WhiningCoil
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
A Map for the Regulation and Destruction of Free Software.
A buddy of mine shared an article about The White House warning people against programming in C or C++ and it teed me off about a conspiracy theory I've been harboring for going on 10 years now.
My baseline assumption is that whatever you choose to call this weird woke, centralized, authoritarian, elite/bureaucratic corporatist conglomerate, they want control. All of it. Over things that you would think have nothing to do with them. They want your wood ovens, your gas stoves, your gamer PCs, they really don't view anything as beyond their purview to "regulate" and make your life infinitely worse by slow degrees.
If you assume these are pathologically controlling busy bodies, which I think you are right to assume, the fact that anybody can program anything probably terrifies them. They barely understand technology to begin with. Just look at any time they haul a tech CEO before congress and attempt to get sound bites for their constituents. It's horrible. But the cat is more or less already out of the bag when it comes to open and free software. How would you put it back in?
By degrees the process is already underway, in the name of security. Most PC's sold today will only boot authorized operation systems, with an option in the BIOS (for now) to turn off that safety feature. Windows warns you every time you try to run an "unrecognized" executable, with the option (for now) of ignoring it's warning. People are far more habituated than ever to closed software ecosystems thanks to Apple and Google and the fact that most people spend more time on phones these days than computers. All it would take is to slowly shave away by degrees until the process of running free and open software is so frustrating that most people don't do it, and the powers that be can "deprecate the feature" under the rationale that it's not used anymore.
Maybe it starts with the big sellers of PCs like Dell, where they just don't have a BIOS that lets you boot unauthorized OSes. And for a while, that's fine, because what self respecting enthusiast buys a Dell? That's probably a perfectly fine security compromise for institutions that don't want to run the risk at all of some unauthorized code hijacking the boot process. Then maybe the feature gets cut from lower end motherboards. But that's fine, if it's still a feature that matters to you, you can always get a high end motherboard. Lots of features are only available on higher end motherboards. And then one day, with little fanfare at all, the feature vanishes.
So now you are stuck running increasingly enshittified versions of Windows and a few select Linux distros. So what?
Well, at the same time, imagine how Windows slowly chips away at the ability to run "unrecognized" code. Right now it's an annoying popup, same as it has been since Vista. Maybe one day the default behavior is switched to not letting you run it at all. But it's ok, there is a toggle to turn on the old behavior burried deep in the system settings somewhere. Maybe a security submenu. Then a while later they get rid of that, but if you know what you are doing, there is still a registry setting you can change. Then a while later they only support the feature on Windows Pro instead of Home. Then one day, it just vanishes.
So now you are stuck running enshittified versions of Windows that refuses to run "unrecognized" code. But it's cool, you can probably still do something to get your code "recognized" right?
Anyone who has had to do any web development probably knows about using self signed certs. Often good enough for local use, generally insufficient if you plan on letting anyone outside of your org attempt to use your system. You have to get a signed cert. And often pieces of software just expect a signed cert, and may not have any option at all to override it's refusal to work with a self signed one. I expect much the same will occur with "unrecognized" code.
All code will need to be signed. Maybe you can self sign code you've written on your local system, but nobody else will be able to run it. Unless they go through the added hoops of adding your key to some sort of key store for "recognized" code. But eventually the self signed qualities of the code will catch up to you, and Windows may just refuse to accept self signed code certs anymore. But no fear! Maybe Github or other organization will offer to sign your code for you. Assuming it meets their TOS, nobody on social media has cancelled you, and their AI hasn't rejected your project for hallucinated reasons. But eventually, however well relying on a 3rd party like Github to allow your code to run on your locked down operating system and your locked down hardware starts off, it will become a barely viable solution. And then free and open software is over.
I hope I'm just being overly pessimistic. But I honestly see this happening in my lifetime.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Maybe. Maybe not. You either wage information war to humiliate, alienate and discredit your political opponents, or you don't. TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.
WhiningCoil
2yr ago
The Gays Destroyed The "No Politics" Rule
Pride month began, and the moderators of /r/Battletech enforced their "no politics" rule as they have through elections, wars, referedums, economic crisis, etc. A long standing rule fastidiously kept by most Battletech groups I frequent. It's preserved Battletech as one of my escapes for long years as every other hobby I had got overrun with far left politics. Alas, no longer.
In response, Catalyst games launched /r/OfficialBattletech, specifically calling out the "bigotry" of /r/Battletech, and announcing Battletech is a "safe space". They parachuted in a community leader with experience moderating "safe spaces". People began making the sorts of spurious claims against the mods of /r/Battletech you are used to seeing, calling them being fascist at best, literally "Heil Hitler" nazi's at worst on the most spurious of circumstantial evidence. The originator of /r/Battletech came out of nowhere and completely removed the mods of /r/Battletech to make damned sure /r/Battletech participates in Pride Month.
Because it's not political. It's just being a decent person.
So I guess Battletech is explicitly left wing now. You are no allowed to opt out of their politics.
Hobbies/Fandoms I'm allowed in
-
Video Games -
Board Games -
Science Fiction -
Star Wars -
Star Trek -
Battletech -
Woodworking
And I log into youtube to watch Stumpy Nubs tell me how to sharpen a chisel every day in fear some flashpoint will have occurred. That the Eye of Sauron finally noticed that woodworking is too white and must be destroyed. And suddenly every content creator I watch will be posting these mewling apology videos for not doing enough to foster diversity and inclusiveness in this important hobby. And the rest of the month ends up being pride themed woodworking content. Making your own buttplugs on a lathe or whatever. How to add glitter to a poly finish.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
I mean... anecdote and all, but my wife and I are trying to find a church right now, not because Pope Francis made Catholicism more progressive, but because that was nearly the last straw. We feel like all the promises of a secular, expert run society we were promised in the 90's just opened up fresh new horrors we could have scarcely imagined, and are ready to try to retvrn and believe in Christ. I find myself questioning 40 years of staunch atheism by the fruits it's bore, and am totally ready to just start going to church and see what happens.
