domain:worksinprogress.co
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
3m ago
Regarding Uchikoshi works, would you recommend I check it out if I vastly preferred 999/Zero Escape over Danganronpa? It doesn't exactly look subtle.
quiet_NaN
4m ago
Just noticing and then going tit-for-tat. There are some occasions where going tit-for-tat is a good move. I do not think that this is one of them.
Take tariffs. Tit-for-tat is fine, because you can make it explicit that your tariffs are retaliatory.
Contrast with terrorism. If members from group A blow up random members from group B, then there are generally responses which are much more efficient to stop these incidents than members from group B starting to blow up random members from group A (unless you are in Somalia or something -- and even then targeting the murderers would likely be strictly preferable). In fact, retaliation would be likely to increase the rate of incidents.
If Whites start to (more) openly discriminate against non-Whites, then of course the wokes will whine how unfair and racist that is and how the government should put its hands on the scales even more.
Now, if a Republican state was saying "as long as the federal government is openly preferring minority-owned businesses, we will openly prefer any businesses which do not qualify for preferential treatment from the feds", that would be a limited tit-for-tat, like retaliatory tariffs. Sure, the wokes would also whine how incredibly racist that is, but a smarter member of the public would recognize that the goal was to have a level playing field, not to establish the fourth Reich.
Realizing if you don't, you have no future.
Rumors of white genocide have been exaggerated, European-origin DNA will be common in the US population for the foreseeable future. For all the efforts to achieve equality of outcomes, the odds of a white person to make it big are still better than for a black person, which is possibly HBD-related. In the contemporary US, Whites might get a -2 racial malus to both sympathy and government handouts, but that does not make White characters unplayable.
Plenty of groups get treated unfairly, and in most cases, making their victimhood a core part of their identity is actively harmful. Women and men, straights and queers, all sorts of ethnicities, can legitimately claim that sometimes, they are treated unfairly. And that sucks and they should push for a better society, but in most cases they should play the game with the cards they have been dealt, rather than embracing their victimhood.
Telling the multi-ethnic society "your game is so rigged against us, we will not play" and going to raise chickens in some rural white-only community, or emigrating to Hungary does not seem an appropriate response to the present level of disadvantage.
07mk
7m ago
I don't think "optimal" needs such an asterisk. That's encoded in the word itself. I think the beauty in the phrase is in how it obscures; it is, on its face, offensive in a way that gets cleared up when the reader or listener slows down and considers what "optimal" actually means and how that challenges the black-and-white thinking that tends to be typical in discussions relating to things that are almost universally considered "good" or "bad."
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10m ago
It's the "doesn't owe you femininity" of the art world.
I kinda think that's just true though! The artwork doesn't owe you anything. In fact, it's a good exercise to ask yourself what you owe to the artwork.
Walter Kaufmann said of Kierkegaard, "there's no other author in world literature who gives me such a strong impression that my soul has been placed on the scales, and found wanting". I think that's what great art should aim to do. There's something fundamentally anxiety-inducing about it.
Of course, if the work serves literally no purpose whatsoever, aesthetic or otherwise, then yes, by definition we would have to question what the point of making it in the first place was. But it's actually quite hard to find a work that meets that criteria; maybe impossible. You know, even something like Joseph Kosuth's "Art as Idea as Idea" where he would print placards with dictionary entries on them and hang them up in an otherwise empty room... even something like this produces an aesthetic experience. It has its own kind of texture, it induces its own kind of perception. It's more subtle but it's there if you can grab onto it. He probably didn't even want that work to induce a "classical" kind of aesthetic experience, and yet it does, because it's inescapable.
Ever notice that, especially evident with how the Western world interacts with other Kodaka VNs, that 'how the presentation will be perceived' is a central element of every ambiguous-gender character
Well, that's a result of the fanbase being largely tumblrites.
I've loved Danganronpa ever since SDR2 first released in English but I never really interacted with the community, so I was surprised to see what a big tumblr/fujo following it had. I suppose it was a result of Danganronpa being relatively "gender neutral", and having some pretty boys like Nagito to latch onto. Although I was even more surprised that the fujo contingent showed up for Hundred Line as well, because that one is much more unabashedly targeted at a straight male audience.
Which one?
I want Hiruko to step on me!
V'ehx is close though, god damn they did her dirty by giving her such a short route...
SSCReader
17m ago
But white people don't have the power to enable it
The people with power are mostly white. Ergo white people DO have that ability. Not necessarily ALL white people (though see below). If a subset of white people is the problem, then that is an intra-racial issue.
