erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
25d ago
I've been getting back into Magic: The Gathering Arena (as recommended by Mai la dreapta). I started out playing an upgraded version of "Goblins Everywhere!" (original upgrade, updated upgrade) in Standard, but when it stopped being legal the deck was a little too underpowered for Historic, so I now run that deck in Pioneer and play "Historic Rakdos Goblins – Modern Horizons 3" (guide) on Historic instead. I don't play Standard anymore because keeping up with the constantly changing cards is a pain in the ass.
Fun fact: To differentiate between all three versions of the "Goblins Everywhere!" deck, I left the original alone, I called the original upgrade "Goblins Everywhere!!" and gave it the image of Faceless Haven, then called the updated upgrade "Goblins Everywhere!!!" and gave it the image of Battle Cry Goblin.
You might as well put blinders on the kids to prepare them for the fact many of them will develop vision problems as they get older, and force them to wear fatsuits to get them ready for the obesity many of them will settle into as their metabolism slows, and steal their lunch money to train them for taxes, and...
"Adult life sucks, so we should make life for children suck to prepare them for it" is such an insanely negative-sum, anti-child view that I am filled with shock and outrage every time it comes up. It's like you don't remember what it was like to be a kid, because you don't treat children like people.
From "Book Review: The Cult Of Smart" by Scott Alexander:
School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the "Burrito Test" - if a place won't let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it's an institution. Doesn't matter if the name is "Center For Flourishing" or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs - if it doesn't pass the Burrito Test, it's an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.
I don't like actual prisons, the ones for criminals, but I will say this for them - people keep them around because they honestly believe they prevent crime. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn't prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we'd have "fewer middle-aged people on the streets" and "fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses", then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT FREDDIE F@!KING DEBOER AND HIS CULT OF F#$KING SMART.
I sometimes sit in on child psychiatrists' case conferences, and I want to scream at them. There's the kid who locks herself in the bathroom every morning so her parents can't drag her to child prison, and her parents stand outside the bathroom door to yell at her for hours until she finally gives in and goes, and everyone is trying to medicate her or figure out how to remove the bathroom locks, and THEY ARE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM. There are all the kids who had bedwetting or awful depression or constant panic attacks, and then as soon as the coronavirus caused the child prisons to shut down the kids mysteriously became instantly better. I have heard stories of kids bullied to the point where it would be unfair not to call it torture, and the child prisons respond according to Procedures which look very good on paper and hit all the right We-Are-Taking-This-Seriously buzzwords but somehow never result in the kids not being tortured every day, and if the kids' parents were to stop bringing them to child prison every day to get tortured anew the cops would haul those parents to jail, and sometimes the only solution is the parents to switch them to the charter schools THAT FREDDIE DEBOER WANTS TO SHUT DOWN.
I see people on Twitter and Reddit post their stories from child prison, all of which they treat like it's perfectly normal. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development. You might object that they can run at home, but of course teachers assign three hours of homework a day despite ample evidence that homework does not help learning. Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development.
School forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving, and psychologically tortured in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse. The only possible justification for this is that it achieves some kind of profound social benefit like eliminating poverty. If it doesn't, you might as well replace it with something less traumatizing, like child labor. The kid will still have to spend eight hours of their day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"! I have worked as a medical resident, widely considered one of the most horrifying and abusive jobs it is possible to take in a First World country. I can say with absolute confidence that I would gladly do another four years of residency if the only alternative was another four years of high school.
If I have children, I hope to be able to homeschool them. But if I can't homeschool them, I am incredibly grateful that the option exists to send them to a charter school that might not have all of these problems. I'm not as impressed with Montessori schools as some of my friends are, but at least as far as I can tell they let kids wander around free-range, and don't make them use bathroom passes. DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time.
When I try to keep a cooler head about all of this, I understand that Freddie DeBoer doesn't want this. He is not a fan of freezing-cold classrooms or sleep deprivation or bullying or bathroom passes. In fact, he will probably blame all of these on the "neoliberal reformers" (although I went to school before most of the neoliberal reforms started, and I saw it all). He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. In fact, he does say that. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it's possible for anything to be.
I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!
And from "Chattel Childhood: and the way we treat children as property" by Aella:
In response to my childhood post, many people responded by saying homeschooling should be illegal.
But homeschooling was probably the best part about my childhood, because it allowed me freedom. I had to do a few hours of schoolwork in the morning from various books, at my own pace - and then I had the rest of the time to do whatever I wanted (so long as it wasn’t sinful and I wasn’t at the ass end of the funnel).
