domain:tracingwoodgrains.com
birb_cromble
6d ago
Well, they kind of are- they foul up any actual investigation
I'm not in the loop on this one. Has there been any actual investigation since the game got popular with the youth? If so, have we seen any punishments handed out, or changes to the developer's behaviors and practices?
yofuckreddit
6d ago
I felt this a couple months ago. Ozempic, self-driving cars, LLMs, humanoid robots, and Mars-capable spaceships all in the past 3 years. We're in a new era, no getting around it.
Oopz
6d ago
Yes, and I absolutely love it. It seems all the sci fi I consumed when I was young is coming to life.
I like fitness and learning which means I'm going to go down the biohacking route more so than the fall in love with non-human minds route. (I'm not judging, I think it's good people find comfort and companionship no matter how it's delivered.)
If this is not a worldwide technological false start and we are turning into a type II civilisation, I'll probably have at least 3 non organic body parts within the next 40 years.
yofuckreddit
6d ago
Simplistic, but my atheistic interpretation was always just this as well.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
6d ago
What do you think of "gym muscles"? Referring here to the idea that musculature bought in the gym is less effective than muscles bought by manual labor.
I think there's some validity to it, but it's not in the muscles themselves.
Imagine you could run scans through my body to figure out exactly how muscled I am, down to the gram and square millimeter. A boxer with the "exact same" stats is still going to hit way harder because they have a massive advantage in more ephemeral elements, like muscle memory and training their body to work together in a certain way.
Just so with manual labor. I did it for years, and I can do the thing where I can heft up some enormous, heavy object and casually walk it a hundred yards. But the thing that lets me do that isn't exactly being strong. It's having an intuitive, pre-conceptual understanding of torque and leverage and balance and how they interact with my body.
I had an incident last week where a young, scrawny employee expressed some degree of being impressed at me raw carrying some large object. And I paused, holding it up with one arm, and explained that my arms really weren't doing much work. I was just holding it steady so that the center of mass was balanced over my shoulder and aligned with my core.
I think that's where the discrepancy comes from. It's not that one "type" of muscle is different from the other, but that you develop different suites of subconscious support skills from different activities.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
6d ago
In Lieu Of Dystopian Sci-Fi Movie, American Just Watching News From England. I've been unironically doing this for a few weeks now.
Canada is even worse. It's time to start building a wall to the north, and thinking about how we're going to handle it when that expanse of desolate wasteland fully devolves into a third world shithole.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
IMO, the appeal of paranormal romance is two things: (1) A man who is a werewolf or a vampire or something is just that much more Alpha (and allows the whole "taming the beast" theme to become much more explicit- I mean, if your love can tame a literal werewolf how desirable must you be?). (2) A lot of women (especially on the nerdy spectrum) don't want to admit they are the kind of Basic Bitch who likes romance novels, but if you dress it up with fantasy elements, then they are "fantasy" fans.
Jiro
6d ago
At the top end, Canadian law requires that judges take immigration consequences into account in sentencing “provided that the sentence that is ultimately imposed is proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the offender.” At no point did we explicitly legislate this: rather, in 2013, it was decided by the Supreme Court, in a judgment authored by now-Chief Justice Richard Wagner.
Singh was found guilty of sexual assault at trial. But he wasn’t convicted. Instead, in January, he was given a discharge by Justice A. J. Brown. The judge explained that a conviction would automatically result in deportation without a right to appeal
A lenient sentence is not the same thing as no conviction.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
I've only read or watched a couple of those. And I see what you mean about them appealing to a "male romance fan" but- well, does it not strike you that there is a large overlap between the male protagonists of those stories and the generic, uninteresting, personality-less girl being mocked in that /r/romance_for_men cartoon?
I gave Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie a try for a couple of volumes, to practice my Japanese reading comprehension. (The Japanese is very simple, though it's full of idioms.) Anyway, I bailed because the male protagonist, Yuu, is so annoyingly... well, non-masculine. Unassertive, cringing, insecure, less smart, less confident, and less cool than his girlfriend... I kept wondering "What does she see in him?" But you have made me realize I was seeing it from the wrong angle, as a story appealing to women (who I guess in Japan find an unthreatening submissive softboi a turn-on?) But no, it's appealing to men- or more specifically, to boys who feel insecure and unmasculine and unable to compete in traditionally masculine ways, but want to imagine the cute, smart but devoted and affectionate girl will still fall in love with them.
