erwgv3g34
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User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
5hr ago
I think about this video constantly ever since I first saw it.
The stated admission (that I do not think is a joke!) that even a literal villain who slaughtered her people can instantly win her over by... pointing a sword at her throat.
From the comments of "Please don’t vote because democracy is a local optimum":
Downloading a girly cartoon romance at random, labelled as a romance and intended for a female audience, and skimming it: Princess is much younger than the prince, and has been given to the prince to seal a peace treaty: The deal was that she was supposed to marry the King, but the King took one look at her and unilaterally changed the deal, giving her to the Prince instead. Prince treats her like the small brat that she in fact is. Prince is a leader of men, commander of the army, and has slaughtered various people in princess’ immediate family. The deal is that her land conditionally surrenders to the prince’s King as a result of military defeat, but the prince has to marry her so that her people get representation and her royal lineage does not totally disappear. Story is that, like the King, he does not want to marry her, because she is a small brat and much hotter chicks keep trying to get his attention, and she homicidally hates him because he has with his own sword killed one of her beloved relatives, and his army under his direct command has killed most of her other relatives (hence the marriage)
Skipping over a zillion frames of the prince in manly poses experiencing deep emotions, thinking about deep emotions, and talking about deep emotions, to the end, they start to like each other just in time for the scheduled wedding,. Final scene is that he goes off to war again and realizes he misses her. He wears the sword with which he killed her beloved relatives in every frame except for a frame when they go to bed, including the frame where he realizes he misses her.
Well I did not check every frame, but every frame that I checked he is wearing that sword, except when they were in bed. As far as I could tell in my somewhat superficial reading, he never regrets or apologizes for killing off much of her family, and treats her as an idiot for making a fuss about it until she stops making a fuss about it.
My account of the story is probably not completely accurate, (aagh, I am drowning in estrogen) but it is close enough. Prince, Princess, sword, arranged marriage, and sword.
So, I would say that the intended readers of that romance rather like patriarchy, and I would not believe anything they said to the contrary.
And:
Well, duh. Having high status people fall in love with you is an obvious sort of wish fulfillment plot.
Yet in films targeted largely at males, for example James Bond, the sex interest girls are generally low status. High status girls is not a major male wish fulfillment fantasy, whereas in romance, high status guys are as uniform as moaning in porn.. Even when the sex interest girl is a badass action girl with batman like athletic abilities, for example Yuffie the thief, she gets in trouble for stealing stuff, making her low status.
Further I doubt that there are what males would call action scenes in twilight because if there had been, males would have willingly watched it. What you are calling action scenes were probably status scenes involving violence and cruelty. I assume this because many, possibly most, romances have status scenes involving violence and cruelty. Love interest cruelty in romance is as predictable and repetitious as the girl moaning in porn. The point is not action, but to prove the love interest is potentially capable of cruelty and violence.
In an action scene, James Bond is in grave danger. In a romance cruelty scene, the love interest hurts someone really badly without the audience ever feeling the love interest to be in danger. The heroine is never in danger from the love interest, but the main point of the scene is that she could be. He is dangerous and badass. Hence the propensity of the prince to knock off relatives of the princess with that prominent and lovingly depicted sword.
In contrast, the main point of an action scene is that the hero is in danger. For example the henchman Jaws in “the spy who loved me” is way more badass than James Bond, so that the audience believes James Bond is in danger. No one is ever more badass than the romance love interest.
erwgv3g34
6hr ago
Yudkowsky wrote a whole author's note about how obvious he thought it was and how he didn't know how to make it any clearer:
Since many reviewers are still asking if Quirrell is Voldemort, I tried putting in a final sentence from "Professor Quirrell's" point-of-view and got such reader outrage at the unsubtlety that I gave up and removed it. I am now seriously asking for help and suggestions on what I can do to make it clear to all readers that Professor Quirrell is Voldemort. So far we have the following facts:
- canon!Tom Riddle applied to teach Defense at Hogwarts and put a curse on the position when he didn't get it.
- canon!Quirrell is possessed by Voldemort.
- It has been repeated within the fic that the Dark Lord has lost his last body but is somehow still alive.
- The author has summarized the First Law of Fanfiction as "Frodo gets lightsaber, Sauron gets Death Star".
