Fruck
Lacks all conviction
Fruck is just this guy, you know?
User ID: 889
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
15hr ago
Did Dase ever end up making a site where people post their ai chats? I enjoyed reading this thoroughly because I am adept at skipping edgy language and I had no idea where either you or grok was going to go with it.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
18hr ago
Shit man, if you are 59 years old you really ought to have figured out what a bad person is by now. Or at least have some inkling. I am similarly confused if you meant you don't understand what he meant by 'insinuate you are a bad person'.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1d ago
At the end of the day I think lists like these are counter-productive. Rather than encouraging independent thinking, I think they just create another shibboleth on the right to stand opposed to the shibboleth on left: post-modernism and marxism are evil and wrong, the answers to all our problems can be found in the past, and the Western, Modern, Liberal worldview is probably correct. Rather I would suggest reading widely, and with things you disagree with. As Haruki Murakami once said, if you only read what everyone is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. This is just as true for this MENSA list as it might be for the slop that we've normalized.
More and better quality shared shibboleths are exactly what the right needs. Shibboleths provide a sense of community and belonging and act as shortcuts - if someone uses a shibboleth they signal familiarity with the concepts related, allowing you to bypass covering them. I completely agree you should read books others don't, but I think there is also a lot of value in a shared knowledge base, and the St John's curriculum not only provides a lot of instruction in independent thinking (which is necessary, independent thinking is stifled at every turn by the modern world), it also includes a lot of historical works, which provide a connection to our history that inspires pride in the Western intellectual tradition. Beyond that though, I think historical works do a much better job of inspiring interest in history than actual histories, although that might be typical minding.
Also yeah the curriculum should be used as a base, a springboard into the pool of knowledge as opposed to an outline of its breadth.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2d ago
Spoilered. It's pretty obvious but it's only two years old and I expected more people might want to check it out.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2d ago
However if I put my Cranky Literalist hat on: I am actually very suspicious of the idea of the monomyth. I do think there are a number of tropes that are fairly common, perhaps to all mankind, possibly due to oral tradition but possibly also just due to human nature. (A separate POP SCIENCE tangent, but I am told there is evidence that oral traditions can persist up to 10,000 years, which is also, I am told, within "striking range" of humanity's most recent common ancestor, so presumably it's not crazy for cultures to share a monomyth by virtue of a common oral tradition). But from what I understand of the "monomyth" specifically, it derives from Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which, admittedly, I have not read. (One of my friends did read it, and gave me a very negative review, so perhaps I am unfairly prejudiced.) But I strongly suspect Campbell (who was influenced by Jung) constructed a Procrustean bed that anyone so inclined can torture nearly any notable person into a "monomyth."
If I put my literary crank hat on, I am fucking sick of the monomyth. Yet another example of a measure becoming a target. Can I ask if you recall where you heard of an oral tradition lasting 10k years? That seems implausible and like it could only be supported by a society that treats oral traditions as evidence, aka a silly one.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2d ago
No but on the other hand they would have gotten on a lot better with the Europeans
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3d ago
That's not how this works and you know it Alex. If you are going to make claims about people on the motte you need to be able to back it up.
It is a farcical request of me anyway. I say journalists are the enemy of the people so often random birds in my neighbourhood now repeat it. So if fox news watching is a necessary component then I disagree with them on a fundamental basis. You are confusing the fact that I defend them when people think up the stupidest possible justification for doing something and assign it to them with me supporting them.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3d ago
You have examples of this behaviour of course. You aren't just strawmanning your outgroup again and confusing politics for science I'm sure, you can link to examples of people on the motte saying no-college boomers are never wrong on any issue right?
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3d ago
I don't think it works for losing weight, but it's a good stamina builder for sure. I base this on the fact that for at least six months in the early noughts when I worked across from Timezone I watched giant men move their feet impossibly to edm every single day and never lose weight. It was spectacular to watch, almost physics defying seeing these 180kg guys do Paranoia on expert, and I was sure they'd lose weight just from sweating (the arcade had big industrial fans everywhere but no a/c) but if they did lose any weight it seemed marginal. But they definitely improved their stamina, going from not being able to finish a track to completing tracks and not even being out of breath by the end of the year.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
4d ago
I've been playing Atomic Heart this week, the 2023 fps that was billed as sort of a Soviet style bioshock, because I played Atomfall last week and it bored me to tears. And in the sense that the combat is kind of shit - you can do fun things if you want to fuck around but the optimal strategy is very straightforward, it is like bioshock. In bioshock the optimal strategy was to upgrade your wrench and health and abuse the research camera buffs, and only bother with plasmids with the big daddies. In atomic heart the optimal strategy is to just ignore the enemies and bolt for whatever objective you are after.
