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FtttG


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 13 13:37:36 UTC

https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/


				

User ID: 1175

FtttG


				
				
				

				
6 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 13 13:37:36 UTC

					
				

				

				

				

				

					

User ID: 1175

She probably will never admit it.

Given to the extent to which she's made herself persona non grata among the woke set by her refusal to budge or play along on the trans issue (the hot-button political issue of the day, especially in the UK; there are essentially no British equivalents to American 2A diehards insisting on the right to bear arms), I put a lot more stock in Rowling's willingness to speak her mind, even if doing so would make her unpopular. I mean, we're talking about a woman who went from being the most successful and beloved children's writer of her generation, to having her fans turn on her, dox her, send her death and rape threats by the thousands, compose creepy fanfiction about her violent death - all because of her obstinate refusal to mouth woke platitudes she didn't personally endorse.

when she tried to write a story in coherent universe

I don't think Harry Potter is a coherent universe, and I don't think she ever intended it to be. Whatever pretense of internal consistency was abandoned as soon as she introduced time travel, then promptly forgot about it.

That's true. I thought Pew were meant to conduct surveys repeatedly.

You're very welcome. I hope you're in a better place now than you were in February.

If "eat hot chip and lie" means "eat hot shit and die", that's news to me. I was under the impression the original tweeter meant it quite literally: that "eating hot chip" (e.g. Doritos) and "lying" are two of the only activities Gen Z women engage in, along with going to McDonald's, twerking, being bisexual and charging they phones.

But the second, bigger issue, is that even if this were definitively proven, with the author herself outright claiming that she typed in a one-word prompt into ChatGPT 10 to produce all 70,000 words of her latest award-winning novel, this could just be justified by the publishing industry and the associated awards on the basis of her lacking the privilege that white/straight/cis/male authors have, and this LLM usage merely ensures equity by giving her and other oppressed minorities the writing ability that privileged people are just granted due to their position in this white supremacist patriarchal society.

This is almost word-for-word how NaNoWriMo defended the right of writers to use generative AI while partaking in the competition: namely, arguing that criticisms of the use of AI in creative writing are borne of "ableism".

Now, you might think that this would simply discredit these organizations in the eyes of the audience

Yup. (Although this was really the straw that broke the camel's back following their earlier grooming scandal.)

Charge they phone, eat hot chip and lie, I assume.

Using the word "swallow" in the same sentence as one in which the word "rape" appears twice makes me uncomfortable for some reason.

if we have any teenage girls reading this

Good God, I hope not.

A data point: 71% of black Americans think hip hop has a negative influence on the culture.

I think what @2rafa is getting at is that certain writers are "covertly based" i.e. they have edgy political opinions which they are consciously choosing to hide, and smuggling them into their works under cover of darkness.

I think what you're getting at is certain writers being "unconsciously based" i.e. they sincerely do not hold any edgy political opinions, but if you follow the implications of their writing to its logical conclusion you end up in a surprisingly edgy place, which the writer did not consciously intend.

I think the likelihood that JK Rowling believes (whether consciously or unconsciously) that real-life teenagers should be armed with deadly weapons is somewhere around nil, even if that's an entirely valid reading of the Harry Potter books.

I liked the one about how the Angry Birds movie was secretly a metaphor for stopping Syrian refugees from arriving into Western countries.

Yeah but degree of difficulty between 'find a hot guy for low commitment casual sex' versus 'find a hot girl for low commitment casual sex' is a Dark Soulsian difference in difficulty curve.

Skill issue.

Given that Katxwoods explicitly mentions crying herself to sleep while her boyfriend is out banging "falling in love with" other girls, it would be remiss of me not to mention this immortal tweet:

When you see two people are in an open relationship it’s like which one of you came up with the idea and which of you cries to sleep at night

For me and my wife, bringing a girl home for a threesome occasionally was a lot of fun

I really did not expect to hear something like this from you.

As ever, this comedy song is apposite more than it should be.

It must be said, I've met a handful of people who were poly, and not one of them was someone I could even imagine going to bed with.

Being that Machiavellian and manipulative sounds mentally and physically exhausting, not to mention time-consuming (rather similar to how I think I'd find polyamory, come to think of it). In his circumstances I think I'd rather cut my losses and put my energy into finding a partner whose relationship style matches my own.

For people who've taken to semi-ironically referring to Trump as the "God-Emperor", depicting him as the literal pontiff is sort of like the ne plus ultra of that. Sort of like the political equivalent of a Chuck Norris joke, or perhaps those memes where there's an election in a country other than the US and someone makes a meme depicting every electoral district in the country being won by the ultimate dark horse candidate - JEB BUSH! In fact the more I think about it, the more I think the latter example illustrates the humour - it's funny because it's completely implausibly ridiculous, and yet the person is keeping a straight face.

