oats_son
11mo ago
Dang, that wasn't it. I'm sorry for my outburst.
Maybe search has the post I was thinking of. It was really fascinating and I regret that my friends missed it.
oats_son
11mo ago
Can someone get me what this AAQC said? https://www.themotte.org/comment/123289?context=3#context
If I recall correctly it was a fascinating look at what neurodivergent people look at on a good looking house versus what neurotypicals look at, and how it related to brutalism. But it got deleted which is total bullshit. I wish the "this AAQC got deleted, sry" crap got left on reddit where it belonged.
oats_son
11mo ago
Looks like Ross saw it and responded, but it got deleted somehow. https://x.com/accursedfarms/status/1820776020074512657
cjet raised some pretty good points if you ask me -- third party dependencies could really trip things up. And then you never know what the legislators really are going to pass. They don't understand technology in pretty much any circumstance, so that could easily go badly. But monetization doesn't strike me as a real big concern. What do companies do already for, say, Club Penguin Rewritten, or private WoW or Runescape server? I would lean towards not allowing monetization (or rather, allowing companies to set rules for private servers beyond you-can't-have-private-servers), but also, the companies shut the servers down themselves. I can't really feel too bad for them if they see someone making money on a product they killed on purpose. As for who pays for it, that's up to the consumers. If it dies, that's on them; they can resurrect it later, anyway, if the software is out there. You don't need a huge server infrastructure to run single player Tarkov. You just launch a server locally and connect to it. Probably going to be more complicated for a lot of games, but it isn't always.
Moreover, if devs see themselves getting screwed by the EU for releasing games that they kill later, maybe they'll be a little more careful about making games and then killing them for no reason. The Crew is a great example. There is absolutely no good reason that that game is dead right now, since it had no online capabilities to speak of if I'm not mistaken, except to check that you have the game legitimately. If you know from the outset that this legislation requires you to have a game that functions after a decade, you will write the software differently. Maybe you'll whip together some single player mode. Maybe you'll write it to be more server agnostic. Mostly it's AAA companies that sell live service games and MMOs. They can think of something. Or they can stop making games they will kill. Or stop selling in the EU.
oats_son
11mo ago
Ah, I forgot to link the associated movement, Stop Killing Games started by Ross Scott of Freeman's Mind fame. The campaign isn't about forcing companies to continue running MMOs forever. It's about forcing them to release the server software for users to run themselves, or some other patch of their choosing that lets users continue playing the game instead of just unceremoniously killing the game. Forcing them to run it forever would be pretty short sighted. As for the specific details, I don't know that anyone knows what that's going to be, because I don't know that it's up to the citizens what the actual regulation passed will be, if there is any. But frankly these are not big asks. I doubt it will do much against the MMO industry.
Also, since this is a campaign being pushed by an American in basically any venue he can get, I don't think you can say this is a case of Europe not understanding regulations have costs.
Euros of The Motte, what could be more fun than effecting real life change? You should sign this ballot initiative in the hopes that less live service games get killed by publishers that don't care once they drop support. (And get all your friends, family, and acquaintances to sign it too.)
If that's not fun enough, I guess this can be a thread where you can list your favorite MMOs or other live service games. I know @self_made_human likes Tarkov, very rational because it might be the best and most unique of its kind. Once there was a game called Fallen Earth that was pretty cool, but I think it died ages ago. I also used to play Lord of the Rings Online a lot, but I'd rather drive around the map in a car than actually play the game. There should be another initiative to just release the maps so that someone can port them to Unity or something and do whatever the hell they want with them.
oats_son
11mo ago
It is an interesting topic, but this in particular was a pretty bad example of the conundrum "deepfaking" can present, because the voiceover is pretty obviously fake. There are a ton of deepfakes on YouTube from last year of all the presidents discussing their favorite anime waifus, but as soon as the joking goes too far, I guess everyone has to try to regulate it.
Happy to see more sushi discussion. I thought I was the weird one for not caring that much about nigiri sushi. However, I did have some unagi nigiri that was actually worth eating, but it's like $10 for two pieces. Edit to add I also really like yellowtail with ponzu, which, does that count as sashimi??
Try some ponzu sauce next time you make sushi if you haven't before, I really like to dip my rolls in that now.
oats_son
11mo ago
Have you posted about q-tips before? Lately I feel like I'm doing a bad thing by using q-tips, but when I use diluted hydrogen peroxide sometimes my hearing feels like it gets muffled for a long time.
oats_son
11mo ago
Seriously, the post you're replying to is about the most charitable someone could get while describing a horrible shoot like this.
