cae_jones
9mo ago
IIUC, "Lala" is Chinese slang for gay, from what my Chinese teacher said 14 years ago. So we're 3 for 4 on the forced queer-coding.
cae_jones
9mo ago
FTR, my reaction to the idea of medically altering the identity bits is something like "Could you kill me in a less horrifying way, please?"
That said, my issues are more age than gender, and the mental aspect is a significant part of that (which only grows more ... perplexing... over time). The trouble though is that it's hard to define what fixing that would look like. If I'm imagining a magical mind-alteration solution, I like to include a daily "revert the alterations, reflect on how they work" period, because that crap is scary and I expect easier to get wrong than not. I have no idea how this could be accomplished in reallity, other than simulations. But I'm not sure much of mine could be resolved outside of simulations. Ugh. Reallity is better than not existing, but I still complain.
All of which is to say, I get the vicious reactions you get for suggesting altering it mentally rather than bodily. I'd prefer people not be so vicious about it (I'm here and not there for reasons), fwiw.
cae_jones
10mo ago
Ability to orgasm seems orthogonal to the quality of one's shape to me. Inability to reproduce seems more relevant, if we're talking about sexual function.
cae_jones
1yr ago
You say this as though my life isn't a series of realizations that what I've been doing is stupid. I've basically spent the past 15ish years contemplating just about every combination of time-travel + past self conversation imaginable, and my conclusion is something like "Maybe I could explain what past-me is doing wrong in a way that past-me will understand and improve upon?" but with a big questionmark.
Like, I cringe at decisions I made yesterday. I can, at least, look to age 12 as when I started reflecting enough to realize things needed fixing, but that still takes time and I'm really not sure I could establish a divider between what passes for current wis levels and then. And I remember a few decision-making processes from when I was 2-5 that were clearly wrong in hindsight, for specific reasons I couldn't intuitively understand but might somewhat be able to simulate understanding if someone who gets my pre-school psychology well enough can communicate it well enough.
Like, maximum cringe is ages 5-13, with a peak at 10-11. But I think I've cringed at my memories and recordings enough that, at this point, I'd just wind up cringing after a transchronal conversation for all the important things I chickened out of trying to teach past-me. Maybe cringe/hour is a better comparison, but it would take a lot of time and revision to chart that over time.
cae_jones
1yr ago
This. The generational progression has been rather pronounced, from my local observations. I should add that it also tracks with the availability of entertainment. My grandparents and my dad's older siblings grew up when electricity and airconditioning were novel. My dad grew up with Saturday Morning Cartoons, Bruice Lee, and Star Wars, with video games requiring a trip to an arcade. I remember not having video games and the Disney Channel being a temporary luxury, but by the time I was in school, cable and VHS copies of everything were plentiful, and whether or not I had access to a NES was entirely dependent on which cousin needed to pawn one for drug money this month... right up until my parents could swing for our own, after which point I spent way too much time on cartoons and video games. And also I was obsessed with toys and wanted just about everything I saw on TV.
My GenZ cousins had even more plentiful video games, and if they hadn't been hit with time limits during early school ages, would have stayed glued to them for hours at a time. My 7yo nephew was given a tablet with Youtube access before he could talk, and still demands to have it when eating or traveling. I feel obliged to add that I often wanted to keep watching TV at mealtimes, but back then my parents actually refused. These days, they put the table across from a 70in smart TV and they have to have something going most of the time.
Safetyism is a completely separate topic, I suppose. The conspicuous correlation between the availability of entertainment, and how absorbed people are by it, is easily observed. Have we made any progress toward safeguarding against superstimuli?
cae_jones
1yr ago
Maybe we should ask GPT4 for a solution? Or at least, whenever someone wants to try a large-scale intervention, they should start asking GPT if it can find any likely downsides.
cae_jones
1yr ago
Yeah, I'm wanting to agree, here. Still anecdotal, but of my 6 grandparents (my parents remarried,), 5 died between the ages of 58 and 71 (most of them around 60), and 1 died at 88 when COVID19 and COPD got him simultaneously. The latter was the only one who did not smoke, and was all the only one not to die a slow and painful death drowning in his own fluids. There could be some other confounding factor, but the smoking is the one difference that sticks out. So the more statistically literate hereabouts will I hope understand my vehement doubt of Sky's claim.