As for the other I'll refer to my previous answer. White (all voters really) voters repeatedly show they rank the economy over limiting immigration. So if limiting immigration and spending billions deporting immigrants hurts the economy (and even Trump agrees it will) then they have different goals both of which cannot be fulfilled and repeatedly they show by flip-flopping that they prize an economy that makes them wealthier over really limiting immigration.
If white voters in the US REALLY wanted to limit immigration above all else they do actually have the power to do so. They just have to repeatedly vote for the people who want to do so, even when the economy is bad. Instead of flip-flopping. But there aren't enough people who do that. It isn't that they don't have the power it is that when it comes down to it they have other priorities. That they don't doesn't mean they can't.
Again compare to Brexit. The Tories (or a subset of them) were the ones mainly driving Brexit. Boris gets rewarded by becoming PM, but then as the economy starts to struggle as Brexit headwinds kick in, they vote out the Tories. The lesson politicians correctly take from that is that giving people what they say they want should be secondary to maintaining a strong economy, because a weak economy means they lose power no matter what else they deliver. Short term politicians are driven by short term voters. And most voters are short term.
This isn't a lack of power, it's a lack of cohesion. Too many voters prize economic wellbeing over anything else. Doesn't matter if in opinion polls say they want less immigration with a 90% majority. What matters is how many of them will stick to that in face of a poor economy. If every single white person voted for a Republican every 4 years come rain or shine, recession or boom they have the power to curb immigration. But to date they do not. It ISN'T a power issue at all. They have the power, they just use that power for other things they value more.
I'm also not sure what you mean by advanced racism in the first place, but hopefully my answer here has helped clarify?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19m ago
Once upon a time, having a beard or long hair meant Something, and usually meant being a leftist/liberal. Even by the early 2000s when I was in college, facial hair was still coded as an academic/liberal kind of thing. Outside the university, anyone who had either was definitely left-of-center.
This seems like total nonsense to me. Maybe it’s just because I grew up immersed in the metalhead subculture, but I can think of a massive number of guys with beards and long hair from the 90’s and 00’s who were not remotely associated with academics or leftist politics. The guys from Pantera, for example, were all extremely working-class Southerners, and their politics ranged from generic tits-and-beer centrism (the Abbott brothers) to generic Southern conservatism (Rex Brown) to basically White Nationalism (Phil Anselmo).
I agree that they signaled “not a middle-class guy with a full-time white-collar job”, but past that I don’t think there was much of a political connotation at that time, nor even a couple of decades before that. (Nobody would have mistaken Waylon Jennings for a college professor either.)
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
26m ago
I think the reason that most institutions didn’t actually stand up against it is that most of them had been infected with nihilistic thinking decades ago, maybe centuries. The idea that nothing really mattered and nothing is really true left the traditional institutions with no footing with which to push back. The churches had long been ecumenical institutions that often hold to nothing as essential to Christianity. They’ve fallen to the point that many of them no longer hold things like the Trinity, Solus Christus, or the need for genuine repentance as essential. Fewer hold that the Bible defines sin or the proper way to live. So from the position that nothing is true or matters, how do you assert that something is wrong?
Academics has been nihilistic and post-rational for about the same amount of time. It’s no longer a search for truth, it’s an opinion laundering operation with a bunch of job training programs attached. How does a professor defend against demands from the woke? He can’t point to facts, he’s long since abandoned them. An institution that cannot defend a definition of woman is not going to stand for much of anything.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
29m ago
Oh look, he already deleted his post.
Gaashk
32m ago
The new Sanderson novel, Isles of the Emberdark. It is, of course, not very sophisticated or thoughty, but is a fun little adventure.
PokerPirate
39m ago
I've noticed the growth of a certain type of middle-aged-white-guy-dad who has a shortly trimmed beard and short hair. This is the style that requires the least maintenance (trim beard once/week, cut hair once every 2-3 months), and so seems to be popular amongst the very practical.
2rafa
42m ago
I think among the under-25s beards are less cool again (admittedly, I’m not really tuned in to late zoomer discourse) and have certain “millennial soy” connotations for the more online crowd.
