FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
8m ago
I Love You, Man is a fairly safe and predictable comedy, but the chemistry between Paul Rudd and Jason Segel is strong and endearing, and I laughed plenty of times.
FtttG
9m ago
The only movie I've ever seen with a date-rape sight gag. And it works. And the movie got away with it.
FtttG
10m ago
The first one to come to mind is The Nice Guys, from writer-director Shane Black, starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling. His 2005 film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang holds a special place in my heart for being laugh-out-loud hilarious, meta before being meta itself became a tiresome cliché, and featuring a romance between two believably flawed characters with amazing chemistry who I genuinely wanted to end up together. The Nice Guys doesn't quite live up to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang but is nevertheless a consistently funny movie, Gosling and Crowe bounce off each other very well and the 70s nostalgia is a fun vibe.
FtttG
26m ago
I wouldn't find this surprising in the least, although I have met a couple of lesbians who grew up in Asia and who were as tomboyish as you'd expect based on their sexuality.
FtttG
9hr ago
New year's resolutions check-in:
- Posted my fifth blog post of the year on Monday, offering my two cents on the school shooting in Tumbler Ridge. It was expanded from a comment I wrote here after the Annunciation Catholic shooting last August. I'm sad to say the points I made remained exactly as relevant six months later as they were at the time.
- Went to the gym three times last week, again on Monday, planning to go this evening. Can deadlift 1.8x my bodyweight for 4 reps, squat .98x for 9 reps and bench press .82x for 7 reps.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
- Have completed 8/11 modules in the SQL course.
How goes it, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble and @oats_son?
FtttG
1d ago
I agree, but I think butches vastly outnumber femmes, and even the typical femme will be significantly less conventionally feminine than the average straight woman.
FtttG
1d ago
One main difference is that PornLesbians look conventionally feminine, whereas RealLesbians usually don't. RealStepmoms will be unlike PornStepmoms in many ways (less attractive, smaller breasts, less sultry, less promiscuous), but both tend to be conventionally feminine in terms of dress sense, hairstyle, makeup etc. "Just like the real thing, but hotter" is a smaller gap than "hotter than the real thing and with a completely different dress sense, hairstyle etc.".
I personally know several divorcés, but off the top of my head can only think of one stepmom.
I suppose what I was really getting at is that being a stepmom is rarely the most salient fact about a person in a way that "lesbian" is. "Lesbian" is a highly salient trait about Megan Rapinoe, such that when someone says "lesbian" she might be one of the first people who pops into your head. Meanwhile "bookkeeping clerk" isn't a very salient trait about someone. If someone says "bookkeeping clerk" you would probably draw a blank, even though statistically most people surely know at least one woman in that line of work. I think "stepmom" is more like "bookkeeping clerk" than it is like "lesbian".
FtttG
2d ago
I can't imagine the average stepmom is especially attractive, but how many stepmoms can you name off the top of your head? It's not a highly visible identity in the way that "lesbian" or "black" is: no woman introduces herself by stating that she's a stepmom. Probably the only time we hear about women raising the children of her husband from a previous marriage/relationship, it's a celebrity, who are selected for being attractive. Hell, even searching the term "stepmom" (specialised websites excepted) would probably just bring you to the movie Stepmom (starring a young Julia Roberts). Most of the time you hear the word "stepmom" used in the media, it's in reference to an unusually attractive woman!
(Funnily enough, the primary context in which I heard the word "stepmother" growing up was the "wicked stepmother" archetype in Grimm's fairy tales: that being an evil, sexy woman who seduces a hapless man and persuades him to abandon or kill his children. I wonder to what extent porn studios are consciously playing on this archetype. Certainly the "stepmom" in porn videos is a wicked, conniving seducer.)
Personally, the incest/faux-incest trend in porn never appealed to me – I just find it creepy and off-putting, and downright paedophilic when it comes to the "stepdaughter" stuff.
FtttG
2d ago
While not mentioned in the book, the usual supporting evidence is observation of sleepwalking humans or blackouts
I don't know if we read a different edition or something, but I read Blindsight recently and IIRC it mentioned the sleepwalking thing a lot.
FtttG
2d ago
I was considering submitting my review of Rejection, but I decided it's probably not the sort of thing that would appeal to SSC readers, so I just went ahead and published it. If I think of something else I might give it a go, but at the moment I have no plan for a specific book to review. My not-a-book review got a fairly positive reception in spite of not making the finalists, which I was pleased with.
Incidentally if you'd like me to read over your draft and offer feedback, I'd be more than happy to.
FtttG
3d ago
Just copying the past
As big as it is and as awkward as it is to play, it probably isn't actually very heavy, by virtue of being hollow.
FtttG
3d ago
Now I have to go back through your comment history to see if you've written anything to piss me off that I've forgotten about it.
