JTarrou
6mo ago
I disagree. Value can only come from within.
My philosophy is that value is created by sacrifice.
Things, people, institutions, are only worth what people give up to get them.
To become a better man, a greater man, you must find more to sacrifice. This is why the ancients burned their children, the ultimate evolutionary sacrifice.
There is no objective value in the Universe. The universe does not care.
Only our subjective experience imputes value to the randomness of nature.
And our subjective experience grants value to those things we give the most to get. By definition. That which is easily attainable is not valuable. Value is scarcity. Suffering is cheap. Making it produce something positive is hard.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Is it too late to save your marriage? Do you even want to?
Barring some highly unlikely miracle scenarios involving lightning strikes, brain tumors or religious conversion, I think so. And yes, yes I would. I would and have given damn near anything to make it work. We don't control other people. We can only control what we do in response.
You're concentrating so much on the pain and so little on the life.
Life is pain.
Everyone is in pain, but not everyone is using it well. Exercise and getting fat both hurt. When you understand the Myth of Sisyphus, you understand the universe.
As to plans, I figure it will probably take me a few months to get everything in order for a clean break. It's a lot of work, especially in secret. I expect to be ready to file mid-summer.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Ok depressives, hop in.
For once on this forum, I'm really going through it in my personal life. Been a tough winter. Grandparents are dying in slow motion. Marriage is imploding. PTSD is acting up. Even broke down and went to the VA to see a therapist. That was back in January, they've scheduled me to see someone to evaluate whether I should talk to a therapist sometime in May. You know, normal bureaucracy.
I'm in my mid forties and my life is coming apart at the seams.
But lads, this is my year. One way or another, it's going to end better than it began. As bad as things are right now, I am entirely confident in my ability to turn it around.
To psych myself up a bit, I want to talk about my luckiest day. The real hinge point in my life. The reason I'm talking to all of you, or to anyone at all. A dummy-rigged IED just outside Iskandaria nearly twenty years ago.
Just wasn't injured badly enough. Hadn't planned on living. I was clawing my way up the ranks of the pointy bit of the US imperial project. The whole point was to get as high as possible before my luck ended and I bled out in some dingy alleyway or Afghan hillside. My luck though, was even better.
By a combination of the vast sums of money America spends on protecting its troops, and the inferior grade explosives used by the Iraqis, the rocket that should have killed me by any rights instead fizzled. I was left “disabled”, but not enough to feel sorry for myself about. Given the options, of course.
A lot changed that day. My career was over, and with it identity and status. I wasn't going to get to die. I was going to have to live, broken. And be a civilian. Took me a few years to get my head around it. The plan was always live fast, die young.
I had to change. Adapt. Re-orient. Re-motivate. Learn new skills. I spent twenty-five years becoming someone, and then I had to become someone else.
I gotta say, it's been excellent. Even with current troubles, I've had another twenty years with my grandparents, reconciled with my parents, seen my siblings grow up and grow families of their own. Met a great woman, and we had ten good years. I've been happier (and sadder) than I ever thought possible at twenty-five.
This is all bonus round for me. I should have died a long time ago. I've been hurt worse, I've rebuilt from less.
Yes, it sucks right now. Currently at “forcing myself to leave the house” stage, and started crying in public at my boot guy's place yesterday. It's gonna be a long year, but I'll get there.
Life is pain, anyone tells you different is selling something.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Saying men have a competitive advantage over women in physical sport is the same as saying blacks are genetically uncivilized?
Not sure you want to nail that comparison to your mast.
restricting a right
Which right is that, exactly?
JTarrou
6mo ago
They're not China, they're Canada.
Politically irrelevant backwater just north of an actual powerful country. Being "progressiver-than-thou" about Britain is Scotland's national identity. Just another not-really-a country making stupid laws to stick it to The Man (meaning the people who protect their borders and fund their government).
JTarrou
7mo ago
The question is whether they want to reduce the incidence of rape or if they want to lecture men who are not rapists.
The answer is in their behavior and rhetoric.
JTarrou
7mo ago
Achievement is always zero-sum. We only respect and feel the power of things that other people cannot or will not do. The magnitude of an achievement is directly proportional to the number of people who have failed.
What the people whining for easy mode are trying to do is co-opt the social cachet of the skill required to beat a hard game at a lower investment in time/ability.
