gattsuru
7hr ago
There's some gay guys (and arguably the entire sperm donation industry) that work on paternity roulette logic. Even for gay guys where it's just so they don't really have to think about who's the 'real' dad, though, it's kinda messy, and not just literally. These days, you can figure out the answer for a couple hundred bucks, obviously, but even if everyone involved credibly commits to never doing that (and the alternatives aren't obvious), it's just denying the questions, rather than actually handling them.
These things all have answers. Especially for soccons who care the most about this stuff, there are sometimes even doctrinal answers, but even most gay guys who only truck with the church when nailing complaints to the door have pretty good ideas about what they wished their fathers had been like. Dropping the odds to 1/6th only really gives an excuse to forget about or delay obligations and responsibilities, rather than making them actually not exist.
gattsuru
10hr ago
... I philosophically prefer surrogacy where the donors stay in the picture, so caveat that I'm going to be biased in favor of donation, here. That said, potential problems:
- You've already discussed your side of the relationship woes and you've got a much better idea of what they look like than I can guess, but they are a pretty important thing.
- There's a lot of messiness with lesbian/bisexual woman politics, because there's such extreme potential for jealousy, and because a non-trivial number of bi women do either get out of college or just randomly sort into het relationships. Unless she's routinely seeing a guy on the side before you, I'd honestly say you've dodged a bullet not getting your dick wet, here, but if you do this, you can never be just that friend she'd never consider again, either to your own wife, to her wife, or to her. Doesn't matter if the only thing involved was a jar and a turkey baster. You don't have to and probably shouldn't go full Pence rule, but you still should be aware there will be new eggshells around.
- You can't really sign away parental rights/responsibilities; courts routinely compare a child's interests against contractual statements and throw the paper away. That's unlikely to come up, given the background you've mentioned here, but it's potentially very expensive -- and worse, may be something you'll constantly be weighing when considering things like offering to babysit the kid even if you ultimately decide to help out. Informal donation provides less protection, to my frustration. Divorce or death are the 'obvious' sources of problems here, but even something like a surprise illness can end up a big question mark pointed your way.
- ... but you can kinda sign away parental rights, and the couple really should insist on you doing it, and there's a point where that's gonna hurt and you're gonna have to bite your tongue. Maybe the breadwinner of this couple gets a job in another state or country and you go from seeing the kid once-a-season to once-a-year, maybe once a teenager the kid gets into hobbies the parents are okay with and you aren't (or vice versa!), there's a hundred different possibilities. You will be, at absolute best, Uncle Guy. Some guys can handle that perfectly fine, some guys can handle it for daughters but not sons, some guys don't even see how it could be a problem, but it's not an obvious problem until years down the line.
- Conversely, if you do become Uncle Guy, you might find that people you're fine seeing once-a-season are really obnoxious to see once-a-week. (Or even really obnoxious to your wife for them to be good friends with her, and nearly-family with you.)
- It's harder, though not impossible, to get genetic screening done through informal donation. That may or may not matter to you, or to the couple; it can even matter for different reasons for each side of the equation.
All of that said, I've seen it work out perfectly fine for a good few people, and not in the porn premise (or polyamory) sorta way. The problems are downstream of you not just getting a kid, but a whole set of informal relationships, but those relationships remain when good things are happening, too.
gattsuru
11hr ago
I've pointed to Cash's Hurt and Air Traffic Controller's Blame, and I'll point to them again. Fastball's The Way is... reeaaaaally fucking dark if you look up the backstory, but it does make the song a little bit more poignant.
For video games and anime, I'm a bit of a basic bitch. Gurren Lagann's Libera Me From Hell and FLCL's I Think I Can aren't ultimate songs -- I'd say not even the best songs from their respective shows -- but the ethos they describe and how they reinforce the themes of the shows are extremely powerful. The Chrono Cross soundtrack is from a pretty meh game and there's nothing special about Scars of Time beyond just being good, but I'd listened to it on repeat a lot in a specific time and trance state, so I don't think I can resist reacting to it now.
gattsuru
2d ago
He's also just really scuzzy, even by the low standards of Ohio politicians. Musk can make these sort of arguments stick by pointing at one of several giant factories. Vivek can point to... failed biomedical stuff in an even-more-scammy-than-normal field, a politically-focused investment fund, and partial ownership of BuzzFeed.
