5434a
4mo ago
Is continually deferring gratification a good idea?
I've got a lot of long, boring tasks to do. I've got some less long and more interesting activities I'd like to pursue.
Doing the boring tasks first will create the time and space to fully pursue the interesting activities free from the shadow of procrastination. Diving straight into the interesting activities would mean trying to squeeze them in around the boring tasks, and even if the boring tasks get ignored completely their incompletion will still have an effect on the fun pursuits. Toy example: you can't easily cook a delicious cake in a messy kitchen, and even if you did it would be more laborious and the result is having to eat the cake in what is now an even messier kitchen.
On the one hand the more I defer the gratification the more appealing the gratification becomes (a delicious cake in a pristine kitchen with friends and family and song and laughter). On the other hand the more I defer the gratification the more all I see is additional messy kitchens to be cleaned.
I suppose the sensible thing to do is to look back, reflect on and take some gratfication from what I've achieved already.
5434a
4mo ago
Cross-dressing as a full-time lifestyle choice is weird, some might say it's Wrong, but both the people participating in it and the people condemning it could at least agree on what it was.
Transgenderism on the other hand, which is at its base essentially the same thing, makes unjustifiably radical epistemic claims.
People-pretending-to-be-the-other-sex became a live wire when those people wilfully abandoned the pretending part. That's the core perversion that engenders such a hostile reaction; the perversion of meaning itself. That those positions came to be enforced by coercion just makes it that much more objectionable.
5434a
5mo ago
Opera music playing in public
Do you mean a subsidised performance in the park or something like that?
The only time I can recall hearing opera music in the public sphere was hearing Nessun Dorma for the football and World In Union for the rugby, or hearing O Sole Mio blasting from ice cream vans since time immemorial.
5434a
5mo ago
Finished Clavell's Gai-Jin. It was fine, enjoyable even, but 1200 pages is a lot.
Will pick up and finish The Asian Saga at some point but ready for a change after doing two in a row.
5434a
5mo ago
might is sufficient unto itself.
But quantity has a quality all its own. And with quantity you need coordination, and then we're back where we are only now it's wolves quoting contract law.
5434a
5mo ago
Unfortunately, as Louise Perry suggests, the feminists took a big swing at the patriarchy and took down the matriarchy instead
I'd like to hear more about this. Could you expand, or share a link?
5434a
5mo ago
Around 2015/16 Bitcoin forked into Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) as a result of different views over how large the blocks in the blockchain should be.
They did this by creating a fork in the blockchain where, after the date of the fork, all the transactions on one chain would be incompatible on the other chain. So if you bought BCH you could transact on the BCH chain, but not on the BTC chain, and vice versa.
However the blockchain prior to the fork is the exact same ledger for both BTC and BCH. So if you had a balance of 1 "coin" on the BTC ledger before the fork then after the fork you'll have a balance of 1 coin on the BTC ledger and a balance of 1 coin on the BCH ledger too, because it references the same transaction history. I hope that makes sense.
The upshot is that if you have a BTC balance from prior to the fork you have the same balance on all the chains that have forked from that same ledger.
Last time I looked, which was quite a while ago, BCH was worth about 1/10 of BTC, but BTC had gone up at least 10x so it's worth following up. You'd need to read up on the proper procedure to do it though because if you send your pre-fork BTC to someone without splitting the BCH out first you're essentially sending them both. I'm about at the limit of my hazy, hungover, half-remembered knowledge at this point.
There were a bunch of other chain splits, from the seemingly more serious minded ones like Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision (BSV) through to the more scammy looking ones that seemed to be just riding the brand name through the crypto hype wave, like Bitcoin Diamond (current value 7 cents). I think BSV forked from BCH, so the same principle applies there.
TLDR It's complicated and you should do some thorough research on before moving your coins. Many of the forked chains are practically worthless but a few of them, while worth less than BTC, are still worth a good bit of money on account of how much the whole market has risen since the date of the fork.
Here's an old article about one of the forks that explains it better and might offer some terms to search https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/beginners-guide-surviving-coin-split. Looks like searching "Bitcoin split" tends to return results about Bitcoin's regular mining reward halving which is totally different. Hope that helps you get started, my information is hugely incomplete and possibly wildly out of date!
