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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2741 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 1, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Republican primary ballot propositions be like: "Authorize military force to deploy to the border to stop ILLEGALS yes/no" "Eliminate all taxes yes/no"

Aside: I would post this in the main CW thread but it's Sunday and don't want it to get lost when the thread rolls over. So I'll just do a lower effort slightly trashier post here.

HAS LIBERALISM PEAKED IN OREGON?(!)

In 2020, the state of Oregon passed a referendum, ballot Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs(!) with a vote of 58% in favor.

Voters in Oregon (such as myself) believed this was the path to enlightened drug policy, being informed by the revered Portugal model. Tacked onto the referendum was a bit of social justice theory as well: the police would be required to document in detail the race of anyone they stopped from now on for any reason. To ensure the police weren't disproportionately harassing the, say, 5 black people who live in Oregon. (okay okay they're 2.3% of the population)

The ensuing data was an almost perfect A/B test, the kind you'd run with no shame over which kind of font improved e-commerce site checkout conversions. By 2023, Oregon's drug overdose rate was well outpacing the rest of the country, so much so that the police officers regularly Narcan with them and revive people splayed out in public parks. Sometimes the same person from week to week. It's true this coincides with the fentanyl epidemic, which could confound the data and have bumped up overdoses everywhere but that wouldn't explain alone why deaths have especially increased in Oregon. The timing fits M110.

Anyway! At some point someone decided to compare notes with Portugal's system. Some stark differences!

https://gooddrugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PortugalvOregon1.pdf

Briefly, Portugal uses a carrot and stick model with a lot of negative incentive, whereas Oregon just kinda writes a $100 ticket and suggests calling a hotline for your raging drug problem maybe lol.

In the first 15 months after Measure 110 took effect, state auditors found, only 119 people called the state’s 24-hour hotline. That meant the cost of operating the hotline amounted to roughly $7,000 per call. The total number of callers as of early December of last year had only amounted to 943.

The absence of stick appears to not be very effective in encouraging users to seek treatment.

Are the kids having fun at least? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/health/portland-oregon-drugs.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/fHxWk)

“Portland [not Portugal, just to be clear --ed] is a homeless drug addict’s slice of paradise,” said Noah Nethers, who was living with his girlfriend in a bright orange tent on the sidewalk against a fence of a church, where they shoot and smoke both fentanyl and meth.

Yes. At least, that's the brightest part of the article. The rest is pretty depressing and sad and sickening and worrisome.

After a few years of this, the Oregon legislature yesterday finished voting to re-criminalize drugs.

The NYT again: https://archive.ph/3zksH

Critics are out in force, arguing that the legislature overrode the will of voters (remember it was passed by referendum) and that the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts. This poster believes the low uptake and missing negative incentives prove that drug harm reduction is not primarily about access to treatment, but about incentive not to use.

The governor has indicated that she would sign.

tbh I'm surprised Oregon repealed this so quickly. Has liberalism peaked in Oregon?

As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.

Aside: I would post this in the main CW thread but it's Sunday and don't want it to get lost when the thread rolls over. So I'll just do a lower effort slightly trashier post here.

I understand where you're coming from, but this post is a poor fit for this thread: per the title, there's nothing "fun" about a huge spike in overdose deaths.

Fair enough, perhaps my sense of humor is too dark and absurdist. Should I delete?

It's probably too late now that there are comments on the post.

Michael Shellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse have made the point more than once that American progressives often cite Portugal as an example of drug decriminalisation done right, and yet the decriminalisation policies implemented in American cities are often much more extreme than in Portugal. I can't remember where but they interviewed a Portuguese cop and asked him "what would happen if a man was openly injecting heroin on the street in Portugal?" The cop replied "oh, he'd be arrested, immediately". My understanding is that this is not what happens in San Francisco.

I first wanted to write "It's like this with almost everything in EU vs America" but actually, it's like this with absolutely everything. People just want to take the parts they like and ignore those they don't, even if they work together or worse, the latter are the ones keeping the society running. Schools yes please, but requiring kids to go is mean; Universities yes please, but testing aptitude is mean; Generous welfare yes please, but having to look for work as a requirement is mean, and so on.

Aside: I would post this in the main CW thread but it's Sunday and don't want it to get lost when the thread rolls over

We should post a CW thread every two days and take it down once it's four days old. That way we can eliminate the discontinuity on Sunday. Mods, please get on it.

Anyway! At some point someone decided to compare notes with Portugal's system. Some stark differences!

https://gooddrugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PortugalvOregon1.pdf

And yet the use trend in both places is increasing.

I'd definitely prefer for this content go in one of the CW threads. Maybe wait a day?

Not a fan of the every two days suggestion; it's better to have things in one place.

Yes that's the irony of it. The Portugal model is still not a shining example.

As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.

Doing the math, you're responsible for 26 minutes of each casualty's life. Pretty okay trade for advancing humanity's knowledge about what policies are effective.

That's a bargain. A paltry price to pay, if it's a price at all and not a bonus.

Drug-related decriminalization is something that intersects between libertarians and the progressive left. However, libertarians are more on board with the notion that more liberty may mean less protection of some people from themselves. Libertarians would also be more comfortable with addressing and punishing drug addicts if and when such addicts violate the non-aggression principle in terrorizing others in public or private spaces.

One can't try-out small bites of lax drug-law omelettes if one can't accept losing a few dregs.

Thoughts on Dune Part 2

I'm a huge fan of the first 6 books, read the first 3 times (though granted it has been a few years), and thought the first movie was a very well-made, faithful adaptation. It had a few flaws, such as no mention of the thinking machines, Butlerian Jihad, or guild navigators, and also the Harkonens being a little too cartoonishly groteque. But it took itself seriously, was visually dazzling, and I really liked that it captured the psychedelic/religious ecstasy elements of the book.

The second one, I'm much more lukewarm on. Much more significant changes from the books (rarely for the better) and just wasn't as dramatically impactful. Spoilers for both movies and Book 1 to follow:

|| Much shorter timeline, so Alia isn't born yet by the end of it. Jessica taking the Water of Life was a very intense scene and I thought the image of the fetus' eye opening conveyed a lot to the audience in a simple but direct way, but there were no visuals explaining her newly acquired access to her genetic memories, it's sort of just explained to us later on. I recalled this Villenueve quote from an interview:

Villeneuve: “Frankly, I hate dialogue. Dialogue is for theatre and television. I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema, but it is something not obvious when you watch movies today. Movies have been corrupted by television.”

