campfire
1mo ago
I think people interpreted my words as me being anti-monogamy. That’s not the case, I like the benefits of monogamy. I consider it a worthwhile sacrifice like going to the gym for better long-term health is. Also on a societal level it’s clearly the best arrangement. Fertility rates would plummet without it.
campfire
1mo ago
the sex is better
Yeah I don’t think this would dissuade me. Sex with the same woman, even if I really like her, feels like eating my favorite meal for dinner every day. It’s always good but at some point I might just start craving a simple Chinese takeout for novelty’s sake.
From an evo-psych perspective this also makes perfect sense: sex with another woman is almost always a positive expected fitness value-add.
I have an enormous amount of trouble understanding how anyone's response to any of this is "ah yes, let's post about my legal troubles on Youtube." I may be old.
He's a YouTuber, it wasn't just legal trouble it was to protect his image which had been tarnished, losing 60k subscribers out of 580k is massive.
barely have the time or interest to put up with/keep track of one woman at a time
Casual sex is very low-effort. Actually dating multiple women might be a nightmare but if all but one only want you for sex?
Do they? He's so far from a typical guy.
Well yes infidelity is not "typical", but the subset of men who cheat is a subset of the ones who can which is a subset of the ones who are tempted.
As promised here is:
A breakdown of the Daniel Greene-Naomi King sexual misconduct scandal
A fascinating case study in social media hysteria and gender relations. I said I'd post this Saturday but the situation kept developing since then so I waited a bit, though it appears mostly resolved in the court of public opinion by now. I did my best to be thorough but there were lots of detailed claims made by both parties involved and I couldn't be bothered to outline all of them, so let me know if there's anything important I've missed that should be added to this post. I did link archives of all relevant videos if you want to examine them yourself. You can also just skip to the end for my funny summary of the events.
First, the facts in the order they were presented to the public, without my analysis:
Daniel Greene is a Youtuber who mostly covers fantasy novels. He had 580k subscribers before his recent scandal broke last, and now sits at 521k (since I started writing this it has climbed back up to 529k). His videos regularly got 40k-120k views, he's interviewed best-selling authors like Brandon Sanderson and Joe Abercrombie, and I've heard his convention panels are regularly packed. He's published 3 novels himself and is working on a fourth. His discord sever was very active and had 17k users. He has been dating his gf Kayla Torrison since 2021 and they were engaged last September.
Naomi King is a self-described Actor, musician, author, and (as she revealed in a since-removed video this past Saturday) Vancouver sugar baby. The two had not publicly associated before this scandal broke.
In 2017, someone on Tumblr accused Greene of rape. This was mentioned in his Discord server in 2021, which he denied by saying he wasn't in the area at the time, and the incident wasn't brought up again.
On June 19th, 2023, Naomi King posted a video to YouTube where she mentions an unnamed friend took advantage of her in Vegas. She implies she had agreed to some sex acts with the friend but they went too far. She also implies that the friend had suggested they would have a relationship but they did not deliver on this after they hooked up, and that she considers this sexual assault.
In the 2-3 weeks after this, Greene took a "mental health break" from YouTube, and also froze his server. He returned on July 7th with his usual posting schedule and unfroze his server.
On February 10th, 2025 King posted a video on YouTube where she accused Daniel Greene of rape, and revealed that his lawyers had sent her a Cease and Desist letter threatening to have her social media taken down after her June 2023 video. I've shared an archive as she's since removed videos from her channel regarding the incident. Some of the text of the letter is in the video, but much is redacted. It inexplicably describes Greene as a "medical professional". Prior to the encounter that prompted this, she shared an 8-page letter with Green about the nature of their relationship which she heavily implied was platonic. She goes on to explain that he had tried talking her into having an affair with him and that she had turned him down. He had confessed, in DMs shown in the video, that "I will probably always be a cheater". But the two agreed he would visit her in Vegas where he would "spoil her like a friend" and he would spend the night with her. It was 4/20 so she had been taking 40mg edibles all day and according to her he was sober. He then allegedly forced his penis inside of her without lube, knowing she couldn't self-lubricate, and came on her "batok", which she describes as a sacred Filipino tattoo. The next morning, the two got breakfast and he paid for her tattoo, and upon getting her alone again, proceeded to allegedly sexually assault her again. After this, she sent his then girlfriend, now fiance (they are still not married as many people discussing this have claimed) a video about what happened and she responded calling them both "disgusting". The video ends with her having a panic attack and mentioning she has reported the incident to the Vegas police.
