gattsuru
4hr ago
The state supreme court finds that (1) the federal supreme court's decision does require Nevada to retroactively recognize the 2008 California marriage, but (2) Nevada's courts are not authorized to create out of thin air a 1992 common-law marriage for these same-sex romantic partners when Nevada's legislature has explicitly refused to recognize common-law marriages even for opposite-sex romantic partners since 1943.
That seems a reasonable enough conclusion for these specific facts, but good heavens do I get twitchy about these sort of retroactive judicial decisions being decided this late in the game. Here, it's 'just' one guy's 401(k) and some stocks, and while that probably sucks for his ex-husband's finances, there's a lot of other stuff that's downstream of this sorta divorce evaluation, and it's been five years since this pair filed for divorce, and a decade since Obergefell. It's just been up in the air that whole time?
There's not really a good solution, I recognize that. Party presentation exists for a reason, Mootness and ripeness same, and past attempts to set up blanket rules for this stuff have been an absolute mess. But it's like the first line to an Aristocrats joke that ends with the shout "a Justice System".
gattsuru
5hr ago
Very likely to get appealed, especially with the split verdict despite heavily overlapping underlying components. The sentencing guidelines put this at 15-21 months, though there's enough possible mediating and aggravating factors that I could see it getting turned into six months home detention or probation situation at one end, or 21-27 months at the higher end.
gattsuru
19hr ago
While semiautomatics have existed and been common in sporter and military environments before WWII, police and criminal violence overwhelmingly favored the revolver into the 1970s. When they moved away from it, they moved from .38/.357 (and heavily favoring the bigger-but-weaker-.380) as a common round to 9mm and eventually 0.45 ACP, further helped by longer effective barrels (as well as more rounds and faster reloads, at least for anyone not named Miculek).
See here for a breakdown of how vast that difference was.
Common knowledge has the aftermath of 1986 Miami Shootout as the turning point for the law enforcement side of the equation, and that is genuinely where federal officers started moving toward more, bigger, and more powerful ammo. State police varies a lot more. And criminal use is hard to measure... but that ojp.gov report puts Philadelphia deaths as going from rarely (3%) to often (21%) 9mm pistol between 1985 and 1990, and pistols as a category were still less common than the .38/357 revolvers alone.
gattsuru
23hr ago
But we have more than vibes. We've had some of the largest and most expensive natural experiments ever created.
Rov_Scam has kindly tried to provide a steelman of prosecutions for BLM protestors for doing 'real damage'. I think it got an AAQC? Fascinating story. But I'll point that the majority of its arsons fall under the supposed five year minimum terrorism enhancement that overcame a plea bargain's limits as mandatory in a case with far less connection to terrorism. The few that don't either revolve around multiple arsons or direct assaults on other people, even in cases where Rov_Scam's summary coincidentally doesn't mention it. We can throw the Molotov Lawyers in for free, but they also got well under. There might be a hundred felony convictions in that area, but there were tens if not hundreds of thousands of felonies.
Fun, and all, but it's also a tiny fraction of what happened during the BLM protests. Even for the specific matter of statute vandalism, a lot of statute vandals just got off free, if they were even seriously chased to begin with. Baltimore didn't even record the Columbus statute one as a crime. Indeed, the first actual punishment I could find was a laughable slap on the wrist. When rioting protestors shoved a statute over onto a man nearly killing him, while a politician told nearby police not to interfere, the only person that actually got in trouble was the one who tried to prosecute it.
And then when you look at political violence, Dolloff didn't even go to trial, less than half of the CHOP/CHAZ murders were prosecuted, and the poster here that claimed to take comfort from reason prevailing in the Gardner case never mentioned him again when the prosecution restarted and drove him to suicide.
We never found out whether Grosskreutz's CCW was merely 'expired' when he tried to shoot Rittenhouse, or if he'd had it revoked, and he was never charged over it or any of the downstream matters that the second option would require. None of the people that tampered with scenes of homicides - on video, unmasked - got in trouble, either.
