Folamh3
User ID: 1175
@FiveHourMarathon pointed out that, in Trump's first term, the Democrats kept hammering in the message that Hillary won the popular vote (something something electoral college reform etc.). This was electorally meaningless, but psychologically important to maintain the narrative that Democrats represented the real will of the country.
Losing the electoral college and the popular vote in 2024 (albeit only by a 1.5% margin) must be profoundly psychologically disorienting.
Folamh3
6hr ago
Folamh3
12hr ago
keep working, treating their firing as illegal and asserting they still have jobs?
The "I'm out of work, but I identify as an employee of the federal government" jokes write themselves.
Folamh3
1d ago
Plus, this is Bayesian reassurance that you’re reasonably well endowed, or else she would had called your dick small (more easily disproved to any potential third parties in text-screenshot court) instead of mid in bed (less easily disproved to any potential third parties in text-screenshot court).
Bro you've got me cracking up laughing in work.
I wasn't too concerned about it: no sexual partner (and I've had more than my fair share) has ever even suggested that I have a small penis. But still nice to know.
I don't, of course. IIRC the first one bled a little, consistent with a broken hymen (although that's not the only thing that can cause one to bleed during sex, obviously). The second claimed I was her first kiss in addition to first sex, and her behaviour certainly seemed consistent with that claim. But you're right: I don't know for sure and I never will.
Folamh3
1d ago
Sorry about that, it was meant more as a joke. Happy to delete if necessary.
Folamh3
1d ago
The fact that Wikipedia is treating the concept of a "queerplatonic relationship" (i.e. a friendship) with deadly seriousness, without even a one-paragraph "criticism" section saying something to the effect of "The concept has been criticised by conservative commentators on the grounds that it is functionally indistinguishable from ordinary platonic friendship in all particulars."
Folamh3
1d ago
Folamh3
1d ago
It was certainly hip to hate on Infinite Jest on Twitter at the time of writing (pre-Elon takeover).
Folamh3
1d ago
In that case, I think the term "porn-brained" is misleading, as it implies that men behave a certain way because of excessive porn consumption.
There is a related trend in pop music made by female Zoomers (or at least performed by them) wherein there’s this surprisingly huge corpus of songs about how bad guys are at sex and how women are better off pleasuring themselves.
Four years ago, I was going out with this girl for a few weeks. It was a fairly casual relationship on both ends, and I was already considering breaking it off with her, as I was starting to notice some red flags not wholly dissimilar from certain of the ones that Mr. Greene in the OP would have been wiser to heed. One night we were at a party, we'd both taken ecstasy (although I don't believe we'd come up yet) and she abruptly asked me if I wanted to be her boyfriend. I did my best to let her down gently and told her that I didn't, but she became extremely upset and burst into tears. I tried to calm her down, but she was inconsolable and stormed off in a rage. Later that night she sent me a nasty message concluding with "I rated our sex 6/10 it's barely a pass."
I didn't rise to the bait - what could be gained from it? Obviously I didn't believe it was true (I mean, I would say that, wouldn't I): if I'm so crap in bed, why were you throwing yourself at me, why did you ask me to be your boyfriend? But even if it was true, the fact that she was bringing it up all of a sudden like this was such a transparently childish, spiteful thing to do that it immediately vindicated my decision not to pursue a serious committed relationship with her.
Frankly, I think this thing of "oh whatever, he was crap in bed anyway" is just the distaff counterpart to that thing where a guy asks a girl out via text, she turns him down, and he immediately replies "lol whatever bitch you ugly anyway". If she's ugly anyway, why did you ask her out, you dork? The sour grapes are particularly ripe at this time of year.
Folamh3
1d ago
if you're orgasmmaxxing, why would you bother with an inexperienced partner?
Before the start of my current relationship, I deflowered two women in 2022 in casual relationships. I won't lie - it was quite the turn-on.
