comicsansstein
No bio...
User ID: 582
comicsansstein
27d ago
Parentheses are rot13.
That thread did indeed prompt this question. I wondered if having no preconceived notions of what a (Freen Natry) is would make the people less likely to be stuck on an incorrect answer. I tried to give all the info a (Zntvp cynlre) would have, without tipping the hand too hard. I may have overcomplicated things.
comicsansstein
28d ago
A puzzle, transformed from being about [redacted] to being about ice cream.
There is a famous gelateria in town, and the owners are rather insistent about only pairing specific toppings with specific ice cream flavors. Their 'old reliable' combination is whipped cream and chocolate chips paired with vanilla. You are aware of the combo, to the point of when somebody mentions choc chips and whipped cream you automatically think about vanilla ice cream.
You know that choc chips are also commonly paired with mint ice cream. They are also less commonly paired with caramel and strawberry flavors, although the latter only in some more specific combinations.
You know that whipped cream is sometimes paired with coffee flavor.
You are applying for an apprenticeship, and have to pass a test so that you won't break the flavor pairing rules. Among the questions, there is the following:
(Below, "flavor" refers to ice cream flavor, not the toppings)
We try to avoid making two-flavor combos where the dessert could be done as a single flavor in one of the two flavors. Given that, suppose you have a two-flavor dessert with chocolate chips and whipped cream (and no other toppings). What of the following flavor combinations would be the best choice for this dessert?
a. vanilla-mint
b. vanilla-caramel
c. coffee-vanilla
d. mint-caramel
e. caramel-coffee
I think that when presented outside the context of [redacted], the answer is obvious, but I want to make sure ;) I'll let you know what this is about in a day or two
comicsansstein
1mo ago
The hypothesis I've heard from my friend who watched it is that the showrunners wanted to make a Mass Effect show, but failed to get the licence, so they retooled as little as possible to (barely) fit Halo lore.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
A longtime friend living abroad slowly ghosted everyone from a friend group, with me being probably the last one. I had a recurring dream about meeting her again, which led to disappointment after waking up. After 3 or 4 instances of that, eventually I had a semi-lucid one when I suddenly went "Huh, I thing this is another dream. If it's not, tell me something that happened during all that time that I wouldn't be able to otherwise know." She just looked at me awkwardly and apologetically, and then I woke up. Haven't had a lucid dream other than that one.
(We're in contact again, in case you're wondering).
comicsansstein
1mo ago
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That it's a term that probably has a more narrow formal definition, but has been watered down to being thrown willy-nilly by people in /r/relationshipadvice and similar places, like "gaslighting" or "emotional labor"
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I've learned about in back in 2007 from the Bioshock previews, which coincided with Fountainhead and Atlas getting Polish editions in 2008 or 9 (there probably were some in the 90s, but with small print runs and niche). I've read the former, but not the latter. Which leads us to...
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I guess whatever the fuck Dominique and Roark had going on can be described as codependency if you squint? And considering that our autistic (cmon, can it be any more obvious with the fixation on trains?) anti-bolshevik queen modeled her characters after her... inclinations, there's probably some real life subtext here which I'm not familiar with.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
A few months ago, I've heard rumors about Chinese fishing fleets that hover near the edge of international waters and terribly overfish not to actually obtain food, but to intentionally crash ecosystems and harm other countries' economy. Is there any substance to those, or is it just another thing that someone made up, probably originating on /pol/?
comicsansstein
1mo ago
If you don't copy and archive everything some of the things you remember reading will succumb to link rot.
