jake
6d ago
The mitigation of risk is the natural result of technological progress. It isn't always bad, penicillin and the whole of medical research being obvious examples, it's also not always good, see my above comment. Contextually I thought I was clear, it seems not, that I was describing specifically "protection from the highly predictable consequences of poor choices." A person who does something unjustifiably foolish and knows it's foolish if for no other reason than its possible consequences, deserves whatever they get. Living in society means you're going to get sick, it's not unjustifiably foolish to live and go about among other people. Living in temperate climates is a hair different as maybe it would be ideal if most humans lived in a climate like Southern California, but there are resources we need that come from harsh climates, and we've long since adapted to living in climates that require heating in some parts of the year and cooling in others. It's also not the same sort of risk, not today; two hundred years ago if you were unprepared by say, not bothering to get enough wood to burn to keep yourself warm in the winter, you'd deserve whatever happened.
And I say this, people say this, because the American Democratic Party would operate in a categorically different manner if it couldn't campaign on protecting its voters from the consequences of their poor decisions. What would they be if they couldn't deliver on abortion and welfare? What would they be if they couldn't back the mass importation of foreigners who will be dependent on government subsidy? For my money they'd be far stronger, as remaining options and ideological inclination kept them as the natural allies and champions of domestic, native-born labor — the platform they once owned.
jake
6d ago
Those high-status men are still fucking the help, it's just now they don't have to worry about troublesome heirs. That's why men of status supported the sexual "revolution," not liberty but the libidinous enabled to sleep with whichever women they wanted. It's David and Bathsheba replayed again and again on our entire civilization. Their beautiful wives and beautiful families wasn't good enough, so make it "easier" for the help, rather than harder for those despicable men. Remove the negative consequences from that specific act, which have indeed drastically decreased, but if I compare a maid being tossed out to the subtle and myriad horrors of modern life as a woman I'd say it's at best a tie, and a tie that favors tradition. What benefits some all too often harms most and social pressures and economic interests have a funny way of taking once-niche-choices and demanding them of the whole. Like pressure to become Strong Female Protagonist when most would rather be Stay At Home Mom.
Seatbelt laws are nominally about safety, they're practicably about preventing all the work required when someone gets launched through their windshield and meat crayons the road. Regardless, Big Seatbelt isn't dictating national elections.
jake
7d ago
This may miss the forest.
The individual abortion may be typically "eugenic," for a particular definition of eugenic, in that it stops poor, unmarried women from having children, or having more children, which means they use less welfare.
Collectively, access to abortion, and welfare, may be highly "dysgenic," though again for a particular definition of dysgenic. Abortion is a kind of incentive, in that it makes a once-risky behavior less risky. Welfare does this too, so do condoms and hormonal birth control. These are prophylactics and contraceptives and treatments centered around the relationship, and since men and women produce children, I'll stick to heterosexual relationships. What's their status? Worse categorically. Dating, courtship, marriage, and childrearing; historically poor, all but nonexistent, also historically poor, a toss-up, some cases best-in-history, many and possibly the mode of cases rife with mental illness. Marriage in particular, the lack of it, the preponderance of single-mother households. What conditions brought this about?
Casual sex. If casual relationships had a positive impact on the psychological growth of a person, making them "better" at being married, we would know. What we see shows they don't. Later marriages, later first children, fewer children, more children in single-mother households. That last of which has categorically poor life outcomes. Why does the behavior persist? What conditions allowed for it in the first place? Abortion, condoms, birth control. Single mothers, add welfare and child support.
That the best of us, the people who should be producing platoons of little copies of themselves and their spouses to help our charge into space, instead have one or two, maybe three, is a tragedy. Yeah AGI is going to solve it, yeah I'm on record about the Simulacra Age and how Japan is going to be so poised for leaping ahead specifically because of their low TFR, but I think a lot of humanity is good and I want it to stick around. Pretty much all of you are pretty cool, I'd like for more of you to be around. I'd like my closest friends to stick around, to have the little copies of themselves to be friends with my kids so when they're grown they'll have some same sense of the joys I've had and continue to have. But most of them aren't having kids, and some of that is motivated by political rhetoric that functions to encourage mostly whites to not have kids, while then complaining about the economics of low birth rates and using those to in part justify dropping tens of thousands of foreigners on middle America.
That rhetoric is why I don't dignify the possibility that all the negatives above are still somehow consequentially "eugenic."
