domain:rifters.com
self_made_human
C'est la vie
23hr ago
This is all hopelessly confounded by the fact that, on the author's own admission, they were doing significant amounts of ketamine at the same time.
FarmReadyElephants
23hr ago
Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?
The mind of AAPs are completely alien to me, so who knows? Maybe one of them is hot and bothered by roleplaying Grigori Perelman.
I've also noted one instance of an AAGP in the wild (a woman who wanted to be a man who wanted to be a woman). Human culture has no end of oddities.
anti_dan
23hr ago
The Dems run Mark Robinsons all the time, they still hit their floor which is demonstrably quite high.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
23hr ago
Despite being an interesting and well-written essay, I have absolutely no sympathy for the author or her views.
All in all, the average woman is psychologically abused in the dating market.
Right. As if the average man is doing so hot.
Dating apps suck for the majority of people. I'd say they'd suck less for the average woman, if they were capable of setting up boundaries.
FarmReadyElephants
23hr ago
There seems to be a large cohort of fairly far-left educated millennial voters that frankly scare me a bit. Call it the Reddit generation. It's the same group that powered Bernie Sanders into stardom. They have the politics of university campus but they are larger than in the past due to the expansion of college education and they keep ideological coherence longer into adulthood due to reinforcement over social media.
We rely on older voters to notice when their policies are going off the rails and elect center-left liberals to clean up their messes. But boomers are a scarce resource and overall it seems like the ideological mix of the American voter is heading in a bad direction, with Mamdani as the latest symptom. The more ideological voters seem to be indifferent to how their policies affect their city or economy. Politics is a badge of righteousness rather than a tool for governance.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
23hr ago
· Edited 23hr ago
This figure includes FTM trans people too, which aren't what I'm talking about with autism
A high number of FTMs I've known have at least stated they're autistic. While autism among the female sex is controversial, I suspect they're correct. I have no data for this, but I think the two greatest risk factors for FTM transitioning are 1) autism and 2) PCOS. I have a friend with PCOS who is a huge fan of Abigail Shirer, and believes that a great number of FTM transitioners are women with the same syndrome -- which is caused by abnormally and dangerously high levels of testosterone in women -- who feel like the symptoms of the condition like male-pattern hair growth and irregular periods make them less of a woman and therefore seek to embrace them as part of their "true self."
This is perhaps analogous in some ways to AGPs and transwomen more generally who are bullied or ostracized for femininity and come to believe that they really are a sissy loser who can't be a man and might as well embrace the only gendered path that seems possible for them.
Actual bona-fide gender dysphoria obviously plays its role, although I wonder sometimes if much of it isn't so much active identification with the preferred sex and more a feeling of alienation and incapability to be accepted as a member of their birth sex that emerges into body image issues. That would make it something that social contagion can affect, much as anorexia can take even subtle (or not so subtle) social cues towards physical fitness and thinness and transmute them like a witch into an inability (Edit: originally there was a typo here that was "anability", which is an uncomfortably good phrase to describe the perception problems of anorexia) to accurately perceive the body's actual thinness. Obviously not all cases, but I think transgenderism is a multi-factor phenomenon and this might be one of the factors.
People sometimes conceptualize transitioners as villains or attention-seekers, and sometimes they can be like that, but I strongly believe there's a wellspring of intense suffering that motivates it in many cases, even if we don't have to affirm every decision that someone who is suffering makes or even agree with their interpretation of their experience.
HereAndGone
23hr ago
I think that this "estrogen cures autism" analysis is false
Well for a start, there are women with autism.
HereAndGone
23hr ago
I'm going to assume the word they are groping for here is "meaningfulness" and not "meaningness" but of course their new girly oestrogen brain can't word properly, tee-hee!
Seriously, if guys think this is what being a woman is like, there is no goddamn hope for any mutual understanding between the sexes. On the other hand, it does explain the 'dressing like an anime avatar my new name is Lilith Raven Andromeda see how I've coated my face in a thick layer of makeup so girly now' transformations.
