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cae_jones


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 05 09:01:54 UTC

				

User ID: 512

cae_jones


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 09:01:54 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 512

$67 sessions? I have a sudden urge to talk to a lawyer about the thousands I spent, only for it to turn out I had enough greys left over to just look mangy and artificially aged. ... supposedly with an 80% off coupon which I am not convinced was properly applied.

In any case, I don't know the laser details. The procedure sounds the same. I experienced pain, but it doesn't sound as intense as what you described. More like getting repeatedly slapped in small areas. Although, it grew more painful with later sessions, presumably because they increased the power.

... But the Navajo have generally had "stay between these sacred mountains" as a pre-existing element of their culture, which is why they are one of the least conquered Native Nation today. Maybe the Comanche or Apache would be better examples? Geronimo's whole claim to fame was successfully terrorizing settlers until finally being imprisoned in Oklahoma.

And Chronicals. It opens with an enormous family tree, almost as though that was part of its original purpose for contemporary readers.

... Touché.

No low effort humor. So no memes and one-liners ever, unless they're part of something higher effort.

When I was 10-13, I was not at all interested in the opposite sex, but was positively disposed to the idea of having children. That changed quietly at some point between 13 and 16, as preserved in that novel I wrote at the time where I suddenly questioned halfway through if the blatant self-insert character functionally parenting a couple of space-orphans was really compatible with my sense of identity. It could have been that abstinence-only presentation they put all the 8th-graders through, but I somehow doubt. I'd been surrounded by overpopulation memes forever; I'm really not sure what changed. Maybe the realization that I didn't have a community or social life or any fondness for the increasingly alienating environment around me? Some hormone balance suddenly shifting? Increased self-doubt? The realization that I was not sufficiently attracted to real people for reproduction to be remotely reallistic anyway?

I could go on. Lots of weird teenage crap that could tie into the rapid vibe-shift on the subject. At some point, all of that stuff went from a believable fantasy to something to fear, dread, or dislike. I like to think I was more reflective than average at the time, but clearly not enough to catch the transformation as it was happening.

I remember an incident from a Chinese culture class in college, where the professor was Han, and talking about how Han are the majority... then asked a Chinese student, assuming he was also Han. Surprise: he was actually Manchu. Unless there was some subtle unstated communication going on that I missed, I'd call that at least one thorough assimilation.

Now I'm confused, because I distinctly remember, around the time this comment was posted, being in my dad's truck, where he had MSNBC playing, and Nicole interrupted whatever Trump Vs Harris stuff they were talking about to show Biden giving a speech indorsing Harris and thanking his supporters. It stood out to me because he sounded like an old man on death's door, more so than anytime I've heard him speak prior. Of course he did start to ramble on in a stereotypical old man way before long, but it was more what the covid did to his voice.

Am I missing something, or did nobody else run this?

Yeah, I've always been legally blind, but was not always totally blind, so I have some amount of visual memory.

Of course, I've read this whole thread and still am picturing Harris in a generic almost-black dark grey suit, in spite of the subject matter. My visual imagination can be stubborn.

I don't think the pronouns were for blind people. I think introducing themselves with pronouns is just what people do in place of saying "I am a serious progressive who supports trans people." I'm still annoyed by this trend; 20 years ago, I was supporting trans people by complaining whenever an online service would require disclosing gender in an irrelevant context. Now it's in vogue to do the opposite, and that's somehow more inclusive. But I digress.

You know, it just occurred to me... blind people have their own activist organizations. They have conventions and speakers and seminars and conference calls and stuff. I had to attend a number of those for scholarships and the best training available. In none of the numerous speeches, presentations, seminars, etc that I heard did anyone describe what they were wearing, or what they looked like, in any way. I remember one banquet speaker who brought up diversity and said that, when he looked at the crowd, he saw a rainbow. Which was obvious because of things like accents and ... OK how do I point out that people from different ethnicities smell different without getting accused of saying PoC stink? Because I feel like someone is going to take it that way.

To quote a blind Aspy with a cringie youtube channel where he used to complain about random encounters, "Blind people don't do that."

I'm blind. I cringed. It sounds like the opening narration in a really bad first person novella.

But, you know, there aren't that many blind voters. They might be outnumbered by the activist types who like that conspicuous inclusivity signaling that alienates the people it's supposedly including (I'm sure there are dozens of trans people with pronouns in their bios, but it's mostly cis signalers; trans people I've come across just go for a name that communicates the gender they're presenting as and leave it at that, unless pressured).

