domain:sotonye.substack.com
ABigGuy4U
14hr ago
I’m increasingly convinced Sam is a The Boys from Brazil-style clone of Leon Trotsky.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
15hr ago
Happy Solstice! Enjoy some mead-fueled rambling!
Earlier this week I was gazing into one of the endless amusing abysses of the internet when I stumbled across a post that spoke to me, all out of place. It was a brief meditation on aging and monogamy that echoed some of my own thoughts on the topic (tl;dr: a psychologically healthy man should still find beauty in the grandmother of his grandchildren), phrased and pic-related with a vibe I appreciated.
So I looked at the pseudonymous poster. They seemed to be some sort of TTRPG designer, or at least that's what their recent posts were about. A very brief perusal showed hints of extremely grognard-y concern about weapon minutia and a post talking about having bards be the representation of the gods, which were based on historical pantheons. Gave some extremely low (or even no) magic, gritty vibes, but that was a cool thought, using Bards telling stories of the Gods in the place of the more "mundane" divine power of healing and light spells. Felt like something William H. Stoddard would have put into a GURPS: Hyperborea book.
And, oh, cool, this person has an Amazon author page, let's check that and see what else they've written and-
It's Varg Vikerness.
Holy shit, I laughed my ass off. I really should have seen something like that coming. But it gave me a great excuse to remember one of my favorite memes.
And it gave me a good excuse to look up what happened in the Norwegian Black Metal scene in the early 90's, to at least Wikipedia standards of quasi-reliability, instead of just Shit My Punk Friend Told Me Over A Blunt Twenty Years Ago. There's a bunch of overlapping articles, but start here or here.
The overall picture I see, reading between the lines a bit, looks like a classic purity spiral. Euronymous installs himself as the Prince of Norwegian Black Metal because he owns the record shop and label and talks a very extreme game about how obsessed he is with death and nihilism and being maximally evil and hating everything bright and fair. But he develops a reputation as a poseur, a guy using the aesthetic for personal gain or self-aggrandizement. Meanwhile, newcomers are taking his rhetoric to logical conclusions and start taking actual actions, like burning churches and murdering strangers.
Feeling his position is threatened, Euronymous escalates his rhetoric, confiding specific, private death threats at other members of the scene. But he does this so much, to and about so many people, that rumors get out and one of those newcomers responds and kills him first.
It's an interesting look into the psychology of a subculture. And while I do appreciate some of the music and other elements, it just reaffirms how thoroughly I find that kind to evil-maxing to just be utterly gauche. For fuck's sake, kids, even The Crow is a fundamentally hopeful film!
But it's also interesting to square that nihilism with how Varg presents himself now, as a committed family man espousing a more positive vision of simple living and racialism (for which he was subjected to a Vampetaço).
And as an added bonus to this whole rabbithole, I got confirmation that Kulak is aware of his theme song, which I admit had been bothering me for a bit. You know I don't usually hold with the Abominable Intelligence, but this Imperium Hymn stuff - it's not bad.
Hell, let's be honest. Black Templar's Prayer is a fucking banger, and it's been dominating my gym-time listening for months. I'd shed blood to have Sabaton or Powerwolf fix the soulless bits and cover it.
Finally, hi Chris! Hope you're doing well.
gattsuru
15hr ago
I've fallen down the emulation rabbit hole. Or perhaps it's emulation hardware?
I was looking for a portable and moderately linux-friendly device to host this project that wasn't a stupid phone ... and I'm probably going to end up just using a busted-ass stupid phone, all the non-Apple dedicated 'tablets' are either huge or crap or both, and I had some familiarity with portable gaming handhelds like the Steamdeck and thought 'oh, how hard could it be to figure out one with decent battery life'?
Surely there must be some market between eWaste web browsers and ItCanPlayCyberPunkForFiveSeconds, even if it's a bit of a weird niche--
Who wants to drink from the firehose!
Okay, emulation has taken off. I'd messed around with SNES or PS1 emulators back when they were all the rage, or the GameCube a decade ago, but I'd kinda gotten the impression the late PS2 era had been a brick wall, with only weird specialty projects like Yuzu as successful exceptions that aimed for the low-hanging fruit and getting absolutely clobbered by lawfare. Hardware wise, I'd seen a million different Raspberry Pi compute stick shells, and just slapped the same code on a RaspPi I already had and considered RetroArch checked.