The executive-holding political faction in the most powerful country in the history of humanity derives significant power from maintaining access to abortion. This is not an appropriate interest of government; maybe it's equally inappropriate for the government to prevent abortion, but I can confidently say on the category, that of the two sides, the "Protect us from the consequences of our own actions" party will in all cases be infinitely the lesser. We are highly intelligent animals, we are meat computers, we learn and improve through consequence. Freedom from consequences is axiomatically harmful to human actualization and that's half our politics. These people vote, their politicians hold office. We sent men to the moon in a decade, now there's an oligarchy-appointed presidential candidate who at least at one time supported funding the transitions of incarcerated illegal aliens and a nontrivial number of her voters support her for no reason greater than her promise of protecting their "freedom" from having children. Abortion isn't eugenic, it should in virtually all cases be understood as the definition of dysgenic behavior, lest words mean nothing at all.
jake
17d ago
How do we have a discussion when you ignore the evidence staring you in the face? The evidence of fraud is the inability to audit results. If a corporation's books have unauditable numbers year after year, people will go to jail. Why is this not the standard for American elections? You repeatedly present the tautological "They wouldn't cheat; they aren't criminals." You don't get to claim this, one you could know every single elections department worker and poll worker and poll volunteer in Alleghany County and it still wouldn't be an argument, and two, it is insultingly untrue to present the institutional American left as having a moral compulsion against breaking the law, most definitely including "felonies." (Also, Pennsylvania was won in 2020 by Philadelphia, no matter how great your familiarity with the mechanics of Pittsburgh politics, it says nothing about the notoriously corrupt Illadelph.)
Maybe 100 years ago a guy could make it through court by taking the stand and saying "I'm just not the type of guy to have done this." Today, that guy would go to prison. I see the retort, "If there's no evidence" -- there may be no murder weapon, but there's means, motive, and opportunity. Circumstantial evidence yes, people do to go prison over circumstantial evidence, but I only make this comparison for the lack of investigation when any one of these meets criteria. A system closed to audit is means; the transferal of executive power is motive; a dominant ideology among poll workers is opportunity. There should be investigations in every state at a minimum every 4 years. I'd support it in my blood red state, as would almost if not universally the voters in this country who could characterize themselves as if nothing else "not left." Yes, when Trump wins in November, voice your doubts, clamor for investigation, I agree. We should audit every election, in every state. Prove it, everywhere, every time. Behind you 100%.
As for paper trails, we still don't know the depths of MKUltra because Helms had so many records destroyed. We know very little about the CIA's drug smuggling because they learned to keep looser books. They don't need records, they would need conversations, those surely happened, but if nobody's recording, nobody goes to jail. Also keep in mind MKUltra included mid-20th century-cultured-American university personnel giving highly psychoactive substances to individuals who did not consent. Stopping the next Hitler from getting to power? C'mon man. It's also feasible for disparate and especially mostly unwitting actors to converge on one goal. Atlanta is individually corrupt, Detroit is individually corrupt, Philadelphia is individually corrupt. Not hard to see their local corruption being incidentally congruous with a separate national objective. But to be clear, I do take somewhat more to the former, I would argue for some level of national conspiracy, insofar as on election night in 2020, the knowledge Trump was to win was received by a central source and propagated to those separate necessary parties who oversaw the injection of fraudulent ballots. There are also assumptions of numbers, we don't know the process, it is closed to audit, we have no idea if, were we able to examine the system, we would find a glaring "at this step it'd be trivial for a handful of actors to introduce significant numbers of fake votes."
And here we return to the inability of audit as proof of fraud. If an electoral system cannot prove itself to be free of fraudulent activity, like the mass injection of fraudulent ballots, that is itself an act of fraud. I describe a criminal act when saying of the system "It can't be audited," that is itself a crime. Though, even without this, you remain wholly mistaken on where the burden of proof lies, and on this I put most vital emphasis: I owe you nothing, the people owe you nothing, because myself and more than a hundred million of my fellow Americans are under no obligation to prove ourselves when we fear the government as having become criminal. The government however is obligated not only by the intrinsic bindings of our nation, but by the very essence of the social contract to prove, whenever demanded, that they aren't criminal. If they can't, they are.
jake
18d ago
What has to be understood about this discussion is the American left is better if they commit electoral fraud. It means they believe what they say, that they really do view their opposition as so grave a threat -- to whatever they hold sacred -- they are willing to take extreme measures to protect themselves. That left, who speaks and acts with capricious concern for constitution and law, have spent most of the last decade giving every indication they would steal an election if necessary, and you are calling them a unique kind of liar. You treat them with a cynicism even the most lefty-hating righty commentators don't hold. You won't find MacIntyre musing on the left not believing in what they march for; 0HP might observe on the meta their level of investment in a given position but he wouldn't categorically reduce the movement to having no conviction in what they say they believe. Hyde's most famous lines all implicitly consider their being genuine believers and Carlson knows them as zealots and speaks of them as such.
"They don't need to" begs the question in assuming they haven't. They needed to for most of the 20th century, we know they had fraud machines dominating major cities during that time, through JFK. What, they just stopped? As the economy exploded and the US reached ever greater hegemony, the corrupt interests packed up? Of course not, the system put selective pressure to produce the sorts of bureaucrats and politicians who don't get caught, and who exert control within their hierarchies such that the system further protects their ways of corruption. Pivotally on the election, which when we look at your field of arguments they fall apart one by one until you're left with "Well despite all that, they didn't." A process that produces a quantity result that cannot be audited is necessarily unfalsifiable. In literally any other circumstance an unfalsifiable number would be presumed false. Why not elections? Why not the thing that decides who has power?