And in that search, Catholicism is virtually the top sect we are most hesitant to consider, behind "Unitarian" which at least near us codes to "Whatever goes man" loosey goosey "spiritual but not religious" non-faith.
Then again, we've encountered a lot of very conservative Catholics near us that have invited us to services with them next week, so we'll see how that goes.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
There Are No Viable Political or Legal Solutions (Drooling Retard Edition with words, words, words fo the slow kids in the back who have hammers they can't be trusted with)
Imagine, hypothetically, your daughter's teacher was a fucking machine. You might have concerns that this literal automaton that is only capable of fucking might fuck your daughter. I mean, you can plainly look up it's product page, seems pretty cut and dry. This machine fucks. You goto your local school board meeting, but inexplicably, the school board is like 70% fucking machines, and they are struggling to understand the nature of your complaints. They actually find them rather hateful, like some sort of personal attack. The police pull your pants down, drag you out of the meeting, and arrest you.
You vote as hard as you can, and bless your heart, you even win! The schools don't care. The dude you voted for specifically tells the schools to tell the fucking machines to stop fucking. They simply can't stop.
When you think about it, it is rather silly to imagine you can vote or law your way out of having a single purpose machine fulfill it's singular purpose. You might as well vote or sue to make a mouse into a lion.
Now, I'm not saying the public education system is literally a machine that fucks kids. Although... No, this is more an allegory that it's impossible to change the nature of a teacher, and the hill they've chosen to die on. Around me free public institutions are risking it all, to make sure kids can keep viewing cock sucking. Libraries are forgoing the majority of their funding from the county, schools are grandstanding on it, it's a world I can scarcely comprehend. Neither politics nor the law provides any solution. Turns out the physical reality of these people's nature, and the fact that they have exclusive control of your child for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week is just immune from votes or the law. It would probably takes the 101st Airborne stationed in every classroom to make it stop, and even then teachers would still do it, confident that the government would never use their monopoly on violence to actually stop them from showing middle schoolers some queer cock sucking.
I repeat, there is no viable political or legal solution. What you do with this knowledge is between you and your own conscience. I've chosen to move counties, keep my child out of public school, and look towards joining a church that shares my values. It's been at great expense, and to my eternal sorrow likely cost me the opportunity to have more children. In a shameful sense, I've chosen to run, because I view my family as something too precious to risk. Other people might have different views, less options, or have already lost the one thing they lived for. I refuse to condemn them for the different choices they may make, nor preface this bare fact, that there are no viable political or legal solutions, with some smooth brained pre-emptive disavowing.
If pointing out the hopeless position we are in amounts to a "call to violence" to you, that is between you and your conscience. It's not illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater if the theater is actually on fire.
WhiningCoil
7mo ago
I've long since lost the reference, but probably 6 years ago I saw some segment on The Hill about a study done by a trans advocacy group. And basically it was a policy document pointing out that putting penises in women only spaces, especially women only spaces with minors, is about the most unpopular policy you can possibly run on. So what needs to happen is that trans friendly politicians need to lie, and then quietly do it anyways. Don't worry, trans friendly advocates in media, and trust and safety teams on social media will cover for you.
No matter what mouth sounds Democrats make, I will never trust them on this subject ever again. And unfortunately for them, until all my children are over 18, it's literally my number one priority. We already live in a world where Democrats sanctioned the state taking kids away from parents, and putting them on a path towards mutilation and sterilization. You don't just get to walk away from that and hope nobody brings up all those children you sterilized.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
So, I watched Escaping Twin Flames this week. It's basically a documentary about a cult, with a fun twist at the end. The short version is it's a cult/mlm that promises true love to everyone paying in. The leader of the cult claimed he could channel who the soul mate, or "twin flame" to use cult speak, of the members was. Twin flames were often just random ass people in the cult members life. No matter what members were encouraged to stalk, harass and profess their love to their "twin flame". That approach wasn't going so great however. There was a manifest lack of success in the group, with vanishingly few members successfully entering a relationship with their "twin flame". Sensing things weren't going so great, the leader changed the rules so that everyone's twin flame was actually already in the cult. Only problem was, 80% of the members of the cult were women, and there weren't enough men to go around. But the cult leader had a fantastic idea. If you just convince half the women that they are actually "divine masculine", and get them to transition, everyone can pair off as "divine masculine" and "divine feminine". It's genius!
Why can't two ladies just be in a relationship? I donno, shut up. Cult leader says so.
So anyways, the final episode is about the cult forcing members to get "gender affirming care". Cross sex hormones, top surgery, you know the deal. And this is enforced through all the classic cult conditioning you've seen if you've ever watched a documentary about cults. The cult recruits from lonely, vulnerable, often young and impressionable people. You are encouraged to cut off everyone outside of the cult. All dissenters are exiled from the cult, creating a status quo where you must do whatever the cult leader says or lose your entire social support network. A lot of people even derived their income from the cult, making the control even more complete. Lots of struggle sessions breaking down the identities of cult members. Like I said, if you've seen a cult documentary before, none of this will be new to you.