Long hair for men comes in and out every few years, it shifts within generations. The early age of millennial cultural ascension (2006-2010ish) often had the men in quite close cropped hair, see early Glee for examples, or alternately the Justin Bieber / emo origin flop across the eyes. By the early 2010s that had largely been replaced by either the side part or the man-bun, which surely counts as long hair. Even the zoomers have already had multiple male hairstyle trends, including the ‘90s DiCaprio center part, the mullet etc.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
46m ago
Ok, well one of my red flags is "this person judges people maximally uncharitably based on one liners in their profile". So if something filters out those people, that's a great thing for me! The point isn't to get dates, it's to get dates whom you actually like.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
48m ago
Started the Annihilation Score which only supports the conclusion so far. Maybe it will get better, but starting it I found it a bit hard to sympathize with Mo so far. We'll see how it goes.
Annihilation Score was the last one I read. I was not terribly impressed with it, and since I didn't think Rhesus Chart was all that great, either, I saw no reason to keep going.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
49m ago
I can't imagine giving someone dating advice that consists of "list all your fringe interests that won't impress women at best and turn them off at worst and plug away for years with little success in the hopes of attracting your one true love".
Nobody is giving that advice. They are saying "if you like something, it's fine to put it in your profile", because they believe (correctly imo) that those who are put off by that are people you don't want to date anyway. There's no need to obsessively list everything which might be a red flag for someone somewhere, the point is to just be yourself and not worry about those who don't like that.
PokerPirate
52m ago
particularly obnoxious violations (like, saying "obviously we all know that [woke position] is wrong...")
I find OPs framing to be even more obnoxious than your quote because it buries the assumption of agreement until mid-post and never makes it explicit. So I was expecting to read a very different type of post, and was unhappy when I realized what was going on. At least when someone starts off "obviously we all know..." you know where they're coming from and can read/skip accordingly.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
53m ago
But it is adding extra meaning, is my point. "Optimal" does not carry an asterisk that says "given other constraints not mentioned here", you have to add those constraints if you intend to communicate them. As far as beauty goes that's subjective, but IMO obscuring meaning precludes beauty. The point of communication is to be clear first and foremost, and "the optimal amount of fraud is not zero" isn't clear (as proved by the very fact that this discussion is taking place).
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
56m ago
They aren't at all synonymous imo (nor are the two you cited, for that matter). That bit of elision significantly changes the meaning of each variant.
gattsuru
57m ago
His distinction:
But the power to decline to enforce a statute just isn’t the same thing as the dispensing power; the former does nothing to alter the potential liability that those who violate the statute might face; the latter at least purports to render them formally immune.
Seems both threadbare and tremendously wrong, though. The various and length delays to the ACA's individual and employer mandate were not only retrospective, nor accompanied by anyone panicking that they could face future liability had the government changed its mind afterward. The DACA authorizations left specific people immune to civil litigation even well after a different President was elected specifically on the matter of changing the rule, and courts stayed those changes!
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
58m ago
I just don't think that there's a loss here. Profile space is not scarce, so if you're worried that someone will find it a dealbteaker then put it in. It's better to go on zero dates than on one date which goes nowhere.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
58m ago
My perspective on the Irish part of it is that it is part of this movie's attempt to subvert the typical blacksploitation narrative. The villains are white, but vampirism eliminates the racial divide. The Irish are pop culture's whitest victims, so making the vampires Irish redeems their whiteness. Vampirism is not exclusively evil in the film - Stack and Mary are happy at the end.
But it's Irish through a black American lens - no division of North and South - every Irish person is a rebel obsessed with Dublin, always. An ancient vampire could be so old he pre-dates Christianity but also he gets kicked around by the English no matter what - because he's Irish. What @Tanista said about Americans larping as Irish on Saint Patrick's day is on point - that's the version of Irish in the film.
Ah, Kodaka's works, one of my favorite subjects.
But this phrase, that an artist should "express themselves", makes me nervous, increasingly nervous, for reasons that I don't fully understand myself and have never been able to entirely articulate.
That's because the implication, which is "[express themselves] within the service of a greater whole", has been lost. (Can't imagine why that would be more likely to apply to artists from highly conformist cultures at all, or why audiences from those cultures would be more likely to see it that way.)
This is also the problem with 'modern' art, by the way: when the creation of a thing is not only fundamentally selfish (it isn't interested in how you'll view it), but the work itself doesn't serve any other aesthetic purpose. It's the "doesn't owe you femininity" of the art world.
Ever notice that, especially evident with how the Western world interacts with other Kodaka VNs, that 'how the presentation will be perceived' is a central element of every ambiguous-gender character (Chihiro [Danganronpa] and Halara [Rain Code])? Progressive critique falls over itself complaining about what pronoun to use [which is the exact opposite of this], but most of their character arcs again involve that perception and service to a greater whole, where their presentation is merely an incidental/a tool to do other things.