Along similar lines to what @WhiningCoil and @TIRM have said i think context and distribution matter a great deal. As an example, I live in a mid-size American city that has a significantly above average crime rate on paper, but said crime is largely restricted to certain nieghborhoods and classes of people (IE Shitbirds). Respectable citizens know that nothing good happens north of a certain avenue after sundown, while the city PD maintains a visible presence in public spaces and transit (which discourages pan-handlers and loitering ner-do-wells) and actively persues property crimes. As a result the day to day perception and experience of most residents and visitors is mostly that of clean and safe '1' streets despite the ostensibly high rate of criminality.
- 1: from crime at least, our drivers and cyclists are another matter.
Do these people want to make me actively hate 'trans' people? I mean, I have some difficulties with how some strands of activism are playing out (particularly the rigid reinforcement of simplistic gender roles of the 'blue is for boys, pink is for girls' type) but I don't think I hate anyone.
And then I read shit like this and I want to get a gun and start shooting (in Minecraft).
"Ooh, I tried oestrogen and it made me so girly! I liked tarot and magical stuff and giggling and being all fuzzy brained!"
(And I say this as someone who likes playing around with tarot imagery but don't treat it as serious.)
I have been on oestrogen all my life (up to menopause) and if it made me describe my sensations like this, I would have preferred to jump off a cliff. "Oh gee, the reason I can't maths is because my little girl brain so soaked in hormones, gosh!"
I think there's a lot of "I expect X to be the opposite of Y, and if taking A gives me the sensations of X, then I will behave differently to how I normally behave" going on here. I think there may well be some physical changes, but mucking around like this is just annoying as all hell.
"According to these models, everyone falls somewhere on the autism–schizotypy continuum"
Yeah, and what makes these models worth more than a hole in the ground? "Hey, by our new model, everyone is some flavour of crazy and if you're not Stereotypically Male Brain Things oriented then you must be Stereotypically Female Brain People oriented".
Give me a break. Or a bottle of sherry. I feel the glittery pink girly need to get blind stinkin' drunk after being exposed to this.
EDIT: On a more serious note, why doesn't progesterone get any love? In cis females, oestrogen isn't there on its own. There's a balance between the two (and more). Do trans women/trans experimenters like our guy here ever dose themselves with progesterone as well to get the full female experience?
Oh, I see he did:
Additionally, at one point I tried taking a 300 mg progesterone suppository. This made me feel quite stupid the following day, so I did not try this again.
Passing a remark about "well duh you stuck a progesterone suppository up yourself all in the name of amateur hour endocrinology, I don't think it was the progesterone that made you stupid" would be too easy - oh darn, there I went and did it. But yeah: wanting the alleged results of oestrogen without figuring out the natural cycle of the cis female hormone levels does lead me to think that there's a lot of "I expect to feel like a, b and c, and I'm going to feel like that even if I have to imagine it!" going on here, I don't think there's a neutral/blind "let's see what happens" trial happening here.
EDIT EDIT: Clearly I'm coming at this from the angle of someone who naturally had these hormones all my life, so I can't speak as to what it would be like to experience the effects for the first time. But I have to say, all the "it's like being on mild psychedelics" - I've never tried psychedelics so I can't say if being female is like being slightly stoned all the time, but the rest of it - cutting down sensory issues, helping with sleep, etc.
Oh how I wish. I've had mild insomnia all my life, and the good old autism spectrum "this tag on the collar of my clothing will drive me insane if I can't tear it off right now" sensory issues. Oestrogen is not a magic cure for that, folks, so I strongly suspect some placebo effect going on, as well as the guy admitting he's doing/had been doing a lot of ketamine at the same time.
FarmReadyElephants
23hr ago
That predictably leads to social deficits and-- guess what-- trans people report high levels of social isolation and loneliness (This figure includes FTM trans people too, which aren't what I'm talking about with autism, but I'll get to that later). Meanwhile, estrogen increases oxytocin and oxytocin reducing autism symptoms and oxytocin decreases the felt impact of social isolation. So immediately, there's a pretty compelling link between autism->feeling lonely->taking estrogen->feeling better that explains the "success" of the trans phenomenon, including the high rates of treatment satisfaction.
