ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
Use your mind! Create new memories! Interact! Don't just add it to a library of forgotten photographs! - Megatron
User ID: 2120
https://www.themotte.org/post/383/wellness-wednesday-for-february-22-2023/68713?context=8#context
First of all, I hope this poster has read https://www.themotte.org/post/195/what-to-do-when-you-get
Second of all, I'd like to express my disappointment in nearly every response I've seen them receive. The fact that their question, which appears to have been made in total good faith, is still getting dogpiled and drive by downvotes is vicariously embarrassing. This isn't a culture war issue. It's a person in the life advice thread asking for life advice on interpersonal relationships as it pertains to their trans friends concerns over a tendentious CW item. prof xi o isn't even stating a position, only that they have trans friends and like Harry Potter (apparently this justifies an accusation of trolling, to the tune of a 45 [edit: 30, my back of the skull hangover sums aren't great] updoot difference. An uncharitable read might see some of the responses from prof xi o as sealioning. Cool. Take your uncharitable reading and keep it under wraps). If I was feeling extreme, I might posit being told you shouldn't be friends with my outgroup is not a valuable remark.
If I want to dunk on wingcucks I can go to arr drama. If I want to dunk on globohomo I can go to /pol/. If I want to dunk on chuds I'll join Hasan's discord. If I want to dunk on MAGAts I'll head over to /r/news. If I want to dunk on libtards I'll join the Mug Club. This is it, as far as I know, for frank and civil discussion between people, whose only commonality on themotte are their shared, seemingly intractable differences. This is unbelievably important to me, because there exists a reality where I am wrong. There is a chance that you too are wrong. Having a place where I can be presented with the absolute best argument against my pet philosophy (and those of others) is valuable, and it's valuable because it can if nothing else, diminish the evil I do as I navigate a confusing and confused world.
Overt forum-wide bias of any particular flavor or stripe, in my opinion, is the most pressing threat to the long term health of this site. Please don't fuck it up for everyone.
P.S. I will be appropriately embarrassed if the OP turns out to be another d*rwin, until that point try leaving the internet at the door and treating everyone as if they are, in fact, sincere.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
What's funny is, in the loose pantheon of supplemental writing and even a brief mention in one of his interludes, there are actually "paladins" or Christian style priests who hunt down and bind and/or exorcize literal demons in the name of God. It's just never been brought up again or made relevant to his Pactverse stories.
"Faith" in the Pactverse clashes somewhat with the Biblical definition, at least as laid out in Hebrews 11:1. When you can perform a given ritual, utter the right words, and invoke the might of a higher power it can be difficult to frame that as "belief". One doesn't need to believe when you can know, a problem inherent to the setting and as such one I'm willing to forgive.
The POV of that particular chapter is also one belonging to a literal apostate, so I can accept there being no deference paid to the Supreme Creator, whether he thought there was one or not.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
I've just signed up after lurking for a good while, please forgive me if I'm a little out of the loop and this has already been addressed or explained. Is there a reason why I'm automatically upvoting my own comments? It seems like kind of an odd feature for the community (if anything I would think you should, by default, upvote the comment or top level post you're responding to) plus I feel a little self conscious looking at the little highlight showing the implied numerical value of how proud I am of myself(1). I'd be very curious to see if anyone else has/had any feelings whatsoever about it.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
And the Trump political ads write themselves.
Even better than that, they've already been written. Trump has already branded "They're not after me, they're after you and I'm just in the way" as a slogan quite some time ago. If this shooter left a MAGA body at this rally then Trump is effectively president-elect. Bringing real political violence to a demographic that, habitually, has little experience with it will be catastrophic for Dems at the ballot (tautological but should be said).
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Book recommendation thread? I picked up and read The Eternal Front as recommended from last week's thread, and found it quite enjoyable - very often I find sci-fi loses me within its own scope, but Blaire's writing felt much more human in scale with far lower stakes than what I ordinarily read. I think sci-fi shines brightest when telling stories about the individuals navigating the cultures and battlefields forged through genetic, technological and/or cultural isolation - the actual bedrock upon which every setting rests. Anyway Eternal Front is a good rec and I'll just second @No_one's writeup for it.