The idea of Trump becoming Pope is just funny in its own right, both because of its incongruence and because it's so on brand for a man of such limitless arrogance - and yet whose arrogance, oddly enough, seems strangely warranted (after all, people laughed when he said he was going to be President, and he sure showed them). The picture of him as Pope is only funny insofar as it visualises an already funny mental image.

110k words on my NaNoWriMo project. Did less work on it over the weekend than I would've liked, as I was busy with another writing project whose deadline is coming up soon.

couples/thruples? what do we call these associations?

I believe "polycule" is the preferred term.

I think this is an obvious and inevitable result of the rat-sphere growing and expanding, to the point that it includes many people who are "normies" along many if not most axes (a category I'm happy to include myself in). The first-generation rationalists were genuinely weird people (disproportionately likely to be autistic, gay, trans, asexual, vegan or all of the above), for whom maybe polyamory really did "work". But it's misleading to draw conclusions about what works for the general populace from such an atypical, heavily selected sample. As rationalism got bigger and bigger, it started attracting more and more normies, for whom polyamory is far less likely to work.

Within the rat-sphere, one of the most prominent evangelists for polyamory is Scott, who's also asexual. I don't think this is a coincidence. Some poly people like to pat themselves on the back about how romantic jealousy is just a bad habit that they've managed to transcend. But let's be honest: 90% of what we call "romantic jealousy" is just sexual jealousy, and it stands to reason that a person who doesn't experience sexual attraction in the conventional way probably doesn't experience sexual jealousy in the same way either. To reuse one of Scott's own points*, you don't get any Virtue Points for "transcending" an unpleasant emotion if it's an emotion you literally don't feel. I suspect many of the early outspoken advocates for polyamory were asexuals (or at least people with atypically low sex drives) who were inadvertently typical-minding the more conventionally-sex-driven people in their vicinity, assuming that - "well, if I could easily overcome my (vastly lower than typical, if not nonexistent) romantic/sexual jealousy, why can't everyone else? Must just represent a massive character failing on their part." This is a bit like someone who doesn't even like drinking alcohol marching into an AA meeting and announcing "I just stopped drinking, what's the big deal? You guys must be weak - skill issue". Katxwoods's point about "low baseline of jealousy" is exactly what I'm talking about here.

(Alternative/complementary hypothesis: maybe if you literally don't feel at all jealous when thinking about your girlfriend getting railed by another man, it might mean that you don't actually love her as much as you claim to? Perhaps you even have an avoidant attachment style, and you're deliberately seeking out romantic partners who it wouldn't bother you to lose, as a defense mechanism? Just a thought.)

Meanwhile, all of the conventionally-sex-driven people being evangelised to about how amazing polyamory is - they wonder why they're really struggling with feelings of sexual jealousy in a way the low-sex-drive people don't seem to be at all, and feel guilty and ashamed of themselves that they can't overcome this "moral failing", unaware that they're playing a completely different ball game to the asexual/low-sex-drive polys. I mean, Jesus, even puff pieces about what a wonderful alternative lifestyle choice polyamory is still make it sound miserable and even emotionally abusive:

[My girlfriend] started seeing this dude who was an absolute stud, having sex with him and having a great-ass time, and I felt totally lame and inadequate.

That was really hard for me, for obvious reasons. I felt like, I’m a hundred percent replaceable. It took a lot of conversations. She was like, There’s nothing wrong with you, this is going to pass, therapy will help. Lots of tears were shed. But medication helped me, talk therapy helped me

Just imagine feeling sad and upset that your girlfriend is fucking another man who's more attractive than you, and thinking "Yes, obviously this is an unhealthy emotional response, I need to dose myself up with antidepressants". I pity this poor man, and hope he realises he's being manipulated and gaslit sooner rather than later.

*Google highlighting doesn't appear to work on this page, Ctrl-F "virtue points".

Whenever you need to.

I read Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde last week. Very entertaining and remarkably well-structured, even when you know the twist. Having read lots of Lovecraft, I can now properly contextualise him within the Gothic horror lineage (although my understanding is that he wrote his stories in a self-consciously retro style, almost like a genre throwback).

Currently halfway through Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality by Theodore Dalrymple, a writer I first encountered via Scott's controversial post "Radicalizing the Romanceless". As the title might suggest, he's a grumpy old man without apology, and his polemical ranting about how much modern Britain (and the Western world more generally) sucks is tremendous fun.

Could I go hire two people off of Craigslist, engineer a scripted social media outrage that results in one or both being able to successfully fundraise for ???, and then split the proceeds with them? Assuming I'm not paying them to do anything actually illegal.

This sounds pretty close to the stunt Jessie Smollett pulled. It didn't pan out the way he hoped.