5434a
5mo ago
I don't know what the procedure is for accessing it but if your btc is unmoved since 2013 then it's pre the chain fork and you'll have the same balance in btc-cash and the various other forks that probably sank without trace.
Tattoos are a bit like dinner services because many people acquire them through imitation rather than purpose. Tattoo-havers often try to justify having a tattoo by claiming it has a personal meaning for them, but that's not the point, the point is that it shows others that you belong to an exclusive group. Why would you need to signal membership of a group to yourself? It doesn't make sense.
The popularisation of tattoos has diluted this signal to point that all it shows now is that you belong to the group of people who have tattoos. I suppose that is exclusive, but it's a bit meta.
It's a bit like wearing a football club strip. If you wear a football club strip on a football pitch it typically means you're on one of the teams. If you wear it off the pitch it means you admire the people who are on football teams. Getting selected to play for a team is exclusive and requires identifying yourself to the other members of the team, admiring the people who get selected isn't and doesn't.
All of these are symptomatic of the lack of meaningful personal identities in modern life. It wouldn't be surprising to find someone with tattoos, a football strip and who also owns a dinner service. It would be surprising if that person was in a football team and had the full complement of domestic staff to serve them dinner. A few days ago I watched a documentary about Japanese host clubs where a number of the hosts in the club wore crosses. Were they Christians? Given that ~1% of Japanese are Christian I suspect that 25% of the young fashion conscious men who make their living from selling champagne bottles to lonely women as a proxy for their personal attention weren't expressing solidarity with Jesus. I suspect they were constructing a fashion costume with shiny and vaguely exotic elements to catch the eyes of their customers. They were presenting an image without any substance.
Some of this is understandable. We all wear shoes, and so athletic trainers have become popular as much because they're comfortable and colourful as because they're associated with elite sportspeople. We all wear clothes, and so we might wear the denim jeans that were made for miners because hey, they're low maintenance and long-lasting. We all have to drive a car, so we get something a bit like a race car or an off road car even if we only drive at the limit between one paved car park and another. And yeah, we all have to eat our dinner off something too. But we don't have to mark our bodies. If you like to decorate your naked body you could use paint or henna. If you like art and design you could ask an artist to paint a fully framed canvas for you. If you like body mods and get a kick out of pain you could get metal teeth, shave your eyebrows off or just repeatedly scratch yourself with an empty tattoo gun. But people don't. They get tattoos because it's an image of authenticity, a commitment. But commitment to what? Everyone likes funny cartoons, everyone has lost someone close to them, everyone likes cool art pictures, everyone thinks the unusual is exotic, and everyone likes to think they're special. But those things aren't special, they're mundane. Being in a prison gang is special. Serving in the armed forces is special. Belonging to a Maori tribe is special. Being a Jew in a concentration camp is special. That's why their tattoos are predefined. You can't get a tattoo of Bart Simpson's butt cheeks on your belly button to show that you're a member of the Maori. You're getting a thick black spiral on your face, like it or lump it. Belonging can imply ownership as well as membership.
It's not about keeping the body in perfect shop condition. If I'd been in the navy for ten years I wouldn't object to having a tattoo to symbolise that status. I would object if I then saw someone else with naval tattoos, asked them when they served and they told me they just think the pictures are cool and that they're symbols for, like, navigating through life with confidence, and stuff. Keeping your possessions in unused condition is lame but it's not half as lame as pretending you possess something you don't. Saying if you can't destroy it you don't really own it is persuasive rhetoric but it shrinks next to the plainer statement that if it's not yours you don't own it.
You know what else women are famously keen on? Men in uniforms. Some like an officers' dress uniform are incidentally rather spiffing, but I'm not sure there's anything particularly flattering about a fireman's waterproofs and safety helmet. The appeal is what it represents: a man who has been endorsed as brave and capable. I don't get to dress up as a fireman and start bagging chicks, if I dress up as a fireman I'll get laughed at if I'm lucky to meet any chicks and more violently humiliated if I'm unlucky to meet any off duty firemen, who coincidentally don't wear their uniform out of hours. Worst case scenario the deception succeeds and I get sent up a 100ft ladder into a burning building where I then have to hope a real fireman comes and saves me.
