gattsuru
11mo ago
In many ways it's worse: the meaning of that document rather changes connotations when you find out Ozy's significant other 'contributed' a bunch of e-mails with Scott just after the NYTimes article, all of which Scott had asked him to keep in confidence, and one of Ozy's first examples of compassionate, integrated feminism argued that all that open-minded tolerance from Excluded only applied to "perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups", ie her side specifically to bash Scott.
Maybe Ozy has all the strength of principles about not prosecuting people, but without the ability to present anyone who won't on their side, it's little more than standing on laurels and calling on an army to do the dirty work.
gattsuru
11mo ago
They've not made the timeline too clear, but yeah. You could even use the same excuse for Frantz themself.
But I think that's an exception that swallows the rule. A lot of cancel culture involves people with petty disagreements getting blown out into public spaces; dismissing a cancellation because it's driven by a flame's drama turns quickly into throwing out major cases.
gattsuru
11mo ago
There have actually been historical Editing Wars over spoilers (including some involving Gerard of the recent TraceWoodgrains expose, who's generally been on the 'just spell it out' side).
But more often, especially for smaller publications, it's that you're either going to have articles from wikipedia to tvtropes written by a) the author or publisher or a related team or b) a particularly neurotic fan. That's not even specific to books! It's not that surprising that Darkship Thieves (estimated readers in the low-thousands) has a really crappy tvtropes page with the vast majority of content coming from one troper. This game has had literally hundreds of thousands of players, and it's got five writers, most of which didn't do jack, and none of whom could reveal the full plot (the game uses a season system, and the second half of the zones won't unlock for another few days).
gattsuru
11mo ago
Perhaps my conception of "real person" exists far out on the tails of reality, and people acting like ActBlue or MAGA surrogate shills online is a totally normal behavior for an average person to engage in.
I think it's even worse than that. It'd be one thing is this was just social media getting to a mechanic that thinks a 'clever' Dem-politician pencil-holder is funny, or a moron with a podcast that can't read.
This is the official GovTrack mastodon account, a site that people here use, myself included. Axios just revised a three-year-old story today to remove 'border czar' from Harris' list of accomplishments. Elon Musk put tens of billions of dollars into twitter to shitpost, and does it badly. I've worked on open-source code with someone who was really proud of having physically attacked Brandon Eich, and that's far from the worst I've seen there; my boss and a coworker have a conspiracy theory about the FBI and the Trump assassination that would be fascinating if they weren't doing it in a business meeting; a forum that once was a mainstay for me blocked discussion of the Trump assassination attempt as a thread the day of (literally as the second post) and never discovered one made the day after. KelseyTUoC spent the better part of a decade as part of the EA community, earned Scott Alexander's respect, and then got to work at Vox... except it was a problem before then, too.
These aren't astroturf, or rando nutjobs who have nothing to their name but politics, or AI, or rats following the Pied Piper, or nineteen-year-olds fresh-faced to the internet, or whatever. This is what they are under the mask.
Beneath that, Trace and Its_Not_Real have been having a twitter debate over The Machine and its output, and I think it's bad enough that Trace's defense is literally pointing to "Hanania/Karlin", but the more critical problem is that even were it true (which I'm far from sold on), The Machine has lost any capability to credibly present the truth, and very few people care.
I wrote, three and a half years ago, about how I didn't see a path back to trust in academia. But why would they care? In many ways, things have gotten worse for the academics, but academi_a_ has been doing fine. Even individual schools and journals with massive scandals have quite happily shaken them off and gone right back to it. Sometimes bad actors manage to get fired, but sometimes they get a TV show. In some cases, and I'll point to Wansink again, the policy proposals and even individual papers don't suffer much even after everyone discovers they were always made up from whole cloth.
