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
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
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
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
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
11mo 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
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
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
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.
cae_jones
9mo ago
So, when the US has bad cops caught doing bad things, we get tons of counterexamples of good cops doing their jobs correctly and professionally. When the British police get caught doing bad things, are their any popular counterexamples of the British police doing their jobs correctly and professionally?
Could easily be a bias thing based around my getting most of my good-cop-bad-cop news from themotte. Since American police code as red, and British police code as blue, that kinda makes sense, though even these days, we seem to have enough lefties around to point out when confirmation bias is painting a misleading picture. But I can't recall any instance of someone being positive toward the British police. Where are their defenders?
cae_jones
9mo ago
Come to think of it, might this be a viable strategy? Trump energizes the base, but is in prison, so his VP has to do most of the actual president stuff. So, they can run Trump for the devout Trumpists, knowing that they're practically running his VP candidate (presumably DeSantez).
cae_jones
8mo ago
Re: energy, I've become fond of interorbital kinetic exchanges, partly because they make the otherwise stupidly costly outer planets potentially profitable, but also because you're basically taking natural flywheels and converting them into power / propulsion / etc. Is it still hydroelectric if the water is contained in Uranian plastic dropped from an altitude of 20AU?
Luna tends to get treated as the stepping stone, and Mars the destination, but it seems more likely that Luna becomes a major center for industry/population, and Mars is the stepping stone to the rest of the system. At least Luna is close enough for a meaningful relationship with Earth.
If I may digress briefly, latest models of the history of the Solar System seem to find a significant role for most planets in the backstory to habitable Earth. The complex dance of the giants shaped the inner system in detail, and Venus dropped Theia onto the Earth to create the Moon. Conspicuously missing from all this, though, is Mercury, which also conspicuously is often relegated to an enormous materials depot in speculations on futurism. Now, the anthropic principal doesn't require that everything we see be an important aspect of our prolonged ability to see it, but if there were a simpler way, it would seem more likely that we'd be in that simpler system, so I can't but wonder at the anthropic implications of Solar System architecture that we've yet to discover.
cae_jones
8mo ago
Did I miss a comment somewhere, or is that article about removing a scene of two gay men forceably abducting a teenager,? That, ah, seems a bit more than horny gay guys mistaking straight guy for gay. I think the child abduction and presumed rape is the immoral part?
Apologies if I missed some comment somewhere that zooms out to what you said instead.
cae_jones
7mo ago
This. When 9/11 happened, it was abundantly clear to me that the hijackers were villains, fullstop. But it bothered me more when the Bush administration used every excuse in the book afterward to justify invading not one, but two countries, though neither seemed to hold up under scrutiny. Evil people doing evil is bad and tragic, but not that weird. The alleged good-guys turning into trigger-happy invaders, though, is almost like betrayal.
Please notice that I have not expressed any opinions on Israel Vs Palestine, here. Just citing an example of the explanation for disproportionate judgment.
cae_jones
6mo ago
I had no idea it was changing. I got up somewhere between 1 and 2, hopped on my computer at what I thought was 2:00AM, then the next I checked the time, it was nearly 2:00AM again. No notifications or anything; it was all done so quietly, I had to check the default calendar to confirm it was for DST.
Had I slept through the first 1:00AM entirely, I'd probably have completely failed to notice anything until someone said something.
cae_jones
5mo ago
As I recall, you rather dislike HPMoR, but this discussion reminds me of the one time it did make an argument in favor of deontology. ... in chapter 108, and I'm not sure if we have spoiler tags, here?
It's much easier to make a convincing-sounding argument to violate a rule, than to find a genuinely good and acceptable reason to violate the rule. Even profoundly intelligent people are vulnerable to deception, biases, temptations, etc, and that makes deontological injunctions a valid defense against those failure modes.