- The Defense Professor at Hogwarts is
5a) A drooling zombie
5b) Who occasionally undergoes a drastic shift of personality and
5c) Becomes a genius who
5d) Loves the spell Avada Kedavra and
5e) Is extraordinarily knowledgeable about Battle Magic and
5f) Talks about how he always wanted to teach Defense at Hogwarts and
5g) Wanted to be a Dark Lord when he was a young Slytherin and made a list of all the mistakes he would never make and
5h) Talks about "pretending to lose", which he learned through a horribly humiliating experience in a martial arts monastery which was wiped out by Lord Voldemort shortly thereafter, except for one student who was a friend of his and
5i) Doesn't seem to understand why Harry wouldn't want to become a Dark Lord and
5j) Talks about how much he hates this flawed world and
5k) Has manipulated Harry into disliking Dumbledore and
5l) Thinks that when Harry knows him a little better, Harry will deduce that he would want to cast a spell on the Pioneer 11 plaque which will "make it last a lot longer"The reader is supposed to know at this point that PQ is LV. How can I make it clearer without it being disruptive? If you have ideas, please share them.
erwgv3g34
8hr ago
Reminds me of the Katie Cohen incident. Summary:
Katie was married to person 1. They either had an open relationship or were poly or something similar, and Katie was also dating person 2, who is married to person 3. Katie and person 2 agreed that if their birth control failed, Katie would abort. Katie got pregnant, decided not to abort. Person 2 cut off contact with Katie, Katie’s marriage to person 1 disintegrated for multiple reasons, and that divorce removed Katie’s primary source of financial support.
Katie then proceeded to portray herself as the victim in her tumblr, with lines such as:
Sometimes I wonder if Will ever thinks about how deeply he’s hurt Andromeda by rejecting her as his daughter. Or if his wife ever thinks about how much enduring pain she created, when she drew her defensive lines against me and my child, rather than let her husband be close to us. How one day Andromeda might be 40 years old, recounting that pain.
Huh, that was 9 years ago; how time flies. Andromeda must be 10, by now; I wonder how she turned out.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
That doesn't prove anything. It could just be that traditional foods have less of the orange soda, whatever it is, and if you made terrible tasting food with the secret ingredient everyone would still get fat.
The smartphone is truly the worst invention in human history.
Future generations will dig up Steve Jobs's corpse and mount his head on a pike.
(But seriously, this autoformatting. Why is it designed around a use case where someone starts a numbered list with a number other than 1 but actually wants 1? When would that ever possibly happen? And what can one do to get around it?)
That's just how it works. Comments are parsed in Markdown, which is translated to HTML. By writing "2.", you are creating an ordered list, which is an HTML object that starts counting from one by default. Fixing this would require breaking the standard.
Maybe create an unordered list? Instead of numbers, use bullets. You can indent the bullets to nest sub-lists.
I have. My sister did this to her ex-husband, before she settled into the life of a childless lesbian.
We can't live like this.
We literally can't; we are empirically failing to reproduce.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
/r/BorednIgnored (NSFW)
Though I suppose it could always be worse...
It's shocking how both the depth and breadth of knowledge have contracted in one generation. Recently I was sitting around a fire with a group of 20 somethings and they asked me what kind of music I liked. I told them "classical" and they didn't know what that meant. Worse still, I had a hard time explaining it. One of the most alien and disconcerting things is that Millenials will text while having sex. I now give a standard warning to Millenials: "No texting during sex or we are done. I don't care how hot you are." This makes the hikikomori seem much more understandable.
A Bug’s Life
I mean, it's Seven Samurai, but bugs. Well animated for the time, decent humour and voices, and also (and possibly more importantly at the time!) better than the coincidentally competing AntZ. The writing wasn't anything groundbreaking, but it was solid, and I'll happily rewatch it.
Antz was a much better movie than A Bug's Life.
A Bug's Life, as you said, is fundamentally just a remake of Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, toned down for little kids. Antz is clever, original, and very much not toned down. The termite battle is basically the insect version of Saving Private Ryan's beach scene. Z and Weaver have actual sexual tension with Bala and Azteca, respectively, as opposed to the chaste romance between Flik and Atta. Antz deals with military coups and genocide; A Bug's Life deals with learning to stand up to your bullies.
Antz is a movie everyone can enjoy; A Bug's Life is a movie meant for small children.
Okay, so why don't studios make movies for less? We know full well it is possible; Super Mario Bros and Oppenheimer were both made on a budget of $100 million, and both did great at the box office ($1.361 billion and $975.8 million, respectively).
Why are the budgets so out of control? What possessed Disney to invest $250 million on Snow White, or Warner Bros to drop $200 million on Joker 2?
