ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
Use your mind! Create new memories! Interact! Don't just add it to a library of forgotten photographs! - Megatron
User ID: 2120
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
5mo ago
That was basically what I meant, with an exclusion for those demos whose victimization is framed as political. What I should have said is, there are any number of potential venues to pull off something like this. Doing it at a rally will guarantee that the collateral will be assumed as part of the motive whether it really was that thought-out or not.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
5mo ago
And the Trump political ads write themselves.
Even better than that, they've already been written. Trump has already branded "They're not after me, they're after you and I'm just in the way" as a slogan quite some time ago. If this shooter left a MAGA body at this rally then Trump is effectively president-elect. Bringing real political violence to a demographic that, habitually, has little experience with it will be catastrophic for Dems at the ballot (tautological but should be said).
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
5mo ago
My playtime for HD2 specifically is probably a 30/70 split between playing with my friend group and running randoms respectively, though I get your point about multiplayer games where the fun is dicking around with buddies. Lethal Company is a pretty good example of a cheap FOTM game that went wide and died off, not mechanically deep, complex or satisfying to play but it's great for a few weekend sessions with the gang.
I know people can get cranky when someone brings up "core gameplay loops" but if a game isn't at least enjoyable to interact with (in terms of controlling the character/player avatar in the gameworld) I'll drop it immediately. As the great Reggie Fils-Aimé once said, "If the game's not fun, why bother?". I would probably play HD2 from time to time even if the servers were shut down (don't think that's actually possible, thanks GAAS, so it goes) just because running around and shooting the guns feels good to me.
I also have a few coworkers who don't seem to understand, admitting they've played with a toy they don't like for hundreds of hours (or even better, bought into the ingame store) is telling on yourself. I genuinely think less of people who do that, they've shit up my hobby.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
5mo ago
My preferences are broadly opposed to yours, but I understand what you mean when you describe a satisfying 15 hr game. There is something very satisfying about a story that you can sit down and casually chomp through over the course of a handful of post-shift evenings. As someone with multiple 100hr+ games in his steam library though, I can't agree on the point with open worlds with only 15~hrs worth of content in them, again with an understanding of what you mean; the only AC game I ever played for more than fifteen minutes was some 2d sidescrolling Prince of Persia-esque sidestory for the DS, played out of a child's desperate boredom and not desire.
The majority of what's on offer from major studios for probably the last ten+ years has been dreck, almost without fail. Titanfall 2 was a rare exception to the AAA studio putting out a mediocre product at full-game prices, and it very predictably flopped as a result. As someone who autisticly gets into the systems of a game, and plays them for that satisfaction, the high end of mainstream vidya has been largely uninteresting and I have ignored it entirely as a result.
Helldivers 2, for all the strangely political discussion that's surrounded it, has been by far my most played game since its launch simply because I can see how much effort was put into these systems I get to exploit (rounds are modeled, counted and persistent in the mag/belt/cylinder/chamber, semi-volumetric ballistics for enemy armor, spalling while not modeled is simulated in the damage characteristics of each weapon, etc.). It was a small AA studio that put out an ambitious nearly decade-long project at an AA pricepoint and people loved it and then got bored and moved on. I've put in 400+ hours and have fun playing it still. We all get what we deserve.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
5mo ago
Your sub list has a good bit of overlap with mine, though I wonder if you'd agree with my opinion that Dillon has moderated quite a bit with his more recent success. His earlier work, up to and including the L.A. porch series was some of the best cultural critique of the 21st century IMHO. Still like his stuff, but he's mellowed now that owns multiple properties and he's not constantly afraid of losing the fleeting success he was clinging to, many such cases.
Any thoughts on lemon party, Ben Avery's podcast? I don't keep up with it seriously but for extremely online types I think it's been a real treat, close to a modern cumtown. Right on the edge of the politically unspeakable too, two of the regular hosts made an appearance on a podcast with Sam and Nick of MDE very recently (had a few fun clips dumped onto my homepage).
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
7mo ago
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
7mo ago
Each game is a pretty well self-contained story, I wouldn't worry too much about where to get started. SA is my favorite entry that I've played, it feels very much like a product of its time so I might be wearing nostalgia goggles. Never finished it though.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
7mo ago
To each their own, I'll probably reread the whole Culture series once I've finished it and I might scare up a different opinion on a second read-through.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
7mo ago
I'll warn you, in terms of pacing Phlebas is all over the place compared to PoG. That said, I think Phlebas is just more entertaining - distinct setpieces, interesting characters, consequential action, clever strategems. It reads more like sci-fi-noir, the main character jumping from bad to worse and still scraping through, seething the whole time at the hedonistic and inhuman Culture as if someone had transplanted an early 21st century man into the setting.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
7mo ago
Book recommendation thread? I picked up and read The Eternal Front as recommended from last week's thread, and found it quite enjoyable - very often I find sci-fi loses me within its own scope, but Blaire's writing felt much more human in scale with far lower stakes than what I ordinarily read. I think sci-fi shines brightest when telling stories about the individuals navigating the cultures and battlefields forged through genetic, technological and/or cultural isolation - the actual bedrock upon which every setting rests. Anyway Eternal Front is a good rec and I'll just second @No_one's writeup for it.
