MaximumCuddles
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User ID: 58
Brother, I’ve got to say that I think you’ve been had.
That YouTube video and “oriface.ai” is top tier rage bait. I mean, real chef’s kiss level.
On par with “it’s ok to be white” or “Islam was right about women.” Or any entry into the Sokal affair.
It’s absolutely beautiful, I laughed for a full ten minutes after watching that short video. I couldn’t believe it, it was an absolute miracle of trolling, perfectly designed to infuriate a maximum amount of people and trivially accomplished through ai trickery.
A toast to the geniuses at oriface.ai, May their enemies be made ridiculous. Legitimately the funniest thing I’ve seen online in months.
MaximumCuddles
22d ago
Having been an aggressive mostly-lurker since the beginning of TheMotte on Reddit, I was absolutely surprised to see my name pop up for this.
I’d like to thank the academy etc etc etc… gets played off stage
MaximumCuddles
1mo ago
I asked the same question about a month ago. Apparently he chickened out came to his senses and realized it was a suicide mission. He went on a big mountain climbing trip instead, which is less fun but more sensible.
MaximumCuddles
1mo ago
Having everyone unbanned for 24hrs before being rebanned on April Fools would be absolutely wild.
MaximumCuddles
1mo ago
I think if Hlynka should be unbanned if he does “The Hock”, with photographic evidence to back up his claim. Trial by ordeal.
I’m not even remotely kidding.
That might be the funniest deep cut mashup of internet niche humor ever produced. It would be a scream come true.
Sure, but two things were abundantly clear even to the political novice; trump wanted the vaccines approved asap and trump wanted the lockdowns lifted as soon as the vaccine became available to let the economy recover, even if it was just to save his own political skin.
If the CARES act was the only major spending bill related to COVID and we got more or less back to business as usual by fall 2020, it would have caused an inflationary period but the damage would have been limited and mitigated by a quick recovery.
There’s a big difference between taking 2000mg of Tylenol and taking 4000mg of Tylenol and four shots of whiskey.
The vast, disparate effects of what you might call the “lockdown political culture” deepened and accelerated this inflationary pressure by absolutely skull-fucking normal supply and demand. And that shit was 1000% on the heads of democrats.
All inflation is just too much money chasing too little goods. The absolutely psychotic extended lockdowns and the hair trigger response we had throughout the administrative state, which was in open rebellion against the Trump administration, caused a ton of problems both on the supply side and the demand side.
I saw this personally as I was privy to the cost increase in my industry which were largely a result of all these collective policies on both the federal level, and on the state and local level, all of which are heavily blue.
So my intuition is that trump might be responsible for like 15% of the inflation surrounding COVID, tops. And the super tight labor market that we had pre-COVID more than makes up for that, and the Trump administration can take at least partial credit for that.
MaximumCuddles
1mo ago
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
The data is either incomplete or wrongly, often willfully wrongly interpreted. I’m literally one of those people he’s talking about; Despite posting in this rarefied little forum full of PMC types, I’m roughly working class in lifestyle and lifetime earning capability.
Instead of going to get an advanced degree, I worked for a living and got married and started a family. I’m an extremely skilled worker with an extremely strong resume, and I’ve been working 40-60 hours a week for the last 15 odd years at decent and respectable enterprises. By all accounts I shouldn’t have to struggle this hard just to keep my head above water.
All I have to do is take a look at my refrigerator to tell you you’re wrong. From 2016 to 2020, if I had friends over I’d always have something special for entertaining; olives, cheeses, charcuterie, pate, maybe some nice liquor or craft beer, high quality meat, a wide variety of fresh fruits, maybe some fun desserts like sorbet or crème brûlée. You name it, it wasn’t extravagant but I always had something I could put together to entertain a few guests.
And that was all on one income, which was a good income but not spectacular by any means. And I managed to save a good amount of money. I could afford to take my wife out to a nice dinner in occasion, we could go on very modest vacations without worrying about it too much.
All that shit is gone now, my family had spaghetti for dinner twice last week. It’s brown bag lunch for me. I don’t keep liquor in the house anymore, too expensive. We’ve basically stopped eating beef because it’s too expensive. For the first time in my entire life I’ve been late on payments on a semi regular basis; I’m quite financially literate but there’s only so much you can do.
And that’s all with my wife working again.
What that people touting these great economic numbers don’t understand is that all the pain and hardship doesn’t end the second the numbers start to get better, the effects of economic stress have long tails that bleed into everything. Just because the earthquake stopped and the house is still standing doesn’t mean it is not still in the process of falling over.
I’m making more money than I ever had but my lifestyle has been severely downgraded since 2020, probably permanently, of which nearly none of the blame can be reasonably laid at the feet of Donald Trump or the republican party.
I live in a deep blue state, in a blue area. And every working class person I know hates the government and the Biden administration. What’s more interesting is my social circle is incredibly diverse.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
For fucks sake, you can’t rely on 100% of people to enjoy a delicious free meal that they pick out themselves, or sex with an extremely attractive and willing partner.
