WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
I mean, sure, if you have no imagination. But choo choo, here we go to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.
Scenario 1: As a cost cutting measure, the Obamacare gene editing doesn't target specific genes, and fixes the narrow pairings that are causing the problem. They just bulk replace, say, 5-10% of everyone's DNA. That's the only way it scales cost effectively. The government contract to make it so goes to a "Minority Owned Business" as many do, and wouldn't you know it, some H1B colony just uses Indian DNA samples to make their gene editing templates. Next thing you know, everyone's kids are coming out just a little bit Indian.
Also it doesn't actually solve any of the diseases it was supposed to.
Scenario 2: The average African American IQ in America is something like 85? But that's the average. Imagine you uplift the IQ of the child of some congenital felon with an IQ of 75. Can you first imagine the very special hell that child now grows up in? I've seen a few his/hers/ours scenarios where a child of a previous spouse is leaps and bounds smarter than the new wife (and the "ours" kids), and the abuse heaped onto them by the less intelligent new spouse is wild. Below average IQ parents can be fucking savage to the high IQ children that end up in their care. Now imagine that at scale.
Scenario 3: Congenital felons again. There is a strong correlation between high IQ and low criminality, but it's not perfect. Imagine we uplift their IQ, but not their criminal dispositions? If you thought "We Wuz Kangs" is bad, wait till you've seen "We Wuz KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN"
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
If Turok was intelligent, he hid it off the Motte. If you go by the qualities typically associated with intelligent people making them, well, intelligent, these are traits like being open-minded, curios, adaptable, self-aware, and demonstrating critical thinking.
I mean, personally I'd probably drop two or three of those myself. If only because by defining "intelligence" so narrowly, you begin down the road of implying that every intelligent person must agree with you. But there is always the possibility that a person who seems closed-minded has seen further than you, and understands what an infohazard is. Or the person who seems unadaptable to you has seen further and understands what a maladaptation is. That one person's lack of "critical thinking" is another person who understands perfectly well what you are saying but still disagrees.
That said, you are correct about Turok.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
I mean, I guess. On the other hand, how many Dunes do you have to write to be consider a good writer? Is one not enough?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Some parts of the WorShip series cracked me up. Like how Plasteel and Lasguns get reused from Dune (or did Dune reuse them from Worship? I should check the publication dates). It's definitely a lesser work compared to Dune, but I enjoyed it. The last novel IMHO was rather weak, I think it was posthumously finished by his co-writer on the series, Bill Ransom. Very Dues Ex Machina and Utopian, which maybe goes against my statements that Frank Herbert's central ethos is that humans are made to suffer. But maybe not, you'll have to make your own judgement about how in tact the human condition is by the end.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Now I'm curious, did you ever read Frank Herbert's other novels? I read The White Plague in highschool when I randomly found it in the library, and then I read the WorShip series when I found it in a used book store, and it definitely reinforces the themes of "Mankind is made to suffer" that compose the core of Frank Herbert's world view IMHO.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Yeah, it's probably fair to say the optimism was doing most of the work. But on the flip side, it's funny to say that Battletech is optimistic. Although I suppose by the standards of "Every human institution is going through a shredder of being flooded with high time preference scammers/thieves that loot it down to the bedrock", it does seem optimistic. Then again it's hard to write a novel in the future where every human society has collapsed and the surface is dominated by feral humans. Though there are a few. I guess The Time Machine could be their ur-text.
I've said this before, but Dune is such a special case. Taken in as a whole work, the overriding theme seems to be that to survive among the stars, humanity will be tortured without end because the human condition is fundamentally incompatible with galactic habitation.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
You know what's funny that just occurred to me? In the background of nearly every optimistic old school sci-fi property is just the assumption that gene editing will be deployed for the good of all humanity. You're enjoying your giant stompy robot Battletech novel, and it just has throwaway lines about how humans live longer and with less disease thanks to the Star League 300 years ago. It was viewed as such an obvious gimme that sci-fi didn't even dwell on it. It was boring, like the precise mechanics of a faster than light drive, or how the Enterprise's computer worked. Give it a few throw away lines and move on with the story. There was a humanity wide genetic uplift program that was 100% successful, now moving on...
I do wonder how much of this was an artifact of the high trust society America used to be, where public works could actually be completed to the good of all with state capacity to spare. Now it's impossible to envision a future where all our children have their disease genes filtered out, have enhanced cognitive functions, and might reasonably be expected to live in relative health until 140. In our low trust hellscape of highly dysfunctional state capacity, corruption exceeding any ability to accomplish anything, massive corporations enshittifying their golden geese with 3rd world scams, and a high time preference work force that can't do even the most simple jobs with trust and correctness, we can only envision the technology heightening the war of all against all.
