5434a
2d ago
Prompted by the discussion about aphantasia I started in on The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks.
5434a
3d ago
Can somebody classpill me on contraception? Class considerations on this are utterly foreign to me beyond "back street abortions with makeshift implements and voodoo herbs = desperate and/or ignorant" and "rhythm method = Catholic".
5434a
3d ago
Can you give us some more details about what the set and setting was for the session?
I've seen it used to refer to both a hot Chad whose romantic interest in women extends no further than the tip of his dick and to a pretty boy that a woman keeps hooked on simping for her by using him for her sexual gratification (the female equivalent of a slampig - I haven't watched it but I think the toyboy fantasy film Babygirl with Nicole Kidman probably depicts something like this model), and also to any unappealing men who are more motivated to pursue sex than sitting at home watching porn and complaining online about Stacies.
Is he a boy and is fucking any significant part of the motivation for his actions? He's a fuckboy.
Reading that article though it reads like an attempt to build a stick for hitting men... but I don't see many men who would be particularly offended by the label. Low stakes defensive maybe, but not sincerely offended. What I can see being offensive is calling another woman's boyfriend a fuckboy. In that sense perhaps the fuckboy label is a tool for women to reassert the sort of social policing they're so adept at and that some here in this forum say could alleviate the ills of current day dating culture. Can you imagine if someone told a woman that the new guy she's excited to be dating is a fuckboy? It's a hit at her value - she's giving him her value and not getting compensated (she does it free!). Call a man a fuckboy and internally he'll probably shrug and think DM;HS. It's labelling him as someone who got what he wanted. Beats being an incel or a simp. Tell a woman her bf is a fuckboy and in short order he'll be put on notice that it's time to man up or he won't be getting what he wants any more. You don't need to tell her directly, posting it to the audience of young women reading a fashion blog will probably suffice to start the thought process.
5434a
7d ago
Rulers rule by codifying their rules into written laws out of a pragmatism that allows them to rule more effectively.
This thread smells of "there's a law I disagree with, therefore all law is illegitimate".
5434a
9d ago
Picked up Cyrano de Bergerac without realising it was a play instead of a novel. Makes quick reading though.
5434a
13d ago
a convincing rationalist answer for why people should quit or not use destructive drugs?
Tautologicallly because they're destructive, but ulimately because the thing they destroy is the benefits offered by the drug. Users end up dependent on drugs simply to return to where they began.
5434a
14d ago
My experience isn’t typical
No one's is. I think the intercontinental, intergenerational (intersectional? a dirty word around here) scale of the internet makes comparisons nearly useless while also allowing almost any reasonably credible explanation to find enough support to pass as "true".
"You could meet someone at work" say 1000 people who work at bars in LA.
"I can't meet anyone at work" say 1000 guys who work in provincial warehouses.
"You can meet people at parties" say 1000 people who like to go clubbing in NY.
"I don't go to parties" say 1000 guys who like programming.
"You can meet people through friends and family, or at church" say 1000 Mormons in SLC.
"I was raised by 4chan and social workers after my dad abandoned my alcoholic mum and the only people who go to church are old or weird" say 1000 guys from the underclass.
"You can meet young, fun, attractive women online" say 1000 20somethings who live across the street from a middle tier university.
"Apps are full of divorcees and single mums" say 1000 40somethings who live in low turnover commuter towns.
Then a statistician comes along, shoves them all into one box and finds that 50% of people find someone at work/at parties/at church/online/etc.
It's like the blind men and the elephant. They're all true but without the full context people are talking past each other. This thread itself is a microcosm of this phenomenon.
On the other hand the internet is the only place where we can discuss this at length because workmates, party goers, friends, family, parishioners and statisticians alike are neither keen nor useful for sitting around IRL bemoaning one's dating woes at length, and maybe even less for proclaiming one's dating success. "Hello boss/barkeep/buddy/cousin/sir/professor, care to share some fully generalisable insight into why some people are struggling with dating? Not me though, I'm swimming in pussy. High five!"
You can ask out basically any single member of the opposite sex
Choose ten separate and unaccompanied strangers and then actively confirm which ones aren't single. As a trans woman you might have an intuition how different your approach and the results would be asking as a man or as a woman.
5434a
16d ago
Just finished my first read.
I enjoyed it a lot, and a lot more than I was expecting. I went in pretty much blind other than having read Scott's blog, so I wasn't expecting so much humour, and the rationalist/utilitarian references that I assumed would be present were thankfully reasonably scarce and understated. I think my favourite part was Dylan Alvarez's entrance and the idea of placebomancy.