And this scene largely fails at that, especially compared to the first. With this movie's $190 million budget, I'd have liked to see something like this scene from the Northman that really drives home the point that "hey, this is a big deal, this woman now has millennia of memories from her female ancestors, it's not just a creepy voice possessing her every now and then".

Paul's Water of Life scene is thoroughly underwhelming. No trippy psychedelic visuals, just a brief glimpse of an adult Alia and a vision of a baby Jessica in a crib with the Baron watching over her, revealing her parentage. Later we see a shot of starving people crawling across a dry desert floor with Jessica walking around them completely unbothered, suggesting the jihad (though they unfortunately but unsurprisingly stick to the phrase "holy war" in the movies) was largely her doing.

Stilgar is much more noticeably zealous. I actually liked this change, added some tonally appropriate humor to the movie (unlike Marvel heroes quipping in the middle of a battle).

Chani isn't the consistently loyal, supportive wife in all but name from the books. Zendaya (playing the same role she plays in every other performance) is defiant and is by the end of it the only Fremen who openly disapproves of Paul's actions. The final shot is her frowning into the camera waiting to ride a sandworm away from Arrakeen. Contrast that with the book's iconic "history will call us wives". This dynamic could have been much worse in today's climate, there's no girlboss moment where the competent, self-assured woman teaches the incompetent, overconfident man a lesson, but I still get the sense, like with the Wheel of Time show, that Hollywood just can't commit to a hero's journey story truly centered around a male protagonist.

This line was dropped:

“Try your tricks on me, old witch,” Paul said [to Reverend Mother Gaius Mohiam]. “Where’s your gom jabbar? Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You’ll find me there staring out at you!” The old woman dropped her gaze. In favor of a less demeaning scream of "Silence!" Too sexist for a modern Hollywood?

Absolutely no mention of the Spacing Guild or CHOAM. 2 of the 4 factions that run the Galaxy and the ones most directly reliant on Spice production, a pretty significant omission. Granted, this is a complicated power dynamic to explain but we could have at least gotten a shot of them in the ships above the planet discussing the political situation like we did in David Lynch's adaptation. Come to think of it, I'm not sure how anyone who hadn't read the books would have understood just WHY the spice is so important. Sure we see Paul and Jessica unlock some new abilities with it, but that doesn't itself explain why all the Imperium's houses are so invested in this one planet.

Chalamet is just not the best choice to play Paul IMO. Book Paul had an edge to him, Tim mostly doesn't.

The final showdown in the throne room was in general, VERY underwhelming. In the book, Paul's internal monologue really conveys the psychic weight of this scene. It's exactly the sort of moment that could have used the first movie's dramatic Middle Eastern chanting and slow-motion. The future of the humanity hinges on this one point forseen in Paul's visions. But the cinematography was very dry and it was over as soon as it started.

Lasguns everywhere. Fun to watch but totally immersion-breaking. Why are the Sardaukar bothering with swords at all if lasguns-shield explosions aren't truly mutually assured destruction?

This change really bugged me because it just feels so thematically off-the-mark. In the book, it's established that Paul's ultimate control of the spice hinges on the fact that he knows how to trigger a chain-reaction that would kill all the sandworms. This is unique to him as it depends on his knowledge of the planet's ecology he learned from the Fremen and their fanatical devotion to him. The Landsraad accepts this and surrenders to him as the de facto Emperor, though there's a jihad anyway. In the movie, Paul threatens to somehow use the family atomics to destroy the spice supply. The noble houses reject this and this kicks off the jihad. This sets up a Part 3 more clearly but ecology is too thematically integral to the plot of the books to justify this change.

Feyd Rautha's character gets much more screentime than the books. Gives as an aesthetically pleasing black-and-white scene on Giedi Prime, but he seemed far too robotic for me, doesn't even react to being fatally stabbed other than to congratulate Paul on fighting well, which is totally out of character. ||

Overall this isn't a terrible movie by any means, and I imagine if you liked the first and haven't read/don't particularly care for the books you'll enjoy this one. But it was a letdown especially compared to the high bar set by the first.

I thought Austin Butler was a great Feyd-Rautha. Great use of microexpressions in many scenes, like the one where Baron Vlad gets murked. Throne room showdown was OK as well.

There was a lot more of changes to the book than in the first movie, particularly Chani's expanded role. I had seen people complain about this before the movie and had dismissed it as similar to some people bitching about Lady Jessica's greater role in Part 1, but here the complaints had more valence - while I've never understood the people who think that Zendaya is ugly (unless it's just plain because of, well, her heritage), particularly since she's playing a survival-oriented desert nomad here, but she's just not that good of an actor, and I'm not sure how Villeneuve's going to handle Messiah with the changes they did here. OTOH a lot of cutting decisions were good (the confusing Gurney-vs-Jessica plot from the book, for instance, and I was even OK with how Alia was handled, probably better to do it like Denis did here instead of a murder toddler.)

The movie felt incredibly rushed. The time skip when Paul went off to cross the desert by himself as an right of initiation made me and my girlfriend go huh.

As arbitrary numbers go, I'd have called the first movie a 8.5 on visuals and cinematography alone, this one barely a 7. The only memorable scene was the soldiers mantling up that mesa at the start with their jet packs, even the use of nuclear warheads (one of the biggest taboos in the setting) felt underwhelming, as did the final battle. Nothing else compared to the Sardaukar's praise for McDonald's in the first.

I think the first movie was slightly over indulgent and slow when it came to its pacing, this one rushed and disorienting, especially for people who hadn't read the books. The geopolitics were rushed, and I would have appreciated at least some mention of CHOAM being on the take when it came to the surveillance of the lower hemisphere and so on. The first movie's music felt a lot more compelling.

Well, at least I got the mild enjoyment of telling my girlfriend all the absurd things that happen down the line, like "will you love me if I turn into a sandworm" and other Dune fever dreams. Or Duncan Idaho being resurrected over and over again till he's like a neanderthal in relation to the moderns. She didn't believe me, but I doubt the movies will ever go there, so it's just something to chuckle over.