If you do copy and archive everything, some people will pull a Regina George and ask why are you so obsessed about the subject, indicating that you caring too much should mean that they should win by fiat. Most normies are close to this, therefore I often can't bring myself to bother with the cataloguing.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
My engagement ring was an armillary sphere (much like this one, only with a gemstone), which had a disadvantage of being impossible to resize. I had to be extra careful when picking the size, so after some back and forth with the jeweler he sent me a few measuring bands that he uses (turns out that much like shoe sizes, the actual dimensions of the "same" size can vary slightly depending on the vendor). That left me no choice but to present them to my now-wife openly, so she new that a proposal was coming, eventually. In the end, it was a good outcome because she tends to get overwhelmed when presented with sudden situations and that setup enabled her to have just the right level of surprise :)
Because the engagement ring is elaborate, for the wedding rings we decided on a simple design.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
I can't hear you over the sound of my novelty suit :V
(The sound is ゴゴゴゴ )
comicsansstein
1mo ago
I'm highly interested in (a copy of) that reddit post, if you can recall any further details about it.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
On the other hand, people who are the furthest to the other side are often very antinatalist, which should have a moderating effect over the generations. But it's hard to speculate, the current demographic transition is literally unprecedented in the world's history.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
Babel by Rebecca Kuang, and boy oh boy is reading contemporary SFF a tiresome experience. Both the characters and the footnotes are constantly filibustering about colonialism and white people. Say what you will about Nora Jemisin, at least her anvilicious books didn't sacrifice worldbuilding for the anvils. Mostly.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
Did anyone ever ran that study controlling for other mental issues, which iirc are highly comorbid?
comicsansstein
1mo ago
I think it's because everyone just does less. People used to be travelers, craftsmen, soldiers before they were writers, and the decades of life's experience flowed into their work. Nowadays people sit passively browsing information for hours on end, and base their writing on other books they have read, one more layer removed from reality.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
If the community picks out one specific woman [...] and decides to make a hate circle around her, publish her home address and start SWATing her residence, make hundreds of hour-long hate videos directed at her with lots of focus on her appearance and personal life, build a mythology around her supposed criminal activities and personal failings, send mountains of rape and death threats, etc.
But enough about JK Rowling!
To make myself clear: I was there, David. I was refreshing the threads on /r/TumblrInAction back in 2014, seeing the TFYC game jam fall apart months before the whole situation exploded after Eron's post, browsing and saving all the screenshot compilations. And much of what you allege is just that, allegiations. Strangely left little to no pixel trail. One specific extant thing I remember that could be treated as harassing was Rich Kyanka's review of Revolution 60. (Well, extant in the form of screenshots, the review itself has been removed from steam it seems).
There was probably a nonzero amount of threats, yes. Everyone gets those. I get anon death threats on tumblr once every few weeks, and I don't even post that much!
And if your argument to the latter is that it's bad and nobody should get those - don't. I very much prefer the internet in which I get an occasional hate mail to the one in which such a thing is infrastructurally impossible, because it would have to look much more like the Chinese internet. A site like the one we're on would be illegal/impossible/dangerous to host, for one.
(And if the argument to that is that my preferences aren't universal and we should have accommodations for people who want a controlled equilibrium rather than a free-for-all equilibrium, then of course we should! Facebooks and Linkedins for the normies on one end, SA, chans and niche subreddits on the other! The thing is, van Valkenburg herself spoke about frequenting Something Awful, so I find it wildly implausible that she was unprepared to handle some amount of heat. Or is that too mythology-building?)
But, arguendo, if the amount of insults that you're insinuating is true, this seems largely comparable to the 24/7 firehose of junk that's been directed at Rowling for the past five or so years. She has the courtesy to sometimes provide screenshots and quote tweets of those, even. I know that UK has some pretty strict laws about speech, so that probably reins in her domestic antifans a little. But other than that, nobody cares. There are no sympathetic articles, no wikipedia articles about the phenomenon. Why is it that some women are more equal than others?
comicsansstein
1mo ago
You know what we didn't have in a good while? A proper gamer drama.