Maybe my awareness of the often unnecessarily grandiose scope of sci-fi is the result of serendipity, as I also (finally) got around this week to reading Peter Watts' Echopraxia after having read and reread Blindsight several times over the years, and for as much as I love his writing he doesn't really do people very well. Maybe he just finds them awkward and somewhat unnecessary to the tale he's trying to tell (this may be a literary flourish of his, kind of the point, I've only just recently been introduced to the concept of "media literacy" please understand). Regardless, if you read/enjoyed Blindsight and haven't read the sequel yet, I'll stick a hearty recommendation onto it. If you haven't read Blindsight and you like hard sci-fi then I don't know what you're doing here. Go read it (it's available for free on Watts' website) and curse/thank me later. Pretty sure our actual future looks more like his vision than Gene Roddenberry's.
Continuing down the vein of galactic scale sci-fi that I like but feel a little lost in the sauce, I enjoyed Alastair Reynolds Inhibitor Trilogy, though when reading it I couldn't shake the feeling I was reading a grimdark Culture fanfic (albeit a thoughtfully and competently written one). A fun read if you have nothing else going on, some interesting semi-hard concepts get trotted out and played with, a few logical conclusions to the laws of physics (and breaking them) are portrayed in fairly comprehensible prose. The first entry, Revelation Space, is fun enough by itself to be worth a read; if you want more of that, then each subsequent book expands on those same themes and scenarios. A medium-strength recommend.
Speaking of Iain Banks Culture series, I suppose I'll register some disappointment with everyone who told me Consider Phlebas was a weaker entry in the series than Player of Games, could not really disagree more - PoG was an interesting look into alien anthropology and cultural hijacking but I found it to be bit of a slog. Phlebas, however, scratched that itch I have for a story about a person doing person things in a great big future. Both were good reads though, and I have a fresh copy of Use of Weapons now sitting on top of my stack.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
It says nothing about ulterior motives and very little about how they see their children. It seems like many if not most parents find having children to be a source of fulfillment and happiness, so it would follow that this would be an experience said parents would want to share with their children (as they would for any number of positive choices made in life, a key component to generational success). Unless you mean to suggest your negative view of lineage or fecundity is/should be the baseline moral position for all humanity, and deviation from it is malicious/self serving?
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Actually what he really needs is to be pinned down in the playground and have his nipples twisted, for tricking me into reading that terrible fanfic with his endorsement.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Completely forgot this game existed and now I'm remembering losing my mind trying to beat this as a kid, I had an identical reaction to my rediscovery of Speedy Eggbert just a couple of weeks ago. Serendipity might be one of my favorite human experiences, thanks for posting this.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Her putting her best foot forward wouldn't necessarily affect his perspective that much, if I had to guess. I won't try to speak for him but I'm guessing he's happy she's got enough feet that she can have a good one.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
I know that I take it seriously, but I don't take it seriously because I think I'm going to be turned into a heap of paperclips or atomized by a T-1000. I take it seriously because I see something else coming, a paradigm shift in propaganda and narrative control powered by LLM's, image/video generators and AI-assisted search engines (I'll confess that I may be a little too unironically Kaczynski-pilled). I don't see how the future I envision is any less apocalyptic than the one our loveable quokkas fear, however.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
There were probably people who really, really liked living in Chernobyl.
Incredibly minor nitpick: the major population center was Pripyat, not Chernobyl (which had less than a third the population, at the time).
To more seriously engage you in opposition, the Chernobyl disaster was (more or less) the first of its kind and singularly unique as well, in terms of nuclear powerplants disastrously failing. Three Mile Island is also a weakly cautionary tale in the sense of uninhabitability, which cuts down on the total number of your negative examples.
Admittedly it's a volatile technology whose use holds a potential for truly devastating outcomes, but there's no reason to think we've more or less accounted for the common failure modes. Human error remains the most pernicious (and universal) of potential flaws in the use of nuclear energy but I, personally, believe that the potential negative outcomes of nuclear power are so mollified by current safety advances that I would be comfortable living within ~5 miles of a nuclear powerplant. I say this as someone who does not fall into your outlined demographics.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Since you'd have to actually click through and read the thread to see, I think it's worth asking: @ZorbaTHut are you aware that permabanned users still get to participate in janny duty? Should probably be fixed if you want this system to work the way I assume you intended.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
I've recently found myself coming to the conclusion that though I prize my own values very highly, I do not value them nearly as high for other/foreign cultures - it feels like it would negate what makes them different and useful to my own.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
I sincerely don’t know what “coding class signals as political” means, otherwise I would answer that question.
