titivate
1yr ago
The more I read reviews of anything, the more I beeline toward reading all the negative ones first. For anything worthwhile, the negative reviews are far fewer and more revealing. It's also faster to tell if the negative reviewer is going to provide any insight and discount the ones that don't, compared to positivers. The good ones cut to the chase and let you know if [thing that annoyed the reviewer] sounds like it'd bother you. Doing this has also lead to some serendipitous and highly entertaining rabbit holes.
titivate
1mo ago
I got tricked by an ssc post into picking up a copy of An African in Greenland. I like historical travel diaries, but instead of the implied premise:
African with conservative tribal upbringing is suddenly inspired to go to Greenland and records his interactions with an equally undeveloped group
I'm realizing it's actually:
French educated teenager runs away from home, spends 10-odd years sojourning across Africa/Europe, and in his late 20s tours Greenland and meets a bunch of rezzed out natives. Somebody convinces him to publish a book 10 years later about his experiences.
It's written in the historical present tense and everything is padded like a YA fiction book. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
This one isn't even in the oven yet, but I've been thinking on and off about the prepping and bug out communities. Frankly, I'm disgusted and think they're rotten to the core, so full of snake-oil salesmen and LARPers that it's better to reinvent the wheel on your own. Every wannabe has a loadout video, nobody actually walks the literal walk the pack is intended for. Somehow, this is acceptable despite the hiking club being right next door.
There's a survival show called Alone, where 10 people are assigned their own plot of wilderness to survive the coming winter until only one remains. Contestants are allowed 10 items from a list of pre-approved gear, and as you might imagine, there has been a lot of improvement on the understanding of the meta-game over 10 seasons. I'd love to see a similar show simulating emergency, expose the /k/ommandos dreaming of rucking 50lbs and urban fighting and sleeping in a mylar bivy in the midwest, while another simply zips home on a kick scooter within a few hours.
But I don't have much of a thesis, everyone's needs will be different, and no one can really be certain what will work before shtf. It's more of a mental exercise and excuse to practice DIY skills at this point.
Tell me about your favorite mods or most interesting fan projects you know. A while back when I was prepping for a roadtrip, I looked into emulator options and games to play during in-between time. Pokemon, was of course, on that list, but since I hadn't played pokemon for over 10 years, and wasn't interested in going thru the grind loop again, I started digging around the ROMhack scene. Most mods were of the usual, outdated, poorly documented, sort. There were only 2-3 polished and highly rated ones but they didn't really grab my interest. But one recently released ROMhack stood out, with its ambitiously vast scope of changes and the author's unwavering dedication. Pokemon Sweltering Sun, a hack based on Ultra Sun (2017, for the 3DS), that in the author's own words, tries:
To have every single Pokemon be fun and viable to use for the entirety of the game... thanks to new moves, abilities and so much more.
By every single pokemon, he means every single pokemon, and to wit, has uploaded a 488 video playlist, covering all 800+ pokemon (the hack adds all mons from gen 1-7), explaining each redesign thought process. There's also a neat spreadsheet pokedex with all the changes for "easy" reference (and it will cause your browser to lag). As a modder, I can tell you that is not normally, This very very insane. It is one thing to make an ambitious mod, it is two things to be super disciplined about clean documentation, and it is three things to have so much sustained passion, because in the process off writing this, I noticed the mad lad has still been pumping out content and just announced a brand new romhack project.
Has the motte astralcodexten'd itself? What's your impression of the off site CW threads so far? I myself check in less frequently than before, and when I do, it seems more... boring?
titivate
1mo ago
Japanese homogeneity
It's not homogeneity that keeps the japanese in line. It's carryover from the days of samurai, when peasants would be killed on the spot for minor transgressions. Just look at singapore.
titivate
1yr ago
The antipathy or even just skepticism so many black Americans have expressed toward Jews is remarkable.