Have you read Haruki Murakami?
His books are usually billed as "fantasy" or "magical realism" in the West, but they all have this theme: a rather dull guy with the personality and initiative of a bowl of oatmeal is kind of dragged into a quest he doesn't really understand, pulled along by a hot chick who's often on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl spectrum and is probably underage or barely-legal, and at some point she will strip off all her clothes and do him for no apparent reason other than that he has a penis. Then a couple of other women including the librarian and the MILF and the MILF-librarian will do the same.
(I am only slightly exaggerating- Murakami bingo is really a thing.)
And now I have realized that you could kind of consider his books "romances for men." An ordinary guy goes on a quest without having to actually do much, and gets laid like pipe without having to put in any real effort or value.
Unironically I recommend him because his stories are surreal and weird and often funny, and really convey a different kind of mindset, with lots of sensory impressions Western writers don't usually dwell on, but the male protagonists always annoy me. And this is perhaps why "romance for men" doesn't appeal to me much. I am hardly a "manly man" who wants to go out and conquer kingdoms, but I guess I am a traditional enough man that I want to see men working, striving, struggling, and earning their rewards. A guy who offers no apparent distinction but has women falling on his dick anyway is not a fantasy for me, it's a mystery.
That said:
I don't see why you couldn't write romance books aimed at men that were similar.
Indeed, it does make me wonder if there is an untapped market there in the West. Maybe someone will eventually tap it. I suspect, however, that cultural differences would make it a hard sell. Boys would have to overcome the stigma of reading "romance" and, let's be honest, a story like I have described, where an ordinary boy wins the love and affection of a hot girl out of his league, would be scorned and mocked across social media and booktock, and become loser-coded.
2rafa
6d ago
What’s the general consensus among your kind of Christian on Jesus’ theory of mind on this? Since he knew he was divine, the Son, part of the trinity, was he not simply fulfilling his destiny, living out an inevitability of which he was fully and consciously aware the entire time, an actor in a play whose audience were mankind - for the benefit of their own salvation?
Throwaway05
6d ago
It's been a longtime since I've seen Candle Jack, maybe he did i
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
6d ago
A theological inquiry: what do you believe were all of Christ’s personal motivations to be crucified, and what was the overriding motivation? We have, of course, brotherly love (John 15:13). But there’s also the motivation to live so as to exemplify the glory of God (17:4); to receive glory for himself from God (17:5) (5:44); consequently, there is the interest to always do God’s will (5:30) and work (4:34). There is also the intriguing verse that His motivation was for his own heavenly joy (Heb 12:2), as “for the joy that was set before him he endured the cross”, which I think is the only verse which directly links personal motivation to the cross. This joy is not necessarily mutually exclusive to God’s glory, because glory itself is a supreme joy.
Regarding the overriding motivation, I am partial to Heb 12:2, that Christ was motivated by the glorious “joy set before him”, because the whole passage reads almost like a doxological summation of the faith (“let us look to the founder and perfecter of our faith”). It ties in neatly with a different underrated verse: “Those who, through patience in well-doing, seek for glory and honor and immortality, God will give eternal life” (Romans 2:7), while the “self-seeking” face wrath (2:8). This is somewhat tricky because we no longer talk about glory as an emotion today. But if you understand that glory is a feeling that always emanates from a person’s assessment, then seeking God’s glory is not self-seeking, because all of the “social valuation” exists within another person. Seeking one’s own glory would mean something like “wanting to believe oneself to be glorious”, which is different and to be condemned. “Seeking that God give us glory” is equivalent to just “wanting to do our best so that God gives a ‘well done’”.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Similar to actual predators, they often impersonated minors, actively approached other users, then tried to lead them to other platforms to have sexually explicit conversations (which is against our Terms of Use).