Maybe my awareness of the often unnecessarily grandiose scope of sci-fi is the result of serendipity, as I also (finally) got around this week to reading Peter Watts' Echopraxia after having read and reread Blindsight several times over the years, and for as much as I love his writing he doesn't really do people very well. Maybe he just finds them awkward and somewhat unnecessary to the tale he's trying to tell (this may be a literary flourish of his, kind of the point, I've only just recently been introduced to the concept of "media literacy" please understand). Regardless, if you read/enjoyed Blindsight and haven't read the sequel yet, I'll stick a hearty recommendation onto it. If you haven't read Blindsight and you like hard sci-fi then I don't know what you're doing here. Go read it (it's available for free on Watts' website) and curse/thank me later. Pretty sure our actual future looks more like his vision than Gene Roddenberry's.
Continuing down the vein of galactic scale sci-fi that I like but feel a little lost in the sauce, I enjoyed Alastair Reynolds Inhibitor Trilogy, though when reading it I couldn't shake the feeling I was reading a grimdark Culture fanfic (albeit a thoughtfully and competently written one). A fun read if you have nothing else going on, some interesting semi-hard concepts get trotted out and played with, a few logical conclusions to the laws of physics (and breaking them) are portrayed in fairly comprehensible prose. The first entry, Revelation Space, is fun enough by itself to be worth a read; if you want more of that, then each subsequent book expands on those same themes and scenarios. A medium-strength recommend.
Speaking of Iain Banks Culture series, I suppose I'll register some disappointment with everyone who told me Consider Phlebas was a weaker entry in the series than Player of Games, could not really disagree more - PoG was an interesting look into alien anthropology and cultural hijacking but I found it to be bit of a slog. Phlebas, however, scratched that itch I have for a story about a person doing person things in a great big future. Both were good reads though, and I have a fresh copy of Use of Weapons now sitting on top of my stack.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
While I find the sentiment of maximizing the purity of your social bubble somewhat loathsome, in this instance I would be entirely content providing you as much assistance on this front as I could. I even think that I could do this in good conscience, given that your stated premise is to
steer clear of them in IRL interactions
The rules I have, personally, for total removal of an individual from my life before I even know them have been invoked a few times in my life, but not often enough that I feel the need to nervously genuflect towards the Paradox of Tolerance when I do.
That said your somewhat duplicitous presence would lead to my wondering whether your [statistically likely presence somewhere along the chain of decision-makers in the hiring/firing process, for instance] motives in this are entirely pure, or at least not intended to cause real, actual harm to real, actual people while offline. Could you please tell me if the stakes being there was a consideration to you, when you wrote this comment?
Would you consider asking yourself as well, if coding "right-wing" to danger or at least avoidance isn't just coding class-signals (your presumed outgroup) as political?
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
Sorry for adding to the wall of text, but I just realized you were one of the respondents there (I realized I was getting pretty bummed by the way some posters I really respect had written their replies and I try to avoid hanging feelings on a person online). I want to be clear, I have no specific issue with most of what's being said in that thread. Again, my big problem is primarily with the pile on. His question was fairly innocuous and considering some of the other material posted here made very, very few assumptions. The one mistake was being blue-coded.
Also to your credit and undermining my point, you did in fact seriously engage and provided a thoughtful and reasoned response when asked.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
Would you please explain to me the thought process behind including this in your reply? If you genuinely believe this to be a bad faith actor then the appropriate response would either be to ignore and move on or to publicly register them as such first. Actual engagement, while an enticing option, is their intended goal - granting it to them just doesn't make any sense.
Alternatively you don't actually think that but you want to call out their belonging to a group/antisemitic signalling, in which case you may want to address that (e.g. Are people of differing ideological beliefs allowed to post here? Are they capable of posting here within the rules? Are usernames even useful for anything other than marking a continuous personality across conversations/threads?).