Part of this satisfaction could also be gaining a new social group. You might find similar rates of satisfaction among people who joined a church, or who in past generation may have joined a music subculture (goth, emo, punk) instead of becoming LGBTQ++.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
23hr ago
· Edited 23hr ago
Also, "Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life." - yeah, making major life changes, having a new project, and potentially a new social group, can do that for you.
I have an acquaintance from college who transitioned male to female. They once showed me a picture of a neckbeard with acne, saying "this is what I used to look like, then I transitioned and I'm so happy with how I look." Well, no crap my friend, you shaved the neckbeard and started taking care of yourself!
Whacking it to not being able to do math is a common AGP pastime.
Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
An older dude who used to do Aikido joined recently, and I will say he definitely learned something in the way of balance and body positioning from his aikido practice, he's very tough to off balance and he's got strong resistance. But at times he is a little goofy with his technical choices.
FarmReadyElephants
23hr ago
Obviously this all has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the risk of confounding factors and psychosomatic/placebo effects in this case is high.
Yeah. "Girlish" traits like frivolity, stupidity/incapability, and artsiness are valued among AGP folks because it turns them on. Whacking it to not being able to do math is a common AGP pastime. There's an element of roleplay going on that is impossible to dissociate from the chemical element without double blind studies.
Also, "Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life." - yeah, making major life changes, having a new project, and potentially a new social group, can do that for you.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
including our very own Scott Alexander have gotten in on the game by describing his platforming of alternative views as "dangerous" and "irresponsible".
Any chance anybody has a direct link to it? I am not surprised by people getting on the train to cancel somebody, for a while, but I thought Scott would know better, given his own history with cancel mobs.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d ago
I'm only conversant in aikido, which is more like action yoga or something. In that, I've been thrown (usually into a subsequent roll) by guys who were very skilled, and also brutally slammed into the mat by guys who seemed to be channeling a different martial art. At my size (about 177cm, 73 kg) there are women who are both taller and heavier (fewer in Japan) of course. The very skilled akiidoka can move you (me) even if I resist, male or female. The regular rando is like an unbalanced sack of oranges. Reading your updates makes me want to try BJJ though the prospect of abject humiliation is always mildly daunting.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
I've heard this being said, well, everywhere since late 2024 at least. It's kind of an obvious point to make, so a lot of people made it.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Salary load can be notable in some industries, but I think it only rarely takes down entire companies (more than capable of causing problems on a per-location basis of course) because it's not often actually the biggest cost on the balance sheet (just the most "controllable" which is why so many emphasize it a lot). It is pretty "sticky" though, so it can compound otherwise controllable problems when a major financial shock happens (this has happened to a few airlines, for example). That's not quite a single point of failure, though it might depend on how you parse the question.
The big thing to note is how the problem used to be worse when pensions were a thing. Many, many companies would go down because they didn't have enough in the bank earning investment return to cover pensions and didn't have enough from revenue to pay it either. Part of why so many companies dropped pensions in favor of the 401K as soon as they could. But even then, you'd still have legacy stuff - GM in 2009 comes to mind, Wikipedia says "For each active worker at GM [in 2006], there were 3.8 retirees or dependents in 2006". Yikes.
The other failure mode is start-ups who hire too much too fast, but that's not really what we're talking about.
gattsuru
1d ago
Yeah, there's a basically no chance if they (or even a not-joke Republican candidate) split the not-Mamdani vote. The sane option to my eyes would be organizing behind Adams, sad as that sounds, but it's also a massive coordination problem. But I don't get why they tried Cuomo in the primary to start with, so maybe there's something that would overrun the 'already lost this fight once' problem. And my low opinion of Cuomo is part of why I don't think they can coordinate.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
For additional fun have one of the contestants secretly be a trained MMA fighter.