I consider my childhood to be, in many ways, obviously better than most other kids’ childhoods - they had to go to school. I only had my agency violated some of the time, but they had theirs systemically violated for a minimum of seven hours of the day, and realistically probably more than that. Sure - mine hurt worse physically, but that was temporary - theirs did much more permanent damage to their relationship with learning.
When I was fourteen, I was extremely well behaved, and so my parents tried (briefly) sending me to public school. I had massive culture shock. The kids’ humor felt regressive, I was horrified by everyone using bad words - but most of all, I was shocked by the amount of time wasted.
I would spend all day at school and learn as much as I would have learned in an hour at home. It was tedious. I had to be at certain rooms at certain times, I had to sit in a single spot and stare at a teacher who took a while to get going with the lesson, and then delivered the lesson slowly, and then we were made to leave. Rinse and repeat. And after I got home, I had to do more homework, most of which I wasn’t interested in. I couldn’t believe it, it felt like I was watching a TV show made out of entirely filler episodes.
I had much less life in me during my time at public school, because they had taken my time away from me. I had less attention and energy to devote to stuff I cared about.
When I first got out of being homeschooled, I ended up in a group house with open, smart people who’d gone to public school. It was an amusing point of difference between us that I didn’t “think learning was uncool”. They explained to me that in the normal world, trying to learn stuff about the world was actually pretty low status. This was mindblowing to me. It felt like someone was telling me that listening to music or enjoying a beautiful sunset was embarrassing.
I feel like I’m in absolute crazytown that everyone seems to think the school system is okay. You’re pouring the most vivid years of someone’s life into the fucking drain, forcing them to sit and wait and stare at walls and spend their attention focusing on stuff that most of them don’t care about at all, and will barely remember afterwards. This is how you treat property, not people.
I am extremely triggered by the way everyone treats kids. It’s upsetting to me that people get mad at my childhood, but aren’t near equally as mad at everyone else’s. You’re mad at the wrong thing!
Every culture throughout history has justified the abuse of treating their children as property by arguing this is good for them and good for civilization. Kids )need_ to learn this stuff to be functioning members of society! It’s good to learn discipline! You can’t have kids just sitting around playing video games all day! Not everyone is self-directed autodidacts!
Sure, I know that argument. But hopefully if my parents had said to you “do you expect her to learn good morals if we spare the rod?” you would have said “have you even tried other methods?”
If you were trying to get an adult to learn how to do something without being able to resort to using physical force, how would you do it? Maybe you would find something they’re interested in and show how learning a specific skill would let them accomplish what they wanted. Maybe you’d point out how their coolest friends who they respect are pretty good this skill. Or maybe you wouldn’t try at all - do they actually need to learn how to do that thing? I personally failed to learn a bunch of stuff as a homeschooler, but simply went and learned it as an adult when I needed to know it in order to achieve a goal.
I’m not sure many people have ever figured out what it means to learn at all, because the thing they’re doing in school is very rarely it. Everyone seems to have fooled themselves into thinking that school is about learning. But half of the skill of learning is knowing how to be curious! Schools force facts down incurious throats; if you grow up in a world where the thing they call “learning” is enacted upon you under the implicit threat of violence, completely independent of your will, then you will never learn how to weaponize your own will into the true Learning.
I feel like an alien, having traveled down to planet earth and found that society just does this and thinks it’s normal, and I am personally horrified but gently going ‘are you sure this is ok’ to people who insist that no, this was necessary and they will happily do it to their own children. On a planet made out of Aellas, any one of you who attended public school could go on the talk shows and discuss your traumatic upbringing where your entire childhood was wasted away into systematic damage to your curiosity. You’d get massive sympathy from the audience and you could go on a book tour and they’d make a dramatic tragic biopic about your life. On a planet made out of Aellas, you’d need therapy.
When I was very young, I remember adults treating me like I wasn’t a person, but this didn’t upset me quite as much as the fact that no adult seemed to remember what it was like to be a kid, or else they certainly would have taken my feelings much more seriously, like they did for other adults.
I was terrified that I, too, would one day grow up and forget what it was like to be a child, and would also stop taking other children seriously. So I swore to myself I wouldn’t forget - I chose the phrase “Don’t forget, I’m a person!” and deliberately sent it up the chain across my older selves by regularly meditating on the phrase and the importance with which it was carried. I’m an adult now, but I have not forgotten what it was like to be a child.
I have been offered fake marriage for citizenship several times (either for money or to help out my cousins), but never true marriage. I have always refused, because I wanted to keep the option open of marrying a mail-order bride for real.
There is homework and then there is homework. On one end of the spectrum, you have problem sets designed to help you master algorithms. On the other end, you have things like projects, which Scott correctly defines as "take this subject you already understand, a few sheets of construction paper, scissors, and a computer program such as PowerPoint, and combine them in whatever random way you want as long as it takes a minimum of six hours of time". And there are plenty of those in high school.
