Hobgoblin_of_Stillwater
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User ID: 2108
Hobgoblin_of_Stillwater
1yr ago
Back when I was in elementary school, I distinctly recall answering this assignment with "I want to be a brave special forces soldier, fighting mutants to save humanity." What can I say, there was that one computer game I had really loved... My teacher responded with an angry note: "Don't kid around, give a serious answer." Well, that was my serious answer! Okay, humanity-threatening mutants might not exist, but that little detail aside, that was my dream job all the same.
As I grew older, I wanted to be a video game journalist. As far as I knew, they had the best job ever: they played awesome games all day, occasionally got up to hilarious banter with their fellow journalists, and had fans sending them letters and hanging on their every word. I even started a personal project to play every notable video game in history, so that I could rightfully claim the title of "the most historically knowledgeable gaming journalist ever!". Let's just say I grew out of this dream over time...
Hobgoblin_of_Stillwater
1yr ago
That may be!
However, that one social media posting isn't the only evidence I have. Let me provide some additional context.
During my time in school, when I confided in my homeroom teacher about the bullying, she offered the same perspective that I am presenting now: "Perhaps they just want to be your friends."
At that time, as a socially clueless kid, I couldn't comprehend what I was hearing. My model for human relations was simple: All human relations can be neatly separated into "friends" and "enemies". If someone wants to be your friend, they are kind to you and do fun things with you. If someone is picking on you, they are your enemy who wants you to suffer. Viewed within this framework, my teacher's words were blatantly absurd. I had no idea how to understand that, so I concluded that she was my enemy as well, trying to gaslight me into silence to avoid having to deal with me; this was the only explanation that fit into my model.
She wasn't the only one who told me that, though. My father had an anecdote to share: "there was this one guy who always picked on me, but when one day someone else tried to hurt me, he was my fiercest defender, and in the end he became my friend." This too didn't fit into my model, so... well, I couldn't exactly accuse my father of gaslighting me, so I just kinda... ignored it.
In retrospect, though, I think it's likely that both my teacher and my father were right.
Hobgoblin_of_Stillwater
1yr ago
The other kids find the presence of said weak and pathetic creature offensive and frankly a potential hit to their own place in the hierarchy. A person who eats with sinners is a sinner, and a boy who tolerates the presence of nerds is a nerd.
I'd say (based on my own experiences, as both a bullying victim and a bully) that this contempt is not even a necessary element. It's perfectly possible for a kid to gladly participate in tormenting the class's punching bag - not because the kid feels any malice towards them, but simply because it's one of the many fun things to do with your in-group, akin to sharing an inside joke. The notion that the punching bag is actually suffering doesn't really... cross the kid's mind; the kid might not even realize he's being a bully.
In fact: Bizarre as it sounds, it is possible for a bully to torment the nerd mercilessly... and, simultaneously, want to be friends with him, wondering why the nerd remains withdrawn.
Let me share a personal anecdote: For some years, I attended a school in which I was mercilessly bullied, by pretty much every boy in my class. We're talking things like tossing my clothes into the trash - things that might not warrant calling the police, but definitely cross the line of casually teasing your friends. Shortly after graduating, I found a social media site where my former classmates were commingling and chatting with each other. Out of morbid curiosity, I looked at what they were saying about me, and what I saw was this:
A: Hey, anyone remember [my name]? He always seemed to be a loner.
B: Yeah, I hoped to become closer to him, but he was always so distant. What was up with that?
"A" and "B" were two of the people who had bullied me the hardest. Apparently, what I regarded as merciless torment, they regarded as harmless roughhousing! It was hard for me to believe, actually; it seemed remarkably clueless of them. However... upon reflection, I had to admit: at other times in my life, I had been involved in bullying other people, and somehow hadn't realized what I was doing until much later. I guess the bottom line is: kids can be really, really oblivious sometimes.
By the way, although ImpassionaTwo's argument is largely weak and hardly worth debating, there is one valid point they make:
It's only nerds that think of humans as rational agents.