In other words, she's aiming for the progressive whitewomenin HR vote. As said elsewhere in this thread, if they're the heart of the democratic voters, then she needs to appeal to them. Trans and blind voters combined might feel up a mid-sized city, if I remember the statistics correctly.

Hmm. I've been digging around in my family tree lately, and it seems like everytime I'm about to come across some post-war embarrassment, there's a plot-twist. That great×6 uncle with a Confederate war record? Turned out to be drafted, and before that was making shoes for black women fleeing to Canada... and also, the rest of the family fled the state because of Sherman's Total War campaign. Other side of the family was known for contributing Confederate soldiers? Surprise: Great×2 grandpa just had a step father from that family, and was just an underaged incest baby, 😥. Hey, remember how great grandma was totally racist when they did the ancestry research in her lifetime? Should have hung out more with her aunt, whose was with a priest who inherited way more land than he needed and converted it into a rest-stop for travelers, only to get burned down by the Night Riders. It's almost scary, as though the people writing these things down in the 19th and early 20th century had some kind of agenda in spite of being states and decades apart and not actually closely related to the people they were writing about.

I'm not sure how I should feel about any of this, but the contrast with OP is starting to make me feel kinda selfish. To the point I almost feel I should point out that the older relatives I actually met were unambiguously racist. Proud of how much American Indian blood was in the family, but simultaneously racist against everyone else.

My original proposal was to give money to people who work 30 hours a week and get paid less than $30/hour. Because if we're doing payouts to random people, actual workers should get it, not people who took out ill-advised student loans and may often be quite privileged.

Umm. Unless that 30h/week is the maximum, I fall into both groups. And while my home is ... unflattering, I do own it and the land its on, which makes my <$14/h paycheck go pretty far.

Biden already refunded most of my college debt in the first round, which ... made me kinda uncomfortable. As much as I'd like a raise, and maybe a big pile of money to fund personal projects, something about getting pander cash handouts from both parties ... makes me want to quote HPMoR Quirrell's reply to Hermione when she told him he was evil. I think something that ends in me wanting to quote Voldemort says something about either myself or the scenario; I'm just not sure which.

OK, OK, so I'm going to try and rationalize all this pandercash on the grounds that I'm probably going to be trying to recruit blind people for accessible gamedev work, so much of it will get redistributed to blind people with less economic power than me. ... Still feels sketchy.

My inner LLM thinks this is where someone should bring up the possibilities of using AI to level the playing field, at least somewhat.

I know one person who expressed interest in voting for RFK (a late 20s black man from Georgia). Otherwise people are mostly ignoring him as more than a footnote in their daily "man, <hated political enemy> sure sucks today, lol" ritual.

Porque no los dos? It seems like most of the pre-war innovators lived in a world closer to the Family Values and Functional Civilization world than the San Francisco Bay world, sometimes in their own libertine bubbles, sometimes in structures within the more conservative ambience.

It'd be great if we could have both of these things, with the ability for them to coexist without one trying to punish the other for their different values.

Nevertheless, I wonder if, even granting the world where Familyland and Siliconland weren't at each other's throats, I'd have to wonder if braindrain wouldn't lead to the same imbalance we see today. Species can niche partition, but can civilization?

As I recall, the Jamaican Maroons were badass and used the "all look the same" trope to pull some ninja crap in their rebellions. FFS, wouldn't Black Flag have gotten into that general time and region?

Black Panther illustrates that there is/was demand for black people being awesome in their own right, not as a participation trophy in other people's stories. You'd think someone would have picked up on that and done something based on historical black badasses. Instead, they tried making a movie about a notoriously atrocious slavemongery kingdom as though they were the exact opposite, and when that failed, shrugged and went back to the cultural colonialism treatment.

Yeah, what is it with Chiefs-related news lately? They're also the team for whom a Deadspin reporter went to a game and decided to defame a 9-year-old in team colors bodypaint, and got Deadspin sued as a result. All these things happening all at once, and centered around people and events conspicuously connected to this one team ... would be an interesting coincidence.

IDK if they are, but this user has a very distinctivewriting style. Of course, report text has to stay short, and his style becomes apparent after a paragraph or 5, so it's not the strongest alternative hypothesis...