Apparently we're not the only ones who saw it like that:
Massey was later pronounced deceased at an area hospital. On July 17, former Sheriff Deputy Sean Grayson was charged with three counts of first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm, and official misconduct in connection with the death of Massey. Sean Grayson will be held in jail until his trial after a Sangamon County judge agreed with prosecutors that he’s a risk to the community. If convicted, Grayson faces prison sentences of 45 years to life for murder, six to 30 years for battery and two to five years for misconduct.
oats_son
1yr ago
I haven't seen you too much lately! How's everything been going? UK treating you right?
oats_son
1yr ago
What the heck do you do with a kettleball? I've heard so much about them being fun or people using them a lot. What makes them fun? Do they replace going to the gym for you?
oats_son
1yr ago
I agree with the other commenters saying this is basically a left wing bogeyman, but I will say that Christian fascists absolutely do exist, see Stone Choir, Corey J. Mahler's substack and Twitter, and this one guy duking it out with the Lutheran Church Missouri-Synod (though he's more just Christian nationalist instead of dipping into the Hitler-was-right sort of thing). Obviously not huge, and if I didn't have a relative throwing this crap in my face, I would laugh at them and move on. Trump is pretty far from this kind of thing.
oats_son
1yr ago
I don't at all think all relationships suck and that you should remain single. But if you're not in one, and not likely to be in one any time soon, then finding some coping strategy is good.
oats_son
1yr ago
Seeing @Skulldrinker's dilemma and also seeing some people I know expressing dissatisfaction with their committed relationships with women (in the case I am thinking of, this guy's fiancee apparently ruined his creative and pleasurable endeavors when she moved in with him because she requires constant attention, so he says) - are there any happy bachelors here? Got any tips for staying sane while single? Because there's no way it can be all bad, judging from all these bad relationships I hear about. What do you do for fun? Do you have friends to watch TV shows with you and play video games with you or what?
oats_son
1yr ago
I'm not sure I understand if HBD has some unified perspective on this. While I see darker hispanics, most hispanics I see are majority European. Is the idea that having too many different races in a country will cause division? Brazil would support that hypothesis, but if it's just about skin color, Chile is reasonably dark and doing pretty well for a LatAm country. Better than Argentina, which is 90% white. If hispanics are underrepresented among engineers and doctors, I'd guess they don't go to college as much, probably because they are poor when they come in from their home countries.
oats_son
1yr ago
oats_son
1yr ago
I don't have much to say about the rest of your post, but Xiaomannyc is one of those Internet Polyglots that purports to have super language abilities and regularly makes videos "shocking" natives with his knowledge of their little-known language. It's safe to say these types don't really bring anything useful to the table. Learning languages is a game of dedication, not speeding through things in 24 hours and impressing everyone. At least his Chinese sounds like it's good, though.
oats_son
1yr ago
If practical_romantic's reason for wanting to get into linguistics is that linguistics is as compelling as sex, that would be a good reason.
oats_son
1yr ago
Why do you want to get into linguistics? Learning a language is the applied version of it, but the higher level stuff doesn't seem that useful to me.
oats_son
1yr ago
This post is good! Yes, that all makes sense. It doesn't really convince me to believe, but it's not totally at odds with reality, like how fundamentalists see it. I may have just talked to too many fundamentalists, but to be fair, that was my only perspective on the bible for pretty much all of my youth.
Catholics don't believe that scripture is infallible? Infallibility is a strong statement to make, and admitting that men wrote it is kind of conceding a lot of ground. I guess I don't know what you're supposed to base your belief on here, if men wrote it and it may not be accurate to what God actually wanted us to know. How would inspired word look any different from some random jackwagon writing whatever he wants?
To that end, is there anything solidifying your belief in day-to-day life? I asked a couple Christians if there is justice in this life, or if it's only reserved for the afterlife, and both of them seemed pretty stumped by what I thought was a simple question. To me, it seems pretty obvious that life is randomly cruel to everyone, Christian or not, a world of chaos, untamed and wild except for where men have tamed it. If someone created it, they're either not paying attention to it, as if they wound up a wind up doll and walked away from the table, or they never cared much about it in the first place, an apathetic god that lets the chips fall as they may. You probably disagree with that, and if you do, I'd like to hear it.
I have so many random theological questions (does the suffering of animals mean anything?), but maybe some other day. Or some other thread.
Under any definition of the time when the Bible was being written, "day" did not mean "actually hundreds of millions of years". Anyone saying otherwise is coping. Genesis is literally supposed to be how the world came about, and people interpreted it this way and believed it for hundreds of years until the theory of evolution and uniformitarianism came about.
Is God supposed to be a loving God, as almost every Christian I see says it, or is he supposed to be literally the most wicked thing in existence, with Satan and every other false god paling in comparison both to the magnitude of cruelty he is capable of inflicting and the willingness to see it carried out? When you pick apples, you keep the good ones and toss the bad ones. You don't take the bad apples, smash them into bits, reconstitute them, and smash them again and keep repeating this same pattern. That doesn't make any sense. You know what would make it make sense? If humans came up with it to scare you into believing it.