What made this special to me is the many, frequent caveats the documentary included that you are not, under any circumstances, to apply any of the horrific trans brainwashing depicted in this documentary to anything else. This is unidirectional knowledge. You are only allowed to consider it in the context of this specific cult being bad. Now here is random trans expert we've hired to reinforce the point that these trans people have been abused into being trans, and not any other trans people you may have had in your life. Ignore your lying eyes. Especially insulting is that all the moms they interview about how their children were stolen away by the cult still use the new preferred pronouns and names of their abused and brainwashed children. Had me yelling at the screen "Have the fucking strength of your convictions you coward!"
Frankly, the nominal stories a lot of parents tell about their children deciding they are transgender doesn't differ that much from the cult experience. Their child is totally normal, not a hint of gender dysphoria, until a person the kid looks up to or wants to impress, often someone the parents can specifically identify, starts pushing it on their kid. Kid does it to fit in with their friend group, maybe a completely different friend group than they had before, maybe a friend group that only exists online. Then kid is encouraged to completely cut off anyone not 100% on board with their new identity. Most horrifying of all is how often the state involves itself in this, with schools serving as a vector to suggest to children, and glamorize, queer identities, facilitate their secret transitions, and CPS stepping in to take custody from parents who don't "affirm".
But going even deeper, where the fuck is the medical establishment? When the Heaven's Gate cult had members castrated themselves, I sincerely doubt they just waltzed into a Planned Parenthood and had it done no questions asked. How are the diagnostic criteria so wide open that a cult leader can have his members electively mutilate themselves at walk in clinics, no problem?
Most ironic of all, is there is a part of the documentary where they describe an incident where the cult leader had his top leadership watch a documentary about another cult. Then he instructed them to write essays about how he was definitely not a cult leader. This was the moment one of the interviewee's in the documentary realized she was in a cult and left. All the other cult members performed that feat of cognitive mutilation however. Meanwhile, on a meta level, the documentary is pulling the same fucking thing on us, the audience, with it's gaslighting about the explosion of trans youth. We just weren't assigned the further task of completing homework about how nothing we saw in the documentary about a trans cult applies to the other trans cult we see sitting right in front of us.
WhiningCoil
2yr ago
Witness to Jordan Neely chokehold death calls Daniel Penny a 'hero'
Whoops, wrong link, not sure how that happened. Lets try again.
Witness to Jordan Neely chokehold death calls Daniel Penny a 'hero'
"He’s a hero," said the passenger, who has lived in New York City more than 50 years.
The witness, who described herself as a woman of color, said it was wrong for Bragg to charge Penny with second-degree manslaughter.
"I’m sitting on a train reading my book, and, all of a sudden, I hear someone spewing this rhetoric. He said, ‘I don’t care if I have to kill an F, I will. I’ll go to jail, I’ll take a bullet,’" recalled the woman, who is in her 60s.
"I’m looking at where we are in the tube, in the sardine can, and I’m like, ‘OK, we’re in between stations. There’s nowhere we can go,’" she said. "The people on that train, we were scared. We were scared for our lives."
Penny stepped in when Neely started using the word "kill" and "bullet."
"Why in the world would you take a bullet? Why? You don’t take a bullet because you’ve snatched something from somebody’s hand. You take a bullet for violence," she added.
Freelance journalist Alberto Vazquez began recording the confrontation after Neely was already in a chokehold and offered a second account of the homeless man’s conduct.
"He started screaming in an aggressive manner," Vazquez told the New York Post. "He said he had no food, he had no drink, that he was tired and doesn’t care if he goes to jail. He started screaming all these things, took off his jacket, a black jacket that he had, and threw it on the ground."
I do wonder if words can do justice with how threatening Neely was being on that train. I'm reminded of the Always Sunny bit about "the implication".
WhiningCoil
24d ago
We're All Sitcom Characters Now
If you've ever watched a successful long running sitcom, you've seen it happen. The characters start out mostly normal with a quirk or two. Maybe a little neurotic, or slow, or promiscuous. Four seasons in and the characters have all become deranged parodies of themselves. All their most entertaining qualities have been heightened, everything relatable or normal has been squeezed out. The character that was a little slow is now a straight up drooling retard. The promiscuous character obsessively fucks everything that moves. The neurotic character is only a step removed from Howard Hughes in his final days. You watch the last episode and the first episode of a sitcom, and you'll barely recognize the characters.
It's obvious why it happens though. The writers and actors give the audiences what they want. Sitcoms are (or were?) a cuttroat business. There was little room for artistic integrity, vision, or any other high minded concepts. Give the audiences what they want, or they'll change the channel and the show will be cancelled. Just shut up and do it!
I regret to inform you that we are all on a sitcom now. Everyone is enmeshed with an attention economy. Be it farming engagement on twitter, or upvotes on a reddit clone. And unlike actors who only have to inhabit their roles for hours a day, for a shooting schedule that might be weeks or months out of a year, those enmeshed in the attention economy must be in character 24/7. On social media, on streaming, on podcast, on youtube, all at once, all the time.
Some have whole heartedly embraced this. Twitter is full of people being characters, allowing the algorithm or engagement to tweak the dials on their personality. Like a second subconscious that lives in the cloud. Catgirl Kulak comes to mind. He's out there using an AI catgirl as an avatar, staying more and more in character as some sort of neo pagan feral/trad nordic catgirl with hot takes. It's a dangerous game he's playing, existing more and more in a fictional role. But there are others. The preposterous performative pro-Elon or pro-Trump nonsense I saw and tried to avoid on twitter this last week was really something. Twitter super users who've built their brand on being staunch partisans like Catturd out there acting like absolute charicatures of themselves. They're just sitcom characters anymore, and rapidly approaching the braindeath of the latter seasons. Others I don't think fully understand what was happening to them. I wonder how much upvote driven personality disorders had to do with certain flameouts here.
