rincer_of_wind
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User ID: 3374
rincer_of_wind
1mo ago
And you're missing the point of what I'm saying. It was merely a colourful way to express that I didn't know when it occurred because the whole thing was so impenetrable for me back then. I wasn't "online" before 2014.
I should have written 2008-2014 for clarity.
rincer_of_wind
1mo ago
Drowning in cynicism is a good way to put it. The older I've got, the more I am confident a lot of the motivation to spend the effort to disseminate the Red pill's somewhat accurate read on gender dynamics is simply pure envy that women in real life can have lots of casual sex if they want and, worse, there is little punishing them if they do. There is a desperate need to seek some kind of "justice" for their actions. Vicariously delivering this is the main content of things like the "Whatever" podcast.
(I encourage people to look up how body count actually effects women's dating and relationship prospects)
It never gets more complex than that imo.
rincer_of_wind
1mo ago
This is supposed to reflect the feeling teenage me had at the time. Gamergate was such a quiet behemoth in the sphere that it could have happened yesterday or years ago. I'm also not being entirely exact with the references to my age for opsec reason.
A post-Gamergate Gen-Z core retrospective
I can't be the only one with this exact same experience. The worst thing to ever happen to my high school dating life was watching that first “feminist owned” compilation by Milo Yiannopoulos.
Thirteen-year-old me was recruited from the Minecraft let’s plays and dropped into the hardened battle lines of what we now call the culture war.
Since I was a young boy, my enemies and friends were already decided for me. People nowadays often make jokes along the lines of “this is what radicalised me.” But I can, honest to God, say it was videos of ladies with dyed hair throwing hissy fits at a supposed patriarchy.
But how did I get to this point? This was my conception of the state of internet politics circa 2013 at the time. Between 2008–2013 there was an event called Gamergate. Akin to World War I, I arrived after the ossification into trench warfare was already complete. As a person late to the party, the commentary I saw was very confusing and never actually touched on what caused the big shitstorm in the first place. I even tried to watch an explainer video, after which I was left even more confused, because it all seemed so inane and random and everyone kept having Very Strong Opinions about little nuances of the situation that I still am confused about to this day.
My vague understanding: a female indie video game developer slept with a journalist to get a good review for her game. She was also annoying about it or something. (Fun fact: I came across Brianna Wu on Twitter recently, who was also involved, I guess. Turns out she has always been a fairly likeable, nuanced, low-key trans woman. Don’t really know how that fits any narrative.)
At this point it had all become, by my estimation, more about feminist influence in gaming than what actually happened (whatever that was exactly). As an avid consumer of video game reviews at the time, I had the vague understanding that, of the people whose videos I watched the more respectable sort, like TotalBiscuit (RIP), AngryJoeShow, and Jim Sterling (WTF happened there, am I right?) I was supposed to be on the other side. These guys always came across as if they really didn’t want to talk about the topic, treating it as a toxic cesspit.
I’ve set the stage. Drum roll please. Come in:
Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad. It all starts with this guy. Pioneer of the political video essay format. Progenitor of the low-effort news commentator. Prime user of the still stock-image background picture.
The “This Week in Stupid” series was the succulent roast-dinner to the “feminist pwned” appetizer. A menagerie of this week’s most epic fails, most ludicrous feminist lies, most egregious overreaches, righteously torn asunder by the smooth, scornful, and eloquent voice of reason.
This man didn’t avoid talking about Gamergate; he bravely confronted it full force. He even had a reaction video to Angry Joe’s video on the topic that honestly was impossibly hard to follow. I don’t understand how people who actually went through the whole Gamergate saga don’t start tweaking when they hear “journalistic ethics in gaming.”
Suffice it to say, embarrassingly so, he was a role model for a young lad like me. (If you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes: he was also solely responsible for Jordan Peterson getting discovered.)
You had to be there. Imitators popping up left, right, and centre, today uncharitably called grifters, amassing large audiences rapidly. It was a golden era. Anyone with a microphone and vocal cords could make it big. There was a voracious, previously uncatered-to appetite for this content, and I feasted.
I started adding Kraut and Tea (now just called Kraut), Armoured Skeptic, and dozens more to my rotation. I saw them go from a few thousand subscribers to tens of thousands (YouTube wasn’t as big back then; a hundred thousand subs made you a Big Deal).
The content expanded from video game politics to IRL politics. The Establishment joined in as a canonical enemy and ally to the feminists, ruthlessly deplatforming these new up-and-comers left and right. It was literally 1984. You had to be there. Free speech became the core load-bearing belief. But the good times couldn’t last forever. At some point the explosive growth slowed down, people started circling the wagons, collabs were handed out jealously. Production values increased along with the drama.
At this time I noticed the prevalence of a certain type of channel in the network: the Skeptic™ cadre. Names like “The Amazing Atheist” and “Armoured Skeptic.” I started connecting the pieces to a deeper origin story for the whole Gamergate thing. It all invariably led to New Atheism and Atheism+. Fourteen-year-old me didn’t know what New Atheism was, but it clarified to me what the fault lines were. Why was one side of the gamer army so hung up about the sexual proclivities and false statements of an, by all accounts, irrelevant developer, and the other side hated them for it?
Basically, the group with the beef was clearly the disenfranchised remains of New Atheism. These people were veterans who had debated internet creationists from before I was born, hyper-vigilant about correct argument and debate. After winning that war, they had been ruthlessly discarded over… something to do with people being busybodies and entryists making it a feminist thing with Atheism+. The important thing was that these same guys, perceiving that gaming was next, didn’t want a repeat. They dusted off their AOL majigs and went to war. (Sorry, don’t know what AOL is; I’m not unc-coded.)