I'm not much of a fantasy reader but this one pulled in a lot of the parts I can enjoy (a bit of Ted Chiang, a bit of Douglas Adams, a bit of Terry Pratchett) and left out almost all the parts that totally put me off fantasy writing (excessive and self-indulgent world building and lore). The last fantasy book I read was the Northern Lights trilogy which was trope heavy YA shite.
My only grumble was that after such a good book the ending was only "good enough", but good enough is good enough.
5434a
20d ago
Increased horniness and its attendant behaviours. Past a certain point it will just end in a nocturnal emission.
In the words of Andrew Dice Clay: "What are you saving it for?! It'll grow back".
5434a
20d ago
70-80. The cars I've driven weren't made to consistently go faster than ~65 meaning the engine has to run at higher than normal revs and they get increasingly noisy and uncomfortable at higher speeds for relatively little time saved.
5434a
22d ago
I've got to say I find your all-encompassing scepticism towards Reddit a smidgen excessive - they were only saying the same thing that you said here in response to posts that echo what you've heard people say to your face, only at scale.
Practically everyone here is or was a Redditor of relatively long standing. Reddit is not a high quality forum populated exclusively by intelligent and thoughtful people, but it's not completely devoid of them either. Eternal September began a long time ago.
5434a
22d ago
you don't hear about non-tech companies spending any substantial sums to use it. If they were to start charging a non-trivial amount for it, no one would pay, outside of a few edge cases
I don't see any mention of figures but there was the first regulatory approval of an AI-based law firm in England last month. https://www.sra.org.uk/sra/news/press/garfield-ai-authorised/
Law, medicine and finance are large service industries with notoriously steep fees that would gladly peel off a few billion to become more productive and competitive if they were allowed to. People might be slow to pay for image slop and virtual waifus but they'll happily pay up for things that matter. Will it scale to offset the expense of running the AI server farms? I don't know.
5434a
22d ago
I was thinking this might simply be an artifact of how the question had been asked
This point has been gone over and over on Reddit and always circles back to some people admitting that no, they really don't have visual imagination.
5434a
28d ago
Any number of real medical conditions don't prove that Munchausen Syndrome isn't also real.
There's always been a small number of LGB and what we nowadays call T. The social sanctions on these people used to be very strong. Despite those sanctions gay men, for example, would still go cruising public toilets looking for strangers to have sex with. They might get arrested, or they might get their teeth punched out, but that didn't stop them. I think we can credit them with sincerity. Likewise there were men who went into the theatre scene where many eccentricities were tolerated and entertained and given a route for expression, eccentricities like pretending you're a woman on stage and then not fully relinquishing the role off stage. Outside of the theatre scene such a man might push and test the boundaries by exhibiting feminine behaviours, but the explicit claim of wanting to be a (or indeed already "being" an as-yet-unrealised) woman would have been met with disapprobation.
Skip forward and we have seen practically every major avenue of cultural publishing pumping out the message that being trans is something to be proud of, that being anti-trans is something to be ashamed of, and that the diagnosis of trans amounts to whether you've ever felt like you're not totally 100% sure that you fulfill all the expectations of your normal gender role.
It's late here so in short: sometimes you get things despite the disincentives (I'm here posting an ant-trans message right now!), you can reasonably expect to get much more of something if you remove disincentives and increase the incentives, and if people perceive the incentives are strong enough they will adopt an insincere position to acquire an advantage.
5434a
28d ago
It's a way to trivialise a serious matter and avoid an expectation of treating it seriously. Much of the time it's probably a habit they do subconsciously without considering how it affects the framing.
It's also an implied admission of distance (physical/social/psychological); those weapons are far away and pointed at someone else. Nobody describes a weapon as a toy when it's present and pointed at themself.
5434a
1mo ago
If you mean what we call studded football boots then the only time I can imagine someone wearing them off the pitch would be if they were under 12 and so excited about their amazing new boots that they couldn't wait until football practice.
The main reason nobody wears football boots off the pitch is that the studs are hard and provide zero grip and maximum damage on hard floors. I'd expect you would get an immediate request to change them if you wore them at a gym. It's not a matter of bad taste, visually they're no worse than most trainers, they're just anti-practical. It's like wearing golf spikes at a bowling alley.