Because eventually every sitcom hits the wall. The characters have been intellectually and emotionally abused and lobotomized to such a point where there is no humanity left in them to ritualistically beat out for the amusement of the audience. It gets it's final season where the writers attempt to rehabilitate them just enough to send them off into the sunset.
There are no writers to rehabilitate you when the algorithm is done with you, and you've lived inside a cartoonish and horrifying version of yourself for attention for years on end.
WhiningCoil
2yr ago
June 22 2020, PCGamer - Chris Avellone accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women
"He got me blackout drunk on Midori Sours (on the company dime). He and two friends somehow got me back to my room, where he pounced in front of the other guys. They left after a few moments (also drunk), and one of them told me what he had witnessed the next evening. I had very vague impressions that someone had made out with me when I woke up that morning, but thought it was a dream," she wrote(opens in new tab).
"When I asked Chris about it, he told me that I had eventually refused him. When more of the night came back to me, I realized the ONLY reason I was able to refuse him in my blackout stupor was because I was on my period that weekend. The ONLY reason."
Karissa said she witnessed Avellone act in a similar fashion with multiple other women at the event, and eventually reached the point where she, backed by two men who were also aware of his behavior, reported him to organizers, who immediately blacklisted him.
"His behavior didn’t stop, though. If anything, it got worse. It took years for his employer to finally fire him (I honestly don’t recall the exact reason he was given, it was a while ago and I wasn’t there personally—this was relayed to me by a friend who also worked there)," she wrote. "He moved to other studios. Other projects. Other conventions until they stopped inviting him on their own accord (whether due to behavior or relevance, I don’t know). I pushed him out of my memory, as did my dear friends, and we only discussed our anger and disgust if he happened to come up.
June 29 2021, PCGamer - Chris Avellone files libel suit over last year's sexual misconduct allegations
Barrows stands by her allegations. "The only statement I will make at this time is that I stand by my story," Barrows told PC Gamer when reached for comment this week. "I told the truth. I am not at liberty to speak further until legal proceedings have concluded."
Along with the lawsuit, Avellone published a blog post titled "It's Come To This"(opens in new tab), in which he claims that Barrows became antagonistic toward him when his relationship with a friend of hers soured. In 2020, Barrows claimed that her best friend "endured over a year of heartache, gaslighting, and emotional abuse at [Avellone's] hands." Avellone says that the friend in question did become "unhappy," but that they had not been in a committed relationship. (The friend is only identified in the post as someone named Jackie. She is not identified in the lawsuit, either.)
March 25 2023, Chris Avellone's blog - JOINT STATEMENT FROM KARISSA BARROWS, KELLY BRISTOL, AND CHRIS AVELLONE
Mr. Avellone never sexually abused either of us. We have no knowledge that he has ever sexually abused any women. We have no knowledge that Mr. Avellone has ever misused corporate funds. Anything we have previously said or written about Mr. Avellone to the contrary was not our intent. We wanted to support women in the industry. In so doing, our words have been misinterpreted to suggest specific allegations of misconduct that were neither expressed nor intended. We are passionate about the safety, security and agency of women, minorities, LGBTQIA+ persons, and every other community that has seen persecution in the video game industry. We believe Mr. Avellone shares a desire to protect and uplift those communities. We believe that he deserves a full return to the industry and support him in those endeavors.”
March 25 2023, PCGamer - crickets
March 25 2023, Kotaku - crickets
It's remarkable that rpgcodex had the coverage that aged best.
Erik Kain working his beat as a based games journalist as well.
I'm not sure what more to add to this that hasn't already been said. Mostly I felt like summing up the entire event from primary sources for posterity and clarity, so that it's obvious who the liars are, and who the good faith actors are.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
I want to talk about game mods.
I cut my teeth on Doom WADs back in the day. WADs that committed flagrant copyright infringment like Alien or Star Wars TC WADs. WADs that replaced all the pinkies with Barney the purple dinosaur so you could shoot him with your shotgun. I played wacky maps like border1 for Team Fortress. And lets not forget the nude hack for Drakan: Order of the Flame. Or the plethora of offensive or innapropriate character models modded into every Quake.
Back then, I don't remember there being any sort of centralized modding sites. The Doom wads I actually found at local computer shows, probably sold "illegally" on a handful of floppies. Many of the maps or models would just download automatically when you joined a private server in Quake 1/2/3. At least I think they did? Maybe not Quake 1. And it's utterly inconceivable to me that id Software would have issued any sort of statement about the offensive material being made for their game, counter cultural as they were. I sincerely doubt they would have put any thought to it what so ever. It was simply somebody else's business.
Perusing Based Mods, a collection of mods generally banned from everywhere else, paints a grim picture of the political landscape of modding. I hate that I even have to use the phrase "political landscape of modding". Doing whatever the fuck you want with something you own should not be a political act. Alas, here we are.
Many of the mods follow a theme. Removing LGBT flags or pronoun selection from games. A few go further and remove homosexuality as content from games. Some remove anachronistic or nonsensicle diversity from games. Some just make all the people white because fuck it why not? A few are more accurate localizations versus whatever Americanized nonsense activist put out stateside. Like restoring the submissive personality to characters which localizers decided had to be more girl bossy.
The latest one I've seen which hasn't been banned everywhere, but which none the less appears to be walking a thin line, is the Better Aesthetics mod for Baldur's Gate 3. I'll let it speak for itself.