Greene was immediately condemned by many of his closest friends. Fellow Booktuber Merphy Napier made a post where she stated the claims were convincing and urged people to donate to RAINN, a charity for victims of domestic abuse. Jackson Dickert, who has <7k subscribers but hosted a mock interview show called Between Two Perns that featured guests as famous as Brandon Sanderson and Terry Brooks, posted a video where he tearfully claims he believes King and wants nothing to do with Daniel, who he had a close working relationship with. Greene's own Discord server erupted with users condemning him. There were a few dissenting voices saying people should wait to hear his side of the story, the mods banned nearly all of them for "fencesitting" or misgendering King, who someone mentioned uses they/them pronouns. They also asked people to donate to Naomi's paypal account to help pay for therapy and legal fees.
On Feb 12th, Greene posted a short video where he, very clearly reading off a lawyer-prepared script, admitted to having an affair with King but that it was fully consensual and had ample evidence to prove as much. He ends saying he'll be suing King for defamation.
On Feb 15th, King uploaded a 3rd video on the situation which, were it not preserved in an archive, is almost unbelievable. In it, she confesses to being a sugar baby (adding context to why Greene offered to "spoil her as a friend"), shares the lyrics to 3 songs she had written about him wondering if he would eventually choose her over his then-girlfriend, confesses she did sleep next to him fully naked, then proceeds to mockingly reenact the sexual assault that days prior she couldn't even discuss without crying. She admits she "did not say no" but that she did try to talk him out of sex before the 2nd alleged SA incident, where she performed oral sex on him and he came on her face while moaning he "thinks about this every time I fuck my own girlfriend". Then she admits they hung out the next day before they both flew home. She reached out to his gf Kayla and told her about what happened in a video where she tearfully confesses that she didn't want any of it and Greene and pressured her into it. The video also mentions that he had also taken edibles, contradicting her earlier statement that he was totally sober. She adds that the man mentioned in her first video was in fact Greene and that she was in contact with another woman he had sexually assaulted, which made her realize this was a pattern of behavior on his part that she had to call out.
The response to this 3rd video of King's was overwhelmingly negative towards her. The comments have likely been lost so you'll have to take my word that almost all were some version of "you're crazy and just exposed yourself" or "I believe you but this video looks REALLY bad for you, please get a therapist and a lawyer". Comparing the comments on the the first and final /r/Fantasy threads on the situation shows a similar effect. There is a MASSIVE shift in sentiment between the threads.
On February 17th, King posted a video titled I am SO SORRY. Oh my god.. It's mostly incoherent. She apologizes profusely to Daniel and Kayla for causing drama and says "I never said he raped me." This is a lie, whether she used the word rape or not she clearly said he forced his penis inside her. She adds, "I don't like this version of myself and am gonna fix it". King had uploaded an earlier version of the video that ends with the full text of the 8-page letter she had sent Greene before their affair, which she has since edited out and I cannot find.
Greene then posted a video titled Proving Naomi King Lied With Her Own Words. It delivers on its title and features Greene, his now-fiance, and his college roommate. Greene had edited the video to demonstrate how King contradicted herself in her own words, and added context to her claims. He points out that she had also given him edibles (she claims they hadn't kicked in yet by the time they had sex, but of course there's no way for her to be certain of this), and that she had specifically said she was taking 40mg of edibles at lunchtime and they only had sex at around midnight. In addition, the video she had sent Greene's gf Kayla has absolutely no mention of sexual assault according to Kayle itself, just King confessing to a consensual affair. King even mentions that she was cheated on 10 years ago, and hates herself for enabling Greene to do the same to Kayla. Texts King had sent Greene which were included in her OWN video included "Last night I said I wanted to do more BECAUSE you said you liked it" and "It seems only you are allowed to express any sort of lust". Greene then identifies the other woman who accused him of sexual assault as Madison, and his college roommate confirmed she had visited Greene in their apartment a year after the supposed rape occured and was completely cordial. He ends by asking all the creators who condemned him to issue a correction to their audiences.
On February 18th, King posted another video (which I can't find an archive of, will edit the post if I do) where she shares a phone call she had with another woman who accused Daniel of "sexual assault" in college and includes details of him just frankly being bad at sex. But worth noting she had sex with him on 4 separate occasions, despite describing even the 2nd occasion as sexual assault.