Why would anyone expect that to stay to one poorly-demarcated field?
gattsuru
11mo ago
RPGnet (which famously explicitly banned any support for Trump on its discussion forums)
Or for ICE. Or for Dobbs, or any other abortion restrictions. Or a variety of police-related matters. And that's just the explicit rules! If you have an account with access to Tangency, look at the first and second debate threads -- I highlighted the thread closure on the assassination attempt, but the "A+" behavior thread that has someone I remember from my time highlighting how Trump ("literally"!) wants them shot is a pretty good and very far from unique glimpse into leftist and even some progressive-dominated spaces now. And especially appalling for anyone old enough to remember when Darren MacLennan and co were so very proud of very clear and thick line separate their normal free speech principles from an exception for nazis-and-only-literal-Nazis.
Sorry, for the most part I try to limit my pettiness with the principle of 'don't get your enemies free real estate in your head', but that site is just such a perfect example of the faults in its own philosophy that every time someone mentions it I have to check to see if it's at least stopped getting worse, and I'm always disappointed.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Yeah, the axeman there is definitely not just meant to be a power fantasy, but also be attractive as such, even if most (straight) guys won't spell it out. The ponytail is the cherry on top, but the giant skull codpiece and flashing abs are a Tell, and one that's perfectly reasonable if it's an option.
((I will join with the original complaints that the art and typography isn't good, though depending on time and cost constraints I can be more forgiving on that.))
I'm... kinda impressed by how bad that is. I get that no one reads the original text, but good lords, you couldn't get a sharper tonal or stylistic mismatch from Elligy's writing style with a steel blade and a whetstone.
The man wouldn't use the word 'lush' unless held hostage, and I think 'chambers of manhood' would by only work Red Triber frameworks as a testes joke.
EDIT: for contrast, the portion where a lot of the words he would use was lifted from.
gattsuru
11mo ago
... I'm a bi furry, so I get what you're coming from. 'Ew, gay' wasn't just a joke limited to samef**s on 4chan, but a mainstay both in and outside of fandom spaces, tolerated in schools, and something I got from even my own family. I was a furry before SomethingAwful discovered The Easiest Target, and despite how much worse it got, it wasn't great before that.
But I also don't think it's terribly honest to compare that to a 'deepest worry' as the 'average bust size of the women in video games'. In tabletop, we're not just seeing people try to establish XX-phenotype'd space marines -- for screw over the lore or themes of 40k, it's not like the non-woke behavior from Games Workshop has been slow to do the same problems either. We just had a recent D&D history that couldn't hold its fire on calling its original authors every type of intentional evil under the sun, while people start reading entrails of games they've disemboweled for signs of The Dreaded Enemy. But those aren't concrete.
In literature, Correia's rant argument stands on its own, and there's been a prolonged campaign to try to get Sanderson, and then there's Mercedes Lackey. For video games, I'll point again to a guy getting driven of an open-source project he's run for more than a decade, in part by threats at his co-contributors' employment if he didn't step down, because he made rude comments about a (trans) spree shooter.
Nor are these rules that 'just' impact the big-names.
And I think that's kinda a distraction. The argument for against using 'gay' as an insult wasn't "we're gonna do it to 'straight white male', and it'll be fair, then". The argument for having options for a female character other than 'tits out McGee' or 'fridged' wasn't to make the only acceptable character archetype variations on Velma from Scooby Doo. I can (and have) made the argument that this was in part for the benefit of many of the people the LGBT and woke movements are themselves claiming to protect, jettisoned in favor of a world of bubble wrap.
But even that's a distraction: this retreat is bad not just because it hurts the subaltern, or betrays its own promises, but because it is wrong at its core, and to all it impacts.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Most sushi is intended to be eaten immediately after being partly-dipped in a mix of soy sauce and green horseradish 'wasabi', so the MSG part's usually covered in that context.
Meat alone-style (sashimi) and meat-on-rice-alone-style (nigiri) are... well, advocates will call them 'subtle' flavors, and if you do have sensitive tastes for meat or fish there are some interesting things better shops do with a light glaze that can't be done with cooked fish, but they're also still going to be pretty bland.
