Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
The fastest American alive vibes with it on the track. Noah Lyles is probably a pretty good example of a black nerd in general. Per his Wiki:
Lyles has posted on X that he has asthma, allergies, dyslexia, ADD, anxiety, and depression.[62]
He is also an anime fan, and has been seen carrying Yu-Gi-Oh cards during competitions.
He's just also blazingly fast and engaged to a Jamaican sprinter, so he doesn't really fit the '80s stereotypes!
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
In concurrence with @BahRamYou, I think what you're observing is the atrophy of the nerd culture that we grew up with. Many of the quintessential nerd hobbies are just things that people do now. Sure, maybe it's more nerdy to be really into one game than another, but the vast majority of young men play some sort of video game, so it doesn't really stand out to be really into one of them. The band nerds might still be kind of a specific thing, but when I see the local university's marching band, they don't really strike me as a particularly nebbish group. There are still socially awkward kids, of course, but they don't really seem like they have the comparative advantage in things like gaming, computers, anime, and so on. Maybe there's some other nerd subculture that replaced it that we're too out of touch to appreciate? I don't know.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
I read 'em even if I don't really have anything to say about them. They're good! You're not just yelling into the void.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Gotcha. I was looking more at the skill part of things rather than the game knowledge part of things. Beyond a certain point, yeah, you wouldn't bump into anyone making that sort of basic error when it comes to understand itemization and game mechanics. Even if they couldn't exactly tell you why a certain trinket mathed out to being the best in slot item, they'd still know enough to go check Icy Veins, see that it's best in slot, and cheerfully equip it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Yeah, I actually looked at selling my character around that time because it was a pretty close to BiS Death Knight at their apex of overpoweredness and I wanted to go do other stuff. I think it was worth about $500 (which would be a bad ROI, but good if you just didn't want to play more).
So, sure, that's a thing, but I also just bumped into quite a few people that just didn't seem all that interested in game mechanics but were willing to play a lot. I know these weren't purchased accounts because some of them were people that I'd hop on Discord or Vent with and they were nice enough guys, they just didn't care to go learn that that you always want to save Swiftmend for when Wild Growth is coming off of cooldown so you can maximize the healing boost on it, or that downtime on Flameshock is immensely costly because you'll wind up wasting free Lava Burst procs. These aren't exactly complicated mechanics, but if you don't know them then you don't know them, and if you don't really internalize them then you'll consistently fail at it under pressure. I ultimately just had to settle on the reality that I'm an obsessive nerd and that if I was going to heal for a casual raiding group (because I don't want to lock up four nights a week playing a game) then I have to tolerate playing with people that are going to put out shit damage and stand in fire. They're not bad guys, they're not even idiots, they're just bad at a game.
On the bright side, healing a mediocre group through difficult content with one of my best friends was one of the more entertaining things I've done in any game and the numbers on the parses wound up being world class precisely because people stand in fire and can't kill things fast.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
I think the narrative that he's a deeply insecure man that really, really, really wants to be cool is basically accurate.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
I don't think this is true. I used to be a pretty big World of Warcraft guy and encountered people with much, much more play time than I had and excellent gear that were straight up terrible players. It's interesting to consider why they were getting carried in raids, but they pretty obviously were, because you'd bump into guys with much better gear that you could easily smash on damage meters anyway. In contrast, a buddy of mine that posted top 100 world parses on healing meters for some difficult bosses didn't actually play all that much. Beyond some necessary amount of time to learn a game well, people just kind of get capped out on their skills and stop improving.
If the point is that they're making incredibly basic mistakes... yeah, the above still applies. You could look at damage logs after and see highly geared players doing things like failing to keep DoTs on targets, letting their own buffs fall off for significant chunks of fights, and other egregiously incompetent play.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
There are a lot of things that you can get surprisingly good at with just a one-hour investment daily. I picked up running about 10 years ago and currently run right around an hour per day based on logs (some variance by week, of course). This results in ~55 miles per week of running and now, nearly 40 years old, I'm competitive with college runners. If you offered me more running or more books, I'd absolutely take the running - I'm just limited by injury avoidance. Of course, if I really wanted to dedicate myself to aerobic fitness, I could tack on another few hours of biking and swimming without much of an injury tax to pay.
Of course, I could still fit in more reading as well - it's not like my schedule is genuinely that tightly packed. The point is that at some level, you have to start picking and choosing which things you want to be good at and when you're going to stop trying to self-cultivate and just play Slay the Spire or something. I think reading 33,885 pages in a year is great. I think being as strong as @FiveHourMarathon is great. I think being an excellent parent (as many Mottizens surely are) is even better! But, ultimately, one is limited in their mental and physical resources and we cannot be all things to all people.