Greene then gave all his Discord mods an ultimatum to either apologize and remain or step down, and all but one stepped down. Most creators who weighed in on the issue prematurely have since issued apologies.
My scattered thoughts and analyses:
1- When it comes to SA allegations, people are still shockingly naive. Nearly 11 years after Mattress Girl's performance art and 8 since the start of #MeToo, the public still has no idea how to respond to claims of sexual assault. It doesn't surprise me at all that someone like King would accuse someone of Greene of rape, what's shocking is the alacrity with which some of his closest collaborators and the vast majority of people who viewed King's first video believed her. Since she largely exposed herself as a liar, people have been saying things like "ah his fake friends just had to get the cloutbucks from condemning him immediately, huh?" But this is an insufficient explanation for what happened. Obviously having to admit they were wrong and plugged the PayPal information of a known fraud is hugely embarrassing for them and so they wouldn't have done so if they didn't completely believe King's accounts. Anyone with even moderately sound epistemics on the issue should know that, while sexual assault is very common and supposedly only 5% of accusations are false (assuming that statistic I've heard thrown around is even true), a women who presents like King does is not >95% likely to be telling the truth. I'm going to editorialize a bit by pointing this out but: women have thousands of "icks" and "red flags" they'll list about men. There are entire social media trends built around this idea. He drives a Tesla? Likes Fight Club? Likes the Infinite Jest? Listens to Joe Rogan? Red flags, each one. I'm not even sure those are necessarily bad choices of interests to look out for. But men look for <10 in women and Naomi King seems to have most of them. She has a LOT of tattoos (including a full sleeve and almost completely covered back), multiple ear piercings including guages, shows signs of BPD, does sex work, is an actor, describes herself as nonbinary, and films her own panic attacks and crying on camera. These are all, based on what I've observed, correlated with being mentally unstable. I sort of assumed most of this was common knowledge. So what's going on here? I think part of it is that something deep in the human psyche says "when a woman cries, you have to protect her". Richard Hanania said it best.. Even other women, despite having likely experienced the way some women use crying to manipulate, were quick to jump to her defense. I also think a lot of men just don't fuck that much. Or married their high school sweatheart and haven't really experienced the dating/hookup scene. Even my limited experience helped my identify the traits I mentioned as being correlated with a) being good in bed and b) mental illness. My more sexually experienced friend also adds "is Filipina and is a nurse to the list" and King is Filipina or just very immersed in the culture (though I can't confirm the accuracy of these stereotypes). Now granted we are talking about the type of man who likes to read Malazan Book Of The Fallen. But there's gotta be a few certified GuysWhoFuck in that group right? Greene is certainly one of them. Or am I unfairly generalizing here and actually these traits aren't associated with mental illness and it's just a coincidence this one person happened to have all of them?
But that's just the surface-level observations about King, there's also her story itself which is extremely questionable even from her first two videos (the ones that, taken together, kicked off this whole scandal Greene is dealing with). Is it not extremely odd behavior to, as a single woman, share a bed with a man in a relationship who had tried pressuring you into fucking him for two years if you weren't actually planning on fucking him? Obviously the fact that she was willing to do this suggests she wanted it to happen, right? I did see one other person point this out and they were met with "wow I can't believe you're going with the 'she was wearing a short skirt so she was asking it' " defense and "I've shared beds with tons of people without raping them". As if what was described isn't orders of magnitude more suggestive than wearing a short skirt and that sharing beds with platonic same-sex friends is the same as opposite-sex friends who tried talking you into an affair. People really just think in memes. There's this idea that some men in the more patriarchal days of old would say things like "she was wearing a short skirt so she was asking for it" so people think anytime anyone remotely questions a woman's narrative it has to be shoehorned into this "wearing a short skirt so she was asking for it" meme and is therefore misguided.
And there's also the shocking naivety about drugs. Even now there are people saying things like "even if she verbally consented, it doesn't count because she was high". This is not a consistent standard anyone can uphold. Especially considering they had both taken edibles. Many couples get high and bone on a weekly basis, are we expected to believe either member can retroactively, at any point, point to one of those sessions and say “actually I was high so I couldn’t consent”? This is a ludicrous standard. There is a ton of middle ground between roofie-ing someone’s drink and raping their unconscious body and two people getting high and hooking up. Marijuana use is pretty common among Americans at 17% and surely plenty of people are having sex while high considering what an intense aphrodisiac it is ( there's even an Arctic Monkeys song about it) , and yet no almost no one is willing to push back on this?