People have made these arguments several times, in depth. I have enough of an ouvre writing them that I have to watch my words so I don't unintentionally blast Amadan with sarcastic quips about four-year posts.
But, hey, that's not immunity.
(Modulo Dolloff.)
Rov_Scam's defense is that the J6s, and the Bundies, and any other remotely comparable matters all involved "morons". Just a total coincidence that the left-wing cities can never find people who give long interviews to friendly press, or 'cover their face' with a mask that makes Superman's glasses look like serious protection, or are "morons" in the exact same bad opsec way, or got caught literally red-handed but then police or prosecutors just coincidentally made a oopsy-doodle, too.
Let's suppose that's true, and not an artifact of willful rejection of various powerful modern tools, or refusal to use preventative policing to catch people before or during the act, in this one case.
They're still not in jail. They're still doing it. They're still getting vast and long-lasting political benefit from it.
And then I notice that only one person in this thread used the word 'immunity', or any word near it.
gattsuru
1d ago
And it's nice in a lot of situations, but like the "auto" keyword in C++, I think people abuse it far too much. Types should be explicitly written out in code!
Good lord, this, and it's become endemic in C# and Java, too, where it makes some of the absolute least sense.
gattsuru
1d ago
I don't think your confidence is shared by the mainstream left, let alone any radicals. They're terrified that Trump is going to black-bag them in the middle of the night!
Do people believe that, or do they just say that?.
"The Republican Party is Doomed" is still written by a man that conflates certification with education with job security with meaningful skills, and who today has yet to confront or recognize a very simple flaw downstream of what that means:
There is not some deep physical law that educated young professionals are the source of administrative or executive power in this world. They have been favored for the last seventy years because (outside of academic-enforced Curleyism) they were competent, not just in systems that they created, but in their ability to manage and adapt to the world.
The average college graduate today struggles to use a screwdriver, and increasing numbers struggle to write or comprehend an essay; a far broader group have actively rejected even the ideals of meaningful understanding of reality. Teacher's unions have begged and striked to require increasing levels of education that you and I know does absolutely shit for their actual capability, and they're unusual for anyone studying it, rather than it being a problem. If you throw the mandate of heaven in the trash, it ends up in the trash.
That's not necessarily a good thing! Obviously there's the big grifter problem, where once you realize that the TV-show grifter and the PhD are equally unknowledgable about 1800s history, you have the problem of distinguishing what randos do have anything. There's a lot of infrastructure and cash that's hard to replicate outside of academic or industrial settings, and the resulting processes not getting done because those settings are so hostile to you they'd rather burn cash and credibility, and just no one trying, doesn't change much.
More broadly, there are still places that have keep some undercurrent of adherence to actual skill or knowledge that's hard to develop elsewhere, with some interest in actual capability, whether or not they've been skinsuited by politics. There's a far broader scope where the things they teach aren't deep knowledge or skills, but they're the teacher's passwords necessary to get anywhere today. FCFromSSC-style "iterated harm-seeking" is going to be very interesting in the !!bad!! sort of ways, when applied here.
I don't think you can avoid plans happening, as people get radicalized, as someone who has even an inkling of what that could looks like, and very many good reasons to wish it wouldn't happen.
More seriously, there's a lot of options radicals have, many of which do not require vast planning or coordination, only common knowledge.
Some of those options aren't bad. If, as a completely random example, the left will be murdering political enemies with impunity or the police and prosecutors will just look the other way when someone on the right gets his or her face punched in... well, I was on team Pink Pistols when gay guys getting bashed was a non-zero risk. I'm not abandoning that because some people insist it'd be better if I were beaten than their brownshits shot, and if they've never said the name "Paul Kessler", I'm not going to even care. There's a functional moral and legal principle, here.
But the majority of options are bad, and they're still going to happen. There's some subtle stuff, like what happens when we it becomes common knowledge the Civil Rights Act doesn't and hasn't realled since its inception, and every jury the least competent lawyer in a red or purple state can manage will nullo your prosecutions, and any lawyer slightly above that Platkins out any attempt to Uno Reverso by getting jurisdiction in a blue state first.