Of course, between this and the climate change post, it feels like someone opened a portal to 1999 and summoned the right wing equivalent to the IFLS SJWs of the past decad", so the combination might have me more biased than usual.
cae_jones
1yr ago
It's hard to tell/decide if I qualify to answer... but I have been alive for long enough and have the corresponding equipment, so:
I never felt like casual sex was something worth desiring. Even at peak teen hormones when my brain once or twice said "hey, what if this imaginary person we just made up from the ether randomly walked up to you and was very explicitly wanting some?", I couldn't go on without them having actual character and it turning into an actual relationship. Heck, during the two years when I was getting (mostly but not exclusively disturbing) vivid sex dreams, there was one with this imaginary LTR candidate in which we were both naked and deliberately keeping it non-sexual, and that actually worked for the whole thing.
But I've generally been way less interested in general than it seems like most people (male or female) are. There've only been two incidents ever where I was superficially attracted to someone almost immediately (once literally the first day at the Math and Science HS, and once literally the last day of college before a 2.5 year sebatical). There's been one person I was ever more than superficially attracted to, and I resisted those feelings for a while, because it seemed like we would not be long-term compatible (and that was when I'd been alive for 28 years).
I've been hit on far more than that. There was a period in HS / early college when people would tell me when they thought girls were conspicuously interested, but I think my "So what?" reaction put a stop to that. For some reason, men of all ages who have the opportunity seem to go through a phase where they try to convince me to get a girlfriend (as though that's something you can just do after graduating). Then most of them give up because I'm clearly not playing along.
Online dating sucks, because it's just names, ages, and locations, without incentive to click one in particular for the possibility of a meaningful profile. Every few years, I give one of these a look, realize there's nothing there whatsoever to interest me in anyone, and move on. People for people's sake doesn't really motivate me, sex or no. Likewise sex for sex's sake is not terribly interesting.
But I'm weird, so YMMV.
cae_jones
1yr ago
Huh, reading these general social expectations now is similarly irritating to what it would have been 15-20 years ago. I think I'd've been better at articulating why back then, though in an annoying self-righteous way that is just cringy, but still... this somehow summoned my early 2000s teenaged rebellion mode. I'm not sure what to make of this.
cae_jones
1yr ago
My first thought when you said "UFOs attracted to nuclear" was "Oh, they're going to point out that nuclear crap can screw with instruments and human eyes, and the underwater stuff gets a lot easier to explain away." But you went in the complete opposite direction.
It's not about hard belief in screwing with physics being impossible. It's the complexity of it all. Aliens exist and casually interstellar travel and visit Earth regularly and are content to just troll rather than any of them just dropping the charade. ... Or people are seeing weird lights and our instruments are under a century old and dealing with novel stuff like nukes and weird sky crap. One's way, way simpler than the other. Both are possible, but why do trolly aliens seem more probable?
cae_jones
1yr ago
It helps, I think, that misplaced nostalgia for the 50s was getting sneered at around the time I got inseparably attached to nostalgia for the 90s. But really, I have no illusions about the overall societal situation or whatever. I was 2-11 years old and living in a city/town that still can't decide if it's rural or suburban or a college town or what. My exposure to the outside world was basically TV and movies, wherein NYC was a city of perpetual nighttime muggings and superheros, everyone in high school was indistinguishable from jock/nerd/cheerleader stereotypes played by conspicuous adults, and drugs were bad, 'mkay?
9/11 might have functionally ended the 90s from the perspective of the West having won history, but history was basically mythology even while I was watching it unfold. 9/11 for me was mainly testing my attitudes Vs the mainstream on matters of justice / vengeance / mercy / whatever. Using 9/11 as a Jedi Mind Trick to get people to support Operation Iraqi Freedom was America failing the test, and teenaged-me getting an inflated ego for feeling like the only one who saw it that way who wasn't on MSNBC. Then I slowly got better at something resembling theory of mind, discovered that being insulated in a school-sized sandbox with "peer pressure is bad, 'mkay?" discouraging socialization, and never actually learning how to try, left me woefully unprepared for anything beyond high school, and oh, look, the "reasons this decade is worse than the last" list got longer, and it still has nothing to do with the general quality of said decades for civilization in general.
