Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
11hr ago
I think a lot of people are basically pretending they have social lives now but in fact spend all the time they can bedrotting with a screen. The men you just don't hear about, they drop out of the offline world completely, but many women still accept invitations from friends, go on dating apps, etc. when they're as stuck inside as a junkie in a traphouse.
I suppose so. Though there's a lot of coaching and player specialization involved in other sports, it's just the most extreme in American football because there isn't the need for players to fill other roles (even in cricket, you occasionally get the equivalent of your big guy needing to kick a field goal). Do you feel that the emphasis in ultra-specializing players physically is good or bad for that chess-style of watching?
Personally, I simply cannot understand the appeal of a sport where you sit around watching largely unimportant nonsense for almost all the time in the hope of catching 30 seconds of action - I already have my girlfriend for that.
Bartender_Venator
23hr ago
Cuba has an estimated 5.5 million tons of nickel deposits (for reference, Indonesia has the most in the world, at 21 million), but produces less than 50,000 tons a year. They have the third largest deposits of cobalt in the world. I wouldn't be surprised if they have more minerals I don't see on a cursory google, since the Caribbean is a mineral-rich region. They also have chrome, copper, gold, zinc, etc. and possibly offshore oil. Not enough to fully bootstrap your economy off (Jamaica might get >80% of export value from bauxite, but you want to do better than Jamaica), but a good start for developing domestic industry in a non-Communist context.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
It's not really American football vs soccer. The reality is that, if you haven't grown up watching either rugby or American football, and then you were exposed to both, you'd never choose the latter as a viewing experience. The rest of the world has their own version of American football, but more free-flowing, more naturally physical, and less advertisercucked. Even the Japanese play rugby.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
And yet, after drawing with Cape Verde, Spain won the tournament, holding the world champions to a single shot. The nature of football is that it evens out over the course of a campaign, without being boringly predictable. (Also, with regard to your second point, football players use their upper bodies a ton when competing for the ball - to keep balance, hold space, know where the other player is, control their movements, etc. You don't notice it, because it only becomes really obvious to a new viewer when it turns into a foul. There's a reason the players don't look like cyclists).
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I agree. The perfect sport is one where both teams show up to the pitch, the computer decides who is better, and the victory is awarded to the superior team. You don't even need to get your cleats dirty.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
Sure, I agree with the points you're making. I'm just trying to say that these prospects come and go every year, every top club's fans are hyped up about their academy players, or some other academy prospect they want to sign, and the majority of them go the Januzaj route. Some are cut early, some make it into their early twenties and then go to Bremen or Getafe or Tottenham, and a few make it to be stars, but always far fewer than fans expect in a given season.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
It's a numbers game, modulated by the attractiveness of your pictures and your standards for looks.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
Then my guess is that you're scaring the hoes in your logistics messaging somehow. But, also, women are just inherently flakey, and luck blows hot and cold in all aspects of life. Sometimes it'll be a string of "haha something came up sorrrrry", sometimes you'll get a "lol im so drunk can i just come over" and sometimes it'll be "lol im so drunk can i just come over" and she comes over and loses her hearing in one ear mid-makeout and you have to take her to urgent care at midnight because she has a pierced eardrum. This shit's weird, man, all you can do is dial in things on your end - including uncomfortable reflection on your technique - and then ride the waves as they come.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
You know ball. However, I would say that in football, there's a constant pattern of youth players who are physically dominant on U-16/18/21 teams (black, white, and hispanic) failing to kick on after that peak. It's kind of priced into football youth development in a way it isn't in American football. Also, breaking through early and playing a ton of minutes is a recipe for being an injury disaster in your late 20s, as the example of Rooney (or Jack Wilshere, or Gareth Bale - btw I disagree with your assessment of Rooney, he went to United at 18 and was their top league scorer in his first season) shows; late-blooming players often have much longer peaks because by the time they reach that peak of game intelligence their body is still able to handle it. Helps if you're in Spain/France and thus doped to the gills, of course.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
Saka (starboy), Madueke, Eze, Rashford, Ivan Toney, Marc Guehi, Nico O'Reilly, Reece James, Djed Spence, Jarrel Quansah (red card lol), Mainoo (why), and I think I'm missing some. The England squad is very black, particularly London players.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
I think we've talked about Chicago before, but it's a tough city when it comes to dating. If you're looking for a tradwife type (under 300lbs) you're SOL. My strategy for assembling a roster in Chicago was pretty simple: decent photos, signal class/exoticism, hide all hoe-scaring interests, take her to a wine bar near a park on the first date, go "stargazing" in the park after, kiss her, have a line to get her back to your place with a modicum of deniability. If you want a girl who isn't extraordinarily boring, swipe on service industry girls or wannabe art hoes. Establish rapport and then quickly move to date logistics, never talk politics or sperg out, brush aside any of that with jokes.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
I'm told that it's difficult to run a trillion-dollar company from prison, even white-collar Club Fed. They might have to find something he did on January 21st, but that shouldn't be too much of an obstacle.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
I wasn't going to say The shield in case he didn't want spoilers.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
FYI, if you use a two-hander, you still want a shield (your character puts it on his back while two-handing) because you can get stat bonuses from them even when not holding them.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
Man, they really trained the LLMs on that coffee_enjoyer post.
