jericho
10mo ago
May be worth noting the difference is almost entirely due to a growth in the bisexual category.
jericho
7mo ago
But what's really interesting is the potential for misuse that I predict will occur for the next controversial game. While Unity has said they'll try to limit malicious behavior, they're providing gamers with the ability to charge developers money by essentially clicking the uninstall/reinstall button.
Any predictions for how quickly we see the first weaponization of this tool?
I suppose if you do not consider new weapons for the culture war to be part of the culture war, it would be unrelated.
My impression is also that the user base for video games generally trends less woke than the developers, so I would predict this particular weapon getting pointed one way more often than the other, but that remains to be seen.
jericho
6mo ago
Also my experience. Even Newt Gingrich, possibly one of the least charismatic politicians I can readily think of, was quite a bit more charming than the average Joe when meeting him in person.
jericho
10mo ago
HBO's Rome, chock full of absolutely stellar performances (James Purefoy's Marc Antony is perhaps my favorite performance across all of television) and while the historicity leaves quite a bit to be desired it does such a fantastic job at creating a sense of time and place.
Other favorite would definitely be The Expanse, quality is not even across the run (first 3 episodes are unfortunately among the weakest which can put people off), but it reaches some outstanding heights in seasons 2 and 3 especially. Highly recommended to anyone who likes Sci-Fi.
jericho
4mo ago
I wonder if this is the first generation appearing that way in the Disney parks - surely there weren't 40-year-old fanatical Disney moms in the 1980s or 90s.
I can say they for sure existed by the 90s as I interacted with some of them at that time. The "Disney Renaissance" coincided with making Disney versions of damn near everything and really pushing it into all corners of life which made this a viable archetype. Annual passes, especially those for Florida residents, were also cheaper at that time so that going to the park multiple times a year was a lot more accessible financially. In 1997 an annual pass was $269, inflation adjusted to $513 while in 2019 it was $1,119, inflation adjusted to $1,340. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the current crop of "Disney Moms" are the children of the initial crop.
I would not dispute, of course, that their numbers have increased greatly over time. I think the increase in prices and wait times along with the variety of schemes (fast pass, fast pass+, genie, apps, etc) to bypass these wait times has led to a lot more people planning their visit in the sort of obsessive, regimented way that those "Disney Moms" were in the 90s-early 2000s rather than just showing up and making their way through the parks, which used to be how almost everyone handled it. I think once you've spent however-much-time looking into different attractions and prioritizing them it's a lot easier to put disproportionate importance on the parks themselves.
jericho
1yr ago
You're fighting an enemy that only exists in certain places and mostly in your imagination
For the people I know personally who are still very edgy atheists (admittedly not Church of Satan stuff) as fully grown adults in the year of our lord 2023, it's because they also happen to exist in those certain places. They all live in very religious areas (one in a heavily Christian part of the US, one in the Middle East and one in South America) and grew up in very religious families. On the internet their views are passé, but in their day to day lives it's still very much counter-cultural.
Basically anything "edgy" is highly context dependent- there's a big difference between burning a Quran in rural Texas, burning a Quran in London and burning a Quran in Saudi Arabia. And the internet removes local contexts, so beyond edgy stuff in all forms inevitably being kind of cringe, you end up with it being especially cringe in places where it isn't counter-cultural. An example in the opposite direction would be the South American atheist finding the "based tradcath converts" cringe beyond all belief, since basically every authority figure around him is Catholic.
jericho
5mo ago
Is it because the accusations came from outsiders? Is it because these particular accusations are not considered as awful as others?
Almost certainly the former. If these screenshots had been dug up and passed around by someone with progressive bona fides as a result of some internecine dispute, this would have gone done much differently.
jericho
1yr ago
Same. I don't have a strong drive to make my parents proud, but I have a VERY strong drive to not make them ashamed. To @hydroacetylene's point, it certainly helps that most of the things that would make them ashamed would be bad things in and of themselves.