And then there's an actual horror stories.
Remember Malheur? Two years ago, if it happened again, common knowledge had already become that people committing actual terrorist arson against federal police didn't get a 'mandatory' terrorism enhancement. Today, there is basically nothing the nuBundies could say that would cost them political support, and until and unless they literally shot -- not shot at -- federal officers, they'd still have behaved better than anti-ICE groups. That includes literally dropping heavy rocks onto the front windshields of fast-moving cars and people, or running for a national office with a nazi tattoo.
But don't worry, without a college diploma, Red Tribers won't drop rocks. That's a fancy-boy edujumacated physics problem. Electricians, machinists, plumbers, gun nuts, maintenance employees, firefights, construction workers, no possible relevant domain expertise. or at least none I'm willing to discuss publicly
Remember when FEMA decided that they weren't going to provide support to houses with Trump political signs? Ah, without the proper cred-en-tialis there's no way some Red Triber would end up walking door to door or considering neighborhoods dangerous based on matters tangentially related to politics. They'll just be a ton of people doing work requiring hands-on expertise, to serve people they hate and know hate them, with ready and long awareness of normal and subtle failure modes. No way they might be in evacuated neighborhoods before most residents return, with easy arguments to defend any place they could be at all.
Remember some of the California trans sanctuary laws? What do you think happens when the mainstream news reports a father just now kidnapping his son, the federal marshals heroically rip a long-pregnant early teenager from their parent's arms the next week, and no one can talk about what the kid's current gender presentation or who assaulted him to start with? Do you think there's anyone who can argue Loudon County a success case for gradual stepwise moderation? Do you think people need a medical doctorate to notice the difference between a week and twenty-one weeks? A historian's degree find every single person with their name on public record for those orders?
These don't require a plan. Many of them don't even require explicit coordination beyond listening to the news, sometimes even only listening to news reporters biased against them. They're not even indicia I think are particularly likely -- since I don't want this to happen, I'm not going to meme my way into disaster.
But think for five minutes, hard, about what thirty unrelated bad actors might individually want to do, just repeating the greatest hits of the last five years.
Then consider how much post-Civil Rights Act civility may have depended on how difficult it was to ensure an attack would hit the 'guilty' and not hit the 'innocent' -- as the charcoal briquettes rant highlighted, the Oklahoma City Bomber very specifically choose to burn children to death among others -- and what signal hearing "Kirk deserved it" jokes and 'jokes' from their neighbors have sent.
I would like it to not be this way. I don't see many people actually arguing it isn't. Only that it shouldn't be.
gattsuru
2d ago
Answer: no.
MINUTES for proceedings held before Judge Robert R Summerhays: TELEPHONE CONFERENCE held on 12/16/2025. A discussion was held regarding the language of a final judgment. The parties are to submit a new proposed judgment (or separate proposed judgments if they cannot agree as to the wording) in conformity with today's discussion on or before January 23, 2026. If necessary, the parties may submit supplemental briefs along with the proposed judgment(s). (crt,Craig, C)
But hey, if it doesn't take him more than four days to read two short papers, Summerhays may manage to actually bring a higher court's mandate to final judgement just under a year!
Not likely, at this point, though.
The person who attempted to kill Kavanaugh received a sentence of 97 months.
gattsuru
3d ago
But as the Trump administration is showing, you can just... not fund them anymore if you think they're full of nonsense.
Funny you mention that:
Plus, private funding is abundant these days, and hungry for talent. Thiel himself just threw a bunch of money at a chip startup that was a complete scam (and should have been transparently so from the outset): he clearly wants to given money to talented people, there just aren't enough of them in his contact list.
The advantage of the conventional educational system, and of government grants in general, is just how damn much money is thrown out there, while its results and evaluations are monitored only on the largest scales at any politically responsive level.
UC, as a specific example, gets several billion, as in starting with a B dollars in federal funding per year for research alone. When UC throws money at a complete scam, or has its staff or students commit overt fraud, these are genuinely nutpicks.