Baldur's Better Aesthetics is an attempt to make Baldur's Gate 3 look more like Faerûn as we know it. More Dwarves will have beards, more Duergar will be bald (including the women!), and fewer Githyanki will be sporting big ol' whiskers. You will also notice fewer people from Chult, but more from Calimshan, and there will no longer be ANY Half-Orcs with pink hair. Please note, these changes aren't universal. A couple of Dwarves have assimilated and gone clean-shaven, and a few lore-accurate descendants of Chultan foreigners remain (like the legendary Duke Ulder Ravengard). But you will certainly notice a difference!
I actually found this thread discussing the changes it made, and the lore reasons for them, interesting. In fact, it turned Baldur's Gate 3 into the Sword Coast I more or less recognize from Baldur's Gate 1 and 2! None the less, at an object level it makes Baldur's Gate 3 less "diverse", and thus it's problematic. I can't say for certain, but I find it suspicious there is zero mention of it on the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit. The single mention of it on the Steam forums is locked. Zero mention on the GOG forum for the game. I can't say for certain the existence of this mod is being broadly censored from the usual captured spaces. But I can't rule it out either.
It's just all so tiring. I go back and play old games, and I'm reminded just how different and natural they are. They don't have weird diversity polemics oozing out of every nook and cranny. Or the crypto-racism of having every evil or stupid character look like me, and every cool, heroic and most importantly moral character look like a Gen Z Nonbinary Zirboss. You aren't constantly confronted with the equivilent of a pride parade every time you meet a new cast of characters. And all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.
My wife and I have a lot of discussions about what we'll expose our daughter to, and we've more or less decided the cut off is the 90's just to be safe. There were still normal shows, books or games that generally depicted normal cis hetero white families like ours positively. To subject her to modern media feels like child abuse. To the 90's it is. Everything after that is just too damned gay for children.
WhiningCoil
2yr ago
Another holiday, another uncomfortable intrusion of the culture war by psychos into my child's life.
Maybe I was oblivious as a kid. I probably was. But somehow I don't remember children's books being as blatantly propagandized as now. Literally every single book my 3 year old daughter got for Christmas is either packed to the gills with LGBTQ "families" or interracial families mixed to a degree that I'm pretty sure is genetically impossible. Like I don't think White Woman + Latino Man = 1 Asian Child, 1 Black Child and 1 tan baby. We didn't set out for books with overt propaganda. We wanted books about nature, farming, the seasons, the months, learning to read, numbers, etc. And yet here we are.
And like I said, maybe I was oblivious as a kid. But then again, I actually got my daughter a lot of the classics I grew up with, and I still don't see it. Goodnight Moon, Where The Wild Things Are, The Hungry Caterpillar, etc still seem like straightforward children's books to me.
It's just baffling to me that books like that appear to be the default option when you tell family "We want books about X" and they search the internet for "Children's Books about X" and just click Buy on the first 5 results. We got like, 12 pseudo random children's books for Christmas, and not one single family in any of them looks like her, despite us being the majority demographic of our nation. It's one thing to be an adult, seeing the precise opposite of reality being crammed down your throat by our cultural overlords. You can by and large tune it out, thanks to the decades of actual life you've lived standing in opposition to pretend nonsense. There is something profoundly disturbing about watching them attempt to brainwash your child any which way they can into believing the world is the opposite of the way it is.
Ah well, Merry Christmas I guess. She liked the stool I built her, and although she balks at me reading the copy of the Hobbit I slipped in the drawer. Just not old enough for all those words without pictures yet.
WhiningCoil
2yr ago
An update to a post I made after Christmas lamenting the state of children's books, and all their on the nose, "current year" agenda pushing nonsense. Specifically an update in reply to this comment.
This is why we only have classic little golden books and some innocuous stuff from the 80s and 90s on our bookshelf. Also Roald Dahl, he's great. As others have said, there's no reason to buy modern propaganda children's books. Not only are they proselytizing, but they're mostly objectively ugly.
Roald Dahl goes PC in a world where no one is 'fat' and the Oompa-Loompas are gender neutral
The publisher, Puffin, has made hundreds of changes to the original text, removing many of Dahl’s colourful descriptions and making his characters less grotesque.
The review of Dahl’s language was undertaken to ensure that the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, Puffin said.
You can read the litany of changes for yourself. I guess I missed the boat on stocking up on Roald Dahl children's books. As is feeling increasingly typical these days, there can be no escape from current year. Fuck me I guess.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
The state of video games in the year of our lord 2025 continues to astound me. I continue to wonder when the inflection point was, between the ascending art form, and it's degenerate form we see today. Insane stories nobody wants to hear, ugly unlikable worlds, artless current year lampshading, technical issues out the wazoo, "gameplay" that seems to revolve around trying to hook into as many addiction centers as possible and draping casual-tier game mechanics over top of it as a fig leaf. it's a disgrace.
An obvious flashpoint was Gamergate, and that's been beat to death. But before Gamergate, Bioshock Infinite killed the AAA title as it was understood up until that point.
Arguably, Bioshock Infinite was the perfect game. Gamers loved it, reviewers loved it, it was philosophical with something for everyone (except a few wokies who got upset that it depicted both sides as capable of great evil), and most importantly it sold gangbusters. And it still couldn't earn it's money back (allegedly1), the developers basically closed down, reducing in size to a mere skeleton crew that never released another game. I'm struggling to find good sources for it, but I recall this sent shockwaves through the industry. I remember panicked headlines on Gamasutra which I had been reading at the time for some fucking reason. Suddenly everyone was shitting their pants afraid that they'd been shoveling money into a business model (big budget AAA singleplayer games) that would lose them money. And to my memory, this is when the changes began.