My soul can live in the 90s, and my personal Utopia can be "the 90s, but better," and post-9/11 America can have revealed ugliness that I was previously unaware of (what with being an isolated child prior), and none of that adds up to the 90s being better (or worse) than neighboring decades from a broader perspective. If our AI overlords can create multiple Utopias and justify giving me access to 90stopia, that'd be nice, I suppose, but I'm not going to evangelize it, or suggest that everyone be forced to join me there. Objectivity when judging decades you lived through isn't exactly easy.
cae_jones
1yr ago
The question of whether or not it's alive, can think, has a soul, etc, is kinda beside the point. The point is, it's going to cause big, world-changing things to happen. Eliezer mentioned many years ago a debate he got in with some random guy at some random dinner party, which ended with them agreeing that it would be impossible to create something with a soul. Whether or not the AI is conscious is not so important when it's changing your life to the point of unrecognizability, and the alignment crowd worries about whether that's a good unrecognizable, or something more dystopic.
cae_jones
1yr ago
Oh, hey, I wrote a paper about that guy in high school French, all the way back in 2004. TBH, I didn't even remember he was black, but vaguely remember the other stuff. If I still have that essay on a jumpdrive backup of my HS nettwork drive, ...' I probably won't read it, because I remember barely squeezing out something I thought I could get away with turning in, but I am at least a little confused that I'd forget almost everything but the guy's name.
cae_jones
1yr ago
In my experience, diet matters a lot. Dairy and onions in particular. And a good antiperspirant goes a long way. By "good antiperspirant," I mean the creamy kind, not the solid bars, applied in detail to all the relevant areas. The difference is stark.
Milk, butter, cheese, bacon, and onions, with nothing beyond cheap bar deodorant? Stank regenerates quicker than I can get thoroughly dried after bathing. Minimal dairy and good antiperspirant, and I can forget entirely until my hair gets intolerable. I pretty much never even have to re-apply antiperspirant without bathing first.
Disclaimer: Still bathe in the tripple digits annually. Mostly because I prefer shaving and bathing in one sitting, and the former must be done at least weekly. *Grumbles about useless lasers and the lack of electrolysis within several hundred miles*
cae_jones
1yr ago
I pretty much exclusively use my iPhone to do internet things, unless I need to upload or download files (and sometimes I'll just download those to a cloud service via my phone and get to them later).
Don't think I could stand to type so much without Braille Screen Input. And it has had versions where the problems rendered it nigh unusable. A bluetooth keyboard would probably be better, but IDFLI.
cae_jones
1yr ago
It occurs to me that reading dating-related content here makes me feel a sense of despair I wouldn't normally feel around the subject. I'm not sure why that is, exactly, since normally if it comes up, I can more or less shrug it off with close enough to apathy. What sorcery are y'all performing that it suddenly feels desperately important when I read discussions here, and pretty much only here?
I want to now go off into a lengthy tangent about my general feelings/history on the subject, but that seems pointless and narcissistic. (But if I should go ahead and post validation-seaking narcissistic ramblings, say so? 😟)
cae_jones
1yr ago
I'm not sure I was ever involved deeply enough to give a meaningful response, but to the best of my recollection...
I was most active around 2008-2012. At the time, there was a very sharp divide between the different sections of the forums (and there were quite a lot of sections, organized into categories). It seemed like most of the active participants in the sections I visited were middle-aged men/eunuchs, with a smattering of 18-50s filling things out. User motivations ranged from fettishistic and body modification (I recall a frequent poster whose username was "splitdick"), to gender identity and BIID, to medical issues requiring castration (prostate/testicular cancer or injury, etc), to autistic or religious people citing a desire to remove the distraction/temptation of sexuality to focus on what they really cared about. There were lots of personal anecdotes, and Jesus et al (but mostly Jesus) provided academic references when appropriate.
