domain:vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com
hydroacetylene
6m ago
This raises the question of- can you name mass-market popculture franchises which are more popular among men?
philosoraptor
18m ago
Read the OP and judge for yourself. Based on my own read of same, I wouldn't go so far as "retarded" but "unexceptional" fails at doing her justice in the other direction.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
41m ago
My mom used to watch Star Wars because she was a Harrison Ford fangirl. When she'd gush, I used to groan and tell her that was TMI. To be fair, he's a handsome man, and I get the appeal.
She also, uncritically, enjoys the second trilogy, which I can't excuse on any level except the second film, which I will defend as decent.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
54m ago
I should have been more specific:
- Her dad is a successful businessman, but not so rich that they have fuck you money.
- Brother is a programmer? I think? Anyway, he lives abroad, works for an MNC and makes big money.
- Mom's a housewife.
From what I could gather, the rest of her family are reasonably well off.
Anyway. Marrying someone below average in intelligence is close to a deal-breaker for me. I strongly value intelligence, at least for the sake of my future kids. I'm the kind of guy who intends to at least try and talk my future spouse into opting for embryo selection for IQ and overall disease risk. Now, if the girl in question was gorgeous and had enough money that we wouldn't have any financial concerns for life, I'd be right on that.
And, to put it bluntly, I genuinely believe I can do better. That might come across as conceited, but I still think it's true! I'm an okay looking guy, who makes decent money, live in the West (which is a big deal for Indian women), a doctor etc. I got into training relatively young, so I'll be a mid-level psychiatrist when I'm in my very early 30s, and hopefully done with career advancement by my mid 30s. As far as I can tell, I'll only get more attractive and appealing with time, my uncle, a senior shrink in his 50s, still has women all over him.
Indian women tend to at least have a kernel of pragmatism. They look at this and are almost always keen. Even right now, if I decided I wanted to get hitched, all it would take is coming home for a few weeks and hitting the apps, or just asking my family to put out feelers on my behalf.
I'm late 20s, and would likely be at my best-by mid 30s. However, I think it's better to be a dad younger than that, raising kids in the West is hard fucking work, and the more energy and health I have in me, the better. As of right now, the plan is to look for someone here (easier said than done the dating market is abysmal), and if that's not successful, consider going the arranged marriage route with semi-seriousness when I'm done with the my current stage of training.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1hr ago
How large does said district have to be? A city block? An apartment complex? Ten thousand people?
In the other reply, @VoxelVexillologist says that it's not well defined, except by litigation and negative examples, but a rough ballpark would be something I'm interested to know.
No_one
1hr ago
I've recently found X-Com Files a so-called 'megamod' for OpenXcom - a fan re-implementation & polishing of one of the first squad based tactical turn based games ever. Ufo: Enemy Unknown, which came out in 1993, back when 1999 was still in the future and was re-made into a slick but profoundly soulless if somewhat competently made corporate product lately.
Better, I've found 'Brutal OpenXcom' which is a fork of OpenXcom with a completely re-written and pretty good AI that doesn't cheat (unlike original) and is massively challenging because it's basically fine and competent and can (if the mod makers were feeling nasty) use the same brutal tactics of lobbing satchel charges 15 m ahead where it suspects the enemy is. Luckily, it's not that common at the start that the enemy has large amounts of explosives on hand. O
Very comfy game. The setting is sort of like X-Files: all the major conspiracies are true. Name a major one , probably true in the setting. You have been appointed to investigate 'weird shit' on behalf of one of the more pro-social ones. Of course you don't know anything about that yet bc you're just some sort of capable security bureaucrat, and you have a shiny permit from UNSC to go around and black-bag people all around the world whenever sufficiently weird crap is happening. And boy, is there a lot of it!
Anyway the gaming loop of classic Xcom and also this is still the same: build base-> respond to weird shit -> black bag or kill said weird ..beings, loot the corpses->autopsy or interrogate -> find out more about said weird shit -> use this to improve your capability -> SHUT IT DOWN (whatever 'it' is, and 'shut' sometimes involves diplomacy and sometimes travelling to space, other universes and being very kinetic).