Chani isn't the consistently loyal, supportive wife in all but name from the books. Zendaya (playing the same role she plays in every other performance) is defiant and is by the end of it the only Fremen who openly disapproves of Paul's actions. The final shot is her frowning into the camera waiting to ride a sandworm away from Arrakeen. Contrast that with the book's iconic "history will call us wives". This dynamic could have been much worse in today's climate, there's no girlboss moment where the competent, self-assured woman teaches the incompetent, overconfident man a lesson, but I still get the sense, like with the Wheel of Time show, that Hollywood just can't commit to a hero's journey story truly centered around a male protagonist.

If any story should have the hero's journey problematized, it's Dune. In the books Herbert could both show Paul's internal monologue and just straight up write a sequel novella to hammer it home, Vileneuve wasn't going to go the way of Lynch though so someone had to fill in that role instead.

Not accurate to the books but it actually makes sense with the condensed timeline. Paul rode up saying he didn't want to be the leader and wasn't the Mahdi and in the span of something like 9 months totally made the Fremen his creatures. It'd make sense for someone, especially someone close like Chani, to get whiplash

My real concern is what this does to any adaptation of Messiah.

New update of my occasional quest to make fandom.com usable:

(ping @netstack for a continuation of here)

  • Removed the useless title block at the top of each screen (more room for content)
  • The top navigation bar is always visible, restoring all of the functions of the previous point while also removing the annoying pop-in
  • Mostly fixed an error that made the page too wide, adding a superfluous scroll bar. It can still appear on narrower screens (including my vertical monitor). EDIT: Fully fixed 2024-03-03. The two new lines of filters at the end do it. I also readjusted the width a bit.
  • Updated to remove the sidebar they added back in under a new name

Gallery comparing my custom blocklist, uBlock Origin defaults, and no blocking (Note that no blocking also has an autoplaying video just below the visible part, which pops to the side and follows you down the page)

Also note that the page size shrinks from 35MB (and counting. It continually streams more.) when unblocked to about 1.3 MB with my filters in place.

My filters:

fandom.com##.notifications-placeholder
fandom.com##.wds-global-footer
fandom.com##.pathfinder-wrapper
fandom.com##.page__right-rail
fandom.com##.is-loading.top-leaderboard.ad-slot-placeholder
fandom.com###WikiaBar
fandom.com###mixed-content-footer
fandom.com##.global-navigation
fandom.com##.global-footer
fandom.com##.page-side-tools__wrapper
fandom.com##.global-navigation__top
fandom.com##.page-footer
fandom.com#$#.resizable-container{width:100% !important;}
fandom.com#$#.resizable-container{max-width:1800px !important;}
fandom.com#$#.main-container{margin-left:0px !important;}
fandom.com#$#.main-container{width:100% !important;}
fandom.com##.global-explore-navigation
fandom.com##.global-registration-buttons
fandom.com#$#.fandom-sticky-header{top:0px !important;}
fandom.com#$#.fandom-sticky-header.is-visible{transform:None !important;}
fandom.com##.fandom-community-header
fandom.com#$#.community-header-wrapper{height:46px !important}
fandom.com##.left.side-bt-container
fandom.com##.right.side-bt-container

Your filters have improved the reading experience tremendously. Keep up the good work.

Funny, I was just thinking about you. Probably because they added that nonsense sidebar.

Keep up the good work ^_^

So how many of you were at Aella’s birthday party?

Sir, this is the Friday Fun thread, not the Monday Man-Made Horrors Beyond Your Comprehension thread.

This is not fun to talk about.

Sometimes I read about shit like this and just think "you know what, I can see where Osama bin Laden was coming from".

Why?

Because his whole thing was that the West was irredeemably degenerate and needed to be destroyed.

I meant more why do you think that's a sign that the world would be better off with the West destroyed.

I just find the arrangement so depressing. This mechanistic, dispassionate attitude towards sex; totting up who put which member into which person's orifice and for how long, who ejaculated in whom and after what interval; the idea of making the act of losing one's virginity into an item on a clickbait article to be ruthlessly monetized (a buried lede, but not even behind the paywall!); the knowledge that Aella probably won't even take a shower after fucking forty men back to back without a break.

I can't quantify this grotesque circus from a utilitarian perspective, perform a cost-benefit analysis and determine that the utility of everyone involved is higher than it would have been had they not partaken. The quanitification involved is precisely what I find so gross about it. That fucking flowchart is more viscerally disgusting to me than any of the bodily fluids mentioned. Nerds being incels is their natural state - they shouldn't be fucking, because when they do they turn sex into this empty, clinical, deracinated, joyless sexless thing. At least when Chad has emotionally empty sex with Stacy (whom he has nothing but contempt for), you know that they're both deriving some kind of pleasure from the experience and aren't just being entered into a spreadsheet.

empty, clinical, deracinated, joyless

Reading the blog it sounded like everyone had a great time with lots of fun. Probably not much emotional intimacy, but I don't see why that matters. It was done with precision and rules, but that's just because rules keep things orderly. You might as well call a game of Monopoly clinical and dispassionate because people agree ahead of time to take turns in a specific order.

It really feels like your whole reaction is just "This is really gross to ME, so I am EXTREMELY offended that other people do it!". Bad enough that you think you know Aella and the participants better than themselves and that you think you can judge that they'd have been better off not doing it. It's much worse that it's emotionally affecting you to such a degree and that you seem to think they deserve some sort of punishment or at least social ostracization from all of society for having a gang bang.

it sounded like everyone had a great time with lots of fun

By her own admission, Aella was terrified going in, had to be (consensually) pinned down to prevent her from striking or biting the men fucking her, and says she'd never do it again. Reminds me of that joke "9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape". Not in the sense that she was raped (it was consensual) but in the sense that I don't get the impression she enjoyed the experience half as much as the male participants. (Although that being said, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if in a few years when the OnlyFans money dries up, she decides to reinvent herself as a #MeToo icon and cites this experience as an example of the humiliation and coercive control she experienced at the hand of an abusive boyfriend/the entire rat community.)

It really feels like your whole reaction is just "This is really gross to ME, so I am EXTREMELY offended that other people do it!"

yeschad

It's much worse that it's emotionally affecting you to such a degree and that you seem to think they deserve some sort of punishment or at least social ostracization from all of society for having a gang bang.

Consenting adults can do whatever they please in private. I can respect this right without being happy about every specific thing they do.

I don't get the fascination with her. At all.

Aella is the planet pluto.

There are thousands like her but, for some reason, the rat community has decided to deem her special and different.