None of it's clearly fraud, or illegal, or even likely to get the New York AG going after him, but I wouldn't be surprised if he loses more Red Tribe support than Jay Jones lost Blue Tribe support.
gattsuru
2d ago
Laurenson had no X commentary about either the Jay Jones scandals nor the Charlie Kirk assassination, and as far I can tell, did not anywhere else. Perhaps I’m missing some counterexample, or some massive story from her media deal.
The movement she’s left has changed. It’s not the only thing failing her tests.
gattsuru
3d ago
I'll start off with my condolences to anyone of any gender that had to listen to nRXs for this to happen at the end of it.
I don’t spent as much time in the movement these days; it’s turned into an echo chamber; racism and sexism are front-and-center, and most of my favorite people have left. But there was a fascinating moment in time when it truly felt like the so-called “dissident right” could discuss almost anything in a sensible way.
... I have a thought. That's not fair, I recognize... though I'd like some counterexample showing I'm just cherrypicking.
Talking about anything in a sensible way is not the point of the story; talking about why no one can group can talk about anything in a sensible way isn't part of the story. Laurenson isn't writing for Red Tribers, obviously, nor writing to Red Tribers, or even explaining Red Tribers to Blue Tribers. The point is to explain where Laurenson's coming from to Blue Tribers, and that's fine.
But from a Red Triber perspective -- and I fully recognize I'm far from hydroacetelene's level of 'real' Red Triber -- it's kinda the last part of this story where there's anything interesting. The Now What section is the biggest frustration, since it starts with 'here's the Blue Tribe principle insulting me and here's the Red Tribe random asshats insulting me, tots similar in scope and regularity' and then leads to a trio of revelations that practically come with the punchline 'do you think we don't know that?' But does anyone think there's a literate Red Triber on the planet, and I'm defining 'literate' here by Chicago definitions, that does not already know that a news media environment with any mix, no matter how lopsided, of Red and Blue Tribers devolves into squabbles?
I can make the argument that deradicalization matters, I can and regularly do make the argument that liberalism is dying at this rate, I can and have made the argument that it's really really dangerous. I'd like to solve that! I've been doing the (sometimes literal) Touch Grass thing, and some STEM-focused community outreach, and a half-dozen other programs trying to bring people together without bringing politics to the forefront.
Online, I'm overtly the bi furry gun owner for a reason, knowing how offputting the constant gay or gunnie references are to so many people: areas I'd like to go and philosophies I'd like to let live become 'target rich environments' if the only ones who wear it on their sleeves are the Everything Leftism Coneheads and straight-from-central-casting . I'd hope that there'd be some impact from showing people are people, and that Red and Blue can join together to achieve goals more important than wars of all-against-all over microns of worthless territory, and that at least some goals of those politics are more than hate or rage or malice.
... but I don't know if that will work, either, and ultimately, the Litany of Tarski wins. The STEM outreach program's had a small and subtle cold war over rainbow pins in the local community, the modded Minecraft server I helped with software problems had its owner proudly promote the time he beat the shit out of Brendan Eich, there's many Blue and Red tribe spheres I can't wear anything on my sleeve. Worse, so many high-profile people pretending to straddle political aisles are very clearly not that there's less than zero trust, here.
Everything else is a distraction. Yes, people are hallucinating their own consensus realities, but (as Laurenson points out!) it's not like the normies are doing any better. If we can't even talk about anything in a sensible way, if we can't talk about why we can't talk about anything in a sensible way, trying increasingly complicated and roundabout messaging won't solve it.
gattsuru
3d ago
Mostly got small or useful stuff, some art prints, some handheld tool batteries, a few gift cards. All appreciated, but not really interesting. The real toy one was Project Silverfish, kinda a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-like with graphics by the way of The Witness (cw: furry scaly inheritors of humanity). It's astoundingly unforgiving and still in beta, but been pretty enjoyable if you don't mind the occasional getting domed by a patrol from a faction you didn't even realize was on the current map.