2- Are narratives this easy to manipulate?
I wish I had posted my predictions about this story to a commitment scheme because I easily knew that these allegations were false and were the result of "the girl who didn't get picked" lashing out against "the guy that got away" even after her first two videos. It seems most people missed this. But this reminded me of Gell-Mann Amnesia. I only noticed the prevailing narrative was false because I bothered to spend a few minutes looking into the claims since I was interested in the particular Zoomer fantasy subculture. I don't have the time or willpower to do this for every claim/narrative I hear in the media (I still don't know much of anything about even the Neil Gaiman scandal), and yet I definitely internalize some of them.
Much was made of the fact that Greene sent a Cease and Desist letter in response to a video that didn't name him, many considered this immediately damning to his case. But I can't imagine why. King's video clearly provides a) a clear description of a person (a man King had played therapist for for three years who spent a few days with her in Vegas and b) a claim about what that person did (sexual assault). Obviously Greene would recognize the description matched him but that he hadn't sexually assaulted her. Even if he was innocent (as we now have very good reason to believe he is), he sent the C&D to avoid exactly the scenario that transpired. If people can't be trusted to see the truth about a simple love triangle while the evidence in right in front of them, how can they possibly be expected to come to the right consensus about claims in history, science, philosophy, and politics? We are almost all swimming in delusional narratives that we've internalized, fed to us by people with horrendous epistemics or bad actors trying to control the narratives themselves.
3- Men really aren't built for monogamy, huh?
A while ago I got into a debate with some people. I claimed, and thought it was uncontroversial, that monogamy is not most men's ideal relationship arrangement. Of course, neither is full polyamory (which involves knowing your girl is banging other men), but most men would love a relationship where their woman is exclusive to them while they can sleep with other women on the side. I was met with unanimous shock and disagreement. That "I just didn't respect women if I felt this" or accusations that I'm typical minding. But I suspect most men actually do agree with me, and the ones who claim otherwise fall into a two categories 1) Men who are sour graping. That is, they know they couldn't pull off an arrangement like this (which tbf is most men, including me) so pretend they wouldn't want it anyway. 2) Ones who "want" it instinctively but are opposed for religious reasons 3) The few who actually just disagree. Cases like Greene's seem to vindicate me. His girlfriend, Kayla, is an attractive woman (happy to cite my sources) who speaks Korean. Most men, in theory, would be happy to score even a 1st date with a woman like her. And yet he couldn't help but risk his relationship by cheating on her with a clearly unstable sex worker? This is very common pattern among famous/successful men. Maybe all it takes is the knowledge that they can repent and get away with it (she agreed to marry him following all this, after all). But clearly the impulse already had to be there. I remember some Motters experiencing envy at Gaiman's escapades when they were revealed to the press (I still don't know the details of them like I mentioned), so are we dispositionally different than the male population at large or just more honest?
4- This whole story is just funny
While I sympathize with Daniel's fiance, who had her partner's affair needlessly exposed and scrutinized by the internet, I can't help but admit the whole situation is otherwise hilarious. If some conservative culture war provocateur gave me this summary of a screenplay he was writing: Charming yet somewhat awkward and mildly woke YouTube fantasy nerd with a model girlfriend uses Black Lives Matter to slide into the DMs of a mentally unstable sex worker with full-body tattoos and guages. She talks him into cheating on his gf, partially by mentioning that as he is a bisexual man, it's normal for him to want to experience a relationship with a non-binary person such as herself despite the fact that she clearly presents as a woman. Despite all evidence that this was a jealous woman lashing out against the man who didn't ultimately pick her, the entire internet sides with her and plugs her paypal link because she's pretty and cries on camera. His close associate is an effeminate man named Jackson Dickert who has curly hair, and wears a beanie and clear-rimmed glasses. This man had been in consideration to take over parts of Daniel's channel from him, but upon being made aware of the deranged woman's accusations, immediately threw him under the bus without bothering to hear his side of the story. In Dickert's video he tearfully confesses he spent most of yesterday crying before calling his mommy who advised him to "act with integrity". He says he wants nothing to do with Daniel and urges his followers to start spaces for women (and trans and nonbinary folx ofc) to discuss fantasy without the presence of predatory men, concluding that "men who abuse women control the flow of information" (seemingly forgetting this entire scandal was kicked off by a much less successful woman posting a video on YouTube who was uncritically accepted by almost everyone).
