domain:anarchonomicon.substack.com
zeke5123a
2m ago
It is gaining in popularity in Germany. Also, the CFL does exist. It is also hard to overstate the popularity of football in the States.
2D3D
6m ago
If your intention is to experience the more salacious nighttime entertainments in Malaysia/Singapore, you have to set aside your expectation of a Soi Cowboy style bargirls spilling into the sidewalk, and know how to navigate the red light scene. The influences of East Asian courtesan style entertainments permeate throughout everywhere the Chinese/Korean/Japanese diaspora has a presence, and the manifestations especially in Singapore are truly unfindable anywhere else.
There are a few extremely interesting nightlife entertainment options that are not commonly experienced by westerners, so I think it is worth sharing the mechanics of Southeast Asian seediness with the fine denizens of themotte. The experiences described below are rated on three variables: Engagement, Play, Damage. Engagement is how much of a conversation/activity you can have with the girl, like if you're on a date. Includes conversation, flirting, playing bar games, having the girl pour your drinks or sing or dance for you. Basically the geisha/courtesan experience. Low engagement is basically when the girl is a meat mannequin, high engagement is the full GirlFriend Experience, whereby it is what loveless guys imagine: a girl waits hand on foot to compliment him for how awesome he is and sympathize with every slight he complains about. Play refers to the amount of physical hanky panky allowed. Low play is sitting side by side, stroking of extremities and handholding (how lewd), medium play is light fondling and sitting on laps, and high play is full on snogging and groping, pretty much first base. Full play is third base and above, in the venue so be prepared for some public action if you're in a full play joint with friends. Damage refers to price. Low is around 50/hour, and at the higher end you are looking at 600/h, not including additional expenditures you may incur of your 'own' volition. More on that at the end
BROTHELS The most obvious is the literal Red Light Brothels. In Geylang they are in the even numbered 'Lorongs', which are on the southern side of the main road and restricted to the earlier numbers (Lor 6, 8, 14, etc). These legal brothels are literally marked with red lanterns, usually with a man lounging outside shooting the shit with other guys. Be warned that there are chinese temples interspersed with the houses that have red trim on the shrines, and these places are not open for business. The working girls here provide purely sexual services, and it is an extremely upfront transaction: you go in, you see the girls in the fishtank (no more glass walls like Thailand, they're just out in the open), and select one to go up to the rooms. If you are unhappy with the selection you can ask the headman for the catalogue, the girls are arranged by nationality so some neighbouring houses may have a girl more suited to your preference. Don't expect too much vibing, these are purely sexual services. If you step into a house without ordering, you won't be harassed or otherwise disturbed, but the headmen will clue others in if there is a tourist just eyeballing, and entry may be refused. No engagement, full play, damage is low to medium depending on the girl.
MASSAGE PARLOURS Because there are plenty of legit parlours, patrons of special service parlours should seek these out at specific locales, particularly Peoples Park and Orchard Towers (the four floors of whores). The obvious sign of the girls will be young women with too much makeup and tight dresses with long fingernails inviting you for a massage. If you find an attractive woman in slacks and a polo t inviting you for a massage, it will be a real one and you would find a very different form of relief following the session. Like the brothels, these massage parlours are fairly straightforward affairs. Select, go in, get it done. Little engagement, pure play. Damage is slightly less than the brothels because these are strictly speaking illegal.
BARGIRLS Hunting grounds for working girls looking for itinerant businessmen unconcerned about fidelity. These are typically filipino bars operating in Lucky Plaza and Circular Road. Though there are plenty of working girls at the various hotels in Orchard Road, these girls typically are prearranged on telegram groups these days and not open for solicitation. The filipino bargirls usually are professional working girls, but often you will find domestic helpers or white/pink collar women having a side gig on weekend nights. These are the establishments where you sit in the bar area with other patrons and have the bargirls chat you up to buy more drinks. High engagement, but very little play on station. Damage on site is medium because these girls are great at convincing you to huy many many drinks to keep them by your side
INDIAN DANCE BARS These are a rather unique feature catering to professional NRIs who have been excluded from other venues due to complaints from working girls about dealing with Indians. The patrons sit on couches surrounding dance platforms, and girls come in to dance to Bollywood hits. Depending on how well you tip the girl may come sit with you and engage in conversation, but there are many platforms and other patrons. Girls stay at each platform for one song before moving to another, averaging 4 songs per shift before retiring for another set of girls to dance and the first batch either rests or sits with a high tippet. The girls are largely hindi speakers because of the makeup of NRIs with the cash to burn - tamils in Singapore and KL can take advantage of local tamil connections to indulge in other entertainments otherwise barred. Due to this specific market dynamic, the demand is surprisingly inelastic and girls can choose to ignore a man even if he tips aggressively. Between the heavies on station and aggressive police presence nearby (at least for Singapore), unruly patrons dont get to stay unruly for long, so the girls make bank. Low to medium engagement, very low to medium play, surprisingly high damage - the tips stack up quick.
