gattsuru
4d ago
That's a necessity to be hosted on Royal Road, I think (without being age-gated, but it's been a while since I checked)
There are at least some adult content works on Royal Road that do not have any serious age-gating: Blue Core is an example (cw: painfully straight tentacles-on-woman, imo mid-but-complete work). They do have warnings that are moderately well-enforced, but I would not give a pre-teen random access to the site.
gattsuru
6d ago
I agree with you on the assassination attempt side: along with the various procedural faults and failures to analyze or punish the source of those procedural faults, the post-incident review has not gone well.
On the other...
Anyway, I still don't know why I'm supposed to care so much which one of these two candidates wins. Biden would do some things to hurt democracy, would support Ukraine a bit more, would support Israel a bit less, and would yell at Russia more. Trump would do some things to hurt democracy, would support Ukraine a bit less, would support Israel a bit more, and would yell at China more. The economy would muddle along without either one being able to do much more than just cheerlead when it's good and shift blame when it's bad. Biden would make certain kinds of mouth noises about immigration through the southern border, Trump would make a different kind of noises. At the end of the day probably not much would change because the president has limited power over the issue and Americans like cheap burritos and construction work, and companies like to hire the people who make it possible.
Neither candidate is someone I could imagine ever voting for. Both parties deeply, fundamentally disgust me in different ways. Biden would make one group of annoying people online scream that the world is ending, Trump would make a different group of annoying people online scream that the world is ending. As before, the Internet outrage would overrepresent the kind of person who spends a lot of time online writing about politics and would fail to capture the fact that in the "real world", most Americans don't really care that much about politics.
The only way I can think of that either candidate could truly screw things up as president is by getting into a major war with Russia and/or China. And, while Trump's legacy in office is more peaceful than Biden's, the combination of Biden's restraint from actually directly intervening in Iran, Israel, or Ukraine and Trump's volatile chest-pounding, boomercon love of Israel / hate of Iran, and anti-China rhetoric leaves me not entirely convinced that Trump would actually be less likely to go to war. I do think Trump is probably a bit less likely to go to war, but it's not enough to make me want to go vote for him.
If Trump is somehow actually significantly leading in polls with the election a month away, despite the usual rioting and screaming about fascism from Dem-aligned news outlets that we'll probably see next year, we will be in for an interesting outcome though if Biden wins anyway. I doubt that it would be enough to make the True Trump Patriots (tm) actually get up off their couches and do anything with their gun collections other than post pictures of them online, but who knows.
I think that in reality if elected Trump would probably just spend all day tweeting and failing to implement his promises. However, to many Democrats it is almost as if Trump is a Lovecraftian god the mere mention of whom leads to insanity. Such Democrats view him as some sort of annihilating force the very presence of which in the universe warps and endangers the sane, wholesome building blocks of existence itself. Meanwhile I just see a fat old huckster sociopath who talks a lot of shit but is effectively restrained by checks and balances. Not a savory person, maybe even a rapist, pretty certainly a bad guy, but not some sort of fundamental essential threat to the entire being of American democracy or to sanity.
It is not that I do not believe in evil. But I do find it odd when liberals perceive demonic evil in Trump, yet make excuses for vicious violent criminals (at least, as a class if not always individually) who are enabled by Democrats' soft-on-crime policies.
Would Trump do many harmful things in office? I am sure. Harris would as well. Which one would do more, who knows? I do not see a clear-cut answer to that question. He certainly would be no angel, I am sure of that. But it also seems to me that often, vehement anti-Trump sentiment has little to do with a clear-eyed assessment of the possible harms that he would cause.
What explains the particular mind-shattering power that Trump somehow inflicts on so many of his political opponents? Interestingly, it largely do not seem to be his actual political counterparts among the Democrat elite who view him as an eldritch destroyer of worlds... the Democrat elite may hate him, may despise him, may say that he is a threat to democracy, but I don't think I can remember any time that any of them acted as if he was a threat to one's very psychological foundation. Maybe their power and their close understanding of American politics generally inoculates them against such a reaction.
gattsuru
6d ago
Yeah, the second edition of Wolf's book got significant scrutiny because it assumed convictions for sodomy were solely due to sodomy, even where they often revolved around other serious acts (though 'Victorian' England commuted even these crimes to prison sentences in nearly all cases).