Nope. Gone are the dime-store-3d-print shells. Forget BCM2711s or RK3399 (... mostly). Even the Bricks built for gameboy-level emulation are running on more specialized and capable processors, and some of the higher-end machines can be comparable to desktop machines I would be pretty comfortable playing 2022 AAA-games on. Sure, Nintendo can cost the software developers or website hosts a pretty penny, but you don't even have to run to skeezy AliExpress offers to get giant deliveries of embarrassingly overt piracy... and maybe some software herpes. The PS3, despite its weirdo architecture, seems like it's actually working okay? And on things like the XBox, Microsoft cares so little about it that you can just rip software straight from an unmodded console, with nothing more specialized than a USB spinning rust drive. Who expected the day when M$ wasn't the bad guy when it came to archiving old games?just don't look at their OS. When you can't play something, it's usually a sign of serious software limits some nutjob is willing to work surprisingly hard to solve, or you're emulating a wii game with a prolonged jerkoff joke as a central game mechanic that doesn't translate well.
Now, there's a lot of sketch here. At the high end, you have fun questions like iffy USB-C-PD implementations and driver hell. More often, expect a ton of hardware that cycles in and out in months if not days, from a manufacturer that's apparently colorblind and depending on Kickstarter churn. Even when everything works out fine, commitment to the LGPL is more in theory than practice, and there's a lot of reason to suspect that the Snapdragon8gen2 chips were 'surplus' from conventional projects -- I dislike Qualcomm's resale policies enough to think that's a plus, but from a support and longevity perspective it's a red flag.
And, yeah, a lot of these come with just piles upon piles of piracy. Ostensibly, you could play native games (many newer devices are fairly fully-featured linux/android, albeit with all the !!fun!! involved since most of the cheaper ones are ARM). Ostensibly, you could just rip games you own or collect, and I'm enough of a hoarder collector that I've actually been able to do some of that, but in all honesty? They're built for piracy. You know it, I know it, most vendors are pretty unabashed about letting you pick how much piracy you want and know it, the less graymarket vendors having to explicitly warn you that they aren't doing the piracy for you know it.
There's an optimistic view that's kinda nice. Yeah, it's a little twisted to be so ruled by nostalgia that you're putting as much processing power into a 2002 handheld game as could run a 2022 AAA one. And if everybody could have just bought a 5 USD rip of great games like Grand Theft Auto 3 or Shadow of the Colossus or Okami and run them on their cell phone, we probably wouldn't have gotten remasters of them. But in turn, there's a ton of other games that will never show up again, or where they are remastered get butchered in the process, or get remastered for a console or environment that itself has a shelf life measured in months. The Baptists-and-Bootleggers of Obsessive Weirdos and Literal Thieves haven't just kept a lot of otherwise abandoned games archived and usually playable (oh boy Games for gofuckyourself Windows Live), but they've made a lot of equipment and play options that would otherwise not exist, even if that requires pretty dedicated design and engineering work. If it also means you can get an unlocked Android device that'll accept alternate bootloaders for less than the cost of last generations Nintendo handheld, I'm not gonna complain.
So I dunno. I'm still more of a keyboard-and-mouse gamer, but some of the options are looking pretty good when I'm away from my desk or my documentation or my reading list. And even for normal gaming time, I think it might be worth firing up Megaman Legends or Robot Alchemic Drive again.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
15hr ago
why not just blow it all out in a cocaine-and-hookers weekend
Because those are illegal, I don't know where I'd find them in my area, and don't have the money to afford them anyway?
and then end it with a 9mm breakfast?
Because I'd worry about missing the right spot, and ending up still alive but with seriously incapacitating brain damage — which is why I'm more likely to go with helium and an "exit bag" instead.
And as for why I don't do that, mostly because my family would get stuck with the bill for disposing of my corpse, which exceeds my (SSI-limited) net worth. Once my parents are both gone, though…
Now, you might argue that America's heart wasn't really in it. Is their heart going to be more in it when it's their own homeland they're burning and shelling?
"Outgroup vs. Fargroup" comes to mind here. Fighting a bunch of people on the other side of the world who you are somewhat sympathetic toward, versus fighting the useless, inbred, gap-toothed, room-temperature-IQ, religious fanatic, every -ist and -phobe, Klanazis that make up the hated enemy tribe?
Also, in the GWOT, America's military operated in a foreign land, while their entire support structure, industrial base, and their soldiers' friends and family were perfectly safe on the other side of an ocean.