"It hasn't been a problem until now," yes, and until the last 10 years the American government hasn't been in a dead sprint toward anarcho-tyranny. We haven't had such material reason to believe they would defraud a nation until now, and raising the novelty of our concern is not an argument.
"Gish gallop" is also not an argument, nor is your false dichotomy. Even you, which I say apropos your ideological inclination, must understand in the pure hypothetical, fraudulent actors would face extreme risk if they went all-in on flooding the machine with fraudulent ballots before the results are known. If they undershoot they lose, if they overshoot they hazard blowing past the polling margins while producing rows of precincts with ≥100% actual or effectual turnout and thus reveal themselves. It's no stretch to understand this as a priming of the narrative, something that requires no knowledge on the part of the individuals in the PA DOS responsible for actually making that statement, as the fraudulent actors anticipate as, like 2020, they will need some number of fraudulent ballots delivered after midnight November 6th, which is when they will have the totals so they will know the approximate number to inject to stay within the polling margin.
As for arguments from complexity, I wrote on this about a month ago. American history has immediate examples of conspiracies involving very large numbers of actors who never came forward. With "democracy and the future of the country" at stake, the ideological component of conspiring for the greater good is more than fulfilled. But this is just a reiteration of the above, that the only argument is "They wouldn't." They would, and their failure and now continued refusal to build a system that proves they don't is the only evidence anyone needs on the matter.
If I had to guess about you, and of course I am probably wrong, but I know this is the case for my brother and a couple of my dearest friends and so I know for many others -- I know they think my view, this view of the world is very bleak. They don't want to live in a world where the American left needs to cheat to win. There's a frightening finality to it, an upheaval of fundamental beliefs about the way of things. I definitely understand if nothing else the discomfort they have at the Trump Right being the good guys, which they feel is the necessary consequent to admitting a stolen election, but it isn't. Everybody can be and often are wrong about many things, like viewing me as a pessimist. I know I'm more optimistic than anyone I know, I don't think anyone on this site is as optimistic as I am about the future, and my optimism does include anticipation of a very dark period, but I see us getting past the issues of today, without war or calamity, I see us reaching the singularity and becoming post-scarcity and settling the stars. The shadows in the hearts of men don't discourage me, they embolden me, I know we'll make it through, but I know we'll make it through by understanding the world as it truly is. The world is what it is, reality is, all unaffected by our perceptions and by what we want to be true rather than what is true. The things we know in this life that are worth loving and worth working for all still exist, and we love them as they truly are even if we're not quite right about what they truly are. They exist in a world that does have shadows, they exist in great spite of those shadows. We just can't ignore the shadows. Know them, name them, chase them. Win.
jake
18d ago
Not 20 years, but simulacra will be in their spread to ubiquity in the 2040s. The largest western nations need too much downsizing and too much conditioning for a rapid shift. While by the 2050s we certainly could automate something like 80% of labor, with population projections putting the US over 400 million by then we're not socially equipped for more than 300 million people becoming suddenly permanently unemployable. With controls implemented by 2060, projections assuming a minimum halving effect means by the mid-2100s the US will reach a stable population, this despite post-scarcity conditions being probably common in western nations including the US by 2110.
Any economist who doesn't account for >90% of human labor becoming obsolete by 2100 is either hopelessly ignorant or using economics as a cover for politicking. Because of automation, there is no economic argument behind any effort to increase the population of any country. We need to already be shrinking, the faster (peacefully!) the better.
jake
19d ago
I find most relevant the announcement from Pennsylvania's Department of State:
Pennsylvanians won’t always know the final results of all races on election night. Any changes in results that occur as counties continue to count ballots are not evidence that an election is “rigged.” See the full explanation at http://vote.pa.gov/FactCheck.
What an odd thing to say. So hire more workers, run campaigns, do everything necessary to ensure you have the results. If significantly poorer, significantly less bureaucratically competent and on-the-whole significantly less organized and civilized countries can manage elections in single days, the continuing tolerance of statements like this -- statements that are expressly narrative primers for fraud -- in the Union is so goddamn insulting. They have the ability, we know this objectively from other countries, and we know from this statement they could but decline to do so. This is ostensible incompetence at counting ballots covering for a highly competent fraud machine.
The general upside is they'll lose the national regardless of fraud in Pennsylvania. The dream upside is they lose the state while posting so many precincts with actual and effectual >100% turnout even the laziest audit torches them.
jake
19d ago
In 30 years, specifically in the 2050s, the world will look with envy on Japan for their plummeting population coinciding so perfectly with the Age of Simulacra. The foreigners they bring in for their current economic-demographic concerns will be kicked out and they'll begin their cruise toward post-scarcity civilization. A few western nations will adopt mass use of automata, the ones most affected by the wars in Europe might be forced to, the others will argue over the legality of automata and where allowed flourish, and where prohibited languish and fade away. China meanwhile will be working on their population problem, as they'll need to shrink their population by >1 billion, in <100 years, without total collapse. I think it'll be easy for the CCP, but I think the reality of that problem will put a halt to everything else. At least unless western hegemony finally and totally collapses, in which case China will just take Africa.
jake
21d ago
I don't think it's anything we'd find surprising.
