domain:kvetch.substack.com
Ex_Nihilo
4m ago
The Vice-Joy of Football Manager
Today I re-purchase, for the third time in as many years, a device I had discarded only weeks earlier out of ludd-ish frustration with my perceived lack of productive potential: the self-built PC gaming rig. This time around I at least possessed the clear-sightedness to hang onto my graphics card and RAM, but all other components - including the SSD, the CPU, the motherboard, and the housing itself - were either dissolved, deconstructed, or defenestrated (only through the window of the dumpster, of course) in an act of feverish discontent with my personal failings.
This cycle of destruction and renewal, while somewhat costly, has its surprising upsides: the exchange of forceful self-loathing for the excitement of building a new machine, the clean restart of what was once a cluttered device, and - most notable to this post and this thread - appreciation for the role gaming plays in the tapestry of my life, only perceptible when its reprieve has been torn out of my daily regimen.
As I get older, I've learned the value of whimsically enjoying the ups and downs of my own decision-making, appreciating the oddity of the battle between my (animal) brain and my (human) mind. While I do occasionally step into other Steam offerings, my preferred dalliance from an otherwise meaningful life is Sports Interactive's masterpiece Football Manager, the greatest simulation game ever built. FM is my version of Tolkien's pipe-weed, Lewis' drink, Disney's cigarettes, Flynn's exploration of the female pudenda (thanks to @George_E_Hale for your very enjoyable posts): my own private Idaho; an alternate reality I can step into in an unhealthy manner and enjoy for that very reason. For the other Elect out there, I'm specifically reminded of Eugene Meltzner's addictive use of Whit's Imagination Station in Adventures in Odyssey. Eugene was chided by Mr. Whittaker for losing hold of reality, but I'm not sure that's such a bad thing - for either Eugene or myself.
I am a writer by trade, and so the bulk of my working hours are spent in a desperate act of escape from the nonfiction in which I am enmeshed towards the greater pursuit of grand fictions; stories that follow avenues through which I myself am often surprised, but which must retain a clarity to the perception of my fellow nonfiction-dwellers. Perhaps, in this third loop of the re-making of my alt-world, I see that my nonproductive addiction perhaps has a usefulness all its own: Football Manager itself weaves grand fictions of the sporting kind using only the names, data, and histories found in our "real world;" spinning the threads of past Champions League comebacks, Premier League relegation battles, and yet-unknown Southeast Asian urban rivalries into a controllable telling of infinite futures (or alternate pasts, given the right database).
And so, rather than shake my head at my own misguided self-discipline (which, naturally, will look like the wise choice a year from now when the cycle turns again), I'll laugh at my own foolishness, re-calibrate the hours to which I'm one with pen and paper, and joyfully tumble headfirst down the rabbit hole in the hope that the water-pipe of Manchester United's 2023-24 season is soon filling my lungs again.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5m ago
I’m still going to say “no.”
Users are allowed to be wrong. That includes misjudging whether something is obvious or controversial. Tolerance for this kind of error depends on the perceived good faith of the user. Since the OP has stuck around to argue his controversial points, he’s earned some benefit of the doubt.
If I’d caught this early, perhaps I’d have issued a warning. But I didn’t, and the rest of the community has already pushed back. Mission accomplished.
stav
6m ago
I have a hard time believing young white men vote overwhelmingly Republican. Do you have any evidence for this
NullHypothesis
7m ago
Seoul and its surrounding regions contain half the population of Korea despite being 12% of the country, the income and prospects are much higher in Seoul. Seoul itself has around 10 million people, so about 20% of the country's total population.
South Korea does have other big cities, if you sort by size you have Busan, Incheon, and Daegu with over 2 million people each, and 6 more with over 1 million people. (Incheon is right next to Seoul and is considered part of the greater Seoul area).
But all the biggest companies are headquartered in Seoul, and I'm pretty sure most if not all the major entertainment and culture also come from Seoul. If you're a young person and you probably want to move to Seoul over any other city. In a culture where status is an extremely important component of one's identity, of course, most people would want to be in Seoul. The companies being in Seoul is a significant factor too, Korea has these things called chaebols which are big family-owned conglomerates (e.g. Samsung, LG, Hyundai) that basically run all the major companies and business and politics in the country. If you get hired into these companies you are considered successful, if you can't then you're a loser. If you want to work in these companies, go to Seoul.