FtttG
3d ago
Everything about the visual aesthetic screams "annoying gimmick band" (they seriously replaced the volume and tone pots with dice? really?), but I can't deny this is a lot of fun, while still being math-y enough for the "count the time signatures" crowd.
My God, that double-necked guitar/bass must weigh a fucking ton though.
FtttG
3d ago
I think the TERF treatment of HSTS is unnecessarily harsh
How so? In my experience, most TERFs are far more sympathetic to homosexual trans-identified men than they are to AGPs.
Blanchard’s theory is true in the sense that AGP and HSTS populations exist, but it’s overly reductive in the sense that they’re not the only categories of trans people out there.
I agree that the "autistic, nerdy, often terminally online kind" of trans person is in a category of its own compared to homosexual males or archetypal AGPs. I also think the etiology behind trans-identification in females is completely different from that behind trans identification in males. "Gender dysphoria" isn't a condition like "lung cancer" or "depression" which affects males and females in the same way, and diagnosing males and females with the same condition hides more than it illuminates.
maybe those individuals would have been celibate monks or nuns in the past, when monastery life and asceticism was a viable alternative to the normal life script.
I've been thinking about this a lot. As much as people criticise Catholic institutions, they were a very effective Chesterton's fence for a particular kind of person who felt uncomfortable in their own skin and wasn't terribly interested in forming romantic relationships. It makes me sad thinking about all the young women who've gotten double mastectomies they'll likely regret, who would've been perfectly happy as nuns if they'd been born a couple of generations earlier.
FtttG
4d ago
Yes, I was tempted to mention something about how some of the most prominent American lesbians are joyless, humorless scolds (Rapinoe in particular). There's nothing fun or sexy about being told off or urged to check one's privilege.
Hypothesis: greater visibility of openly gay women has made the lesbian fantasy seem less appealing.
I believe lesbian porn is still being produced at the same rate as always. It usually stars heterosexual women, many of whom also shoot boy/girl scenes, and who look just as conventionally feminine as you would expect any heterosexual female porn star to look. (I once saw a YouTube clip in which actual lesbians watched lesbian porn intended to appeal to a heterosexual male audience and ridiculed how silly it was: for obvious reasons, no actual lesbian has long fingernails.) For heterosexual males, the essence of the lesbian fantasy lies in watching two hot, conventionally feminine women with high sex drives have sex with one another. No straight man wants "realistic" lesbian porn i.e. two butch women with crew- or pixie-cuts, both dressed like lumberjacks, neither wearing any makeup, having sex less frequently than even straight couples do.
In the past, when homosexuality was more stigmatised, a typical straight man might legitimately not know any out lesbians (sure, he knew tomboys, but he probably just assumed they were all straight, as indeed most of them probably were). With no real life examples to compare it to, he was free to imagine the lesbian fantasy as he wished, and perhaps even believed that the modal lesbian couple really did consist of two conventionally feminine women in a relationship with one another. (This even makes sense from an experiential perspective: if you've been told that lesbians are just like every other woman with the idiosyncrasy that they are exclusively attracted to other women, it's reasonable to assume that lesbians look and behave like the modal woman, this idiosyncrasy aside.) Outside of porn, this belief might have been reinforced by representations of lesbianism in popular culture: the depiction of a lesbian wedding in Friends was seen as groundbreaking at the time, but nowadays they'd probably catch flak for casting two straight women in these roles (both of whom were attractive in very conventionally feminine ways). Thus, when the typical straight male in the 90s heard about two women having sex with one another, he would either picture a) two average straight women; or (depending how much of a fantasist he was) b) two very attractive, conventionally feminine women. Either way, this mental image is going to be very far removed from what the typical lesbian relationship really looks like, and a lot more appealing to the modal straight man.
But with the greater visibility of out lesbians in popular culture, even a straight man who doesn't personally have any lesbian friends is far better acquainted with what the typical lesbian looks and behaves like than his equivalent in the 90s would be, which is bound to colour the fantasy. A straight man in the 90s would hear about two women having sex with each other, envision two attractive, conventionally feminine women having sex, and think "wow, hot". A straight man in 2026 hears about two women having sex with each other, his brain immediately goes to Ellen DeGeneres or Megan Rapinoe, and he thinks "ew". Knowing what the real thing looks like destroys the fantasy.
I completed XCOM 2: War of the Chosen on Commander difficulty, and almost immediately began trying to beat the base game on Commander difficulty with Ironman enabled. Much like playing the first game with these settings, it takes awhile to get out of the "one of my soldiers was killed, I'll just reload and try again" headspace. Generally the first few missions will be fairly smooth sailing, then I'll hit a wall and all my soldiers will get killed; rinse and repeat. Wish me luck.
This was included on a list of Phil's worst "gaffes", but no Chinese person I've mentioned it to has been offended by it, or even contested it. They really will eat anything that moves, and more power to them.
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