domain:houseofstrauss.com
No.
But only because my answer to all calls for empathy, unbidden and spontaneous, is no. I'm not going to participate in the hyperreal fixations of others. Nor am I going to be coerced into accepting the implicit axioms such worldviews come with.
Others may support you. I will not.
I do have one of the gradual brightening wake lights. I purchased it probably 6+ years ago now, but I believe it's the Philips HF3520.
Dumb idea, but you might be able to try a fluorescent light in the fixture. Those usually take a few minutes to get up to full brightness, especially if it's cold in the room. The wake light I have can be programmed to brighten over about half an hour.
you were having this pure and chaste and beautiful reverie and now you're thinking about sex
Why does sex inherently contradict the former?
Seriously, I want to know, because it's very far from obvious to me; I tend to see the latter mostly as an extension of the former, but then again I don't get out much these days and my attraction heuristic has always been more "what body type predicts the former" than anything else.
I have never cross-dressed, not even in private.
I, too, consider Japanese sailor school uniforms unisex. Then again, I'm not really AGP either; the reason I don't do this more often is because most of the clothes don't fit/look bad. Girl clothing is generally softer and (to a point) warmer, so if you have the sensory-processing issues mentioned downthread, you're going to identify a bit more with them beyond mere sexual arousal (provided it fits, of course).
as though they are all sick perverts who want to inflict their fetish on the rest of us
I take this one level higher: I think it's a bunch of wicked women (and men, but women have much more incentive to do this) who want to inflict sick perverts on the rest of us as an extension/entrenchment of the privileges they already enjoy. The wiser transpeople [the ones following the golden rule described in a sibling comment] are trying their best to minimize themselves/accommodate for other people (for the reasons below), and as such I don't have much problem with them. Most of the ex-women and ex-men I know are like this, but some of them are not.
I don't want autogynephiles to transition.
I only want the wise ones to be capable of considering it (they're the only ones able to bear the costs, anyway). I want the answer to be "no, because you only want to do it to validate a certain obnoxiousness/only want to validate it just to shock the squares" for the wicked, and "no, because this isn't a productive or healthy option for you" for the simple.
But I don't have the kind of revulsion that some people report.
Which is why you need a sensory processing disorder as a pre-requisite (usually from autism, but doesn't need to come from it, and autism tends to be used as an excuse to not fucking control oneself). I think it would be different if your body constantly reminded you that your dick exists, much as I find myself sensorily overloaded when I'm lying flat on my stomach for too long.
because I'm a Christian and take Christian sexual ethics seriously
No, you just read what's presented to you rather than thinking about why it exists in the first place. It's the safe option. (At least Catholics bother to root it in "natural law".)
The main problem with accepting it (should you take seriously "who on earth thinks getting married and tying yourself to another person is the easiest way to indulge in some perverted sex act; come on" as seriously as you say) is the same as it is when you eat food sacrificed to idols- that it gives the wicked a #NotRealChristian division upon which they can prey, setting the wise (and wicked) against each other and driving off the simple. Which is obviously contrary to what should be one's objectives as a Christian.
I'm a bit surprised that foreign oligarchs and billionaires haven't set up a scheme to flood those districts with ex-pats who are available for jury duty.
That would require changing federal law, as currently, non-citizens are ineligible.
What AGP individuals desire above all is attention for simply being. This also explains why even handsome and widely known men like Bruce Jenner would be AGP despite being objectively sexually successful, rich and famous (largely) heterosexual men. The reality is that 95% of women don’t really experience this, but male attention is so overwhelmingly focused on the hottest women, often without them even knowing, that they extrapolate this to the wider female experience. The trans fantasy - and this part is true for both AGP and HSTS - is to be a 95th percentile hotness woman. The rest of womanhood or womenfolk don’t concern them or factor into it at all. It’s like how acting students never imagine life as a merely moderately successful actor scraping by on bit parts and background roles in off-broadway shows and police procedurals; the fantasy is being the star.
