daguerrean
10mo ago
I think Chris Roberts (of Starcitizen infamy) got his start exactly this way as a high schooler funnily enough. Not sure if that counts for or against your point though
daguerrean
10mo ago
I predicted a major conflict INVOLVING the US would continue, start, or conclude in that period
A bold prediction to make considering it exhaustively covers literally every possibility
daguerrean
10mo ago
Why does a shorter development cycle mean that game developers in the past were better? I mean yea, I'm not sure any modern game developers could come up with fast inverse square root but I don't really follow the inner workings of modern games so maybe they are doing equally shocking things and I just don't know about it?
I do think there is something to be said for raw numbers of fights. A similar thing happened in baseball where basically every record based on sheer volume has some unbreakable record from 1910 when pitchers pitched complete games every day. This is undoubtedly largely a result of player pay, if your pitcher has a 300 million dollar contract you are going to treat him like a priceless artifact and handle him incredibly gently, you're never really going to want to push him to the absolute breaking point. When contracts were at most a few hundred thousand a year, yea you can ride him like freaking Secretariat until his UCL turns to dust. So I think there is some truth to the idea that the most resilient players today are probably being held back from achieving their true potential out of fear of injury. Nolan Ryan definitively shows that some humans are capable of throwing at modern speeds for a vastly higher volume of games than pitchers today ever approach.
daguerrean
10mo ago
When I read the first sentence I thought you were going an entirely different direction with that. Either way it’s based
daguerrean
10mo ago
Agreed, I think the anger at Aloy is often misidentified, even by the people that are angry themselves. She’s just a 5/10, and there should be a place in media for people that aren’t attractive, there’s really nothing objectionable about her in isolation. The issue is that she’s a product of a movement that doesn’t just seek to establish representation for unattractive women but also seeks to abolish representation of attractive women: see replacing Lara Croft.
daguerrean
10mo ago
1950s suburban nightmare
I am fascinated by this genre of "horror" (loosely described) having such a hold on women. I truly don't understand it. Don't Worry Darling, Revolutionary Road, Stepford Wives, Jeanne Dielman. To me it's reminiscent of a corresponding male genre that expresses existential horror at the idea of a boring office job (Fight Club, Office Space, The Matrix).
daguerrean
10mo ago
Israel is committing genocide in Gaza
You cannot seriously say that this view is anything like QAnon or Pizzagate. As Ben Garrison was saying, “crank” doesn’t just mean someone that’s wrong.
Someone claiming Israel is committing genocide might be guilty of using an overly expansive definition of genocide for motivated reasons, but there’s nothing crazy about the claim, there’s nothing detached from reality.
daguerrean
10mo ago
Youtube and Facebook and to some extent Instagram are weird that way. Moderation is obviously slightly woke but the commenter base is definitively anti-woke. Places like Reddit, 4chan, X have a more typical convergence of leadership and userbase.
People who seriously identify as left-wing would often dispute this. Many on the left see the Democrats as a right-wing party, and the mainstream media as centrist, liberal, centre-right, or something else other than left.
This is certainly true, but I think when Democrats are talking about this in the context of losing the election they literally believe that the Democrat-aligned media is lacking, not communist-aligned media. I see this all the time on Reddit.
I believe your average non-communist Democrat sees it this way. Republican-aligned media like Fox puts party support above all else. They put no value on truth, morality or fairness and just spew misinformation 24/7, anything to help Republicans. Meanwhile the NYT is primarily concerned with Truth, Justice and Objectivity. If this shakes out to favoring the Democrats that’s just because “reality has a liberal bias” and “it’s not politics just basic human decency”, the NYT only favors the Democrats by this convergence of their values but they would not lie, cheat or steal if it helped the Democrat cause. So the NYT doesn’t count as Democrat aligned in their mind
I’ve seen many Dems on reddit lamenting the whole “when they go low we go high” strategy and wishing they could fight dirty as they perceive Republicans are.
daguerrean
10mo ago
Maybe I get this impression just because I avoid leftist spaces like the plague, but it really does seem like the right is more inundated with obvious, low-quality grifters. I attribute this to the fact that Republicans have become more heavily dependent on the less educated, but also because a lack of established media orgs leads to grifters fulfilling the demand from an underserved market.
daguerrean
10mo ago
I think this is an unfairly low effort dismissal. I don't like all the people above, but they are thoughtful and making more of an effort at fairness than you suggest. Read Ymeskhout's if you haven't and look at things like Trump's post about AI crowds that were included in it. I understand the traditional Motte argument that Trump lies like a used car salesman and Democrats lie like lawyers and there is certainly some truth to that. And I agree that at the moment Democrat lies are more dangerous precisely because they have a veneer of respectability and acceptability by institutions. However, I don't think that changes the fact that Republicans really have become the party of choice for conspiracy theorists that have very little grounding in reality. It is a very particular kind of mindset that is a not insignificant portion of the electorate and it has become increasingly partisan in recent years particularly since Trump and doubly so since COVID.
daguerrean
10mo ago
Maybe Danny Casolaro? I don't have an opinion on his case but it's kind of the 'classic' of this genre imo
daguerrean
10mo ago
I generally believe in consumables theory, that you really can't go wrong with them and they will almost always be used. For the past few years I've often fallen back on a gift box of pastrami and pickles and such from Katz Deli. It is the kind of thing most people would never buy themselves but every man I have given it to greatly enjoyed it.
daguerrean
10mo ago
I remember there was a Motte survey a few years back (when on the subreddit), but I haven't seen one since unless I missed it. Do you think there would be any interest in a new one? Any questions you would like asked?
daguerrean
10mo ago
If I'd been born ten or even five years later, dollars to donuts I'd be calling myself Lilith right now.