By contrast, Peter Thiel could, if he liquidated his entire fortune, do that perhaps for four years. Not, you know, in reality, but if we replace economics with a frictionless spherical cow, it's kinda close.
In the real world, his foundation gives out less than five million per year, and I don't say that as a criticism. I couldn't quickly find out his stake in Substrate, the chip scam you mention, but it's probably not a large portion of the 100m USD that Substrate has been dick-waving as its seed fund. This is Thiel's Solyndra, perhaps! (Wasn't Solyndra 500m+ USD in government-supported loans?) This is Thiel's A123 Systems!
Actually, it's worse than even that: a lot of the evaluation protocols have been absolutely braincored themselves. I can't give the full rant without self-doxxing, but suffice it to say actually interesting with these groups seriously will turn your stomach.
So the real answer is that a successful buyer must have a solution to reliably cut through all of this mess and evaluate decisions several orders of magnitude more reliably than government funding, or a successful seller have so clear a product and vision - and marketing capabilities and acceptable presentation and everything else - as to resolve all of those issues for them.
Otherwise, it's a game of dice.
gattsuru
4d ago
Yeah, especially given the broader zeitgiest at the time, it was a genuinely surprising take, and the level and degree of conflict between the heroes and the government is a much more nuanced take than the "you people are young" summary he'd give in interviews. As an exploration of political philosophy or philosophy of war, it does a pretty good job, if limited by its time and its awareness.
My big complaint's just that it doesn't really feel great about its characters. It's a comic book, and a short-run series at that, so expectations are never high to begin with, but the ending is undermined not just because It's Woke, but because it doesn't really feel like a conclusion for the characters that got to it. Tom feels very Batman-inspired and Horus very Superman, and that's a classic for a reason. Do their perspectives actually say anything about Truth, Justice, and the American Way? About assassins criminals being a cowardly and superstitious lot? Or if they're working as alternative company counterparts to Captain America and Iron Man, anything about their political philosophy? Artemis pointedly compares the US government with the Nazis in one argument with Dominic: did he persuade her before his death, or was her violent persona and facing always an act?
You don't need this sort of deeper layering. Black Summer benefits in the sense that not doing it means you can't do it poorly, like No Hero or The Boys and their utterly wretched X-Men parodies. But it's frustratingly noticeable given how little else there is to say about the characters.
That said, I do think it's one of, if not the best, Ellis short series. So part of it's probably me not clicking with him as a writer in general.
gattsuru
4d ago
A positive hit on an fMRI would a) not indicate whether practicing or non-practicing, and more seriously b) have an 8% error rate, and thus remain less powerful a predictive tool than Kaworu fandom.
Not a complete list, I don't remember all the fiction, and some of them are either so specialized in focus to be irrelevant, or I just read on a bet and a review is besides the point (eg, Minotaur Milking Farm after it became a short-lived twitter meme, which beyond its obvious problems was also just bizarrely normie).
Conventional Books -
A Market of Dreams and Destiny: Alternate universe London Underground Gaiman-esque fantasy where everything has a price. Serviceable prose, decently interesting universe, but it needed several editing passes or maybe even a serious rewrite. The author has too many viewpoint characters and too little meat to each tone, the politics go beyond overt to the point of hilarious inconsistency, there weren't any real big payoffs or conclusions, and the central questions just didn't hook me much. I was kinda hoping for a something akin to Fable Of The Swan, so might expectations might have just been too high for what's ultimately just angsty slash, but I just came away feeling meh.
Icarus Series: Scifi series rolling around spacers that operate somewhere between couriers and smugglers, with some twists to that. I'd actually read Icarus Hunt a couple decades ago, but I'd filed it away as a Zahn one-off; stumbled across the reset of the series in a B&N and splurged. I think I prefer the characters from Hunt, since for goofy publishing reasons, Plot and subsequent stories focus on a different set of main characters, but each story still works great and a not-absolute-best-tier Zahn character is still a great character. Not my single favorite Zahn series -- I think the Conqueror's Trilogy just had a better central gimmick -- but well-executed and consistently clever and easily beats Blackcollar.
