TheDemonRazgriz
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User ID: 3577
TheDemonRazgriz
3d ago
FWIW, I have a college buddy who has become quite successful in the tech-sphere, and he once met a guy who had been part of DOGE. According to that guy, the whole thing was very disorganized but also very active and he left feeling like he had accomplished something meaningful (he also described it as tremendous fun). It seemed that most of them knew the project wouldn’t last forever and just tried to do anything and everything they could to potentially cut bloat and whatever stuck would stick. Based on that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if their more successful initiatives were quietly adopted by at least some departments after DOGE was formally dismantled. I realize this is only a second-or-third-hand anecdote but it’s at least some evidence that the whole thing wasn’t totally useless.
TheDemonRazgriz
4d ago
chirurgeon
So, for real, what’s the deal here? I don’t have a dog in this ongoing argument, I’m sincerely curious. I had never even seen this word before skimming through this thread, and a quick google only gives “archaic synonym for surgeon”. To my knowledge it’s not used by any surgeons or even seemingly medical historians. Where did you pick this up? Are you just a super-hellenophile classicist, or something?
TheDemonRazgriz
4d ago
She just has name recognition, there’s no way she really gets nominated. I’m doubtful she’ll even make the attempt. Newsom is much more likely (cold comfort perhaps), or even AOC, but my gut says the eventual nominee will be someone nobody knows or cares about right now.
TheDemonRazgriz
6d ago
I am less than convinced that Mass Effect 2, the game which famously and gratuitously focuses the camera directly on Miranda’s ass almost every time she speaks, was made by people who wanted to avoid the male gaze. Seriously, if you’ve forgotten or if you never played the game, look up a compilation of her on-ship conversations. It’s outright comical. The idea that Miranda “catsuit” Lawson is an example of uglifying female characters is just totally ludicrous.
That game comes firmly from the upfront and open “sex sells” era, it was a period where the pressure from major publishers was to make the female characters hotter and put them in less clothing. I would note that Mass Effect 3 is still very much under this pressure: just look at what they did to Ashley Williams. Publishers did not switch to the modern prudishness until about 2015-16, post-gamergate, and it was a sharp change.
TheDemonRazgriz
7d ago
Number one for me is probably the early (think Cahokia) Native Americans, who didn’t leave almost any records and built mostly in wood. The large majority of our knowledge of North American native tribes starts with the tribes which existed at the time of European contact, and often only in the state they were in at that time. It would be fascinating to know their earlier histories, who came before the tribes we know, how did they form, how they got to be in their political positions and relative powers as we know them.
Also, the proto-Slavic cultures in places like Poland that also built primarily with wood (and so left essentially no ruins) and either barely had writing or wrote on wood which did not survive. We do have some general knowledge about these cultures but as far as I know there’s not much granularity.
TheDemonRazgriz
7d ago
I disagree. Women don’t call each other whores except as an extremely harsh insult. To my knowledge there was never a sex-positive-feminist push to “reclaim” it like there was for “slut” either.
TheDemonRazgriz
7d ago
I largely agree, no strong feelings like I said but if pushed, I think that’s where I land as well. If you take out the word “whore” you only lose the shock humor of saying it at all (which is technically less humor, I guess, but a minor impact), and the punchline of the joke is really the following part about the shorts that focus your eyes straight at the asscrack, “but you’re not allowed to look!” So arguably it keeps the focus of the joke on the real punchline anyway.
TheDemonRazgriz
7d ago
Yeah, that was quite a bit edgier than I’d expect from SNL, appreciate the link. But it was also in 2015, just barely at the dawn of “the Current Year”… I’d be surprised if they’ve booked anyone close to that level since then.
TheDemonRazgriz
9d ago
I finally gave in and watched his SNL monologue. It was ok, decently funny. Pretty mild by general comedian standards but I assume significantly cruder than most current year SNL openers. The two real laughs he got from me were “you look like a gas station egg” and “you’re either gay or you’re Hitler, that’s where we’re at as a country.” And the bit with him plodding down the hiking trail and trying not to scare the woman he ran into was a funny mental image.
He also didn’t bomb or anything (which I’ve occasionally seen claimed by some of the online rageposts), he was getting consistent laughs from the audience. And, this was clearly a success for SNL, I haven’t heard them talked about so much in ages (and I heard that this was their most-viewed monologue ever, not sure if that’s true but it clearly was highly viewed). I suspect they chose to bring him on as essentially ragebait for their main audience, while also trying to do a little bit of “we can still be edgy” signaling to the masses.
