domain:rifters.com
OliveTapenade
15m ago
It's possible he thinks that way, or even that he just thinks that owning the character and account is what matters. I suppose one could make a comparison here to his companies: he presumably thinks of himself as designing or making cars or rockets, even though almost all of that is done by lower-level employees. Likewise he may think of himself as playing PoE2 even though almost all of it is done by a lower-level contractor.
To be honest the impression I've gotten with regard to Musk and gaming is that he just doesn't understand how gaming works. That PoE2 YouTuber, as I recall, pointed out that what Musk claims to have done is mathematically impossible - he could not have reached that level in the game in the amount of time available. It's not doable. But I would not be surprised if Musk believes that sheer skill can accelerate one's progress in the game. Is it possible that he just doesn't understand how grinding works?
I suppose I think that he has very surface takes on games. I remember when he claimed that chess was too simple and Polytopia was better. Not only does that tell me that he doesn't know much about chess, it also tells me that he doesn't really know much about Polytopia, which is a quite simple 4X that can be mastered relatively quickly, and which did not hold much interest for serious 4X players. On the surface Polytopia looks more complex than chess, because it has more widgets to manipulate, but in terms of strategy it has less depth. What this tells me is that Musk probably played Polytopia for a few hours, maybe even a few dozen hours, but has never deeply familiarised himself with the genre.
I suspect that Musk finds the idea of gaming interesting, and is enchanted by the idea of being a hardcore gamer, but he is what we used to call a casual.
There's nothing wrong with being a casual. Casual gaming is a great way to spend your time. But a casual who wants to be seen as hardcore, doesn't have the skill, but does have the money... well, that's just cringeworthy.
gattsuru
26m ago
Technically, two furry versions, though you have to go into settings for Bad Rudi. Tbf, they're both obnoxiously monofocused and pretty lackluster when it comes to animations or gameification; Rudi on telling 'cool' stories, and Bad Rudi just trying to swear at you (cw: exactly what I said, loud sound).
But, yeah, it probably says a lot of strategic things.
OliveTapenade
29m ago
I can understand that case - part of what makes Musk willing to be daring and innovative in business is also what makes him willing to do bizarre and eccentric things in other fields. Having enough ego to disregard the advice of everybody else in terms of what's possible for rockets or electric cars probably goes with having enough ego to, well, do these other absurd things. So you've got to tolerate a bit of weird gamer nonsense as the price for all these other benefits.
I suspect that overall we disagree about the net value of Musk's contributions to society, or about the desirability of things like AI girlfriends or artificial companions more generally. I'm quite pessimistic about AI in general, so I consider it preferable to maintain as large a taboo as possible against using AI for social purposes. If there is a respectability cascade that results in the public considering AI girlfriends/boyfriends to be legitimate or healthy ways to spend one's time, I would consider that a negative development. But we may have different high-level generators of disagreement on this issue.
Hieronymus
35m ago
The Reader’s Digest condensed version: The Old Testament ritual for purifying Jewish priests to serve in the temple requires the ashes of a spotless red heifer. Rabbinical tradition adds a bunch of criteria to the biblical law (as rabbinical tradition is wont to do) such that qualifying cows are absurdly rare.
Some Jews who want to restore the temple would like to breed qualifying cattle. A few eccentric dispensationalist Christians, who believe that the rebuilding of the Jewish temple is part of the unfolding of biblical prophecy, want to help them. This isn’t a common thing, but it has geopolitical relevance, as rebuilding the Jewish temple would require tearing down the Al Aqsa mosque.
OliveTapenade
35m ago
The tennis example strikes me as absurd and lacking in dignity for either Ackman or the tournament, but the presence of a substantial benefit to the tournament does change the calculation a bit for me. The tournament has traded part of its credibility for a large payment. Depending on the tournament's finances, that might have been a worthwhile trade for them, but it's still undoubtedly sordid.
Sunshine
42m ago
If you observe a person's number of teeth over time, you will find that they start with 0, rise to a certain peak, wobble a bit as baby teeth are lost and replaced, and then stay mostly stable at a certain number for a long time (possibly losing a few to accidents). Then, at the end of their life, they gradually lose teeth their one at a time until they have none.
If you were to look at a snapshot of a community, you would find that some children are gaining teeth quite quickly, the adults have a stable number of teeth, and the elders are gradually losing teeth. In a community that is 50% children (not rare historically) you might take an average and find that the number of teeth in the community is rising rapidly. However, if you were to extrapolate that to assume that the community's children are mutating into shark-like creatures who constantly grow more teeth, you would be making a mistake. In the long run, everyone ends up with exactly 0 teeth.
