erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
The person most likely to submit it is still you. It's the same principle behind an egosearch.
If I am an AI, and someone asks me to identify the author of a random internet comment, my prior is at least 50% that the person asking is the author.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
Based on the first paragraph I though it might be "Kindness to Kin" by Eliezer Yudkowsky, but when I read the rest I realized that could not be it. So I tried AI and GPT cracked it; it's "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" by James Tiptree Jr. Very New Wave.
Robert Fitzgerald's 1961 translation is the standard modern version of The Odyssey (or, at least, the one all the school textbooks seem to have):
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.He saw the townlands
and learned the minds of many distant men,
and weathered many bitter nights and days
in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only
to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.
But not by will nor valor could he save them,
for their own recklessness destroyed them all—
children and fools, they killed and feasted on
the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun,
and he who moves all day through heaven
took from their eyes the dawn of their return.Of these adventures, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
tell us in our time, lift the great song again.
But if you're looking for something a little more trad, Alexander Pope's 1725 translation is excellent:
The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound;
Who, when his arms had wrought the destined fall
Of sacred Troy, and razed her heaven-built wall,
Wandering from clime to clime, observant stray’d,
Their manners noted, and their states survey’d,
On stormy seas unnumber’d toils he bore,
Safe with his friends to gain his natal shore:
Vain toils! their impious folly dared to prey
On herds devoted to the god of day;
The god vindictive doom’d them never more
(Ah, men unbless’d!) to touch that natal shore.
Oh, snatch some portion of these acts from fate,
Celestial Muse! and to our world relate.
And whatever you do, don't read Samuel Butler's 1900's translation (which is, inexplicably, the most popular version on Project Gutenberg):
Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, oh daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them.
erwgv3g34
7d ago
It’s definitely not at the level of GamerGate, which in turn was less important than the average games journalist suggests.
GamerGate was a huge battle in the culture wars. An entire generation of nerds was redpilled by the realization that:
- Game journalists were coordinating with each other as a class to put out a unified media narrative.
- Those same game journalists absolutely hated gamers.
And, of course, this lesson was readily generalizable to other fields, such as cinema, or politics.
There is a reason that Scott Alexander had to censor the term, reducing us to talking about reproductively viable worker ants.
To this date, the Wikipedia article on GamerGate starts with "Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture." Anybody who reads that sentence and remembers being there knows that Wikipedia is not to be trusted on political matters.
erwgv3g34
14d ago
Finished watching Jaws on Netflix before it went off the air. I found it disappointing, which is surprising considering its reputation (the first summer blockbuster, recommended by both Roger Ebert and Critical Drinker, etc.)
I think the problem is that I couldn't connect to the characters. Chief is too much of a coward, both morally (fails to stand up to the Mayor) and physically (afraid of water). Quint has potential, but in the end he comes across more as a greedy asshole than as a truly passionate shark hunter. And the research dude is just there. I don't care what happens to these people; none of them are awesome enough to keep my interest. Combine that with the slow pacing (the shark is famously not shown until the final act to build suspense) and I was left looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie would be.
It only really gets good in the last twenty minutes when they are directly battling the shark, and by then it is too late.
erwgv3g34
18d ago
- Charlotte's Web (1973)
- The Hobbit (1977)
- Castle in the Sky (1986)
- Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
- The Lion King (1994)
- Anastasia (1997)
- The Prince of Egypt (1998)
- Mulan (1998)
- The Road to El Dorado (2000)
- Titan A.E. (2000)
erwgv3g34
22d ago
Im gonna sound authoritarian here, but this shit needs to straight up be banned. There is no social positive for computers and humans to emotionally intermingle in this way.
Your predecessors said the same about jerking off, or gay sex, or interracial relationships.
Yes, and they were right!
erwgv3g34
23d ago
Assuming that the US passed a war powers vote, or otherwise just decided just to drop everything and go home, what next? It's a total capitulation, and to me it seems braindead obvious that Iran isn't going to stop harassing and extorting nearby shipping. I mean, what have they got to lose, meanwhile the more they extort the more money they get.
Does a politically-viable path to victory exist? If, not--if this is going to be how it ends anyway-- isn't it better to get it over with as soon as possible, rather than after years of fighting that don't actually accomplish anything? The decapitation campaign has clearly failed to break the Iranians. What's next? Boots on the ground? Bombing civilian infrastructure? Nukes?
erwgv3g34
24d ago
Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths and Legends has an absolutely fantastic ending that explains all the mysteries and ties up all the narrative threads; it's like the antithesis of The X Files. But it only went on for one 40-episode season, so I'm not sure it counts.
Tons of single and double-cour anime (Erased, Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, Azumanga Daioh, etc.), but again, not sure they count.