Ordinary Xcom had the alien invasion. XCom Files starts out earlier: you don't have jet fighters and intercontinental ranged VTOL troop transports, you have airline tickets and vans. You go around, abduct farmers, tussle with Men in Black (well, you are technically MiB too, but there's the not-so-prosocial ones), tussle with cultists, fight alien tech smuggling organised crime (most lucrative part of the game really) and so on.
It's a long mod, I'd say 6x-10x longer than the original game, and quite difficult, but you can save & load until you figure out how to do things. Or that you need to fight that particular battle another day.
OpenXcom looks dated, but the battles can be ran at increased resolutions which makes it look somewhat better. There's a lot of extra keyboard only controls for convenience which are nicely documented in the controls menu.
Anyway, except for some sometimes uneven and mildly bad writing in a few reports, I really like it and rate it higher than Xenonauts, which looked a bit nicer but felt somewhat soulless. If any game deserves a proper remake, it's the original Xcom. And no, I don't mind the cringe one they made. Proper scale, no stupid constraints on squad size, actual sloped hills. I can't believe it but forests in the old one look less artificial than in the new one, which doesn't have slopes.)
FlailingAce
1hr ago
Thank goodness the government is finally diversifying its investment holdings. Do you know that most of our money is in low yield Treasury bonds? It's no wonder USG is nearly bankrupt. As a stakeholder myself I'm a big fan of this move, though I would still prefer a more balanced portfolio.
No_one
1hr ago
No_one
1hr ago
male who would choose to hire a 51-year-old prostitute also has a severe mental disability that warrants special sentencing treatment.
There are certain groups, and drunk people often are in one of them that don't seem to care much about the age. E.g. will rape old people etc. Any appropriately sized warm hole will do.
functor
1hr ago
Libertarianism as the only right wing ideology is a flawed view of the left/right spectrum. Most right wing governments have historically been involved in the economy and securing essential resources for the nation. Mercantilism, fascism, monarchy etc are completely compatible with a nationalistic economic policy. If anything the liberal factions have often been aligned with leftist groups against nationalists and traditionalists.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Do you have any numbers on that? Like I said, from what I remember the Disney Star Wars merch didn't move at all. Star Trek had the same problem. Was actually enough to cover the movie shortfalls, or were they making money with the legacy merch, or something?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Does this represent a leftist turn in the Republican Party's view on the state's role in the economy, leaning more towards a nationalist democratic socialism?
I mean, Trump representing a turn from free markets was something talked about since his first term. If I remember correctly all the Blues were mocking the very idea, even endorsing Rainbow Capitalism, starting with Clinton's "will breaking banks up stop sexism?".
sohois
2hr ago
Merchandise is the biggest earner for IPs by a huge margin, indeed the value of Star Wars was probably 90% merch sales when they bought it
SkoomaDentist
2hr ago
I don't think spamming a page and half long zero effort AI slop counts as "fun".
4nji2
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
3hr ago
Silly and indicating pop/stereotypical conception of aspects of the world/history. If she understands that her understanding is in fact surface level, sure.
If however she considers herself your equal (given your high minded posting history, I am comfortable putting you at least a step above a person who thinks bodyparts were measured of alice subjects), than you have the worst of both worlds. A chip on her shoulder, but without the receipts to justify it.
Your best bet is to go indie. If you absolutely must attempt traditional publishing, skip the agents and try submitting directly to Baen.
But, seriously, go indie.
Trad publishing would be hard enough if you were willing to play the idpol game, because you'd be competing with all the other people who are also willing to play the idpol game, and trad publishing is a tournament market where a few well-connected authors make it big and everyone else waits tables. But the fact that you are not willing to play makes it hopeless.
You are like a student applying to Harvard on the strength of his SAT and AP scores, unwilling to do extracurriculars or networking because that's not what education should be about, refusing to disclose his URM status and without a legacy family member to vouch for him; it's not going to work.
I see from the sibling comments that you don't want to publish serially. That's not ideal (you are leaving money on the table), but not quite a dealbreaker; while serial publishing on Royal Road or similar supported through Patreon is the usual way to fund a work in progress, once it is finished the standard practice is to delete the free copy and put it on Kindle Unlimited, so you can just jump straight to that.