Edit: At the time of my initial post above, I thought Aella had just had a, you know, birthday party.

A 42 person gangbang............there are no words.

She's relentlessly self-promoting and targeting a particular niche and being very practical about it.

There's a fair few quite thoughtful 'content creators' but her drive for self-promotion is way, way beyond any of them.

She does something that, as far as I know, literally no one else does. She applies statistics to what makes sexual activities pleasurable and the best ways to do and get it from a female perspective. She also frankly talks about the kink community which I can enjoy from an anthropological perspective, and uses the rationalist lingo which I lie.

The one time I saw a graph of hers posted somewhere (here, maybe) the instrument was a Twitter poll, which--I am no psychometrician but I took a few courses in stats, and more to the point research design--seems of dubious generalizability just considering the homogeneity of the sample (thirsty horndogs). Are these pilot questionnaires? Is there some degree of scrutiny of the research design or is it just ask some questions, get answers, and make interpretations? But honestly I have never looked too closely. Maybe there's more to it than I imagine.

She does a lot of Twitter polls, and I think it's important to recognize them for what they are, and not give them more or less credit than they deserve. They are not making grand sweeping claims about all human kind, they are looks into her follower base. They can be the first step to seeing if speculation into a topic is useful(what kinks are especially rare even among kinksters? Are any kinks that are thought rare actually ubiquitous?), where the Twitter poll is not supposed to be the final answer but rather the first question.

A lot of times too she looks into the relationships between two variables, like say income and kink. She might ask, Do you have an income over $100k? Are you kinky? Yes/Yes, Yes/No, No/Yes, No/No. Then the conclusion isn't that if 50% of responders say Yes/Yes, that 50% of Americans have an income over $100k and are kinky. It's about seeing that if more wealthy followers are kinky than wealthy followers are not kinky, but the relationship is reversed(or even just less extreme) among the poorer, there might be something interesting going on there. Among normal people the % of kinkiness for all groups might be lower, but it's quite plausible the same relationship will exist.

I'll give her that this is pretty funny. Also her noting how her "internal screaming" at getting penetrated by 42 guys was irrational so best just ignore it. That was funny too, went around twitter a lot.

/images/17094999766742048.webp

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

I had thought the gangbang thing was a joke. I was wrong.

The amount of mirth internet has derived from the "came in fluffer" line making it over to linkedin in memes more than makes up for any internal screaming and regrets Aella suffers, so I guess, it's okay.

/images/1709585298873786.webp

I just learned her real identity a few days ago after following some threads from the guy doxxing eigenrobot, realized I'd already heard of her father separately, and I think now my reaction to whenever I hear her mentioned, after whatever the newest escapade is, is just going to be feeling horrified that raising a child can turn out that badly.

Any chance you could clue me in, or am I better off not knowing? Hadn't even heard Eigen got doxxed. Who did that?

There was one unhinged account that existed solely to antagonize him, that's since been suspended.

I didn't see any proof that the guy claimed to be him was him, but eigen seemed to treat it as true, and the guy pointed to sources that seemed to have known him at some point personally.

I don't want to dox her further, but: her dad is a relatively well known evangelical protestant christian person. He was popular in the 2005 era internet atheism wars (as a person trying to pwn atheists with facts and logic [about the bible]).

I don't have daughters and always wanted one but sometimes imagine this kind of thing and wonder how I'd react. Not well, I'd imagine.

There is a reason honor-killing exists.

There is also reason why the "having a daughter is the ultimate and final cuck" copypasta has the power it has, that most men feel a sense of existential dread at the thought of having a daughter, and many #girldads find ways to cope and not think about it (especially if they don't have sons as a source of distraction and compensation).

Another example would be Mayli/Amelia Wang (real name: Kelly Baltazar), father was a Goldman Sachs vice president. She did hardcore porn immediately after turning 18, including Facial Abuse. Her father tried continuously to throw his balance sheet at getting her videos disappeared off the internet, but was not completely successful. Then he died.

Her fun little excursion doing things like rimming some tattooed greaseballs, vomiting on their cocks, and getting facialed can still be viewed on sites like Spankbank.

Let me reiterate, she has no shy solo teen scenes. In her most vanilia scene, she gives a five minute rimjob to an elderly citi-...

Her dad bought all three of the scenes so technically he owns all three of the scenes with his daughter in them! He did this to file copyright claims to any site who might have his daughter's scenes.
Now that he passed away, the only thing you need to decide is if you want an 1080p upload of Mayli blowing snot bubbles on a 43-year old man's dick or if regular 720p is enough to save on the bandwidth.

Mayli had an issue with selling weed at Georgetown a few days earlier and it didn't sit well with the family
Mayli got 200 dollars for the Facial abuse shoot.

Well that's the saddest thing I've read all afternoon. Paying $80,000 a year to send a girl off to college to do drugs and fuck hundreds of guys might be the most degrading thing in the world.
That bucktooth smile of hers is adorable though.

Paying $80,000 a year to send a girl off to college to do drugs and fuck hundreds of guys might be the most degrading thing in the world.

Yet a deci- or centi- amount of that much dick is a common experience for college daughters while their fathers foot the bill.

$80K a year would be consistent with Sam Hyde’s estimate of $250K all-in for sending a daughter through art school, especially given inflation since then.

I suppose, coming back to this topic, that the question is whether you’d rather have a failson or a whore daughter. My sense is that the latter is more preventable than the former, although I’m actually not sure.

Unfortunately, I think there's strong evidence that, until the 20th century in the West, the overwhelming majority of sons were failsons.

The stat is common enough that I won't take the time to cite it, but something like 70-80% of human ancestors are female. This makes all the sense in the world when you think about hypergamy especially before the true institutionalization of monogamous marriage (and, in many parts of the world, including the west, its continuation today). Warlords and kings ffffuuuccckkedddd and most soldiers, peasants, military-age-males did not.

The fact of the matter is most men in history failed to reproduce. Now, you can make some arguments (with which I would agree) that that doesn't necessarily make them automatic failures. If they led honorable and virtuous lives, if they died fighting for a worthwhile cause etc. But inherent in all of that is a lot of value judgements that could shift based on the viewer. Something like passing on your genes would probably be close to a human universal "he done good!' criteria. I am open to disagreement here. I'm just trying to establish as objective and discrete threshold as possible for fail/urenot-failure.

