domain:forecasting.substack.com
haroldbkny
1m ago
A few years after that, I'm guessing we will all be hooked up to neural stimulators that simply give direct electrical impulses to the dopaminergic pathways in our brain a'la Olds and Milner. That's all that's left, really.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
2m ago
Hah, this is peak introvert energy. Not actually wanting to attend, but wanting the warm feeling of knowing there are groups nearby that you could attend if you wanted to.
Having worked in online gambling a fair bit I'd kinda love to know the distribution of who's actually paying these sums.
Surely Sophie's gotta have some insane pareto principle where she's got some Saudi Paypig who's absolutely blasting on the dream.
Though looking at the payment graph from https://instagram.com/reel/DN6HkAKDhYp/ it seems remarkably flat aside from that one big month.
aldomilyar
6m ago
Yeah once you're in the electronic payment loop it's fairly hard to engage in anything too discrete. The hard part is getting the cash and/or crypto into that loop, not channeling it once it's already in there.
haroldbkny
11m ago
We believe that it may be an outbreak of sex addiction. It's a new phenomenon we don't completely understand yet, but it seems to make people... different. Of course, we all know the normal healthy male thinks only of sex occasionally and has no desire for sex with multiple partners. But in the sex addict, their entire lives are consumed with thoughts of wanting more and more. The mere sight of an attractive woman could... can make them think about sex with her.
odd_primes
38m ago
They take a 20% cut, and don't accept cash or crypto. They makes it a pretty unappealing option for money launderers. If the money is coming from stolen credit cards, platforms are quick to track down which creators have an abnormal chargeback rate and ban them.
Fundamentally OnlyFans is no different than Patreon, Gumroad, the Kindle store, etc. There are plenty of storefronts online where an individual can charge money for access to content. They all tend to follow pretty similar best practices for preventing fraud and money laundering.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
41m ago
Married many kids, greatly enjoys child birth.
Excuse me, what?
zoink
50m ago
I know a Mormon man, as queer as a three dollar bill. Married many kids, greatly enjoys child birth. His son came out and his response was "Get over it, I'm gayer than you are!"
jkf
54m ago
Some of the older tiktok ones are interesting:
https://tiktok.com/@alidumana1/video/7190441685413809414
"UK 🐈 money" apparently...
It's hardly more shameful to be in a relationship with a machine than an e-whore. Neither is something people are likely to admit.
I think the ability to pretend to oneself that it’s really the girl on the other side puts a floor on demand for the “real” thing. If anything I think OF girls using AI to talk for them will generally outcompete AI chatbots alone.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1hr ago
I'm kind of stunned we've been able to erect (tee hee) a whole market apparatus around females flaunting their reproductive goods that's been completely stripped of reproduction itself. It seems like such a hack. Like figuring out if you turn natural plant pesticides into a drink it gets you high (caffeine) and it grows into some enormous coffee and tea industry.
I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine.
I'm with Iconochasm here: I've triangulated that I'm at the far high end of male tenderness and romantic shyness, and those examples strike me as painfully unmasculine. The rat character just feels hunched over, passive, depressed. Maybe a desire is there, but if this resonates with the trans masc community than I don't know if they really get what men aim to be like. Although I love my tenderness, I also don't want to be the guy who apologizes for kissing a woman who really wanted me to kiss her. Ask me how I know.
and also is more gynophilic in his partners than I am
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean -- I'm really not trying to be a jerk here. But, I mean, you are bisexual, and obviously you have a deep connection to gay culture. I'm not sure that being more gynophilic than you means a whole lot, particularly when we're talking about people who are exclusively attracted to women. Do you have a preference for women?
I admit, I didn't even realize you had any interest in the fairer sex until you explicitly said you were bisexual -- my ingrained mental image, which is hard to shake, is that you're twink who likes wearing programmer socks. I guess I've known too many geeky MSM or furries that fit that frame that I slotted you into it. And I genuinely want to know how wrong I am.
are really gay
The "trans men are really gay" thing actually contributes to the point you're refuting: if you're flying from femininity, what is less feminine than being gay? As you've said before, femininity isn't really all that prized in gay culture, stereotypes aside.
a longer-running thread revolves around wanting to be a dad
Well, a parent, at least. There are obviously differences between moms and dads, but I don't know how to meaningfully distinguish "I want to be a parent, but I don't want to get pregnant" (which would actually contribute to the point you're trying to refute!) from "I want to be a dad."