Gave the SO a new monitor - OLEDs really are amazing and have come down a lot in price - and seems to be serving okay, though only after purchasing it found that the 'adjustable stand' was really just five degrees and an absolutely zero vertical control.
Most of the other gifts to family or friends are pretty unexciting. I've got access to a sublimation printer and some weirder-shaped heat tools, so replacing damaged or badly-faded and no-longer-manufactured coffee mugs or other easy-to-find blanks is a fun parlor trick, especially now that post-processing tools (AI or otherwise) have gotten so good, but most of them won't have any meaning outside of the recipient.
Uh, helped a coworker get his daughter and son-in-law some desktops together, which was a lot more !!fun!! than expected given current RAM pricing. I was able to pull some tricks to get them 32 GB each without paying a kidney, but wow that entire thing was a mess.
gattsuru
5d ago
This is probably something that's just inaccessible to me, but would that really solve that many people's discomfort? If biological role means reproduction, I can give examples of people who'd be happier if they could knock someone else up by scissoring hard enough, but the latter is one of the rarest kinks I've ever seen. Guys who'd want female reproductive organs and get knocked up are more common... and still one of the central examples of kinks most straight guys are extremely uncomfortable with.
If it's something about muscles or hunter/gatherer breakdown, that seems less likely to directly squick, but more likely to just not have a lot of people care and a few people really care.
gattsuru
5d ago
The original essay is available online. I get that you're trying to reject its assumptions, but I don't think you're really succeeding at it so much as arguing over definitions.
If we replace the Ranma or Ozy's thought experiment instead with "how would you react if a mad-but-exceptionally-skilled plastic surgeon kidnapped you and gave you the exact outside appearance and vocal patterns of the opposite gender, without messing with your gonads, menses, yada yada; we'll call the population that had this done to them momen and sound like a bad scifi flick, they're tots not women-in-your-specific-sense", and one half of the subject population immediately slit their own throat, and the other half got slightly annoyed about having to replace their wardrobe and learn how bras work, it'd be compatible with your claim and Ozy's.
At least some of the sameness of AI writing reflects misuse or unfamiliarity with the tools, rather than a deeper problem with the technology itself. It's not hard to give different flavors to different characters. It actually takes some effort to avoid going too hard on it. Completely avoiding the dread em-dash requires a bit more effort, and keeping a world consistent requires a decent (set of) lore bibles, but it's definitely possible and a bit easier than building and keeping coherent a more serious effort by human writers. The more complete your lore bible, the more the LLM can give the appearance of talking about a consistent world.
It still needs human review -- I left in a prompt for the foxman merchant version that has a logical error with a pronoun, and did regen one response for the hedge mage that had a sentence structure error giving bear tails a claw -- but that's a lot faster than manual writing even for that.
gattsuru
6d ago
Silverhand is canonically a practicing bisexual, but it only comes up if you go into a gay bar to start with. Reeves has worked that sorta blue more overtly in the past, with My Own Private Idaho, but he's also played a lot of bi-or-gay-in-other-media characters that dropped the theme in translation, most notoriously with the in-name-only Constantine film.
gattsuru
6d ago
"Cis-by-default" is trying to motion toward the difference between the sort of straight guy who'd react to a Ranma'ing by poking his own breasts and giggling for three hours straight, and the sort who'd immediately douse their head in boiling water. (To turn back into a man, right?)
Ozy originally had a poll from somewhere saying some sizable number of men in that situation claimed that they'd go full suicidal, but I can't find it or any real references to it, so I can't look back at how well-designed it was, and even the summary had a lot of questions unanswered about how performative that claim was. But from a revealed preferences sense, you do get a lot of similar outputs: most obvious in smut where some fraction of guys get really uncomfortable with (especially but not only VR) female protagonist games even in F/F-only contexts, but also more subtly the difference between guys that are bored by and those that are outraged by having to learn about woman-specific things like traditional makeup use.
That said, yeah, I agree quiet_NaN doesn't seem crypto-trans. I've clocked people wrong before, but at minimum I'd expect a crypto-trans person to either really like the gay romance option or at least mention the lesbian option for an alternate universe Witcher 1, even crypto-trans people that don't fit Blanchard's typology.
gattsuru
6d ago
The feds had supposedly been offering a plea bargain for a while, though the details haven't been made public. If the bargain was just felony-with-no-jail, she had a lot of reason to reject it even if a conviction was likely; if it was a misdemeanor, she was making a pretty high-stakes bet.