I lean towards the idea that having a whore daughter at least feels intrinsically worse because of the inherent value placed in women. Things like dowry's exist across hundreds of cultures for a reason - sexual and reproductive access is important.

But there may be a little trick here. How many women, across history, have a "ho phase" followed by decades of monogamy and legitimately good performance as a mother? You can adjust "ho phase" sensitivity by time and culture - anything from "Mom spent some time as a ... waitress ... on the sunset strip in the 1970s" all the way to "Lady Kingsbury-Hampton-Bottomtooth once spent an unchaperoned weekend in Marseille. London society was quite atwitter!" The point is if we're looking to designate "whore daughter" with some sort of discrete event or events the same way we are for failson --- you might have a higher number of qualifying applicants than you'd like.

Porn and OnlyFans are a different spectacle altogether. People do things in private, enjoy them or don't enjoy them, and adjust their behavior and values accordingly. When you broadcast intimate acts to literally the entire internet'ed world it really smacks of a lack of awareness or a deeply narcissistic tendency that, to me, is far more worrisome than the dick coefficient of your life. And here's where I'll beat my favorite deceased equine; the sexual revolution made whore-dom cool and passed it on to young women utterly incapable of making sound judgement calls on actions that will impact them for the rest of their life. I'm empathetic to a teen girl who is angsty with her Goldman Sachs dad (yo, but, like, can you maybe slip him my resume lol?). If she decides to go off for a few months with the town badass (barbed wire tattoos, somehow got sent both to and home from boot camp, "knows a guy who can get us illegal fireworks") that's fine. Or, rather, that used to be fine. Now it's ... not enough? Now "sexual expression" is .... FacialAbuse (dot) com (don't google it, save your soul).

I’d personally rather have a failson. Maybe at some point he’ll find some ambition and turn his life in a better direction.

If a daughter’s gone whore, there’s no putting the toothpaste back in tube. The dicks she’s sucked and taken aren’t going to unsuck and untake themselves. It reminds me of a possibly apocryphal recount of the aftermath of a chick posing nude for Playboy, that her family went on with life as if she were dead.

In the Wang example, your beautiful little girl having a mixture of vomit and semen, and possibly urine and ass juices, rubbed on her face while she asks for more will forever be seared in your brain (until your death) and forever available in thousands of minds and hard-drives of people out there.

I don’t know about preventability, although I feel like I’ve thought about it and then forgot or kicked it out of my memory for cope reasons. I probably have more control over a son not being a failson than a daughter being a whore; there are substantial cultural pressures that encourage a daughter to be a whore, or at least a thot.

Interesting. I suppose, though, that the daughter is still likely to continue your genetic legacy, while the son probably isn’t.

More comments

Goldman Sachs vice president.

To be fair, who isn’t a VP at Goldman these days?

I was actually thinking about that while writing the comment, that a "vice president" in financial institutions can be some rando in their late 20s, some guy or girl who managed to survive and wanted more after his or her Associate years. But given Kevin Baltazar's age and the context, I just figured the normie F500 definition of VP was more germane here, especially since even the C-suite at GS can have "Vice President" in their title.

Last I heard or read, the primary title dilution controversy at GS nowadays revolves around "Partner."

Then my friend has a strikingly beautiful daughter who is now 19, speaks two languages fluently and is studying to become a veterinarian. I suppose it's never too late for vomiting on cocks for cash, but one has to think positive.

Indeed, growth mindset 📈.

Ooooh, someone's mad he didn't get in.

A joke. I try to make a joke.

Ha, at this distance I probably just don't know enough about her to froth at the mouth. I'm not immune to various Circes. Or sirens, for that matter.

She’s just another odd internet character within this strange little rationalist Silicon Valley world from which this community originates, except she’s probably the only prominent woman and worked as a prostitute, which obviously adds some interest.

But does she really have a heart of gold?

I couldn't speak to a heart of gold, but she at least occasionally has something interesting to say. Not as often as people would have you believe, but sometimes. I recall reading a long blog post she did about the business side of prostitution which was legit fascinating. Not something I would ever really have learned about otherwise.

Me neither. There's this corner(s) of the rationalist community/discourse that is about the personal lives of popular Rationalists, Aella, Polyamory, Sex, and I hate it. I have nothing against Aella the person, she has a niche and does what she does, but talking about Aella... FUCK YOU I WILL NOT TALK ABOUT THE PALE SKINNED ONLYFANS GIRL

My broad take is.. (rationalists) are a bunch of insufferable dweebs. They have cool models and ideas, which I don't mind incorporating into my own, but please don't impose your dweeb shit on me, I'm just here for the models and ideas and not who is fucking who.

i like to pretend its not real and just modern art

Some of the memes are pretty funny: https://twitter.com/iroasmas/status/1763947341038469418

Properly laughed out loud at that, thanks

She makes content specifically intended to titillate nerds, who are thus titillated.

I'm pretty much a nerd, and I genuinely don't know if I could get it up for someone who by her own admission only bathes once a month.

She's repulsive based on that alone.

I'm a nerd and I've always found her repulsive. She has a very unexciting body(just me) and her faces scares me.

It's not her look or coloration, it's just that she looks like an alien wearing a human suit. Something forced and uncanny about all her facial expressions.

I was wondering when the Aella gangbang discourse would make its way here.

The surprising thing is that I can't think of anything interesting to say about it. I haven't seen anyone else have an interesting take either. Aella is such a unique human being that any minor updates that info from one additional gangbang could provide have approximately zero relevance to any other societal issue.

Did she allow something like 10 men to gangbang her at the same party? Absolutely bizarre and pretty disgusting behavior.

37 according to the substack post.

It's about as edifying as a man signing up to 37 porn sites in one day. It's an anti-achievement.

It could be a Clerks reference.

i thought 42 might have been a deliberate reference but it looks like they invited 43 and there was a no show. i'm sure these numbers are just coincidences and not deliberate numerology.

Hmm, yes… gangbang discourse. What is there to say—whores gonna whore? In this case, very much literally.

Perhaps you and everyone else are just “it’s all so tiresome”d out, because Aella is not so unique in her brazen promiscuity among e-thots, but more unique in her success with “not like other girls”-ing and having eked out a niche in the nerdosphere.

Obligatory Valentina copypasta reference: “Of all the rationalist sphere-adjacent women (so far), Aella seems like the most ‘unique’ human being—by far. Skilled, tough, smart, beautiful…”

The part with her ignoring the "internal screaming" at the gangbang broke containment and spilled over into esoteric RW twitter. Which mostly just finds her sad and ignores her.