All the actors from the past decade are basically defunct: Sarkeesian largely ceased publishing after the parted ways with McIntosh (my long-standing belief is that he was the brains behind the operation, and she alone just couldn't make enough quality material to stay relevant), Zoe van Valkenburg's last claim to relevance was an accusation against another of her exes in 2019, resulting in his suicide soon after. Youtube continues to steal lunch money from written articles about games, so Polygon and Kotaku are shells of their former selves. Vice's Waypoint has come and gone, and the only thing of note they did was having to apologize after posting a 9S forcefem fanfiction on main.
There has been some occasional flareups here and there, but nothing that could possibly rise to the 2014's heights of in(s)anity. Dare I say... until now?
You probably haven't heard of Sweet Baby Inc.. It's a "narrative consulting" company that specializes in retooling the game's scripts to better represent historically underrepresented groups. Notable releases with which they worked in the past few years include God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2 and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. For those of you who don't play often, the former two were generally favorably received, while the latter was a critical and commercial bomb that was dead in the water for years before its launch and probably killed the development studio.
The broader public (by which I mean the narrow, extremely online subset of the fandom) learned about its existence some time last year. People have been coming up with some wild conjectures about what exactly SBI's involvement was with those games. Like for example many western AAA titles in recent years struggle with modeling female faces for some reason, and the in-game models look uncanny valley-ish and quite unlike the people they're modeled after, and the conspiracy-inclined are saying that the characters are deliberately made ugly to challenge the patriarchal standards, or something. I am of two minds - most of the examples usually provided seem to be deliberately taken in-between frames, but still it's a bit weird how Japanese devs like Capcom, Platinum or Kojima Studios don't have those issues.
But let's put aside speculation about technical issues and focus on what is SBI's department: writing. Well, thing are not looking so good there either:
- Jon Stewart gets called "one of the good ones" with some bizarre anti-cop writing. I think it's written in-character from Harley's perspective, but still.
- Most of the (mind-controlled, hance they're the bad guys in the game) Justice League die pathetic deaths, in one case almost getting literally pissed on. But somehow Wonder Woman is immune to Brainiac's brainwashing and gets to have a dignified, dramatic moment, at least comparably.
- Also WW: her society is brought up as superior to ours, having solved issues such as toxic masculinity.
- And then there's the case of Miles Morales having wrong country's flag in his home. Representation!
Oh, and as you probably expect at this point, SBI's members have been occasionally seen on twitter gloating about how the hold white male gamers in contempt. I've given up twitter and tumblr for Lent, so I won't be providing specific examples here, sorry.
A few days ago, a steam curator was created listing all the games that have SBI's involvement as "not recommended". The situation is played out predictably: some employees claimed harassment, the steam group got Streisand Effect'd and grew to 200k over the last two days, it has been mass reported, people are trolling in the fora claiming to have insider info, the forum got wiped... Kotaku has written an article about it, the article's author claims that you can't be racist against white people. It's all 2012-2015 discourse frozen in amber, time is a flat circle. The only difference now is that because it's Musk's twitter, the statement gets stamped with a community note. Contrary to what I wrote at the beginning, it'll probably blow over in a few days, but I decided to do a writeup just in case.
Myself, I haven't bought a western AAA game since 2017, and I wish all of you the same.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
Years ago, I mentioned to a friend of mine that one of the advantages of living in a country that's 98,5% monoethnic (and with most of the 1,5% being virtually indistinguishable) is that cultural tastes don't break down along ethnic lines (as the latter don't exist) and so I can safely dislike whatever the fuck I want without people trying to tar me as a racist. I still stand by that opinion.
I disliked Peja and Liroy and what-have-you back when I was a teenager, and judging from what I hear on the radio when I go to the barber, the condition of Polish hiphop has only gotten worse in the next 20 years. The beats are slower and more repetitive, the lyrics are uninspired and more repetitive, and it's hard to treat boys two thirds my age rapping about their gangsta exploits when the only actual dealer I know is a deeply pathetic person.