Add to that the people who (rightly) won't trust the technology, given the institutional own goal "the science" has inflicted on itself the last 10 years. Even if it were possible for everyone to benefit from a genetic uplift program, a portion, possibly a large portion, would choose to be left behind.
Oh the future we could have had. Alas.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5d ago
Is it because her most popular acting roles downplayed her attractiveness and made her look a bit masculine (see Euphoria, Dune, Spider-Man)?
Yes. I mean, having only seen her in Dune, she was like a 3 out of 10. I get that sometimes you ugly up an actress for a role. Charlize Theron in Monster for instance. But that seemed entirely unnecessary for Dune, and she genuinely seemed ugly on the inside as well. I'd say that's down to the butchery they performed on her character, but she seems to be a natural at it from what other in character and out of character appearances I've seen of her.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5d ago
I'm not that cynical about BPD.
Yes. I agree. That is your problem. You should be.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5d ago
Indeed. I've been a proud Luddite since GPS. I look up directions, draw a map by hand if I have to, and commit it to memory. Although to my shame, I will use GPS for places I'm unlikely to ever return to on long road trips. LLMs inspire an innate disgust in me it's difficult to describe. Perhaps reading Dune as a child, and it's proscriptions against making a machine in the likeness of a human mind hit harder than it was meant to.
I think a lot of it comes down to people living lives with so little that's "real" in it, so little family, friends or genuine romantic loving relationships, that the comparison isn't between an illusion and real, but an illusion and nothing.
A long time ago, I read some article talking about people who found romance on Compuserve. And if you aren't as old as me, I can barely explain it. Everything I want to compare it to is also long gone, like AOL. But it was basically one of the earliest proto-internet services, with some messaging and chatrooms. I think it was even before the World Wide Web. So people would meet on there. Wives would leave their husbands, move across the country to see this guy they'd only ever spoken to over proto-email. And then it wouldn't work out. The relationship was different when it wasn't mediated by a screen.
Something strange has happened since then. People now spend more time on screens than off them, and all relationships seem to be mediated by screens. It's almost as if relationships on screens have taken primacy over relationships in real life. If you meet someone online and go to see them and it's weird, there is no longer any need to deal with it. You can sit on the couch side by side on your phones and keep having your relationship through your screen. You might even still fuck! Though I increasingly doubt it.
In this context where reality has become subordinate to the screen, it's no wonder people no longer have a sense for what's real or what's illusion.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5d ago
Ah the BPD girlfriend. I'm not sure we've all been there, but I remember my turn. Two even! And it does seem to permanently fuck your scale for what a satisfying relationship can be. Leaves you chasing the highs they gave you, without the catastrophic swallow a gun barrel lows they'd inflict with their boundless histrionics.
The thing you need to keep in mind with BPD's is that none of it is real. There are only barely people in there. It's all for effect. They might as well be LLMs, making whatever mouth sounds (even with your dick in it) are required to get what they want from you. Be it attention, money or security.
It was off putting for my wife, when I first met her, to hear from my friends that my ex's were crazy. I think every woman is afraid of being pigeon holed as being "crazy". Sometimes she feels a little crazy, in that way I think most women struggle with the instability of their own emotions and the tides of hormones that batter them. And I'd tell her, back when this used to come up, "You don't understand, they were crazy". I'd tell her about the time one came at me with a knife because I was playing a violent video game with her in my apartment. Or the time one secretly started moving in, established residency, and then refused to leave when we broke up. Or the time one had a whole backup boyfriend primed and ready for her to dump her pets and her lease on, moved down south and then married a 3rd guy.
I guess my point is, detoxing from BPD highs is just like coming off any other drug. I do hope one day you can settle for "Stable but boring". Because you're entire concept of "boring" has likely been utterly destroyed. You're unlikely to find a normal girl willing to fuck you and flatter you the way she would when she was trying to pull you back in.
Then again, I mentioned BPD's are like LLMs, and once again it's thoughtless AI which brought all this up with imagined offspring in the first place. I'm not sure what the cure for illusions are. Weirdly enough, I've found 40K bullshit not terribly off the mark.