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
The fluttering hands and stressed murmurs that pass around rationalist circles every time the subject of "unaligned AGI" comes up has always confused me somewhat, and I think what you're describing is essentially the root of my fears as they relate to AI. Alignment isn't the issue we should be worried about, the whole human species is unaligned; different nation-states, corporations, religions, regional cultures and local flavor are all in contention with each other to some degree. An unaligned AGI may be an existential threat, but who cares? The third impact is mercurial, and the when/why of its arrival will be in a manner of its own choosing.
AI is dangerous because, as with all things technological, it acts as a force multiplier, amplifying the intentions and actions of its users (to a lesser degree, its creators; the author of new tech effectively dies the moment it slips into the world) to superhuman levels - users who are motivated along overtly tribal and ideological lines. I'm not afraid of Skynet, and honestly I think it's rather silly to obsess over the imagined cataclysm du jour. I am afraid, mortally so, of my fellow man's darker impulses and the paths they will walk to manifest them. Insert that one C.S. Lewis quote here
There's a wide spread, perhaps universal (in America at least), sentiment that everyone is lying to you, on some level or another, whether these are government agencies or news orgs or scientific journals. True or not, doesn't matter. What matters is these latest innovations and the timing of their release seem primed for the environment they find themselves in, where uncertainty and a dash of extraordinarily naive credulity (just look at the quantity of people who will share a screenshot of !person/thing I don't like saying something unflattering) have attainted the dream of a free flow of information.
The thing-in-itself has never been less valued, its representation more revered. Maybe I'm weird for maintaining what I view as a moral objection to AI rather than an ethical one, it just feels like so much of the discussion around this stuff avoids the obvious cultural and societal impact this will have (e.g. Replika).
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
I sincerely don’t know what “coding class signals as political” means, otherwise I would answer that question.
I think it's likely you are confusing the urban/suburban/rural cultural divides with political allegiance: while these things map to each other to a degree, these are far more likely to signal class allegiance as opposed to political (e.g. "conservative", "progressive"). Since we're discussing anecdata, I happen to know a great many pro-lgbt, pro-public healthcare, pro-prison reform, all around fairly leftwing types who also exhibit every sign you likely find repulsive (religiosity, "traditional" families, regularly hunting every autumn, drives a pickup truck daily for no reason). These are overwhelmingly lower class markers, not political. In fact there's almost no commonality whatsoever between the "cultural" practices of members belonging to any given political group, these commonalities are far more accurately mapped onto stuff like Red Tribe/Blue Tribe, lower/middle/upper class. If you've (perhaps) had trouble figuring out just why the chuds voted against their interest in 2016, perhaps view it through the lens of "the proletariat sending a message to the petit bourgeois". Hopefully this helps you understand my meaning, I wasn't attempting to be cryptic and apologize for not making myself more clear.
“Would I not hire someone if I knew they were conservative?” To answer that, I would, yes.
Thank you for answering, it's pleasing to see my assumptions born out by reality, at least so far as this place is a reflection of it. How do you reconcile your overt and clearly stated reactionary behavior and bigotry, that appears of the same order (if perhaps a differing flavor) with what you proclaim to despise? It's hardly an original observation, but could you please tell me where and how your desired institutional discrimination differs from historical redlining, women being unable to vote or legally own property, or exclusion of lgbt from marriage/adoption/surrogacy? Or that this discrimination will catch only bad actors and not simply the poor, working and lower classes?
This is not a gotcha to be clear, I find quite literally everything you've said to be objectionable but I'm genuinely curious what your worldview is that consolidates and synthesizes what appear to me to be contradictions and am hoping for an explanation. Or do you simply not feel that these are contradictions, and that conservatives are so uniquely repugnant and valueless as a group their ultimate extinction (not via murder or violence of any kind of course, just the inexorable push over a generation or two down and out of our shared world) is a net benefit to society?
If you are asking me if I would hurt a conservative in real life when you say “real harm”, no.
