domain:savenshine.com
Blueberry
8m ago
The vibe riding is an interesting thought. I guess it is the same in music/fashion/art: cool people surf the wave at the exact right time, uncool people are too late, but few stay relevant over decades without becoming a dinosaurs.
chooky
9m ago
I think that part of the backlash is simply because a lot of people started out primed with a disdain for Sweeney, mainly because of the perception that her popularity is driven purely by her looks, namely her curves. My wife got mad when I said I thought she was great, but my position was that at that point she had pretty much been 2/2 on starring in absolutely amazing shows (Euphoria and White Lotus 1), and she did a commendable job in the movie about Reality Winner. Of course, now that Anything But You has happened (and I love rom coms!), I kind of have to retract my "will watch anything she stars in" position. To me, the Sweeney brand was initially about absolutely impeccable taste, but people who did not appreciate her HBO shows do not realize this.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
12m ago
Monica Lewinsky unambiguously consented, and was over age. (I don't think that excuses Clinton's behaviour - I think supervisor-subordinate sex in the workplace is almost always wrong, and banworthy, and I separately think that thou shalt not commit adultery.) She wasn't the plaintiff and only became the centre of the scandal because she was the woman who retained evidence that could prove Clinton committed perjury. Some of the other women didn't consent.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
13m ago
I agree wholeheartedly. I've always had a very 'dad' sense of humor, and I think I'd make for a good father. I've no shortage of good role models in that regard.
I yearn to find the right person, and have children who would be as proud to be my kids as I am of my own parents. I'm sure when that person is there, these regrets will fade, and when I have my actual flesh and blood to cradle in my arms, no imaginary doppelganger can hurt me again.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
14m ago
As I said, literally just the screenshot, in a context where its understood that youre supposed to "look at this lefty".
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
16m ago
I assumed that if they advertise as a barbershop they might be using straight razors.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
17m ago
Back in the eighties, Benetton (anyone remember them?) were running ads that had nothing to do with clothes, with pictures of some random African kid. I still don't know what the message there was supposed to be.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
18m ago
It's a long story. One I could have penned ages ago, but was in too much pain to do so. The breakup was shortly before I found out that matched into psych, and that particular excitement kept me busy for a good few months.
We just weren't compatible in many ways. While it might be rude to label exes with mental disorders, I am actually a psychiatry trainee, so it does mean something when I do it (and I'm happy to pin several diagnoses on myself). I strongly suspect that she has borderline personality disorder (gets it from her mom).
In fact, I actually went through the diagnostic checklist using her as the example.
BPD women are popular for a reason, men much wiser than me have fallen prey before.
Pros:
-
She was kind in the way of people who cannot bear the existence of preventable suffering in a five-mile radius. Dogs followed her around like she was Saint Francis, except Saint Francis probably wouldn’t have had the cops show up to return the “rescued” dogs to their original owners. She did the illegal thing for benevolent reasons, which is a not-unusual intersection in that Venn diagram, and her worst fault with animals was that she loved them so much she forgot discipline exists, which is how you get a nippy little mutt and also me doing my best to be civil to the nippy little mutt.
-
Intelligent. She studied at a much better med school. Unfortunately, she didn't study when it came to our exams. I was grinding away like mad, but she wanted to tour London, take it easy. We worked at the same hospital, we'd applied together (even HR thought it was very sweet). I had a brutal job in Oncology, but one that paid well. She took ER shifts that were more grueling and somehow paid less, then used the workload as the reason she wasn’t studying, which - look, I told her so many times. I did the annoying, unromantic thing where you say, “There is a path from here to there that requires pressure now for autonomy later.” My repeated warnings that her preparation was insufficient to secure a specialty position were met with dismissal. The outcome is a matter of record: I am now in the UK, and she is not.
-
Hot. Great in bed. Even after our breakup, let's just say I wasn't too great at turning her down when she called me over. My ex employer wouldn't be happy to hear what we did in the doctor's room.
-
She was funny. People underrate how hard it is to find a woman who genuinely laughs at your jokes without that blank “gendered social expectation” delay. Most women are fine, often delightful, but humor variance skews male; sorry, I don’t make the distributions. With her, the jokes landed, and I felt like someone had finally tuned the radio to the right frequency.