My armor is contempt. My shield is disgust. My sword is hatred.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5d ago
This one really broke my heart. I'd been pulling away from the boardgame community for years and years at this point. I get maybe one new game a year, I listen to a single board gaming podcast more because I like their banter than anything. I no longer visit any boardgaming website because they are all so overrun with activism. And sadly, that single podcast I listen announced they were severing their relationship with CGE after being sponsored by them over this Harry Potter incident.
I'm just so profoundly exhausted by it all. Why do these people have to make it so fucking hard to just enjoy things?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
6d ago
In today's "old man yelling at clouds" news, it appears that leftist memes (e.g. on imgur) have taken to calling Trump a pedophile due to his connection with Epstein.
The left finally learned how to meme I guess. Is this the source of the latest round? All I hear is it being spun as "Trump mad that Epstein was stealing underage sex workers teenage employees from his resort" With lots of dark hinting about why Trump would hire teenagers in the first place. Fucking pervert.
And I'm sitting here, feeling the class divide between reporters and everyone else more starkly than ever. I think it was Matt Taibbi who was talking about how reporters used to be a blue collar profession, but they've been increasingly infiltrated and gentrified by ivy league grads. And if this has any validity at all, it comes out here. The people reporting on this are a class of human being with no concept of a highschool summer job. That's what illegals are for. The idea that teenagers are in the service industry is on the face of it suspicious to them. Or that teenage girls (attractive ones to boot) would be in "front of house" positions. I was going to say something like "Has the world really changed that much since I was a teenager?" except all this shit would have happened when I was a teenager so I feel I can speak on it with more authority.
Ah well, I guess you had to be there. A shame these people get to write the first draft of history.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8d ago
Can I make a suggestion as someone who is likely to get a travel visa?
I've grown to understand that I'm going to get muzzled in the culture war thread. Just how it's gonna be. But I'd appreciate still being able to participate in the other threads, I do enjoy the community of them.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8d ago
Shots fired at BurdensomeCount?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8d ago
Israel is a first world nation trying to survive in the third world. There have been a smattering of experiments in this regard, South Africa, Rhodesia, maybe others I'm not aware of. To maintain first world standards of civilization, they more or less all had to resort to the same methods of keeping the savages out, and disenfranchising as many of those that made it "in" as they could. Also violence. Lots and lots of violence. Because violence truly is the universal language, no matter what anyone tells you.
It's a shame South Africa and Rhodesia didn't have a Jeffrey Epstein to take whatever measures were necessary to make sure they maintained the support of their essential trade partners and patrons in the face of global disgust at how the third world behaves, and the measure that are required to survive in the face of it. I suppose Jews don't have higher measured IQ's for nothing.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
11d ago
So you're a filthy casual?
You know.... unironically yes, but only because I feel like the ground shifted from underneath my feet. I mean, minus the mobile gaming thing but let me explain.
I think nearly all gaming up until mobile gaming and esports would be considered casual to modern sensibilities. There were no global rankings for Quake, you might even play only the single player game and never venture online with QuakeWorld! You might only play custom maps for StarCraft or WarCraft III. Did StarCraft even have a global ranking system or did that not start until StarCraft II? Jagged Alliance IMHO is hardcore as fuck, but it's also largely a sandbox for fucking around and beating it at all represents a substantial achievement.
None of these games have the sort of cutthroat competition a global ranking system introduces, nor the sort of metagame progression or constant attaboys of unlockables, achievements or cosmetics that mediocre modern games might shower you with to try to keep you around. They aren't super sweaty, and you can probably see everything they have to offer in terms of novelty in about 10-20 hours.
And yet, the moment to moment gameplay of them is so fun, I return to them over and over and over again. I don't need a global ranking, achievements, or loot crates to make Quake 3 on a LAN just as fun as it ever was in 2000. Or playing through the StarCraft campaign again. Or firing up Jagged Alliance for the first time a few years ago. They were made fun for fun's sake. And that, unironically, seems to code as "casual" now.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
11d ago
If you need to gamify something to enjoy it, then you don't actually enjoy it.
Counterpoint: Actual games.