So, yeah, I guess the punchline is that you're overestimating books to the average local denizen in all likelihood. I like reading (and read voraciously as a teen), but I don't like it more than going to bar trivia with friends, going to my run club with friends, watching the Bills game on Sunday, or just shitposting on the internet. Replacing the latter with more reading would be good, but I bet I won't do it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Yeah, this is a good and correct point. I waffled a bit about how I wanted to phrase it, because we certainly do have fundamentalists and not just a few of them. My objection is that phrasing it as "a fundamentalist religious tradition" suggests to me that this is a uniting force that is a key element of the current Trumpist movement. While some fundamentalists are part of that movement, they aren't exactly steering the ship - JD Vance is Catholic, Musk isn't religious, Vivek is (I think) Hindu, and the Cabinet nominees are a mishmash of different religions and constituencies. So, what I mean to say is not that the United States lacks fundamentalist religions, but that it isn't a fundamentalist nation and the Trump coalition does not emphasize fundamentalism. I unironically think integralist Catholics have more political sway with this administration than young Earth creationists.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
That level is almost certainly associated with real risks for liver and cardiovascular diseases, but my bigger worry would just be trajectory. It seems to me that if someone can't go down from five drinks per night, there is a pretty significant chance that they will eventually go up instead, and that this is a ratchet.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
what does The Motte think about moderate drinking?
As with almost every single thing, I think it's likely to be a marginal effect. Seed oils, a bit of booze, grassfed beef, some vitamin or other, high fructose corn syrup, caffeine... whatever. I think properly measured these things all pretty much blend into the background and have no meaningful impact on general health, wellness, physical ability, or longevity barring an actual significant deficiency or severe overuse. Stay reasonably lean, move around a bunch, pick up heavy things from time to time, and that'll get almost every bit of predictable benefit that you can get from health choices.
Every time I dig into studies that say otherwise, they appear to be complete garbage.
(For the record, I think drink at least somewhat too much and expect that it comes with at least some adverse risk down the road - I'm not trying to come up with some cope for why I'm actually totally fine.)
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
There are broader arguments here, but I want to pick at a couple of the smaller bits:
a country with a fundamentalist religious tradition
This condition is neither necessary nor sufficient for something to be referred to as "fascism" in any meaningful sense. Nazism was more occult than religious, Pinochetism doesn't have much relation to religion, Oswald Mosley wasn't interested in Anglican authoritarianism.
To be more direct, the United States doesn't really have much of a fundamentalist religious tradition - it's a religiously pluralist country where the largest single religion is Catholicism, and it's a squishy strain at that.
violence
The American right broadly and Trumpists more narrowly are just not very violent at all. The central example of right-wing violence during the Trump era is a single riot where the only deaths were one of the rioters and a couple geezers that got too excited and had heart attacks. This wasn't nothing, I didn't like it because I don't like riots, but the political violence in the United States has been primarily racialized (BLM riots and associated violence) or Islamist (various acts of terrorism) for decades.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
I broadly agree, but with the footnote that you don't really need a radical break, you just need a consistent policy of saying that no on one showing up from Central America is actually a refugee. This is (in principle, not practice) easy to accomplish, because approximately none of them actually are refugees. Almost all of them that say the magic words and claim to be threatened aren't. Their countries suck, their countries are super violent, everyone there is at risk all the time, but no, they're not actually being targeted for political, ethnic, or religious violence. Recognizing every ridiculous and obviously false claim to refugee status was a much more radical approach than doing the opposite.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
I think being a homer is pretty analogous to the snail darter situation. The person involved probably does intellectually realize that they're playing fast and loose with the facts, but they want it to be true and they're willing to sand off any rough edges around the facts to get where they want to go.
Depending on the circumstance, there are definitely things where I would prefer that my interlocutor thinks I'm bullshitting them for personal gain than that they think I'm just such a simpleton that I don't grasp the facts. I unironically think it's more of a show of respect to say, "I think you don't really believe that and are making an instrumental argument" than saying, "I think you're incredibly stupid".
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Never?
I don't buy it. If I'm watching a football game with a huge fan of a team and they express some opinion about a call that's just super obviously wrong, I think it's more charitable to say, "dude, you're a homer" than it is to say, "you don't understand the basics of the rules here".