My response would probably be: Dude, this is all way too on the nose. Everyone in this story is a caricature of what The Babylon Bee thinks progressives and woke young people are like. No one actually uses Black Lives Matter as a pickup line. And "Jackson DICKert"? I know Marvel got away with "Dr. Doom" but that was a comic book movie, bro.
And yet that's exactly what happened. Life imitates meme. Shakespeare couldn't have written a more entertaining drama.
Tagging @Pynewacket @YoungAchamian @rincer_of_wind @Fruck @malcontent who all wanted a breakdown of this.
campfire
1mo ago
I've been watching Fantasy News weekly for a while, he does have an annoying political skew (the one time he made a video on a non-fantasy book recently was to praise gay erotica writer Chuck Tingle, and supported the needless race-swapping of The Wheel of Time show) but it was the best summary of the state of the genre and publishing ecosystem on YouTube. Admittedly, he's also responsible for me and many other Zoomers reading the Wheel of Time, which is one of my biggest inspirations as a writer.
I’ve been following this situation closely because while I wasn’t a fan of his, he was a big source of my reading recommendations since the pandemic and I hope to be a published writer myself someday. Is there any interest in a breakdown of the situation? On the one hand I’m one of a handful of people on the internet who is actually seeing the big picture here (mainly because every major platform including his discord is banning anything mildly skeptical of the girl who accused him) and it does have some culture war implications, on the other hand it’s very niche drama from a particular subculture.
EDIT: Message heard, breakdown coming tomorrow morning
EDIT2: Naomi posted a second video where she contradicts herself and adds new context to the first (all of which actually makes her look worse) so I'll need more time for this writeup.
campfire
2mo ago
They're widely condemned among economists for good reason. Most econ grad students can cite 7-8 exceptions but these aren't outweighed by the economic costs or don't apply to already developed nations. Best case scenario is that they're just used as threats to receive other concessions.
campfire
2mo ago
Anthony Jeselnik is great, his jokes pretty much all follow the same bait-and-switch format, but they always land, the bit on Eric Clapton's son always gets me
campfire
2mo ago
There was an ACX book review submission (never posted on the blog as it wasn't a finalist) on The Wheel of Time, anyone have a link to it? It was part of a larger word doc compilation IIRC.
campfire
2mo ago
How do they get away with just not working? Does Amazon not track every click you make on a work computer?
campfire
2mo ago
These books made me better at British history than 99.9% of American middle schoolers. The Slimy Stuarts stands out as an especially entertaining entry.
In my opinion, it's relatively easy to "debunk" materialism. I'd recommend watching Bernardo Kastrup's playlist, he's the leading proponent of Idealism these days. In his version, which he calls Analytic Idealism, consciousness is essentially all there is, and matter is a phenomenon of consciousness instead of the other way around. This is the view I subscribe to now. Some version of this view has popped up throughout human history and across cultures, it's arguably the mainstream view amongst the more philosophical strands of Hinduism (like Advaita Vedanta), Kabbalah has some overlap, the German Idealists mostly believed this (especially Schopenhauer who wrote clearly enough to remove any doubt about the content of his beliefs). Unsure how respected Kastrup is in academia, but he's definitely the person responsible for popularizing it in the last 10 years. Philip Goff is another recommended watch, his interview on Alex O'Connor's channel makes his case for panpsychism, a slightly different view that is essentially physicalism but with the caveat that consciousness is an inherent property of matter and not an emergent property of the interactions between certain sorts of matter. I think this view requires more assumptions than analytic idealism so I don't subscribe to it. That being said, it does address some of the major problems with materialism.
The basic case for Analytic Idealism goes a bit like this (this is far from a rigorous philosophical proof but it will suffice for now, will try to answer any questions about it):
- We should prefer monism to dualism because it requires strictly fewer assumptions. Any dualist ontology has to explain how two fundamentally different substances interact with each other according to a set of laws, which suggests they might actually be the same substance.