I think there are three elements for why the “women dress like whores in the gym” bit sparked so much anger. The first is, obviously, lipstick-feminist internet-rage-machine types who would’ve lost their shit about any version of this joke, not very interesting.
The second, I think, is the word “whore” itself. It’s unexpectedly harsh (which is why it was funny at all, that part of the joke was really just “I said whore on SNL lol”) but may have set off women viewers more than just saying something like “skimpy” or “sexy” or whatever and then continuing to the rest of the joke. I think this affected my wife’s perception of it, for example: she’s pretty feminist in her views but not easily offended, and the joke clearly bugged her more than she wanted to admit (this is why I watched it, I got curious). She doesn’t even dislike Shane Gillis or that style of humor; e.g. she loved Tires and likes Dave Chapelle. She argued that this one was unfunny because there’s really no joke beyond “I just said whore lol” and he should’ve either worked it in better (maybe more of a lead up about him feeling out of place around the hot gym women, or something, she suggested, so there’d be an additional punchline that kept him as part of the joke) or just dropped the shock-humor. I don’t really agree, it didn’t bother me after all, but I do agree that it’s nothing but shock humor and thus not really that funny anyway, so maybe there’s something there? Curious what any female motteposters might think.
The third part, which I think is a little more interesting, is that he’s actually making fun of a very specific type of woman: gym-fluencers who are basically filming softcore porn on the gym equipment. If you’re a boomer-lib who doesn’t get those videos in your targeted social media, or if you don’t regularly go to the gym, or even if you just don’t see these types at your gym, you might genuinely not know these girls exist! I go to a pretty normie gym (neither expensive nor dirt-cheap, mostly-young clientele, blue city) and while there are plenty of hot women, the actual “gym whore outfits” are extremely rare and I’ve never seen someone filming Content — I’m mostly only aware of the type from the internet. So a lot of the enraged audience may have sincerely thought the butt of the joke was supposed to be merely “women wearing sports bras and leggings while working out” which in fact is not what he was going for. I can imagine that if you pictured that kind of outfit and behavior, which gets attention of course but is really no sluttier than the jacked dudes wearing dolphin shorts and muscle tees while ego-lifting, the joke would seem a lot more bizarre and mean-spirited.
I also have heard what you’ve described above (abrupt and major calf cramp while sleeping/resting) called a Charlie horse. The mild cramp while exercising (presumably in your side/abs), I’ve always called a stitch.
I used to get Charlie horses (as in, exactly what you’ve described, to a T) pretty often (like, once every couple months) during a period when I was taking much worse care of myself. The last time I got one was a few months ago after a, let’s say, rather significant night of drinking. Before that I hadn’t had one in years. As far as I know, dehydration is the main cause, as well as a lack of potassium, which is why they correlate with excessive drinking and being hungover. Being overtired can also bring them on, I think, although that’s probably a more indirect causation via tiredness fucking up your body in general. I’d honestly suggest just drinking more water during the day and adding a few bananas to your weekly diet, and stretching won’t hurt either.
If you don’t notice any change after doing that for a while it may be worth asking a doctor to do some tests/screening in case you have some other, less common sort of deficiency going on. But I’d bet it helps.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
Yeah, they’re definitely fringe-of-the-fringe. I have some variously-queer friends and acquaintances IRL and none of them act like this, even the truly far-left types aren’t this far out there.
IMO, you can think of people like this in relation to the left the same way as, say, wignats in relation to the right. They do exist, some of them really are closer to the halls of power than is comfortable, and you could be forgiven for reading their outsize online presence as real influence (they probably think of themselves that way)… but in truth they are a tiny extremist fringe of a much larger movement, and you are very unlikely to run into one IRL, even in spaces associated with their general political tribe.
The left’s unique problem is that left-wingers are pathologically afraid of the great sin of “looking mean.” Right-wingers have a much easier time telling someone explicitly to shut up and fuck off. For the progressive media, this is compounded by the long-running semi-conscious strategy of never ever using the phrase “far-left” to characterize anything.
Publishing this article is itself a (gentle) attempt to disown them. The Globe is very left-leaning, I’d say firmly left of the NYT, and this wasn’t even an opinion piece. The anthropological tone is kind of a way for progressive but more establishment-friendly lefties to say “look at these other people doing this wacky stuff.” It also lets them ring the “electoral liability” alarm under the cover of a human interest piece, without having to make any firm statement of such.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
No way this guy is serious.