And I also see that your goal is to make enough money to quit your job. As you correctly note, if an online novel gets popular enough it will eventually be acquired by a trad publisher anyway. If not, it is very unlikely that it would have ever gotten traditionally published in the first place, or that it would have paid back its advance if it had. None of those self-published guys you see at your local's writer groups would have made it big if they had tried trad publishing instead of online publishing; they would have just failed.
If you are serious about this, you have to commit one way or the other. Make a desperate all out effort to get traditionally published, including ticking the idpol boxes, and understand that you will most likely fail anyway. Or put all your effort into being an indie author, including adapting your writing to the serial format, and understand that you will most likely end up as a midlister doing his own marketing and outreach and never making as much money as you are currently making in a well-renumerated job.
And if neither of those are acceptable to you, just quit now, before you waste any more time on this.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4hr ago
I said significant bodily injury, not serious bodily injury. Purposeful infliction of significant bodily injury still is aggravated assault in New Jersey, though a lower degree.
b. Aggravated assault. A person is guilty of aggravated assault if the person:
(1) Attempts to cause serious bodily injury to another, or causes injury purposely or knowingly or under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life recklessly causes such injury.
(7) Attempts to cause significant bodily injury to another or causes significant bodily injury purposely or knowingly or, under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life recklessly causes such significant bodily injury.
Aggravated assault under paragraphs (1) and (6) of subsection b. of this section is a crime of the second degree; and under paragraphs (2), (7), (9), and (10) of subsection b. of this section is a crime of the third degree.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4hr ago
The US government is seeking stakes in Intel, TSMC, and Samsung, among other firms:
Expanding on a plan to receive an equity stake in Intel in exchange for cash grants, a White House official and a person familiar with the situation said Lutnick is exploring how the U.S. can receive equity stakes in exchange for CHIPS Act funding for companies such as Micron, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung. Much of the funding has not yet been dispersed.
Similarly, a few months ago, the Trump administration approved Nippon Steel's acquisition of US Steel contingent on the USG receiving a golden share that gives it considerable supervisory authority:
The golden share gives the US government veto authority over a raft of corporate decisions, from idling plants to cutting production capacity and moving jobs overseas, as previewed in a weekend social media post by the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick.
It's an interesting turn for the traditionally market-oriented, small government party to start making a play for the commanding heights of the economy. The Federal government has a long history of giving out subsidies as a matter of policy, but it generally hasn't tried to assert an actual stake in recipient businesses (it will sometimes assume control of failing institutions, but this is generally an emergency measure rather than a long term plan).
- Does this represent a leftist turn in the Republican Party's view on the state's role in the economy, leaning more towards a nationalist democratic socialism?
- Are there risks of corruption arising in the Trump administration related to government acquisition of major shares in large companies?
- Does this represent an expansion of executive authority? What do we expect USG to do with its stakes in these companies?
- Does this raise potential conflicts of interest, directly aligning the interests of the Federal government with large firms (rather than their merely influential status today)?
lagrangian
4hr ago
I can't magic male role models out of nowhere
Is there some variety of tutor/coach you could hire that suits any (special?) interests of his? This is about as close as it gets to magic, if it's an option financially. College students work pretty cheap. Math, piano, programming, personal trainer?
Rosencrantz2
4hr ago
This is entirely obvious advice but I would read the bios of individual agents on literary agency web pages and then research any who seem promising -- you'll likely be able to find e.g. video of them speaking on panels. When you find a hit, write to them in earnest as if you are someone they'd want to talk to outside of a business transaction. Given the economics of publishing, you are shopping for them not the other way around.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4hr ago
Such a pity that both Bizonacci and Leonardo of biz vanished from the earth. So much was lost when they messed with the captcha rules on /biz/ under admittedly severe pressure from shills, the board is barely a shadow of what it was. Someone made a full Chainlink waifu picker CYOA! Someone made a thematically-appropriate Chainlink RPGmaker game where you wait around for ages. NFTs that were just a printout of the amount of gas you paid to get them. Tasteful monerochan lewds. All these memories lost, like tears in the rain.
TitaniumButterfly
4hr ago
Thanks. For some reason doing that just felt impossibly onerous.
It's just literally straightforwardly true that blue states tend to have bluer congressional delegations compared to popular vote than red states have redder congressional delegations compared to popular vote. Texas had actually come closest in proportionality among big states before redistricting.
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