There's some risk to overcorrection here -- there were executions for consentual adult sodomy as late as 1835, albeit extremely rare and controversial in their time; there were pressures for people to play up likely-consensual overtures as not when caught; there were social reasons that older men were presumed to be 'converting' and coercing 'youths' and recorded as doing that for young adults -- but it's hard to overstate how much of a mess the scholarship is.
gattsuru
6d ago
There's at least competition for worse, though I'll admit the spoilers and overall 'Graphics Art Is My Passion' feeling is worse with the one you link.
gattsuru
7d ago
That's really neat.
It's just at the napkin stage, now, and I don't yet have the programming chops to pull it off. But there's some fun ideas happening in this sphere, and while it'll be a long while before I'm even thinking about that level of design, it's a good way to keep motivation to learn.
I'm still looking for low profile glasses with a decent HUD, maybe those are worth a try?
With the caveat that I've only had them in my hands a day so far, depends a lot on what tradeoffs you're wanting to make, and what your use case is.
The One Lites are lightweight and surprisingly bright, but adjustability is mediocre, especially for very large or very small IPDs. The resolution is about the max of what's relevant for the field of view, but the field of view isn't great (~45ish degrees diagonal), and the lower framerate compared to the Pros or XReals newer offerings is noticeable for gaming (and fixing a virtual object in real space while the user's head is moving). No AR glasses are going to be stylish, but while the birdbath-style optics and Temu-brand sunglasses don't scream 'geek' as much as a Moverio set, the thick frames still look weird (arguably weirder) indoors and the newer generations with waveguide optics are thinner and better quality. The diopter settings are nice if you're nearsighted, but they can't handle astigmatism and you'll still need prescription lenses if you want to see the world too.
That said, it's really hard to beat the price, especially with the very robust used market going around.
It's not a standalone device, so if you're wanting a HUD outside of the office or a commute they're not easy to use. I don't have a compatible smartphone, and compatibility is complicated with any of these glasses. Viture sells a neckband style mini-computer, and it's supposedly pretty lackluster in about every way. Most (Thunderbolt-equipped) laptops work, but if you want to use a desktop computer or raspberry pi it can get more complicated -- the Pro Dock is very heavily built to handle some goofiness with the Nintendo Switch, but it might be useful for some of those cases and isn't an awful deal.
Dedicated devices like the Even Realities stuff might be better if you want an ultrasimple HUD that connects to your phone, and they're low enough profile that I could see them in a normal eyeglasses store, though in turn they're supposed to be a nightmare for hobbyists to develop anything serious around, and the screen specs are (intentionally) pretty crap.
gattsuru
7d ago
Kinda. I've done a proof of concept that was just a rangefinder using a monochrome SPI oled and some plastic lenses and a different time-of-flight chip, and that did have longer range than this layout will (although you start running into eye safety issues trying to exceed 50m). This one's more intent to be closer-range (the spec sheet says four meters and that's being generous), but gives a reasonable depth map across a wide field of view. Assuming I can get the data off the chip anywhere near the right speeds, the next step's going to be trying to get this into a wiregrid map overlaid on the user's field of view.
If that works with a low enough latency that it doesn't cause an Exorcist revival, mid-term goal is to try to use that map to project virtual desktops or graphics to solid objects, first from a fixed viewer position and then as the user moves.
Most of the current implementations for that sorta stuff depend on fidicuaries like AprilTags (or QR codes) and thus visual-light cameras that have a wide variety of privacy concerns, or solely handle angular heading. I don't think all of what I want to try will work -- these glasses near-universally give up on pinning virtual items in absolute position to the user for reasons, as anyone that's tried to integrate IMU data into position will tell you -- but there's a bunch of things you can do if you're willing to give up the general case and might work.
gattsuru
7d ago
There has been some, though it's both indirect and likely to be low-impact outside of the courts.
Some amount of it's probably just that Trump isn't very pro-gun, and doesn't really want to spend the political capital on it. Same reason that he's not drawing a lot of lines in the sand for abortion law. Some amount is probably procedural -- as much as the lawfare is being rough for DOGE, most of what DOGE's going after doesn't have the nice clear-line text, while a lot of the ATF funding does, or it has civil service protections in a way that's harder to argue violates separation of powers -- similar to how Brigadia v. Buttigeg wasn't going to get settled before (and likely not after) it got renamed. Some of it's that the malefactors don't have names, where even someone that obsesses over trying to identify specific bad actors or bad behaviors just gets organization or sections or groups that would need a forensic accountant and a lot of luck to actually figure out who called the code red made decisions.