Now the downsides, which ended up outweighing all the good:
-
She was very hot-tempered. She loved getting into arguments and then breaking down in tears. I'm a very stoic person, and I hate raising my voice. If we argued, I'd withdraw and give myself time to cool before coming back to make amends. She found this worse than me just fighting back. And boy did we argue. I think in my prior relationship, which lasted 5 years, we argued less over the course of half a decade than I did with her in a few weeks. It was ludicrous, it drove me nuts.
-
She had little tact. On our third date, I had to stop her from picking a fight with a bouncer three times her size, which is a good way to get banned from a club and a better way to get (me) punched. With parents and friends, imagine me as permanent damage-control. People like her shock the air; sometimes this is charming, often this is a thing you apologize for over dessert.
-
She was awful with money. Spent it like water, was always in debt. When we'd come to the UK, we always fought because I wanted to be frugal, and she wanted to spend money she didn't have. She failed that try and went again, borrowing a significant amount of money from me. I gave it gladly, but she continued to live well above her means, and took months after we broke up to finish paying me back.
-
Her politics were god-awful, typical bleeding heart lib stuff. To her credit, she did tolerate my heterodox and witchy opinions. I still want to go the States and hate the fact it's not an option. She had every right to try, but said she'd die before moving there.
-
Unironically watched the Crown and Bridgerton. I'm being unfair here, but I must mention that she'd always get very miffed if I categorically refused to watch along. To her credit, she did make we watch Euphoria, and Fleabag, which I actually enjoyed. I would have been content to have the two of us sit in amiable silence while doing our own things, but she wouldn't have it.
-
She flip-flopped on the idea of kids. I've always been confident that I wanted them, when I'm settled. She'd go from arguing with me over baby names to strong protestations that she'd never have any. She was almost three years older than me, which means fucking around and ignoring the biological clock wasn't the best idea.
My family and friends really didn't like her, though they tolerated her for my sake. They thought she was a gold-digger (not true, at least in my opinion) since I come from a wealthier background. They could see that she was driving me insane, and I can't argue, since I literally went blind for a bit because of the stress.
The highs were stratospheric. The lows scraped magma off the basalt. I'm not built for this, my heart can't take it.
After we split, I had flings, most of them absolutely insane women, some with people I might have stuck with if I’d stayed in India. In Scotland, I had a stable, but extremely boring year-long relationship. I ended it. “Stable but boring” is a phrase you say apologetically, but it names a real tradeoff: if you have a history of chasing fire, you will tell yourself that room temperature is death. I don’t want the fire anymore. I want the happy middle: someone who is fond, easy to return to, a person I am slightly more myself around. Whirlwinds make great anecdotes and bad homes.
I had a manic pixie dream girl; the dream had too much nightmare in it. Some lives feel like literature. Literature is bad for your eyes. Ask me how I know, or don't, because I just laid my still bitter heart bare before you.
(In exchange, please tell me something useful about places to visit in London today. I was eyeing the Camden Fringe, but not sure if it's worth the hassle)
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
18m ago
Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset. This should be as obvious as saying that the four legged furry animal that barks at the mailman, chase tennis balls, that lives in my house, and had two parents who were both dogs, is, in fact, a dog.
He may have been an asset (and probably was), but the controversial claim being made here is more than that. If Epstein was entrapping and blackmailing people like Clinton, Trump and Prince Andrew on behalf of Mossad, then he was a Mossad agent and the people he was blackmailing were assets. And at most intelligence agencies, including the CIA and MI6, Epstein would fail the character and loyalty tests to be recruited as an agent. You don't want someone who might predictably find themselves in a position where they are tempted to blab in exchange for a reduced sentence knowing the things Epstein would need to know to do the job of Mossad blackmailer-in-chief.
That's rough. I wish you good luck.
At least fall isn't far, and your kids are grown out of the most care-intensive ages and (mostly, I suppose?) not into teenage rebellion yet.
Do you have any nearby relatives or friends who might help you out when needed?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
21m ago
Can you speak plainly for the benefit of those few who genuinely don't know what kind of meme you describe there?