Well, no, I did not enjoy it. All I could think about while watching the dinosaurs attack was "I don't care what happens to these people". Because the movie didn't make me care.
It is the job of the scriptwriter to create awesome characters that I want to root for, and a believable world with coherent rules that make me believe those characters are truly in danger, because I know that the writer won't just pull a deus ex machina to save them.
Why are blockbuster movie scripts so... bad?
I've been going to the movies more in the last year than I have in the previous decade, because I have a coworker turned friend that likes to watch films in theaters and it is a cheap way to hang out with him (protip: bring your own snacks and drinks in a backpack instead of buying from the concession stand and watch the morning matinee instead of purchasing the more expensive evening tickets). And what I keep noticing is that, while they are very pretty, the writing in them is absolutely, uniformly awful.
I'm not even talking about politics here. I'm talking about how nobody in Mufasa ever stops to think about "wait a minute, how do I know that Milele even exists?!" the way a level 1 intelligent character would. I'm talking about how half the runtime of Jurassic World Rebirth is pointless action sequences that contribute nothing to the plot. I'm talking about how Brave decided to waste its amazing prologue by focusing the movie around the mom turning into a bear.
If you are already spending $200 million dollars producing a movie and a similar amount marketing it, why can't you just throw in an extra million to hire Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin (or, hell, Eliezer Yudkowsky) to write your script for you?
But... it doesn't seem to be a question of money? It is certainly possible to find much better writing in direct to video films than in theatrical films, despite their much lower budgets. Everybody agrees that the DCEU was a pile of crap, while there were have been some very solid entries in the DC Universe Animated Original Movies series. I recently watched Justice League: Gods & Monsters, and I was hooked from the first scene of General Zod cucking Superman's dad to the end credits; I wasn't looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie is going to last, the way I do when watching a blockbuster.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
But you can say that about anything? "People don't like it when the market causes people to starve/end up homeless, so we need socialized grocery stores/housing". We don't; we just need to make it cheap enough that the possibility of starving/ending up homeless/dying for lack of healthcare becomes remote for any reasonably functional person. We are pretty much there with food; for housing and healthcare, we literally just need to stop stopping people from building housing/providing healthcare.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
(yet another way that healthcare breaks market mechanisms, because hospitals don't like when people die, they treat people first and ask for payment after).
It's not that hospitals "don't like it", it's that they are legally forbidden from doing so. If it was legal to turn people out to die, you would absolutely have some cheaper hospitals that made sure you could pay out of pocket or had insurance before they treated you, and if you didn't they would just escort you off the property.
Following up on Rear Window, I watched The Birds (1963) yesterday. Apparently Netflix licensed a bunch of Alfred Hitchcock movies; good to know.
Some thoughts:
- We never find out why the birds are attacking, though the trailer implies they are rebelling against human abuse.
- You know how modern horror movies will make you spend twenty minutes with jerks before the monster shows up and starts fucking people up? This movie takes a whole hour for the first major bird attack to take place; that's half of its runtime!
- FMC is adventurous, perhaps a little too much so; lying at the drop of a hat, breaking into LI's home for a prank, etc.
- The shot of the lovebirds leaning with the car turns was amusing.
- LI's jaw could cut diamonds.
- Smoker culture is prevalent, with people offering strangers cigarettes as they would a glass of water.
- Phone calls are expensive enough that FMC offers to pay for them, but cheap enough that the postmaster eats the cost.
- Special effects are a little dated; it's very easy to tell that the actors are in one layer and the birds in another.
- Scariest part of the movie? The post office with a sign saying that dog licenses are issued there. "Oi, mate! Ya got a loicense for dat pupper?"
I think the problem, as usual, is diversity; the US has a large ethnic underclass that thinks it's fucking normal to go around without an ID, and has no idea where their birth certificate is, if it even still exists. You can't enforce "papers, please!" on illegal Hispanic without enforcing it on urban blacks, and they would fail just as often despite having every legal right to live and work here, leading to much wailing and gnashing of teeth; see the kerfuffle about needing an ID to vote.
"Bugman" in this sense is meant to evoke eusocial insects, like ants and bees; the implication is that Asians, though hard-working, are highly conformist. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down and all that.
Probably genetic; East Asian cultures have a history of collective punishment that is largely absent from the West, so if you fucked up, you didn't just get yourself killed, but your whole family; that strongly selects for conformist genes.