KTV This is where things get interesting. Ignore the family friendly venues where you drunkenly belt out hits from your teenage years with your friends for that sweet hit of nostalgia to fend off the advancing years. These KTVs are where the girls make every effort to make you feel like a young man again while draining your wallet to make you as poor as a young man as well. These places are everywhere and at the same time invisible. A local is necessary to navigate to find these bars with opaque windows and negotiate with the door bitches, but it is quite the experience. Upon entry you and your buddies are guided to a private room, then the mamasan will bring out a selection of available girls to entertain you. The job of these girls is to get money out of you in one of twp ways: directly paying them for how much fun they provide you, or playing drinking games with you to both drink your booze and make you finish your booze more quickly. And these girls are good at both: the modern courtesan experience, where the girls alternate between singing and dancing for you， to aggressively challenging you to games of liars dice whereby the losers drink, to sitting on your lap and stroking your hair while you sob about why your boss isn't giving you your promotion and topping up your cups every few minutes. Then at the right moment they will put your hand on an appropriate body part and let you start feeling like you're going somewhere... only for the notorious butterfly system to kick in. See, these girls aren't exclusive to you during the 4 hour shift, there may (or may not) be other patrons who also enjoy the charms of your selected girl, and these girls flit between rooms akin to a butterfly. All the better to whet the appetite and loosen the wallet. The girls typically are mandarin speakers, so looking for an english conversant one can be difficult. Thankfully the language of lust is purely physical, and for everything else wechat autotranslate lets them tell you how much money they are demanding of you. Virgin punters are easily taken advantage of, and it is necessary to get the mamasan to reign in her girls. If one has no favourites, it is best to get the mamasan to determine payouts, otherwise the girls are aggressive double dippers and will try to convince you to pay them separately from the mamasans. As a fun note, the snacks in these establishments always feature the infamous fruit platters, a shitty collection of cheap cut local fruits that somehow go for fifty to a hundred bucks a pop. Baffling till you realize this is how entertainment budgets allow for this type of expense to be charged to the company - the fruit platters are the mamasans take for her to distribute. Engagement is medium to very high (depending on your own level of game), play is medium to high, and damage is medium to high, or even Catastrophic - more on that later
THAI DISCO/SIAM DIU This is the cleanest yet most damaging sleazy establishment. Like an Indian dance club, the girls are on a stage to sing and dance before the tips determine which patron ends up winning their affection for the (partial?) shift. Unlike the Indian dance clubs, where girls rapidly rotate between the small platforms to get each set of couches to tip aggressively, these girls on stage get bidded on like prize horses. And like prize horses, bidding gets crazy. A runner collects money from bidding patrons who signify the amount they are paying and the pin number of the girl they are interested in. During the 'award ceremony' after the sets, the girls get garlands or sashes draped across them like mardi gras beads, signifying how much they are earning. Each garland starts at 50 bucks, up to 25k. Did you notice I said earning, even though I said bidding earlier? Thats because this isn't an auction, its a bet. The amount a punter puts into the pot only lets the girl know he's in play, but the winner is whoever tilts the hardest. When the alcohol flows and a popular girl flits between two or three high rollers in a shift, things can go nuts towards the end. I've seen bidding wars have a girl get competing bids of 10 12 15 20 25 30k in a single session, with the runners frantically rushing back and forth to scan QR payment codes and drape increasingly lavish flower garlands on the girls. All this just for the girl to sit with you and chat you up, mainly so you can rub it in another mans face that you've been better at draining your companies bank account than he is. No play on site, but you are guaranteed to bring her home for the night if the damage exceeds 10k (yes the threshold is that high). Engagement is low to medium, play is low, damage is a binary of low or catastrophic. Thai discos are magic money draining pits. Magic money draining however happens not only at the venues themselves, for many girls - especially the thais- fancy themselves shamans. By the magic of a sob story and promises of exclusivity, a girl who obtains your phone number will cast these spells incessantly to drain you of all your funds and any lines of credit as well. Many men have fallen under the sway of these girls, and a single night of 300 can be the gateway for tens to hundreds of thousands to disappear into an abyss.
A circumspect man with his head screwed on tight will be able to experience exotic entertainments without losing everything, but everything can be lost if the right spell lands.
Singapore has a rather staid reputation, deservedly earned relative to the insanity one can experience in Bangkok, Pattaya or Batam. Yet the febrile sleazy scene, guarded by conscript police and a political establishment unbeholden to moral grandstanding has allowed an extremely robust commercial sex sector to thrive, without the stain of organized gangs and it's consequent violence blighting the land.