The general pattern was to always, always discourage rushing into castration, even though there was frequent lamenting the lack of support from the medical community. One young, fit christian poster kinda scared most of the active members by confidently skipping the recommended preparation and getting surgically castrated very quickly after opening discussion. On the other hand, there was a middle-aged autist who spent many years trying to convince doctors to help, and wound up bringing an elastrator to an appointment to demonstrate the ability to castrate himself if no surgeon would do it in a safer way (this was apparently when the doctor in question was utterly terrified of anyone discovering that he gave in to the threat).
There were threads about castration of minors, and the mods seemed to watch those closely and take action if anyone seemed too supportive of castrating minors IRL. I think there were also serious concerns about doxxing (one poster apparently had direct experience with at least one-three teenagers who were castrated in the Netherlands for non-trans medical reasons, and had a habit of revealing more detail than was necessary, and got modded for it). One of the admins not mentioned here (Palo, IIRC) had plenty of stories about boys expressing interest in castration prior to puberty, then changing their minds almost immediately afterward.
And as I recall, there were lots and lots of origin stories involving boys observing the castration of livestock.
Now that I'm trying to remember everything I can, I do recall a discussion that got uncomfortably positive toward sexual experiences for boys, particularly between 10 and 14. I recall someone (I forget who) posting large chunks of an article about various men's experiences when they were underaged, to which some posters replied with fond recollections of being 10-14 and getting molested by older teenagers.
Ultimately, what I got out of it was a lot of medical information, and a confusing mix of support for wanting to escape sexuality and also so much explicit sexuality, that I really couldn't say much about what was really going on. In the bits of the forums I read, Jesus generally posted in a very dry, academic manner, and Kristof came across as a grumpy old vet who was getting too old for this shit and really just wanted to be a nun. I kinda got the impression that some accounts, like Kristof and Palo, were often held by older people in the community, and might have changed hands when the original user died, but I never confirmed that. Palo came across as both the top mod and the one who took moderating for safety most seriously (though, there are mods I don't remember so well, so take that with some salt).
Oh, and the pushing for a male-to-eunuch identity thing was always there. Jesus was pretty open about trying to publish research to encourage medical recognition of such an identity. I'm more surprised that the others got involved in the publications and such, since they always struck me as more oriented toward the community than being involved as researchers directly.
I feel like I have not answered the question. :(
cae_jones
1yr ago
I was familiar with the EA and the mentioned posters back when they enforced the rules about not supporting this stuff on minors. Honestly, I participated in some of Jesus's research threads (never knew he posted in the stories section. The others don't surprise me.) Seeing them going from careful and professional to doing cartwheels down the slippery slope is ... disappointing, to put it mildly. I remember when people got modded for seeming too enthusiastic about the new policy recommendations. Heck, mods there provided plenty of information in agreement with the prevalence of both desisting after puberty and fettish-driven fixation on castration. And that's just what I got from the handful of boards I bothered reading (Eunuch Central, the general health board, and occasionally the surgical/chemical castration boards. I once poked my head into the stories section, read the titles, and noped the f out of there.)
cae_jones
1yr ago
No, I do not. But I have extremely relevant issues, so that doesn't answer the question...
But I have to ask: whence the concept of children's fiction? Or, even, whence the concept of adult's fiction? Or better yet, how functional is the post-industrial idea of child Vs adult, compared to pre-industrial versions of these identities/roles?
Childhood and adulthood as we know them today are new. Yes, the two have been distinguished since time immemorial, but not in precisely this way. Decreased child mortality, child labor laws, compulsory education, the disappearance of jobs that children could traditionally participate in, all utterly transformed what it means, culturally, to be child/adult. "Culturally" being the key word.
Entertainment, though, has such a whacky history that I'm sure I'd miss something trying to summarize it. I think the big thing is that, at some point, the entertainment and toy industries realized how much of a cash-cow specifically targeting children can be, followed by realizing that getting an older audience to stick with it will also increase profits. Furthermore, if we're talking the past 40-50 years? Children's entertainment is wildly different from the nursery rhymes and fairytales of a century ago. At this point, I think culture hasn't really caught up with the fact that the entertainment industry is trying to get really good at selling fun stuff, and that they sometimes succeed beyond what a narrow view of demographics would suggest. Kids growing up with media made for children, these days, are growing up with the products that out-competed weaker products. Of course it's going to have sticking power.