Unless these voting districts consist of approximately 25 voting people, any district reporting 100% one way voting is like Soviet level bullshit.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
There’s a great deal of ruin in a nation.
And more importantly, my children live here. And hopefully, my children’s children.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
Does anyone know what happened to “The Hock” guy? Did he die or what?
Was there a Deadpool on him? I demand answers.
Before anyone objects that this doesn’t belong in Friday fun, this is certainly fun for me, as ghoulish as it may be.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
I think you mean an awesomely autistic hobby..
I’m not on the spectrum at all but when my kids were little in leu of giving them tablets I’d just give them my phone and open google earth. It gave me a needed break from my own phone and they absolutely loved it.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
When the “Place. Place, Japan.” Memes were roiling I was often tempted to simply say: “This, but unironically.” And chadface it.
I’m decidedly not a weeb; I consume very little Japanese culture, maybe more than the median person in my country but not a lot more. I don’t romanticize the place at all, I have no dog in this fight.
But fuck me do they have some gorgeous, walkable cities. And I would absolutely fight most people who use the phrase “walkable cities” out loud more than thrice per year.
I put walking tours of Japan up on YouTube as idle content while I’m doing housework and it always amazes me how nice they are. Even my kids love them, and my Latino & Latino adjacent clan.
Not a Japanophile amongst us, and yet we love those cities more than the ones available to us.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
I’m just saying, I a hundred percent agree with you. Which is why “Wrong side” is in scare quotes, I absolutely don’t frame this that way.
I love this analogy, the Truman show is a perfect encapsulation of our incredibly stupid media ecosystem that has penned in an increasingly small amount of people into epistemic closure.
In the taxi analogy, trump haters act like they are requesting we go to the city of dis on the 7th circle of hell, when we really want to go to like… upstate New York. Can you imagine if every cabby you asked to go to upstate New York cried or pissed and shit themselves or immediately tried to change the subject or flat out refused to talk to you afterwards? I imagine That’s a common feeling being a Trump supporter, like “What the fuck is wrong with these people? I just want to go to Connecticut from Manhattan.”
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
Probably! But history is made at the margins.
For example, I bet if you ask four random cabbies in Manhattan in the 1940s to take you to Harlem, it’s not crazy to think that most of all of them would reject you. Some percentage of the refusal is rational, concern about crime etc, but certainly not all of it. Maybe not even most of it.
And more importantly, there were non crazy reasons to want to go to Harlem in the 1940s, lots of them. There are plenty of good reasons to go to Cuidad Juarez today, but a lot of people on the US side of the border would refuse.
I think it’s an excellent, but not perfect, analogy.
History is strewn with lots of groups who did and believed things that the majority thought were crazy. Most really were crazy. A smaller percentage weren’t crazy at all with the benefit of hindsight. And sometimes the majority of society were clearly the crazy ones all along.
That’s the risk of living in history, backing the “wrong side” in hindsight, but we don’t have hindsight in the present.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
Eight years later, the “crackhead taxi driver” analogy still holds.
Imagine you have a destination in mind. You hail an Uber, 4.9 stars, great vehicle, clean. You tell them where you want to go and they look at you like you have three heads. And after realizing you’re serious, they flat out refuse to take you there. No matter how much you beg or attempt to reason with them or bribe them.
So you call up a Lyft. 4.6 stars, nice vehicle. Same outcome, first they think you’re joking, then you’re crazy, and finally an idiot.
On and on it goes. Seven vehicles later, you hail an unlicensed taxi cab. The driver opens the door, it smells like piss inside. There are empty beer cans and takeout containers strewn around the vehicle. You tell him where you want to go, the driver looks at you for a minute with his cigarette still in his mouth and says “Fuck it, let’s go. Hop in.”
If you’re a Trump supporter, hearing that you just jump in. So far it’s you’re only shot to get where you’re going, it’s getting late and you’re getting desperate.
Honestly? Don’t blame anyone who chose that way. With the benefit of hindsight, I think they were absolutely right.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
Well, if you define the success state of simply being a better doctor than this won’t help directly.
But it sounds from the OP that they are suffering from more general spiritual/psychological malaise, and I know from personal experience that strong & consistent physical training in pursuit of a series of difficult yet achievable goals does wonders to keep the mind sharp and the darkness at bay.
Really the point is that I’ve found the greatest counterbalance to depression is feeling goal oriented and physically empowered, and learning and practicing an aggressive combat sport is just one of the most extreme yet mundane examples of that.
Plus with ADHD brain, the sedentary modern world is a double enemy as we’re akin to hunters in a world made for farmers.
A physical discipline that requires full mind-body activation for extended periods of time acts as a powerful tonic to lift the spirits. Doesn’t have to be fighting, it’s just the thing that is the most direct path from A to B.
Downhill skiing, mountain biking, trail running, Olympic wrestling, judo, mountain climbing, are all activities that could possibly scratch the same itch.
There’s a reason it’s a known archetype for high powered businessmen or other such high achievers under a ton of stress to lean into stuff like this (or the yin to the yang, meditation.) It works and really takes the edge off.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
My suggestion? Choose violence.