In fact, Robin Hanson has a post about how only math homework helps. It probably generalizes to other math-like subjects, like physics and compsci. But it does not justify the three hours of homework a day that kids receive from all their subjects combined.
And the communists had equally impressive-sounding arguments for why Marxism would work. And the Soviets were doing everything humanly possible to hide their failures. And 1949 was before the Great Leap Forward. And...
It obviously wasn't impossible to realize by then communism would fail; Hayek and Mises did. But castigating Einstein for not realizing it, when economics was not even his field... seems a bit harsh? Humans don't have ten years to consider each bit of evidence. Scott has admitted that he would have probably been a communist if he had been alive at the turn of the century (I can't find the exact tumblr post, but this one gestures at the same general direction), and I would have probably been one too if I had not come of age in the 21st century with all the evidence available to beat me over head.
From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter 108:
It is only by harsh experience that we learn which principles take priority over which other principles; as mere words they all sound equally persuasive.
(But as for the people who have access that evidence and still choose to be socialists, there is no hope.)
erwgv3g34
27d ago
Back in the day you could work a factory job that sucks, have a still skinny wife, and pump out a couple kids in a 1500 sq ft house. You can still pull that off if you are Hispanic.
Latino here. I did not know that I got a +2 racial bonus to TFR. How can I unlock this power?
erwgv3g34
27d ago
Not with the minimum wage, housing regulations, mandatory health insurance, AI, etc.
erwgv3g34
28d ago
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
This new Irorian song is a total banger. Very inspirational. "You don't have problems, you have skill issues", indeed.
Link to the glowfic, but you need an account to read it.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
Hard choice. The Dark Knight, Kick-Ass, and Mask of the Phantasm are all excellent in their own ways.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
Afghanistan, maybe; no president could have gotten away with not retaliating. But Iraq? No, that was an unforced error; a target of political opportunity.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
He could also have shot to wound
This is a stupid Hollywood meme, like silencers (which are in the real world used to protect your hearing, but get banned because normies watching movies think they literally make guns silent). Nobody in the firearms community teaches that, for multiple reasons:
- it's much harder to hit a limb than a torso
- it's much easier to hit bystanders
- any wound can be fatal if you hit a vein
- the fastest way to stop a threat is to empty a magazine into the center of mass
- you should only be shooting if you are afraid for your life
- the legal consequences are the same
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
This commercial made me seriously consider voting for DeSantis; best political ad I have seen since "Casey", also featuring Ron ("Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you" is overrated). But he dropped out before the Florida primary, so it was a moot point.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
But you're not going to see a Fifty Shades of Gray For Men make the front pages, nor will some random male-focused shipper fanfic smutty fanfic get a full film
Funny you should say it like that, since Fifty Shades of Grey is LITERALLY a Twilight fanfic called Master of the Universe with the names changed.
I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror. Damn my hair, it just won't behave, and damn Rose for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal. I have tried to brush my hair into submission but it's not toeing the line. I must learn not to sleep with it wet. I recite this five times as a mantra whilst I try, once more, with the brush. I give up. The only thing I can do is restrain it, tightly, in a ponytail and hope that I look reasonably presentable.
Rose is my roommate and she has chosen, okay, that's a bit unfair, because choice has had nothing to do with it, but she has the flu and as such cannot do the interview she's arranged with some mega industrialist for the student newspaper. So I have been volunteered. I have final exams to cram for, one essay to finish and I am supposed to be working this afternoon, but no - today - I have to head into downtown Seattle and meet the enigmatic CEO of Cullen Enterprise Holdings, Inc. Allegedly he‘s some exceptional tycoon who is a major benefactor of our University and his time is extraordinarily precious... much more precious than mine -and he‘s granted Rose an interview... a real coup she tells me... Damn her extra-curricular activities.
I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror. Damn my hair – it just won’t behave, and damn Katherine Kavanagh for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal. I should be studying for my final exams, which are next week, yet here I am trying to brush my hair into submission. I must not sleep with it wet. I must not sleep with it wet. Reciting this mantra several times, I attempt, once more, to bring it under control with the brush. I roll my eyes in exasperation and gaze at the pale, brown-haired girl with blue eyes too big for her face staring back at me, and give up. My only option is to restrain my wayward hair in a ponytail and hope that I look semi presentable. Kate is my roommate, and she has chosen today of all days to succumb to the flu.