The narrative around its release would fall on political lines, the right would know she wanted dead kids, the online left would say with varying couching the kids deserved it, the establishment would focus at best on some random point about the essay while they continued the exact rhetoric they put out following the shooting: "Psycho murders multiple children, trans most affected." Especially if there are likely superficially true but substantively false allegations about abuse by the school.
I think if it were some astonishing new low in depravity we'd have read it, so we have read it, in the gestalt. It could be a rare bit of wise realism. Nothing will be gained from litigating her words, let the dead rest.
jake
24d ago
Great to read the new section, keep at it. I think I won't make any more suggestions until you're much farther along/done, or if there's something specific you want checked.
What's wrong here is the particular equivocation of politics and war. Politics is not equal with war, politics are meant to avert war, but they are equal in that both are about the transferral of power. If we were to assign a sex polarity to the practices, politics would indeed be the feminine method to the masculine method of war.
Beyond that, I can tell you where this divide ends. We'll pass the core of this turmoil, enough to stabilize us as we move into the approach for the singularity.
Around 2030 we'll see the first examples of convincing human simulacra. These will be proofs of the concept but they won't be largely available until later in the decade. Boston Dynamics maintaining their exact rate of advancement will have robots with convincingly human articulation by the mid-30s, especially with AI improving at helping research.
In the 2040s, simulacra will be able to replace a great deal of labor and production of simulacra will become the national industry of whatever country that perfects them. My bias is Japan: they're most poised with the combination of established acumen, workforce and key socioeconomic factors, namely their inverted population pyramid. Low TFR will be neatly solved by simulacra taking over labor. As so-ordered a nation and people as the Japanese, they will implement the necessary policies to begin the country's move toward quasi-post-scarcity. Those few other similarly ordered nations will likewise swiftly adopt simulacra, and as tens of millions are produced by the year, and only increasing, simulacra will quickly become a reasonable household expenditure. I expect by the end of the '40s they will be ubiquitous in every country where they are legal.
For the price of a mid-range car, households will be able to purchase a lifetime of service from a chef-maid-assistant. So average households will acquire simulacra, further increasing demand, and lonely men will also buy them for all obvious reasons. That motivation for purchase will not end with lonely men. "She's a 10 (she's a hotter-version-of-pick-your-hottest-celebrity), but she's a robot" won't last. One of your friends will get one, and you'll interact with it, and even if you're obstinate about "it," eventually it will be her to your mind, because she talks, she laughs, she appears to think, she in all ways seems the part. You'll only know because you know, that won't be enough. It won't matter how they aren't "real" because they will be real enough. All but indistinguishable for the existential question of soul in the machine, and it won't be long before you're not so sure about that, either.
At ubiquity they will end dating. The bottom third of men who can afford them for a start, to half, to I'd expect a Pareto 80%. The man is accustomed to not having children, it's our evolutionary history, it may bother them, it won't stop them. What women say won't matter, a guy might want what only they can offer, but not at the cost, especially not if they've never had that success, and that already increasing population will represent an even greater percentage of the next generation. To put in such effort to settle for someone less attractive, less responsive, more burdensome, more risky, to settle for something human when he can have something machine-perfect. Work, go home, play games until she has dinner ready, watch a movie, fuck, maybe play more games, go to bed. His friends can and will talk shit, his base urges are satisfied, he won't care enough about what they say. His true needs will go unsatisfied and it will be a lifestyle harmful to his soul, but it will be so much easier.
Some women will have them, not many. I'd rather not invoke inceldom, I find the specific slant to their ideas irrelevant here, but it's true men pursue while women are pursued and that imbalance defines dating. The asymmetric effort of dating as a man versus dating as a woman, again the man pursues, he works, he pays; the woman is pursued, she is worked for, she is cared for. The simulacra will thus be unnatural as a thing women acquire as a relational prosthesis; why would she pay for what, for good reason, she gets free? The simulacra will have no being (or so we'll reassure ourselves), can father no children, can offer no increase, can offer no status. Women will have them as the chef-maid-assistant models, maybe even more sometimes, but they won't replace, not in the way they will replace relationships for men.
Harems will re-emerge, they will be the only option for most women, so they will be easier. Between simulacra and harems, female sociopolitical power will collapse. They will lose too much leverage with too many low-status men, while high-status men will each become a little king with his court of concubines who will certainly have no power.