Part of her decision-making was probably resistance huffing, but there's also a lot of long-standing norm about treating various protections around judicial office-holders very expansively, both to avoid complex legal situations and with the tacit understanding that prosecutors that didn't would find judges suddenly less charitable to their position. That equilibrium became a lot less stable since Dugan's initial behavior.
gattsuru
6d ago
That's fair, and further I like to think keeping a "you have to actually read and rewrite the AI's output" principle is optimistically going to get a best-of-both-worlds situation where the human's writing benefits from the machine's access to information, and pessimistically at least reduces some of the spam potential. But I will caveat that you're vastly overestimating the ability of the casual reader to spot AI signatures without a very high false positive ratio.
gattsuru
6d ago
Getting a conviction is a little surprising, if only because of the extremes of jury nullification we've seen in other cases. The split verdict is weirder and might help the inevitable (and quixotic) appeal, but there's probably going to be more mileage in hammering on the edges of the sentencing guidelines to avoid a prison sentence and pulling the next Dem president for a pardon.
I'm not sure if it says anything too big. The behavior here was especially brazen, the immigrant unusually unsympathetic, the arguments about primacy of criminal cases particularly unbelievable, Dugan's unwillingness to testify on her own behalf technically can't be used against her but definitely didn't help, and the feds were able to get a relatively friendly (or at least not-actively-unfriendly) jury pool.
It's information when you're not surprised, but it's not that strong a signal.
There's also a bit of messiness about the actual judicial seat. She's been suspended since April, but still is technically a judge. The state has previously argued that a felon has to resign from office at the time of conviction, not sentencing, but there's not really a direct enforcement mechanism and if there were it'd be run by the largely-sympathetic-to-Dugan judicial office. She could be impeached, but it takes two-thirds of the state Senate to do it, and while Republicans are a majority, they're only a slight majority. Especially if Dugan pushes appeals, she could end up keeping her seat til 2027 or even 2028.
gattsuru
6d ago
There's a minor scandal in the tumblr video game sphere, because Studio Larian discussed the use of AI tools in the development pipeline. It's not clear exactly what they were using the tools for, but most critiques have interpreted it as only using AI-gen for concept art that won't even get a pixel in the final game, and they're still very unhappy with it.
((I've been trying to come together with a top-level post on the topic, but I dunno if it'll be interesting enough or if it'll be me going full Gelman Amnesia given that we have actual video game artist experts around.))
gattsuru
6d ago
That's a good argument about game media erring on the liberal side, but it's still weird how "woke" AAA games are, rather than borrowing from the broader liberal ethos. Not just in extremes, or some post-hoc sharpshooter's definition, but in what's being done specifically.
"Safe horny", as much as it gets smudged with tumblr associations, isn't actually a good representation of the (even post-Yahoo) tumblr ethos. Hell, I'm not even sure the Type I/Type II body thing is more compatible with trans thought than "masculine"/"feminine": you'd know better than I, but both the clean and smut-focused indie works I follow with trans readerships (and a few cases authorships) don't take that tack. Or for a non-video game example, compare Dungeons and Dragons to Super Lesbian Animal Adventure. The latter is much more left-wing and probably more offensive to soccons, but the former's got a lot more wokisms.
gattsuru
6d ago
Yeah. It's hard to make out exactly how bad, given that there's even more of a closed-door culture than the US's terrible backroom deals, on top of the language barrier. But there's very clearly a lot of explicit and implicit pressure going around, and it's not just focused on Chinese domestic or quasi-domestic policies. A lot of it's weirdly arbitrary even to the Chinese.
gattsuru
6d ago
I’m sorry, but I can’t help but think this is over-optimistic nonsense.
I mean, I'm not proposing that the Red Triber partisans will win, get serious concessions, or even survive. Just that a lot of people will die. From my perspective, it's pessimism. I don't like the 'Blue Tribe rolls over the country with no serious resistance' situation, not least of all that the Blue Tribe is clearly incapable of maintaining vital infrastructure literally anywhere they've taken over. But my proposal involves mainstreaming political assassination, spree attacks and indirect warfare on civilians based on arbitrary and often-wrong signals, immediate direct attacks on that same infrastructure, and serious damage to large-scale logistics even faster and quite possibly in my lifetime.