I still have a tumblr account. While rare, I promise you these people do exist, and if they’re anywhere IRL they’re going to a mask-requiring queer bar that doesn’t charge.
Also, for the confused, near-100% odds this person is a biological woman. There’s a certain type of FtM who still call themselves lesbians. No, that doesn’t make sense to me either.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
This kind of thing is so wild to me every time I hear it. Always makes me wonder what made it stick in certain places. I live in a deep-blue city and stopped regularly seeing mask-wearers in probably 2022, maybe 2023 at the latest. They’re not gone, but they’re quite rare. Under 1% of people I see walking around, easily. I suppose it could just be my circles but I actually spend a fair amount time in left-leaning or left-friendly spaces, like small bookstores and punk concerts, and they’re very rare even there.
Of the ones I do see it’s probably 40% young visibly-neurotic women, 15% obvious trans people (perhaps some overlap here for the ones who pass well), 40% frail-looking elderly white people (usually women), and 5% ghetto and/or homeless black people (often under the chin or similar, this group I truly don’t understand). I don’t even remember the last time I saw a young man with a mask; the last time I recall noticing someone with a mask was a (visibly neurotic) young woman at a concert, accompanied by her unmasked boyfriend.
Actually, having typed that, I do occasionally see Asian people out and about with masks. But I don’t mentally count them as “mask wearers” because they’re clearly doing it in a sane and culturally-normal way. I do sometimes think it would’ve been good if we had come out of Covid adopting the East Asian norm of “go out wearing a facemask when you’re contagious with something”, but both sides contributed to this being impossible, and obviously just going back to normal is far better than living under the Permanent Covid Regime would’ve been.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
To be fair, you can make a living out of being a clown. You probably can’t make a living running a hyper-niche bar that doesn’t charge people.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
It’s not a straw, it’s an emergency induction port.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
Agreed, spindrift actually tastes good, not merely “more interesting than water.” It’s a little expensive but also head-and-shoulders above any competitor I’ve seen. Both of those are probably because they rely on diluted juice instead of extracts or flavors, afaik.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
I am quite confident that, in context, they are calling the entire concept “paternity leave” in a unisex way, as in “parental leave”. The same way some publications would call Anne Hathaway “an actor”, or the person who takes your order on a restaurant a “server” rather than a “waiter/waitress”.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
Ha! That is crazy, I’m pretty confident I know exactly which town you’re referring to… and if so, you definitely know my hometown too, we bordered you, although you probably never thought about us much. In high school I found out there was a running joke one town over (not originating in your town, the other one) that “in [my town] even the black kids are white”, if that jogs your memory at all, lol.
We did have a quirky political environment, in some ways we were mega-liberal (possibly even more than in what I assume is your hometown) but in other ways we had some pretty ardent conservative streaks. It was a small and rather odd place, a lot of very good memories but also some not-so-good ones. We were extremely tight-knit, since everyone knew everyone else since either kindergarten or 3rd grade (depending on which side of town) which I think is (subconsciously) why we reacted how we did to Bin Laden getting taken out: the fact that one of our classmates’ dads had died in 9/11 made it feel more personal, like they had come after us and we had finally gotten revenge. Obviously there were some people who didn’t really care, but they just shut up for the day, lol. There were downsides to that kind of closed social environment for sure, and I knew some people (including friends) who fell on the wrong side of it, but the upsides were real too.
Small world indeed. I don’t suppose you grew up Catholic? If you did, there’s a high chance our families went to the same church.
I was in pre-K, or possibly preschool actually, so it’s a hazy memory, but I do remember it. I think I’m basically the youngest possible person to actually remember 9/11; I suspect this is a factor (among many, but still) for why I’ve always identified more with “young millennials” than “old zoomers”. I grew up in a town in North Jersey where people commuted into NYC for work, the kind of place where you can see the skyline very clearly if you get up on a hill, so it was pretty personal for me and mine.