I wouldn't have been born without Lord Trevelyan, that doesn't mean my options are to either hang myself or a portrait of him.
jericho
9mo ago
I believe the kid in Up is actually Asian (at least, I and others read his appearance as Asian and the character's voice actor is Asian).
I can't speak to the church experiences of others- but for an American protestant growing up in the 90s and 2000s, when talking about sin and temptation and all that during services, the focus was definitely:
The Flesh >>>> The Devil >> The World
I wonder to what extent people jumping to thinking Lewis was talking about the flesh was due to a "horses, not zebras" assumption based on the sermons they heard growing up?
Edit: I do think your assessment that Lewis is in fact talking about Susan being lured away by the temptations of the world rather than the flesh is correct.
If teenage girls were reading YA novels for 4 hours a day
Are they not? They absolutely were when I was in high school, including problems of girls reading Twilight and Harry Potter during class time.
Edit: I guess I can't say for certain the hrs/day, but it was very common to see girls reading the YA craze du jour during lunch, free periods, or basically any other time they could.
jericho
4mo ago
While in some cases I'm sure some people are taking "conservative" and "edgy 4chan humor" to extrapolate to "actually a Nazi using the pretense of irony to cover for it", for others "conservative" + "edgy 4chan humor" = "Nazi", no further layers needed.
The number of times per year that I'm too ill to pull up a computer and work is maybe a couple days per year, but I've talked to other people that think it's completely unreasonable that a given company (with strictly non-physical work) only allows a couple weeks per year of sick time. We must be feeling quite different, right?
I think part of this might be, as you say, subjective differences regarding the experience of the same illness, but this could also be just a difference in immune systems/health in general.
That is to say, I wouldn't be surprised if the gap there may be doubly influenced by your running- first in just being healthier and getting sick less/getting less sick and second by then being better at coping with whatever level of discomfort you get from that sickness.
Edit: There is also the noted vicious cycle for chronic illness (real or perceived) where feeling like shit makes you less likely to practice the habits which make you less likely to feel like shit, which then causes you to feel like shit even more/more often. Once again to some extent this applies mentally, but is also a very real thing physically.
they film a scene where one visits his rabbi and the rabbi essentially says “it doesn’t really matter whether you believe, just follow the rules”. American progressivism cannot really conceive of such reasoning.
I remember reading some time ago about how for most pre-Christian religions the focus of the religion was on practice, not belief or love or anything internal. It didn't matter if you doubted Zeus's existence (although for the most part the existence of deities was taken for granted) or thought he was a right prick, what mattered was that you performed the right rituals on the right days with the right sacrifices and said the right words.
Edit: Thanks to Ilforte, proper term for this is Orthopraxy.
And while there was a break with that tradition already with Christians in general, Protestants in particular then took it even further with the whole "sola fide" thing.
I'm not wholly sold on secular progressivism being a new religion, but I am wholly sold on it being directly downstream of Christianity (particularly Protestant Christianity) and wearing its influences on its sleeve.
jericho
5mo ago
I agree with you broadly but:
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson held people captive and forced them to work by threat of violence. Does that mean all of their social/political/economic views are suspect as a result?
I have absolutely encountered people making basically this argument.
There were black British characters in Hamilton (see here where the British soldier is a black woman). Also, the primary antagonist is Aaron Burr, not King George III, played by a black man. Unless by "all the villain characters" you literally mean just King George III, which makes me confused on the plural.
jericho
11mo ago
My far-right friends see the Ukraine war as the Globohomo Lefitst Elite spitting in the eye of a Trad Warrior State.
FWIW, and I do realize in the US they are basically a rounding error compared to the progressive left, most of the far-left capital-C communists I've seen regard the Ukraine War as two capitalist imperialist powers duking it out.
I know in the past people writing book reviews here have felt discouraged due to lack of direct engagement - I unfortunately don't have any commentary to offer except that this review has sold me on the book and I'm downloading it now.
Based on what you have written here, I would also like to recommend to you the book "Spies and Commissars: The Early Years of the Russian Revolution" - there are some very obvious echoes of the French Revolution in the Russian ones and the book's focus on the personal level helps play up the drama.
jericho
1yr ago
Good luck and Godspeed.