Saying that contemporary pop owes its style to hiphop may be a bit of an own goal, as I haven't heard a pop song released in the past decade that I would call "good". There are some passable ones i.e. I won't wince when I hear them on the radio, but my threshold for "good" is that I would like to listen to them on my own, and the last album to clear that bar was Gaga's Artpop, so 2013. There's nothing released that's catchy on the level of Song 2 or Rockafeller Skank. There are even no popstars - Taylor is the last remaining one, and this is why her fanbase is so psychotic sometimes. In better times, all this fan energy would be diffused between multiple artists.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
Yeah, that one
comicsansstein
1mo ago
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Echoing my question buried deep in the thread: can anyone recommend a good historical source to read up on the AIDS crisis, that's less opinionated than the Salo forum?
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Has anyone here ever had an experience with hiring a private detective? Is they way they are portrayed in the movies or books pure fiction?
comicsansstein
1mo ago
The trick is to spend a lot of time theorycrafting outlandish ideas, so that when somebody asks an out-there question you have a ready fully baked take instead of coming up with one on the spot. The downside is that it's slowly making you insane and unable to carry a normal political conversation because you jump to faraway conclusions ;)
comicsansstein
1mo ago
Yep, that's the one. By the way, if anyone has a better, more mainstream source to read up on the history of AIDS crisis, I'm all ears.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
Such a technology would be a perfect wedge for the trans community as it exists today. It would split the people who just want to have a different body and then move on with their lives from the people who want to always and forever be a markedly different counterculture. The latter would have to resort some nonbinary or fully posthuman neoforms to keep their unique status. Think Gibson's Tessier-Ashpool, Herbert's Harkonnen, Fading Suns' Decados, Lem's 21st Journey of Ijon Tichy. They wouldn't have existing category of people to base their status claims on. I love it.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
I distinctly remember seeing a twitter thread in which a gay relationship advisor (that's bracketed (g (r a)), not ((g r) a), mind you ;) ) wrote that the religious were right, it was a slippery slope, and it's a good thing that it was. @TracingWoodgrains, help me out, I remember you conversing with that guy.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
When I was much younger, the transformation of Poland into a free market democracy and reactions to it by the communist party remnants (turned social democrats) was quite fresh in my memory. I thought that leftists hate Reagan because he presided over the victory of capitalist America over the communist vision of the world.
Then I got fluent in English language and eventually American politics, and learned about many policies of Reagan that were quite disastrous, like kicking The War On Drugs up a notch. I thought then that leftists hate Reagan because he gutted the welfare state, broke a major strike (air controllers) and left the gays out to die.
These days I think that many of the things that Reagan was blamed for were inevitable, or rather that they were symptoms of larger trends not influenced that much by the presidency - that stagflation was the result of forsaking atom, and so the American civilization's capacity to generate energy stopped growing (I don't remember the details, but I remember seeing a group of charts that suggested that energy prices and capacity over the centuries are the answer to "why did everything started going to hell in the 70s"). And after reading the Salo thread, I don't believe that a Dem president would make a difference w/r/t AIDS - the public sympathy just wasn't there yet for this to get major funding, that required decades of positive propaganda. No funding means that PrEP isn't developed, which means that mostly nothing can be done.
(The viable solution would be to go full authoritarian and shut down the bathhouses, but no American president would do that. I think that for example in the USSR less gays per capita died of AIDS, mostly because homosexuality was much more seriously persecuted and so they had, ahem, less opportunities to get infected. That's some heavy duty tragic irony.)
Also, seeing people talk about Late Stage Capitalism I'm kinda back to thinking that many leftists do in fact have unprocessed grief over the collapse of the USSR and a miserable failure of their imagined future. Mark Fischer pretty much made an entire sub-school of thought out of that grief. And so they hate Reagan because he is the face of the triumph over their future.
For the record, I think Haley would be a much worse president for everyone involved. She exemplifies the GOP at its worst - giving absolutely nothing to their constituents except for tax breaks to the business, constantly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory when facing off against Dems on cultural issues, and war adventurism in the middle east for the hell of it.
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