FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
4hr ago
There was a Tom Clancy novel in this vein The Bear and the Dragon. One of the later Jack Ryan novels where he becomes president and his best buddy becomes vice president. A pseudo-Putin ex-kgb Russian president discovers major resources in the far east of Russia, an expansionist Chicomm government looking for resources and lebensraum* invades Russia, the US steps in and kicks the piss out of the Chinese invasion force on livestream using drones**, the Chicomms in desperation launches ICBMs at Washington, which an Aegis destroyer shoots down with President Ryan personally on deck***. In the aftermath of the failed invasion and stalled nuclear attack, the Chinese government falls to a group of student protestors angered by watching the Chinese army get wrecked on livestream.
The "natural" alliance theory of Russia and the United States relies on the idea of creating an other who they both hate more. This idea comes up every few decades, often with a different boogeyman. The USA and the USSR were natural allies against the Nazis. They were natural allies against international Islamic terrorism. They are natural allies against China. They are natural allies in the face of alien invasion. Etc.
One can see the outline of the logic. Both are frontier peoples, the Americans went west and the Russians east. They each have vast hinterlands of natural resources existing alongside urbanized industrial and post-industrial cores. Once you create an evil anti-western-civilization threat, they both look pretty similar by comparison. It normally involves a hopeful projection that Russians want to embrace American values, and I suppose that when the same theory is offered in Russia they project Russian values onto the American people.
The irony of the novel two decades on is of course that it was both very prescient, we really have seen the invading expansionist army of a declining power shredded live on the internet; and very wrong, it was Putin's army that was embarrassed on livestream and it has had no discernible negative impact on his hold on domestic power. The people did not, in fact, rise up after watching a promised easy victory over a declining neighbor devolve into sci-fi murderbots wiping out a generation of men. And while there may be a rapprochement between the current American and Russian presidents, it doesn't represent a personal bond between two noble ex-intelligence operators seeking to bring Russia into the liberal Capitalist future, but a friendship between two regressive oligarchies who admire each other's efforts at kleptocracy.
*Seeking to save their economy after President Ryan implements trade sanctions (due to a controversy over a forced abortion and a murdered Catholic bishop, this was at the height of the One Child policy, and there was a broad right-wing fear of the ruthless forced abortion population reduction policy. This has, of course, entirely flipped, it's almost impossible to imagine the Chinese forcibly murdering babies in the name of population control today.
**There's also a subplot where a pseudo Vasily Zaitsev old man in the mountains WWII vet snipes the Chicomm commanding general
***After President Ryan personally allows soldiers on duty to smoke cigarettes, improving morale and productivity. It's an excellent 1000 pages of Tom Clancy stuff.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
7hr ago
I'm really disappointed that you just made this scenario up, rather than Ovechkin actually being the subject of deportation proceedings. That would have been kind of funny.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1d ago
I feel like that might more be the old "move" of putting an slr with a tripod in your dorm, allowing the easy transition when you bring her back to a "photoshoot" which no drunk girl can resist。
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1d ago
Oh man we're on our way to one of my favorite college urban myths: the friend of a friend cocksman (often a lawyer or law student) who required a written or filmed consent contract prior to hookups.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1d ago
I feel bad for Jane Doe
Why, particularly?
She is the one who made the affirmative choice to make this her whole personality, rather than quietly transfer to a state school where no one knew her and reconstruct her life. Even assuming that she did experience a traumatic sense of violation after the fact, I still can't get my head around just how awful her behavior after the fact has been.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1d ago
Some time, as an experiment, try to dirty talk with a partner about great sexual experiences you had. It's like Rashomon, she's going to remember it completely differently than you do. Not necessarily in terms of "consent" or whether something was good, but in terms of what happened, in what order, who initiated what. Eyewitness accounts are unreliable at the best of times, when trying to minutely reconstruct the play-by-play of a drunk orgy from eight different sources is practically useless.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1d ago
You know, this is an interesting take, because if your desired end state is that everyone involved is punished horribly and made an example of, you seem the most likely of anyone involved to get your wish. The boys have been plastered everywhere, in a way that should give future fraternity men pause before engaging in this kind of thing. Jane Doe may have been doxxed already, she surely will be by the time this has run its course. If she chooses, she may be able to scratch some kind of positive living out of it as a professional rape victim, but this is going to end up the defining event of her life, in a way that will give future women pause before engaging in this kind of thing. All 8, or however many of them there are exactly, all of their lives have been irreparably altered negatively by this event. This will haunt them on the internet for the rest of their existence, it's probably not even possible to disappear as one used to and run away to the great north woods where no one knows your past.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1d ago
Idk, I'm pretty comfortable saying that pimping is a crime, aggravated by those pimped being even mildly underaged, regardless of the degree of "trauma" we think was suffered by the whore in question.