For rolls (maki or uramaki), much of the purpose is to make flavor combinations that wouldn't work otherwise. You could make a plate with grilled salmon, marinated with mango and cucumber, topped with seaweed flakes, served over rice, but it'd be drastically different than the sweet-vinegar rice and uncooked mango common to sushi rolls -- cooked cucumber can't be crisp, mango used in a marinade will be less intensely sweet, and the cooked plate would almost always want a long-grained rice with little seasoning or even a 'wild rice' for flavor. For sushi, the meat is more there to provide a strong base and some mild fatty flavors (modulo smoked salmon in heavily Westernized sushi), while the nori (dried seaweed) and other fillings are supposed to play a bigger role in what you describe as the taste.
((And even smoked salmon rolls avoid the intensively fishy smell of pan-fried or grilled fish. I don't mind it, but a lot of people do find it to detract from the meal.))
Some purists will still complain that Americanized maki goes too hard on, and I'll even agree with them in some cases (Flaming Hot CheetosTM Sushi is an abomination that not even Taco Bell has been willing to accept, yet), but the typical store or homemade maki leaves a lot of space to make it flavorful without making it overpowering.
Alternatively, look for 'poke' bowls, which tend to mix a lot of the same base materials with a lot more fixings, and can give a better intro to the underlying core flavors will still having a heartier feel and texture to them.
gattsuru
11mo ago
The shrine and bamboo forest use the environmental clues most heavily, but they're present in the Red Ship's door puzzle, a couple Town puzzles, and a decent number of the coastline ones.
But I think 2rafa is more commenting on the emphasis on 'maze'-style line-tracing puzzles, which aren't the only puzzle in The Witness, but they do make up an overwhelming majority of the content. There are a bunch of modifiers that get thrown in such that they mostly feel 'fresh' -- I'd argue that a few, like the hollow tetronimos and gamma symbols, are kinda underutilized -- but both panel-staring and even the most clever bit about panel-less point of view puzzles gets a little rough after the first few-dozen even if each has a gimmick. Completely discrete puzzles, or where the line-tracing is just a completion mechanic after you've done the heavily lifting, are a small minority of the puzzles, and most of them aren't great (most infamously, the Jungle sound puzzle).
Contrast Myst, where the only real underlying overlap in game mechanics was button pressing, lock-combination-solving, or use-x-on-y. That wasn't always a good thing, and I don't think there's a single Myst player that likes the sound tunnels section! Even the good puzzle mechanics seldom got time to breathe or develop. It does feel more varied, though, and you can tell Myst's background as an adventure game, in contrast to The Witness as a puzzle game.
On the gripping handle, while the line-tracing is never sudoko-level, I could see it as tetris-level; it is engaging for most of the play. And it is critical for the whole meta-plot's core concept that it be everywhere in the Island.
I will make a separate complaint that The Witness's story also just not that compelling. No matter how bad the Myst series got, the basic concept of linking books and creating ages and rifts in unstable ages is cool, and leaves a lot to be said both within the Myst narrative and without it. There's a reason things like MystCraft exist.
The Witness tries to do some interesting stuff with Themes, and there's a lot of interesting questions raised in universe, but they're ultimately not anything relevant to the setting or its story. Indeed, the 'true' ending does little but (falsely!) present the skills and pattern recognition that the player has gained as pointless. It may just be that's not what Blow set out to do, but it still feels disappointing for how atmospheric the game is.
Google's Twitter account claims the removal of autocompletes is intentional behavior, though it doesn't seem to be shared by a number of other (sometimes fairly recent) other assassinations or assassination attempts that would have fallen under the claimed policy's terms. Westerly's position seems the more charitable explanation, but that they're not using it doesn't encourage.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Yeah, historically, a pretty sizable number of authors write under gender-ambiguous or male-sounding names, especially in history or scifi. Andre Norton's my favorite example, as she changed her name legally, but afaik was not trans or trans-adjacent.
It's fallen out of popularity in recent eras, at least outside of romance (where mainstream het and f/f works are almost always published under female names, and m/m under male names). There's a few cases where that's turned into someone coming out trans or nonbinary, but they're pretty rare.