I think that you and I have differing thresholds for what we consider "harm". I think someone being denied the opportunity to fulfill their natural talents or chosen course in life, not by insurmountable failure or poor fortune, but rather by a conscious and conscientious human being deliberately putting their finger on the scales to be harmful. Consider that others may share my definition of harm, and that some quantity of the hostility you see might be a normative reaction from fairly standard-issue human beings towards perceived contempt and deliberate depredations. Consider that the Morlocks also know how to read, and have recognized, rightly or wrongly, the parallel between your course of action and the UN definition of genocide, specifically Article II.c. Consider that someone otherwise entirely sympathetic to your motivations and lived experience would still look at your proposed course of action and consider you "a baddie".
I know you've stated already that you aren't interested in discussion or debate (here, at least) so if you don't want to respond then feel free to ignore me, I won't take it personally and am happy to indulge your wishes.
Bonus points:
but one attended their college’s Turning Point club
You and I may be in agreement with your direction on this specific example, if not your destination. Mere attendance isn't quite the mortal sin to me as it would seem to be for you, however.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
It escapes the rage-bait/circlejerk flair that the r/*advice subreddits almost universally share.
Really? Because what I saw was 8/9 top level replies using varying degrees of effort and wordcount to say essentially the same thing; "your friends are unreasonable, possibly deranged, your continued existence as a mentally stable sophont is in jeopardy if you leave these people in your life". Social circles are vitally important and are precarious things at best, and telling a stranger to rip up a part of theirs (who knows how sizeable that part is, immaterial to my point), especially over a CW topic, is not good advice, by any measure. The problem for me however isn't that this advice was dispensed (I think it's a real position that a reasonable person can have, I'm not accusing anyone of misrepresenting their own beliefs), the problem is it's the only goddamn advice he got, sans the one person who read his post and provided an answer to the actual question within.
Additionally, I believe that you can in fact discuss CW adjacent topics like "how do I navigate a situation where my friends feel strongly about !issue and I really don't, here are my uninformed and nascent opinions, wat do" without the obviously negative reaction he received. He very technically invited this when he said
Any response is much appreciated.
Still not an excuse for the smug dogpile, not in a place allegedly dedicated to good faith discussion.
I suspect if the political valence had been flipped he would've received at least a more neutral/positive response e.g. "My friends are strongly pro-life and think that Roe being overturned is a landmark victory for innocent life, I kind of feel like it's not murder but this isn't an issue I care much about and I'd rather not alienate my friends if that isn't necessary, wat do." "Wow wow sounds like ur friends might have something to teach u, try asking them for profound opinions" (I view the pro-position on both abortion and trans issues to be largely unreasonable along very similar dimensions and to somewhat similar degrees, but I think a differently coded question of the same genre would have prompted a VERY different response, not like my exaggerated example but along those lines).
The level of detail - trans friends (who I love dearly) - coupled with the admittedly amusing false dichotomies is a dead giveaway. There was no need to go into that level of detail to get meaningful advice - "my friends are getting offended because content-creators have different views than them, what should I do" would have sufficed and would have nonetheless garnered, I reckon, substantially the same response.
Maybe this is uncharitable of me, maybe I didn't make my point clearly the first two times. Regardless,
Maybe he's a troll. Maybe he intends to stir shit up, JAQ off, dissemble then flame out. Cool. Wait for that to happen. I'd like to see this place manage discourse a little bit better than mentally installing a script that turns [Blue Tribe shibboleth] into [!downvote] regardless of how ridiculous I or you or anybody else might find the woke catechism.
I've lurked this place for years in its various forms, and yes, there are fewer and fewer high quality leftwing/liberal contributors every year (are libbies too thin-skinned for rational discussion? I think so! Does public pontification on the topic of Blue tribe irrationality and pussification drive away left-wing posters? Yes! That's why I will always keep my mouth shut for topics I can't write an evenhanded take on). That's why I feel it's incumbent upon all users of this site to point out the burgeoning Red tribe bias that is contributing to the evaporative cooling here. Is it a problem at the moment? I don't think so, could be wrong. Is this going to be a problem in a year? Probably, and it'll compound over time. This place is neat, I've made my case upthread already for why I think that is. If I come here same time next year and this place is where the 125 IQ groypers and Anime PFPs™ hang out, well, miss me with that shit. I know plenty of smart rightwingers in my personal life, I don't want to go online and read the shitpost version of something I already agree with.