Made in Abyss is also a pretty good example of this (and an even better one if it makes you uncomfortable)- it's extremely offensive to Western sensibilities, and it would be to mine as well if the work was just one big centerfold of a naked limbless Riko- but the fact the author thinks that way is harnessed into a narrative that flat out doesn't work if the main characters either aren't children or have the invincibility child characters usually have.
(This is also something Kodaka does when he can get away with it re: Ultra Despair Girls; Omori does this too in its own way [if you compare the Omoriboy comic, the tissue box serves the same purpose in both works, but in an extremely meta sense in the game compared to the comic]).
I got weirdly obsessed with one of the girls and wanted to waifu her
Which one? The first one, the tomato, the tomboy, the onii-chan, the girlboss, the swordswoman, the one that makes fun of the audience for being Danganronpa-obsessed, Hulkamania Sister!, the ahegao-faced one, the secret one, or the enemy (not that one, the other one)?
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
I can remember a time when males with long hair were… seen poorly, and usually tilted progressive. But beards seem to have been just unfashionable and not particularly lib coded.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
I understand what you're saying, and I'm happy for you, but GP was giving generalized advice. Like I said, most people aren't that selective. I can't imagine giving someone dating advice that consists of "list all your fringe interests that won't impress women at best and turn them off at worst and plug away for years with little success in the hopes of attracting your one true love". It's not what most people are looking for. And while I understand not wanting to get too involved before finding out it's a dealbreaker, it's not like you're going to keep it a secret. Like I said in my post, when you're online dating, you are your profile, and you're going to be your profile until she meets you in person. The profile is to get your foot in the door; after you actually meet, you're a real person, and discussing hobbies and interests is fair game for a first date, and you can tell her whatever you want on that front. And if you think that one date is too much of an investment to be worth the risk, then online dating just isn't for you, period.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
A shifting part of the culture war: beards and long hair.
Once upon a time, having a beard or long hair meant Something, and usually meant being a leftist/liberal. Even by the early 2000s when I was in college, facial hair was still coded as an academic/liberal kind of thing. Outside the university, anyone who had either was definitely left-of-center.
Now, though, if I meet a guy with a beard or long hair, those features tell me very little if not nothing about his political positions. Radical anarchists, normie libs, Joe Rogan listeners, fervent MAGA types, and just about every other political type could have a beard or long hair (the major exception being devout Mormons). Clothing, tattoos, general level of fitness, and other features are much better indicators now than facial/long hair. The mustache/goatee combo might be slightly right-coded because it’s popular with certain types of boomers and early Xers, but even that’s a weak indicator.
I suspect the change was in full swing by 2010 since Duck Dynasty started airing in 2012. All of the major male characters have long, shaggy beards, and most have long hair as well. This article from 2015 notes the upsurge of beards among the right. That means we’re at least 10 years into the change.
As big as the change has been among regular people, though, perhaps the even bigger change is politicians. I don’t remember any major politicians having facial hair prior to 2018ish. I remember Al Gore growing a beard, but that was only after he was VP.
JD Vance has a beard, and is the first Pres or VP to have facial hair since VP Charles Curtis (Hoover’s VP), who had a mustache. Vance had a beard when he ran for U.S. Senate in 2022, Ted Cruz has grown a beard since being a senator (but was clean-shaven when he initially ran for senate), and Ruben Gallego (D) of Arizona ran for U.S. Senate in 2024 with a beard.
Article about Vance’s beard
I think this comment probably sums it up:
“There’s not a single millennial out there who would find the question of whether a politician has facial hair to be relevant,” said Republican consultant Brad Todd. Is the stigma against beards subsiding? “I think it’s completely gone,” he said, “due in large part to the Silent Generation moving out of politics.”
With the WW2 veteran generation gone and the Silents almost gone from politics, their aversion to facial hair appears to have gone with them.
This article on politicians and beards has this interesting comment considering the former association of beards with leftism:
”The right has been leading in the beard movement recently, and I think the left has been trying to play catch-up,” [Professor Oldstone-Moore] added.
Obligatory link to “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. (Isolated bassist camera for those who want to see Entwistle's master class in playing)
The parting on the left
Is now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight
Speaking only for myself, I voted Reform because of the Boriswave and because Sunak clearly signalled he didn’t plan to do anything about it. It had nothing to do with the economy.
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