I've heard it pointed out that transwomen who embrace the female in long hair and flirty dresses never seem to connect with the unsexy but more psychologically and socially deep-rooted parts of stereotypical female gender performance, like being held responsible for emotional labor in conversations, over-contributing to household scut work, organizing office parties and remembering birthday observances, spontaneously volunteering care for the sick and elderly, feeling impulses or pressure to politely apologize, compromise and defer in conversations, feeling sorry for winning in a competition (because it hurts someone's feelings), fearing unwanted sexual contact and altering behavior to avoid it, fearing pregnancy and ditto, shouldering by default the more grueling parts of childcare responsibilities, etc.
Not all AFAB people experience all of these to the same extent, but I bet the proportion of women who experience their femaleness partly in one or more of these ways is vastly greater than the proportion who experience femaleness through short skirts, pert boobs and glamour makeup.
Might a real point of compromise be to clarify that AGP individuals desire to be, not women, but specifically hotties? It's possible that the few women who also self-identify as hotties would have an easier time embracing men who do the same, and it would clear up a lot of the issue for the many, many other women who feel that their womanhood is something more complex and fairly unconnected to hotness.
Man, you're importing water on Vulcanus? I think you should get acid neutralization soon. Maybe when you start harvesting calcite?
The ship I arrived in is still in orbit, and its eight asteroid collectors pull in a fairly large amount of ice while it's just sitting up there idling. It's pretty easy to periodically drop the collected ice from orbit and load it into the cracking plant. I'm a sucker for free resources, and it seems like acid neutralization is intended as a significant sink for both acid and calcite; if I can work around that step, it looks to be a free and very large productivity bonus right off the bat, with the bonus of giving me an excuse to lean into orbital infrastructure. It'll be a bottleneck until I get launches going again, but with the launch capacity Vulcanus offers I'm looking forward to building the mother of all space stations.
A bit of a tangent, but foreign financial crimes are almost always prosecuted in the Southern District of New York or the Eastern District of New York.
I'm a bit surprised that foreign oligarchs and billionaires haven't set up a scheme to flood those districts with ex-pats who are available for jury duty.
Fair enough. I don't quite agree but that's more reasonable than it sounded.
I think something important to note here is the sheer volume. Especially for those who spend a lot of time online, there’s a firehouse of memes, and because of the silo effects, you simply don’t hear anything from the other side. It’s always been rather hilarious to me that the leftist response to free speech on Twitter was to leave almost immediately. And it’s rather the wrong approach to a radicalism spiral on either side. If you’re going down a black hole, the critical thing that can keep you from going too deep is seeing the other side. If I’m becoming a radical lefty, seeing conservative content and specifically memes opposed to mine will at least keep me from thinking that my Marxposting peers are in the mainstream.
The other thing is to unplug from media. Go camping and leave the phone at home. Read books, draw, paint, make warhammer figures, bake stuff, who cares. But unplugging from the firehouse is probably the best cure for radicalism.
My last story was up on Royal Road and some forum sites and got in the low 5 figures of readers and all the commentary that entails, both good and bad. I have an open offer to get it professionally published, but I'm taking time away from it to write something else atm. Having a stranger post a long review detailing exactly the things you know you got wrong is exceedingly unpleasant to experience. It's easy to shrug off the inevitable lunatics, but a well reasoned critique from someone who likes the story in the abstract cuts deep.
Man, you're importing water on Vulcanus? I think you should get acid neutralization soon. Maybe when you start harvesting calcite?
I tried leading the demolisher around by the nose, but I couldn't pull it off. Their lava geysers always got me eventually. In the end I just put down turret pods in their territory and let nature take it's course. I've heard other people have great luck with mines.
I basically completely abandoned the original planet for Vulcanus. The only thing it's missing is Uranium, and I'm not really missing it with 400% solar efficiency. I even got everything so automated I can completely manage it remotely to keep that factory growing while I bootstrap Gleba.
Good question. Just off the cuff I feel like it should be the majority to justify the framing.