“Plans” will happen, sure. Lots of stupid, counterproductive “plans” by idiotic “lone-wolf” actors — a large fraction probably egged on and guided by undercover Feds into the least effective courses possible... Not effective ones. This is an illusion created by the apparent effectiveness of left-wing supposed “lone-wolf” radicals. who are really just the visible end of a vast, less visible organized apparatus
There's a strong argument here, where so many of the various 'mysteriously unsolvable' televisions crimes, the bizarre willingness to let criminal or outright terrorist organizations coordinate publicly until they can overwhelm coincidentally-nonresponsive police, and the cratering homicide closure rates are really reflections of those industries being unwilling and uninterested in actually catching criminals, and I think you're absolutely right there. There's really strong nonpublic evidence for it! You can go full Yarvin and say that even the drug gangs are just politics by other means and no one in power wants to solve or prevent crimes if it'll make the , or you can stick with hradzka and notice that actually solving problems would get in the way of diverting tons of money toward (often toward supporting the violence these orgs claim to be fighting) while pretending to solve problems, whatever works.
Yes, when those orgs were faced with a Red Tribe political activist group committing crimes or 'crimes', they took out all the stops, and then a couple glimpses in a grainy camera and some parallel construction is enough to track someone down and toss them in jail for years.
But there's a separate argument, regardless of whether these orgs could solve crimes that they're ignoring now, whether they could catch attackers who are actually and seriously planning around them. So far, Red Tribe political activists have often signed their names on manifestos nailed to doors, and their actual dedicated attackers have had the sort of opsec normally held by Scooby Doo villains. The omnipresent surveillance state is kinda shit. Yes, we can't know it's full capabilities and we can't judge by the overt crimes it doesn't solve because it doesn't want to, but
And there's an even-more damning one about whether those orgs could prevent attackers. Because the US military had a real trouble there just in the specific context of green-on-blue attacks. You can't win that way if the opponent still has the will to fight, but you can do a lot of damage.
How many people do you think will really pick option 2?
Do I think one in a hundred will take the stupid option? Maybe.
But I think this question depends on implied other options. Both Option 1 and Option 2 look terrible if your alternative is staying home and doing nothing and everything just being boring. But Jake Gardner was literally minding his business.
This is unintelligible. Beyond the grammar errors — “when we it becomes”? — I have no idea what this means.
Sorry for the typos. Basically, I'm proposing near-complete jury nullification of several well-liked (and sometimes even well-intended!) federal civil rights act bits, and common knowledge that any such nullification will happen, with the only exceptions being aggressive enforcement against Blue Tribe orgs that are stuck exposing themselves to liability in Red States. Red Tribers might already see that as a plus, given the various CRA abuses. I'm less happy when it happens to a FACE Act case involving baseball bats, but I won't be able to argue against it.
I’m not clear on the scenario you’re vaguely gesturing toward here, but the answer to “what do you think happens?” is “nothing,” because nothing ever happens. Red tribes grumble, and mutter “somebody aught to…” and “next time, we’ll…” and then roll over and take it.
The specifics of the scenario don't really matter: the core just requires undeniable evidence of sexual assault of a young minor, the minor fleeing to/being kidnapped by the minor's biological father, and federal officials kidnapping the minor again to return them to the same location they were molested, likely to the same person that molested them. The trans custody stuff with a possibly-desisted FTM just seem particularly easy for each tribe to form its own media fragments, since no bigwig Red Triber is going to believe the defenses of each step, and no bigwig Blue Triber is going to admit that there's a problem in what's happening.
Remember the Comet Pizza guy? Because as touched in the head as he was, charging in with a rifle to stop a pedophilic conspiracy that didn't exist, he was limited by two factors: he thought he was being a hero, and he thought revealing 'the conspiracy' would get everyone on his side. Maybe in a world where the entire left wing had spent the previous two years joking about how it was better to be a sex slave than go to Catholic school, he wouldn't have done anything at all, or maybe just have tried the same 'reveal to everyone' approach.