I don't know how else to read this besides "'vigilantes' are similar to predators". It sounds like a defense attorney arguing that the cop who impersonated a drug buyer is just as bad as an actual drug buyer, on the sole basis of their actions being superficially similar.
There are a lot of things we let cops do which we do not let random citizens do. If you try to by drugs from a cop and get arrested, "but I was running a vigilante sting operation" is not going to fly.
From my understanding, all relevant parties on Roblox appear as minors. The actual minors appear as minors. The child buggerers pretend to be minors because that is much more likely to be successful -- a 14yo might send nudes to what they perceive as a 15yo, but not to some 30yo creepy dude. The vigilantes pretend to be kids because otherwise the predators would not be interested in them.
Crucially, none of the parties knows the identity of the other party. If two bi-curious 14yo girls trade nudes, then that could be two girls (or 15yo boys!), or any of the five other combinations.
Both the predator and the vigilante have an interest to lure their conversation party off-site and then get them to do something incriminating.
An ethical vigilante would just sit there and wait to be hit on, then play the reluctant-but-willing-to-be-persuaded minor. Even then, that would be rather icky, because there is always a chance that the person on the other end is a minor. Flirting with someone who poses as a minor and might be a minor is bad. And if they go off-platform and the first thing the suspected predator does is sending them a nude selfie which confirms he is indeed a 15yo kid, they might be on the hook for CSAM.
And simply joining with a username like fluttershy_2011 and talking about MLP all day waiting for some creep (or boy) to hit on you might not work very well for vigilantes. So they might take a more active role instead, which would be even more problematic.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Anyone else feeling particularly cyberpunk?
Even normies online are talking about 'clankers' (humanoid robots out in the wild, not ASIMO scripted performances). I'm giving vague orders to Claude Code and watching it go. People are actually having relationships with digital waifus like Ani (not in the news media sense like 'Japanese man marries hologram girl but company is discontinuing the service' but in a more organic sense). The most valuable company in the world is a near-equivalent of 'US Robotics' from the Asimov novels.
Feels like there's been a step change in just the last few weeks.
AfterEpictetus
6d ago
I think you may have misunderstood my argument.
if you violate a custody order you are more likely to be judged unfit
I agree with this. P(judged unfit | violate order) is significantly higher. Hence my comment about requiring a trial.
But we're talking about a theoretically individual case. Statistics don't matter to the individual.
Let's take someone who was given no custody and has a child in an unsafe situation. A few days out of that situation might be better than none. I'm not sure that parent is automatically irresponsible.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I haven't stepped into a Barnes & Noble in years
It's funny that you mentioned that. Last night, I was waiting to meet up with some folks and I arrived early enough that I needed to kill some time, which I did by walking into a Barnes and Noble. The sci fi and fantasy section had a clear view of the entrance, and after a while I noticed something odd.
The place had a ton of customers, but nobody was buying books. Almost everyone who left was carrying a coffee from the integrated Starbucks. Those who weren't walked out with board games or things that would have been purchased from a toystore in days of yore.
I eventually bought Adrian Tchaikovsky's new book when I left because it felt wrong to be at a book store where no one was buying books.
marinuso
6d ago
I think the overt politicization of the American judiciary makes it better in this case. Each individual judge may be biased, but since both sides get to appoint judges, and fight over it, the justice system as a whole ends up fairly representative.
In most of Europe on the other hand the justice system is treated as an apolitical, bureaucratic organization. The judges should be professionals, and leave their biases at home. The public shouldn't care about the judges, in the same way that we shouldn't have to care about minor functionaries in other random government departments, who are just hired on the basis of their skill set and are there to do a job.
So in the Netherlands: the Minister of Justice appoints the head of the Council for the Judiciary. This council in turn appoint the heads of the courts. The courts then hire judges. In practice even the ministerial selection is done based on a shortlist, and the courts too make shortlists. The minister could maybe ram through a political appointee if he really wanted (and get everyone to yell InDePeNdEnT JuDiCiArY), but that political appointee would have no institutional support and get nothing done.