The 2050s will see human gestation in synthetic environments, so clinic-based artificial wombs. Here I don't think that it will take that long for the breakthroughs in tech, instead it will be the economics and social impacts of simulacra that will give incentive to developing the tech. Again I expect Japan to widely adopt, as their already low TFR falls off a cliff from their herbivore men taking to simulacra. They will have a reduced need for a new generation from so much of their labor being automated but I expect there still to be decades between the ubiquity of simulacra and those simulacra reaching the capacity to automate >90% of all labor. This will also be the first sight of the real benefit to the age of simulacra, the offer of stability in overseeing the drastic reduction in human population.
Starting in the 50s or 60s we'll see government regulation on reproduction. It won't be severe because it won't need to be, so anyone who really wants a big family will be able to have one with minimal structural hindrance. It will be simple incentive-based, I've referred to the policy as the "Half-Right to Reproduction." Systemically its purpose will be to halve the population with each generation, it'll work faster than that. Every person will be bestowed with one half-right they can exercise at age of majority. Would-be parents can combine to a whole-right and exchange it for their child's addition to the government dole, UBI, which will also exist. As AI and simulacra come from almost all labor, the newly jobless will need placation else promiseless young men become bored and at-risk for chaos. AI-managed industry, so all goods, pharmaceuticals, medical care, farming, and also advances in 3D printing, will see the cost of goods plummet while their quality peaks. It will become progressively harder for the government to not adopt major socialist practices as capitalism finally begins to "win" in competing itself out of existence. The population can't keep growing in such a system, at least not until we have FTL and a thousand shipyards in Sol. Assuming FTL is possible, which I don't, but I sure hope it is.
Simulacra will play a critical part in stability in keeping men satisfied. Advancements in entertainment, so another 20-30 years of development in video games, the arrival of UBI and the removal of needing to work to live. The population will need to be distracted until most can die childless but "happy enough." Half-rights help this goal, because people can sell their half-rights or buy other's half-rights, all at government exchanges. The exchanges will always buy half-rights, subject to reversible sterilization. A guy will go to a clinic next door to the exchange, maybe incorporated into the exchange, get whatever implant that stops sperm from working, get the cash to order a simulacra, sail into the sunset. Easy.
I don't expect western nations to swiftly automate labor like Japan. We'll need to acclimatize to the idea, begin the inculcation of no-work-to-live in successive generations so that when they're older, or their kids are older, they'll be prepared for not having jobs. With that and the shrinking population, by the turn of the century Western nations will be ready for post-scarcity life. New generations will still be needed in the interim, artificial gestation is pivotal here for the other paradigmatic social change.
As relationships and childbirth are "solved," as countries most adopting simulacra and bespoke children grown in vats enjoy golden ages while their men break productivity records, why would a country not produce as many sons as possible and as few daughters as necessary? There will be outgroups, so the Amish and the like, potentially a new movement of tech-circa-1999, but they will be small, none meaningful political factions, or where meaningful, supportive of the new power structure. I'd also expect a "reserve" population for practical concerns of catastrophe and ovum stocks, but most women will belong to the elite population. This above all is why we will see minimal and then no opposition to sharp sex-demo disparity with the great decline in the population of the human female: with so few, being a naturally born woman will be a position of immense status, inherently aristocratic. They will necessarily be the best of the best. Those chosen, those expressly wanted few. A new nobility, and it will indeed be so easy.
Women will "benefit" first, eventually men will, as again the purpose will be to shrink the entire population. So each generation will more-than-halve itself until the population is at an "acceptable" – at least stable – level. The sex distribution will once again be at parity, and those naturally born biological males will also be inherently aristocratic, as all civilized humans belong to the new nobility.
And all of this will just work. What I describe will happen because it isn't fighting back, it isn't trying to undo anything, it doesn't require conquest over more than a century of culture, it doesn't require recovery from war or calamity. It will work according to slopes and entropy, it will work in congruence with human nature. It will be the easiest path through, so it will just work.
If it's physically possible we'll break the tyranny of the rocket equation and achieve FTL travel. We'll begin spacefaring regardless and when, in however long, man reaches frontier planets to settle and dominate, they'll return to lifestyles us today find familiar. Those humans will begin the real work, of understanding and healing the light scarring on our gestalt soul from the depravity of human civilization, culminating in what was necessary to pass through the 20th and 21st century – with what was necessary to pass the Great Filter.
It didn't have to be this way, now it has to be this way. Or else we're all fucking dead.
jake
27d ago
The Byzantines were dealing in solidi, easy to collect gold in fines and then use it for paying mercenaries. A hiring-mercenaries-level-conflict in the States would mean the dollar and economy collapsed. There'd be dealing again in precious metals, and bartering. Weapons, food, medicine, and those soldiers could well be offered another certain kind of good: women. If a faction pays in women, those women have no power.
jake
28d ago
Low regional pricing (currency, Steam regional prices are set by currency,) discounts/e-rebates for store credit, free keys. Valve isn't freewheeling in China, Steam China operates through Perfect World.