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
This further undermines the environmental protection position, right? They invented a fake species to try to stop a dam from being built, the dam got build, and the fake species still lives there. At some point, it's more charitable to think that the "conservationists" here are a bunch of liars that just want to stop things from being built than the alternative, which is that they aren't capable of identifying species and have no idea whether the species they just invented will even be impacted.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
I don't think anything happened that I'm not just about on the same page with, to be honest. The only difference is the inclination to articulate it rather than sticking to norms. As mentioned in a couple of my recent posts about the death penalty, I am really having trouble sticking with politeness around certain issues, and things like Rotherham and Islamist bullshit pretty well top that list.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Mechanics have no trouble telling you what it will cost to take a look at your car. They'll post their hourly rate and let you know that if it's just [X] they'll figure it out pretty quick, but it might take [Y] hours if it winds up being the transmission instead. Ask a physician what their hourly rate is for diagnostic services and you will be likely to receive much less transparency and possibly a look of indignance that you'd be so gauche as to reduce their priestly actions to mere labor.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
The crazy person explanation doesn't really require any extra steps or additional information. He may well have believed that he needed to get this information to Pete Hegseth and that he was staving off the feds by carrying explosives in a rented Cybertruck if he'd had a bad break with reality. I think the simple crazy person explanation more or less puts a bow on a lot of questions along the lines of, "why the hell would he do X?" that I'd had about the choice of hotel, choice of Cybertruck, incompetent bombmaking, and so on. The answers are all that his reasoning had broken from reality and could not reasonably be expected to remain consistent from one moment to the next.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Yeah, there are many scams where the scammer isn't actually doing anything illegal, they're just relying on people's anxiety with saying, "no, fuck off". All the way down to beggars trying to guilt people into giving them money for gas with a ridiculous sob story, all the way up to patent-trolling and blackmail. For the party being harassed, there is both the cost-benefit analysis of what it takes to get your harasser to go away to the skillfully crafted guilt or anxiety inducing attack on their conscience.
As an addendum, one small thing that I really hate about this is how developing the hardened shell of being quick to tell people to fuck off subverts judgment and charitable behavior towards people. Years ago, maybe about a decade now, an indigent looking man in a wheelchair tried to stop my wife and I on the sidewalk. I ignored him on the basis that he was almost certainly trying to get money. My wife stopped; it turned out all he wanted for someone to pick up his lighter that he'd dropped (there was no add-on begging, he thanked her kindly and everyone went about their day). I felt bad about that and still do, but my alternative would be hearing approximately 38 bullshit stories that end in, "so I need $20" for every one disabled guy that just needs a hand with something real quick.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
I'll once again note that various excuses about how a treating physician probably can't really know what things cost ring hollow for anyone with a decent veterinarian. That end of things is admittedly a newish experience for me, but when I take my dog to the vet and he presents treatment options, I can inquire what they cost and his reply is, "about [$X], but I can get the exact number for you if you want". That physicians cannot do this for much narrower ranges of practice indicates an incentive structure for not knowing what things cost.
Lawyers can debate...
I genuinely believe this is the part that triggers so many people to feel the way they do about Luigi. Guys like Brian Thompson make tens of millions of dollars and if anyone has a problem with it, they can get their lawyers to take it up with his lawyers, who will all make a shitload of money arguing with each other, lying for hire and making arguments that no one actually believes and that most laymen can't even understand. I'm surprised that others are surprised that profitable Kafka rituals occasionally trigger rage.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
The wildest part of the transaction situation, to me, is how many people feel personally wed to the corporation in a way that they're frustrated by colleagues preferring additional compensation to exercising the misguided loyalty of sticking with a company that will drop them as soon as their expected future marginal product is negative. Employer-employee relations are inherently an adversarial collaboration for any employee that doesn't have substantial ownership stake in the corporation. Forgetting this is incredibly foolish.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Were these Pakistani monsters worse than the Japanese during WWII? Were the British toffs who let it happen worse than the genteel Germans who looked the other way?
The Brits that allowed it might or might not be worse, but they're more pathetic. Collaborators are often held in even lower esteem than invaders. The Pakistani gangs are an alien, evil group of invaders. That's horrible, but it's intelligible. If you could find a Chinese guy that was worrying about anti-Japanese sentiment on New Year's Eve of 1937 in Nanking, I'd probably hate him even more than the Japanese soldiers raping their way through the city.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
What happens when it comes time to find that material?
At this point, I'm ambivalent. There are independent journalists that are doing good work with Patreon-style funding. The incentive structures and institutions at play are concerning and I don't have much confidence in how this will shake out in the medium term, but it's not obvious to me that the answer will be generalized enshittification of journalism. If I were inclined to be optimistic, it would be by considering how the variety of content platforms in television have led to some niche products that are really good. If I were inclined to be pessimistic, it would be by noting that the variety of content platforms mostly turn out a bunch of absolute garbage and what you wind up consuming is not necessarily driven by quality. We'll see.
How weird. That's not the link I dropped in! Fixed to a functional one now though.
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