AvocadoPanic
25m ago
I spoke to an attorney last week. It was sad and depressing. I completed the documention exercises he recommended before I blocked the the extremist content from the network. This is a non-perfered option.
There are areas for improvement. 2 years ago, she insisted on homeschooling. I'm reenrolling the children for the start of school in the fall. It's challenging, I work full-time, I've not been to the office in several weeks. I may switch to a full remote work plan. 12, 10, 8, 6
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
36m ago
I think a screenshot of this comment without context would do very well as a LibsOfTikTok-style righty meme. Can you guess why?
FtttG
40m ago
I see your point, although my understanding is that the risk of contracting HIV from getting stuck with a contaminated needle is vanishingly low, and the risk of contracting it from a dirty scissor blade presumably lower still.
It's interesting that these people think it's perfectly legitimate to discriminate against prospective sexual partners on the basis of viruses of the mind; actual viruses, on the other hand, are off-limits.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
42m ago
How does it work? I don't understand.
On the off chance this is a serious question:
Are you typing one handed?
Basically? If you use your phone for it it's not very different from actual sexting, at least in my experience.
I haven't tried the back-and-forth messaging format much and mostly generate fanfiction-like narration, if you can tolerate that then frontends like SilliyTavern support Quick Replies, essentially buttons that send a pre-set prompt (which isn't limited to being your actual textual reply, it can be a meta/OOC instruction). Beyond regenning the response to fish for a porn clip response that Hits Just Right, ST can also continue the chat without your input (as if you sent an empty message), or even straight up "impersonate" you by drawing on the chat history and the current contents of your message box to generate a message from {{user}}'s PoV and write in your stead, though IME that results in cringe most of the time so I don't use it.
Personally the uh, multitasking was never much of an issue for me, there's more than enough downtime between responses/regens while the LLM generates its reply.
the moment it challenges me, I’m reminded I could tweak the code to make it agree - and that’s when the self-loathing creeps in, because it’s not just about the illusion breaking; it’s knowing I’m the one pulling the strings.
True, with great power comes great disappointment. I do not miss the filtered days of character.ai, but I can't deny that with gaining the ability to change prompts/character definitions at will and freely fuck with the LLM's "perception" in the absence of an external filter, something has been lost. Can't tickle yourself and all that, I suppose.
Blueberry
43m ago
My bet for the next corporate play: American Eagle is advertising with an attractive Black (my guess is a men to avoid direct comparisons between two women) and another cheesy word play (“black is beautiful” or something like that). That won’t go as viral though as there is not much controversy left.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
44m ago
This is a great post.
I think a good way of summing up the social dynamics @SSCReader is talking about is that the Red and Blue tribes have different theories of American greatness. The Red Tribe believes that the secular source of American greatness is the natural resource wealth (including, possibly even especially, the agricultural land) of the American continent. (Reds often say, and the ones who say it appear to genuinely believe, that the true source of greatness is America's special relationship with Divine Providence, but the way providence works itself in practice is that God gave Americans a continent with huge natural resource wealth). The Blue Tribe believes that the source of American greatness is Yankee ingenuity and (for centrist and right-wing Blues) the capitalist institutions which maximise the economic value of it.
In many ways the cleanest ways this shows up is in the Europoor discourse. Most of the people mocking the Europoors are Red, and the mockery therefore focusses on the destructive stupidity of European (mostly German) energy policy, and includes a lot of factually dubious insinuations that Europeans are not going to be able to keep the lights on. But when a Blue like Noah Smith mocks the Europoors, he focusses on the failure of Europe to build a trillion dollar tech company.
This model is, for me, the best way of explaining Trumpian economic policy. Part of the reason why the Red Tribe loses in American politics is that the Blue theory of American greatness is mostly correct - it really is the case that as of 2025 the main source of American wealth and one of the main sources of American geopolitical leverage is software-driven innovation, and that the place where it happens is the Bluest place in America (coastal California and greater Seattle). Trump wants to change this by changing the economic rules, such that the Red theory becomes correct. At the level of vibes, the memes coming out of the White House in support of a new masculine, blue-collar vision of American prosperity don't show men working on assembly lines (understandable - there is a whiff of pink-collarness to assembly line work and non-union assembly line work really is pink-collar in most times and places) or even men doing traditional heavy industry (like WPA/Nazi/Soviet propaganda posters of manly men with hammers) - they show miners and farmers. At the level of policy, if the UK/EU/Japan trade deals actually happen roughly as announced, then the US will have higher tariffs on steel than on car parts and higher tariffs on car parts than on finished cars - the exact opposite of what you would do if you were encouraging US manufacturing. But the other side of the coin is that all three deals very explicitly promote US natural resource exports - as did the trade deals Trump did in his first term.
