cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
2d ago
I've been dreading this a bit too.
My middle daughter is 4 and has been insisting for a year now that she is a boy. That she doesn't like girls or playing with them and only wants to be with boys. We've mostly surrendered on the clothing front, we buy her boys clothes and shoes, but she still has long hair. And we certainly don't introduce her as a boy.
She has been in the same daycare most of her life, and they are not the kind of place that would encourage that sort of thing. The hispanic lady that runs the place talked to me about voting for Trump because of the things the left was doing to kids in school. The pre-k she is in right now is Christian oriented and less likely to pull any funny business on this topic. Our best guess for why she does this is that she had a really good friend at the daycare that was a little boy a year older than her, and she just wanted to emulate many things about him.
But she enters kindergarten at a public school next year.
I wish I had good advice for you. The one positive thing that might be going for me is that class sizes are large and she is likely to go unnoticed.
cjet79
2d ago
Choose your own adventure books exist, but I think that whole genre just fits way better with a game. Multiple ending options based on how you played just makes sense within a game.
Any stories that play off the actions of the player are going to be more powerful in game form. Bioshock is a good example here, but far from the only one in the genre. Dishonored is another one where choosing to be non-violent, or staying completely hidden will change minor details in the following levels.
cjet79
4d ago
I played that a little while back, definitely enjoyable game. Can't remember if I even got to all the biomes they had released at the time.
I might have eventually gotten a mod that allowed portaling metals. I remember travel just sucking up a bunch of my time in the game.
cjet79
4d ago
Is that the second book in that series, or the entire series? I only remember reading the first one. And it was about the time I put down all Brandon Sanderson novels. I think he executes decently well, but he also goes off a formula. Or maybe its the same formula every fantasy writer uses. But things became too predictable and I got hardcore into web novels instead.
cjet79
5d ago
Video game thread.
I played return to moria this past two weeks. It's a survival crafting game. Gameplay wise it is fairly standard for the genre. The setting of middle earth is fun. I'm not a massive LOTR nerd, so I'm sure I missed some subtleties.
There are some mechanics that definitely make the game better suited for co-op. I played it alone and felt like I was missing out. Storage sizes always felt too small, there were legendary gear items that you could only carry one of, and you could be picked up upon death by a comrade if you had one. I eventually downloaded a mod to fix the first two issues. It expanded storage and allowed carrying multiple legendary items.
Progression happens entirely through gear. And gear drops on death. Corpse runs were not as brutal as I feared. The game seemed to handle agro and grave placement in a way that helped corpse runs.
Resource collecting was generally pretty standard but sometimes I'd find myself making fun little mining platforms to get higher.
The map is procedurally generated, but it's more like pre-made rooms that are stuck together in an odd assortment rather than fully new terrain each time.
Navigation was tricky with the map not helping much except to provide general directions. I ended memorizing a lot of tunnel layouts in order to get where I needed to go.
Replayability felt low. I didn't want to totally start from scratch after getting used to all my awesome gear. The next update is supposedly adding NPCs for bases, I'll probably replay the game when that comes out.
cjet79
5d ago
Solid black, we have joked about wrapping it in caution tape to improve visibility.
cjet79
6d ago
Got so close to getting T-boned this morning. 4 way stop, I'd stopped, spotted a car to my right still headed to the intersection. I'm like cool I win. Start driving through the intersection. Car to my right blows through their stop sign. Is turning onto the road like I'm not already halfway through the intersection. Lay on my horn swerve to the left, narrowly dodge the car.
It happened 100 feet from my house, with my baby daughter in the back seat. Fucking asshole drivers, I might have ended up in jail today had he hit me. I am also starting to think that the minivan I was driving is cursed. It would have been the 4th accident in that vehicle in just 3 years of ownership. The other vehicle we've owned for 8 years has zero accidents.
cjet79
7d ago
Path of Ascension for space cultivation. It's not finished, but there are a few arcs that make for good stopping points.
Elder Cultivator has a kind old man as the main cultivator. Story eventually starts to drag, but I got like 1000 chapters out of it before I dropped it.
In racking my brain for other cultivation stories I've read and coming up blank. I'd say learning how to quit a story is a useful skill if you are gonna start reading cultivation stories. And not just quitting books you immediately didn't like, but quitting a story you've enjoyed for 800 chapters, but the last two hundred haven't been good and the trend is in the wrong direction.
cjet79
10d ago
I wouldn't say I purged it so much as never had it in the first place. Or at least haven't had it much as an adult. I have some vague recollections of jealousy from elementary school. Pretty sure puberty switched my priorities.
I thought most adults were similar. I guess that was typical mind fallacy.
There are a bunch of philosophies/religions that try to curb that jealousy. Marxism being a major exception that encourages everyone to embrace that jealousy, and tells them that it is fully correct.