Edit to add: The idea that you can handwave away the unfairness of that is kind of infuriating to me. You're telling me that a kid can be born in a nowhere town with no opportunity, grow up getting abused by his parents, reach ripe adulthood somewhere after 12, lose faith in God because nothing good is happening to him, and end up shooting himself, and he goes to Hell to be tormented forever. Not only was life unfair to him, but also the afterlife was even more unfair to him, somehow. There's no way to reconcile that fate with any of the rest of the New Testament claiming God to be extremely loving. That's pretty unequivocally horrible. God created every part of this situation -- a cruel world, the rules behind entry to Heaven and Hell, the ability to sin and feel pain. What majesty would do that?
oats_son
1yr ago
I don't at all disagree with the benefits of genuine belief. I feel I have been robbed of these for myself because I just thought about the issues too much. Are your children doomed to the same bitter realization decades down the line? You're just supposed to hope they're less good at critical thinking than yourself?
I was raised with a fundamentalist view of the Bible. One relative of mine went on to grow even more fundamentalist, veering into hatred of the Jews (a severe misreading, if you ask me, and I thought downright heretical until I looked at the lines he was fixated on), but here's some of my grievances. I don't know my Bible very well, and I frankly hold little regard for it, so I will not read more.
- As I said, young earth creationism is pretty wild, but to my eyes, you pretty much have to believe it, according to my fundamentalist relative, due to Jesus quoting something in the Septuagint regarding it; it is also the basis of the faith (why would we need saving from original sin if there was no Adam and we are no more than slightly more intelligent monkeys). If not, then there's all kinds of questions we can get into: why is the perception of God something that changes with the more we know about the world, instead of something eternal? Why did God write the scripture like that, so that a great portion of believers feel forced to stamp their feet about the world being 6000 years old? Why does my mother insist that the Tower of Babel story is literally true?
- Much of the Old Testament deals with God proving himself to be better than other gods; a good example of this is probably the Book of Job, where God goes along with "The Adversary" to test Job. Christians seem to rethink these verses of being false idols and Satan in all cases, but it seems pretty obvious to me that it's about directly combating competing gods in the old world. There are so many points in the Old Testament where it basically says "sweet, my god is better than yours, that's why he lets me kill you and all your male heirs, and then breed your young girls after you're gone".
- From what I've read, there are so many different words used for hell in the books of the Bible that there isn't any consistent view of them, but the mainstream Christian view is that nonbelievers are thrown into an eternal lake of fire to be tormented forever. But believers in Christ get into heaven. I don't know how far right people can get into the weeds on Septuagint vs Masoretic words for "Hebrew", but never even examine this idea at all. Or maybe they have and I don't know it. But what I have heard is that you have to believe all of the Bible, young earth creationism, not permitting women to teach men or get divorced or other things, laying with men gets you stoned, and crucially, Christ's resurrection, or you go to hell. Knowing my relative's issues with the Catholic Church, it amazes me that God would let the Catholics twist the Bible so hard for so long with no resistance whatsoever. They literally could not read the Bible for centuries and discover what it really said. Wouldn't most of them be damned for their degeneration of the Word?
- It is staggering to me how unfair the requirement that you must believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ to not be damned. People on the ground witnessing the miracles would have had such a huge leg up in their redemption. Atheists killing themselves by jumping from a plane can save themselves mid-flight, whereas someone pulling the trigger of a gun gets no such chance. Because Jesus incarnated in a little spot in the Middle East, huge swathes of the populace have never even heard the name of the creator of the universe. Entire continents of people would be damned due to not even having a chance at receiving the message. Or, alternatively, they are saved due to their ignorance, but then once missionaries come and give them a chance to hear the message, then they're damned. Or maybe you're more like C.S. Lewis and think that being saved or damned comes from after death, whether you can accept Christ then or not. Okay. That doesn't seem very true to the message of the Bible to me, but that would be a little more fair. But even the concept of hell is crazy to me. What kind of justice is this? Infinite pain for a life with finite sin? Even the biggest assholes I know of in real life wouldn't go for that. And if you take the classical view of what gets you damned (disbelief in the redemption), how can you really hold it against someone? They were provided with no direct evidence of such a resurrection, in a world where pain and suffering are quite arbitrary, and any relief comes from men, usually atheist men.
If you take issue with these grievances, let me know, but like I said, the Word of God should probably be more eternal than to vary completely based on cultural attitudes and scientific research. I don't really see much room to wiggle away from these while still staying true to scripture. And God has let humanity's Christians splinter further and further over 2000 years without any further clarification. @FCfromSSC
Good writeup. How do you learn new swimming techniques? I basically only know how to do a breaststroke while keeping my head above water the whole time, and doggy paddle.
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