The mature civilizations of this planet are becoming less religious. It would be a mistake to assume the immature civilizations will continue their current trend lines exactly. It is better to assume they will follow the same course of evolution the more-developed civilizations took. The more-developed civilizations are becoming less religious over time, and unlike with children there are no new undeveloped civilizations rising up. It is reasonable to assume that, if things continue on as they have for another 100 years, secularism will continue to rise.
ABigGuy4U
55m ago
If the temple is going to be rebuilt, the site would need to be consecrated with the sacrifice of a red heifer. It has to be a heifer that has no other colored hairs at all. That is very rare. Ranchers in Texas are working with ultra-orthodox groups in Israel to breed a line of such cows to have it ready in case the Dome of the Rock suddenly....goes away.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
They're invertebrates ping-ponging around inside this closed space of legal 'rules', penned in by judicial review and the ECHR. They don't realise that they have the power and the duty to write and rewrite the rules as necessary to achieve outcomes. They're too wedded to the 'rule of law' now, they don't realise that it's truly just a social construct.
Quantumfreakonomics
1hr ago
>He doesn't know about the red heifer
shoeonfoot
1hr ago
Sorry to resurrect this thread but I've only now gotten a chance to read this post and all the responses carefully. I'm curious what you make of this thread. I'll copy it below in case you don't want to click the link.
Why the Epstein story matters so deeply to the political right—and why sweeping it under the rug is not just offensive, but a civilizational betrayal:
This isn’t just about Epstein. It’s about what his case reveals: a nexus of unaccountable power, intelligence cover, institutional rot, and elite impunity. The story touches every nerve the American right has been warning about for a century.
Since FDR, the right has feared the unchecked expansion of the administrative state. But the real danger wasn’t just bureaucracy—it was the fusion of that bureaucracy with the intelligence community, financial elites, and transnational interests.
Epstein is the singular window into this world. A man with no clear source of wealth, deep ties to U.S. and foreign intelligence, and access to the most powerful people in the world—running a blackmail operation under institutional protection.
The CIA won’t talk. The FBI walked away. The media refused to dig. And Israel—whose alleged involvement through cutouts like Wexner is whispered about but never investigated—remains off limits. That silence says more than any report ever could.
For decades, the right has asked: Who really governs? Who watches the watchers? Epstein gave us a glimpse. And what we saw was not a “conspiracy theory”—it was conspiratorial governance: intelligence services operating with total impunity.
This isn’t just about criminal sexual behavior—though the abuse of underage girls is itself an unspeakable crime, and one that demands real justice. But the fact that such crimes were instrumentalized for power is what makes this even more sinister.
The use of sexual blackmail to compromise institutions and shield a network of elites is not a subplot—it’s the playbook. This was kompromat as statecraft, and it operated in the open, protected by the very agencies tasked with protecting us.
The reason the Epstein story haunts the right is that it confirms our deepest suspicions: —Our intelligence agencies are political actors. —Our elites are compromised. —Our allies are unaccountable. —And our institutions lie to preserve their power.
Worse still: every time the Epstein story is buried, the very institutions doing the burying destroy their own legitimacy. The cover-up corrodes the foundation they claim to defend—rule of law, transparency, democratic accountability.
This is what Eisenhower warned of—not just a “military-industrial complex,” but the seamless merger of state power, private capital, and foreign intelligence. Epstein is a grotesque fruit of that fusion. Ignoring it won’t make it go away.
The right sees Epstein not as an aberration, but a revelation. A moment when the mask slipped. When the postwar liberal order—underwritten by secrecy, mutual blackmail, and “strategic alliances”—showed its true face.
So no—we won’t move on. Not because we’re obsessed with scandal, but because the Epstein case is the Rosetta Stone for understanding the modern American regime. And the regime knows it.
That’s why it must be buried. That’s why we must never let it be.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
I can already see the framework, the jewish tricks are practically manifesting before my eyes:
This is an odd and derogatory thing to drop into the middle of your post. I am not quite sure what you're getting at, or if this was meant as some kind of ironic joke that I missed, but you seem to be playing on the trope of "Jews are responsible for everything related to social degeneracy and porn." You're either failing to speak clearly, or if you really want to pin this, of all things, on the Jews, you need to provide some kind of evidence for the claim that "Jews" are behind this.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
... is it more hilarious or disturbing that they are making the furry version available before the male human version?
Quantumfreakonomics
1hr ago
On the Protestant end, the number of things that are “demonic” are growing really fast.
This is in contrast to the Catholic view, in which everything is presumed demonic until exorcised (why do you think they bless things so much?)
shoeonfoot
1hr ago
Buddha statues you can put into your garden
Note that is frowned upon by most genuine Buddhists.
Trump was able to win over a lot more Catholics than he did in 2016 and 2020. In fact, a majority Catholics voted for Clinton and Biden, but then swung like +10 in favor of Trump. I'm not sure what effect this had on Trump winning as many states as he did, but if it was relevant, a Republican will have a harder time winning in 2028 if the Catholic vote swings back to D.