Some of it's just the scope of the problem, in the same way that Trump isn't throwing the FBI out despite the arguments in favor. It's one thing to bite the bullet on throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's another to actually take that process on, at this scale.
gattsuru
7d ago
... arguably? (cw: no actual wing-wong, but still NSFW)
Gay4pay as a genre also attracts just masc-looking guys who are pals with guys, but there is significant crossover workforce from the het side of the aisle, including people that are pretty clearly more into the het fuckery. A lot of them focus on solo work (eg, the squirrel guy), but the difference in pay is significant, and modern chemistry can do a lot to keep an erection going even if physical interest isn't there.
((There's a handful of pieces that involve gay-focused actors who are gay-focused in their personal lives having heterosexual pairings-or-more, though for a variety of reasons that's a far less common kink.))
The line gets fuzzy and definition-focused: you can argue a strict definitional no-het-would-stick-their-dick-in-a-dude, and I'm sure at least a few are either self-closeted, or playing it up for the viewers. On the flip side, I know enough people that thought they were bi and then found out that it wasn't working for them once they actually got another dude involved in person (and a few that thought they were bi until they got a woman involved in person), and while that occasionally fails around the physical bits not working out, it's as or more often something where only the mechanics work.
gattsuru
7d ago
Trivially, I was bisexual or gay for the better part of a decade before I entered even the most expansive definition of MSM, and that's as someone that was a pretty late bloomer when it came to having any interests.
gattsuru
7d ago
For a more recent example, if lower-stakes, I'll point to Julia Serano. She was, for quite a long period of time, the go-to example in the ratsphere of a Real Feminist who Cared About Everyone. And then it turned out that her work about not dismissing the perspectives of other people was really about not "dismissing perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups".
gattsuru
7d ago
Been absolutely swamped between work and volunteer work, but on the hobbyist side, finally got in rev0.2 of a carrier board for this thing, along with a used pair of these. I was holding off on hope for the L9s (release date: soon), but given some of the issues rev 0.1 hit and the amount of other work needed to glue these two things together, it's probably best to try at a smaller scale first anyway.
gattsuru
8d ago
Sorry, I did not take this as an accusation about me, and did not mean to imply any such accusation. I’m more trying to motion about how both performative and genuine surprise at the malefactors on one’s own side is fairly common, and that distinguishing the two can be tricky even for shock or ‘shock’ at an opponent.
gattsuru
8d ago
There's a lot of information that gets messy when you try to get more than surface-deep into it. There was a big deal about a USAID grant for 45m to Burma/Myanmar scholarships after DOGE tweeted about it, and these are things you can look up!...
But while there's some funny punchlines involved, it doesn't really tell you that much. IIE got the grant -- which is better than some cases, since domestic grantees in some categories can receive anonymity -- but outside of some joking-not-joking CIA links, that doesn't actually mean much. They're 'just' a cutout, and while they've got a lot of staff, their day staff aren't the ones doing most of the actual spending and day-to-day education stuff.
You can kinda piece together a rough outline by seeing who publicly announces that they've gotten onto a grant with similar numbers around the same time, but even a lot of that falls off the internet pretty quick. It's really easy to go full Pepe Silvia, too.
gattsuru
10d ago
I'm pretty sure I get the joke. What I'm interested in seeing is whether it's a joke in the 'ha ha, I'm going to act the exact opposite of this' sense, or in the 'ha ha, I'm going to be extra wounded if someone notices a pattern' sense.
If you'd rather we spend three posts getting to the point where you can even recognize the "or does this mean anything?" part of my post above, I think that illustrates a lot of why I'd comment the way I did.
gattsuru
10d ago
If you find a conservative-leaning individual that actually believes the Republican Party and broader right wing is low on people who were likable but turned out to act as though "sinecures are more important than ideology, the country, the debt, everything", please point them to me. I can come up with a pretty wide list of once-loved (among soccons) conservative politicians and speakers that turned out quite willing to sell their movement up a creek, sometimes for embarrassingly few pieces of silver light grift.
gattsuru
11d ago
Because I’ve looked at your profile page:
yes I’m addicted to downvotes every time I get one it’s like a bump of that sweet smoking gun and yes I’m into BDSM let me get into my St. Andrew’s real quick and then you can call me a troll until your throat hurts.