Hugo Award Novels: yes, I still get the packet, though it's harder and harder to justify paying for it. Mostly a lot of meh. A Sorceress Comes To Call is well-executed prose and nothing else; The Ministry of Time has a great idea it does absolutely nothing with, Someone You Can Build A Nest In is about as shallow as xenofiction gets. Alien Clay's the only one I'd really put a vote into, and that's just workable rather than deeply memorable -- it's far from Tchaikovsky's best.
Humble Tech Book Bundle: Computer Science the Fun Way: a bunch of No Starch Press compsci books. I'm mostly self-taught (and worse, self-taught in weird focuses), so these were a kinda interesting read from a formal programming perspective. They're all pretty reasonable for their subjects, but what those subjects actually were and how closely they related to computer science versus computer engineering was rough at times. Computer Graphics From Scratch is literal 'how you'd do things without a graphics API, which you will never do', while on the other extreme Data Structures the Fun Way was a distillation of the various 'how do B-trees do and why would you actually use them'. Only real big complaint I have within the content was Code Craft, which felt both very opinionated on what coders should be doing and simultaneously fell prey to many of the same problems that mauled the old Clean Code movement. On the other side of things, The Book of I2C and Introduction to Computer Organization were the sort of writing that seem like great dives through layers of abstraction that I was looking for. Dunno that I could recommend any of these on their sticker price, but the shop regularly offers deep discounts.
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Yudkowsky's AI safetyism to the masses. Takeaway: Not Great, Bob. There's few things more frustrating than a good writer making bad arguments for a position you think is worthwhile, and Yudkowsky's written single one-off jokes (eg, Moore's Law Of Science Fiction) that were more compelling than this book, while providing only the least-plausible defenses against his proposed horror stories. The first half of the book is telling us how People Won't Just in the face of a superintelligent system, and then the second half gives a list of things that would work if People Would Just. Few people are going to buy into the assumptions, here, and those that do won't trust the conclusions. I've long complained that post-golden era LessWrong erred by emphasizing pivotal moments and extreme runaway, but the book comes across as less grounded in its speculative fiction than Friendship is Optimal, and where a reread of FiO leaves people going oh fuck, I keep coming away from sections thinking they'll be dated in years, if not months. Maybe there's something valuable here I've missed because I've read Yudkowsky since the 00s, but I just don't see it.
The AI Con: Takeaway: Even Worse, somehow. Where Yudkowsky seems likely to be dated quickly, The AI Con seems like it was dated before it even started writer. Computers Make Mistakes, IQ Doesn't Exist, Stochastic Parrots, Water Consumption, yada yada. I don't know if the authors originated this stuff or just absorbed it from those around them, but they sure as hell didn't care whether anything was meaningful or correct. Even where it should have been strong, on the economics and social impact, it still couldn't bother: "bossware" is up there with eyetracking for something that could become a dystopian hellscape, and deepfake ransoms are already making the world cyberpunk in the worst ways, and the authors can't actually sell those stories. Finally, the policy proposals are a grab-bag of the impossible and/or useless.
((There was some "how to deal with AI for normies book", too, but the part where I can't remember the name tells you about how valuable it was: think three-hundred-plus pages of 'ah, but LLMs do X' that were marginal predictions for Llama.))
The Unplugged Workshop : woodworking handtool-focused crafting guides. Hard to review this because, outside of watching a few youtubers, I just don't know the topic that well, and it's impractical enough that few people I know do either. Worse still, it's definitely an intermediate-level work, with only occasional accommodations for beginners like myself. Still, highly readable, well-organized, functional, and good project layouts, and the stuff I've tried so far has... well, not always turned out well, because I'm used to chisels as a de-riveting tool, but at least been more limited by my skill than that of the writer. Even if you're really into woodworking, a marginal buy, decent borrow.