There are large financial returns on embracing a search for the good, rather than simply trying to do better than a neighbor or friend. There are also social gains to be made in cutting off status competitions with friends.
cjet79
12d ago
This debate shakes out the same way every time. Amadan was willing to write the objections, so I'll not repeat them all.
I'll add that I see being slow on responding to news as a feature rather than a bug of the policy.
This is not a news website it's a discussion website, and it's a place for thinking. I'd prefer allowing people to digest the news elsewhere and then post here if they want to actually discuss a particular thing.
The poster earned a ban because I have explicitly told them in the past to not do this. I'm not in favor of unlimited "warnings" that have no teeth.
cjet79
12d ago
You know not to do this, I've warned you before about low effort top level posts. 1 day ban while the discussion shakes out.
cjet79
12d ago
There is some silliness here. The existence of a zero sum game at the top of a field doesn't mean everyone has to be involved.
Only one person can have the absolute best house. It's a zero sum game. And there can be an arms race / wealth race to own that house. But there is no limit on how many people can have an excellent house.
Zero sum competition seems to be the game in top end places like New York or San Francisco. But you can travel to any other metropolitan area, find a software or finance job at one of the many companies based in that city and be at the top end of middle class wealth in that city.
Competition for Ivy League schools can drive kids crazy, but a good state school is not hard to access.
I live in a good house, in a good neighborhood, in a good area, with good schools, and our family income is through good well paying jobs. None of these things in my life are the best. There are better houses / neighborhoods / schools / jobs / etc. But I'm happy at the current trade-off point.
I am continually confused by people that seem willing to burn all of their wealth and happiness to compete for the best in something. I often find that quality growth in a product or service is linear. And price growth is linear, except for the top end of the market where things go exponential.
cjet79
13d ago
Mafia is gonna Mafia. States are gonna State.
I think there was recently an assassination of an Indian political separatist on Canadian soil. Putin assassinated a journalist in the UK. The saudis cut up a journalist. The US just blew up a boat in international waters that was merely suspected of being a drug running boat.
These things don't surprise me too much. They are ugly incidents. But I get the sense that they are merely another item on the international negotiating table. Its possible that they happen in America too, but perhaps one of America's conditions for such things happening is that no one is allowed to know about it. The power dynamic between the two countries probably matters a lot in all cases.
I do admire the people that loudly protest these things and raise the cost of doing them for all countries. In that sense I agree with your post in general. You just also asked for personal feelings of the readers, and that is why I think you see a lot of shrugs and gestures at 'realpolitik'. Its hard to pay attention for too long and stay angry about these things constantly.
cjet79
14d ago
It wasn't enough effort, since you removed it so fast I removed the mod note as well.
cjet79
14d ago
Ownership is a form of social technology. An old one for sure.
But I guess that means I could consider communist nations attempts at controlling technology levels at a national level. They failed due to outside competition and a breakdown in the fact that the social technology they tried to get rid of was a load bearing part of modern society.
cjet79
15d ago
Slowing is one thing stopping is something different.
After all, if we have achieved at some a perfect or 'good enough' mix of physical and social technology, than getting further away from that point is bad. Driving fast or slow off a cliff doesn't make too much difference.
cjet79
15d ago
I'm surprised there haven't been more attempts to freeze a society as a given technological level. The Amish have done it. I think some Buddhist groups in Asia do it. Vows of poverty by monks in Catholicism sort of have a similar effect.
If any people in a particular time period feel like they are at an optimal balance of culture and technology, they could run a tech freeze. As long as they can shelter in a larger culture that will prevent invasions.
The fact that it happens so rarely leads me to believe that everyone has some nostalgia glasses on and believe they just missed the golden ages that were their childhood. Rarely is anyone satisfied with the current culture enough to attempt to lock it in place and preserve it. Or they are some combination of optimistic about the future and powerless in the present.
cjet79
16d ago
This is also a bad comment and would have earned you a ban had I seen it first.
cjet79
16d ago
This is mostly an attack on various people. Such things aren't explicitly banned, but they are heavily treading into waging the culture war. I was going to make this just a warning. But looking through your history its basically the only thing we warn/temp ban you about.
5 day ban. It will escalate quickly if see this again, we shouldn't have to ask you a half dozen times to follow a specific rule.
cjet79
18d ago
Spam posters are guaranteed one set of eyeballs on this site. At least that Russian guy asking about who owns the website seems to have given up. Or I just haven't been the first to spot him in a while.
I am generally against cancellations. But even during the height of the woke cancellations I feel like I remember some careful Republican criticisms of "its insane to cancel people for saying something that half the country believes". So I don't feel like their stance was ever fully principled free speech.
I do have one exception for cancellation: if you've cancelled others then you yourself become fair game. Jimmy Kimmel was fair game. Roseanne Barr, and apparently some band that was on the show were both things he was happy to cancel.
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