Which means they had nothing to fear from giving up and going home. When "home" is where you're fighting, it's win-or-die, so the motivation is much stronger.
I don't remember where it was, but I remember a year or two ago reading an editorial online from a retired general, ostensibly about the possibility of civil war in the US (though he ultimately used it to lay out his — IMO ridiculous — position on counter-insurgency), where he gave this as one of the arguments as to why whichever side of a second civil war the military pics simply cannot lose — the US military, since the 20th century, has not been and cannot be defeated, the politicians have merely gotten tired and called it off; but since doing so in a civil war is suicide…
You can get a job being someone's bitch in June. That's what being an apprentice is.
No, seriously, the trades are jobs
They're shitty jobs that nobody would take without the promise of a master card at the end. Nobody will do a phd either without the promise of the degree at the end.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
15hr ago
But increasingly, the only roles which are prestigious in modernity are those of white collar undefined-what-the-value-add-here-is jobs and those of pushing the bounds of theoretical knowledge
This isn't necessarily directed at you in particular, but it seems like a good excuse to talk about it:
I often see sweeping generalizations about "prestige" on TheMotte that betray a very particular kind of coastal, Blue Tribe, upper-middle-to-lower-upper class perspective on what counts as prestigious and why. But not everyone in "society" shares that perspective. Ask yourself, the types of guys who are actually working these trade jobs, do they know about your concept of prestige? Do they know what you consider prestigious or not? And if they do know, do they care what you consider prestigious or not? It's not a rhetorical question, I'm legitimately asking. I don't exactly have a foot in that world either.
Think about a black teenager growing up in the projects in inner city Chicago. He's a part of "modernity" too. What does he consider prestigious? He may be aware to a more or less vague degree that people think that being the President is prestigious, or that being Elon Musk is prestigious. But what he considers most viscerally prestigious, his "revealed preference" for prestige if you will, is being the local drug dealer, or the most feared local warlord. That's what actually matters in his world. Or maybe he could aspire to be a major rapper or athlete; those are things that "society at large" finds prestigious as well. Those positions are certainly compensated well enough. But even then, they're the sort of thing that the more well-to-do Blue Tribe perspective might look down upon as "tacky". Note that a couple comments here have already given their personal shortlist of what they consider prestigious, and "being Jay Z" and "being Tom Brady" haven't made any of the lists so far.
I once read a comment here that said "being a doctor is one of the most prestigious things you can be". And I just thought... really? Really? I mean it's an important job, don't get me wrong. Thank you for your services. I'm happy for them that they're making a lot of money. But at the end of the day it's, from my perspective, still just another job. Doctors are, modulo individual technical skill, fungible, and fungibility is antithetical to prestige as far as I'm concerned.
Now, if I were in the same room as say, I dunno, David Chalmers or Slavoj Zizek, I might find myself stumbling over my words in a vain attempt to make a good impression, because those people have achieved social positions that I do consider to be highly prestigious. But this is hardly a universal opinion! Many educated and well off people of good repute have never heard those names; and if I were to explain to these same educated and well off people that they were philosophy professors, a common response (particularly from those of a more conservative bent) would be "well they're just parasites who are stealing our tax dollars and filling young peoples' heads with nonsense, so why the hell would I think they're prestigious?" (In fact your reference to the "philosophy of fartsniffing" indicates that this would likely be your response!)
The TL;DR is that there are almost as many conceptions of prestige as there are people, so before we say that the prestige of such and such a thing is motivating people to do XYZ, we should establish what model of prestige the individuals in question are actually operating on.
gattsuru
16hr ago
I agree he's more sincere than John "Article III is <Not> Worth a Dollar" Roberts, fair. But I don't see any way to make VanDerStok workable in the same frame as Bostock.
Trivially, VanDerStok isn't clearly saying that the GCA definition of "firearm" is massively broad; that's why it has to keep wavering back and forth from ordinary meaning to what Congress 'meant' to say whenever discussing "artifact nouns". That's very far from Bostock's explicit division from what Congress intended to say from what the statute actually spells out.
But more critically, VanDerStok is a dodge. Gorsuch does not write to say that the GCA definition of "firearm" is so broad as to even cover all of the plaintiffs. He discovers that APA challenges must act as a facial challenge such that no enforcement of the regulation could ever be a valid interpretation of the statute, after the plaintiffs never argued it and the government defending the law disavowed. Even were he absolutely sure that the ghost guns rule were perfectly in line with the statute, he's not actually committing to it, either.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
16hr ago
A British friend of mine takes Finasteride and swears by it. I asked my (urologist) doctor about it once in the dark days when I was fannying about worried about my hairline, and he looked at me and said "You will develop man-boobs." (Urologist due to BPH, but they can also prescribe it--though he said he was unwilling to).