I can remember being pulled out of school early, but I can’t remember how the teachers were acting or what they told us (I assume at this point I was still just thinking “yay, half day!”). My mom picked me up and to distract me, or possibly to distract herself, took me downtown to go to a certain toy store that I liked. It was a very nice day to walk around after all, perfect sunny weather. By this point I remember noticing that she was stressed out, as though something was wrong. When we arrived, the store had closed early for the day, and in fact there was almost nobody around on the whole “Main Street” area. This was weird, so I asked my mom why everything was closed. She said that everyone had gone home because there had been “a big tragedy” (in retrospect, I’m not sure if she knew yet that it was a deliberate attack, not an accident… she probably did by then, but I don’t know what time this was all happening). I asked her, “what’s a tragedy?” Can’t really imagine being in her position for that one, but she explained — I don’t remember how much she told me, but at least to the effect of “something very bad and very sad has happened in New York, and people have gone home to talk to their families” — and everything felt very serious.
It was almost certainly the first time in my life I had ever really felt somber, or had the realization that truly bad things do happen in the world. I assume afterward when we went home I just played in the yard or read a book or whatever other normal kid stuff, but that moment really stuck with me, and I do remember exactly where I was.
Obviously not everyone my age actually remembers the day, but it definitely had a big impact on all of us in town. I grew up in a small town, so we basically knew all of the same people all the way from the beginning of school through graduation. One of my classmates lost his dad in the attack.
One of my history teachers (who was supposed to catch a flight the very next day in fact) made a point of reminding students what it was like in the area at the time, since none of us could remember. Our town was under the takeoff and landing paths for an airport, so normally you’d hear a vague background noise of jets all day. In the weeks after the attack, it was silent, punctuated every couple hours by the roar of a fighter jet on patrol.
I think the day had a huge formative impact on everyone my age and a bit older. Really planting the idea that yes, there are sometimes real enemies out there. Despite being a thoroughly left-liberal town/school, we never really had an anti-American set of kids, even among the SJW-types and the edgy punk types (who I was adjacent to) they’d at least keep that kind of thing to themselves. I recently watched the documentary “102 Minutes That Changed America” with my wife, which is a really excellent compilation of footage from various people on the ground on the day of the attacks, played in real time as events progress, and including some street interviews. It was an emotional experience watching ordinary people reacting and slowly realizing what was happening; surprisingly raw even now, frankly enraging, dredging up a latent feeling of “fuck the people who did this” that’s definitely etched deep in my bones in a personal kind of way.
One more aside: when the SEALs finally killed Bin Laden in 2011 (8th grade for me), it was a party atmosphere in the whole school. Basically everyone came in (spontaneously, with no real coordination, we just all heard about it in the morning and reacted the same way) decked out in American flag T-shirts and hats and whatever like it was the 4th of July and we’d just won the Super Bowl all at once, and nobody got much work done all day.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
I would assume simply a typo (or confusing “paternity” for “parental”), or intentionally using “paternity” as a generic/unisex term (like when people don’t use the word “actress”).
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
It is. They’re the same tattoos.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
My friends frequently describe me as the "stupidest smart person they know" , so I relate to this lol
Ha! Back when I was in middle school or so, I said something to my friend (wish I remembered what) that prompted him to crack up and say “you know, I can never tell if you’re the smartest dumb person or the dumbest smart person I know.”
I suspect this website attracts a type.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
My circle must just be in the stone age, then, because I still know multiple people who don't own computers.
Well… while I agree that the figure of one-in-four Americans using LLMs daily, or half weekly, is very hard to believe (I would love to see a breakdown of who exactly responded to that survey and how the data was weighted), I think you might indeed know some real stone age outliers.
Are you including smartphones and tablets in your definition of “computer”? If yes, then not only do I not know anyone who doesn’t own a computer, I don’t think I know anyone who knows anyone who doesn’t own a computer. And that’s including my elderly relatives and their circles, friends who have family from third-world countries, etc. If not and you just mean desktops/laptops, then I can at least think of my 92-year-old grandmother, who never bothered learning to use a computer when they were new and only reluctantly accepted a gifted tablet from my parents around a decade ago. But that’s about it.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
The flying car is held back by trying to be a car, which is the part people actually want. A flying equivalent to the station wagon is several steps less attainable than the ForTwo.
Yeah, this is the crux of the problem imo, combined with the need for a runway to take off and land. Forget the safety regulations, we are not actually capable of making a flying car. What we are capable of making is a drivable airplane, but there’s no demand for that.
One of my friends has a mostly-joking conspiracy theory that GRRM has already more or less written the conclusion to the series, but just doesn’t want to deal with it, and will only ever release it posthumously.
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