The frustrating thing about it though, is that the first four hours of the game are designed specifically for a avoidance play style, but once you leave the science complex that strategy straight fucks you to death. The first four hours basically teach you to scope out an area, find all the enemies and then take each one down without immediately pulling the rest, and by the end of the complex you are actually pretty adept at it, you get into that puzzle style game loop where you are trying to find a path that lets you kill everyone in one smooth chain of kills, and it's fun and does feel bioshocky.
But the second you leave the complex all that goes straight out the window - now as soon as an enemy spots you you may as well restart, because everything in a five mile radius just alerted and is coming for blood. Technically this isn't the case - you only alert other enemies if you kill one in front of a camera, if you just kill one only the enemies in line of sight will come for you. But the thing is when you kill enemies little repair drones get spawned to repair the bot you destroyed. And if you kill the repair drone another one comes and another - I sat repeatedly killing those drones once and they did stop spawning after the tenth one went down. They do the same for the cameras. And repaired enemies don't drop more loot. So you have to keep moving, and the security camera drones inevitably see you and then you are done.
Putting all this together, and wasting an hour testing the limits of the respawn system, it became clear the carefully planned approach was completely unviable. Not only do the repair drones mean you have to spend five minutes taking down each camera or enemy plus their ten repair drones, but doing so would bankrupt your ammo reserves due to loot not respawning with the enemies. You could combo the energy gun and the machete that recharges your energy too I suppose, but then you have to wait even longer for the drones to get in melee range. So I figured I'd tackle it the other way - bee line for the objective and see how far I could go before something killed me, and adapt from there.
Well the answer to how far can you go before the enemy kills you appears to be 'forever'. I ran straight to the tower I was supposed to visit - some moustache robots, saw robots and mortar robots saw me, but once I was on the tower elevator they couldn't touch me and by the time the game had finished explaining its plot points they'd forgotten about me. I went back down the elevator and bolted to visit the baba yaga lady and again caused plenty of ruckus that had completely died down when the exposition was over. And as I was reminiscing about times gone by back in the science complex where the cutscene gating had been annoying me by messing up my killing spree, it hit me - just run past all the enemies always. Or fuck it, why not just play something better?
I don't understand how I am supposed to play this and it feels like two different dev teams were making similar but distinct games that Mundfish stitched together. Which is a pity, because there was clearly a lot of effort and thought put into the world building and while it does have some familiar tropes playing out, it also has some rarer quirks, and a pervasive sense of that Slavic 'no fucks given' philosophy. The sexual element is particularly interesting from a meta perspective - clearly the devs were not anticipating the way younger millenials and zoomers would react to aggressively sexual dialogue sans either the safe consent-focused attitude of the 'playersexual' (excuse me while I vomit in my mouth) philosophy and it is grimly amusing reading reddit threads about it, watching poor kids torn between celebrating female sexual openness and complaining about feeling violated. Which is surprising, since they made the protagonist like that too - full of quips and jokes about every situation, and capable of bantering with everyone from his glove to baba yaga, but whenever he starts interacting with the sexy vending machine he's pissed at her for being gross and trying to avoid conversation at all costs.
But the alt history angle of the game is cool in its own right - it's set in a universe where the Soviets discovered an advanced technology they call the polymer, which is like a nanotech liquid that basically took the resource cap off the Soviet tech tree so that by the fifties the USSR is a post scarcity marvel. The science facility you roll through at the start gives you a glimpse at the progress - aside from the advanced robotics on display you also see them doing advanced genetic research and splicing, and using the polymer for teraforming, 3d printing, working in extreme temperatures and the kollectiv, which is using the polymer to upload everyone's consciousnesses to the cloud and allows you to instantly learn things by downloading them from other people's experiences (although sadly it's not as direct as pressing your forehead against someone else's and learning all they know). I think I already know where the plot is going to go
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
4d ago
Holy shit, mewgenics is actually coming out? That's an appropriately idiotic trailer, I hope it approaches the original hype (I no longer expect anything to live up to the hype).