Interesting that your experiences diverge so much from mine. If you ask me, travel slutting is a totally different experience if you're a man and also not a celebrity, in that you actually have to plan everything and pay for things yourself (I'll be honest, I did once have my debit card stop working in Antwerp and had to pull an Italian girl to get dinner and a bed). Self-reliant backpacking, in my experience, teaches you the exact opposite skillset and vibe, an upbeat cynicism that always ends in a yearning for the familiar bed back home. Things change a lot when you introduce enough drugs, though. At a certain point, you start thinking "wouldn't it be nice if I had the resources for me and my best friends to get a beautiful rental, spend a weekend rocketing through the psychosphere, and then go home to routine - so, how do I make this happen".
As a wise man once said: when you get the message, put down the phone.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
I agree - I have a high opinion of Stoicism, hence the lesson about figures in the movement who seek "thought leadership" positions.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
Note that Ryan Holiday, the most famous Stoic influencer online, regularly seems to have embarrassing emotional meltdowns in public, usually over politics. A lesson in that for dealing with Actually Existing Rationalism, too.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
Mystery Grove's substack, IM-1776, Shakes' post history.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
Each day, you get paired with a random person, with weights towards your interests but still allowing some variance.
In a previous career stage, I tried several apps that do things like this, and joined networking groups that do it low-tech. The thing this proposal hasn't considered is MLM schemes and similar sales-motivated people. Which people are most motivated to talk to new people everyday? You've got your founding population, or a parasite group that will move in very quickly (see also the death of Clubhouse).
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
It can both be true that our immigration system is largely a tool of fraud and parasitism, used as a cudgel by elites against the American people, and that in many countries there some men and women with true American hearts, who could make themselves beloved and patriotic Americans today as easily as if they were born here. Just part of the tragedy of the whole situation.
It really depends, irl. I think Scott’s right, it’s all barber pole. If you are at a status level where, by sympathizing with the losers, you could be mistaken for a loser, people will use that to shut you down. Whereas if everyone knows you have a tinder harem, you can sympathize with shut-in incels; if everyone knows you’re fuck-you rich you can sympathize with the rednecks and rust belters; if everybody knows you’re a rarefied academic you can sympathize with ghetto criminals. The thing about status games is that there’s always a bigger fish. On the Internet, there’s no obvious social status granted to a an anon poster (though people can make a play for it, and succeed or fail, as you can see in the contrasting examples of Cim and Count). This means that the moves used to shut down the kinds of discussion you’re talking about are actually more effective on the internet than irl, because online someone can always just accuse you of being a loser, and trying to disprove that puts you on the defensive and thus automatically lowers your status.
Bartender_Venator
19d ago
Something that's funny is that, when you spend a long time in a place like this, you start to get a pretty decent understanding of the psychology of various poaster types. For a lot of people, the arguments are just little props they use to get to the emotion they want to express. Someone wants to find reasons to say "this means civil war!" because he wants to be incandescently angry. Someone wants to write a 2000-word explanation of the Female Mind so that he can feel he understands the species. The anti-victimhood/Elite Human Capital people really wear it on their sleeves, though. "You're a loser, I'm a doer" (as far as I can tell, MKC lives a completely normal and unremarkable life in a completely normal and unremarkable place - not that I'm sneering at raising a family, that's a noble thing, but wildly out of step with some Manichean division of the world into "builders" and "whiners"). That's it, that's the whole post, everything else is a spandrel.
Bartender_Venator
19d ago
I feel like I see this kind if application of rules-lawyering in a lot of inappropriate contexts, such as interpersonal relationships.
I find it irritating and honestly sometimes pathetic on the internet (it's almost always not intended, just the rationalist personality style, but it often comes across as "I'm afraid to debate as a debate, so I want to set the exact frame of the argument exactly where my evidence is strongest, declare the win condition which is easiest for me to achieve, then put every burden of proof I can on you, and declare victory if I can claim I keep the 10% of my argument I choose as my win condition"). Note that this is also how ratbetting works, frame control is often much more important than the substance of the bet. It doesn't help that I grew up around lawyers who tended to see that adversarial mode as implicitly a lesser form of lawyering compared to understanding relationships, pragmatics, iterated games, etc. In comparison, trying to "win" a conversation is a little gauche.
What I do understand is that a full debate, where both sides are fully allowed to contest the frame, takes a lot more work on the internet. You have to write instead of speaking, you have to deal with the inherent difficulty of conveying full meaning via posts, and you lack a direct relationship to your audience/interlocutor. Still, people here should recognize the difference between the two, that one is a lower mode than the other, and that winning or losing a rules-lawyering debate really doesn't matter very much unless the specific question of fact is seriously prior-shifting, which it very rarely is.
Interesting, in my experience watching American football I'm basically unable to tell when the action will resume in a given space of milling around. I assume you pick that up fairly quickly.
In my experience, women go for soccer very quickly, but they only remember the good-looking players (I have an American friend who still occasionally asks about Olivier Giroud) or the villains of a given team. It's easier for sports-agnostic women to experience sports as personal drama between men - see also the explosion of F1 interest.
I think the connection to baseball is a meaningful one, even if cricket is probably closer than baseball to the abstract idea of American football you're portraying. American sports are, generally, optimized for ultra-intense fan engagement with lots of statistics, whereas old-world sports tend more towards "may the best man win, old chap" with relatively less structure around that. Personally, I sort of appreciate that the stats wonks in soccer aren't really that useful, but it also means that there's very little to actually think about beyond watching the games and scouting transfers. Tactics are incredibly important to a team, but you've discussed them to death by Monday.
I can see the Fire Emblem metaphor, though I think the "war simulator" thing has been tortured to death (I could also give a spiel on how soccer and rugby are closer to small-unit infantry tactics - let alone that soccer fans engage in much closer activities to war than any professional athlete...) and we should accept that the war-related psychological inheritances that sport activates in us have almost nothing to do with what happens on the pitch.
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