I don't get to play as much as I'd like these days, but I got a spaceship sorted out after three iterations of redesign, and sailed easily to Vulcanus. I came down with a pretty good selection of material to work with, and the last few nights have been figuring out the basics of the new environment in the landing zone. I made the annoying mistake of building my first dozen smelters using an assembler rather than the first smelting machine, but it's a minor hiccup and I'm getting my bootstrap base built now. Coal liquefaction is going, but I'm handicapping myself by trying to run the oil system off orbital ice rather than acid neutralization; this makes everything slower until I can get launch capacity back up and build a serious orbital ice farm. If worst comes to worst, I can always cannibalize my ship for the purpose, but pushing through the production chain the normal way seems doable at the moment.
I've unlocked orange science, and the obvious next step is to start worm hunting to expand my buildable territory. My current plan is to build a tank and a bunch of piercing shells; even with the constricted environment, it seems like it should be pretty easy to kite the worm while the cannon grinds it down. I really appreciate how they've added and expanded more "breakthrough" moments in the game's design, where you can see a goal that will significantly change what you're doing, plan how to achieve it and execute the plan; right now, that's securing minable tungsten so I can stop relying on the bits and bobs from harvested surface rocks.
I started messing with quality on nauvis, but that's on hold while I deal with the million things that need to be built-out on Vulcanus. I'm salivating over the launch capacity available there once I get a proper factory set up.
My main concern isn't whether a ~2.0 TFR is attainable, it's whether it's sustainable. The reactionary route of mostly/entirely restricting women to the homemaker role seems to result in fertility rates higher than really needed, and all other approaches seem to converge on sub-replacement fertility. For as much as we've avoided Malthusian collapse, the prospect of population growth outpacing productivity is theoretically sound, and I don't want to push our luck much further.
For nearly all of human history, populations were kept stable despite TFRs of 4.5+ by massive infant mortality, appreciable maternal mortality, and more death in general. The social technologies that ensured fertility was kept that high are now mostly unneeded, potentially harmful, and crippled by the Pandora's box of contraception. In their absence, the paradigms that have emerged haven't been any more adaptive, to say the least. I have no idea what the optimal arrangement for fertility in industrial society might be, but I'd bet it won't be as simple as retvurning to tradition.
Wow, what a great point. And this applies to so many other groups, not just vegans. Thank you so much for this, I’m stealing this.
That is interesting, I didn't know there was a term for what I had. I've done Keto diets before, but didn't have much effect. I think I just have a slightly longer circadian rythym. I've managed to not let it effect work, but it definitely got worse over covid when I was at home and able to easily nap.
Yeah, I dropped off with near everything I needed, plus a landing pad, and a ship to automatically ferry additional supplies. Basically the only thing I'm fabricating locally at the moment is repair packs, turrets and ammo. Valcunus has so much automated, and so much launch capacity, that it's simply not worth the frustration to do it all again with infinitely worse logistics thanks to things perishing, seeds needing to be sent back, spoilage getting sucked out of all the loops, etc.
The worst part starting out was I was constantly running out of seeds because I was processing the fruit and nuts with assemblers instead of biolabs. Oops. I didn't want to have to deal with even more loops for nutrition and spoilage, but it turns out you only are seed positive if you process in biolabs. With that problem sorted I'm finally growing the factory to my satisfaction and getting into the pre-requisites for launching rockets. Still going to need a lot more harvest spots though.
Distant belt of land mines plus clearing a dead zone before you leave (maintaining it with artillery later, they're slower to re-expand than biters)
You definitely need a checklist of supplies to bring to have an easy time setting up there.
And never never never use solar there: check the stats. Burn trash in heating tower, heat exchanger, turbine. Split in your jelly->rocket fuel production on low prio so it burns trash before fuel.
My Factorio: Space Age playthrough hit a brick wall at Gleba. This will not become an industrial hub. It took forever but I finally got some iron and copper production going that doesn't stall out constantly. Now I'm just trying to get the bare minimum going to build a launch pad and start shipping out research. I'm importing all my belts, drones, solar panels, etc from Vulcanus, and I give zero fucks about that. I haven't really had to build any defenses yet, but I can see pentapods creeping closer on my radar. Big ones even. I got some turrets and ammo automated, but I think I'm going to play around with delivering ammo by drone to gun pods and see if that can keep up with threats.