If anyone has suggestions for other things worth doing or being, or that satisfy that "check my phone while waiting in the line to pickup the kids" nudge that avoids my new no-nos, I'm all ears.
Lighter fiction would be my suggestion. Collections of genre short stories (lots of excellent options for sci-fi /weird fiction/horror) are good, but also most more generic fantasy or sci-fi would work. Gotrek and Felix for Warhammer Fantasy, Ciaphas Cain for 40k, Discworld series has worked for me, haven't read R.A. Salvatore's D&D stuff but I've heard it's the kind of thing you can pick up and put down as needed.
Basically just fiction that isn't literature and isn't aiming for realism. If you want to be extra careful, can exclude stuff published after a certain year, year chosen to preference.
Comics or manga could also work depending on preferences.
jericho
1yr ago
If we accept both positions, that unequal power structures undermines consent, and that there's an unequal power structure between whites and minorities (predominantly blacks), then this should mean that all interracial sex between a black person and a white person is rape.
There's definitely been back and forth in progressive circles about some views circling back to 1950's American Conservatism and this is absolutely one of them. Haven't seen it as much recently (could just be due to traveling in different circles, though I hope the "you've just reinvented anti-miscegenation" argument won out), but I definitely remember this coming up in progressive circles some years back, with people arguing such relationships were "problematic", but not rape (similar tone of discussion to say a 28 year old woman with a 62 year old guy- not quite willing to call it rape but people casting aspersions nonetheless). Though I'm sure someone somewhere went ahead and made the final push to the rape label.
I will say, when it came up it was almost always white guy x non-white girl and much less often white girl x non-white guy.
Whereas a white female slave owner (or someone adjacent to the slave owner, who still holds power over the slave, like a wife or daughter) and her male slave are portrayed as having equal ability to consent.
This specific scenario being the exception, I've absolutely seen this called out as the male slave being raped.
jericho
7mo ago
If, on the other hand, you have people willing to go the extra step to solve a problem, help a customer, or fix something that is not working - well hey there, your customers have a better experience and don't go away planning to switch to your competitor!
The issue is often that their competitors are not any better in this regard. Or, even when they are, any advantage from customer service is absolutely swamped by other considerations.
I travel a lot and have had a range of experiences with hotel front desks, but I can't say any of them would ever trump even a small difference in price or location. I think the only exceptions I could imagine would be those bordering on the actually criminal.
Especially in the era of travel aggregators, a lot of folks are looking at just the price tag and maybe a map.
jericho
11mo ago
Not to dox myself, but as someone who has lived in Florida (including but not only Tampa) for a good chunk of my life, I would lower the fed slightly, lower the leftist radicals a decent chunk and up the trolls and hateful idiots. Maybe like 40% / 25%/ 20% / 15%.
Unless the radicals are dedicated enough to LARPing that they also go out to bars dressed normally and talk about this stuff to really sell the act (though I guess those could also be feds trying to infiltrate? I just know a lot of drunk dudes at the bars here start getting into politics and the Jews do come up). I will add that I would not take it turning out that these folks were actually recent moves from New York or California as meaning they were actually disguised leftists. The people (well, young people, not retirees) who have moved to Florida from New York and California in past couple years seem both more outspoken in their politics and more right wing than the average pre-covid Floridian (once again, ruling out truly dedicated LARPing that extends to work and bars).
Guessing a lot of them are kind of "cutting loose" after being in cities where being vocally conservative was asking to be a pariah.
It definitely feels like a reaction against the Starbucks "breakfast milkshake" rather than a genuine preference much of the time.
I've been pegged incorrectly as a coffee snob several times by co-workers due to my preference for black coffee, which I find humorous since I actually am neutral at best about its taste. I've just found it the best low calorie caffeine delivery system.
Yes, the NYC subway is a completely different animal from any other public transit system in the US. Numbers kind of speak for themselves on this one.
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