5434a
1mo ago
all of the physical changes can also be reversed in short order if you desist [...] Can reverse it later by stopping them whenever.
Voice breaking and breast development won't be reversed just to name two. That physical changes aren't reversible is pretty much the entire basis for puberty blockers. If physical changes were reversible the kids with gender misidentification could develop without interference until they were 18, or any age thereafter, then decide they weren't happy with their body and change it without any issue.
I want to add on that this kind of thinking seems to only occur around the trans-osphere. Nobody thinks that the 5'0 weakling with the weak chin can become a gigchad by taking some extra testosterone. At best he'll get bigger muscles (and smaller balls). Women and men around the world want bigger tits and dicks respectively, but the tits require surgery which produces ugly Frankenboobs and we still haven't cracked dick embiggening. But we tell trans identifying people that yep, with a little medicine, a bit of routine surgery and a ctrl-H to switch M and F in their paperwork they can slide into a whole other body. It comes over as somewhere between wishcasting and denial of reality.
5434a
1mo ago
Arrange an event and invite the people you want to get to know better.
The main ingredients are an easily understood distracting activity or two that promotes interaction (cooking/eating, watching sport on a screen, simple table games, whatever suits you and your group), somewhere to rest and an informal atmosphere.
If you don't want to arrange something yourself look for similar low stakes events around your area and ask if they're thinking about going, then if they're open to the idea suggest meeting there.
5434a
1mo ago
Indelible mark that communicates to an exclusive group one's belonging to that group - A tattoo is a natural choice.
Art that wouldn't work if it wasn't on a body - Could have done the same thing without making it permanent.
Fine art that could have been hung in a frame - Just hang it in a frame.
Humour or material that only means something to you - Just stick it to a pin board.
A design that you want people to see you wearing - Just print it on a t-shirt.
Incredibly niche specific purpose, like disguising blueprints so that you can smuggle them into prison or enacting a strategy to deduce who murdered your wife despite persistent amnesia - You're a character in a screenplay.
I think people are getting distracted by considerations of class and aesthetics but I don't think it's purely those factors as you said that you're okay with little nose studs and non-face tattoos. I don't like jewellery, piercings or tattoos but I don't have that visceral reaction you're describing.
Maybe it's along the lines of being bad with the sight of blood. Most people would flinch if they saw someone with a rusty bit of metal sticking through their hand, so seeing an eye-catching and sizeable piece of foreign matter penetrating a facial feature might be triggering the same reaction even if it's intentional and meant to look "good". Or maybe it's a bit more of a body horror thing where you're uncomfortably aware of the chance of the piercing catching on something and causing a horrible accident. I get quite uncomfortable when I watch power tool videos on YouTube where the people are carelessly changing over blades without disconnecting the power. I know it's not going to happen because the video was uploaded without a bait title and thumbnail, but it's unsettling nonetheless.
5434a
1mo ago
How to Build an LFS System
The LFS system will be built by using an already installed Linux distribution
I suppose it's Linux all the way down. Unless...?
Rod Stewart (age 80!) played Glastonbury this weekend with his customary troupe of sexy blonde model-looking backup singers/musicians in tight cocktail dresses. Out of curiosity I looked up who his wife is. A sexy blonde (age 54) who was a lingerie model when they started dating. His ex-wife? A sexy blonde model (for the same lingerie brand nonetheless). His ex-ex-wife? Another sexy blonde model. The ex gfs who were notable enough to make it into Stewart's Wikipedia entry? Sexy blonde models.
I don't care for Rod Stewart's music, I like his fashion sense even less. I'm not qualified to judge how physically attractive he is but at his peak he seems average at best? And yet whether it's by fair means or foul he's continually surrounded himself with sexy blonde models for more than 50 years.
I don't have a point, just adding supporting material. I'm not sure I get your point either. It can't just be "rich men like hot women", poor men do too! Rich men get hot women? Somebody has to, and if the choice is Man A, rich, or Man B, poor, it's understandable why a woman might pick the rich one.
Rich women exist too lest we forget, and according to the prevailing theory they don't care too much about underwear models and want to marry rich(er) men too. But rich men are already rich. What use does Bezos or Stewart have for a woman's riches? Woman A likes him because he's rich, Woman B likes him because he's rich. Looks like he'll turn to the tiebreaker.
And what of Mackenzie Scott's now 2nd ex husband? Where does he fit into this? Neither rich nor a model, but she divorced him after one year of marriage. Just #rebound things?
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