Tattoos should symbolise being somebody, but more and more they symbolise being anybody with £50 and a free afternoon. If you're a Naz Reid fan you don't need to get a tattoo, you can get a selfie of you courtside enjoying that special moment after they win the match. Let Naz Reid wear the team strip.
Edit to add: Another aspect of traditional tattoo usage is that many of the people who used them either don't have much personal property beyond the clothes on their back for one reason or another, or are liable to find themselves in that situation unexpectedly. This touches on the "if you can't destroy it" aspect from the other side - if you can't deprive someone of it then it's something they'll have forever. In a funny way it circles around to being a different strategy for keeping their possessions in an unaltered condition.
5434a
5mo ago
I don't know what if any restrictions exist but it seems like it could be fairly straight forward to cross post the AAQCs to a Substack instead of a subdomain (vault.themotte) that isn't even linked from TheMotte or the AAQC threads.
5434a
5mo ago
Maybe a modest amount if the narrative presentation and my sympathies line up with the characters' experiences. If something happens in the book that is surprising to me and the characters then I suppose we're similarly surprised, but not if it's clumsily foreshadowed but still took the characters unaware. Similarly something might happen that makes the characters angry or sad, and I could either feel sad for them, contemptuous of them, curious how they'll adjust, or bored by the whole situation.
5434a
5mo ago
The wiki pages cover the basics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cold_reading
A search for "cold reading techniques" will bring up less dry sources. This one has a few books recommended at the bottom which you can find on annas-archive.org or libgen:
https://www.vanishingincmagic.com/mentalism/articles/how-does-cold-reading-work/
The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading: A Comprehensive Guide to the Most Persuasive Psychological Manipulation Technique in the World
Ian Rowland Limited, 4th Revised edition, 2008
“A comprehensive guide to the most persuasive psychological manipulation technique in the world and its application to psychic readings. Cold reading can loosely be described as 'how to talk to a complete stranger as if you have known them all your life'. This definitive yet easy-to-read guide explains every aspect of cold reading in detail. Although the book focuses on how cold reading is used within the psychic industry, many cold reading principles have applications in other fields such as selling, negotiation, management and therapy. This is a 'must read' book for anyone interested in the psychology of persuasion.”
5434a
6mo ago
It's difficult to judge as a TV show because I know the book and so I knew the plot and the characters going in and could tell what parts they took out, what parts they altered, what parts they cut down and so on. Over all it was fine, no complaints*, but the book is necessarily a much richer experience and if I ever want to revisit the story I'd re-read the book rather than rewatch the show.
* One complaint: Lady Ochiba's anime villainess dialogue delivery.
5434a
6mo ago
Some blend of the three. John is a lazy thinker so he defaults to lazy explanations: He's the only thing that matters, so any obstacles he encounters are deliberate sabotage, and that sabotage is the worst possible kind, and so you should feel sorry for him because he's the only thing that matters, and if you don't you might as well be dead to him. Egocentrism, probably with some sort of neurochemical deficiency that biases his perceptions towards negative interpretation.
And maybe some people have picked up on those vibes and started actually fucking with him because why not, he's a miserable sod who already thinks everyone is out to get him anyway so they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. At that point he's "right" but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
it's how I model people
You model people as being like John, or you model people the same way John models people?
5434a
6mo ago
If you can you could turn over a couple of spade's worth of garden soil each day, I imagine she'll find it fairly quickly if there's anything worthwhile in there and it's not much more work than filling up a feeder.
5434a
7mo ago
How long is the engagement for a typical arranged marriage? What would be the longest and the shortest?
5434a
7mo ago
I've been reading more of James Clavell's Asian Saga. I've also been catching up on cleaning and maintaining my garden tools.
In the books every peasant bows and scrapes at the feet of the samurai. My very limited knowledge of martial arts is that those same peasants developed ways of fighting with their gardening tools because they were forbidden from owning real weapons.
So... who were the peasants fighting?
5434a
7mo ago
Go to www.chatgpt.org/chat, you won't have to sign up or log in. Then type in the box.
5434a
7mo ago
I consider those attributes critical inasmuch as absenting them from the discussion leaves us with nothing to discuss, or at least nothing conclusive. Non rhetorical question: How can it be otherwise?
