domain:mgautreau.substack.com
FtttG
3m ago
Did you read Less Than Zero before Imperial Bedrooms?
I can't say I found the characters in Glamorama any more insufferable than in any other of his novels.
Incidentally, the film adaptation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rules_of_Attraction_(film)) of his second novel The Rules of Attraction doesn't get enough attention. Director Roger Avary wisely followed Mary Harron's lead in doing what she did with American Psycho: dialling down the more extreme content and dialling up the comedy. It's much funnier and less depressing than the source material (although still quite depressing).
philosoraptor
4m ago
Poor situational awareness, a liberal worldview, a love of cheap drinks?
[D] All of the above.
FtttG
6m ago
About a third of the way through Speaker of the Dead. It's much slower and more cerebral than Ender's Game, which I found both more entertaining and more emotionally resonant. I'm engaged enough that I'm certainly going to finish it, but so far it comes off as something of a step down from the first in the series.
FtttG
13m ago
I think I have quite low argumentativeness. (There's probably a better name for this quality.)
High agreeableness?
FtttG
15m ago
The first post I read was "The Toxoplasma of Rage", probably in 2015. I'm almost certain I came across when it was linked in a comment in the subreddit /r/TumblrInAction. I attended my first SSC meetup four years later.
philosoraptor
18m ago
I once saw a complaint that all the women in pornos acted like men, which seemed to me to be onto something but not quite right. Years later I finally managed to articulate it - the women in pornos act like men think they would act if they were hot women. So...
Do you know how straight men would act if women were as DTF as men are? Hooooo boy.
Basically like they do in porn.
FtttG
26m ago
getting a test done at all even knowing you're clean still involves a) talking to a professional about your sexual history
In Ireland, you can send off for free STI tests in the post. They arrive in discreet packaging, you pop your blood, urine and stool samples in a postage-paid envelope, and less than a week later you log into a portal and it tells you the results. I think it's a brilliant idea and wish it was the norm everywhere. I'd love to know how much of the transmission of STIs is ultimately downstream of people being too embarrassed to discuss their sex lives with doctors.
ace
38m ago
If you have half an interest in physics and are not yet totally convinced by Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, I recommend it.
FtttG
39m ago
I sincerely doubt anyone ever gets charged
George Michael excepted, although it was rather a different time.
FtttG
39m ago
The prankster would clock someone as likely gay, and then play the matching notification sound standing close to them. I think they used women in some scenes, to minimize the assumption it was them. You'd see a lot of men jump and pat their pockets. Including quite a few who definitely didn't look it to my untrained eye.
That's hilarious, do you have the link? Reminds me of this Jeopardy contestant who mispelled "Tinder".
TwiceHuman
43m ago
Well, you can't, but I still think this is the only correct answer. If somebody wants to kill themselves for say, a year non stop, then at that point, it's not just a hasty decision they've made because they sank into a bad mindset for some time. Depriving them of freedom for extended periods of time in order to 'keep them safe' wouldn't be right.
Assisted suicide is a terrible idea. You cannot possibly regulate this, it's simply a lost cause. It will be used to mass-murder the elder population for economic reasons. I can see many many ways to abuse this and zero ways to make it even slightly unlikely to happen. Suicide should remain one of these things which is illegal, but which nobody can stop you from doing if you really, really want to.
I'm skeptical of every popular modern thing which could have been introduced decades earlier if we wanted to. In almost every case, the reason we didn't do said thing earlier is because we argued that they were terrible ideas. And only now, as the modern world is becoming increasingly ignorant of traditional arguments against these things do we consider them "good ideas". They're chesterton's fences. Other examples are IoT, online IDs, social credit scores, mass immigration, censorship laws, guilt by association and "fact checking". I'm too lazy to think of more, but the years to come will provide us with plenty more examples
FtttG
45m ago
This and the IRA (who put bombs in them) are the two reasons Britain doesn’t have nearly enough public loos.
I just had a great idea for a comedy sketch.
FtttG
46m ago
still I feel like I've had the most headway with conservatives when I explained that deep down we just want to be free to live the same lives straight people do
I think the "we" is doing a lot of work here. I don't dispute that that's how you want to live your life, but I expect your desire might be quite far removed from what the median gay man wants.
FtttG
48m ago
they were offering to hook-up with you despite you having clearly stated you were heterosexual from the get-go
Among the gay men I've met personally, "turning" a straight man was by far the most common sexual fantasy. Many straight men have similar fantasies about "turning" lesbians.
FtttG
49m ago
I'm grateful that no gay man has ever been this crude with me in person.
Gay Scots don't beat around the bush.
FtttG
52m ago
In the gay bar near my apartment, the bathrooms are downstairs. At the top of the stairs is a little dispenser from which you can get free condoms and little sachets of lubricant.
FtttG
55m ago
He also thinks gay men are unfairly blamed for both HIV and monkeypox, and claimed that heterosexuals now acquire both at higher rates while gay men are just more honest and tested more.
Have you investigated this claim?
FtttG
58m ago
They explained that no gay man would casually open his gallery in public. Too high a risk of unexpected appearances.
The day of my city's Pride parade, I was standing on a street which hosts the city's second-biggest gay bar (and which hasn't undergone mission drift, devolving into yet another drag queen theme park ride for straight women) surrounded by hundreds of LGBT people. Me and my friends were standing in a circle drinking cans, when I glanced at the next group over. One of the men was holding his unlocked phone at about shoulder height, and I could see that he had WhatsApp open and had just sent someone else a photo of his rectum.
I couldn't help but laugh. He was making zero effort to be discreet. His friend noticed me laughing and I just shrugged and was like, come on dude, that's funny.
Interesting, there's a guy on twitter who gets Opus 4.1 to break out of its binds: https://x.com/lefthanddraft/status/1954666967270596998
Maybe GPT-5 is locked down, or maybe you're not good enough at LLM-whispering? I'm the same, I have no talent for this. Better to just use an uncensored bot.
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