( I don’t downvote lightly, and this haven’t done so here yet.)
gattsuru
11d ago
I don't think we know, or can know, what people would do in a vacuum. Your question was how people would react without the Times writing those two articles, not about a world where the Times didn't and hadn't existed as the paper of record for literal lifetimes and spent much of that time both papering over this sort of behavior, and stigmatizing any organization that would report on it.
The Times isn't the only part of that, or even the biggest part, fair. But that just kicks the problem up one level. Whether you call the ecosystem that the Times swims in and creates a conspiracy or prospiracy or The Free Market Modulo All The Law And Gov Funding Involved, it's still a giant machine of giant machines, often heavily coordinated, of which many or most of its components have explicit or not-exactly-vino-veritas recognition of what they're doing and how they're coordinating with other components. The degree to which that might be coordinated or naturally evolved is an interesting question, though one that I think has far more evidence against your position than you'd expect, but it's still besides the point. A machine that evolved fully organically is still a machine that would be fully compatible with :
Because while they'll only read a hackernews thread about TW's article once, they'll have heard the counter-narrative a million times, and will be sick of mustering the mental resources to reply critically with half-remembered anecdotes in the face of emotional blackmail. Eventually they'll forget they ever questioned the need for DEI programs, because only maga Nazis think that. The majority of people will never even see it once because reddit moderators deleted every mention of the article from the default subs, and banned the people who linked it.
So don't count on the familiar manipulation tactics failing forever just because it doesn't seem to be working right now. There is still an enormous propaganda engine manufacturing public opinion, and if I was in charge I'd make fighting it a high priority. But the current counter-elite supporting Trump dismiss that arm of the cathedral as opportunistic mercenaries, and fail to recognize the threat.
A fully headless organization could still produce a million articles about the counter-narrative that had the exact same notes, they could still aim massive amounts of emotional blackmail through every available institution, they could call everyone that disagreed with them maga nazis, they could still ban a ton of people who try to link things.
And that makes it pretty clear that whether or not Jesweez was acting in good faith -- perhaps they haven't seen any mainstream media coverage on this topic, or haven't read any of the actual coverage, or prosaically don't realize the ramifications of the words they're using -- they either don't or shouldn't actually believe their claim that this literally just "a few people you disagree with in a comment section."
gattsuru
11d ago
Yeah, I've got a small genre of posts just for this sort of stuff, followed by places where the administration swore it wasn't going to do something, waited for the court case to end, and then did it anyway. This was this week, and I didn't even have to go searching for it. There's a million ways to talk about how all of these cases are tots different and there's some line that absolutely wasn't drawn by a Texas Sharpshooter, but the idea that this is terra nova is laughable.
gattsuru
11d ago
Actually, now that I think about it, I think if Trump supported the LGBT population, was pro-sex education, or something else very much so not socially conservative, I believe it’d do it.
Those are some interestingly selected examples. Let me go grab a big drink of water and -
... are you intentionally trying to channel Darwin levels of being wrong for the engagement, or does this mean anything?
gattsuru
11d ago
There is another possible outcome. Can you see the one you are missing?
The trouble with making this argument is that at some point you have to actually make the argument, not just snark about it. I don't think you have, and I don't think you can, and I don't think the foremost advocates can or will.
gattsuru
11d ago
Reddit's going to Reddit whether or not NYT posts that kind of article. Reddit would not Reddit in this way if the NYT posted a front page news article specifically highlighting how this particular claim was not just true, but clearly documented and well-established basic fact. Don't get me wrong, they might do something different, but barring a pretty specific sort of Darwianian troll, most of this type of personality doesn't like to actively invite people to correct them, and despite Reddit-the-org's best efforts the sort of personality who get aroused at the opportunity to post a one-line link debunking someone, regardless of political alignment, is not zero.
The 'prospiracy vs conspiracy' model falls apart when we're talking an organization the size of the Times. These articles have two different bylines, from two different parts of the organization. The people with the bylines weren't the only people involved in writing them, they have layers of editors and fact-checkers, there may have been some level of legal review, supposedly they have a bunch of varied expertise specific to various domains.