It is also slightly humorous that the rat character throws a party to interview candidates for impregnating his girlfriend, which seems, well, like something a lot of men would find somewhere between uncomfortable and enraging.
EDIT: A few more reflections after downloading the comic PDF. I braved the rat pornography so everyone else wouldn't have to.
But most of the sex doesn't come off to me as gay, or male -- they come off to me as lesbian wish fantasies about doing masculinity better than men. In particular, the initial sex scene in the comic features the rat character pulling a strapon out of his everyday carry bag (as one does) and then insisting on putting a condom on it, because ????. This is a contradiction to the stereotype that men won't wear a rubber.
Then, during the sex scene, he asks the female character, "how do you like to do it?" and she responds by saying, "Nobody's ever asked me that before!" Again, this is a contradiction to the view that men don't give a damn about women's sexual enjoyment, which is puzzlingly common among women. The point is that the trans masc rat is a Better Man (TM) than those dirty cis rat boys who didn't treat her right.
Maybe that is how a lot of men are, I don't know. But the idea that I'd have a sexual encounter and not aim to make it a good one for my partner is like suggesting that I set my pizza sauce-side down. What's the point of getting my rocks off without having a memorable experience that ends in mutual satisfaction?
(Of course, she doesn't know what she likes, and the trans man rat character just substitutes his own judgment for her inability to state her sexual preferences, and those happen to be absolutely exactly what she likes. Another trope in sexual fiction written by women.)
The "single pregnant woman meets Good Man (TM) with dad vibes" is also a common female fantasy -- obviously it's quite adaptive. But it's not necessarily something that I'd say reflects an internalization of maleness so much as a desire to perform proper maleness for women, or in other words to be the butchest lesbian who ever strapped on a dildo.
I did definitely enjoy the transition from "we literally just reunited on the street randomly" to "we are having sex, we can separate physicality from emotions, right?" to "we are now madly in love," which took all of one evening. Can I make a u-haul joke?
Also... it really does seem like the "main character" in the sex scene I read was the female character. It was all about her. I'm not getting "I AM A MAN FANTASIZING ABOUT BEING MASCULINE" vibes, but very much a projection of women's sexual desires onto the trans male character. Particularly in the "you're my princess but you're also my slut" thing, that's textbook girl next door with a naughty side energy. Of course, I think many men would be happy to do that for a woman if she asked (but in the comic she doesn't ask -- he intuits).
The comic's depictions of sex read more to me like something written by a woman than by a man -- might as well have been written by women I've dated, it's so painfully familiar. (ngl, didn't hate it.) He's a woman's ideal man, not a man's ideal man. That's not an insult, but it is important. I don't think this proves what you think it does.
zPvQINBQvfFR
1hr ago
"SNITCHES could be here" he thinks, "I've never been in this neighborhood before. There could be SNITCHES anywhere."
zPvQINBQvfFR
1hr ago
Everybody is a badass on the Internet.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1hr ago
Another group transitions, and either the desire to reify their masculinity by becoming culturally gay or perhaps the influence of testosterone, leads them to become hypersexual. 2rafa's description from a few years ago of someone she "knew as a girl and she was a blue hair, tumblr type, I suspect into Yaoi. Now he’s a twinkish bottom with a thin beard addicted to Grindr hookups" rings very true to me. I know people like this. There's always the beard.
Sometimes this seems to happen to people who identified themselves as lesbians before transitioning, which means that they jumped the shark from not wanting male attention to really wanting male attention. I once met an FTM transitioner in a marriage with a woman who was looking for men to sleep with. "I like women and she's nice, but I need to be fucked, what she doesn't know won't hurt her" was a real quote. First time I ever encountered the concept of a lesbian sham marriage. I guess in this case the beard was more of a person.
Rex
1hr ago
If your society reacts to LGBT by throwing them from tall buildings, you are much more inclined to play being a cishet.
Is it really “playing”? It seems completely obvious to me that even if these sliders exist, most people would be much happier with a wife and children, compared being some old queen alone in your apartment with a terrible body condition due to years of abuse.
