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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2662 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 22, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Anyone know the story I'm thinking of? It was a world where every wall is dominated by porn, and people know nothing but that. People have fleeting memories of life beforehand (just dreams IIRC) but other than that this is all they've ever known.

Hard to google for obvious reasons.

The idea was that some civilization really liked porn, so they'd send somulated versions of themselves in to experience hundreds of years of it, not aware they were basically creating hell.

On a slight tangent. Is anyone else annoyed by conservatives' vilification of porn and video games?

It's not that I don't see the harm of those things. But they are the effect, not the cause. People turn to porn and video games as an escape from a shitty boring life. They can bring forth a shitty boring life in sufficient quantities, but criticizing the effect seems like pure laziness (and borderline grifting). The real cause is an order of magnitude more difficult to address.

At this point, porn has become an applause light for a subset of the online right. Which they extend to many other forms of technology as well (like AI???).

I don’t think that’s right. Gambling has been a problem in every culture where it was permitted. If it is available it will trap men, as it did to important men of history like Tesla and Mozart. It’s a superstimuli, So it will be inherently addictive regardless of what is going on in a culture. Video games are a hyper-extension of gambling, involving all the same cognition but with added superstimuli.

Porn, like gambling, is also a superstimuli. No matter how healthy your culture is, superstimuli activity will always be more desirable by definition. It doesn’t matter how hot your wife is if you can see a variety of the world’s most attractive women by clicking a few buttons.

I would say these things are definitively in the category of “causes”, just like the availability of opiates and alcohol are also causes. If every human had the ability to click a button and be administered an opiate, probably half the world would be addicted, because human nature involves occasional lapses in judgment and willpower.

With gambling I think back to when I was a kid, and it was perfectly possible for a middle class American to gamble any time they wanted, you just had to take a trip to Atlantic City, Vegas, or one of the Indian reservations. Because it was in a designated area, and most people need to take an overnight trip to get there, there was a romance and occasion to it.

There's something miserable about video poker machines in gas stations that I just can't get behind. About windowless off track betting parlors. And gambling on your phone removes all the positives you might be paying for at a casino: the atmosphere, the occasion, the trip, the social conviviality and adventure. It replaces it all with the bare fact of pissing money away.

And maybe I'm just glorifying my childhood, addicts still fucked things up, but it seems like we had a good compromise and fucked it up.

A funny modern development is gambling streamers. Twitch, the incumbent in streaming, banned gambling a while ago, but it draws enough users to gambling that Stake, an online gambling company, funded an entire twitch competitor - Kick - just to bring back gambling streams. They also pay popular streamers to gamble on kick. The streams themselves are apparently entertaining enough to draw tens of thousands of viewers per stream, which is comparable to e.g. many millions of youtube views. To me, it's strange - you're just sitting there as slots, tiles stream by and sometimes match up, and someone else's finances do a random walk. (While the losses the streamer makes are real in one sense, it's more than compensated for by their pay). And the streamer isn't even pulling a 'lever' with their finger, it's fully automated. (As this vod demonstrates - letters and colors fall for a full hour next to an empty chair). I understand the appeal of watching the talented play sports and esports. I understand the thrill of gambling. But when you've taken out both the skill and the risk, what's even left?

I found a few years ago that I enjoy watching gacha pull streams and videos on Twitch and YouTube, much to my surprise. Gacha pulls being video game slot machines where in-game currency (purchasable with real currency, of course) is exchanged for a chance at acquiring an in-game character or item. I had expected to have no interest given the purely random nature of it, but that was not my experience at all.

One big thing I noticed was that there was a lot of fun in the vicarious thrill of both the high highs and the low lows. IRL and in video games, I hate gambling. The last time I went to a casino, I stuck to the $1 tables, and I don't spend money for pulls in gacha games. The streamers and YouTubers whose pull videos I watch tend to be whales who regularly spend $hundreds in a sitting just for a chance at getting some video game characters (and sometimes just for minor buffs for characters they already have), and it's fun to vicarious experience someone else's thrill of winning big or their despair of an extended losing streak without actually putting my money on the line.

Another big thing is the streamer or YouTuber themselves. Creating reaction content is a skill, and the way these people react to their randomly-generated victories and defeats can be quite entertaining to watch. I imagine these are factors that provide appeal for streams involving actual gambling.

But when you've taken out both the skill and the risk, what's even left?

Distraction? Sort of association with money?

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