I'm curious to see if organized Christianity adopts a more hardline position on immigration. What I'm increasingly seeing among the Online Right, especially after Epstein, is that the only thing that will salvage the Trump administration is mass deportations, and their attempt to synthesize Christianity with this goal.
TIRM
1hr ago
It's not clear any company running this sort of thing can seriously prevent leaks over a long enough time for it to be relevant.
With sufficient will, they could do just this. This is a choice they actively make one way or another.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
There's real technical ability in lawyering and banking too, but it's always engineering that gets singled out for treating women wrong. Somehow or another (male) engineers are the worst of the worst in terms of oppressing women.
Or... the narrative is completely wrong. Engineering gets singled out because women prefer the bros to the nerds.
Blueberry
1hr ago
Meditation and yoga sessions and cheap decorative Buddha statues you can put into your garden/house without making a strong religious statement.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I’m not sure how sinful it is, but most of the people who talk about it seem a bit off. Like they don’t really seem to care about anything else.
gattsuru
1hr ago
I have two. I'm not a good writer, and a lot of my better writing I'm not really comfortable linking under this name, but I think they say something about what could be useful to good writers.
This is the all-audiences one: reviewing the review of the re-view. Not every recommendation here is good or even correct (Grok either can't or doesn't notice that I mention that the "Matryoshka doll" story is explicitly fictional and couldn't be known to be true in Mahaffey's version, and probably doesn't have access to the original book; it also handwaves errors in fatality numbers in an aircraft crash are actually pretty damning), but it does catch errors I didn't notice after multiple rereads ("opposites side") and that I definitely mirrored Mahaffey's approach far more heavily than I'd intended or even recognized, along with a few good style recommendations.
((Uh, and the recommendations about asides, nested parentheticals, and being a pedantic hater might be correct, but not exactly useful given that they're kinda my intentional tone.))
[cw: nsfw text and themes below, though nothing worse than you could put on YouTube]
My other example is from a bi furry piece, albeit an except stripped of the actual bedroom activities. So that may make it unusable for examination. If not...
This isn't perfect. There's a good portion of it that's either blowing smoke up my skirt ('cheeky'), or only finding corrections that are trivial (duplicated words, comma errors) that I or a beta reader would probably have caught on a re-read, or that are amadan's extremely generic your first how to write advice (slow pacing). Some of the tone emphasis between flirty and platonic is arguable or even just, imo, plain wrong, as is one of the comma errors where it recommends a 'fix' that's already in the original text. Others are pretty clear good advice, such as on rising tension and characterization, but probably an artifact of my limited experience as a writer and .
(and, tbf, that this is a small excerpt).
By contrast, the problems with the wristband themes would be very hard to figure out with a beta reader: they're a moderately common convention in bi furry stuff, such that almost anyone who'd want to beta read would be so familiar with it as to take it as a given, but they're not so common that I should have assumed every reader or even every experienced reader would have gotten it.
But this is a subgenre-of-a-subgenre-of-a-subgenre piece. I could believe that grok has enough (mmf) furry smut in its input to avoid being absolutely one-shot! There's not really enough orientation play involving multiple male characters, furry or otherwise, for me to think the stochaistic parrots complaint applies, here. And this particular version of that subgenre focus is defined in no small part by a logical inconsistency. Even in the long-form, grok could 'recognize' it was being 'confused' that the character's self-identifications didn't match up with their behaviors, even if it came up with the 'wrong' response; that's about as good an evidence that you'd need to clarify what's going on as available from human reviewers.
and this is Grok's two-generation-old model.
Terracotta
2hr ago
I mean, I chose engineering because it's an area where genuine technical ability/ technically excellent work exists, and because it draws personality types (both male and female) who tend to get excited about the material work itself and who want to use their technical ability to do a good job. Also because I have first- and second-hand personal experience of adjacent things happening.
Sales and similar bro-professions seem much more like jobs where persuasion through performing a social role is the whole point, so it's hard to imagine someone complaining about their externally-imposed social role getting in the way of their good work. I know a realtor who works her augmented breasts very effectively as part of her job, and she doesn't seem upset about it at all, any more than the local car salesman who leans into stereotypes with his down-home aw-shucks accent. But maybe I'm being unfair to sales, and actually there is a lot of technical subtlety there as well, who knows?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2hr ago
Just wanted a tattoo because it felt cool lol. My best friend came up with a design I really liked, and on my deltoids it went. You could also consider it a getting into med school/becoming an adult gift to myself.
Stellula
2hr ago
Personally I see a fusion of Buddhism x Christianity already happening, and expect a sort of Christian orthodoxy mixing in Buddhism mental techniques as the most successful religion of the 21st century.
What things do you think that Buddhism offers that Christianity does not?
I had thought that most skulls had some teeth, often most teeth?
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