Does anybody remember Stoya? She was another pornstar who tried to do the “not like the other grills” schtick, but I don’t think it worked.

Yeah, haven't heard much from/about her in quite a while, but damn, did she try.

Then again, I really don't keep tabs on Aella either, so it's very possible that the amount of "stuff happening in life" is probably roughly equal for Stoya as for Aella.

My girlfriend sent me a link to this Facebook short.

Isn’t it funny that the more affection people have for a person or animal the more silly nicknames they give them? My partner and I call each other all sorts of incredibly silly names. It’s an interesting quirk of our psychology. Why do you think we do this?

I do not get the appeal of dogs with small heads and long faces. Those things creep me out.

Do you mean the Russian Wolfhound? They look goofy but their looks follow the needs of taking down a stronger creature that had to kill everything it ate for most of its life. They're fast and with those long jaws they are more likely to get the better of a bite.

Here's a silent film era documentary of them working:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L0e85IhDsRI?feature=shared

After I learned more about their purpose, they went up quite a bit in my book.

Yeah, those guys, or whatever similar breed is in the video linked from the OP. The dogs in the 1910 video look a bit healthier to me. Their modern descendants seem to have been bred in a way that grotesquely exaggerates those features.

It’s a good video, but it unexpectedly reminded of the sad ways some of my past girlfriends were “gravely funny,” like they could come up with funny things and recognized when something was stupidly hilarious, but wouldn’t actually laugh at any of it… they were clever enough to see the opportunity for a joke but couldn’t enjoy the delivery, as if they had to be “corporate” or “grown up” all the time but still wanted to ensure they had a humor slider setting.

That sounds kind of tough. I've been fortunate that my girlfriend likes laughing and her sense of humor is similar to mine. Sometimes we'll get in a conversation where we're just having laughing fits over some stupid joke.

Helldivers 2 is a blast. Haven't had this much fun in a coop game in ages.

I don't understand @Cjet 's objection that the guns aren't satisfying to shoot. They're chunky, with intricate mechanics (they simulate rocket backblast! You can adjust the rate of fire on the MMGs!) and they provide visceral feedback, enemies have detailed damage models and aren't just bullet sponges, you can blow off limbs and see bugs limp, perforate them enough and they'll bleed to death. The robot enemies get blown into scraps in an eminently enjoyable manner. And it's not like the "normal" guns are only an appetizer for support call-ins, they are more more than capable of dealing with 90% of what the game throws at you, and it makes sense that you need to bust out the big guns for tanks of both the biomechanical and engineered kind.

My online buddies have had a great time just fucking around, running through the woods, swamps, taigas or desert with tracer fire lancing overhead, or away from an absolute horde of bloodthirsty bugs.

It's the best Starship Troopers game. It's the best ODST game. It's the best Tempestus Scion versus Tyranids game. You drop heavy fucking ordnance on some very unsympathetic foes, and laugh your ass off when your buddies respawn you in the middle of a minefield or your drones and turrets blow your head off (friendly fire causes half the fatalities in the game, and it's hilarious), and you generally have a great time.

I would heartily recommend it, and hopefully they'll get around to a balance patch that makes some of the off-meta builds less suicidal on the highest difficulties. They're adding mechs and other vehicles soon, and if you wanted a 40k Dreadnought game, this is it.

IMO, the best 'Starship Troopers' game is running around in the nuclear powered tank in Factorio and shooting off hundreds of mini-nukes or just pasting the bugs using the 70 odd tons and the energy shield.

(Yes you could load a hundred nukes into a big tank, even in the real world. )

Are you talking about the Spidertron?

Spidertron isn't squashing the bugs. It steps over them. You can drive over them with a tank, this is a valid way of dealing with most of enemies unless they're really thick on the ground / very late game.

I play with the Rampant AI and the associated 'arsenal' mod which adds some more flavors of weapons -mortars, miniguns, faster-firing rocket launchers, more ammo types and two more variants of tanks and cars - advanced and nuclear, which are bigger, heavier and have more slots / better weapons.

Well, if you're a fan of the book I can't argue that isn't a faithful representation, all the more if the tank has legs. The Mobile Infantry weren't grunts with assault rifle, they used nukes as primary weapons. And even fought super advanced alien midgets, assuming I'm not getting it muddled up with another mil SF novel.

Yeah, I meant the vibe of using sf or almost sf-weaponry -nuclear cannon shells or RPG warheads are essentially that even if they exist - to kill untold hordes of extremely dangerous alien bugs and still essentially not even winning because no matter how fast you kill them, there's always more.

Of course killing them personally in Factorio is not a winner's strategy, usually you just carpet bomb them with nukes and pave the wasteland over with defensive lines.

And even fought super advanced alien midgets

The opposite, they were tall lanky things called 'Skinnies.' They also jumped around with jump packs, powered armor and I think laser swords.

they were tall lanky things called 'Skinnies.'

Just to add context: these are the first enemies the protagonist is in combat against, but they switch sides and for most of the book the main conflict is the same as in the movie, humans-vs-bugs.

(for a loose definition of "the same"; e.g. in the book the humans are trying to capture a brain-bug so they can figure out how to communicate and negotiate peace rather than fight-to-the-genocide, whereas in the movie they want someone for Nazi Doogie Howser to torture)

[The Mobile Infantry] also jumped around with jump packs, powered armor and I think laser swords.

I was going to joke about you confusing Starship Troopers with Star Wars or Halo ... but I pulled down my copy to check, and what do you know, the protagonist cuts through a wall with "a knife beam at full power". I swear I just reread it a few years ago...

I have no idea how anyone can call guns weak or unsatisfying when the autocannon exists, blasting apart armored bugs/hulks or crowds of regular shitters with it is nothing short of a spiritual experience. Even when you're the loader you can feel yourself partaking in it alongside your comrade. Ultimate male fantasy.

The game works best in unexpected moments of chaos. Like, you and the squad will be running to the next objective when suddenly an enemy horde side swipes you out of nowhere, so you start sprinting away with lazers flying over head, and you dive into cover, and you start fumbling with stratagems to get an eagle cluster out there but the fucking arrows are weird, and then a robot gets around your cover and you have to switch back to your weapons and you start shooting wildly and then your idiot friend died and he's calling for a reinforce but fuck fuck fuck youre barely surviving. Stuff like that.