This is why in debates like those around Deshaun Watson, I keep trying to bring back the anachronism "whoremonger" as an insult specific to a man. The best you can say is that they were engaged in prostitution, even if you leave the consent questions alone it's still not a good thing for a man to be doing.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1d ago
They treated her like a piece of meat. Sure, they had a couple of consensual if intoxicated threesomes with her, and that much is fine if fairly gross. But after that, they started texting each other about "free pussy." The latecomers wandered in awkwardly looking for action, and the original parties just let whoever come in, what's the matter? They barely knew her at this point. After the event, they seem only to have been involved with her as far as making sure the event wouldn't reflect badly on them, no interest in her whatsoever. (I think the slant most people draw from this is that they were worried about being accused of rape; I'm wondering if they were actually worried about everyone knowing how much they loved having sex with their bros.) "Wow, that was a wild night, huh? Well, good knowing you." And under mysterious circumstances, general knowledge of this wild night starts getting around, so the fraternity president now knows enough about this one chick to disinvite her specifically from a party.
I've talked before about how a lot of rape-culture controversies arise because under a consent-only view of rape, and a criminal legal standard of intent mens rea, you can run into the scenario in which there is a rape, but there is no rapist. A woman feels that she did not give consent, or that she was coerced into giving consent; but the man feels that she did give consent, had no intent whatsoever to have sex with her against her consent or to coerce her consent, and would have stopped within a reasonable interval after consent was withdrawn. This is a common disjuncture.
Cornell, in the spirit of an elite research university, has developed the inverse: rapists, but no rape.
This case feels quite opposite of most. Speaking as one of our resident perverts: I both find the actions of the men disgusting, and it sure feels like some of them were at best neutral on the question of consent; and I think the girl pretty much consented tow hat happened. At any rate, while I understand the idea that consenting to a threesome or even a foursome does not constitute consent to the other three or four comers; it does feel like once you've entered the group sex with relative strangers arena, an additional man or two slipping in is at worst a contact foul rather than a felony. The mindset of the man who wants "free pussy" without caring much for consent is blameworthy, but I have trouble seeing "I had sex with 5 men rather than 4" or "I did a bit more ket than I had planned to" as life ruiningly traumatic rather than mildly unfortunate.
It's tough to imagine that she would find the incident particularly noteworthy at all, but for the propaganda about trauma that she had been fed by the culture.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
4d ago
I did too, mechanically you could do everything you needed to do. But culturally, the standard was a warrior main tank, so it was tough to get people to put faith in you as a bear.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
4d ago
A lot is collective. Playing with and against friends on the playground, I realized things like "Having six mediocre pokemon is generally less effective than having three good ones."
Similarly, I played Druid in the original run of WoW, and nobody really wanted a feral druid tank in original TBC. Just wasn't viewed as workable, main tank was always a warrior. Now, in the rerun of TBC, Druid tanks are very highly rated, and warriors are on the outs. Druid became a lot better in later expansions as a tank, and with that knowledge as part of the collective culture it works backward into TBC classic.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
5d ago
There're also the evergreen questions, like what the responsibility of a university should be in cases like this, or what the police department or justice system should do. Seasoned culture warriors will point out that wanting to be hard on this kind of crime correlates with wanting to be soft on other kinds of crime.
The most awful part of this, in my mind, is the lawsuit being filed by Jane Doe against the national fraternity, the bar, the university, and her own sorority for failing to "prevent her from binge drinking." I guess that statement might make sense in a lawsuit against a rehab facility? But not against a voluntary organization that you chose to join, which I've no doubt had a code of conduct that you personally signed stating that you would not binge drink or do illegal drugs.
If we really expect Frats and Sororities and colleges to control the behavior of students against the students' own will, then the culture is rotten and they need to be abolished entirely.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
5d ago
Variation in outcomes is a bitch. Aella is one of my favorite internet personalities purely in that there are so many men who talk a lot of trash about how they're going to raise their daughter mega-trad and super-religious so she doesn't end up a whore....and well...