Oh and for other touristy crap, just stick to the good hawkers near train stations. Maxwell, Amoy, Old Airport Road and Chinatown Complex are the top tier hawkers and the internet recommendations are generally quite accurate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10m ago
I always deeply resented the sort of "wisdom" you're describing, and that hasn't really changed. I resent the fact that our political establishment has insulated itself from any form of legal accountability, and one of the reasons I continue to support Trump is because I want the contrast as stark as possible. Prior to Trump, one could claim that the insulation from legal consequences was at least impartial, because both sides enjoyed it. Now we see that both sides enjoyed it because they were part of the establishment, not because the system was actually impartial. The common knowledge is useful for coordinating defiance to that establishment.
Bleep
14m ago
government admission that evidence has been tampered with post seizure is a serious issue; you want to give the government the benefit of the doubt in all places we don't have "actual evidence" their conduct was below the standard we should expect, but that isn't a fair assessment given the history of these prosecutors not only in this case but others
we're talking about an extreme standard to prove criminal guilt; reasonable doubt inhabits these hidden areas of government conduct
at some point, 'oopsies, we made yet another misleading statement totally accidentally and also fought to avoid admitting it for months and also here are better, more innocent explanations for why evidence has been tampered with' should adjust your priors in meaningful ways as opposed to handwaving "reduced credibility" which doesn't actually affect the way you evaluate any of this
for these prosecutors, bridging the gap from this admission to concluding they're likely lying is justifiable
jkf
16m ago
Potential emergency home remedy for angina I guess? Keep your powder dry and your bullet-puller at the ready!
Bleep
27m ago
are you referring to use the cover sheets for the photo?
sure she does, she uses the changing statements of Jay Bratt, knowledge of what cover sheets they brought with them, the uniform nature of their appearance in the photo attached with a paperclip, the rolling trickle truth of prosecutors being forced to admit at the very least they made misleading statements about various pieces of critical evidence in the case, and the fact that no classified cover sheets were logged as "recovered" in the container
you can claim the DOJ team has not explicitly written "yes, we placed these cover sheets saying 'up to human intel' on the documents and took a picture of them," but you cannot claim she doesn't justify her assertion
laxam
42m ago
Yes. Multiple times in our history, our politics has chosen the openness of the electoral system over strict adherence to the law.
This kind of prosecutorial discretion used to be considered 'wisdom', the kind of compromise that keeps the system going at the expense of absolute legalism.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
48m ago
Maybe. @ZorbaTHut handles feature requests.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
50m ago
I think you hit the nail on the head. It really was a great time for video games, and while there are still good games coming out it's not the peak that it was then.
cjet79
55m ago
I've played most of the total war games. The later entries in the series I've enjoyed less. Maybe I should spin up one of the old ones.
Felagund
57m ago
Sure, debt's just a human construct. But it's one that we currently depend on heavily in order to do things. Like, yeah, we can just not pay people (ignoring the constitution for a second), but then we'll have a harder time raising enough money to do things, because they won't trust the US's promises. (And yes, you can do things without money, but money's kind of how our whole economic system runs, and it's hard to have efficient alternatives.)
If we have the raw resources and the might to decide how they get divvied up, the rest is just semantics.
To be clear, you're recommending something like a tribute system, since you've mentioned the military? Or is this just divvying up domestic goods? The US is a net importer, I believe. (And incentivizing new innovation and production is an important role of an economic system beyond just dividing existing goods.)
ffrreerree
1hr ago
What are the current factions of online American leftism? I stumbled on Red Scare's podcast with Steve Sailer. I was aware of antiwoke dirtbag leftism but it was still somewhat interesting to see the audience mostly giving this an eyeroll, certainly not delighted by this guest but also certainly not calling for a cancellation. They seem to reserve their wrath for Israel, capitalism, and fat people. Where does this subreddit fit in in the political landscape?
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
The strength of Eurovision is that you can know absolutely nothing about it, watch it, and still be thoroughly entertained. Eurovision has such wide appeal that people far outside Europe tune into it and watch it, sometimes fanatically.
American football is impenetrable to anyone who isn't already deep within it. American football even by football standards is an unusually unintuitive game. It doesn't spread beyond America, at all, and even in America there are wide swathes of the population who don't understand it.
practical_romantic
1hr ago
Spot on. Plus they had a vibe that you do not see now. Games were not as formulaic as they are today. Wolfenstein, Doom, Deus ex, Gohtic 2, the GTA franchise, they all seem fresh. Even the assassins creed was great till ac brotherhood. I do not like new games at all. Too woke and predatory with zero creativity.
cjet79
1hr ago
I've played total war 3k a few times, pretty early on. Meant to come back around to it after it got more fleshed out, and then ya CA abandoned it.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1hr ago
I finished the latest installment of Sun Eater the other day.