The nerd's limited social awareness renders him more susceptible to bullying, not just because his awkward behavior makes him a prime target for becoming the class punching bag, but also because he's unable to truly understand what is going on. The things I said above - that bullies aren't necessarily sociopathic sadists; that otherwise friendly and well-adjusted people may still bully others, and may even feel amicable towards the very same people they're tormenting - are unfathomable to a nerd who operates under a simplistic, strictly rational model of human behavior. And so, the nerd suffers under what he sees as inexplicable malice - unaware that his tormentors may be simply clueless, socially awkward in their own way, and not merely implacably evil.
Hobgoblin_of_Stillwater
1yr ago
The word is "
Hobgoblin_of_Stillwater
1yr ago
Basically every live-action series, as I don't watch them at all. So: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, CSI, Stranger Things, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Black Mirror...
Most modern Western cartoons, such as: that one with the crystal lesbians, Loud House, Gravity Falls...
Video games: Mass Effect, The Last of Us, Life is Strange, Dark Souls, Resident Evil, Doom (2016)...
Hobgoblin_of_Stillwater
1yr ago
Question about forgotten essay:
I remember coming across writings on Africa somewhere online, a year or two ago. I'm not sure if this was a single essay, or two different essays, but I remember two striking fragments:
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A description of a group of African laborers waiting (for work, or for the bus? I do not remember). The author was struck by the way these laborers could spend huge swathes of the day just waiting and doing literally nothing, save for moving themselves to stay in the shadow.
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A description of a horrifically poor African village, where the sun heat was so exhausting that the inhabitants could just barely put in enough work in the fields every day to feed themselves, and spent the rest of the day lying listlessly in their huts.
I think the same essay (or another on the same website?) also had a discussion on why African countries have so often degraded into dictatorships.
Does anyone remember what I may be talking about?
Insanely Sane
That one reminds me of Gwern's "On the Absence of True Fanatics". As well as his "Terrorism Is Not About Terror", wich concludes that "terrorism is a form of socialization or status-seeking"; if that theory is true, then conducting a one-man false-flag operation, like the one you describe, would be precisely the opposite of that, and thus is unappealing to people who might otherwise have a terrorist mindset.
For a less traditional kind of reading material, I've been reading the visual novel The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass, a mystery story released in 2021 by Trinitite Team.
The novel takes place in an office building, where an unique gem called the Sekimeiya is exhibited to the public. Suddenly, unknown assailants release knockout gas in the building. Several visitors lose consciousness, and wake up to find themselves trapped: all the exit doors are sealed shut by the tower's impregnable security system. It's a fairly typical setup for a "closed circle" mystery story. However, about a quarter of the way through Chapter 1,
This becomes the foundation of a mind-bendingly convoluted mystery, with
The developers really want you to try and solve the mystery on your own, and provide several unusual tools to do so: there's a complete transcript of every single line said in the game (which you can search by keyword or speaker), a detailed recap of every notable event, dedicated note-taking sections for each scene, and a detailed map that precisely tracks the protagonist's location at any given moment. Just reading the entire thing can easily consume over 30 hours, but re-reading it to unravel every mystery on your own is a quest is likely going to take... well, I'm maybe 5 hours into that endeavor, and I've barely started figuring things out.
Here I'll admit that, while I've read a lot of mystery stories in the past, I've never approached them "properly"; I never tried to find the answer on my own before the detective's summation -- I was perfectly content to simply read the answer and revel in the surprise of the plot twist. Sekimeiya is only my second attempt to solve a mystery properly... which is honestly an audacious choice, given its extreme complication. However, the writing is good enough that I do not mind re-reading it, and the music is high-quality as well.
Hobgoblin_of_Stillwater
1yr ago
I have recently begun reading Graham Robb's The Discovery of France, after reading a glowing review by Gwern. The book unveils a fascinating record of France around the time of the Revolution -- beyond Paris it was mostly empty tracts of countryside wilderness, punctuated with occasional microscopic hamlets. The isolated villagers rarely encountered the French government, and for the most part were happy to govern themselves, forming a hundred distinct cultures. Astonishingly, there was such a proliferation of dialects across the nation, that villagers living on opposite shores of a river could be unable to understand each other.