There’s almost nothing more empowering than learning how to turn your body into a weapon, pick a martial art and start learning it, join a training gym and get good enough to spar on a regular basis. Nothing fancy, I recommend good old western boxing to start.
“b-but MaximumCuddles, I’m a lover not a fighter / I’m gentle at heart / I don’t like fighting / blah blah blah”
Good news! If you’re an adult man*, you’re almost certainly wrong about yourself. You come from a long line of sex-havers of which some portion had to resort, sometimes multiple times, to extreme violence to live long enough to bust a nut. It’s quite literally in your blood.
So, you want to feel empowered? You can quite directly empower yourself physically, with time and luck the mind will likely follow.
You want to feel driven? Avoidance of pain and the pleasures of adrenaline, physical power and mastery are incredible motivators. It’s very easy to motivate yourself not to get punched in the face.
It’s important to remember that you are, in fact, still a wild animal and that all the guardrails you perceive aren’t actually real. And, more importantly that your body means something, it’s just through the modern way of life that most people have forgotten why they have a body at all. Nothing brings it back into clear focus like violent physical struggle.
I saw somewhere else a suggestion of travel while slumming to drum up that feeling of total freedom, and while it’s not a bad idea, the discipline and pleasure of building a physical skill that strengthens your body far outstrips the quintessential “backpacking through Europe to like, find yourself man”.
That guy who hung around here who is probably dead in the Alaskan wilderness wasn’t wrong, he was dead right about needing physical struggle to have a full life and get laid on the regular. He just went way to far, it’s pretty easy to toughen yourself up, you just need regular access to mock battle with real, but mild consequences.
So what are you waiting for? Chop chop! Blood for the blood god!
*(If you’re adult woman, also good news, you’re probably wrong about yourself as well. It’s just not likely as cut and dried.)
Ps- I say this as someone who has fully diagnosed ADHD out the ass and dropped the stimmies a long time ago, and my life is pretty good! So I feel like we have an overlap of experience.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
Whiskey is completely bottle stable, and doesn’t develop in the bottle over time so any time is a good time to drink it.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
I’m, quite literally, a wine expert. A paid wine professional.
I fucking love port, in the wine world it’s very much that bell curve / midwit meme where wine noobs love it because it’s sweet, midwits over correct against sweet wine because so much of it is trash, and certified wine geeks and fanatics circle back to it and have no choice but to admit how awesome it is.
Because of the blending involved and the fortification process it’s not as subject to as much vintage variation as a typical dry wine, so honestly just go crazy on the vintages. Most of them are certified bangers.
I highly recommend Churchill’s, that’s my go-to port producer. All things being equal they have longer fermentation than the big houses which means less residual sugar and less Brandy needed to get to the required alcohol by volume. So it’s less syrupy, less hot, and much fresher.
It’s still sweet but you can dome an entire 6oz glass without getting a tummy ache.
If you have a child and are of means, the old tradition was to get a lion’s head cask of the vintage of your children’s birth year and sit on it until they’re 18 or 21, and give it as a birthday present. I’m too poor to do that but if you have the money, space, patience and storage ability (needs to be in a cool place) to buy several cases of vintage port to keep for your kid, it’s an awesome tradition.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
I just started General Wrangel’s ”Always with Honor” after hearing it described as one of the greatest war memoirs of all time, up there with ”Anabasis” by Xenophon, which I’m reading simultaneously.
If you’re not familiar, General Wrangel fought in the side of the whites in the Russian civil war and held out in the Caucasus mountains for years. He died in exile.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
No, shortly after I hit my max deadlift of my life I got married, spent a lot more time working and started a family. I had a lot less time to train, so I just hit the gym as much as needed to stay reasonably strong and have a good QOL.
I feel like we have opposite proportions, as even at my strongest o could barely do more than my body weight on the bench. I always preferred shoulder presses but it’s quite a bit harder to press heavy. I had a decent squat but nothing to write home about. Clearly, I was born to deadlift.
Nowadays I mostly just do novice level Mountain biking and keep my Muay Thai skills alive, go on the occasional long hike or bike ride. I’m still decently strong for someone approaching middle age with a desk job, and I go on a lifting tear once or twice a year for a month or two just to keep the fire alive.
I have the feeling I’ll get back to it when my kids are grown.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
I wasn’t on PEDs although I understand why that would be an assumption, anyone I’ve ever talked to with a background in this straight up told me I’m a weird outlier in terms of bone density, including my childhood doctors.
Took me a better part of two years to achieve that training 3-4 times a week.
I was also pretty laser focused on getting my deadlift as high as possible, and started off my powerlifting journey with high lower body strength as I had formerly trained as a cross country runner, and was an avid cyclist and amateur martial artist (kickboxing).
It’s really amazing what you can achieve when you’re consistent and keep your goals very narrow.
Really the food analogy is spot on.
Feeling hungry - no shame
Eating a bit of junk food - no shame, everyone does it.
Overindulging on occasion - understandable, forgivable, but not to be lionized.
Eating 15 double cheeseburgers a day for six months and gain 100lbs - commit seppuku immediately, kys to rid your family from shame.
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