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
5d ago
attending a WNBA game Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes.
My dude, come on. You're going to make the world's most basic error in facts in a post about people making basic errors in facts?
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
5d ago
Perhaps I was a particularly stupid seven year old. I genuinely never figured out the Saffron City thing! I spent forever wandering around, trying to figure out how to progress the game from there, before I just randomly lucked into it.
In the meantime the Mankey I had forgotten in the daycare weeks ago was level 50-something. Which slotted perfectly into my bad/stupid team.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
6d ago
In the studies you've read, what sorts of interventions prevent the child from growing up to be a moralizing prig?
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
6d ago
This is a near total non-sequitur, Joe Biden made a timeline, sure, but he made a timeline based on our not being at war with Iran.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
6d ago
How exactly does it fix it?
When I download WoW, I hit play and then I play it. You can't get less friction than that.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
6d ago
Reading about WoW's development, the biggest thing they nailed that got me into the game in 2004 and back in 2026 is that they are obsessed with making it run on everything. They didn't want you to need serious gaming gear to play it, so that more people could play. It's one of the few good games that will run on my macbook air without fiddling around with a bunch of nonsense that crashes anyway. I've downloaded a few games people recommended over the years, only to find that my computer wouldn't run it for a variety of reasons, and given up. I'm not going to spend hundreds on a new console or a gaming pc, and even a bit of friction in getting a game to run on my computer tends to leave me cold about trying it.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
6d ago
Sure but when I have 9-1 free, I won't want to book it for running Sunwell. The unique factor here is that I am not free from 9-1, I'm on shift watching the baby, I can't go anywhere or do anything, but that isn't actually a very active activity, it's mostly just feeding her every two hours, changing 2-3 diapers, snuggling if she fusses, and making sure she doesn't die, before waking my wife up and passing her off until 6am. Under normal circumstances, my wife is mildly upset if I come to bed late. In these circumstances, I'm being kind to my wife if I stay up extra late, letting her get more sleep.
And anyway, while I'm questioning why everyone else is quitting TBC all of a sudden, I'm kind of feeling like I'm going to be less interested in TBC after I get an Illidan kill. I have Black Temple booked for Friday night with a group that cleared it in three hours last week after running a successful Hyjal with them on Saturday, and I mostly just want to kill Illidan once. He's the guy on the box, and I never got him in high school. That's beating the game for me. After I knock him out, I'm not sure I'll want to run it every week for the foreseeable future, though maybe I'll try to gear up enough to "mothball" my shaman until Sunwell drops in case I want to come back. Maybe I'll level an alt, or maybe I'll look for a single player RPG that offers a similar experience, or maybe I'll just quit video games again for another decade.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
6d ago
Your intuition seems to be incorrect with regards to normies. Generally I'd figure enlisted are the normiest of normies, and the DoW feels that playing GTA 6 at launch is such an incentive their offering it up to convince people to re-up.
But regardless, my concern isn't really "Do most people feel that the launch of a video game is as much of an event as things I want to do, like getting drunk at an iggles playoff game or setting a rock climbing tournament?" it's "Do people really think that they get to judge how I spend my free time because I have a wife and a kid, or insert themselves as the person I forgot to ask about a deal between my wife and I?"
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
7d ago
The USA actually seems to be reducing military engagement in the region below prewar levels, with the announcement today that troops are pulling out of Iraq. (Again)
I pray that a peace deal is reached, and to a lesser extent that it is favorable to the United States and does not lead to the destruction of Israel.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
7d ago
I've always felt that way about popular FPS and similar games, in that I try them when hanging out with friends, who are much better than me, and then I'm not that interested in playing because I suck and I'm not interested enough to invest the effort in ceasing to suck.
Sure but on September 1, the inevitable end of the game was known. Either the servers would move on to Wrath and all your TBC achievements would be irrelevant, or Classic+ would drop, or it would be a low-pop Era server. There was no universe where the "vague near-future-but-not-really feeling" lasted very long. Given that state of affairs, it shocks me that people invested anything that they weren't ok with losing?
I will note one thing that seems rotten is people who spent real money on boosts suddenly finding the toon they boosted in a different position.
To be honest, I wasn't sure anyone other than me ever read that book. Was it really popular in any way?
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