Anyway since then I've both calmed down and lost much interest in Finasteride. I believe you mentioned minoxidil, which is basically Rogaine right? But has no hormonal component that I know of. (I write all this before reading your deepdive but I will from now.)
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
16hr ago
Ah, I had not realized (or remembered) that Lord Kelvin wasn't born that.
Serfs these were not, but no one in this forum could be said as being of "serf stock,"
Oddly, some people in my family talk about us being "good peasant stock", but it isn't actually true; they were shopkeepers and skilled laborers in the old country.
Gaashk
16hr ago
I have a friend who's an apprentice electrician, but he already has a bachelors from a good college and is happy to be taking trigonometry again, so it's more of a "same academic skills, better personal fit" when compared with white collar positions.
1549 Book of Common Prayer
Though the 1662 Book of Common Prayer is much the same
O Merciful God, who has made all men, and hate ſt nothing that thou ha ſt made, nor de ſire ſt the death of a ſinner, but rather that he ſhould be converted and live: Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Hereticks, and take from them all ignorance, hardne ſs of heart, and contempt of thy Word; and ſo fetch them home, bleſſed Lord, to thy flock, that they may be ſaved among the remnant of the true I ſraelites, and be made one fold under one ſhepherd, Je ſus Chri ſt our Lord; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.
FD4280
16hr ago
Arklatex sounds like software for reverting typeset math into bad handwriting.
faceh
16hr ago
Nope. But its definitely authentic about it, it doesn't hate the contestants.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
16hr ago
Human history has been a fairly steady march of increasing liberalism
This is straight-up Whig history, and I am far from alone in rejecting it.
Edit: and now I see IGI-111 laid it all out much better and in more detail below.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
16hr ago
Something's gotta give between
- Abstinence until marriage
- Marriage driven by choice and random chance relatively (25+) late in life.
- No fault divorce.
- A healthy sex drive in an individual.
So just get rid of #2 and #3, then.
9 is wildly overrated. The gameplay in 9 is totally broken. The animations take so long that everyone's ATB bar fills up at at the same time, so you can never guess what order the turns will happen!
The writing was also lousy. The "comic relief" character Quina is by my estimate the 6th funniest character of the main cast, behind Steiner, Zidane, Vivi, Eiko, and Garnet ("What's that phrase again? Oh yeah! Get off me you scumbag!") and arguably 7th because Freya and Zidane have that bit where he pretends he didn't know her name. Amarant was a wildly underdeveloped and pointless character, and while Freya was interesting the writers just forgot about her halfway through the game (common problem in final fantasy).
Great music though.
I haven't played them all, but of the ones I've played, I guess I'd rank them 12 < 3 < 9 < 4 < 5 < 8 < 7 < 10 < 6.
Does anyone actually look up to middle managers in HR departments, girlboss or otherwise? How is that prestigious? Lots of people look down on HR as useless do-nothing wreckers, yourself included. HR are villains in popular culture: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ADWb4gM7cDM
Or McKinsey? Consultants are also reviled and blamed for so many problems. Quite right too IMO.
Academia is prestigious (letters before and after your name!), being a lawyer is prestigious, working in finance, working in some human-rights NGO is prestigious/virtuous, being a doctor is prestigious. All of these have some tangible pull factor, ranging from power, wealth, high academic requirements or virtue. There might be hostility but they're not despised like HR is.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-l0HFgfDWec&t=13
I'm looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes
HR only has a lack of negatives (you don't have to deal with the general public grubbily asking for fries, you work sitting down all day).
I think the issue is that there's a default track in that you're supposed to go to university (you are smart aren't you?) and then people feel like they need to use their uni degree, so they go into HR or some similar low-value public service job. It's a smooth progression.
Nobody ever dreamed of working at McKinsey, they just end up there after going to uni and studying 'business'.
pssandwich
Pro-life, MRA, Social Democrat, Environmentalist, Atheist
16hr ago
Thanks for the response! I disagree with you that this makes a case for personhood (as a distinct concept from "being a human organism").
Well whether a life is or is not a person is an important moral factor in deciding how immoral it is to kill that life.