I might be mistaken but your objection seems to rest on "man" operating as a floating signifier that can be either male (sex) or masculine (gender). This is problematic because for transgenderism to be legible the gender has to be associated with sex. A gender that is unassociated with a sex is effectively arbitrary. If transgenderism depends on gender being arbitrary then it can't make strong claims predicated on gender, if gender is illegible then claims on gender can't be understood, and if gender is strict then gender only serves its function as it relates to sex.
5434a
7mo ago
Lost Girls is a fun bit of erotica from Alan Moore you could finish in an afternoon. The Sandman is another good Alan Moore piece but as far as I know it's a full length comic series rather than a self-contained graphic novel, but maybe there's a compendium.
For something not involving Alan Moore Transmetroplitan was good fun and from what I remember would probably appeal to the Motte crowd for it's cyberpunk / absurd culture war aspects (sexy Sesame Street!) but it's another full series.
5434a
7mo ago
I read one of each of the gentleman burglar character books (Fantomas, Arsene Lupin and Raffles) and from what I remember Arsene was the best of the bunch.
5434a
7mo ago
I think trans people have shared traits and interests that justify - make useful - the existence of the group term.
So do I when they're grouped as a sub category to a referent super category, but if we call them women the super category ceases to signify anything essential and becomes effectively arbitrary and correspondingly insignificant. (And when it's arbitrary I have no need to justify my opinion beyond it being an opinion that's mine. Back to square one, the circle created by trans rhetoric travels in both directions despite their intention.)
When I say "transwomen aren't even transwomen" I say it to contrast their own rhetoric and demonstrate their dependence on the binary they (selectively) disavow.
At base my argument is that "men who [choose to pursue and increase their femininity, AKA transwomen]" is legible. Each element points to something distinct even where the element might be fuzzy at the boundaries. "Transwomen are women who want to affirm their gender identity as women by pursuing feminine social signifiers" (the most charitable framing I can come up with) loses legibility the more you think about it as each element circles back to itself until the boundaries it depends on collapse into meaninglessness.
My own belief is that they do this because, less charitably, they are men who [want to be women and throw out these convoluted rationales to avoid the distress of acknowledging that they simply can't]. What they can do is increase/maximise their femininity, which is what they're already doing, and which I can't see anyway of discrediting. It's plausible, it's feasible, and it's legible. It doesn't float my boat, but it doesn't knit my brow either.
5434a
7mo ago
Trans women are not women, have never been women, and will never be women.
Transwomen aren't even transwomen. In their quest to deconstruct gender in order to grant themselves accommodation within that same genderscape that they disavow they have inadvertantly demonstrated that it's transgenderism itself that carries no semantic water. That is to say; there's no such thing.
Nevermind the old chestnut of "what is a woman?". That one has multiple satisfactory answers from the simple to the scientifically robust. Try out "what is a transwoman?". The sole universal quality of every possible rational answer begins with "a man who...". A man. Because without that there's no binary boundary to transit. A woman cannot be a transwoman.
Either it's real, and they're not it. Or it's not real, so there's no it to be.
[Obligatory olive branch that I don't care two iotas (iotes?) about men rendering themselves maximally feminine. Obligatory post script that this all applies vice versa too.]
5434a
7mo ago
@zorbathehut
While we're doing site UI feedback, it would be great if the site tracked read/unread status while logged out.
When I'm logged in the site tracks how many new unread comments a thread has accrued since last viewed. When I log out and log back in the new comment count resets to all read, meaning I can't see which threads have been active, and I can't ctrl-f through the thread for "~new".
I share your rule. It's only that I feel like I'm passing a point where I'm losing sight of what it was I wanted to do.
Propagating more plants is about halfway down my list. In fact I'm mere days away from discovering whether the seeds that I collected from my garden last year are going to come out with pink, white or blue flowers (come ooooon pink!). On the other hand maintaining and improving the (poorly planned) garden is one (slash many) of the tasks towards the top of the list - and those particular tasks have a tendency to cycle back and regenerate in short order.
I've found taking before and after photos of projects or documenting in other ways to be a good way of keeping some perspective on progress and avoid the feeling of being stuck in a perpetual "work in progress" stage.
Anyway, I texted a friend who I've been putting off catching up with until the weather improved. Drinking beer on a boat will be a nice change. Can't help feeling that it doesn't actually advance matters though. Ehh, trade offs. It's not like I was going to fix everything in one night.
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