Bryan Caplan would not have lasted five minutes in ancient China or feudal Japan.
erwgv3g34
13d ago
Take-home essays were always a stupid idea; there was nothing stopping past students from having a big brother or a stranger from Craigslist do the actual writing, so they unfairly penalized anybody who was honest and did not have a big budget. All graded assignments should be done in class; AI simply made this clear.
erwgv3g34
13d ago
If you are too crazy to be trusted with a firearm, you should not be out in public, period.
erwgv3g34
14d ago
Working a fulltime job as a cashier, or barista, or whatever is also well within the physical and mental capabilities of a teenage male. That is enough to pay for a room or even a studio. And considering how many families throughout history have been raised in similar or worse conditions... it's really also a matter of our society not being set up that way, not of material impossibility.
In an alternate reality, we could end credentialed education at 8th grade like the Amish do, a boy would either start working directly or apprentice into a trade, then a couple of years later when he accidentally knocks up some girl at 16 he marries her at the point of a shotgun and is able to support both at a low standard of living until he finishes his apprenticeship or gets enough experience that he can find better work.
And, ideally, in that parallel universe we also build more fucking housing and train more fucking doctors so that our standard of living does not keep going down even as the economy becomes more and more productive, the way it does in this world.
erwgv3g34
15d ago
When life is a constant battle against starvation, you don't have the luxury of resources to have to think long term. You live that beautiful, simple, horrifyingly savage life of "one day at a time." Once you figure our larger scale agriculture, you start to have more stuff and then you upgrade to the perennial problem of how to organize society. Every society that's flourished has settled on long-term pair bonding and marriage-til-death. Some have carve outs for lawful divorce, but the intent is clear.
The causality is backwards. Once you develop marriage to guarantee men exclusive sexual access to a woman and thereby produce children of assured paternity, men have an actual incentive to work hard and create wealth in order to support their spouse and offspring. Civilization is a built as a byproduct of men seeking to provide for their wife and kids.
With no marriage, you get sluts in mud huts. Men compete for women by being the biggest thug, not by being the best provider. Women compete for men by being the biggest whore, not by being the best possible wife and mother.
What happens when welfare and child support replace marriage is left as an exercise for the reader.
erwgv3g34
15d ago
The article is paywalled so I can't read the entirety, but if you can quote me the part where Ms. Zito is single and pregnant, go right ahead and I'll be properly horrified.
She isn't. Here are all the paragraphs mentioning Ms. Zito, from the non-paywalled archive:
Rhaelynn Zito is one such conservative convert. Ms. Zito is a 25-year-old nurse who lives in Raleigh, N.C. In 2023, she said she had a real belly flop of a year. She went through a breakup, lost a family member and was searching for purpose outside work. Ms. Zito began listening to Ms. Clark, whose Turning Point USA show is often ranked among the top ten of health podcasts on Spotify.
Listening to Ms. Clark, Ms. Zito said, changed her life. She started a Bible study group, cut down her drinking and stopped dating casually as she focused on finding a husband. She stopped using birth control, taking up a natural family planning method recommended on Ms. Clark’s show, and became dubious about abortions and vaccines. She no longer identifies as a feminist.
“What dipped my toe into all of this was the MAHA movement,” Ms. Zito said, referring to the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, championed by influencers like Ms. Clark and now led in the Trump administration by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “I find myself leaning more conservative than I ever have before.”
...
Right before she flew to Dallas, Ms. Zito realized it was time to tell her close friends and family that she identified as conservative. After all, they might see her post photos from the Turning Point conference on Instagram.
Ms. Zito braced herself and called her grandmother, a liberal Methodist pastor in New Jersey. “I’m moderately conservative!” (She said her grandmother didn’t make a fuss, mostly wanting her to be happy.)
Ms. Zito still encounters political issues that prompt her to lean left. She finds some of the White House’s messaging about ICE raids to be “unchristian.” She believes in access to abortion under some circumstances. She wants a career. But she finds the MAHA of it all compelling. “It’s just like Alex Clark always says,” she explained. “We will not have political fights in 100 years if we’re all sick and don’t have babies.”
Sounds like she turned her life around; good for her. She is still young enough to catch a husband and have children.
erwgv3g34
15d ago
It would be, if the constitution was written today. Much of the bill of right was in responses to specific abuses by the British government, e.g. the third amendment exists because of the quartering acts. If the founders had witnessed the way the current government controls people through threatening their driving licenses, which are functionally required to participate in modern society anywhere outside of New York City, they would have surely included an amendment guaranteeing the right to drive.
How do I get prescription stimulants without a prescription?
(If I had enough conscientiousness to be able to get a prescription, I wouldn't need the stimulants.)
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