In fact, France would be a great setting for one of those "isolated village with secret dark local rituals" stories -- especially if you're thinking of the Alpine villages, so isolated in winter that they stored their dead on ice, on the rooftops, until the snows melted and a priest could reach the village for the funeral rites. I won't be surprised if you tell me such novels have been published in France.
Another part that particularly struck me: the description of cagots, a discriminated minority (not allowed to sit with others in the church, barred from most jobs, etcetera), who were hated for their-- well, that's the thing. They didn't fit any of the usual justifications for discrimination, didn't trigger any primal fears: they didn't belong to a specific ethnic minority, religious sect, or suffer from any particular illness. As far as anyone can tell, they were just... a completely arbitrary subset of families, a hereditary caste, hated and discriminated against for no other reason than "everyone else's doing it".
That's just a small part of the myriad of fascinating stories and trivia from the book, and I'm not even a quarter of the way through.
Hobgoblin_of_Stillwater
1yr ago
Reminds me of this short-ish essay from 2005 (?):
https://web.archive.org/web/20140508105717/http://plover.net/~bonds/objects.html
[...] My theory is that for something to attract fans, it must have an aspect of truly monumental badness about it.
[...] Once a work passes a certain basic all-round level of competence, it doesn't need the defence of fandom. It's impossible to imagine a fan of Animal Farm, the Well-Tempered Clavier, or the theory of gravity. Such works can defend themselves. But badness, especially badness of an obvious, monumental variety, inspires devotion. The quality of the work, in the face of such glaring shortcomings, becomes a matter of faith -- and faith is a much stronger bond than mere appreciation. It drives fans together, gives them strength against those who sneer. The sneers make their faith even stronger; the awfulness of the work reassures them of their belief. And so the fan groups of Tolkien, Star Trek, Spider-man, Japanese kiddie-cartoons etc. develop an almost cult-like character.
I need to stress that I'm just talking about aspects of badness; the above works all have their many admirable qualities which attract people in the first place (though in the case of Anime I'd be hard-pressed to tell you what they were).
Hobgoblin_of_Stillwater
1yr ago
Found on 4chan: AM (from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream) reads the schizophrenic rants of Francis E. Dec. Delightfully dramatic. (Warning: contains n-words.)
Hobgoblin_of_Stillwater
1yr ago
To be fair, I do like the features recently added to Google Image search: the ability to transcribe text from images, or to translate it into another language directly. They can be helpful in many cases (including, frivolous as it may be, quickly translating dialogue in Japanese fanart).
On the other hand, finding the original source of an image (a very common use case) now requires a few extra clicks, since Google Image prefers to "helpfully" offer you other images with similar content.
Hobgoblin_of_Stillwater
1yr ago
Apparently, back in the day, random aphorisms were very frequently used to fill up empty space in the corners of magazines.
And in general, so were random factoids. Here's an example from James Lileks's blog:
[Below a newspaper comic] Queen Elizabeth was the first English sovereign to use a fork
Note the little fact: one of those things newspapers used to fill up white space. I will always remember one in the Fargo Forum: “Ants will go to any lengths to get water.” Seemed rather ominous.
Hobgoblin_of_Stillwater
1yr ago
Is it possible to search for exact word matches in the Motte search box? I want to search for posts that mention "AI" without getting results for words containing "ai" (like "fail", "said", "claim").
I listen to music if I'm doing some otherwise rote, mentally unengaging task, such as transcribing text from paper. I'm pretty sure music is distracting when I'm trying to do something that requires focus. The exception, however, is digital drawing; I always listen to music while drawing, and find it's actually an important part of the process.
I have been trying to appreciate music more, as well, by closing my eyes and making an effort to closely listen to entire albums without thinking about anything else. It's an interesting experience, to be sure.
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