The corollary is that MAGA doesn't need to fix academic Blueness. If you believe that the source of American greatness is national resource wealth, then burning down the universities won't break America. And MAGA in the country want Trump to just burn Harvard down yesterday, not carry on faffing about trying to reform it.
This also explains why remote workers moving out to rural areas doesn't help - the people who rise to the top in that world are still doing so based on Yankee ingenuity, and so Blue will be higher status than Red. The sales of North Face jackets and demographics of National Park guests make clear that the Blues aren't actually anti-rural or anti-outdoor. A NYC banker doesn't stop being Blue because his wife keeps a horse at their upstate vacation home, and remote work is no different.
The obvious exception to this model is MAGA embrace of cryptocurrency. I think this is an exception which proves the rule - I am comfortable arguing that MAGA embrace of cryptocurrency is top-down in the way that MAGA embrace of coal mining is bottom-up. It also appeals to the Kulak_Revolt type of Red Triber who has given up and thinks watching the world burn is more practical than a return to a masculine blue-collar model of economic prosperity.
Were I ever to embrace Christianity, it would be Lewis' libertarian version:
"One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons—marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema [or porn??]; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning."
Lewis, C. S.. Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics) (pp. 78-79). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Such a contrast with the sects of which Handmaid's Tale is an exaggerated version.
One can make a case, however, from Screwtape Letters that Lewis would have thought video games inspired by Satan!
"Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our workmanship. If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity of snowdrops this January, sunrise this morning, plum pudding this Christmas. Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer. Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up. This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids."
Lewis, C. S.. The Screwtape Letters (pp. 136-137). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
"He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one."
... maybe through the vicarious bloodlust of GTA or Postal, they finally succeeded??
Lewis, C. S.. The Screwtape Letters (p. 44). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
57m ago
No phobia against HIV-positive people? In an establisment handling sharp objects that touches multiple people per day? Well, at least they had the decency to tell on themselves.
RococoBasilica
Actually a Quality Retribution
59m ago
Our lives are a series of branching paths. Every major decision: career, relationship, location - creates a ghost-self who took the other route. For most of human history, that ghost-self remained an indistinct specter. You could wonder, vaguely, what life would have been like if you’d become a doctor, but you couldn’t see it.
To offer some sugar as an antidote to Southkraut's salt: Once you do have a child, the lure of hypothetical other worlds entirely evaporates. All sad words of tongue and pen still try to assault your mind every once in a while, but their siren song sounds cacophonic simply because all of these other worlds now have a fatal flaw that renders them despicable: Your actual child isn't in them. And just as I would let this actual world burn to save my actual child, so would I sacrifice the multiverse for it.
JTarrou
1hr ago
They do not currently have the cultural capital to ruin lives en masse.
The loss of privilege feels a lot like oppression.
2rafa
1hr ago
Maybe (I saw you posted this after my last comment), but we sometimes know ourselves less well than we think, are good at talking ourselves out of happiness.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Well, getting your throat cut by a woke barber is one way to go out, for sure. Low probability of it happening, of course, it's only a handful who actually try to shoot to ICE agents after all, but consider: You'd probably make it to the Darwin awards, would be the talk of the town on the internet, and give a hell of an ego boost to the then-imprisoned barber.
Or, more realistically, you'd end up with half a haircut and the police escorting you out eventually.
Under classical morality, Clinton is a cad and a rake and Lewinsky is a slut and a home-wrecker.
Under classical morality, most sex is illicit, and most illicit sex has two perpetrators - rape stricto sensu is the rare case where one partner is wholly innocent because she didn't consent, not something that is only illicit because of the lack of consent.
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