But I just saw I was wrong about Cyberpunk's peak, SteamDB has it at 1.05 million. The difference isn't so stark now, and like I said above, the game is clearly very good, and I'm sure I'll play it eventually.
It can also be true that something other than the even very high quality of the game as responsible for its popularity. 2 million concurrent is incredible but I want to know is this a single player experience truly worthy of those numbers, or is it something else. I think we'd be seeing those numbers soaring among western gamers if it were paradigm-defining. It might be, in a month we might see over 3 million, with a million playing in the west. Maybe not, but even if it just playing to market, that's absolutely valid. MiHoYo of Genshin Impact, Honkai, Zenless Zone Zero, play to the western market in having attractive women and no hamfisted politics in their games. China could do nothing but publish AAA knockoffs with fanservice and no politics and devour the market, and they'd be valid to do it, but that wouldn't make the games amazing themselves, and that's what I'm interested in.
The concurrent player record could be inflated. It's a new IP by a foreign studio and while covered by culture war circles before its release, it was only after release and the record-breaking numbers that I saw it brought up among normies. A good comparison is Cyberpunk 2077, its peak was 250K just over 1 million, from a somewhat-established IP, the at-the-time preeminent studio, Keanu Reeves, and years of hype.
That said, if it were bad, Steam would show it, and the negative reviews I see are mostly "Game too hard", with a complement of "My computer can't run this." Some have better criticisms, "Invisible walls everywhere," "Buggy AI", "Repetitive", "Poor world design" and "Not enough variety in attacks." So probably a mix: something was done to inflate the numbers, but for a very good though not paradigm-defining game.
jake
1mo ago
I've finished with suggested edits in the doc. It kept signing me out, that may be why it looks like several people were making suggestions.
I've done a lot of anon editing in /lit/ /wg/ threads, most of what I've read there is the kind of bad writing that editing can't fix. Yours is good, and you can see that in my edits being almost all words and parts of sentences you could omit. Using a few too many words is an easy fix. I liked it, I'll be reading more as long you keep us updated.
I meant to put these in my previous comment -- "That" can often be omitted, and there are some rules on writing numbers. The article says and I'll summarize, it's just narrative consistency, always writing them as numerals or always writing them as words. That is narrative, so in narration you'd write them all as numerals, and as dialogue you'd write them as the full words (though there are specific exceptions to this, the one I can name is street addresses, which are always written as eg "123 Main").
If you want, make a copy and DM me an anonymized/open commenter link and I'll suggest edits on the entire story.
Your writing is quite good, there are disruptions in flow from you doubling and sometimes tripling up on adjectives. Most instances you could omit one or all, two examples:
In the station, an ever-present soundscape practically smothers us, heavy and ominous and oppressive
Soundscape implies atmosphere and ubiquity, I think there's probably a better word choice. Heavy/Ominous/Oppressive aren't exact synonyms but here they're redundant because of "smothers."
"The ocean smothers us with sound" conveys it in fewer words.
I hear Whitlock faintly stirring* in the bunk underneath me. The bed creaks as he slowly, gingerly* sits up and begins to vomit into a bucket, choking and heaving and gasping* as the contents of his stomach unceremoniously escape his body. Once* the retching is over, there’s laboured breathing and a soft, low thud;* the low sound of a head being rested against a bunk pole.
"Stirring" implies a quietness, you could go with "I hear Whitlock's weak stirs."
"Slowly, gingerly" gingerly implies slowness.
"Choking and heaving and gasping" like the above, your omission of commas is meant to emphasize the unpleasantness but just "choking" captures it, and we already know he's having a bad time from the context, before and after.
"Once" is a word for temporal specificity, "when" is a word for temporal generality. When also reads better, "When the retching is finished there's laboured breathing"
"soft, low" redundant
I might omit to "there's laboured breathing and the low sound of a head being rested against a bunk pole"
Last notes: the rules for italicizing apply to titles of works, words not in English (though this would be often, not strictly always), and scientific terms. In prose you can style how you want so you can use italics for names like "Proteus" and "Mazu" but there are times it hurts the flow, especially back-to-back with "Caelus, Qianliyan."
Spirulina is proper when referring to the organism, for a food product it's just "spirulina cakes."
jake
1mo ago
I'm surprised China in particular isn't making better use of the internal division in the West
Were Harris to win in November, the probability of China taking Taiwan would increase. But they don't need to rush to exploiting the division when their plans mean benefitting long-term. Yeah, I've heard "The Chinese economy is about to crash" for at least 10 years, but the tiger stands. It might be paper, but the eagle might be a puff of smoke. If Europe and the US keep declining, then on the timeframe China works at, soon nobody will be able to stop them when they make open moves to devour Africa's resources. That's their actual goal, and if Western decline reaches that point, who gives a shit about chip backdoors?