I also basically agree with all object-level responses given in the thread
Same. I don't disagree that these trans friends hold an irrational, low information and censorious cluster of beliefs, but this is something I believe to be comorbid with the Human Condition™. I too hold a number of irrational or otherwise low information beliefs on a great many topics, and I suspect everyone else here does as well. The idea that one should take the advice to cut ties as a result of ignorant opinions with those in their immediate circle, as delivered by a stranger on the internet (regardless of context or object level content) seems preeminently dim to me, let alone reasonable. I'll confess to some difficulty now squaring your circle: how can someone of your background and obvious familiarity with the history of a culture that rewards filial impiety1 be comfortable endorsing a practice that is at least superficially similar in type? Or is this something you've already considered, and feel that these two are sufficiently (or completely) disparate subjects?2 Please keep in mind I do not mean that there's never a reason to cut someone completely out of your life, or that you even need a good reason for it, only that the idea of someone (who is unfamiliar with your life beyond whatever broad strokes you provide) telling you to do it for political reasons is just wild.
Perhaps we need to learn to not engage so... earnestly.
In essence, that is my point. Being met with a circling of the wagons doesn't assist in the exploration of ideas, even if the point of exploring said ideas is to eviscerate them more effectively.
Maybe we need to codify this heuristic into a rule (haven't we already?).
I also thought that there was something along those lines already enshrined, but the closest thing to such a stricture would be the rules pertaining to consensus and inclusion. Nothing said in any of the immediate replies rises, in my opinion, to the level of requiring moderator action. That said I believe that the letter of the law may rhyme with the spirit, but that they do in fact mean different things. You don't need to say "as everyone knows" when everyone coincidentally seems to know and profess the same thing. No use getting worked up over consensus building when the consensus is obviously already built.
the measure of the community is whether there is still the will to engage on proposed terms, helpfully and within the bounds of polite discourse.
I agree, and I may have gotten carried away with doomsaying; themotte is not even close to declining to the point I would stop visiting, let alone lose its value on the broader 'net. I don't believe this is a problem as it stands, but I do believe this specific ailment I have described will raise its ugly head in the fullness of time. I lack the experience, knowledge and understanding needed for maintaining an online community, and have little to offer as far as adjustments go. I only believe it's necessary to avert this particular future if this place is going to hold any value down the line, and I can at least point out what I see as the first sprout poking up from the soil.
You can notice my absence there
An amusing downside to posting prolifically is that one's absence does in fact become notable, if only for a given genre of topic.
1Apologies for the source, but the internet is inexhaustible and SEO has crippled my ability to confidently scrape for a more reputable source of my illustration in a reasonable timeframe.
2I am genuinely curious, I am not accusing you of any sort of hypocrisy or double standard. I don't even recall if it's a topic you've explored publicly here, if you have done so I'm always ready to read or reread your write ups.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
Thank you, and greyenlightenment too! I have never and would never make an account on reddit and probably not hn either, so I guess this is one of those little shibboleths that you wouldn't even think about if you were familiar with those kinds of message boards. It still seems odd to me like laughing at your own joke before anyone else does, but if that's the industry standard I'm not complaining. Learn something new every day.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
My preferences are broadly opposed to yours, but I understand what you mean when you describe a satisfying 15 hr game. There is something very satisfying about a story that you can sit down and casually chomp through over the course of a handful of post-shift evenings. As someone with multiple 100hr+ games in his steam library though, I can't agree on the point with open worlds with only 15~hrs worth of content in them, again with an understanding of what you mean; the only AC game I ever played for more than fifteen minutes was some 2d sidescrolling Prince of Persia-esque sidestory for the DS, played out of a child's desperate boredom and not desire.