Is it really remarkable? It's super old and to me seems to have gone down over time. Decades ago you had articles like these: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-antisem.html
Summary of above:
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Everyone believes Jewish suffering is heroic, black suffering is of their own fault, so the negro envies the jew
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Jewish suffering is decoupled from their success in America, opposite to blacks
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Jewish people don't behave sufficiently differently from other white christians to be excepted from black anger
titivate
1yr ago
Are younger people less skeptical of the US government compared to older generations? I only have a small sample size but it always struck me that the boomers I know seemed more skeptical of Uncle Sam regarding privacy and foreign policy compared to people that use reddit. Or is it just reddit that tends to be more pro-US than the general population?
titivate
1yr ago
If I felt the juice was worth the squeeze, I would just order 1000s of counterfeits to experiment with. I see no ethical issues with this when basic competitive lands cost an arm and a leg.
titivate
1yr ago
I rewatched the first two terminators in honor of our new overlords, and I really wished they'd focused on Skynet instead of its dumb agents. There is a massive void in pop culture in the shape of a modern 1984 that exploits our AI fears and mercilessly twists that knife. The Matrix was also too fixated on the physical struggle despite taking place... in the matrix.
I want to see humanity's strongest put up against a pan-omni AI God, watch them get outplayed in slow motion at every turn, baited into having some hope, before realizing they were getting hustled, and end buck-broken. None of that limpwristed shit like Ex Machina.
My point was disproportionate punishment for minor transgressions results in a pro-social society, not specifically violence, not homogeneity. Like recently there was that principal that lost his 130k pension because he stole $5 worth of coffee in Japan. I brought up Singapore because it is also an engineered rule-obeying society despite its obvious heterogeneity, and they mete out all sorts of "draconian" punishments. And another example is 1600s Taiwan, where the locals were observed by the Qing to be extremely Japan-like despite the mix of chinese settlers and aboriginals because it had been previously ruled for decades by a Ming warlord who would do stuff like cut peoples arms off if they chopped down certain bamboo.
Finally getting covid recently crystallized some of my thoughts on disagreeability. Small tasks feel like huge endeavors, what tasted good before now tastes weird, small shocks take forever to recover from, nausea is the new neutral, everyday has its own signature of shittiness, and I have absolutely no patience to humor or indulge anybody. I used to be able to volunteer and do the high energy positive wholesome thing when working with kids. Now you might as well ask me to do a triple back flip. It wasn't acute sickness that took away that ability though, it was more like an accumulation of chronic illness symptoms that never disappeared completely. I am in utter awe of spritely middle aged men, who bounce back like rubber balls, but if you don't have that golden retriever personality, contorting yourself into a poor imitation is just too tiring, man. I have my hands full just managing myself here.
titivate
11mo ago
I'm content to stick to the kiddie pool threads, but my disconnect with the CWR is less to do with alleged circlejerking than it is with how CurrentHappening oriented it is. It's either news chatter or a bingo board topic, usually both. I know it says CW right there on the label, and I'm a nobody so... But I just expect it to be a little more serendipitous, and a little less retreading of the latest developments on wokeness. I can't stomach reading even 10% of the comments, it's so tiresome; I have no clue how you manage to moderate and participate in this groundhog week of yours.
If you were able to meet your past selves with perfect recall of yourself at the time, how far back (what age) could you go without feeling cringe at and still be satisfied with your character/intellect/overall decision making?
titivate
1yr ago
With games, you should already know if you're going to be into the core gameplay loop from just the descriptions and promotional video. Reading the complaints are just to confirm if the execution was botched.
titivate
1mo ago
If tiktok is forced to sell, that would legitimize China's stance against facebook and google years ago, which wasn't a ban either. The million dollar question is how much American soft power will the move cost? What will be the new equilibrium on foreign-aligned social media in all the other countries once the dust settles?
What are the fun things you are doing with chat.openai.com? So far I'm using it to:
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Rediscover childhood computer games I vaguely remember
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Augment my DIY skills and help navigate the hardware store
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Fill in the gaps in my memory of books, shows and movies or...