Sure, there's that, but I also find it very nice when you happen upon a competent squad and you high-speed low-drag operate your way through the map, wiping out patrols before they can call reinforcements, ticking objective boxes left and right, and generally being the elite of Super Earth's finest.

And then one tiny thing goes wrong and everything's back in your scenario!

I don't understand @Cjet 's objection that the guns aren't satisfying to shoot. They're chunky, with intricate mechanics (they simulate rocket backblast! You can adjust the rate of fire on the MMGs!) and they provide visceral feedback, enemies have detailed damage models and aren't just bullet sponges, you can blow off limbs and see bugs limp, perforate them enough and they'll bleed to death.

I understand how the game can be fun. I think I'm in the minority in not preferring guns that blast enemies apart at short ranges.

The three maps I played didn't really allow for long range engagements. There were terrain obstacles that severely limited line of sight. Maybe I just didn't play enough maps.

Ammo felt frustratingly limited for the main guns. And it all came back to "throw a [grenade]". Ammo is out, throw a grenade for new ammo crate. Big baddy is around, throw a grenade for artillery strike. Or throw a grenade to call down a big rocket launcher.

I think the cape signified my movement issues with the game. Commanders wear capes. I like playing a recon/scout/sniper build in most shooting games, and wearing a cape while playing any of those rolls would be downright stupid. Its slow, conspicuous, and does not allow easy movement.

I am also starting to become a shooting game elitist. The base mechanic of a shooting game in my mind is clicking on tiny things on the screen. Doing it quickly and accurately represents skill. Doing it quickly and accurately while also doing a bunch of other things (like managing resources, moving around a 3d environment, and coordinating with others) represents mastery of the base skill. A bunch of "shooters" these days tend to focus on the "other things" and the base "shooter" mechanic is nerfed down to nothing. And I understand and get that. I don't just like playing shooters, there are many other genres I like. But whenever I play something vaguely with "shooter" mechanics I inevitably enjoy the base shooter stuff a bunch and just want more of that.

If hell divers at some point supports a more shooting focused playstyle, I'd be happy to jump back in. Just doesn't seem like that is the game's strength right now, and probably also why its popular.

Precise shooting vs Hordes of enemies.

Nah, complete change of style for the game. If you're dealing with hordes, the thing to do is area damage.

There are some longer range support weapons you can call down. Like the auto cannon. The shooting also requires accuracy as the bugs/bots have different vulnerable parts to them that make all the difference when shooting them. You have a problem with the visual of a cape in a very non-serious send up of Super Earth's MANAGED DEMOCRACY at war? Maybe you're just looking for more of a PvP style camping trip. This ain't that. I also enjoy a good old school shooter, but it is nice to mix it up. Shellshocked servers on HL2 maps were the best of the best for that kind fast twitch play. The old school MOH franchise on PC was up there too.

Maybe you're just looking for more of a PvP style camping trip.

Not really, as i said, core gameplay is pointing and clicking at a specific spot on a screen. Being prevented from doing that pointing and clicking is a side mechanic in my mind. And often a very unwelcome side mechanic in my opinion. I generally prefer singleplayer. PvE is a somewhat close second. PvP is something I usually dislike.

I find it a breath of fresh air, there are a million people that are split second 100% accurate with a mouse and can no scope you on CS till you quit. The move mouse to pixel 124fa and press mouse button is a solved game. I still enjoy it, but it is nice to mix it up!

Good description. I'm just not interested in competing with others in the sport of "optimize rapidly clicking on a particular pixel". I still like to play shooters, but I want them to check for skills other than the core of pretending to be an aimbot.

Is there a term for the joining of two phrases or expressions with the last word of the first phrase starting the second phrase? For example:

Mobius strip club

Augean stable genius

I've heard it called "word association football"

A garden path sentence?

The term they use for this category on jeopardy is "before-and-afters"

Also on Wheel

a zeugma apparently (asked gab.ai)

She opened her purse and her heart.
He did not lose his wallet or his mind.
The sun sank beneath the horizon and the hopes of the team.
They buried the hatchet and the hatchet man.
Time heals all wounds, but rum helps.
She left her heart in San Francisco and her luggage at the airport.
He struck oil and the fancy of the lady.
He lost his shirt and his temper.
She took her hat and her leave.
He lost his head and his job.

Zeugma dick

Lmao gottem

Zeugma is where you use one verb with two meanings but attached to different terms.

"She entered the room with her hair bound in a ponytail and her teeth in bright wire braces." Bound there is used for both objects.

I'm thinking OP is more just thinking about the common term "pun."

They're not the same, though I'm finding it hard to articulate what the difference is. The examples are clearly different, though?

They all equivocate on verbs, whereas what I had in mind usually goes noun->adjective.

My favorite zeugma:

Fact: In Pastafarian heaven, there is a beer volcano and a stripper factory.

Joke/zeugma: In hell, they're both flat.

I think Zeugma is a broader term than OP is looking for, though OP's examples are zeugmas. I define zeugma as "a word used once with two meanings as connected to different parts of the context."

I've only ever seen zeugma used to refer to sentences, and never to non-propositional phrases - though the principle here seems similar. I'm not aware of an established name for these. Phrasal zeugma maybe?

The wife and I decided that instead of watching 3 hours of TV a night, we should read together, which has been a nice change. The wife suffers a bit from literary narcolepsy. Which is to say, reading puts her immediately to sleep. So the night turns into 10-20 minutes of us reading together, and then me reading for another 2 hours while she's asleep on the couch next to me. Which is fine by me.

I finished A Princess of Mars and Day of the Oprichnik this week.

I gotta admit, A Princess of Mars left me underwhelmed. All the descriptions were just so perfunctory and staid. You'd think it would be difficult to describe the fantastical flora and fauna of a living mars in a boring manner, but he pulled it off. The characters are frankly tedious and boring as well. Even the action is so-so. Possibly the most interesting part of the book is the fact that it came out in 1912. Which means the main character, a former confederate cavalry officer and southern gentlemen, is generally esteemed and presented as a noble and moral person. It also heavily features the canals of mars, which were believed to exist at the time he wrote it. Has some fun airship battles, which play out like naval battles since the era of flight, or aerial combat, was so new when he wrote it.