They had an election. Officially, Maduro (the socialist encumbrant) won. Unofficially, it's sketchy even by the standards of Venezuelan elections (Jimmy Carter's seal of approval twenty-five years ago!), with a massive swing from recent polling, bans on political candidates, Maduro claiming a massive foreign cyberattack (echoing 2019 claims after that mess), so on. Add in background of the oil stuff and a broad ban on firearms mostly unenforced against Maduro's supporters, and there's a lot of room for things to get Messy.
((In theory, if any irregularities could be proven, it would be a major embarrassment for the Biden administration, since they removed a lot of sanctions on Venezuela's oil exports on the basis of free and fair elections. But I don't think anyone who cares will hear about it, and the [agreement officially had collapsed in April anyway.))
No idea where you live, so can't say on police barricades.
EDIT: some alleged but hilarious return numbers.
EDIT2: the Maduro government is announcing prosecution of said banned political candidate, among others..
gattsuru
11mo ago
I've seen a good few who weren't Haley fans -- Pete Spiliakos or EsotericCD, both of whom would have preferred Youngkin -- but they also generally weren't Trump fans, and many had (and some still have) committed to not voting for Trump regardless.
gattsuru
11mo ago
The other Whitehouse has submitted a new bill on point #2. There's some morbidly humorous bits about the unintentional incentives -- the newest nine justices get to handle most cases, while the President gets to appoint a new one every couple years, which is funny until you've made a 'senior' justice's ability to rule on a case dependent on a Biden 2025 appointee not having a stroke -- but for the most part it's fucking with statutory jurisdiction as a workaround to shove the older appointees out. Meanwhile, cases where SCOTUS has original jurisdiction, the whole team is supposed to get together.
So you get the worst combinations of court-packing and constitutional law problems.
gattsuru
11mo ago
I don't think so. The animations were a little shorter, but not enough to make it less annoying. I don't know whether it's the worst puzzle in the series -- some of the solo version of Uru was outright broken as a result of its weird development history -- but it's easily the least fun part of Myst proper.
gattsuru
11mo ago
gattsuru
11mo ago
"Because they're not even allowed to think" is belittling the WSJ writers and poll-creators, not the interviewed men.
To do the homework, the WSJ's 2024 numbers come from an series of internally-run poll. While I can't get the questions of all of them or breakdowns by gender, I can find the relevant parts for Feb 2024, and the split between Q12A and Q12B is... demonstrative in a lot of ways.
gattsuru
11mo ago
... I'm impressed how hard the first guy pegged (hurr hurr) my gaydar, given the topic focus he started with. Which isn't as weird as you'd expect -- anti-abortion gay guys are surprisingly common -- but likely to make for an awkward presentation to normies. And if it's aimed at trying to gross out weak conservatives, it's gonna run into problems when even the hardcore Catholics treat the 'mouth stuff is a sin' like a joke, and have for decades.
As something to throw around as red meat for the wiltering leftist, to cross the metaphors, I guess it works? By those standards I've seen more impressive tumblr reblogs, today, though.
But the whole broader presentation is pretty standard, perhaps modulo the incompetently executed QR code (oh boy, Rolling Stone!). Compare Paul Ryan's grandma, or 'Youngkin's' campaign bus. It's be something meaningful if it came with the Harris Seal of Approval, but officially these PACs are completely independent, yep yep yep, ignore the winks and nods; laundering attacks on both politicians and the perceived class of the opposition's voters have a long-standing approach on both sides of the aisle (any remember pyjama boy?). And that's the simple overt stuff, rather than things like the anti-mormon Prop 8 backlash.
Sorry, Q13 Split B, on page 6. I'd confused the numbering system since Split B would not have been asked Q12.
Half of the response group (Split A) were asked
"What issue is most important to you when thinking about who you will vote for in the 2024 Presidential election?"
They gave answers in 30ish categories, with 9% giving some category outside of those answers, and 3% giving no answer. The other half were asked :
"Some people feel so strongly about an issue that they won’t vote for a candidate if they disagree with them on that issue. Of the following issues, what is the one issue you most strongly feel you couldn’t vote for a candidate who disagrees with you about it? If it’s another issue or if you do not feel strongly enough about any of the issues to determine your vote, please just say so."