But there's another option.
I’ve watched my parents, my friends, my neighbors do exactly this my entire life.
Sure. And a wide majority of people will probably keep that, even in my nightmares. Most people didn't even know about Ruby Ridge.
gattsuru
6d ago
There's a small faction that just dislikes the mere possibility, even in good games, often to completely inconsistent ends. It's funny that they end up the dark mirror to Saarkesian complaining about Bayonetta's lollypops without recognizing how much that parodied a Devil May Cry protagonist, but they still real. But they're also a small, if vocal, minority-of-a-minority.
A decent game buys a lot of patience. Hell, even games that are bad, but at least have some signs of passion going into them, get a lot of forbearance (example gratia: rayon spelled out that Palworld does Type 1 / Type 2 bodies, and no one cared).
gattsuru
9d ago
Hell, there's a !!fun!! question if it isn't an Experience Machine. What happens when everything but the 'people' are real? If you had immortality, I can think of worse ways to spend thirty years than a Primitive Technology meets Minecolonies run to really build an monument in the same sense that Sagan joked about making an apple pie from scratch.
gattsuru
9d ago
The state supreme court finds that (1) the federal supreme court's decision does require Nevada to retroactively recognize the 2008 California marriage, but (2) Nevada's courts are not authorized to create out of thin air a 1992 common-law marriage for these same-sex romantic partners when Nevada's legislature has explicitly refused to recognize common-law marriages even for opposite-sex romantic partners since 1943.
That seems a reasonable enough conclusion for these specific facts, but good heavens do I get twitchy about these sort of retroactive judicial decisions being decided this late in the game. Here, it's 'just' one guy's 401(k) and some stocks, and while that probably sucks for his ex-husband's finances, there's a lot of other stuff that's downstream of this sorta divorce evaluation, and it's been five years since this pair filed for divorce, and a decade since Obergefell. It's just been up in the air that whole time?
There's not really a good solution, I recognize that. Party presentation exists for a reason, Mootness and ripeness same, and past attempts to set up blanket rules for this stuff have been an absolute mess. But it's like the first line to an Aristocrats joke that ends with the shout "a Justice System".
gattsuru
9d ago
Very likely to get appealed, especially with the split verdict despite heavily overlapping underlying components. The sentencing guidelines put this at 15-21 months, though there's enough possible mediating and aggravating factors that I could see it getting turned into six months home detention or probation situation at one end, or 21-27 months at the higher end.
gattsuru
10d ago
While semiautomatics have existed and been common in sporter and military environments before WWII, police and criminal violence overwhelmingly favored the revolver into the 1970s. When they moved away from it, they moved from .38/.357 (and heavily favoring the bigger-but-weaker-.380) as a common round to 9mm and eventually 0.45 ACP, further helped by longer effective barrels (as well as more rounds and faster reloads, at least for anyone not named Miculek).
See here for a breakdown of how vast that difference was.
Common knowledge has the aftermath of 1986 Miami Shootout as the turning point for the law enforcement side of the equation, and that is genuinely where federal officers started moving toward more, bigger, and more powerful ammo. State police varies a lot more. And criminal use is hard to measure... but that ojp.gov report puts Philadelphia deaths as going from rarely (3%) to often (21%) 9mm pistol between 1985 and 1990, and pistols as a category were still less common than the .38/357 revolvers alone.
Something like SCAIL and LoRA abuses can probably do that today and is probably already getting used in that sense today, but the current version of the technology goes a little nuts for segments longer than 9 seconds, and it's painful to do even short segments using the existing workflows, on top of being egregiously slow on consumer hardware. I've seen people take it into a couple minutes by doing really aggressive generation of prompts to make a flipshow to start with, but anything longer than that tends to either end up needing to compromise on weird physics or ugly scene changes.
And the current implementations have some limits; pose info can't do talking heads well, going beyond three characters with pose info gets rough, and some particular pose changes can go full-on Exorcist. SCAIL's lipsync capabilities are worse than WAN animate, and while it's possible to combine them, it's even more finicky.
But compared to the cost and unpleasantness of traditional mocap, or even makeup? If you can possibly use this tech, there's a lot of good arguments in its favor.
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