The majority of what's on offer from major studios for probably the last ten+ years has been dreck, almost without fail. Titanfall 2 was a rare exception to the AAA studio putting out a mediocre product at full-game prices, and it very predictably flopped as a result. As someone who autisticly gets into the systems of a game, and plays them for that satisfaction, the high end of mainstream vidya has been largely uninteresting and I have ignored it entirely as a result.
Helldivers 2, for all the strangely political discussion that's surrounded it, has been by far my most played game since its launch simply because I can see how much effort was put into these systems I get to exploit (rounds are modeled, counted and persistent in the mag/belt/cylinder/chamber, semi-volumetric ballistics for enemy armor, spalling while not modeled is simulated in the damage characteristics of each weapon, etc.). It was a small AA studio that put out an ambitious nearly decade-long project at an AA pricepoint and people loved it and then got bored and moved on. I've put in 400+ hours and have fun playing it still. We all get what we deserve.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
I'll warn you, in terms of pacing Phlebas is all over the place compared to PoG. That said, I think Phlebas is just more entertaining - distinct setpieces, interesting characters, consequential action, clever strategems. It reads more like sci-fi-noir, the main character jumping from bad to worse and still scraping through, seething the whole time at the hedonistic and inhuman Culture as if someone had transplanted an early 21st century man into the setting.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
I'll report in as a datapoint.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
It might have been received too many plaudits but I wouldn't say it was boring. Visually interesting and had a lot of heart (its message of unconditional love and the rebuke towards the post-ironic cynicism in our society landed nicely to me), though it leaned into the zany a little too much for my liking. I'd give it an 8/10 if you held a gun to my head. For reference I would say something like Annihilation or Oldboy (2003) are functionally perfect films for me, I love great visuals and think good acting and compelling stories are less important (not that I can't appreciate an excellent performance, There Will Be Blood is in my top 10 all time and I will sit down and re-watch it any time, if asked).
Speaking of performances, have you seen The Whale yet?
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
I don't disagree with anything you've written here, sans the reiteration of this guy's troll status. Maybe my trolldar is out of whack but IME even concern trolls don't seriously respond the way he seemed to. Perfectly willing to accept that I'm wrong in this instance, but I still think it's uncharitable to levy that accusation based only off of that thread. That said I still can't help but feel like my takeaway here hasn't been taken away. I can only assume this is due to a lack of precision or unintentional obfuscation on my part, or maybe the point was made, received, and summarily discarded (that's fine, if I've been spazzing out here please let me know, seriously. If that's the case then I sincerely apologize for wasting the reader's attention and server runtime). It was wrong of me to even mention score (I personally loathe that there's even a scoring system here in the first place, but people seem to like it so I'll accept that I'm in the minority and won't be a pest about it), it distracts from what I'm trying to describe.
What bothered me was that after the second or third reply, his post kept attracting rejoinders for days (I know, I know, it's an internet forum and responding to a day or two day old post isn't necroing, but I didn't think it was worth remarking upon until I saw another dunk close to three days after the OP) with an almost identical theme to the rest. What I don't mean is, that if someone already said what you think then you should shut up and not say anything at all. What I do mean is, that after receiving a few replies making it clear in detail that this framing is inappropriate for this place, the dead horse kept attracting blows. It would be more healthy for the site, in my opinion, simply to not try (deliberately or not) to drum others out for such a faux pas. Yes, I think the average person (and especially a Blue1) receiving this degree of reaction one or two times will most likely never come here again. The point I have struggled to convey is: that someone saying something objectionable should be objected to, but just because you disagree with a post doesn't mean you need to say it, especially when you can just scroll down and see your opinion already well represented. It just makes you feel good, and them bad.