Was also interesting to read on wikipedia how the book influenced Heinlein, Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury, James Cameron, Flash Gordon and Carl Sagan. But ultimately, I can't really give it a recommendation.

Day of the Oprichnik was wild. Really pulled me along, and I finished it in about two days. Checking the wiki for this book, something like 70% of it is analysis, so I'm sure most of the subtext of the book went over my head. But I enjoyed it all the same. Honestly I don't want to spoil anything about it, since going in completely blind was half the fun for me. I will say, it's a bewildering and perversely charming slice of life story in a dystopian Russia. It's also 100% from the first person perspective and an enforcer of the regime. So that's fun.

A Princess of Mars

S.M.Stirling wrote IMO an amazing riff on the Barsoom books called "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings" . For those who don't know Stirling, he's a 1776 (luv me liberty, luve me small government, luv me common law etc) Canadian, who is, also, at the same time a hardcore HBD/biodeterminist guy but keeps very quiet about it to not upset the Boomers who are most of his readership.

It takes place in an alternate timeline where someone (or something) terraformed Mars & Venus to support life and transplanted humans there. Cold war kind of fizzles out into a huge space race when it turns out both places are habitable and in fact inhabited. Venus is a jungle planet with primitive tribes, Mars is very cold and quite dry but its engineered ecology supports a slowly declining civilization despite its inhabitants being almost Ivy League material of 125 average IQ. Why Mars isn't in space and colonizing Earth is handwaved in the book with a "no uranium on Mars" claim.

It's amazing how much heresy you can pack into what looks like and is a fun adventure book and get away with it if you package it sa "fiction". There's even some obvious applause bait with mild subversiveness of the male human hero getting rescued by a princess etc. Meanwhile, it seems the reviewers completely avoided mentioning why "hero getting rescued by a princess" makes perfect sense in context. (my metaphorical sides are hurting)

One can also tell that Stirling is uneasy with things as they are for us, because somehow, Martian biology is precisely of the kind that liberals like him would like ours to be. Little in the way of sexual dimorphism, due to an average lifespan of ~250 years, childbirth and child-rearing doesn't hurt women's vocations or careers much.

Publishers Weekly called it "charming", and praised Stirling for "successfully creat[ing] a truly alien environment", but criticized his "inclusion of pirates with eye patches, heavily armored guards riding 'fat-tired, self-propelled unicycles' and other moments of near-parody."[3] Kirkus Reviews lauded Stirling's "magnificently wacky Martian biological machines" and "fully developed and carefully crafted social system", calling the book overall an "unexpectedly rich lode of creative ore", and judging it extremely favorably compared to Stirling's previous work.[4]

At the SF Site, Dave Truesdale "heartily recommend(ed)" the book, saying that he could not "think of a better [example]" of planetary romance.[5]

Meanwhile, within the book, it's made clear that Martian biotechnology works flawlessly and that Martians at their apogee routinely engineered themselves for various desirable character or physical traits. (E.g. the imperial bodyguard caste are almost as strong as earth humans and have psychology similar to that of special forces soldiers. Ultimately obedient to lawful, competent authority but never quit and independent of mind..

We do this whenever I feel like I need to look at something that doesn’t glow before bed.

Absolute best success was Code of the Woosters. My girlfriend and I took turns reading it aloud, which really suited the comedy. Cripplingly funny.

How do you feel about Elric?

I haven't read A Princess of Mars, but I watched John Carter last year, which I understand to be a fairly direct adaptation of it. My wife thought it was too hard to get into given the strange world building, but I thought it was a super fun adventure romp. I didn't know the history going in, but I remember thinking "wow, this is practically ripping off Flash Gordon, almost scene for scene".
Needed more Queen, tho.

Day of the Oprichnik

At first the book doesn't even resemble typical Sorokin's prose, lulls you with its now obviously prophetic story and then the centipede scene bludgeons you from behind like a stealthy mugger.

Meanwhile me, recognizing that scene like an old friend. "That's it! That's where the Space Marine meme is from!"

The discussion spurred me to read the book. If that's what all Sorokin is like, I ought to check out some of his other work.

Yeah, I knew nothing about it, the author, or anything. Just showed up in a list of recommended Russian literature.

Apparently Russia also has a hyperventilating liberal class shouting "THIS BOOK IS LITERALLY JUST LIKE RUSSIA IS TODAY!" Which seems... unlikely. I know it's not great, but yeah.

It's not literally that, but consider that it was written in 2006, right in the middle of the first, pro-Western phase of Putin's rule. The whole idea of Russia isolating itself from the West, reinventing itself as a junior partner of China and adopting an explicitly reactionary internal policy sounded about as plausible as the plot of The Day After Tomorrow back then.

Superficial people were misled by the Chinese efforts at pretending they're going to liberalize. Anyone with a more suspicious mind and some real interest in China would have understood that's a lie.

2006 was when Politkovskaya’s murder happened, and at least in Finland that was widely considered a sign that things were developing to an adverse direction. Of course even before that it was common to speculate on far-right/left forces taking over in Russia, and Putin was considered at least lightly authoritarian.

Politkovskaya's murder went relatively unnoticed here, since her favourite topic wasn't exactly popular with the general public. "Chechens killing other Chechens? Finally some good news!"

So what happened? Where did it all go wrong? Was Putin not invited to the slumber parties?

Depends on which Kremlinologist you ask. If you ask the man himself, like Tucker did, it all went wrong when Wolfowitz proposed his unilateralist doctrine.

Whenever I hear about "A Princess of Mars" it seems like the proper way to adapt it is as isekai anime.

When I first skimmed the post and saw the title I did indeed think this was an anime they were watching, until I went back and actually read it.

Aldnoah.zero is halfway there. Not very good though.

The wife and I decided that instead of watching 3 hours of TV a night, we should read together, which has been a nice change. The wife suffers a bit from literary narcolepsy. Which is to say, reading puts her immediately to sleep. So the night turns into 10-20 minutes of us reading together, and then me reading for another 2 hours while she's asleep on the couch next to me. Which is fine by me.

I applaud this. I keep trying to get there and failing.

We've been doing this for about a decade. Highly recommended. We watch a movie(or equivalent) together maybe once a week, for the rest of the time we sit together and read or watch our own stuff.

Our media interests don't particularly align and I personally feel like media consumption is a mostly personal thing anyway, if someone else starts commenting on stuff I lose immersion.

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