One thing you quickly realized is that most of the women the soccer players and reality TV stars cheated with were much uglier than their wives and girlfriends, often objectively ugly, even. Sexiness isn’t really the point, male sexuality isn’t picky; many men seem to care about relative looks (say, a 7 vs a 10) only because having a hotter girlfriend makes them feel better and confers upon them more status and value as a man, when it comes to sex alone their standards are minimal at best, it’s mainly about convenience.
The Coolidge effect is an incredibly powerful force. As at least one commenter pointed out before me, if you're looking to get your rocks off, having an affair (thereby exposing yourself to scandal, divorce, losing half of your assets, child support payments etc.) is vastly less "convenient" than just having sex with your wife.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I'm wondering if there might be some kind of perceptual component to the Coolidge effect. That is, it's not merely that sexual novelty is an important component of the male sex drive, but that the male brain so wants us to "be fruitful and multiply" that our brains are wired in such a way that they will literally make women appear more attractive to us than they "really" are prior to us having sex with them. La petite mort/post-nut clarity seems to be such a universal male experience, there must be something to it. (Probably the timescale is longer for women, which is why the end of limerence seems to come after weeks or months rather than minutes/hours.)
I don't know how you'd get this past an IRB board, but it'd be fascinating to do a study like this. Get a bunch of men and women who don't know each other in a speed-dating event. The men are asked to rate women's attractiveness on a scale of 1-10 (we could couple this with objective data like hooking them up to a heart rate monitor, measuring how damp their palms are, penile tumescence etc.). Some of the men will have sex with some of the women. Then, at least a day after their first sexual encounter, ask the men to rate the attractiveness of the women they've had sex with on a scale of 1-10. I would predict that the average rating would shift down by about a point, corresponding with decreased physiological excitement.
It's kind of creepy to think that, if I find a woman attractive, I might be partly hallucinating that.
Folamh3
1d ago
Freddie deBoer has a fun article about the recent vogue for hating on Infinite Jest, its author and the people who've read it.
Folamh3
1d ago
Well, maybe for pay-by-the-word magazine authors.
And publishers of serialised novels.
Folamh3
2d ago
"Thank you my fatherland, for helping me to be totally re-integrated and normalized."
This is so annoying, Jesus.
I actually think declaring myself to be a creationist would be met more warmly than declaring that biology is real and there's no such thing as a "female brain in a male body"
Absolutely. To a rationalist (a label I consider increasingly inaptonymous), gender-criticals are neargroup, creationists are fargroup.
what then is the purpose of knowing book length with exactitude?
I'm writing a novel and it would be extremely helpful to me to know the word count of some of my favourite novels, so I can see how mine compares to them from a pacing perspective. In much the same way that directors aim to have the inciting incident by the end of the first reel etc..
Folamh3
2d ago
Word count, syllable count and character count would all be equally valid objective metrics for the length of a book, in the sense of how much content it contains. I used word count because it's a standard metric used in numerous contexts (including, obviously, publishing).
Folamh3
2d ago
The page count is not an exact metric for how long a book is (i.e. how much content it contains), for the simple reason that the same book can have multiple editions with drastically varying page counts. As outlined in the original post.
Folamh3
2d ago
What you seem to want to measure is "how long will it take to read this book"
No - what I want is to know how long the book is. Knowing the word count would answer my question exactly, because the length of a book is its word count, in the same way that the duration of a film is how many minutes it takes up (not how many scenes, not how long it feels - just how many minutes). Knowing the word count wouldn't answer the question of how long I can expect it would take me to read it (in the same way that some ninety-minute films can "feel" longer than some films which are two hours long or more), but it would answer the question of how long it is, which is exactly what I want to know. The word count and the page count are both proxy metrics for "how long would the average reader take to read this book"; the page count is an imprecise proxy metric for "how long is this book", which is the word count.
I literally covered my mouth in shock part way through the first paragraph. Oh my God, what a nightmare.
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