I don't think it's much fun if it's secret, it's more fun when everyone knows what's up. Does the MMA fighter take a pissant attitude around the house, being unafraid to step on toes because he knows no one will challenge him? Does he have trouble getting anyone to accept his own challenges, since there's less shame in avoiding him than in avoiding someone who has an "unfair" advantage? Also, in my ideal libertarian-hellscape version of this contest, the contestants would be allowed to choose any amateur ruleset to fight under. So they could choose boxing, wrestling, kickboxing, kyokushin, MMA, muay thai, etc. So maybe you know that so-and-so wrestled D1, so you challenge him to box. Etc.
We have very limited data from the "enforced violence" dates which occur roughly once in each season of The Bachelor/ette. Every season the contestants are forced to box, wrestle, or otherwise scrap on one group date. Notable observations:
-- Women give credit to the winner of the boxing tournament even if he outweighs the other guys by 40lbs
-- Men don't care who wins.
-- Only one contestant, to my knowledge, has ever refused to participate on principle, during the Covid season in 2020. She was summarily given a terrible edit and booted off the show.
-- On the other hand, it's nearly always a good move during a rugby or football date to claim an "injury" preventing you from participating, which will allow you to hang out on the sideline with the Lead.
I'd imagine there'd be alliances formed early with the best fighter, but then later some betrayals as they try to get him removed. Maybe you have 4-5 guys each throwing down challenges to the same dude forcing him to decide if he wants to lose some face or actually fight each of them in a row. I'd bet that under almost ANY circumstances, sleeping 5 dudes in a row buys you immense status points.
I suspect we wouldn't see that many fights, with the fights primarily being used to settle "drama" problems in the old fashioned way: camera cuts to Chris telling us "Trevor told Kaylee I said X but I TOTALLY DIDN'T SAY THAT; Trevor must meet me on the field of honor or yield his argument!" If Trevor isn't willing to get in the ring, then he doesn't really think that X was said, does he? If he persists in lying, but refuses to back it up, Trevor's probably headed home, right? At the same time, if Chris keeps whining about Trevor lying about him, but never challenges Trevor, then Chris is probably headed home. And if they both get in the ring and bang around with no clear winner, does it overly impact either of them, positively or negatively? They both showed they were willing to fight to defend their honor, and both put up a good showing, is that enough?
But then the structure of the show is that there's normally out of 24 guys only about 6 Kaylee is actually interested in, and as the show winds on you'll also see challenges made in desperation, from guys who are about to be sent home because Kaylee doesn't like them. Trevor, who is definitely going home soon, will challenge Mike, one of the frontrunners, making up a bullshit offense as a reason and trying to get some juice out of the fight to get attention. Does Mike feel like he needs to accept the challenge, given that Trevor is so far beneath him? Does Kaylee feel that Mike needs to accept it, and will lose attraction to him if he doesn't? What if Trevor is much bigger and stronger? Might Kaylee choose to send Trevor home immediately, for trying to pick a fight without cause, or just to protect her favorite boy?
And because you get a wide range of size, strength, skill in fighting, and toughness in your contestants, do you get a white knight? Trevor, a former college football tight end, picks a fight with David, a scrawny software developer, and intends to challenge him publicly. Thad, a former amateur boxer who has made friends with David but also needs the attention, steps in and challenges Trevor first. Who does Kaylee end up falling for in this scenario?
JarJarJedi
1d ago
As far as I know, they did not, and continued to use cannabis despite the loss of this case. Eventually the policy of USDOJ changed to a less insane one towards medical marijuana patients (thanks Obama), so the feds stopped harassing them. The SCOTUS decision, however, remains as another milestone in the long road from the limited federalist government to "you got only the rights that the feds want to give to you".
Homies Ride or Die update
Been consumed by that rendering bug where the lighting seemed all wrong on the tires and I began to suspect my model data was fucked up.