More than all that, though, when entertainment became a mass industry, constantly pumping out new material, I think that left a huge impact on culture we haven't really figured out, yet. When producing new stories in masse was expensive, popular culture didn't have much to latch onto. Pop culture as a concept is spectacularly different following a relevant technological innovation, after all. References to the Bible and classical mythology were the norm, and it was all public domain so you didn't have to worry about getting demonitized for quoting a Psalm or two. Put a clip from Harry Potter in a video on Youtube, and so help you if it's more than five seconds long.
TLDR: this aspect of culture is changing, and fast, and has been for a good century and then some, at least. What do concepts like childish and immature actually mean, and how long have they meant that, and why? What even is the purpose of entertainment? I don't think the answers to any of these are sufficiently agreed upon for there to be a straightforward answer to the original question.
cae_jones
1yr ago
The last time I checked for meetups, they were all either not sufficiently local, mostly old ladies and/or exclusively for women, at inconvenient times, or all of the above. Notice I didn't mention whether or not any of these were remotely interesting. Begars V Choosers and all that. I did see ads for a local axe-throwing place, but even assuming they'd let a blind person throw an axe, the timing was perfect such that the pandemmic killed it.
I mean, I'm writing this at 2:09AM on Sunday morning, having recently woke up. It's a little earlier than I'd normally be up, but I had nothing at all to do last night and wound up asleep way early. I'm not sure I could get an Uber in this town pre-dawn on a Sunday, not sure when busses start (on Sunday), and don't exactly live somewhere walkable. My options even after sunrise are mostly to call some missionaries to ask for a ride to their church, which isn't social activity so much as hymns, testimonials, and discussing the esoteric religious concept of the week. There's a park near me, but it's only open 12:00-5:00PM, and isn't exactly a social option so much as a cheaper alternative to installing a playground in my back yard.
But maybe I haven't checked for meetups recently enough? Everyone insists that meetup is a problem-solver these days, and I'm somewhat out-of-date.
cae_jones
1yr ago
I always preferred dolls to cars, thought it was cool that one time someone gave me a hot pink t-shirt, and was amused when that first letter my parents received about disability benefits kept calling me "she" ... But none of that made me a girl. And if we're talking gendered stereotypes, I preferred action figures and rough-housing and swords most of all, and was conspicuously annoyed when people intentionally misgendered me (unintentionally was / is kinda neat).
When I was 8-9-ish, my grandpa tried to hide a doll I'd sleep with. This was quite upsetting. Were I 8-9-ish today, and anyone at school found out about these things, would I get the opposite treatment? ... And it's hard to imagine how I'd'veresponded. I think I was both aware enough of the absence of seriousgender identity concerns, and stubborn enough to say so bluntly, but I'm only, like, 75% ish confident in that. And that mostly because I haven't heard anyone who would be doing said hypothetical convincing sound like they'd have any idea how to be convincing to 8-9-ish me.
The especially frustrating part about this whole mess is that I've always wished I'd somehow dodged puberty ever since puberty. But I had to experience a good deal before I could really make that decision, after which it was far too late to do much about it. What's more, I get the sinking feeling that the neurological effects of puberty were relevant to my figuring this out, and to certain ... positive character development? things, and this was never just a physiological dysphoria. Negative character development throughout elementary school also hurt a lot when I became aware of it. As much as I deeply loath what has become of my body, I was at peak a-hole in the couple years before puberty. I like to think I could be reasoned into realizing this and trying to improve, even without getting mindflayed by hormones, but it doesn't seem at all likely that such would actually happen if all this were taking place today. Someone would say "Are you sure you're not a girl? Here: let's put off puberty while you think about it." And that would be it, and I'd probably be even more emotionally incontinent for lack of the trace amounts of prepubescent testosterone or whatever that enabled me to train resistance to crying over minor things.