This is my preference, but I'll work in whatever the code base I'm playing in already has.
Do you have one of those gradual brightening wake lights?
My system for winter mornings is having one of the bedside lights on a cheapo dial timer (the whole setup is dumpster loot for testing the concept). It works, but it's a bit too sudden a change in light level. Looking for something better.
The variable alarm apps that listen for you stirring are also very nice, since you won't be broken out of a deep sleep.
People thinking that vegans in general are obnoxious and morally self-righteous because those are the only vegans they notice. They might pass plenty of vegans in the street and just assume that those people are meat-eaters, since eating meat is the default. But obnoxious vegans draw attention to themselves, hence come to represent vegans in general in the public mind.
I'd like to bring up the opposite problem, too;
Vegans claim to never meet pushy, irritating vegans, and like to assert that those people simply don't exist. But the reason they don't meet them is because the irritating vegans simply have no reason to be preachy and irritating to someone who is already a vegan, creating a massive blind spot where they refuse to believe that the type of vegan who annoys meat eaters at every opportunity is not just made up because those people, who might even be standing right next to them at the salad bar, just never display those behaviours towards them.
One complication is the Golden Rule and private autogynephilia. Let me start with a three way sub-classification of private autogynephilia.
-
Repression It would be so easy to buy a dress on line or at a thrift shop and dress up and blush. No! That would be wrong. One makes ones mind a battle field and victory is not giving in to temptation.
-
Binge and Purge One gives in to temptation, dresses, make-up, maybe even a wig. Then one gets disgusted by what one is doing, and throws them away. But a year later one does it all again.
-
Limited, private indulgence One gives in to temptation. Release turns into relief, and one puts ones cross-sex items away, in a suit case or a drawer, knowing that one will be tempted again, and indulge again. But also aware that the over-all effect on ones life is negative. Without turning ones mind into a battle field, one tries to avoid temptation and leave off for months or years.
The Golden Rule is often written as
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
All three classes of private autogynephile see autogynephilia as a misfortune. It takes them away from seeking a girl friend or a wife. It takes them away from sublimating sexual impulses in other, satisfying alternatives. Yet it is so horribly unrealistic. They are a bloke, not a girl; autogynephilia involves fighting a war against reality and reality always wins. And they cannot expect any-one else to join in and humor them.
What would they have others do unto them? They hope that others will refrain from encouraging them. No "woman of the year" for a man. No "Stunning and brave" for a man. No inviting a man to use she/her pronouns. They hope to avoid cultivating and strengthening their fetish. They don't want to get outed. They don't want to have to say "please stop talking about positively about transition, because I'm both tempted and sure that it would work about badly for me." It is the same as when the ex-alcoholic is invited to go for a drink. He doesn't want to reveal his private past and he doesn't want to be cajoled.
And what then does the Golden Rule command them to do unto others? They see it as partly idiopathic and partly social contagion. They keep it private to avoid contaminating others. They oppose publicity and encouragement around transition. This is rooted in compassion for those with autogynphilia. It is a net negative for them. As best they can judge, it is a net negative for others. They wish to avoid harming others by encouraging the fetish, just as they hope that others will avoid harming them by validating and encouraging their fetish.
This proves too muchÂą; your argument could be adapted to defend cancel culture!
This is also begging the question² of whether transitioning is a bad decision; furthermore, even if it were, if the 'consequences of a bad decision' include extralegal violence, protecting people from it is one of the most fundamental functions of society, and protects you from somebody else deciding that some aspect of your life-style is a 'bad decision' that they are entitled to assault people over. (You still Kant dismiss univeralisability.)
¹Proving too much: an argument which, if valid, would also prove something known to be false; elaborated here. ²In its older sense of 'a proof of P that assumes P'.
More options
Context Copy link