What about the idea of making a separate thread? I'm very interested in AI, but it's a poor fit for the Culture War Roundup. If "Transnational Thursday" and "Tinker Tuesday" can get their own weeklies, surely this deserves one, too? We just have to decide on an alliteration! (Claude recommends either "Machine Monday" or "Singularity Saturday")
erwgv3g34
28d ago
Calling the fertility crisis "essentially voluntarily" is disingenuous.
From Kevin Dolan's 2023 Natal Conference speech:
A consistent 95% of Americans say they want kids but it looks like only about 60% of Millennials will get there and it's much worse for the Zoomers. Fertility decline often gets characterized as inevitable: you give people the freedom to choose and it turns out parenting just isn't a desirable choice.
But that's not the story that you hear from childless people. In surveys only about 10% of childless people say it was a conscious decision. Another 10% deal with some form of medical infertility. But in 80% of cases it's what demographer Steven Shaw calls "unplanned childlessness". You'll hear more about exactly what that means, but bottom line: the infrastructure that gets ordinary people educated employed paired off and raising kids has just broken down.
So I view this is fundamentally a conservation project. If the Bengal tiger suddenly and dramatically stopped breeding we wouldn't say "wow I'm so glad the tigers are prioritizing their mental health" or "they're spoiled; they're just not made of the same stuff as their tiger ancestors". And we certainly wouldn't say "good there's too many Bengal tigers; Bengal tigers are ruining everything". Instead we'd look at their environment and try to figure out what changed; what's disrupting their ability to fulfill this most basic imperative.
But would they rather be a random horse 130 years ago, or not exist at all? Because that's what happened to the majority of horses that would have been here today; they were simply never born.
erwgv3g34
28d ago
It's what Scott calls a "fighting a rearguard attack against the evidence", where whenever a member of a favoured community does something atrocious, we have to exhaustively dig through every single thing they ever said, wrote or posted about to find something to pin it on other than their membership in said community.
The term "fighting a rearguard action against the truth" was coined by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
erwgv3g34
28d ago
I've still got the old AOL Instant Messenger (remember that, kiddos?) logs from when I used to chat with my high school girlfriend right up until she broke up with me
Same (well, MSN Messenger logs). I'm planning to use them along with other sources of information (photographs, memories, etc.) to create a fork of her after the singularity. Which, now that I think about it, would also make for a pretty good Black Mirror episode!
When I read Charles Perrault as a boy in Spanish, several of his tales would talk about "escudos". I admit it was a little confusing, but it was obvious from context that they meant some kind of currency (I would imagine them trading heraldic shields). Maybe "monedas" (coins) would have been clearer, but "pesos" would have been a bastardization.
Trump would totally be Gendo. He became president as part of a larger plot to reunite with his dead brother, but first he needs to support Israel and wipe Iran off the map in order to fulfill a prophecy from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Get in the fucking bomber, Barron!
(Who would make a better Miasto, Kristi Noem or Tulsi Gabbard? Kristi is hotter, but Tulsi has actual military experience.)
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
Are we talking about shonen romcoms, or shoujo romance? Because those are pretty different.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
Which one of the three henchmen is the evilest?
Bob.
Which one should the plucky rebels assassinate first?
Alice.
If the answers to these questions are different, are the plucky rebels truly fighting on the side of good?
On its face value Halo is remarkably bleak and yet it also has something that I feel is sorely lacking in a lot of modern media. Sincerity.
I don't know if this is true across modern media, but modern Hollywood is definitely poisoned by irony. If you won't take your movie seriously, why should I?
It's about the relationship between created and creator. It's that meme about "the masculine desire to perish in a heroic last stand" in video game form.
From Lays of Ancient Rome:
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods."
Sadly, I was never able to play Halo (or other critically acclaimed FPSs like Bioshock) due to an unusually high sensitivity to motion sickness; I wanted to throw up after 30 minutes.
KuroBaraHime is a troper. 5P was an initiative to remove all the underage sex stuff from the wiki (among other things). "This page was cut for reason: KuroBaraHime: P5" should be parsed as "KuroBaraHime says the reason this page was cut was because of 5P".
I'd just like to add that this American insanity is completely at odds with weeb culture. All the most popular waifus are underage (Asuka and Rei are 14, Haruhi is 15, Nagatoro is 15, Komi is 15, etc.). All the most popular MCs are underage (Naruto is 12, Edward Elric is 15, Eren Yeager is 15, etc.). Fans want to read stories and watch porn of these characters. It's the entire foundation of imageboards and fanfic websites.
Someone once pointed out (NSFW) that 4chan has a policy against lolicon and shotacon, but cannot make explicit the rules about teenage characters due to mutually contradictory constrains. If they said that posting porn of 14 year old characters was OK, the advertisers would drop them. But if they actually enforced a rule that all characters had to be 18, 90% of the content would vanish overnight. So they keep it vague let the mods use common sense.
It's really annoying that I have to add "BTW, this is an AU where the characters are 18" to the prompt every time I use Grok for creative writing!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9HTe5rqX4vo
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