You’d have to be pretty far off baseline for that not to apply.
phailyoor
1hr ago
Actually I wonder if anyone has leaked the scripts that ewhore ghost chatters use to entice their suckers I mean customers. Currently talking to AI companions through grokslop or character cards etc. is incredibly vapid and repetitive, because they're basically just an amateurish system prompt slapped onto an ordinary model. At least for the prompts out there, they only vaguely describe the author's idea of the ideal girlfriend (in the case of grokslop, Elon Musk's idea) and don't embody any understanding of human psychology and behavior. Basically a glorified version of "You are not ChatGPT, you are the ideal girlfriend. You are x, y, z, etc."
Paid ghost chatters and also pig butcherers do use a script that exploits human psychology, and they do take notes and use CRM software to manage the relationship. I think if a mainstream AI companion fully modelled this relationship, including appropriate flowcharts and notes for human interaction, it could seriously start threatening the place of humans instead of just being a plaything for the super lonely or horny.
Book review about the Afghanistan war: https://devinhelton.com/afghanistan-fractally-stupid-war
I’d have had an easier time if I’d had only had British troops under my command. The ANA have come on leaps and bounds but their command and control isn’t quite as advanced as ours. My men took significant risks yesterday to push them forward. Or should I say pull them forward? As such, it’s a significantly harder battle to wage.’ While their job was supposed to be to act as mentors for the Afghan Army, they were still commanding them. When I asked what had happened to the ANA’s company commander, Major David couldn’t quite stop himself from breaking into a huge smile. He was a bit more diplomatic than most of his men: ‘He manages to locate himself in the safer rear areas on most occasions. Yesterday, he was not present and I had to command his companies.’ (page 41)
Also included are lawyers imposing hour-long delays before airstrikes could be launched (often the planes had flown away before approval was given) and a Pandora's box full of perverse incentives.
We should've left Afghanistan many years prior to 2021. If the war was a joke in 2009-2012, when the book itself was written, then it was a joke later too. But instead everyone kept passing the parcel onto Biden. My main takeaway is that the Western system is not very good at a timely withdrawal. All this discourse about exit strategies and yet we find it very hard to pull out. It's also basically impossible to correct the error either, no senior figures were punished for the legendary amounts of fraud. Past a certain point the war in its totality can be considered a fraud.
A very sour taste in my mouth now that our cowardly, treacherous, drug-ridden, corrupt, rapey 'allies' from the Afghan Army are being relocated over to Australia, Britain and America, often at considerable expense. The lying still hasn't stopped even after the war was lost.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2hr ago
Breaking Bad but where Walter White uses OF for money laundering instead of a car wash.
pigeonburger
2hr ago
This just made me think about how easy it must be to launder money through OnlyFans kind of services.
sodiummuffin
2hr ago
Thanks to the media coverage people have now taken note of the man's social media accounts, such as his Instagram account ali.dumana.5 and his TikTok account alidumana1. We know the Instagram account is his and not someone else with the same name because it uses the same profile picture as the picture used by the Daily Mail article.
Here is an album of some posts of note, such as one of him in a ski mask captioned "Gypsy Gangster Man", another on Tiktok tagged "gypsy" and "gangsta", one captioned "I'm waiting for you whores to get in my super car", and one of his posts showing off cash. Also he put "gangster.com" in his Instagram bio. I went to the bother of making an Instagram account to confirm these posts are real and still up (I didn't bother with Tiktok since they're more of the same). Archives: 1, 2, 3.
Throwaway05
2hr ago
Wait until he finds out what they do with crayons.
You know I think you see war less in media these days and OIF/OEF were "small" in many ways. The military is pushed out of our culture in a way that's kinda new given the World Wars and Vietnam have defined American identity for a long time.
I'm wondering if you see vets in political office less now?
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
2hr ago
Really interesting interview. The guy is very pragmatic, but his exit plan is to get as far away from the degeneration of society once he gets his nest egg together.
Having worked in similar vice industries I feel like that's surely gotta be some sort of insane relationship with a singular whale to make the majority of that (who could frankly be taking a sexual thrill in her publicizing the numbers). Sophie's pretty but I'd be gobsmacked if that was sheer weight of $50 users.
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