That said, China is helping sow the division. The whining about Russia for 8 years involved a mountain of stuff Russia was not doing, but China was doing, and at a far greater scale and efficacy. Russia wasn't on Reddit while China has been prolific at shaping narrative on the site. China had orders-of-magnitude more impact on Twitter, and yet decades more potent an impact still with TikTok. The Chinese hand on the scale has massively inflated the apparent size of the online left while also increasing its actual numbers. Whether they controlled trends directly or quickly passed it off to non-ideologically-aligned-as-such American subordinates, the result is the same. This "backfired" in congress forcing divestiture, but what makes TikTok beneficial to the Chinese will largely remain.
In this particular hypothetical, they would get the kid as the patsy while their sniper gave them the video and the pink mist screencaps for the rank-and-file lefties to spam on every platform everywhere, which is objectively what would have happened. There is a clear morale reason for them to go for something messy. In the continuation of this hypothetical, now they might go for something quiet. It also won't work. A gust of wind and a head-turn saved him, call it luck, I call it providence.
jake
1mo ago
The audio is clear, it's a clip from a single phone, I'm familiar with firearms but I don't think a special familiarity is necessary to recognize the three distinct reports. I don't need analysis to confirm what I can hear plainly, but that it comes from CNN should be enough.
It is significant. Certainly there's time still for one of the local law enforcement offices to put out their official report and it could be the report says one of their officers engaged Crooks. But we don't have it right now, and that is a chasm in the chain of events. A person was discharging their firearm in the same brief window of time another person was trying to kill President Trump. Who was it? Where were they? What or who were they aiming at? What or who did they hit? Why don't we know?
There could be a reasonable explanation, I won't dispute that at all, but it seems like your assumption that there is, is being applied to consider its current absence as unimportant. It's not, it's extremely important. Because there is an unknown gun firing, there is a possibility the bullet that pierced Trump's ear was not fired by Crooks, that's what's on the table, and until it is answered, it is the most important question about July 13.
jake
1mo ago
So ask. You're here, you're more thoughtful than most, I'm happy to explain. I'll explain now, I hate power. Look at history, it's always the same story. Titans of men raise great nations and their people enjoy golden ages. But those men die, their power must be passed on, and inevitably, every single time, someone reigns who is wholly unfit to rule. Often they kill nations outright, at best they sow ruin for their children or great-great-great-grandchildren to suffer through or else die by. Some intrinsic inadequacy in our specific personage births tyrants, petty and brutal, and the more the population grows, the more tyrants appear and for the last century they have grown enough to infest the American government at all levels. I am cynical of them to a man, I know their crimes, certain ones I'd give you as "conspiracies" for the sake of magnanimity in this discourse, but there is a laundry list of abominable deeds perpetrated by the American government that there is absolutely no debate happened. Iraq at the top of the list. We started a war and maybe a million people died over a fucking lie. The perpetrators are still around, they weren't elected to begin with and they weren't fired, they weren't jailed. They're still working, or enjoying comfy retirements. Same as the generation before them, same as the generation before them. The machine never changed. The Company never changed.
The disposition isn't specific, it's broad. There are powerful career individuals in the United States government and I do not believe there is a single action they consider unacceptable to their morals because the evidence cries thunderous, they have no morals.
Last November Vivek Ramaswamy was giving speeches to tiny crowds where he was saying there's no chance Biden is on the ballot for 2024. A month ago this was still a "right-wing conspiracy", before the debate, Biden's obvious lack of fitness for office was a "right-wing conspiracy." Now we know for sure how the people running the executive were not elected, and they were enabled in their deceit and their necessary tyranny by an effective state-media establishment.
Now, the party who brands themselves as the "protectors of democracy" are by all appearances going to run a candidate for President who nobody wanted, and if truly democratic primaries had been held this year, a candidate who indeed no one would have voted for. The party, the media, the state, have justified extraordinary measures targeting President Trump under justification of him being a "threat to democracy", they fight tooth and nail against anything and everything they perceive as a move to disenfranchise voters, yet their most recent major move was to disenfranchise their entire constituency. This is a fact, I describe reality.
I also describe reality when I say if there was no conspiracy at work in the attempt on Trump's life it was neither for lack of motive nor opportunity.
jake
1mo ago
I think this would be fair if I were citing arguments and analysis of the biased. Like if I were quoting the guy from the second link in #2, where he argues the origin and target of the shots, that'd be fair. Or if I were quoting the research being done by the Heritage Foundation. I'm not, I give them no current stock. Everything above other than the link in #2 is either an unbiased (or counter-biased) reporter, or where it's a biased reporter I only linked it because it contains Cheatle's testimony or raw footage/audio. The guy speculating on USSS protocol is biased, but he's also providing a counterargument: it could be protocol they don't keep recordings, or reasonably-selectively keep recordings, and the rally didn't qualify for entirely justifiable reasons.