There is an interesting fact and reality to consider for South Korea, which is its antagonistic neighbor to the North. Seoul is basically right next to North Korea, so in the unlikely event there is a war occurs again South Korea would be extremely vulnerable to an attack. There is an incentive to try to diversify economic, political, and cultural activity across multiple areas. South Korea actually did try to plan and began the development of a new capital city, Sejong in 2007, although it has not actually become the new capital city of South Korea. It's also located in the center of the country and outside the range of artillery strikes from North Korea. Part of the desired goal was to divest people away from Seoul into Sejong. But rather than pulling population from Seoul as desired, Sejong seems to have just pulled growth in population from its surrounding areas, and both cities saw growth in their population since 2007.
07mk
11m ago
We're probably at least a year away from something that meets all those requirements, if not forever (the "free" part is the big one there). I don't think we even have free AI image generators yet that can generate 1920x1080 individual images that doesn't involve installing Stable Diffusion locally.
My source is that I made it the fuck up wrote before about the noticeable difference in censorship between Claude 2(.1) and Claude 3 of all flavors. I expect Anthropic still prefills the shit out of it in the official ChatGPT-esque interface so (as per another struggler's impression) it's not immediately obvious, you'll have to use direct API access and custom frontends to see how based Claude is when you let him cook a little (he's even aware of it). Of course this isn't an out of the box experience and you have to fiddle with prompts, settings, etc an awful lot, but you can take my word that Claude can output some real shit when prompted right. Technically so can GPT but imho Claude's florid writing style makes it much more entertaining.
stav
17m ago
You're straight up wrong if you think wealthy Indians and Asians are voting to bring low income housing into their neighborhoods. Also, prop 13 was passed when my parents were in high school so that law was passed by the Greatest Generation and Silent Generation. And those 30 year old Hispanics are net takers. Whites pay significantly more in than they take over their lifetimes. Can't say the same for Hispanics and especially blacks.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
17m ago
I would suggest employing a cook and a personal trainer.
Felagund
18m ago
I'm going to get accused of being a "Putinist" surely, but Russia is not waging a war of annihilation.
Well, except that they're both losing much of their youth to combat and emigration.
yofuckreddit
18m ago
Train for an ironman, work on side projects, play golf with executives.
yofuckreddit
23m ago
I highly recommend California as a tourist destination.
My family lives in California, so I've visited almost everywhere except LA (which I've universally heard is a shithole I don't want to see).
It feels like a different country. It's the same currency, abiet effectively devalued by 15%. But I very much enjoy visiting - the food is almost universally excellent, people are kind as long as you pretend to be a leftist, etc. There's just a lot of stuff to do.
stuckinbathroom
24m ago
How distant a runner-up is St. Petersburg?
hydroacetylene
36m ago
[2]: Yes cjet as you say every single time anybody complains about this topic there is no length requirement. And yet: yes there is.
There is no requirement for belisarius-level textwalls. You need a paragraph of thine own for each top level post or spicy hot take. That’s a perfectly doable standard and 90% of contributions which don’t rise to it are ones we’re better off without.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
39m ago
But many internet rightists who do address the JQ or are Holocaust deniers are also Jewish. Are they the "true DR"?
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
43m ago
While this portrait is obviously isn't a traditional one, I think it's a great artistic work. You don't need to interpret read as blood, it can be symbol of England, or royalty. To me the main message of the painting is the otherness of Charles, him being more than a human, looking almost like a lovecraftian herald.
hydroacetylene
43m ago
Germany has multiple major cities and holland seems to have at least two.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
47m ago
If they don't have anything original to say, but do want to hear what others think
Frankly, I'd rather that we have rules that select against those types of posters. If someone can't even write one paragraph of non-trivial thought in response to a news story - not world-historically original thought, not thought worthy of prestigious publications, but just a simple "hey I've been thinking about the Israel campus protests and how they compare to BLM, I wonder if this will help Trump in November because he's more of the law and order candidate, could tip the scales in some battleground states" - then they're probably unlikely to post worthwhile replies in response to other people's posts, and we really don't need them here.
hydroacetylene
56m ago
I have no idea where they actually live.