I was using this ancient format for loading 3d models (".obj") that I downloaded from sketchfab.com but it turns out when it says this format is the native format uploaded by the artist and the other formats are derivative, it's kind of lying. A few 3d people have told me you want to get the ones in .glb or .gltf format, even if sketchfab says these were auto-converted . (I do not know how to make sense of what sketchfab says)
Anyway I thought maybe the .glb models would have more reliable model data and they do seem to. So then I got the .glb model loading mostly working (using tinygltf) but I was getting this random error where the car would render fine for the first frame and then vanish. I spent about 4 days trying to debug the bgfx state machine until I realized I was creating vertex and index buffers in the GPU and sticking handles to them in a class, and then I created a destructor for each class that would free those handles up. Fine, except I was not realizing I was copying the class around and the old class, a transient object, was getting destroyed which was deleting the memory held by the handles.
Since the handles are like, integers into a GPU resource table and not pointers, I wasn't getting any kind of pointer derefence error. It was just accidentally working for one frame and then failing to work after that.
I had to spend a long, long time staring at this stuff and remembering C++ copy/move semantics before I was able to track this down. Lesson (re)learned: don't put things like file/resource handles in object destructors unless you're extremely careful.
Finally making progress again. I'm getting a lot more texture data and the tires look a lot more realistic now, matching what's on sketchfab. Maybe I'll get spinning tires and stuff working again by next update!
I mean yes, I was handicapping myself significantly. Which is actually true in like 1/4-1/3 of the rounds I spar most days, I'm a large man and there are a limited number of opponents that I can go 100% against, and then even the ones I could go 100% against often choose to go light. I go light against smaller men, though less so than I do against a woman, and I go easy on people less experienced than me, though there aren't a ton of those, and I roll light with guys who want to roll light due to injury or to work on something. I've miscalculated against new guys before and gotten tapped out for my trouble. But never against a woman!
This is entirely a case of me underestimating her ability and overshooting the amount I had to handicap myself in order to have a productive round with her. But that's still me discovering something, in that up to this point I wasn't entirely sure there existed a point at which I would have handicapped myself too much to escape from a woman's submission hold. She had that sucker sunk, there was no way I was going to be confident in getting out of it. Which genuinely, I couldn't believe, I sat there (not) breathing for a couple seconds just sort of stunned before I tapped. Because up until this point while I occasionally let a girl get a dominant position, if I turned up the strength slightly I easily found my way out of it. But there's some point of advantage at which that would no longer hold. This was a discovery.
Unfortunately, up until now I've only rolled with women who I was close to even with in technical skill. I hope at some point to have the opportunity to roll with a female opponent with a significant experience/technique advantage over me, so I can fill out that quadrant of the square. Obviously strength is good, but I get tapped by guys I am bigger/stronger than regularly. What margin of experience would be enough to worry about? I'm pretty sure I couldn't take Adele Fornarino, but where does the line sit?
Also, closing your eyes is useful when rolling in that it trains you to grapple by feel. When you're locked up on the ground in guard, there's a lot of stuff you can't see because it's behind you or because the motion is too small to really perceive a difference, but that makes a big difference. I can't necessarily tell what my opponent's hands are doing behind my back, or how his weight is distributed between his legs, with my eyes. But I can feel it, and if I can learn to feel it and react to it that's more information I'm gathering.
I actually managed to hit a few sweeps and one triangle choke on other full grown men with my eyes closed. Which, among other things, allowed me to talk shit on them about beating them with my eyes closed.
Isn't the whole point of martial arts (at least some technical ones, like BJJ) to make this possible? I mean, if it were all Grogg smash and whoever has the best muscle wins and there's no possibility of the weaker partner to prevail at least sometimes at some point, then what would be the point of learning all those intricate techniques instead of just hitting the gym and eating the proteins or whatever is the recommended way of getting more Grogg smash in.
Surely, strength matters, so if you'd lose to a much weaker opponent all the time, you're probably doing something wrong (or they are extremely good). But getting it once in a while, when you didn't play full strength, by a choke (which - I don't practice BJJ but I can assume - is not supposed to be a strength-against-strength thing) is IMHO not very surprising.
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