I think it's likely you are confusing the urban/suburban/rural cultural divides with political allegiance: while these things map to each other to a degree, these are far more likely to signal class allegiance as opposed to political (e.g. "conservative", "progressive"). Since we're discussing anecdata, I happen to know a great many pro-lgbt, pro-public healthcare, pro-prison reform, all around fairly leftwing types who also exhibit every sign you likely find repulsive (religiosity, "traditional" families, regularly hunting every autumn, drives a pickup truck daily for no reason). These are overwhelmingly lower class markers, not political. In fact there's almost no commonality whatsoever between the "cultural" practices of members belonging to any given political group, these commonalities are far more accurately mapped onto stuff like Red Tribe/Blue Tribe, lower/middle/upper class. If you've (perhaps) had trouble figuring out just why the chuds voted against their interest in 2016, perhaps view it through the lens of "the proletariat sending a message to the petit bourgeois". Hopefully this helps you understand my meaning, I wasn't attempting to be cryptic and apologize for not making myself more clear.
“Would I not hire someone if I knew they were conservative?” To answer that, I would, yes.
Thank you for answering, it's pleasing to see my assumptions born out by reality, at least so far as this place is a reflection of it. How do you reconcile your overt and clearly stated reactionary behavior and bigotry, that appears of the same order (if perhaps a differing flavor) with what you proclaim to despise? It's hardly an original observation, but could you please tell me where and how your desired institutional discrimination differs from historical redlining, women being unable to vote or legally own property, or exclusion of lgbt from marriage/adoption/surrogacy? Or that this discrimination will catch only bad actors and not simply the poor, working and lower classes?
This is not a gotcha to be clear, I find quite literally everything you've said to be objectionable but I'm genuinely curious what your worldview is that consolidates and synthesizes what appear to me to be contradictions and am hoping for an explanation. Or do you simply not feel that these are contradictions, and that conservatives are so uniquely repugnant and valueless as a group their ultimate extinction (not via murder or violence of any kind of course, just the inexorable push over a generation or two down and out of our shared world) is a net benefit to society?
If you are asking me if I would hurt a conservative in real life when you say “real harm”, no.
I think that you and I have differing thresholds for what we consider "harm". I think someone being denied the opportunity to fulfill their natural talents or chosen course in life, not by insurmountable failure or poor fortune, but rather by a conscious and conscientious human being deliberately putting their finger on the scales to be harmful. Consider that others may share my definition of harm, and that some quantity of the hostility you see might be a normative reaction from fairly standard-issue human beings towards perceived contempt and deliberate depredations. Consider that the Morlocks also know how to read, and have recognized, rightly or wrongly, the parallel between your course of action and the UN definition of genocide, specifically Article II.c. Consider that someone otherwise entirely sympathetic to your motivations and lived experience would still look at your proposed course of action and consider you "a baddie".
I know you've stated already that you aren't interested in discussion or debate (here, at least) so if you don't want to respond then feel free to ignore me, I won't take it personally and am happy to indulge your wishes.
Bonus points:
but one attended their college’s Turning Point club
You and I may be in agreement with your direction on this specific example, if not your destination. Mere attendance isn't quite the mortal sin to me as it would seem to be for you, however.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
While I find the sentiment of maximizing the purity of your social bubble somewhat loathsome, in this instance I would be entirely content providing you as much assistance on this front as I could. I even think that I could do this in good conscience, given that your stated premise is to
steer clear of them in IRL interactions
The rules I have, personally, for total removal of an individual from my life before I even know them have been invoked a few times in my life, but not often enough that I feel the need to nervously genuflect towards the Paradox of Tolerance when I do.
That said your somewhat duplicitous presence would lead to my wondering whether your [statistically likely presence somewhere along the chain of decision-makers in the hiring/firing process, for instance] motives in this are entirely pure, or at least not intended to cause real, actual harm to real, actual people while offline. Could you please tell me if the stakes being there was a consideration to you, when you wrote this comment?
Would you consider asking yourself as well, if coding "right-wing" to danger or at least avoidance isn't just coding class-signals (your presumed outgroup) as political?
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Would you please explain to me the thought process behind including this in your reply? If you genuinely believe this to be a bad faith actor then the appropriate response would either be to ignore and move on or to publicly register them as such first. Actual engagement, while an enticing option, is their intended goal - granting it to them just doesn't make any sense.
Alternatively you don't actually think that but you want to call out their belonging to a group/antisemitic signalling, in which case you may want to address that (e.g. Are people of differing ideological beliefs allowed to post here? Are they capable of posting here within the rules? Are usernames even useful for anything other than marking a continuous personality across conversations/threads?).
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
I'm personally not at all afraid it'll break society; that would be one of the better outcomes. Personally I'm much more disturbed it may bend it into something unrecognizable before it breaks, at least in my lifetime.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Thanks for the link, I haven't kept up on lesswrong for a while now. Glad to see stuff in this direction being discussed, at the very least.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
My response to your first question.
As for your second, I really couldn't tell you - I can't think of a place off the top of my head I would feel comfortable exposing to this place.
If something like a second American Civil War were to take place, my layman's estimation says it would almost certainly start in the next ten years if it happens at all. I could be wrong as tensions could yo-yo for longer than I, personally, might find sustainable but the population can accept.
As far as time to walk it all back goes, well. I think the American population has balkanized both further and for longer than most might admit or realize. The fractures within the major factions might prove to be the new political faultlines of whatever comes next, something like the death of the Whigs and subsequent rebirth of the Republican Party after the Civil War.
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