- That leads us to the question of what the fundamental substance of the universe is, for which matter/energy and consciousness/spirit are the two leading candidates, where one has to be a phenomenon of the other
- The mainstream scientific view is materialism, the view that matter is the fundamental substance (FS), and consciousness is a phenomenon of matter. This leads to the Hard Problem of Consciousness as you mentioned. As I'll explain, I don't think the Hard Problem of Consciousness is a real problem that humans need to solve, just a problem for Materialism as a worldview. It's like saying "the Hard Problem of Geocentrism is explaining why Mercury is in retrograde if the Sun revolves around the Earth". The answer is that the assumption is wrong, the sun does not revolve around the Earth.
- The main problem with materialism is that epiphenomenalism, one of its corollaries, doesn't have any good explanation for it. Epiphenomenalism is the view that physical events produce consciousness, but because physical events are all that occur (under materialism), consciousness itself has no impact on physical events. But if consciousness doesn't "do" anything, there doesn't seem to be any reason why we should be conscious. If seeing a tiger produces a feeling of fear, and the fear triggers a response (us running away), then it makes perfect evolutionary sense why we're conscious (to experience fear, for example). But if the process of the photons bouncing off a tiger, hitting our eyes, triggering an electrochemical response that leads to our leg muscle fibers twitching is sufficient, the fear we experience is just there for no reason. This is where physicalists tend to disagree with me. They are content to say that the electrochemical response in the brain that eventually leads to us running away simply is the felt sense of fear. Why should this particular physical process also be a qualia whereas, say, a clock ticking isn't? It's not even clear what in principle we could discover that would explain this sudden appearance of 1st-personness from 3rd person phenomena.
- If Analytic Idealism, the monist view that consciousness is all there is, and matter is a phenomenon of consciousness, doesn't have an equivalently hard-to-explain problem, we should prefer it to materialism. The Idealist equivalent to the hard problem of consciousness is the Hard Problem of Matter: if reality is fundamentally consciousness, shouldn't there only be a single "self" and not seemingly separate selves? This is nowhere nearly as problematic because we have an example of a single field of consciousness segmenting itself already: dreams. In your dreams, a single field of consciousness (your mind) localizes a "self" within itself that experiences phenomena as being external to it. We can extrapolate that it's possible for a universal field of consciousness to segment itself into selves that perceive themselves as separate from each other.
- Therefore, the most likely ontology is Analytic Idealism
Something else worth considering are theories of personal identity. Who are you really? And what makes you you as opposed to anyone else? This link does a great job of summarizing the three primary categories of views: Closed Individualism (CI), Empty Individualism (EI), and Open Individualism (OI). The last of which I subscribe to now. OI takes the position that there is a single self. Every experience in the universe is experienced by this Universal Subject. It should be worth noting that these views are ontology-agnostic. This video by the late Mario Montano makes the case that Open Individualism should be the default perspective under physicalism as well as Idealism. Practically what this means is that "you", that is, your deepest identity and not just the one associated with the human reading this now, will never die. But you should live as if everyone is you, that is, the difference between you and your father and a dog and your worst enemy isn't meaningfully different than the difference between you on your last birthday and you on your next birthday. Torturing your worst enemy is the moral equivalent of torturing your future self.
I'll second @Magusoflight 's suggestion that you look into NDEs. In particular, I can recommend the book Why An Afterlife Obviously Exists by Jens Amberts. It makes the case that NDEs are evidence of an afterlife because:
- Hundreds of millions of people have had them
- Pretty much everyone who has had one comes to believe in an afterlife
- No religious group is more likely to experience them
- There is a lot of overlap in their phenomenology and semantic content
One thing that stands out is just how profoundly meaningfully they feel. Just as your friends feel more "real" than the characters you meet in your dreams, the entities people meet in NDEs feel like the closest, most intimate friends, that they've known for an eternity. If the primary purpose of the brain isn't to produce consciousness, but to sustain the ego in attachment to our bodies, then it seem plausible that NDEs, which occur during periods of extremely low brain activity, are peaks at what the afterlife.