Publishers were desperate to do anything but a AAA singleplayer game which would lose money even if it succeeded because it cost so damned much. You saw more games as a service, more DLC, more online requirements, more courting of controversy to make up for obvious lack of quality. Or maybe the woke shit was just a convenient hack to get free publicity and better reviews from a gaming press that Ziff Davis had centralized in San Francisco and then abandoned. Who's to say.
I'm obsessive. I keep a spreadsheet of all the retrogames I aspire to play again, the year they came out, the issue of Computer Gaming World they got reviewed in, which of my stable of retro PCs I should play them on, etc. Around 2015 the list stops. The last game on it is Rebel Galaxy. The last big budget AAA game on it is Borderlands 2 from 2012. I didn't stop at that date because the games weren't retro enough. I stopped because as I was perusing lists of top reviewed or most popular games year by year, that was roughly the time upwards of 80% of them became Games as a Service. Either always online DRM, a multiplayer focus, or even 10 years of perpetual updates chasing "engagement" made them unsuitable for a list oriented towards posterity and nostalgia. Which once again, is more or less right around the time Bioshock Infinite and it's disastrous aftermath was rippling through the industry.
Arguably, Ubisoft has been fighting the good fight. I make fun of Ubislop titles, and their super generic, open world, casual action adventure mechanics. But they are still ostensibly offline big budget single player games. Which really only leaves woke-baiting as a tactic to try to punch above their weight. Alas.
In the 2000's I think it was, Nintendo announced they were no longer going to devalue their games by reducing their prices. It was customary to release $20 versions of games that had sold a bunch. It was easy in the back half of a consoles life to stock up on all the classics pretty cheap, and brand new to boot. Nintendo argued this created a race to the bottom, and quit doing it. People were upset, accused them of being greedy. Gamer entitlement is quite the sight to see. But in the meantime, I think Nintendo was largely vindicated. The first party games that released for the Switch were all 1000% worth the money, especially when compared to the GaaS titles Xbox or Sony were pushing. One again Nintendo is pissing gamers off raising prices. Switch 2 games look to cost $70 or $80, and the console itself is priced at $450. This could be greed. Or like in the early 00's it's Nintendo insisting on being paid what they are worth. Unless you want them to start whoring it up on the corner of Woke & GaaS.
- It's possible in time, 2K recouped the cost of Bioshock Infinite. We don't directly know. They posted losses in their quarterly statement when it came out. Somehow it got cited that the game cost $200m to develop and market, but Ken Levine laughed that off without providing a real number. I do see people remarking that the game went on sale "quickly" whatever that means in 2014, I can't exactly recall. It's supposed to have lifetime sales of 11m, but those are always inflated with giveaways, bundles, massive sales, etc. Were I to guess from smatterings of numbers I see floating around, I'd guess 4-5m at full price in the release window? Which could be 240m in total revenue, minus whatever the retailers took as their cut. So it's not inconceivable that it didn't recoup it's alleged $200m investment inside a reasonable time window.
WhiningCoil
4mo ago
This is a bad thing to me and a cause of some hopelessness, since America produced a great deal of good things during its heyday, and even still is doing awesome things. It is predominantly America's technology companies settling the frontier, and recently they've struck gold with AI, proper chatbots, unlike the Cleverbots of old.
Did America's heyday have anything to do with liberalism? When do you think the "heyday" of America even was, and why do you think liberalism was it's defining feature, so much so that it gets to own all that greatness?
I don't know man. I used to think we had things figured out in the 90's. If you're going to give any particular era to "liberalism", whatever that means, the 90's would probably qualify. Culture seemed to have definitively move away from a conception of The United States as a white Christian nation, and towards a multicultural melting pot. When I think back on my public school education, probably 50% of our assigned reading were polemics about racism, and the importance of not being mean or prejudging the blacks. It felt like we were getting more color blind in the 90's. Bill Clinton had his "Sister Souljah" moment calling out anti-white racism.
I now question whether any of that was sustainable. I question whether the 90's were just the brief period between when the radicals had pushed the overton to a fairly neutral feeling middle, and then further off a fucking cliff. Maybe liberalism was always doomed, merely a stalking horse used by radicals to destroy the "heyday" you romanticize. A lot of those 90's liberals have had a fuck of a mask off moment of late. The ones that seemed sincere have defected to MAGA. Or at the very least realize MAGA is the lesser of two evils compared to the DEI race essentialist.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
I guess it's sex crimes week on The Motte. Here is one I've been puzzling about.
How on Earth was Danny Masterson actually convicted?
This has been a slow boil for me. I'd seen headlines here and there about the slow rolling case against him. I totally missed when the first trial went to a hung jury. Then suddenly I see he was convicted on 2 out of 3 rape charges and sentenced to 30 years. Even saw some headlines about Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis getting dragged for writing a character witness letter for his sentencing. But something jumped out at me.
He was being prosecuted for crimes 17-19 years old at the time the prosecution started. Red flag number one, I don't know the specific law in CA, but surely that's pushing the statute of limitations, right? Indeed it is! Statute of Limitations for rape is 10 years. So how did they still prosecute him?
Well there are a few exceptions.. Namely
- Kidnapping the victim
- Drugging the victim
- Using a firearm
- Having been previously convicted of a sex crime (or maybe just being accused of multiple sex crimes?)
What appears to have sunk Masterson's SOL is that there are multiple accusers. Now reading the law myself, the reading seems clear to me. The exception requires a seperate conviction. But I'm no lawyer or judge, obviously.
(d)(1) The defendant has been previously convicted of an offense specified in subdivision (c), including an offense committed in another jurisdiction that includes all of the elements of an offense specified in subdivision (c).