This whole situation is just so frustrating! Even if I had a mental time-machine, it's not like I could go back to the 90s, chop off my testes, then hand them off to someone who could science up viable gametes just in case I found someone willing to be artificially insemenated by a permachild for some reason other than that I obviously brought the winning lotto numbers back with me. I can't Detective Conan myself smaller now and take advantage of The System™ without contributing to its misuse against children, the majority of whom I'd be quite shocked to discover are any better at resolving this stuff in time than I was. Oh, and the trans activists probably would hate me because it being age-related instead of gender-related pattern-matches to trolls who claim age dysphoria as an excuse for active paedophilia to tarnish trans people by association. (FWIW, I denounce said trolls.)
There really should be more options for helping children with dysphoria, whatever the type. There really should not be a creepy movement to sterilize children based on a short conversation. The information necessary to make a decision like that is not available to humans with our current level of knowledge and technology. As much as I might wish I'd accidentally sat on some dry ice when I was 10, I can't in good conscience support the policies that would have given me what I want when it would have been viable. When we get Medical Omega, maybe things could be different, but for now, I'm not sure there's anything to do for kids like me besides support after it's too late.
(Attempts to prove me wrong are very, very welcome.)
cae_jones
1yr ago
As I recall, both "Woke" and "Social Justice Warrior" originated as indonyms, and were dropped as soon as the Memedom realized their adversaries were using them as insults. The same could well be the case with these various disillusioned young male counterparts.
cae_jones
1yr ago
So I need to ship a package from the US to China, and a quick search leaves it unclear which if any services do so at present, what with the COVID policy shenanigans. And distinguishing shady from legit on the first page of results seems... like the sort of thing I should seek another opinion on.
So, what should I do to get this package sent?
cae_jones
1yr ago
I kinda feel like "adulting" looks suspiciously like the genesis of such terminology. And if I'm being pedantic, my high school health textbook in 2002 divided age into things like chronological age and social age, but those feel more like "biological sex" and "gender roles" rather than "sex" Vs "gender", so IDK.
So, I'm working on a game where an NPC is probably trans. I say probably, because I had the character's design and the mission they're part of and other interactions mostly worked out before realizing that it kinda made sense in context.
The context is a sort of pastoralist style Utopia sponsored by fully automated luxury space communism. Clarketech abounds, but the exact limits are only defined in so much as they are plot/gameplay-relevant. The antagonist is a bio-engineer who thinks that this civilization has gotten stuck in a local maximum, and is way more transhumanist than most people in the setting (most people the player interacts with, anyway). Oh, and he thinks that whole capitalism thing isn't quite so out-dated as everyone else, but he keeps his shady dealings with extragalactic warlords to himself.
The original idea for this sidestory was based around the idea that the boss's bio-engineered minions were scowering the region for the player's party, and this NPC happened to be the local misfit who first notices disturbances the local miniboss causes. As I expanded way more on the worldbuilding and backstories for other characters, it occurred to me that the boss would totally have offered body modification services to the people with the rarest issues, especially if he could learn how to improve on longevity-extending treatments in the process, and some of the other miniboss encounters fit perfectly with said minions keeping tabs on the boss's most unique clients. Since this NPC was established as having an unsure time fitting in locally, and just happens to live within sidequest distance of one of the miniboss encounters...
Actually, what made me realize it was when I noticed that the local species had sexual dimorphic qualities, and I accidentally hinted at a mismatch with this character, and all of the above pointed toward their being trans as an explanation. FWIW, the people of this world have feathers, with males having bigger, more flamboyant plumage. This NPC was supposed to be female, but I gave her a rooster-esque red streak without considering the implications (I was aiming for evoking the image of a ponytail). So, I figure her comb must be reduced, else it'd be dysphoria-triggering, but could still have distinct coloration, and she could still have the habit of compulsively smoothing it, especially when stressed. The clarketech is very likely strong enough to enable her to pass perfectly otherwise, but after the player finds the boss's former clients/victims near all the other minibosses, and the only things that stick out about this character is her awkward relations to her community and her nervous tick, people wanting to read into it could probably draw the conclusion.
... Maybe. If that can be improved, I'd love to hear suggestions as to how. I'm not super confident about it. But it accidentally fit perfectly, so eh.
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