Therefore, she cannot attend the interview she’d arranged to do, with some mega-industrialist tycoon I’ve never heard of, for the student newspaper. So I have been volunteered. I have final exams to cram for, one essay to finish, and I’m supposed to be working this afternoon, but no – today I have to drive a hundred and sixty-five miles to downtown Seattle in order to meet the enigmatic CEO of Grey Enterprises Holdings Inc. As an exceptional entrepreneur and major benefactor of our University, his time is extraordinarily precious – much more precious than mine – but he has granted Kate an interview. A real coup, she tells me. Damn her extra-curricular activities.
By contrast, looking at both Head over Feet and The Love Hypothesis, it seems clear that the latter was more heavily edited.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
Nice try, FBI.
Not today, CIA.
Good attempt at obscurity, Department of Homeland Security.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
Airplanes? Ships? Semi-trucks? Electric cars are only good for suburban commuters. Everyone else needs a power source that can last over long distances and doesn't take ten hours to recharge.
As for solar, battery storage capacity lags far behind power generation capacity. Which is a problem, because it means solar is unreliable. It doesn't matter if on average solar can produce all the power you need; a couple of cloudy days in a row will screw you over.
Even if you really care about prompt-adherence, there are realistic Pony finetunes you can use to get a model that can understand *booru tags.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
Greece is in Europe, Egypt is in Africa, and Hittites and Assyrians were in Asia; good enough for me.
Besides, the point of the meme is to play up Bronze Age civilization as much as possible with technically-true statements, to make it sound like a crazy conspiracy theory on par with ancient aliens and Atlantis.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
I was generating porn locally with Stable Diffusion XL running on an $800 gaming laptop that had an RTX 4050 with 6 GB of VRAM two years ago. Most of what I made was hentai, but it would have been trivial to train a LoRA on a couple dozen SFW photos of a particular girl, then made porn of her on demand.
There's a great theory out there about how, three and a half millennia ago, the Mediterranean was dominated by super advanced civilizations. Like, this is way before classical Greece, but supposedly these guys had intercontinental trade routes, giant palace complexes, literacy, booming populations, etc. The kinds of things you would expect from the Roman Empire. Then a series of catastrophes happened, culminating by an invasion of mysterious sea people that came out of literally nowhere; their cities burned, massive fractions of the population died, pottery and art regressed hundreds of years, the written word was lost and had to be reinvented with new alphabets... basically their own version of the dark ages.
It's an excellent theory, with lots of detailed lore and worldbuilding, it almost makes me think it was real... oh, wait.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
The part that stings a bit is that this dude is a divorcee with two kids, and she just dove right into his arms. I can't even imagine what he offers over me, other than comfort/familiarity.
Magic Knight Rayearth is on Netflix! Now this is some serious nostalgia; Rayearth was one of the first animes I ever watched as a little kid living in Latin America in the 90s, right alongside Saint Seiya and Dragon Ball. Accordingly, I was shocked to see that it had been given a TV-MA rating, apparently for nudity? But it's tasteful, artistic nudity; no different from the transformations scenes in Sailor Moon. There is a stereotype out there that Americans are totally fine with blood and violence but God forbid that a kid might see a nipple, and damn if this doesn't lend credence to the allegations.
In any case, the story follows a trio of 14-year old girls consisting of the spunky Hikaru, the elegant Umi, and the nerdy Fuu (or Lucy, Anais, and Marina as they were called in the Spanish dub) after they get isekai'd to Cephiro, a generic RPG fantasy land, while on a field trip to Tokyo Tower and told to rescue Princess Emeraude (Esmeralda) from the evil Zagato. And I know that sounds like the most boring, cliche, and straightforward plot you could possibly think of, but there is a few things that make the show work.
First, the girls have great chemistry, playing off supporting characters and each other as they mature from three random schoolgirls into the legendary Magic Knights (Guerreas Magicas); watching them talk is as much fun as watching them step up to the challenges they encounter. Second is that the setting is not quite as cookie-cutter as it first appears; halfway through, it is revealed that their ultimate weapons are the Rune-Gods/Mashin (Genios), giant robots they must pilot into battle, so the series is actually something of a fantasy/mecha hybrid. And the third is that the show has a great sense of drama; some of the deaths are surprisingly heart-wrenching, and the ending drove me to tears.
So, overall, I recommend Magic Knight Rayearth. Netflix only has the first of two seasons, but that's OK; the first season tells a complete story with a very logical stopping point, and the second season reads like somebody wrote a fanfic sequel. At 20 episodes, it's a bit longer than a single-cour anime like Erased or Madoka but shorter than a double-cour like Evangelion or Cowboy Bebop. The original Spanish dub is there, for those who prefer that language. Or, if you don't have Netflix, you can also watch it on YouTube: English, Spanish.
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