I know this feeling too. At the end of high school, around 2008 I had a friend confide in me his feelings of gender dysphoria (although he didn't word it that way, being before the whole transgender trend) thinking I shared them. Of course I didn't, but he must have taken my autistic personality traits to signal it. I wonder if others, like say antifa members, occasionally look at Proud Boys and recognize in them a shadow version of themselves.
daguerrean
10mo ago
They rarely displayed overtly feminine behavior as young children, and their personalities run the entire gamut of the male distribution.
In my limited experience their personalities seem to not just be male, but hyper male. Like take for instance the prevalence of trannies in the speedrunning community, it is hard to think of a more hypermasculine activity than speedrunning. I don't mean masculine in some spiritual sense of idealized masculinity (masculinity of war, hunting, bravery, leadership etc) but in the empirical sense of percentage of partakers in the activity. The motte is similarly hypermasculine, so it doesn't surprise me we have a few AGP types such as yourself around here. But why do you think this is? Are you generally hypermasculine in your other interests and thought patterns?
I have always suspected that I am in the "at-risk for AGP" demographic, even though I've never felt it myself. I imagine that some AI classifier, upon taking stock of my job, my hobbies and even my writing style would probably say that I am male with the an unimaginably high degree of certainty. Job in software (probably 90% male), enjoys Paradox games (probably 99% male), main hobby is a collecting hobby (probably 90% male), participates on The Motte (probably 99% male)...I imagine these things are even more heavily male coded than things that stereotypically come to mind like UFC, hunting, Joe Rogan etc.
daguerrean
10mo ago
I just signed up (never really having used Twitter) to see for myself. Scrolling the default feed as a new user was mostly normie stuff, sports, pop culture and such, however with a heavy overrepresentation of ghetto black content. This was third and this was the fourth post on my feed. Two of the first ten posts were from conservative pro-Trump types and a third was from Elon himself, but it was not related to politics. Scrolling a bit further basically confirms that: 20% conservative, 20% ghetto, 60% normie pop culture/sports.
daguerrean
10mo ago
Bathroom 1: For men, trans women, trans men, and any iffy dykes who freak the chicks out. Bathroom 2: For feminine women
I feel like this is the unofficial rule for everything, or at least it should be in our intuition. Like the NBA is not the men's basketball league, it's the open basketball league and no women are good enough to play there. So we have 2 leagues, open (NBA) and women (WNBA). At my college there were two kinds of recruiting events for computer science majors, job fairs for all and job fairs for women only.
I think it was Aella that wrote about how passing was actually meaningfully important in the whole trans issue, and I have to agree. If a man can successfully pass as a woman then he should be allowed to use women's restroom, although it seems like saying we "allow" that is pretty meaningless in that case. If we can't tell that it's a man how could we stop him? To me this basically feels like the norm thirty years ago, kind of an unofficial don't ask don't tell restroom policy. If you look like an absolute freak then yes women should be able to scream and shout at you and summon security to harass you for an hour or so.
Edit: In a way it reminds me of this classic. I feel like they both come down to "know your place" and act accordingly. Now how do we codify that into law? I'm not sure how, but I'm not sure it needs to be.
daguerrean
10mo ago
I don't understand what the message is here? Yes I am blue tribe through and through no matter how racist and pro-White I may be. I am disgusted by the low class vulgarity and tastelessness of Republicans. I am aware that in light of the election Republicans seem more interested in being the party of the uneducated and the party of men than the party of Whites. But what am I supposed to do with this information?
daguerrean
10mo ago
Pro-Israel/Pro-Russia poster in the wild
I don't track individual poster opinion enough to say if any individual person fits this bill on the Motte, but that is close to the vibe of this place. The Motte is heavily Jewish and overwhelmingly pro-Israel outside of a few dedicated posters like SecureSignals that even the mods are palpably hostile to. The Motte isn't exactly pro-Russia but it is more willing to view the conflict with Mearsheimer-style nuance than normies, along with a dedicate subset of outright pro-Russia posters.
I take this as the Motte being largely composed of disaffected American blue-tribe contrarians. If the blue tribe/college standard is Palestine/Ukraine by virtue of being contrarians the Motte will naturally gravitate more towards Israel/Russia
daguerrean
10mo ago
But if you think NATO prestige is important, its a huge loss.
Why? I genuinely know very little about NATO so this question is sincere. Why would Finland and Sweden join if NATO is dead? Why would Ukraine losing discredit NATO when it wasn't even a member? It got a shitload of money just for being a proxy, presumably we would do much more for a legit member. Money can't guarantee victory but money is useful and people want money, why would that prospect not retain its attractiveness? If I offer to give any student at my local high school free SAT tutoring and a student I tutor gets a very low score does that completely discredit me and prove my tutoring was worthless? Not at all, at the end of the day he has to take the test and I can only do so much. The tutoring could remain an extraordinarily good deal for anyone willing to take it.
daguerrean
10mo ago
No, largely because Jewish people sympathetic to ethno-nationalism mostly live in Israel! Jewish Americans sympathetic to civic nationalism show loyalty to American ideals such as the Constitution.
There is a factual disagreement here that can be resolved: How common are influential Jews outside Israel that support Zionism but oppose White nationalism?
daguerrean
10mo ago
Your interlocutor really has a hilarious profile and photo, truly beyond parody. I sometimes wonder how people that seem to perfectly conform to every aspect of a certain stereotype mentally cope with it. "Disabled", they/them, "brat", asexual panromantic, Jewish, cat lady that enjoys "riding on public transit"
Can anyone think of any notable artworks produced by extremely online and transgressive subcultures like incels (but not limited to them)? Things like Negative XP. Ideally things with some artistic merit and not just meme value (like Elliot Roger's My Twisted World).
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