JTarrou
7mo ago
On one level, it's a silly, ridiculous political "scandal" for a slow news week.
On another, there is a lot of signaling going on there, on both sides. Politics isn't about politics, and this is as valid a battleground as any. It is interesting to see the positions being taken.
Boosting a niche thing like trans awareness over the prime holy day for (supposedly) 65% of the country is a little on the nose from a public relations standpoint. Christian-bashing has become so prevalent on the left that they sometimes forget it's a majority of the country they look down on.
JTarrou
7mo ago
Not what I was asking.
You said the "bloodbath" quote was "less of a lie" than the election one. Now, in context, that refers to 2020. Now you say 2000?
You were comparing Trump to Al Gore, and positively? That reframes the whole thing!
JTarrou
7mo ago
I'd settle for a humanity with the ability to tie shoes and sit on a toilet properly. But like God before me, I am doomed to disappointment.
JTarrou
7mo ago
You know the option where a guy is altruistically helping others? That doesn't happen. Go with the other one.
JTarrou
7mo ago
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Open your eyes.
You can see, and you can breathe. So move.
If you can move, stretch.
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Open your eyes.
You can see, you can breathe, you can move.
If you can do all those things, speak your own name.
Loud or quiet, say your true name. The secret one.
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Open your eyes.
You can see and breathe and move and speak.
You know who you are.
If you know who you are, you know what to fix.
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Open your eyes.
You can see, breathe, speak and move.
You have identity and purpose.
You can work, you can communicate, you can fight.
In that order.
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Open your eyes.
Now: Begin again.
JTarrou
7mo ago
Well, this is the previous "sex dolls" from PD2
Sounds to me like projection
JTarrou
7mo ago
Let me illustrate by talking about a game that I was very interested in, bought, and turned out to be shit. This has nothing to do with SBI directly.
For those who don't know, the Payday series is co-op crime shooters, think first-person GTA without cars and with friends. You get heists, objectives to complete, you can do stealth or go loud etc.
Payday 2 was excellent, it still has a strong playerbase despite being released over a decade ago. I played quite a bit of it.
So they announced Payday 3 and I was ready. The initial guff I got from beta testers was that teh game was a bit janky (somewhat to be expected) and the female models had gotten ugly. There were a couple people whining about "diversity" and shit, but nobody really cared if the game was good.
Narrator voice: The game was not good. They made it permanently online, meaning you had to be connected to their servers, even to play alone. You needed a new launcher and a special Starbreeze account. And their servers didn't work. And the whole structure of the game was just......bad. It wasn't fun or engaging. Just a joyless grind-fest with no rewards. If you could even get in to play it, which you couldn't for the first three weeks of release. The relative fatness of the female characters was the least of anyone's worries. Frankly, the models weren't that bad.
The playerbase cratered after an initially decent start. Within a few weeks, the number of people playing had dropped 99%.
According to SteamDB, Payday 3 has a 24-hour peak of just 378 players compared to Payday 2's 31,866
The CEO of Starbreeze just lost his job for his role in this abortion.
And yet, lots of people who didn't play the game defend it against people who did by claiming that they just hate diversity.
It's not about the uglier female models. That's just a symptom of a deeper problem. When you see that in a game, it indicates that the game wasn't meant to be good, it was meant to tick the DEI boxes. IDGAF about the female models in isolation, but I have a very strong association between obvious political choices in games and shit games. I gave the game a shot, ignoring the trolls whining about unimportant things like how fat the females are now.
Now I'm out forty bucks and I have a game that is worse in every single playable way than its predecessor. Because the studio decided that chubbing up the female models was more important than making sure the servers were functional for a permanently online game.
DEI, not even once.
https://www.ign.com/articles/starbreeze-ceo-out-after-payday-3-disaster
JTarrou
7mo ago
It's never really come up.
Let me use a sports analogy. Tomorrow, you're going to get revenge on someone in a game of tennis. You've never played a game, not one. Your opponent is the worst professional tennis player in the world, ranked dead last. How you feeling about your chances?
Thanks for the sympathy.
I am lucky, in many ways. I could think of it all as bad luck, but that ignores the full range of possibilities. I know how bad things can actually get, and complaining about my relationships on the internet from my climate-controlled townhouse is far from the worst possible outcome.
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