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
5d ago
Thanks chums! I wish things actually happened in Queensland more often, I enjoyed writing that post.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
5d ago
Good post overall, but low information voters are waaaaay more confident generally, that's why they don't need more information.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
5d ago
And quadruply if the only way you ever interact with them is online and you never have in person conversations with them, because then you don't have facial tells and they have time to craft a response.
Gattsuru's point is solid though too - arguments providing evidence against the shtick would be counter proof of the shtick - a single article in the opposite direction wouldn't prove much, but it would be some proof that he wasn't just arguing in this direction because he always argues in this direction. I also consider it genuinely noble to argue against self-interest, if not necessarily wise.
Lol I am, how embarrassing. And yet it's tiberian sun I remember for sure, because our game loop was we'd all ally with each other then try to betray our ally and suicide bomb them with blue tiberium before they could do it to us. Oh yeah, it was because we were suicide bombing each other and generals was the breadth of our exposure to middle eastern culture at the time. A different kind of embarrassing.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
5d ago
Tiberian Sun was broken as hell, but I have to say it was a very fun type of broken. My friends and I played that game so much, just doing stupid shit, that the first thing I thought on reading your post was "We need shooooes!"
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
7d ago
I don't know how to fix it either and I have been losing sleep about it for a while, but I am glad to know you can see it now too. In the broadest scope @faceh nails it with consequences, but enacting consequences is going to be a real challenge. It does seem like we're going to need a significant numbers of lives lost in an actual disaster to occur before we can snap enough people out of the fog of complacency, because until lives are lost the buck is too easy to pass, it's too easy to downplay and dismiss it as 'misinformation'.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
9d ago
They're bigger kinks than you imply I think, but I do agree with your overall point. Except about rationalists, who it seems to me do better than 'common sense' thinkers in some areas and much worse in others, particularly when other people are involved, and on average they're about par. But that's another benefit of liberalism - now that we can recognise this flaw and stop putting rationalism on a pedestal we can work to change it. That is the unstated project of the Trump campaign imo, and it will mean rationalists having to put up with some blatantly stupid policies and ideas, but that actually isn't any different from the previous state of affairs, the stupidity was just harder for rationalists to see.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
9d ago
Ah but if we do that, then shouldn't we also hold enlightenment societies responsible for advancing society to the point where there were millions more people on the planet to get killed in famines? If they hadn't industrialised they wouldn't have had population booms that introduced a lot more people into society, which would have meant the crazy policies would have killed fewer people!
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
10d ago
Yeah that's pretty much how I see it too, and those technically correct objections feel like the trap snapping shut when you are particularly aggravated - otherwise why not a more substantial response (autism just feels like another cop out when you are in that frame of mind) - and if you don't recognise that (hell, sometimes even if you do) you can break out the big guns and sink yourself further.
Lol I should probably also say, in case anyone thinks I'm trying to rewrite history and jump on a bandwagon, that hlynka and I didn't start off well at all either, he called me the worst poster on the mod more than once and I think I told him that I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire at one point. And I have no idea if his opinion of me ever changed, but I also don't care. I grew to like him as a user, I think the demodding changed his perspective and sharpened his skill at argument, and I don't need reciprocation.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
10d ago
Welp, I thought you were going to say Dean is spinning it or doesn't have all the facts and maybe find a way to hint at the shape of this badass thing he did, not immediately back down.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
10d ago
Victory in violence always demands the sacrifice of your body. You might hope to get away without injury, but you never expect it. People of violence understand this and accept it, or lose. So I am going to need more than assurances he did something badass if you want to change my mind that that incident didn't cement his status as a risible caricature.
Actually that was a revision by the Grimm brothers. It enhances the story, because children back then (and now) were often put under the care of people who weren't their parents and it is good to learn early that just because someone calls themself your parent doesn't mean they love you like your parents are supposed to.
That's a pretty good way to spin writing a dumb comparison and then admitting that you can't think of a better one. But not good enough to actually distract me sadly.
More options
Context Copy link