Complete Guide To Sewing: I was told this was The Standard Book on the topic, and I can see why. Where a lot of 'beginners to experts' books tend either, this covers the whole spectrum from before your first stitch all the way to deep project work I couldn't even begin to understand. Not an enjoyable read by any means, but a good reference. The projects are my only big complaint: not only were they clearly marketing to a specific demographic that had zero overlap, these felt more like they were trying to help guide people who were already working from a pattern, leaving you to really guess at sizes and shapes. If you're doing anything sewing-wise more serious than patching torn pants, worth a buy... but get a used copy.
Comics -
Promethea: another one I'd read before, but that was borrowing it from a library, and now the local comic book store had the full series in trade edition. It's an Alan Moore comic, with all the benefits and costs that involves : wildly metafictional, deeply detailed, uncomfortably sexual, not quite as clever or as dedicated to its principles as the writer wanted it to be, and with an unfulfilling conclusion. Still, if you like Common Grounds or Astro City, it's worth looking at, and far more approachable and optimistic than the typical Moore comic.
Black Summer: second verse, same as the first: read it in the Obama era, and now could find it in full TPB. It's a very late GWOT story, and intensely political about it. The first pages have a superhero with blood-drenched hands lecturing the White House Press Corps about how 9/11 was planned and the Wars In the Middle East were just filling for corporate greed and the last two Presidential Elections were stolen, but he's Taken Care Of The Problem. The only men and women who can challenge him are the five(ish) surviving self-enhanced members who once worked with him... if they want to, and can get past a government presuming they are his allies. It'd run into political disfavor before it had even finished, as by 2008 concerns about a President's legitimacy had become much more popular in the wrong side of the aisle. In 2025, a man surrounded by floating eyes talking about stolen elections has rather different political valiance (and Ellis would get cancelled for other reasons). But where Ellis's other works in the same time period were either pointless gore porn (No Hero) or have a couple interesting scenes trying to cover up threadbare plot and nihilism (Supergod), Black Summer remains interesting enough to keep on the shelves, even if (or because) it'd never get written again. Not quite good enough to recommend as a buy -- the conclusion just doesn't feel earned, to the surprise of no one familiar with Ellis -- but might be worth a borrow.
Online Published -
Contention I and II: average Joe gets isekai'd into an alien or post-human world without even the clothes on his back, and gets to do the Primitive Technology speedrun. There's some really good plot seeds here -- the main character's obviously flawed in relevant ways without being an absolute asshole, there's a big driving question about the local precursors that's escalated really well, the not!magic system is useful and compelling without overriding a lot of the discovery and exploration bits. But it's also only two novellas into a story that seems built to go on for another two or three books minimum, the author only started on Book III in the tail end of last year (currently patreon-only), and that makes it hard to recommend.
Kitty Cat Kill Sat: basically Rimworld - with one of the more sadistic storyteller options - meets cozy fiction, where an (accidentally) self-uplifted domestic cat pits herself against all the plural of several post-apocalypses. My gold standard for xenofiction is Book Of Night With Moon, and Argus doesn't quite get that high. The plot's a little too meandering, the payoffs need to be set up better, and it needs an editing pass. Still a fun rampage, happy to have paid for it.
Reaper's Lottery and Executioner's Gambit: furry scifi, with very heavy raygun gothic and gumshoe inspiration. It's intensely furry, like the rest of the Hayven Celestia works, enough to probably be offputting to anyone else, but like Skinchange (cw: featureless furry nudity, scifi violence) it's got a pretty strong core underneath it.
