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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34923 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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or not trying to sleep with a subordinate

One of the reasons I gave up on any career is the realization that no amount of status will compensate for my enormous unattractiveness. If one can't screw young pretty interns, why even bother doing even the bare minimum?

If one can't screw young pretty interns, why even bother doing even the bare minimum?

I'm sure you can think of a couple reasons.

I actually can't. I have no rent or mortgage and I provably can survive on ramen and cheap vodka. I'm against travel on ideological grounds. Entertainment can be pirated. Any other I'm missing?

Whatever ideology it is you care so much about could use a competent champion. To be honest you don't seem like a very happy person to me. If you don't know what it is that will make you happy, giving up and refusing to even search for it hardly seems like the solution.

Going against the juggernaut of an ideology that is progressivism/woke/whatever you want to call it? No thanks. It can make transnational corporations jump. (As an aside, I wish we lived in a cyberpunk world, that'd be an improvement.) I'm deeply unhappy, that's an astute observation. The world is rapidly going to shit, people en masse are espousing something that to me sounds profoundly insane, and something or other is going to kill me soon.

All you do by giving up is guarantee that nothing will change. Pick something small to work on and I'm confident you'll be happier and more satisfied with your life, even if that thing has nothing to do with status or money.

This forum is not a personal blog, but we're low and deep enough by now. There is a feature usually only seen in books and games that I've always wanted in my home. After boozing enough over the course of a week or two I implemented that home “improvement” project. The satisfaction afterwards? Less than an hour total, there are some bottles and some porn I've thought back to for longer by now.

Are you interested in creating entertainment? I see all sorts of ideological and narrative flaws in pretty much all entertainment nowadays--it seems like a reasonably bright person could easily create something better, whether it's a book or a movie.

Let me tell you about tumblr user L.-I. who is one, max two degrees separated from people with tumblr accounts from here. That user takes numerical evidence of being better than other people, like ELO, extremely seriously. Even I, who enjoys to an unhealthy extent an opportunity to feel superior to somebody, find this somewhat obsessive. And one time I made a mistake of commenting under a complaint of being useless as a writer on the account of how few reviews and likes a fanfic received, that the quality of writing is only one aspect, maybe not even the dominant one. There's timing, networking, catering to popular tastes in fandoms and tropes, so on and so forth. The mistake was that, apparently, all that and more had been taken into account already. And still, barely any readers. Tell me Will, if somebody like that writes only for the result to perish unseen when AO3 servers are taken offline, what chance do I have with my stilted words and this tiny comment taking me more than ten minutes to compose?

Edit: and, to be clear, I didn't give up without trying. My latest foray into writing a fanfic got whole whopping 111 views after more than a year. The only question about an original work would be if that figure would be 1 order of magnitude lower, or 2.

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