. Just using it as body and face wash 1-2 times a week. Lather up, let dwell for 30-90 seconds, and rinse.
I will look into this. I used to use Head and Shoulders daily, but due to the irritation caused by even lukewarm showering, I have cut back on my showering to once every 3ish days (I work from home, don't interact with people a lot).
What is the proposed mechanism for how it would help facial skin? Antifungal?
Testing123
5mo ago
Always bad acne (never quite sure about type, I think bog standard), rosacea, chronically sensitive, acne scarring, lots of smaller discolorations, rough textures (especially orange peel), big pores, very dry by default.
Anyone have unusual advice for salvaging bad skin?
I have had terrible, borderline life-destroying bad skin since high school. I've fought it for over a decade with every treatment option under the sun (including copious amounts of SPF to block out the sun), and it's still awful, albeit in a more "beat up, scarred, leathery" way now than a "covered in pimples way" it used to be.
I think I'm totally fucked and just have to accept that. But might as well ask if anyone has any unusual or hail mary methods for improving skin texture/quality, fighting acne, reducing scarring, reducing redness, etc.
Just for the hell of it, here is a list of skin treatments I currently or have formerly used:
Niacinamide
Retinoids (Accutane and Tretinoin)
Azelaic Acid
Urea repair
Vitamin C (topical and oral)
SPF (million sunscreen variants, applied every day, applied every two hours outside)
Snail Mucin Power Essence
Oral collagen supplements
Fish oil supplements
Vitamin D supplements
Daily cleansers
Hyaluronic Acid
Ferulic Acid
Toothpaste (actually a pretty good short term pimple reducer)
Glycolic Acid (exfoliator)
Korean facial masks
Slugging (putting a layer of vaseline or a similar substance on at night to trap in moisture)
Eliminating hot showers
Silk pillowcases
Claritin (to reduce general inflamation)
Rhofade (weird, controversial short-term treatment for redness that restricts blood flow to the face)
Ivermectin (fight skin mites associated with rosacea)
No sugar consumption
No dairy consumption
Black head removal tape
Botox
Dysport (similar to Botox)
Microneedling
Radiofrequency microneedling
Fraxel non-ablative laser
And I'm sure there's a whole bunch of random smaller treatments from when I was young that I forgot
I have become something of an amateur expert on this shit, feel to ask anything if you're curious.
Testing123
5mo ago
I keep seeing this take in discussions, and I just don't get it.
Yes, the killer messes up in the beginning and he makes a few mistakes throughout the film (shooting the nails into the guy, getting caught in the Florida house, snagging the janitor's key). But the killer ultimately succeeds in everything. He kills everyone he wants to kill. He doesn't die or get caught or get grievously injured. And he repeatedly shows cold blooded efficiency, like when he killed Tilda Swinton or the Florida guy. Based on his wealth and reputation, he has probably successfully pulled off dozens of assassinations in the past.
So the killer is not a try-hard buffoon. He really is an expert assassin, but as he admits in the opening monologue, he isn't a genius, so he makes some mistakes along the way.
As for the ending, I think the textual read is that assassinating a billionaire would bring too much police attention and risk, so better just to threaten the guy. I'm guessing there is also some sort of subtext about the billionaire boss surviving while his contractor/employees all died, hence the killer monologuing that he's now part of the masses being exploited by the few, rather than vice versa.
Testing123
5mo ago
Fincher is a master technician and I respect the film for what it is... but the sum of its parts is very "meh." It's just not interesting. I didn't care about any of the characters, I didn't care about the plot, and maybe 60% of the film literally consists of watching Fassbender do ordinary boring shit like pick up rental cars and buy stuff off Amazon. I was never quite bored, but I was never really into it either. Yet again, I really wish Fincher would apply his amazing filmmaking skills to more interesting material. But at least the mid-movie fight scene was amazing.
6/10
I'm not sure how to get a group of specialists, but as a backup, go on Reddit or Twitter some other forum and post a bounty for whomever gives you the best advice.
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