To use some verbiage I hate but still find useful, I think the way this community treats the Blues is toxic. Is it justified? I'm willing to concede that point, but I didn't come here to turn the tables on my outgroup, I came here for discussion featuring light as opposed to heat. I hope it isn't necessary to say that it's bad when the Blues do it, and it's bad when the Reds do it. I think themotte has already started down the path of becoming a social media-tier echochamber, just in photo negative. I hold this place and its users to a significantly higher standard than I do twitter or reddit, and it's not because everyone here is smarter than them but rather everyone is trying to be better than them.
Thank you for taking the time to write a serious reply.
1I am perhaps being uncharitable when I say that lefty potential-posters are more easily offended than the righties. For clarity's sake, I do not advocate a two-tier moderation system for the opposing ends of the political spectrum as a solution for this.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
Endlessly fascinating to me how hard the internet has accelerated the life cycle for nostalgia, I've noticed myself pining for the good ol' days of the internet with newgrounds, YTMND, SA, 4chan or even what YouTube used to be. These things disappeared or underwent fundamental changes to them not so long ago (a similar timeframe to paying off a car loan or meeting, courting and marrying a stranger) and yet everybody who remembers the internet before Facebook (at least those I've spoken with) all seem to share a similar sentiment. My favorite quote that encapsulates this was from a post from 2014 on one of 4chan's now-defunct text boards saying "2012 was so long ago, was i even alive back then. who knows."
I read for the first time in 2022 the Three Body problem trilogy as well as the fanfiction Redemption of Time, the Inhibitors trilogy, the Hyperion Cantos, and the first two Ian Banks' Culture novels. I've also been very slowly working through my omnibus of the Princes of Amber series (serial?), which is enjoyable but a bit too pulpy for my taste.
Me and my close circle of friends also started a book club to help motivate us to cover works of literature and quality fiction that our schooling or upbringing had never shown us, so we read King Lear, and Child of God by the inimitable Cormac McCarthy amongst others. I was the one to tap out ultimately however, Frankenstein broke me. I cannot possibly envision a realistic future where I can power past the first 50 pages or so, it's some of the most eye-strainingly tedious writing I've ever slogged through, and I read most of Galt's screed in Atlas Shrugged. Maybe I just got filtered.
ETA: I also did a substantial bit of rereading but that was mostly retreading things I've read many times before, primarily Blindsight twice last year, once in January and again in September. I also read Worm for the 10th time.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
If something like a second American Civil War were to take place, my layman's estimation says it would almost certainly start in the next ten years if it happens at all. I could be wrong as tensions could yo-yo for longer than I, personally, might find sustainable but the population can accept.
As far as time to walk it all back goes, well. I think the American population has balkanized both further and for longer than most might admit or realize. The fractures within the major factions might prove to be the new political faultlines of whatever comes next, something like the death of the Whigs and subsequent rebirth of the Republican Party after the Civil War.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
Since you'd have to actually click through and read the thread to see, I think it's worth asking: @ZorbaTHut are you aware that permabanned users still get to participate in janny duty? Should probably be fixed if you want this system to work the way I assume you intended.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2yr ago
Not germane to the discussion, but can you explain Bert Kreischer for me? I like Tom fine, think he's quick and pretty funny, most of the rest of the deathsquad guys are pretty okay at least to me, but Bert has always been a guy I just don't get. He feels to me like he isn't a real person, I've always felt like he's some kind of cutout for a PR company whose name no one knows (Bent Pixels maybe?). Am I just a hater? I'm okay with having an irrational dislike of a comedian, pretty easy for me to just not consume content that rubs me the wrong way.
Are you talking about Wildbow? I remember him saying something along these lines a little while ago, specifically his breakdown of the backlash he received forthe "Avery is dead" arc in Pale.
Also, if there's sufficient interest in it, I have a jumbled mess of thoughts I might be able to kludge together into a top level post describing why I think he peaked with Twig, from the angle of someone who is very much in the visible1 minority (not trans, not a furry, not squeeing over various characters, not socially liberal) of his fans.
1Based purely off of a cursory examination of the online communities that bother discussing his writings in the first place.
More options
Context Copy link