On December 5th, three weeks after the government shutdown ended:
District Judge Telephone Conference set for 12/16/2025 2:00 PM before Judge Robert R Summerhays. Call-in instructions will be sent to counsel via electronic mail prior to the conference. Issued by Judge Robert R Summerhays on 12/5/2025. (crt,Taylor, L) (Entered: 12/05/2025)
But, hey, Broussard's still only 20, maybe the court will manage to find its ass with both hands and an atlas before literally no one can benefit from the final judgement... if the court's actually making a decision. Anyone want to bet whether a final judgement comes out before Christmas?
gattsuru
6d ago
Possible, but I was direct-linking hardcore stuff under that, so dunno how effect it'd be.
gattsuru
6d ago
It definitely works for some people, so don't read that as a complete nonstarter for everyone. It just doesn't work for me, even if the fantasy was still interesting, either being self-conscious while waking up or getting an elbow to the eyeball are kinda moodkillers.
gattsuru
6d ago
Hm... Can you check your default sound device? Windows will normally try to only output to one audio port at a time. In Win10, left-click the Sound Volume control from the System Tray, click the name of the currently-selected audio output, and you should get a list of all available outputs. Win11 hides the interface a bit more, but it still exists. Look for one that says Speakers or AC97. You may have to restart applications or refresh web pages to have them recognize the new intended audio output, although modern apps are usually pretty good about responding near-instantly.
Very common problem where it defaults to HDMI or DisplayPort, especially when going to monitors without speakers or where the speakers default to no volume.
It's possible to get multiple outputs working simultaneously, but it's kinda jank and requires going pretty deep into the interface weeds.
gattsuru
7d ago
[cw: almost certainly TMI oversharing. And most of the names here are either gay or male-leaning-bisexual]
How good is your imagination in this arena? Do you have a "mental spank bank" that surpasses the one on your hard drive?
I write smut, if not necessarily good smut, so my imagination's doing fine. There's a lot of options that aren't really featured in conventional porn at all, and despite the best efforts of the furry fandom to explore new domains of indescribably bizarre smut, there's a lot of stuff that either isn't available or only has a tiny number of not-great examples. Forget weird kinks: "Woman in jockstraps, het sex, go" seems vastly underserved and trivially easy to execute. I've got a handful of story irons in the fire, and while most of them are probably not desirable to the average poster here (
In the bedroom, I'm a lot more interested in pleasing others. That's fun and sometimes a good start for a stroll down memory lane, but those experiences don't always or even often transfer over well if I'm just trying to shut down for the night, so to speak.
On the flip side, there are things other people have produced that I either could or would not consider, or have done anywhere near the same quality, even solely within my imagination. There's a really good short form animation of people competing in a video game while also abusing the settings on remote vibrators, doesn't even show a hint of a genital, would never have considered it as a concept beforehand, really gets my motor running. Fek's Spellbound (cw: technically there's a pair of boobs, but it's almost all gay) and a lot of Ruaidri's animations should be comedic, but it's just so well-executed that it works. A lot of LawyerDog/Cantio, Braeburned, and Rick Griffin's stuff is both comedic and horny. Even for conventional human-on-human camera porn, there's a lot of imagery that's not something I'd have considered.
On the gripping hand (hurr hurr), a lot of scenarios presented by my own imagination or presented by others, aren't really practical or desirable; sometimes they're not considered because they're bad ideas. Sex while gaming is actually pretty unpleasant, quel surprise. Wake-up sex is an interesting fantasy, but no level of carefully-circumscribed consent beforehand can overcome a startle reflex. A lot of rough sex or degradation is just unpleasant, rather than kinky in a fun way. Ethical exhibitionism or enhibitionism isn't as time-consuming to set up as it sounds, but it's still ultimately very chilly and I don't have the physique for even ENM. Orientation play just doesn’t really work in situ; fantasies that depend on magic or superscience or both tautologically can't actually happen. Haven't tried the Braeburned orgies, but don't really want to, either.
*I don't know why she felt it necessary to give me special notice in this manner. I don't think we were very close, though we were both acclaimed by others as highly effective employees.
I wonder if she left because she saw herself at an ethical or liability crux, and thought you were competent such that you'd end up next in line after she retired, and didn't want you to feel like she was abandoned/shoving it on you or for you to not be aware of the scope of the problem. But I dunno the domain-specific context.
gattsuru
8d ago
To be specific, Nicholas Decker is the one proving himself a real libertarian when it comes to ai-generated photos of children, or fucking almost-18 teenagers and being sucked by animals. To be fair to him, he's just being an edgelord; to be less naive, he's doing it in very stupid ways.