As to what I believe, there's things I'm sure of and others that are more speculative. I'm 100% sure consciousness does not end at death. Reincarnation in the traditional Hindu sense, I think, is plausible but unlikely (20%). But what really inspires me is the evolution of humanity. It seems implausible that one species of mammals can so dramatically develop their understanding of the universe that they can bend the world to their will and improve their lives by leaps and bounds without being somehow divinely ordained. So if I had to integrate all of these observations into a single belief system, it might look something like this: We are all God in potential. The purpose of life and history, the telos of the universe, is for God to develop a fuller understanding of itself to reach increasingly more intense, wonderful states of being. To approach what Plato called The Form Of The Good. Everything we do is, in some twisted sense, in service of this goal. Failure in this life can be a temporary setback. But with intelligence and perseverance, and a deeper understanding of our shared being, all will eventually taste the fruits of heaven.
campfire
3mo ago
Sorry, doesn't answer your question, but would you be comfortable sharing how much your current job pays and how you got into it?
campfire
3mo ago
Yeah I've since familiarized myself with the original more. But a major deviation this remake made is (not a spoiler because it's in the first scene) Ellen and Orlock have been in contact since she was a teenager, through a telepathic link of some sort, which started when she prays for "a guardian angel, a spirit of comfort" and he's been haunting her dreams ever since.
campfire
3mo ago
Can answer as a 2nd gen for good measure
- I couldn't, maybe very broadly North or South but tons of room for error
- Fairly confident with the more common last names (Patels are Gujurati, Singhs are from the Punjab region or around there) otherwise I couldn't
- Among 2nd gens I know, nonexistent. Among 1st gens (according to my father and some family friends who work in tech), Hindi speakers are sometimes a bit cliquey, though this really does seem to boil down to language more than any North/South enmity
- Basically couldn't
- My mom's family is Tamil so I know Iyer/Iyengars are Brahmin but that's about it (neither of my parents are Brahmin)
- Among 2nd gens, nonexistent. My father works in tech and is very dark skinned and has also never faced any caste-based discrimination in America. Mother is very lightskinned and other immigrants have never mentioned each other's caste to her either.
- I only speak English so N/A
- Among 2nd gens not at all, 1st gens yes some linguistic lines
- Among 2nd gens (and 1st according to my father), not at all
campfire
3mo ago
I mostly liked Nosferatu, Robert Egger's new remake of the 1922 German silent film, but I think I had the wrong expectations for it which hampered my enjoyment. As I'm not very familiar with the original, I expected Orlok to be more subtle, charming, seductive. But instead the movie uses every filmmaking trick in the book to make you realize Orlok is the most evil man alive before you even see his depravity on display. Plotwise it's very generic and lacks true dramatic tension, even when the visuals are incredibly gripping. But it's worth watching for the cinematography alone. On the big screen, nearly every shot is very cinematic and the movie just has an intense, psychic, propulsive energy to it. The first film in years I'm considering a second theater viewing of.
Thematically, it seems to argue that women have the undue burden of taming the darkness in men, but are also very attracted to this darkness. There's also a hint of exploring the limits of modern science to diagnose our spiritual maladies, though most of these ideas are underexplored in service of delivering a captivating creature feature. Still, manages to deliver this great quote from Willem Dafoe's mystic character, Franz:
campfire
3mo ago
Just started The Way of Kings for the first time myself, it's tough avoiding spoilers on social media. Initial thoughts are that the spren are very goofy and Kaladin's depression isn't as effective a plot point as it would be if he weren't already an incredible soldier and surgeon. The worldbuilding seems cool though.
campfire
3mo ago
Curious what this is?
The basics are to take her two different bars, one quieter where you can have a "real" conversation and beat her at pool or connect 4, then a second louder one where she's forced to lean in to hear you speak which gives you good kino opportunities. Look for some favorite media you have in common or if you have a pet and she's interested in meeting them and use that as a link to invite her home. If she says she has to leave ask her if she wants to listen to music in your car and kiss her, you'll likely seal the deal on a second date. But like I said most men who are failing are making mistakes that I can point out, it varies a lot but usually has to do with coming off too polite and like you're putting too much effort into getting her out which screams desperation and that you have too much time on your hands. To identify any other mistake would take a longer conversation.
I couldn't disagree more, whatever "progressive brownie points" you'll get from "believing a victim" do not outweigh having to apologize for asking your followers to donate to a hysterical person that accused your friend when you couldn't even be bothered to wait for that friend's response. In a video that will live on your channel forever as a reminder of your foolishness. Even right after the accusations were made they should have calculated that they could get almost as many progressive brownie points if King produced more evidence or Greene was silent for 10 days (which is borderline an admission of guilt). They would not have jumped to condemn him if they didn't believe the allegations.
More options
Context Copy link