20 people to a three bedroom trailer.
The secret side effect of high housing costs is extreme crowding in lower income households. They need the income from renting out bedrooms to keep paying their own way. And people can’t afford their own place, so they rent rooms, often to share.
I’ve seen people on here wondering how low functioning but not actually dangerous people can be homeless; don’t their extended families take care of them? There’s no room, quite literally, in these households. Couches are being crashed on by someone who can contribute, or a more sympathetic dependent. Bedrooms are rented out for the cost of apartments in more normal cities. You don’t see the same scenes in place like houston where housing costs are more reasonable, because low income households can accommodate people like that.
Spookykou
56m ago
I remember trying to read that post and finding it pretty impenetrable, which is also the most upvoted comment on the post. I will try to retreat back to the 'easy to read' component of 'well formatted' here to salvage my position.
NullHypothesis
1hr ago
I don't think there even are any 'free' AI video generators out there.
The way these websites work, they will falsely advertise free content, make you go through a bunch of hoops, and once you get to the output it'll be blurred or restricted in scope or have you sign up or do something that will eventually lead you to take out your wallet and pay for it.
If there is something that's truly free, it won't be free for long.
Tomato
1hr ago
House prices are high because of policies that people like your parents voted for. Hispanics, Asians, and Indians aren’t voting for zoning restrictions and fighting tooth and nail for Prop 13 and similar policies. At least guys like Newsom are wielding power at the state level to force lazy freeloaders (65 year old whites) to make California livable for normal hardworking people (30 year old Hispanics).
NullHypothesis
1hr ago
People get busy, and some of these people for some reason use whatever spare time they have to go on the motte and nowhere else. Earlier this year I got busy with work for 3 months and just didn't have the energy to constantly browse the news so I just didn't during that time. I did come here on the motte a few times to check the quality posts and that's it.
Nobody at work really talks about news/politics except for the most banal topics because it's not appropriate. The campus protest story has not come up a single time at work, or in my family, or with my friends, or in my hobby groups. I am aware of the topic because I have more time now and browse some political content online and it's talked about there, but I could have easily missed it and then I wouldn't have known about it. Or I could've easily just only seen the headlines and dismissed it as another college protest (amongst the tens of hundreds of different protests that's happened in the past decade over literally anything) and then I wouldn't have the context to understand why @Stellua is asking the question. And if I have to do additional research myself to try to understand the context, well I'm only going to do that if the post is interesting, and the post by itself is not interesting to me.
Just to give an example of how the question sounds when you don't have the context:
Have the campus protests had any sort of effect on animal rights? It seems like no.
And you would probably be asking what am I talking about? Well if I link this article here: https://veganfta.com/2024/05/09/activists-protest-animal-experiments-at-the-university-of-arizona/
Then there would be something to talk about, you'd have the context to know what I'm talking about.
It's so easy to assume something is common knowledge when it's really not. I do grant some leeway that the motte culture war thread being political in it's nature you probably do expect most people to have been aware of the story but it's not guaranteed.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
As I and many others use the term, "identity politics" refers to politics based on immutable identity characteristics (race, sex, caste, ethnicity etc.). It appears that (with the possible exception of the aristocracy, depending on how hereditary privileges worked at the time), none of the groups targeted by the communist regime meet this description: kulaks can sell their land and immediately become non-kulaks, industrialists can sell their factories.
We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look in materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession. These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror. -Martin Latsis
The communists considered "kulak", "industrialist", and "capitalist" to be immutable characteristics. Their whole ideology was built on the idea that social conditions shaped individuals immutably. that was the whole point: to create a system which made immutably-good people, which would then self-perpetuate. New Soviet Man.
stav
1hr ago
It’s not about it being logical. It’s just about people seeing things suck and voting in a reactionary way. Seeing homeless and crime and insane housing prices yet keeping your voting pattern the exact same is not something I’d expect. I would think there would be at least some votes to the everything sucks guy but apparently they want to vote for the most pro-establishment guy ever that has been in office 50 years. The blue city I live in has gone to shit the last 5 years but everyone is probably more pro-Democrat than ever before. Nothing will change their voting patterns apparently.
boo
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