And then I think they lost that battle too. And they realized the problem must be attacked at the root: the birthplace of the totalising feminist menace, universities.
And whatever your thoughts on these people are, they changed the world. This is a bit crazy to say, but I think they started and defined the online-era culture war.
I have a million more things to say and will maybe make a follow-up post on my view of the continued evolution to the present day. I want to go deeper into my shameful ̶P̶e̶t̶e̶r̶ Stefan Molyneux, Paul Joseph Watson, red-pill era, and how the skeptic-to-Nazi pipeline had more than a grain of truth to it.
Nowadays I feel a lot of resentment for all the broken trust between me and my childhood idols. I fought this war alone in my classrooms. They gave me the forbidden fruit of knowledge, only for years later to become what they taught me to hate.
But really, am I the only one who went through this live?
rincer_of_wind
8mo ago
I really like your explanation as to why individual components of IQ correlate so much. It makes a lot of intuitive sense that its partially a selection effect. Surprised ive never IQ seen truthers mention it.
rincer_of_wind
11mo ago
Yeah, sure. That's why I'm not betting 100% on it. I give it 5% odds of it happening personally.
rincer_of_wind
11mo ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3sWBc3qUet0 - Line drawing. I had great success with this.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BKiopm83L8c - Lots of good exercises
I would personally also recommend the beginning figure drawing course by proko
But don't be afraid to just fill up an A4 page with whatever thing you want to draw that day. Choose a random object on your desk and draw it until the page is full. Organic shapes are better. People are best, but you can't step right into that one without watching a few videos or having someone teach you some basic principles. Never use a ruler.
rincer_of_wind
11mo ago
- Eastern collapse in 4 (+2) months 2. Belarus mobilization and incursion in September (November).
Big fan of your Ukraine posts! Reddit and here.
rincer_of_wind
11mo ago
Il take a three to one bet that you're wrong on both counts by the time specified + 2 months. For a what counts as "complete collapse" of eastern ukraine; a thread on the culture war roundup that has at least three known posters stating it as something close enough (with no more than half of those posters changing their mind within one week)
I highly doubt you will agree to these very favourable terms. Hopefully the end result will inspire you to be more critical of your information sources anyway.
Yes there actually is.
The three things that matter are quantity, speed and deliberateness in that order. You want to be drawing as much as possible as quickly as you can(this is sort of related) while trying to acchieve an objective/criteria you are trying to improve in.
What you want to improve in at first is line control and your visual spatial sense. So having a line you want to put down in your mind and putting that line and its length exactly where you intend to relative to other lines.
All drawings start off as a collection of lines.
Lines are actually often called curves and you want to master the S and C curve, putting the inflection points at the right place etc.
The other part is recognizing what curve or line make up the parts of the form you want to translate on paper.
The actual practice is, depending on your personal interest and mental fortitude, either drawing random objects in front of you or (pictures of) naked people (lets face it, pretty women).
For quick early motivating success do objects.
Shit out a couple of dozen quick sketches of these things a day, focusing on one or two of the skills I named earlier. Watch a couple of Proko YouTube videos to get some pointers.
You will be able to greatly impress your friends in at least three months and be better than most "artists" in a year. You will never be satisfied with your own skill.
Additional things;
Drawing is not tracing a shape. Drawing is a form of information compression, the better you are the less lines you need to convey what you are drawing with the least bits(lines) as possible.
The confidence and elegance of the line is paramount. Lines shouldn't overlap, be shaky, or be something other than the permitted curves.
Never erase anything just start over if needed.
Draw lines in one steady stroke.
Never draw from memory, always use reference. The only way to learn to draw without reference is a ton of related reference work.
Never spend longer on a picture to make it more pretty after you have the shape and form down. This is much harder than it sounds and one of the biggest impediments to improvment.
This is how you scientifically improve your drawing ability. There's a million other skills of course, you can never master all of these. Shape is the most important though, and shape is all you need to be a great artist.
Shading, perspective, texture, weight, composition, colour, flow. All important but far far easier to learn(with the exception of perspective) and a huge info hazard for young artists imo. These are all things that you will eventually want to learn, but theres no cheat code like with shape, where you can put yourself head and shoulders above others very (relatively speaking) quickly. And the learning habits you build up from shape and form practice will be critical for these too.
Most artists use these as a crutch, putting makeup on a pig. They can make pretty pictures, but they will stagnate with a terrible foundation.
The reason most artists don't learn shape and lines is that it's really hard and requires extensive deliberate practice. The vast majority of creatively inclined people are more interested in expression and creation than improving their craft.
You learn to make very pretty fragments by doodling and drawing what comes to mind. This is very inefficient and you will never catch up to these people in the domain of aesthetic doodles.
You need to be prepared to draw a lot of ugly shit. It's like any other skill, only that it's so broad most people can get by with avoiding it and starting off making pretty little doodles but never outgrowing that. Most visual artists are actually very self conscious about this.
Edit: below you mentioned you wanted practice katas. The practice Katas of drawing are fairly unpleasant and demotivating to do, which is why they aren't taught to beginners. But yes, it is drawing something like the same teacup twelve times on one page in 10 minutes. Deliberately repeating and refining the lines from the previous tea cup.
Ah, my bad, I wanted to change that to *'is currently' not always has been.
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