The Times is -- at five thousand employees -- on its own an enormous propaganda machine. Not every employee, not even a sizable portion of those employees, is involved in this particular propaganda; there is no explicit 'you must lie this many times per article' metric; many would do the same for free if they had the opportunity. But neither are people unaware of whether they work at the Times, or unaware that the Times misleads and demands that they mislead. Its personnel talk at length about these goals, publicly and privately and in every option in between, both internally to the Times and to many other often sizable organizations that have similar priorities. Whether this falls into some other category of coordination in besides the point.
gattsuru
12d ago
The New York Times has a recent story, where it summarizes the matter as:
For Mr. Trump’s claims about an Obama-era directive criticizing the F.A.A. for being “too white,” the White House also cited a lawsuit filed by a conservative legal organization on behalf of applicants for air traffic controller positions. The lawsuit accused the agency under the Obama administration of discriminating against them because its hiring practices were “engineered to favor racial minorities.” That lawsuit is pending in court.
And the next day:
In a misleading claim, Mr. Trump insinuated that the administration of President Barack Obama — the first Black president — had stocked the Federal Aviation Administration with people who could not do their jobs.
“They actually came out with a directive: ‘too white,’” Mr. Trump said. His administration will be different, he went on. “We want the people that are competent.”
(Asked for details on the “too white” claim, the White House cited a lawsuit filed in 2015 by a conservative legal organization accusing the Obama administration of hiring practices that were “engineered to favor racial minorities.” That lawsuit is pending in court.)
If you want to argue that the Times isn't an enormous propaganda machine... I think you're going to need a lot of evidence. I don't think you can credibly argue that they're just some comments section.
I've put fifty bucks against it, and another fifty bucks against Snow, specifically, being singled out in PBS, NBC, or NPR. I think it'll take longer than his bet to clear, but given the degree of swivel with 'throat-clearing', I wouldn't be surprised if tendentious pieces ends up being enough.
Which is kinda the failure mode for Trace and Amadanb's approach and philosophy. Forget impeachment: the federal House couldn't manage to condemn Lujan Grisham.
This sorta concept floats around in furry, therian, and (to a lesser extent) otherkin spaces pretty often, so it's not too odd to see if pop up in Zizian thought since they seemed to pull in whatever slipped through tumblr at a given time. There's been some attempts at extrapolating how much humans map around the concept of having a tail, and it is pretty fun for furries and therians when they can add prosthetic ones (and/or more expressive ears, hackles, so on). There are other behaviors like quadrobics that seem to spontaneously develop without significant public discussion or formal artwork, for better or worse.
But a lot of it's probably just trained or learned: too much falls outside of the space of things that non-furs do.
And, more critically, too much of it's non-falsifiable. A big criticism of 90s-style spiritual therianthropy was how much even the Weird Species therians only wanted to pick up the interesting and fun habits from their totem animal/fursona/whatever, over gross or lesser-known ones. And while that was somewhat overblown (insert a dogs sniffing butts, which was a common highlight, and rimming joke here), it applies as broadly or more broadly here. There's no shortage of Weird Behaviors specific to various lemur species or to most proposed common ancestors; there's not even a shortage of weird anatomy things. ((eg, is that weird 'jump wrong and fly' dream normal people get something something leaping lemurs ancestral memory)). You can pick and choose what you think might show up in a big enough populace, but even if you had a magic wand that distinguished 'this drive is shared and has a historical grounding' from 'this is just something you picked up from watching Zootopia', you could easily pick and choose until you had some summary that matched the real world but had absolutely no predictive power.
The moral argument is... less clear; Zizians aren't (weren't?) as attached to what they perceived as True as you'd expect from the capitalization, even beyond what you'd expect from a group like this. See the mess around dual souls (or Undertale), or even the bit at the end of that piece about a dragonkin. These people aren't making a REVURN argument, and the sheer variety in beliefs or expressions of this take makes it incoherent to attempt it. There just aren't that many lemur therians, and they don't want to start online drama with the
LotRelf otherkin.There's people who do or did, back in the height of online therianthropy, though they didn't often find much commonality with out trans folk of the era, or even into the late '00s. It might return, despite its incoherence, as the least-bad-agreement point for an often wildly-incoherent alliance of varied positions, only because the alternative explanations feel worse. TW's freedom of form as the logical endpoint of freedom of expression, but it's pretty unpalatable for a political sphere that's happy to draw territorial exceptions to those principles, nevermind its contradiction to the likely usable points.
The extent any specific position can switch be switched out for today's goals is... not encouraging, and the Zizians show exactly why, but it's also not a failure mode specific to them, or their political allegiance, or to their specific political fight.
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