Or
(e)(4) The defendant has been convicted in the present case or cases of committing an offense specified in subdivision (c) against more than one victim.
And I believe this is the part pertaining to SOL
(g) Notwithstanding Section 1385 or any other law, the court shall not strike any allegation, admission, or finding of any of the circumstances specified in subdivision (d) or (e) for any person who is subject to punishment under this section.
So I donno, maybe it's not as clear cut as I think. I repeat, not a lawyer.
Moving past the SOL concerns I have, what was the evidence against Masterson? Near as I can tell none. There were 3 victim testimonies, some expert testimony, and that was it. Zero evidence corroborating the witnesses, zero physical evidence, zero circumstantial evidence. And this is why SOL is so important. It's not a get out of jail free card. It exists so the defense can practically gather some evidence to exonerate their client. After 20 years, most physical evidence will be gone, alibis will be impossible, witnesses will be difficult to find and their testimony will be even more unreliable than already notoriously unreliable witness testimony. All we're left with is he said/she said, and the biases of the jury pool.
This was an idle, principled frustration for me. I honestly could give a shit about Danny Masterson. However, now that figures more politically salient, like Russell Brand, are in the crosshairs, the precedent set by Masterson's chilling conviction are all the more frightening.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
I keep meaning to dick around with some LLM software to see for myself how some of the nuts and bolts work. Because my layman's understanding is that they are literally just a statistical model. An extremely sophisticated statistical model, but a statistical model none the less. They are trained through a black box process to guess pretty damned well about what words come after other words. Which is why there is so much "hallucinated information" in LLM responses. They have no concept of reason or truth. They are literally p-zombies. They are a million monkeys on a million typewriters.
In a lot of ways they are like a con man or a gold digger. They've been trained to tell people whatever they want to hear. Their true worth probably isn't in doing anything actually productive, but in performing psyops and social engineering on an unsuspecting populace. I mean right now the FBI has to invest significant manpower into entrapping some lonely autistic teenager in his mom's basement into "supporting ISIS". Imagine a world where they spin up 100,000 instances of an LLM do scour Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Reddit, etc for lonely autistic teens to talk into terrorism.
Imagine a world where we find out about it. Where a judge forces the FBI to disclose than an LLM talked their suspect into bombing the local mall. How far off do you think it is? I'm guessing within 5 years.
WhiningCoil
2yr ago
I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.
You know, the idiocy of Disney's "The Force is Female" push doesn't take a genius to figure out. I was talking to my wife about it, and I just asked:
"When we were kids, how many little boys did you know who liked Star Wars?"
"Tons."
"Did you know a single girl who liked Star Wars?"
"No."
It's the absolute height of fart huffing retardation to literally jettison your entire built in audience for an IP, and try to replace it with an audience that never cared about it one iota. Like I get the typical neoliberal line of "They're just trying to expand their market". Except now the experiment has been run, and they've wound up appealing to less people than before.
It was literally inconceivable to me, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, that I could stop loving Star Wars. I dragged my poor not-yet-wife to a midnight screen of The Force Awakens, well past her bed time. And she went with me because she knew how much it meant to me, god bless her.
And yet here I am. I fucking hate Star Wars now.
The ways they've seemingly purposely spit in the eye of every fan of the original Trilogy and EU is insane. Between turning all the legacy characters into beaten down pieces of shit, killing them off ignominiously and denying fans the reunions they desperately wanted. Putting aside all the glaring technical issues with the craftsmanship of the films, like poor writing, poor characterization, completely nonsensical plot contortions, etc. I forget where I heard it, but someone joked that all new Lucas Films are made for an audience of one, Kathleen Kennedy. Every film has to be about a stand in for how Kathleen Kennedy views herself, replacing a character that is a stand in for how Kathleen Kennedy views George Lucas. Once I heard that, suddenly it all made sense.
God I hope Disney sells it all back to Lucas at half the price.
WhiningCoil
22hr ago
This view of suffering, as some sort of negative imposed on life, is bizarre to me. I mean it makes sense coming from a person suffering clinical depression or otherwise deeply disordered. But suffering, by and large, is our biology's way of pointing the way to go. Only children think the world would be better off without suffering. Anyone who has ever seen a news segment or documentary about people literally born without the ability to feel pain understands what a nightmarish body horror that is. I'll never forget the one I saw. Turns out without pain, it's hard to keep an infant from clawing their own eyes out, chewing off their own tongue, fingers and toes, and other acts of senseless self mutilation. They won't cry when they need something, so the new parent, ignorant to the condition, first discovers something is amiss after the child, instead of crying to be fed in the middle of the night, lets their parents sleep peacefully while they remove their own eye with their curious searching fingers.
Suffering may seem pointless to the disordered mind, but every now and again we get a Twilight Zone like glimpse at a world without suffering, and it's a horror almost beyond belief. Like a hell out of Event Horizon or Hellraiser.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
All this person is describing is remaining forever a child. It's actually kind of amazing. He blames that on being neurodivergent? I can't really assess whether that's a valid defense of his willful ignorance or not.
Even in his own post, he repeatedly points out all the places he recoiled from any exposure to base reality.
Men don’t compete against women, so a casual watching of a nearby TV during a conversation doesn’t give any observations. To notice a difference I would have to look for the reported numbers somewhere on the screen, write them down, and compare them across the events.
I mean, on the one hand, I can't recall the last time I actually watched the Olympics either. On the other hand, you are rarely comparing similar numbers here either. If it's some track event, all the men's times will be clustered, and then all the women's times will be clustered say, 30% slower. You aren't comparing decimal places here. Even casual observers should notice.