The headline writers are just not very good.
Hanania's just an obnoxious putz in other ways. He's pretty heavily abandoned the classical racism that the headline focuses on, but that's mostly by pivoting into a broader anti-lower-classism that's more tolerated so long as no one pins him down and makes him comment on lower-class <insert race here>. That doesn't make him wrong, but it does mean he's quite willing to play with news memeplexes so long as it's convenient.
But it's like the Newsom-Kirk interview, a lot of this stuff is just wind. Polis is more deft about it, because Hanania's whole 'but the experts' schtick is going to have more Democratic-moderate appeal, but it's not like he's actually going to care what Hanania or Decker think, just that it's useful to pretend he does. My guess is that Polis is trying to pivot to the national level, but maybe he'll retire to be a private advisor or focus on business.
I'll caveat that :
- in someone who had some heterosexual arousal beforehand (reading between the lines, possibly to the point of what we call schizoid sexuality today), was a strict top, already reported weird sex burnout (and was a piece of work otherwise: don't do nutmeg)
- extremely prone to addiction
- seemingly ended up bisexual-ish by modern standards, although that doesn't really get in the way of the wife-and-kids bit as much as the druggie bit
- in a study by a guy who was a bit of a crank even by the standards of his own time, depending on his reporting.
It's a pity that a) no credible research org is willing to try anything along these lines today, and b) the places that would want to try it are so sketchy, because it seems like tRMS should be a good deal more ethical and ... well, if not reversible, at least not as heavy on long-term infections and seizures. But I've got a kink for orientation play, followed a lot of bihackers in the tumblr ratsphere (and unintentional bihackers in the furry fandom), and I know more people who've ended up in relationships they can jerk off over but not consistently consummate than who've gotten it to work out well. Maybe they're just missing something -- I'm convinced that a lot of the 'physical' problems are downstream of scent and texture, which neither the Tulane study nor modern efforts generally train around -- but it might well be something deeper that only a small fraction of the populace can train.
On the gripping hand, if you just want a wife and kids, a gay guy doesn't really have to go that far. Beards are not new technology; post-nut clarity isn't gonna make a vial of your swimmers stop working; fujoshi are not unobtanium. Which points to the broader issue. Despite the perceptions, gay guys are looking for more than a hole (or pole) to pump and ignore until the next time they get horny.
gattsuru
8d ago
The US says it had a "seizure warrant" for it. What does that mean? Was the vessel subject to US laws at any point, violated them, and this is the result? The US says that the tanker is sanctioned. What does this mean?
The United States issued a number of sanctions in 2022 related to the transfer of Iranian-originated oil in violation of US law. The Skipper, then operating as the Adisa, was one of the ships in question. See here for another example.
The seizure warrant is sealed, unsurprisingly, but it's almost certainly issued based on further evidence that the ship was being used to transport oil to sanctioned countries.
There's some messy legal philosophy stuff involved, here; the actual behaviors are not new.
gattsuru
9d ago
... I'm going to be blunt, and this is separate from Motte rules since my expectations don't matter for that, but I don't think you gained much from the AI-gen, here.
There's a couple fixes ("Dixon" vs "Dimon"), but there's also spots where the LLM is introducing changes in meaning that either aren't correct or aren't what you were going for ("attempts" to "attempt", "can’t build themselves" to "no longer capable of building themselves", the introduction of "importing their safetyism to our shores").
Asking the AI for information or directly for grammar checks tends to be more productive than just asking it to rewrite text, though you should still review any recommendations and especially anything involving math before acting on or implementing it, and be aware that it's going to guide you toward toward least-common-denominator answers.
Hell, there's a !!fun!! question if it isn't an Experience Machine. What happens when everything but the 'people' are real? If you had immortality, I can think of worse ways to spend thirty years than a Primitive Technology meets Minecolonies run to really build an monument in the same sense that Sagan joked about making an apple pie from scratch.
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