Unlike a certain infamous fat garden gnome, Ruocchio is a fruitful writer - he puts out a book every 1.5 years or so, with the conclusion of the series planned for next year. I might as well shill it and share some of my impressions here, he well deserves it.
1.Sun Eater is a space opera about a traitor and genocidal murderer to some, hero of mankind to others. Told from his own perspective, as a memoir that he writes at the dusk of his life. From the first pages, Dune and Warhammer influences become apparent, but I quickly forgot about this: don't let anyone say that Ruocchio doesn't have his own creative voice.
2.The quality of writing—the way the books are written word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence—is where Ruocchio really shines, and that's fortunate, since I consider this to be the backbone of any work of fiction. In this regard, Ruocchio mogs...wait, the spell checker is upset with me for using zoomer dialect...I meant to say dramatically outperforms most authors I've ever read, and the vast majority of modern writers overall. He will make you open a dictionary a few times if you want to understand some sentences fully, but the prose is by no means overly ornate. It's elegant, memorable, and quite detached from modern conversational English, fittingly for something presented as the writing of a far-future aristocrat. Maybe there's something to say in favor of the more down-to-earth style most common in modern prose, but my guess is that most other writers don't write as Ruocchio simply because they lack the wits and sufficient command of their language.
3.I find evil/irreconcilably antagonistic aliens to be a much more interesting direction to take than the Star Trek approach, or, god forbid, "humans are the real evil". It's not just that it's terribly overdone and tediously misanthropic in practice, hostile aliens seem inherently more plausible. Finding common ground with beings that share our own nature is challenging enough. Competition for resources might not be the most plausible cause for conflict when interstellar civilizations are concerned, but there are any number of others to explore.
4.I enjoy speculations on alien cultures and theology, and here Ruocchio doesn't disappoint either. We humans can observe our flaws and some of the worst animal inclinations in ourselves easily enough.
The Cielcin can as well, and as their condition is more degraded and repulsive, even given their habituation to it, they draw more radical conclusions than most human religions. They remind me of Gnostics, believing this universe to be corrupted and seeking release from it. They also resemble Muslims in their rejection of the visual arts.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
Just this week I was joking that it looked like a forbidden snack.
I've got some old .303 British cartridges in the safe, but I will not be testing this.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
The New York courts get to decide the law. They're not impartial. Any appeals would have to go all the way through the New York system (with Trump potentially imprisoned the whole time) before reaching the Supreme Court. Which would most probably simply reject any appeal on the grounds that there is no substantial Federal question.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
Second the Three Kingdoms recommendation for historical TW. @cjet79 mentioned he doesn't like the powerful lords and heroes in Warhammer, which 3K does have kinda... but you can play in "records mode" which is more realistic. And I think that 3K just plain nails the gameplay more than any other game, even Warhammer. The campaign layer is the best in the series, with the diplomacy/espionage/family relationship systems. And the battles feel great too. The terrain can be interacted with (like you can set forests on fire), the cavalry feels super satisfying to use, and the leader duels are super cool and thematic.
I think it's a shame that CA dropped 3K like a hot potato, because it's some of their best work by far.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
2hr ago
Russia is currently trying to open another front by crossing the border between Belgorod and Harjkov. It's something I've been expecting for a while: why expend your material advantage on pushing through entrenched Ukrainian defenses in the Donbass when you can use it elsewhere? But the direction of the attack left me puzzled. You can't take over a major city with 50k men, especially one that is an important military hub for the existing frontline: that's not enough neither for a frontal assault nor for an encirclement. Getting closer so that you can reach it with your tube artillery isn't a valid military reason either, unless you want to just punish the locals for self-identifying as Ukrainians. I would've tried to threaten Sumy or even the Konotop-Bahmach-Baturin triangle.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Well yes, college ball is too much like the pros these days. Need something lighthearted and trashy, for to let the chainsmoking wives of America fly their regional prejudices proudly over the most trivial excuses.
2rafa
2hr ago
Could you not just manipulate vote totals so they go +20 when they fall too far below 0.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
2hr ago
Speaking of magical thinking. To quote Who's Line is it Anyway? "Everything's made up and the points don't matter". Debt is just a human construct. When you see people wax on about there being 200 trillion in ghost credit default swaps ready to doom the world economy when a butterfly in China's housing market flaps its wings it is hard not to just dismiss it all out of hand. MMT is, I think, a result of some institutions evolving to understand and use this concept. If we have the raw resources and the might to decide how they get divvied up, the rest is just semantics.
The transfer system is garbage. Really undermines college sports.
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