This all sounds very nice in theory, but in practice everyone (except, depending on how the election went, the minister) is a fairly serious progressive by now, and they will always make progressive rulings, and hire more progressives. And there's no way to change that except by going full Orban.
prosecutors refuse to charge or hold criminals or the law is changed on things like felony shoplifting
I don't actually have much of a problem with this in the American context. The laws are made democratically, and almost everywhere in the US, the district attorney is also an elected position.
If a DA gets elected on the promise not to charge criminals, then indeed doesn't charge criminals, then gets reelected, then clearly the people actually want this. At that point I can't really disagree with it. I disagree with the stance, but not with implementing the results of the vote. If the median voter of e.g. Portland really is this progressive, then yes, so should the government of Portland be.
The problem comes when these people are appointed by "the system" and cannot be removed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
I often edit my posts after writing them (a short while after, before anyone can read them). Sometimes I cancel the edit, or alter something else and leave a thought unfinished. On balance it wasn't a good line of argument and should've been deleted.
Sometimes it's the legislative branch assuming that a court should interpret this reasonably and then the court going all the way, other times it's just bad politics that makes bad law and then that ties the judges hands so they have to make bad decisions.
Some irony in me criticising others and failing to finish the very sentence where I bemoan, though my opinions on this thrice derived rationality forum don't matter at all.
hanikrummihundursvin
6d ago
I don't see the connection between 'being a person' and therefor automatically being inclined to give foreign rapists light sentences.
To me it doesn't seem reasonable or humane, just cowardly and sick. Being so wrapped up in and simultaneously so blind to ones own twisted moral intuition that it becomes practically impossible to differentiate between the person raping a 15 year old and the person calling them a pig is not 'normal'.
I think it would be a lot more pertinent for people like this to examine their state of mind and how it has managed to drive them towards results such as this. But it seems like we've managed to build an impervious wall that keeps people away from exploring the true extent of the problem and just what feeds these 'outgroup sycophants' to do what they do.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
From your 2nd link
he did show “some response to younger females” in phallometric testing, but he agreed to take therapy in light of the finding
TIL.
We have discussed this before. As Scott writes when describing US sex taboos:
Acknowledging even the slightest attraction to anyone under 18 makes you a monster, but people who are just slightly older than 18 - even by one day - are called “barely legal” and feature especially prominently in sexual imagery.
Personally, I suspect that a majority of men are hard-wired to be attracted to any fertile-looking female. Some might be more into teen porn and some might be more into MILF porn, but very few will say that B cups or D cups are a hard no in the same way a beard and a cock are for most men.
So I do not think that measuring if the perp gets a boner from the average 15yo female is going to be very crucial information. If he has two brain cells to rub together, the next hooker he will hire will be of legal age. Who gives a fuck if it is a 19yo who could pass for 15 or if she is a 30yo MILF?
Personally, I also do not think that we should take all the information which affects re-offending probability into account. If the perp was sexually abused as a child, has a brother who is serving time, comes from a bad neighborhood, was raised by a single parent, has a father with a criminal record, is black, is unemployed, or is irreligious, that could all be statistical risk factors for re-offending.
But criminal sentencing is not only about preventing re-offending (even if harsher lower the risk of re-offending after release -- which may or may not be the case). It is also crucial for a stable society that it is seen as broadly fair. In fact, this very discussion is about a way in which it is unfair!
In my opinion, besides the specifics of the case, sentencing should only be based on prior convictions. Of course, the defense is free to argue that the accused has found god or is really into MILFs or whatever.
Also from your 2nd link:
At the top end, Canadian law requires that judges take immigration consequences into account in sentencing “provided that the sentence that is ultimately imposed is proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the offender.” At no point did we explicitly legislate this: rather, in 2013, it was decided by the Supreme Court, in a judgment authored by now-Chief Justice Richard Wagner.
So the case with the 15yo sex worker sting was not an activist judge, but simply a judge applying the law as it is.
I certainly think that the SC ruling is bad. I mean, it is good that courts can take into account consequences outside of criminal law when determining what punishment is appropriate. If someone has spent a decade on the run in shitty conditions, or had his marriage or professional life destroyed by his deed, that might be factors to reduce their prison sentence compared to someone who experienced no negative feedback. If you know that the defendant will get deported after his sentence either way, you might shave off a year off the sentence (on the assumption that most citizen criminals would not take that trade).