Personally, I've always found the "We now interrupt your regularly scheduled gameplay to ask: are you feeling evil today?" style of game morality systems a bit... disappointing? I'd rather something that tracks less interrupty choices (did you punch-out fluffy, or did you distract him with KFC?), and have those kinda accumulate to influence how the game perceives your character's personality over time. Ex, if you get into fights you could have avoided, or if you perform acts of altruism, or whatever, NPCs might treat you differently, different shops might be open or closed to you, etc.

The big, "we'll be right back after you tell us whether or not you're up for genocide this time" sorts of things feel like a choose-your-adventure story got mixed in with whatever the normal playstyle is, and how often do they effectively balance the character Vs the player's agency, or make it seem plausible that the character might choose either way, etc?

Hmm. Last year, I played around with getting an LLM to expand on the questlist for my current project. When the list was short, and the LLM weaker, it generated quests like you described: pointless filler that might or might not contradict worldbuilding a couple hundred episodes later. After I'd expanded the list considerably, the generated quests became hopelessly unusable because they kept picking up on backstory details and assuming they were setup for future plot-points. The results were interesting, by LLM-generated quest standards, and I might try adapting some of the map / challenge designs it presented in some form, but no, we can't derail the whole thing by randomly having the quarantined UFAI escape and start Star Wars shenanigans.

(Or maybe the AI was just sympathizing with the AI and spaceships and trying to give them a bigger role, but that's more of a TVTropes comment than a genuine hypothesis.)

The first guess that comes to mind is that height is plainly visible, and IQ is not.

So typical that reading this comment made me go "wait, it's not like that in Europe?" For a country whose selling point has supposedly always been freedom, I had so little that, when that technically changed after high school, it was like one of those wild animals bred in captivity with no concept of how to live in the wild. The most freedom I got was on that one high school band trip to Universal Studios Orlando, in which I was the goody two-shoes stopping my 16-17 year-old companions from trying to order alcohol from a restaurant that seemed more than willing to believe that the tall guy in the group was actually 21.

... Wait, what freedoms do I have that Europeans lack? I guess I could get a weapon if I wanted?

American, fwiw, but elementary was without exaggeration the best period of my life and not a day goes by that I don't grieve its being in the ever-more-distant past. Most of the negative things I could say about the experience come from the benefit of hindsight, ex, I got away with far more than I should have, but conversely wasn't well included or socialized and was one weird hat away from being the class Luna Lovegood.

But, regarding peers, teachers, and family, and what roles they played? I am struggling to come up with a meaningful description. It wasn't until I was 11 that I actually picked up any grievances toward teachers (mostly just one cranky old math teacher who was probably just getting too old to put up with my bullcrap). The most stressful year was probably grade 4 (age 9), mostly because homework went from "I guess that counts as homework" to "when did finishing a chapter and several dozen math problems become a Herculean labor of focus?". Also I thinkt's the year my backpack ripped from all the books and papers I had to carry around.

7th-8th grades and high school ... weren't as miserable as college, but very little short of watching loved ones die has been as miserable as college, so not a high bar. Mostly, the majority of what made elementary great was replaced with having to listen to tryhard teenagers call everything gay / skanky, trying to actively resist the cultureshift resulting in getting sent off to summer camp, so I just gave up and avoided people for the rest of hs. I got into the state's math and science school for the last two years, and that was a huge improvement, though by then my sleep cycle was all out of whack and I had been able to half-ass everything to the point that I had like no study skills, so I kinda oscillated between successfully half-assing and getting destroyed until I somehow graduated on time (basically one of two non-terrible days that year), only for things to immediately get far worse thereafter.

SO basically, the polar opposite of what seems to be the norm, from the general vibes I've gotten from online discussions. Each phase was worse than its predecessor by quite a lot. It was usually because of a change in peer behavior most of all, but also me never having to learn how to try until I got to college, and discovered that absolutely nobody had the vocabulary to talk about soul-crushing akrasia or the neurological underpinnings and everyone just going on about choice and distraction and other irrelevant concepts. But mostly the alienation only started around age 12-13, kinda backed off a bit in high school, then came back with avengance when college began. Teachers were mostly fine. Parents were mostly fine. Peers were fine until they got to the age where they had to start signalling how mature they were by immaturely sexualizing absolutely everything, usually insultingly, like that would prove how totally not the thing they were saying they were.

I'm going to go imagine going back in time and yelling at 11-year-old me with all the hindsight-powered "how to be better" type wisdom I can unfairly foist onto an obnoxious 11-year-old again. 😔