FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
2hr ago
If the cops unjustifiably kill some random law-abiding productive citizen with a family and community, that's much worse.
Agreed, but that wasn't the comparison I was making. I was comparing an unjustified killing of someone with forty previous felonies with a justified killing of an erstwhile law-abiding citizen.
FtttG
4hr ago
On the day of the shooting, she looked much more like a stereotypical angry aggressive lesbian.
At this point, I have to ask if we watched the same video. Good's partner was the one loudly berating and mocking the ICE agents, while Good herself was, for the most part, sitting in her car and smirking. She was being obnoxious, but I can't say I saw anything "aggressive" in her demeanour, prior to her pressing the accelerator.
As to "looking" like a lesbian: she was dressed appropriately for the Minnesota climate.
FtttG
4hr ago
I'll admit that I may have phrased my argument poorly (as I said in the wellness thread, I was under pressure to meet my self-imposed deadline). The argument I was trying to make is that, in the hypothetical world in which it could be established that Ross's shooting was justified beyond reasonable doubt, it wouldn't matter if Good had been a scrupulously law-abiding citizen prior to the altercation. Conversely, in the hypothetical world in which it could be established that Ross's shooting wasn't justified, it wouldn't matter if Good had had numerous criminal convictions beforehand. I probably shouldn't have bothered getting into the weeds of what either of these hypothetical worlds might look like, as they weren't relevant to my argument.
FtttG
14hr ago
Happy to help! FYI if you want to tag a user, just put an @ before their username.
On QTCritique, the feedback on the latest draft of my query has been fairly positive. Over on /r/pubtips, it's been very harsh, with people coming away saying they have no idea what my novel is even about. I was tempted to dismiss this as just typical Reddit behaviour; on the other hand, many of the users and mods of that subreddit are (or at least claim to be) published writers and other people working in the publishing industry, which suggests that their feedback ought to carry more weight than the feedback from my fellow unpublished novelists over at qtCritique.
Given that a consistent criticism is that my novel is too long (even after chopping out a good 20k words from the first draft), I reckon I have no choice but to create a fourth draft, aiming for it to be at least 8k words shorter than the third.
slam poetry (but not the irritating kind)
Such a thing exists?
FtttG
14hr ago
I can play the rhythm guitar part for "This Mortal Coil" pretty much perfectly.
Next up is "Phobophile" by Cryptopsy.
I got a score of 13 when compared to an average of 27. Interestingly, I correctly anticipated which of my responses it would say were in tension with each other. Obviously, I'm now required to pedantically justify myself as to why my responses are not really in tension with one another.
I agree these are slightly in tension with one another. To justify myself, I would argue that many
I feel on much firmer footing with this one.
FtttG
1d ago
It's pretty nifty, and my day job involves SQL-based databases so it's nice to get some direct experience with the tool itself.
FtttG
1d ago
I always felt that the idea that Australia, with its relatively small population and relative isolation from Europe and America, could be invaded and completely conquered in such a short period
If innumerable games of Risk have taught me anything, it's this.
FtttG
1d ago
There are so many Wings and Wongs in China that every time you Wing you get the Wong number.
haha
FtttG
1d ago
New Year's resolutions check-in:
- Posted my second blog post of the year on Monday (right down to the wire, it went up at 11 p.m.), about a particularly pernicious reaction to the Minneapolis shooting which seems to recur whenever a member of the opposing political tribe is killed or disgraced.
- Went to the gym three times last week. Couldn't bring myself to go on Monday, so went yesterday afternoon instead. Can deadlift 1.73x my bodyweight for 6 reps, squat .88x for 10 reps and bench press .7x for 9 reps.
- Have not consumed any alcohol, fast food, fizzy drinks or pornography since waking up on January 1st, although I have snacked between meals quite a bit.
- Have completed five of 11 modules in the SQL course.
- Have practised guitar for roughly one hour every day since January 1st.
How goes it, @thejdizzler?
FtttG
1d ago
I like it as a title, but couldn't begin to fathom how it relates to the content of the book it adorns.
FtttG
2d ago
I can never reliably spell "manoeuvre" ("manoeuver" for the Yanks) without looking it up.