My willingness to relatively quickly take the adverse inference is probably a result of my disposition, but I can say on 7/13 I wasn't thinking it was a hit, and by my own logs I wasn't looking hard at it until 7/16. I didn't write on some of the questions raised until 7/18, and even on 7/19 I would say I was only on the verge. The audio analysis is what pushed me over and that's because there's no argument against it. Three weapons were fired, Crooks fired some of the shots, the USSS counter-sniper fired the last shot, and there is a burst that is unaccounted for. Short of federal law enforcement and the domestic intelligence apparatus being in the midst of a clandestine nationwide manhunt for the second shooter and they don't want to give anything away, there is no other good explanation. But hell, it could be that, and if it is and they catch the guy, great.
We're in a black swan sprint. Attempted assassination of the previous President, the incumbent President announcing (or "announcing") he's not running for a second term and now a growing din that he's dead or all but. My grandmother experienced a cluster of transient ischemic attacks. She was sharp, in her mid-80s and about to make a long drive to Texas for her annual checkup, to the next day being unable to ever drive again and maybe ever think again. Her body lived a few more years, it's a bad way to go.
I started with no conclusion about the attempt on Trump's life but for transparency's sake I am the type to assume it was a hit. I think neutrally reported evidence now shows it was a hit.
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Cheatle testified the USSS was alerted between 2 and 5 times to Crooks
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CNN on forensic analysis showing reports from 3 weapons; and I don't know this guy, I'm not endorsing any of his analysis or quoting it here, but at around 18:40 is a clip where 3 distinct reports can be heard.
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CBS news on the USSS saying their counter-snipers fired a single shot.
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I can't find anything from the other law enforcement at the event saying one or more of their guys discharged their firearms, I think we'd know by now if one of the cops took shots.
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Cheatle testified the USSS has no recordings of radio comms from the event. Recording everything could be a policy that only applies to the details protecting the sitting President, but given everything else we know I take the adverse inference.
I think the adverse inference is justified because of the chasmic hole of "third gun." A third person was firing a weapon at that event, we don't know who they are (or were), we don't know where they were when they took those shots, and most importantly, we don't know why we don't know. If they were killed in whatever building, that's a corpse that got disappeared in the middle of a crime scene where somebody tried to kill a former President. If they got away, they got away. That doesn't happen without help. Conclusively: at least one person at that rally charged with protecting Trump tried or helped someone try to kill him. The necessary next question is how high does it go?
jake
2mo ago
Elsewhere in the thread someone quoted ABC news, in turn quoting the Butler county sheriff, who confirmed the story of Crooks being confronted by an officer just before firing.
To have that confrontation, the "sense" to ignore the cop and make those shots at 150 yards with iron sights--no adrenaline pumping, no jitters? Crooks must have been a crack shot with frozen veins. I guess I assume a second shooter wouldn't miss (+ all the other questions that raises), because otherwise that explanation would make far more sense than "random schizo is as coolheaded as scout sniper."
The barely teenage groupies who had sex with guys like Mick Jagger were raped. A 14 year old girl is not capable of consenting to sex with a man of that level of fame. They were adolescents caught up in a wave of historically unparalleled wall-to-wall social and peer pressure. The music was good and they could feel it, but those teenage groupies had no context, they were fans of the Beatles and the Stones because they were that-which-is-most-popular. I'm sure you've seen the Beatles on Ed Sullivan; those girls didn't spend the entire performance screaming because they were there to hear the music. This phenomenon can be seen today with Taylor Swift. She is measurably popular because she is popular, and I say that as someone who likes a fair number of her songs and who doesn't care what she's chosen to do with her life. Back then, what would show a girl's "fitting in" more than for one precious moment being the desired object of one of the most famous men alive?
Much of this applies to the teenage girls who were legal adults, who while I would say in their case had nothing happen justifying prosecution, were nevertheless coerced with a lie. The lie of status, the story is perceived status, but it was always and only ever fake. "For that moment, he wanted to fuck me" for that moment, an immensely famous man on a world tour unsurprisingly wanted to have sex with a young and attractive girl who would do anything for him. She tells that story for the exact reason that she wasn't good enough; else she would have married one of those guys, or we would know her as a model or an actress. I'm sure we do in some cases, but those guys went to a lot of places, and those places had a lot of groupies. They weren't sleeping with future models every single night, even though they could have been sleeping with actual models every single night.
All that aside, of course it's not unthinkable, because we live in the time when it isn't unthinkable. But if you had some method of traveling to 1960 and conveying absolute proof of the consequences of the sexual revolution, it would be unthinkable, and it would have never happened. They would see the evidence and they would know it made everything worse. And even ignoring everything else here, everyone knows we happily indulge in things that aren't bad for us, been to the store lately? Seen the sinful glut of Oreo varietals choking half the shelves of the cookie aisle? Four kinds of Funyuns, ten of Doritos, several dozen flavors of Pringles? Who's that for? (It's me, and I love it. Get it?)
Yeah, well enough, though your point might be a bit unclear. Ultimately I'd just stake Chesterton's Fence on the subject, whatever it's ostensibly about, it sure did work for a very long time.
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