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Filter the unimportant episodes to a show I don't want to watch entirely
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Brainstorm or provide design inspo for my pet projects
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Cherrypick examples to back up some argument in my head
titivate
10mo ago
It's a subsequent development to the API change protest and subreddit blackout. Subs will reopen but maliciously comply. I'm not clear how John Oliver became the face of it, he may have been chosen for lolsorandom reasons.
titivate
1yr ago
In the last week I saw two instances of reddit comments that were unique in phrasing and almost identical. The first was in the same thread shilling some video game streamer, so that's not surprising, but the second was copying a comment from a three year old thread found via other discussions tab in /r/documentaries. Someone brought up a similar situation in a CW thread a few months ago but I don't remember it well. Anyways both comments were later deleted, and I only saved the second account name, a one year old account with only comments in the last week that just did the same^1 thing^2 today and most of its comments are copied from crossposts. Any guesses on the purpose of this?
titivate
1yr ago
Suppose your tastes change fairly consistently, or you have poor long term memory, or you've an elven lifespan. How would you approach flavor of the year fascinations? You read a book, watch a movie, travel to a new place. You evaluate, catalogue, and collect experiences and memorabilia. Maybe you write notes, scrapbook, keep top 10 lists, create customized setups suited exactly to you, and so on. But, in a few years, you'll have inherited someone else's belongings. Baggage, filled with clothes that no longer fit you, nor spark any feelings of nostalgia.
So what do you do? With the films that no longer move you, the playlists you won't put on again? Archive them away like your parents did with your drawings from second grade art class? Build a mini museum into your man-cave, a shrine dedicated to reminding yourself who you once were? Or make a clean break with the past, get rid of that outdated junk, and appreciate that you still have whims to give?
titivate
6mo ago
What would you call the following dilemma and options:
Someone presents an argument, to which another responds with a counter-argument that is tangential or slightly off-target. The OP must decide to either 1) legitimize the counterargument by engaging, and run the risk of entering an unproductive dialogic detour, or 2) attempt to steer the conversation back to the original argument but risk appearing dismissive or uncooperative.
titivate
10mo ago
John Oliver becoming an icon of the resistance and being posted everywhere is the latest "most reddit thing" to happen, but I have to admit I'm surprised because it's spreading to places I didn't expect. I previously attributed flash mob meme activism to the anglo white male demographic, but it's happening even in subs like BestofRedditorUpdates, a repost sub of AITA and the like, with a predominantly female base, likely even moreso than its parent. They held a poll whether to convert the sub to a John Oliver shit posting sub, and the yeas outnumber the nays almost 5:1. Am I the only one surprised by this?
titivate
11mo ago
Do people post for a sense of impact? I hadn't considered it. Why should a chef change the menu for one person's arbitrary tastes? If most people like cake, let them eat cake. @TheGodhead already said more or less my thoughts anyways.
Last week I was wondering whether the first chinese balloon story was really so interesting as to occupy the top 4 spots in /r/all and 5 of the top 11. Today, a week after the Ohio train chemical spill, the full severity is finally hitting the front page, albeit only one post at the 10th spot as of now, with the "why isn't this being talked about" group battling with the "it is being talked about, here's 10 news links" group in the comments. I saw the chemicals specifically being discussed a few times before today in doomer prep subs, but the front page was mostly UFOs or earthquake posts the last few days. Charitably, what the latter group don't understand is that what the former means, is, why did a tangible disaster story go less viral than a relatively inconsequential balloon, why wasn't it talked about the way we talk about other threats, why did it not develop the way we've come to expect big stories to develop? Uncharitably, the latter want to reinforce the conservative conspiracist trope. The white house certainly could have made a big statement about it, like they did with multiple statements about balloons and UFOs, but it's not false to say there was coverage of the train story, despite it being punctuated/less than the expected amount.
Every country will signal boost other stories to take the heat off embarrassing incidents, but what is unique is how skilled western media/culture is at dancing around plausible deniability. They covered it, but something clearly wasn't the same. It's like a rhetorical ABS, as in making controlled micro delays, to render judgment impossible, until enough time has passed that whatever the truth is, it's become a fait accompli. Like with the nordstream bombing, or old CIA shenanigans/warcrimes, the facts are suspended in the air until its old history, at which point you will have Americans saying how they're not surprised X or Y happened, but then turn around and continue to give themselves the benefit of the doubt or maintain faith in the system. Similar to gell-man amnesia but reflects worse for both the writer and the reader.
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