In my experience, the downside is that, when breaking a rule fails to have any noticeable negative consequences, it becomes easier to break the rule in the future. One might argue that this is a sign that said rule wasn't worth having in the first place, to which I must point out that the way the brain associates actions with outcomes can only predict so far ahead on incomplete information. See also: the crack and opioid epidemics, small lies that turn into a house of cards you're forced to live in, how the whole free love and hookup culture things turned out...
cae_jones
5mo ago
Would it be reasonable to summarize as "Deontology is consequentialism in advance"? It seems like the point is that, come time for decision-making, rationalizing a suboptimal decision is easier than you'd expect, so it's better to have the decision already set. The downside being that genuinely out-of-context problems might return garbage when put through Deontological checks, but it's also easy to convince yourself something is an OOCP when it isn't, too...
cae_jones
5mo ago
I'm having a hard time deciding what a reasonable ban duration for drunkposting on a holiday should be. I keep defaulting to 1 day, but that only functions like throwing someone in the drunktank until they're sober, and that only works if you catch them in time. OTOH, more than 3d feels excessive, unless there's an existing pattern. But in this case, 4d would keep them in the drunktank until the next thread... Ugh, it's good I'm not a mod.
cae_jones
5mo ago
Hyperbolic use of "literally" when the context doesn't make it obvious leaves me feeling like I must correct the record, lest someone take it exactly as literally as written.
When I was 12, 13, and 3/4 of 14, I:
- Had gone through puberty.
- Had gone through (pathetic and nearly useless) sex ed.
- Had never encountered, searched for, or meaningfully considered searching for porn.
- To the extent that I had any awareness of shame/pride cultures surrounding sexuality, it was less about signalling experience, and more about signalling heterosexuality, under threat of being called gay. I hated this and refused to participate as expected, and thus perished my social life (what little there was, anyway).
- Was annoyed by how much my peers (many of whom seemed to get to puberty 2 or 3 years later than me) took to making everything about sex.
- Did not masturbate. TBH, I misunderstood what the word meant, and thought it was specifically referring to autofelatio. (Yes, the physical functionality was there. First nocturnal emission was around 2.5-3 months after 12th birthday. I remember when, event-wise, but not the precise date.)
- Actually obtaining sex or sexual release was not actually on my mind much? I'm not sure if I can clerify this one without getting more detailed than I'd like.
- To be clear, no, my lack of masturbating at this time did not fall into the exceptions listed in the OP. I wasn't "resisting"; it just straight-up wasn't something in possibility space, so far as "things to do when bored and alone" were concerned.
I can see how that "have I mentioned I'm heterosexual today, and that y're totally a gay skank?" culture seems explanation enough for why middle school boys would over-report sexual experience, "literally all of them"? Did I misinterpret this?
cae_jones
5mo ago
[citation needed]
I did just learn that it only takes one sentence and a slight amount of context to make me utterly despise a total stranger, so that's ... worrying.
... You're the "you hate it because it's true" type, aren't you?
I hate it because it's evil. True things can be evil, in which case, reallity and we fight until something changes. Reallity has a rather stronger W/L ratio than hunans in general, much less this particular human, and yet, somehow, I'm still not surrendering.
And now I need to find a way to express why I said it's evil. While I generally prefer equality to status hierarchies, I'm not so sure I find hierarchies in general evil. So somewhere between amoral hierarchies and dick-up-your-ass, the problem manifests.
cae_jones
5mo ago
Fair. I do think there is a preferable middleground between Communism and law of the Jungle, but finding it without painting the planet red has proven challenging.
cae_jones
5mo ago
Re: Kwanzaa, I finally met someone who celebrates it instead of Christmas last year. Otherwise, my only exposure was Nickelodeon ads for the Rugrats Kwanzaa special (which I somehow never managed to catch), and TFS throwing in a mention into one of their holiday videos.
Speaking of Rugrats, that's also the majority of my education on Hanukkah. Never did get the origin of the potato pancakes thing, since potatos are not a crop I'd generally associate with Iron Age Israel. Something to do with a prohibition on leavened bread?
But the Rugrats Hanukkah special did make Hanukkah out to be a bigger deal than Passover, which in hindsight is kinda clearly coming from the present, given that the Passover special focused primarily on the Exodus story, while the Hanukkah special spent more time on the characters, while the backstory got like two short scenes. (But Grandpa Boris's narration on the finale was oddly intense and sincere for a NickToon, IIRC.)
Oh, and in college one year, a Jewish student taught his friend group how to play Dreidel, and we also watched the original Godzilla Vs Mothra, so that was fun I guess.
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.
More options
Context Copy link