No! Do not get me started between the difference between compulsion and fun. If you can play a game and enjoy it without any meta progression or score at all, only then do you enjoy the game. All the rest is just artifice trying to hijack your addiction centers.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
11d ago
It might have been the friend I was doing it with, and how the trails were rated in our area. It was 15+ years ago, so I'll probably get all the details wrong. But there was some sort of rating system that didn't seem dissimilar from rock climbing ratings, and he was really into getting to the next difficulty, and mastering X, Y and Z skills necessary for doing so, and upgrading his bike with fancy brakes and tires and shocks. Where as I just had some dinky street/trail hybrid bike with none of those things and found myself completely incapable of keeping up. I just enjoyed doing the same trail or two when I could.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
11d ago
Unless someone can gamify it to some extent, lay out an extremely clear path for progression, with periodic rewards and a well-defined end-goal, and some mechanism for accountability, then I'm just less likely to commit to it fully, since I'd have to use discipline to establish a habit and overcome the initial unpleasantness. But so many side activities seem pretty pointless to engage with if they aren't going to drastically increase your status or wealth, even if the skill itself is handy on its own terms.
I think gamification is the exactly opposite of what you need. I cycled through a bunch of frankly masturbatory hobbies before I settled on woodworking. I tried to learn guitar, I tried mountain biking, I did martial arts for a long time, I've tried to make video games off and on for my entire adult life, did a smattering of electronics repair. All of them, to various degrees, felt like pissing in the ocean. I think I enjoyed the martial arts and mountain biking the most, but at a certain point going through the motions felt pointless. Especially with martial arts, once I no longer had anything to prove to myself that I could do it, I just wasn't feeling it anymore. I sunk costed through many more years of just showing up, but my drive to put in the extra work evaporated. A lot of what compelled me to put time into hobbies I really wasn't getting anything out of was the addictiveness of the gamification in the learning method.
But woodworking, at least for now, is fantastic. I make beautiful things that go into my home that are exactly what I want, and I don't care one teeny tiny bit how they stack up to what anyone else has done. It's not gamified, it's not competitive, but it's marginally creative and meets specific needs. Plus it's nice having hardwood furniture in my house instead of flat packed sawdust and glue. Mastering a smattering of baking recipes has been similar. I wanted great scones, I didn't like any of the bakeries around me, I figured out a recipe that produces the scones I want and now my family gets to enjoy them.
Human motivation is funny, and in several ways, I suspect gamification has spoiled our brains to expect more rewards for fake task than they deserve. I've found making real things you actually want and need has been a great detox, and doesn't necessarily carry with it the sort of "I'm too tapped out from work to do this" vibe that other more masturbatory and pointless hobbies might. But that might just be me.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
11d ago
I will say, every person I've ever met with more than one tattoo has a weird penchant for self destructive habits/major life choices. One tattoo seems like the gimme. Lots of people get one tattoo. I see lots of people who's singular tattoo is a tribute to someone deeply important to them who passed away, like a parent or child taken too soon.
More than one, and their life choices become totally baffling to me. Not just in the tattoos, but just in all their habits. Bizarre, sudden choices that jump the path of life onto a different (often worse) track. Nightmarish eating, hygiene, spending or drug habits. There is even a peculiar breed of people who get lots of Christian tattoos who are plainly overcompensating for personality disorders that constantly threaten to cause them to break with their faith. It's like they need the words or symbols indelibly scribed on their body in easily viewed places as a reminder not to do shit. This sort of tattooed person is often less bad than the rest, but also tends to be a bit of a powder keg.
I guess if I had to pin a through line of all the people I've ever known with lots of tattoos, its that they are constantly wrestling (or wallowing) in a wide spectrum of self harm.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
11d ago
I was always shocked when I'd goto Boston in March/April, and coming back from a convention at 1 am we'd pass gaggles of scantily clad women without jackets outside some club while we hustle past in thick winter jackets. Some hoes are just a different breed.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
12d ago
The etruscans predominately were not enslaved and conquered
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman%E2%80%93Etruscan_Wars
Rome was the eventual victor in the wars and the last Etruscan resistance was crushed in 264 BC when Volsinii was destroyed after a slave revolt. The Etruscans were assimilated into Roman culture and Rome became one of the Mediterranean superpowers amongst the Greeks and the Carthaginians, though the Etruscan language survived for another 300 years (until the early first century AD).
Maybe you have some rosy ideas about what iron age "assimilation" looked like. But coming from the civilization that made "Vae Victus" a household phrase, I doubt it resembled an American "Melting Pot" too closely. I think it's safe to say they were conquered and had their cultural identity destroyed.
Oh yeah, there are always the fears about pushing straight to production with our children. But honestly I think that's the least of it with how dysfunctional all our institutions are these days. We'd be lucky if all that happened was everyone developed generative disorders by 60 instead of living to 120 when you consider how horribly we'd fuck it up even if the technology worked flawlessly.
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