I don't agree. in my moral system the only relevant factor is whether it's a human being or not. I can't think of any non-abortion/consistent life ethic issues in which not making this distinction would lead to a conclusion that you'd disagree with.
For example, people generally don't consider taking animal lives equally immoral as taking human lives
This issue can be resolved by just deciding axiomatically that human lives are important and animal lives are not. This is what I do in my moral system. There's no need to introduce a concept of personhood separate from being a human organism to resolve this issue normally. Moreover, I think even among animal rights people, the unironic belief that "animals are people too" is pretty fringe.
I'm aware that lots of people use the concept of "personhood" to talk about abortion, including some pro-lifers. I'm just not sure what it gets you outside of the context of the abortion debate, which is what I mean when I say it's an ad-hoc concept. I think you can recover the entirety of most pro-choicers' morality, aside from abortion/consistent life ethic stuff, by just defining "person" to mean the same thing as human organism. I don't even think this runs afoul of what most people who believe in animal rights think. But pro-choicers introduce this extra "personhood" concept that doesn't play any role in their other beliefs to resolve this one issue, rather than taking the simpler route of just defining everything in terms of being a human organism.
I'm not saying the pro-choice position is inconsistent. I'm saying that it requires introducing extra complexity to your moral system that isn't used for anything else. Is there any issue, aside from consistent life ethic/abortion stuff, in which you must appeal to personhood as distinct from being a human being in order to arrive at the normal position?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
16hr ago
That Devon Eriksen quote pretty much describes a good portion of my own worldview, and your analogy about mitochondria versus viruses sums up another chunk (indeed, it's a metaphor I use myself from time to time). And I, for one, think #1 is pretty much inevitable, with maybe the slimmest hope of #3 (though I think that to be successful, #3 can't rely on "outbreeding the enemy" alone, and will ultimately have to resort to a superior capacity for violence).
wifje
16hr ago
Nice write up, in the last couple of months there was some researcher, this one i think? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29569259/ , that claimed that some structural issue with a vein in the groin is the main cause for prostate cancer, and that the way it works is that it causes very testosterone rich blood go directly from the testicles to the prostate. have you seen anything related to that in your research? i did some googling after that because it sounded like something that could have at least an indirect link and havent found anything too clear, but wondering if you noticed something
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
16hr ago
Healthy cultures are evolved phenomena, and most cultures currently alive are no longer suited to their environments.
This right here is a big part of what makes me a "reactionary" right there. The entire modern world vastly overestimates the capacities of intelligently-designed, top down "culture and education program[s]."
AvocadoPanic
16hr ago
I would have liked him to know the population of Iran, and the approximate ethnic make-up of the population. I would have liked Tucker to follow up with a query to see if he knew the population of Israel.
I would have liked him to condemned Mossad intelligence operations carried out domesticly in the US. Call for increased efforts by FBI counter-intelligence. Especially in an interview just before Juneteenth, they day we celebrate the execution of the Rosenbergs, notorious Soviet spies.
LiberalRetvrn
16hr ago
You can get an entry level HVAC job in June by having a clean driving record, piss test
I really don't believe this. One of my coworkers finished a private electrical trade school, went into debt, and he still can't find an apprenticeship. I doubt HVAC is much different, especially in my area of the country where nobody even has air conditioning. Maybe in a big metro area or something. But I work at a lumber yard in a rural area and everyone wants to do either trades or become a firefighter (for some reason). And the firefighter guys seem to have a much higher success rate. I've applied to at least 100 jobs and gotten 2 interviews, both of which ghosted me after. And yes I'm an autist but I can hide it pretty well for short periods of time. The most recent one was for a "laborer" position at a company that does kitchen remodels, so it was actually one level below an apprenticeship, but there was a possibility to maybe become an apprentice someday. The interview went pretty well in my opinion, but he said they had hundreds of other applicants. At this point I'm more interested in joining the navy, since at least it's guaranteed employment and bennies once I'm in, rather than sinking hundreds of hours into job searching and hoping some boomer will answer the phone.
It didn't come up, but I'm passingly familiar with what you're talking about. I believe that Scott has written about this a few months back, and the mechanism attributed was venous stasis/insufficiency causing the local hormonal levels to go too high.
Not related to balding as far as I'm aware, and largely out of my wheelhouse. I'll defer to Scott, and limit my commentary to saying that I don't see anything obviously implausible with the mechanism purported.
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