They gave answers in only 15 categories, with 7% other, and 12% no answer. For individual answers, there are wide spreads -- 20% of split B thought abortion so important that they mostly strongly felt and could not vote for a politician that disagreed with them, while only 8% said it was the single most important question. In Split B, the closest I can find is the 1% that were categorized as "Inflation".
Some variation from one split to the next isn't unusual -- it's hard to get a perfectly random sample -- but the gap here is vast, and not especially coherent. Some of this probably the different question wording, especially the dropped importance of the economy-focused answers for Split B. But another portion probably reflects merged or split answers, especially for things like "Freedom and Rights", "Foreign Policy (general)".
And that's the open-ended question, where the poll subject had the most control over matters. If the WSJ article is really coming down from the latter questions that are thumbs-up or thumbs-down on specific matters (which they almost certainly must be, given the numbers the WSJ infographic uses), this gets even uglier. There's a lot of questions, even ones fairly high on Q12/Q13, that weren't investigated in later question at all.
gattsuru
11mo ago
It's kinda interesting that both Haaretz and ALJ describe the victim in this case as "he" -- were it one, I might think translation issues, and that's still possible, but it's a lot less likely. There's a lot of demographic reasons for a lot of violence against prisoners to target men, and I've seen 'gang-rape' used to describe the situation, but doesn't exclude the Abu Ghraib or Oncale-style sexualized-violence-as-humiliation option. Which is still bad!
At least from the public reporting, the accused soldiers were arrested. While some (and/or some other soldiers stationed at the facility?) resisted, they didn't do so very long or very successfully. A separate problem came about when external protestors, including some Israeli politicians, started protesting outside the base and then pushed their way inside, before being redirected back out. This is absolutely embarrassing for a military power, but it's more shoving contests gone dumber than a serious riot.
I think some of the right-wing protest comes about because there have been a number of high-profile exaggerated examples of IDF abuse, but a lot of the criticisms of treatment in other cases do have real foundation. Whether the underlying allegations here are Oncale-style abuse or more conventional gang-rape of a prisoner, they're going to need serious investigation to prove whether they happened or not.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Even beyond the faults in the AI voicegen, "I'm a deep state puppet" is a pretty overt 'parody'.
gattsuru
11mo ago
I'd be interested to see court documents to understand exactly what "no additional elements of coercion" means. Depending on context that can mean anything from 'didn't drug or threaten her life' to 'was completely unconscious at the time of the incident', and usually law and judicial contexts care about where it's enough to count as aggravating convictions. The Times summary, for however much you trust it, looks closer to the former than I'd like, especially with the "They also drank Baileys Irish Cream Liqueur together and slept on a cardboard box under a hotel stairway when they couldn’t get a room".
His defenders argue that because he was not convicted of grooming, he didn't do that, but even in the highly unlikely situation he didn't groom her in the colloquial sense, it seems very likely he fit in the text of the statute, so it's hard to pull too much data out of it. I've got... less than favorable feelings about the 'it's-ephebophilia' side of libertarian thought, but depending on the behavior this could well have flunked even that.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Yes, don't trust Wikipedia summaries. From the source:
"As indicated in Exhibit 1, three million persons applied for legalization. The applicants represented most legalization eligible aliens given an estimated illegal immigrant population of 3-5 million in 1986 (Hoefer, 1991). The approval rates for temporary and permanent residence were fairly high among both legalization (pre-1982 applicants) and SAW applicants. Nearly 2.7 million persons--nearly nine in ten applicants for temporary residence--were ultimately approved for permanent residence" ...
The impact of IRCA was much more concentrated with respect to legal immigration than naturalization (see Exhibit 2 and Exhibit 3). IRCA LPRs represented more than 40% of all immigrants in fiscal years 1989-1991 but never accounted for more than 23% of naturalizations in any one year. The peak in IRCA naturalizations probably occurred in 1996 when one-quarter million became citizens. By then, the entire cohort had become eligible to naturalize.
The best partial transcript I've been able to find starts about halfway down here (at [10:20:09]), goes to here and here, and ends here, but that only covers the first hour and a half.
YouTube has an automated transcript at here, but it's very low quality.
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