I opted out of gym as much as possible, it was humiliating and vulgar. The only post-puberty phys ed class I was forced to take was sex segregated so I wouldn't have had any opportunity to see differences. In earlier gym classes I didn’t look around much. Why would I? Are people comparing themselves to see how many jumping jacks they can do? I just wanted it to be done with.
I mean, did his school never do the Presidential fitness tests? He never noticed how different the standards were for even barely pubescent boys and girls?
Nothing about this entrenched ignorance seems accidental. Some seed was planted that caused him to recoil from any confounding evidence. And it's like after he got through childhood carefully selecting the reality he was exposed to so as to not challenge his pre existing views that were passed onto him, he just never gave it another thought ever again. Nor spent any time being physical with women, as even relatively sedentary man strength is often greater than female gym bunny strength.
WhiningCoil
2yr ago
Man, I have such mixed feelings about this.
I really want Trump to get out of the fucking way. He had his shot at being the hero of the populist right, he failed comprehensively. Somehow his enemies were stronger than ever after his tenure, with an even tighter grip on the culture, the levers of power, and the minds of our youth than ever before. His entire presidency was the perfect examples of one step forward, two steps back. He simply was not the guy.
Is Desantis the guy? 70% chance he's not in my estimation. But I'm willing to give him a shot.
I'd heard some talk that after so many Trump backed candidates ate dirt in the midterms, and Desantis fucking cleaned house, that meant America was "over" Trump. But that doesn't necessarily mean he'd lose a Republican Primary. Especially not with a crowded field, and a 30% cut of the base that's ride or die for him. Republicans will have to pull the same shit the DNC pulled on Bernie, and keep some Trump adjacent candidate in the race to try to split his base, while every other nominee falls in line and endorses someone else chosen behind closed doors.
With my luck, Desantis will be the Trump adjacent candidate they use to split the base, and fucking Jeb Bush will be the anointed insider candidate.
Anyways, Trump getting back on twitter is step 1 to growing his reach again. Right now he's so marginalized only that ride or die portion really gets his messages anymore. He doesn't go viral. Barely anybody even knows what he's saying anymore, beyond second hand accounts of his "melt downs" on Truth Social. My only hope is that he has too much pride to come slinking back to Twitter without Elon issuing a personal apology for the terrible way Twitter treated him, and begging him on his hands and knees to please grace Twitter with his genius and insight again. I guess I have to further hope Elon doesn't then go and do just that.
As much as I'm a free speech guy, and thought his banning was patently ridiculous, now that he's gone, I wish he'd just stay gone. But it's looking like he's going to take the RNC down with him every bit as much as Clinton took the DNC down with her in 2016.
WhiningCoil
21d ago
I don't follow Aella. In fact I usually mute anything I see about her. E-girls thrive on attention, and the only correct course of action is to block/ignore.
But what I have seen is that a large part of what set this off was her complaining that she wants to get married and have kids, and no partner she wants to do that with returns the sentiment. She may have also broken up with her long time partner cuck because he didn't want kids with her? So she was mourning the situation that she would never have these milestones in life she wanted.
And then what I saw was people, IMHO rightly, pointing out that if she wanted those things, a life of being a filthy whore in public was mutually exclusive to them. This was a self inflicted wound. And especially zeroing in on her entitlement to a "high quality male" (not her words, but reading between the lines), despite being a literal prostitute that doesn't shower. Like what did she think her value was? The post I saw were blunt about this. Perhaps excessive. But examples must be made lest others fall into the same trap. Consider the sort of man you want, and act accordingly. It's at least known among some men this is what must be done to attract the correct sort of woman. Women just seem to have entitlement.
WhiningCoil
7d ago
Men who want sex... get married.
/r/deadbedrooms would like a word. It's interesting you brought up closing on a home, and said marriage makes it so that neither party can get what they want without coughing up what they were offering it. It just doesn't hold up under scrutiny though. Virtually the only way to make the arrangement fair like you claim it is would be, is to make it so that you can have as much sex with your wife as you want, consent be damned, legally. But I doubt anyone has the heart to go through with that. So you are left with one side that can defect at will, and the other losing most of their assets and income.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
I had a friend who used to be a teacher. He was all in on virtually every neoliberal shibboleth of teaching. Against school choice because it took resources away from public schools. Always making snide comments about what will happen to special needs kids if schools got fully privatized.
Naturally, his sons all have some non-specific emotional/behavioral problems that lets him game the system for them to have personalized education plans and extra resources. He's always been good at gaming the system like that.
We're currently struggling with some shitty behavior our daughter is tracking home from school. My wife is adamant that it's something the school should be "fixing", and I keep asserting it's not their job. It's our job. So our daughter is currently grounded.
I donno man. I guess there is some theoretical intellectually in tact individual that needs extra resources either because of a physical disability or idiosyncratic mental problem (like dyslexia) that if gotten over the hump of not being able to help themselves, can go on to utilize their education for the betterment of society. Personally, I've never seen one. I mostly only see parents pushing their parenting duties onto teachers through fake special needs, or fake special needs students becoming fake special needs employees, expecting all the same accommodations around their emotional needs and learned helplessness.
I do expect lots of malicious compliance around this though. Totally normal shit like just wanting to have a conversation with a teacher about how to help your child in an area they are struggling with becomes "Sorry, Trump said I'm not allowed to."
It's who whom the whole way down. Unless my memory fails me entirely, which it may, I can barely tell half of you semi-anonymous handles apart, TracingWoodgrains fed LibsOfTiktok false info once upon a time to in an effort to delegitimize her as well.
More options
Context Copy link