However, doing this proactively -- to avoid issuing a prison sentence because it would have further unpleasant consequences -- seems silly. I mean, I can construct a case where the predictable consequences of a 90 day prison sentence are deportation to Afghanistan and getting beheaded by the Taliban, and I can see that a judge would be unwilling to sentence someone to their death for a minor crime. But this is not the case here. Staying in Canada as a permanent resident for another four years before getting his citizenship does not seem like undue harshness.
the value of a sex-offender-free workplace
Hard disagree here. If you really think that workplaces should not employ convicted sex offenders, are you then willing to pay them unemployment benefits for the rest of their lives? Or do you think they should just get the death penalty, or be forced to beg in the streets?
The idea of criminal rehabilitation requires people to find employment. After an offender has served their sentence, they should join the workforce again.
For professional licences, there are sometimes higher standards, because these come with a lot of additional responsibility. You do not want a habitual drug dealer as an officer of the court, or drunk driver as a doctor. Because of the privileges offered by such jobs, we want to filter for people who take laws extra serious, on the presumption that if they do not take general laws serious, they might also cut corners in professional regulations.
NunoSempere
6d ago
Yes, I'm quoting Chinese military news
Magusoflight
6d ago
There ARE ways to deal with bad judges in Canada. For instance we had a case where a judge asked a raped women why she didn’t simply shut her legs harder. Iirc the law society basically got him off the bench for that, a big No No. if we wanted the public could pressure similar measures, but we probably won’t. Canadians are addicted to being Nice but even moreso to being Not Like Americans. If America is deporting foreigner criminals., why, we’ll just NOT deport them and maybe even give them a reward for it too. See how not American we are? Such moral superiority is truly a reward on its own.
It is clearly, completely and permanently over for Canada. It’s interesting that there was a huge drama in Britain a few months ago over the possibility that certain kinds of sentencing impact reports (which were non-binding but could theoretically play on the emotions of a judge) would be granted automatically for non-whites, LGBT and women but not automatically for straight white men. The (Labour) government threatened to abolish the commission that determines this kind of thing and then forced them into repealing that guidance.
Meanwhile Canada has been officially and openly granting huge sentence reductions on the basis of race for years. The left just won another majority. Even the Canadian right is less anti-immigration than Keir Starmer. Canada’s constitutional system and political deadlock make major reform of human rights law that would allow for mass deportations (which would require packing the Supreme Court, which has rules about who can be elevated that limit it to the almost entirely progressive judiciary) effectively impossible.
Canada and Belgium are the two western countries that are furthest gone with regards to mass immigration, and the two for which I would argue recovery is categorically impossible1, without any likely or reasonably viable routes. Both share the misfortune of having developed as multi-national states with little shared loyalty or national character, making them perhaps uniquely incapable of articulating any kind of anti-immigration position. Maybe the numbers will wane a little, but nobody already there (now getting citizenship and permanent residency by the hundreds of thousands a year) is going home.
1 it is probably also over in The Netherlands, England and Wales, Ireland and Sweden. Weird and unpredictable things will happen in France, although I think hardcore republican assimilationism is more likely than remigration. I think the far right will come to power in Germany, Austria or both. Spain and Portugal will become Latin American countries with large African diasporas. The rest is harder to predict.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
6d ago
I’m generally not interested in “fluffy” romance, where the romance is literally the only thing going on. But as long as there’s something else going on in the plot then I enjoy those types of stories quite a bit.
Quite a few anime and VNs fall into this category, but you already said you don’t like things that are “too Japanese”, so, yeah, unfortunate.
A while back, when I lived closer to the coast, I typed my address into the national sex offender registry to see how prevalent sex offenders were in my area. I was shocked by how long the list was.
I assumed the high number had to be related to something like this, so I started looking up news articles and court cases. It's something I regret doing to this day.
The depths of human depravity are far deeper than most people could imagine. Even someone like myself, who was the victim of childhood abuse, failed to realize how profoundly fucked up things can get.
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