FtttG
2d ago
If X changes Y, then X has affected Y.
The change that X wrought on Y can be described as the effect that X had on Y.
Additionally, if X pretends to be Y, we can say that X affects Y (normally used in the noun form "affectation").
But although "affect" is usually used as a verb and "effect" as a noun, both can be used as verbs and nouns.
If X sets out to change Y, then it can be said that X effects change in Y.
And the emotional state of X is also known as X's emotional affect. One of the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy is a "blunted" or "flat" affect.
FtttG
2d ago
Advertising appears with the newspaper. The first paid newspaper advertisement in American history was in 1704 in Boston, it is literally older than the United States of America.
Hell, go back even further. Roman gladiators were paid to do product endorsements. Ridley Scott hired a team of historians to jazz up the movie Gladiator, and they were planning to depict this, but figured that audiences would have a hard time taking it seriously even though it's true.
FtttG
2d ago
To me, no spaces makes it look like the words on either side of the em-dash have been hyphenated. To return to your previous example, when I first read your comment there was a split-second when I was thinking "what on earth is an 'author-well'?" and wondered if it might be an inkwell than an author dips his quill into.
FtttG
2d ago
How do you avoid local optima and "OK, we've clearly reached Enough technology with pointy-rock-on-sharp-stick, we've out-competed all the other squids and whales, any more energy spent on technology would be wasted effort when we could just breed ourselves up indefinitely." traps?
I think you're making the mistake of thinking of the human species as a unified entity. It's true that humans are the dominant species on the planet, but some humans are more dominant than others. Henrich argues that inter-tribal competition is a major engine of technological progress, and that this often comes in the form of cultural evolution which in turn has a knock-on effect on biological evolution. Tribe A figures out a new method of preparing food which makes its members more likely to survive to adulthood and have children compared to Tribe B, and over time Tribe A outcompetes Tribe B, passing on this method of preparing food to its descendants. This obviously affects Tribe A's biological makeup (see: rates of lactose intolerance in Europe compared to Asia).
Once again, I don't see why any part of this process necessitates that the entities be conscious. If you have a species containing multiple competing tribes (and even neighbouring tribes of chimpanzees go to war with one another) and they develop some way of passing on information from one generation to the next, all the ingredients for cultural evolution and hence technological development are there.
Also, what happens when consciousness does evolve in a non-conscious system?
I'm not sure what your point is. Probably this happened to us at some point in our evolutionary history. I just reject the idea that it was preordained. Consciousness achieved fixation in our species because it gave us a competitive advantage in our specific evolutionary niche, but in a different environment it might never have happened.
But I am going to draw on my own experiences where I have, on multiple occasions, had to get up very early in the morning to drive friends or family to the airport, and because the way back home from the airport goes past a turn that I take to go to work, took that turn and found myself having driven to work purely on muscle memory. I was executing the habit "Drive to this destination." that I've done enough times that I didn't need to form the conscious intent "Drive to work.", it just happened. But it happened because I'd done that thing so many times.
Right but, again, I assume the roads weren't empty of other cars, right? You still had to respond to novel stimuli in the form of other vehicles on the road, even while executing a repetitive task.
FtttG
2d ago
Even Merriam-Webster acknowledges that usage varies:
Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it.
I suspect this may be yet another "separated by a common language" thing, where spaces on either side is the norm in the UK and Ireland.
Yes, I agree that in the second photo she looks more like a stereotypical angry aggressive lesbian. But she doesn't look much like a stereotypical angry aggressive lesbian, and I think your phrasing was a bit weaselly. For any two photos of Beyoncé, she will look "more" like a stereotypical angry aggressive lesbian in one of them than the other: that doesn't imply that she particularly looks like a stereotypical angry aggressive lesbian in either of them.
Of course the first one is more flattering. But I don't think it's remotely indicative of media bias that most outlets chose to use a nice photo of Good when reporting about her, rather than a still frame extracted from a video taken seconds before her death. Even the New York Times used a very flattering photo of Charlie Kirk in their obituary for him, and not, say a photo of him immediately after or immediately prior to him being shot, which would have been "more relevant to the subject matter under discussion".
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