june you gifted us with meta on marius's virginity, can you also expound on ancient roman perceptions of penis size and what effects what he's packing would have on his Issues™ and perceptions of self?
I am SO glad you asked.
Sexual themes
yknow what chilchuck deserved that sex ed talk maybe if someone told him about safe sex earlier he wouldn't of ended up divorced with 3 kids
just choked on my drink
suckin' AND fuckin'? In THIS economy?
because of infl[I am dragged out of the room]
[I come sprinting back into the room] YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE BETWEEN SUCKING DICK OR COCK [I am dragged back out as a previously unseen microphone is wrestled away from me]
BECAUSE OF INFLA[gunshot]
defined as “mental distress from holding two conflicting ideas at once”
I’ve never seen anything falsifiably attributable to cognitive dissonance, and I don’t think people hold conflicting ideas simultaneously anyway and cannot get mental distress from it
There’s a fully 3D rendered Quake-style first person shooter game called .kkrieger that’s only 96kb in size – it would fit on the very first commercial floppy drives released in the 1970s with room left over. And it looks… well it doesn’t look like a modern triple-A game but it looks as good as its contemporaries from 2004, and those came on multiple CDs. The boot-up time is ungodly, and it takes a really good computer to run, because the game uses procedural generation as compression: none of the assets are saved in the game, just the instructions for how to make them. When you launch the game, it’s creating all of the texture maps and level loadouts from this set of instructions. The .kkrieger executable isn’t a game, it’s instructions how to make a game.
And basically I think that’s what ideology is. Not a big list of Truths, but an instruction set for taking any given data and deriving Ideological Truth from it. This instruction set almost always uses nothing but emotional reasoning. When new information is presented, the reaction is constructed on the spot and recited with as much conviction as if it had been a foundational belief, and then discarded the moment it is no longer relevant. That same information can be presented in a slightly different context later on, and a belief about it will be constructed on the spot again, but the different presentation results in a completely different belief being constructed, expressed with just as much conviction. This is how people seem to have two contradictory beliefs, because their set of ideological instructions will lead to contradictory outcomes for two different bits of information. But they experience no distress from it because they never hold those beliefs simultaneously: each one is constructed when needed and discarded immediately after.
Has anyone else talked about or looked into this sort of thing?
still believe this
100% predictive model no notes
tired: believing bivalves are aphrodisiacs because they contain high levels of zinc
wired: believing bivalves are aphrodisiacs because of their resemblance to certain genitalia
inspired: believing bivalves are aphrodisiacs because they have absorbed the great fuck power of the sea
sleepy: u slurp em like pussy
The other thing that makes me feel better about aging is that time I was at the lesbian meetup and talking to some cool ladies in their late 50s who said they wanted to organise a new meetup just for their age group and above.
"Oh, why?" I asked. One of them heaved a sigh of immense weariness and said "We're tired of younger women trying to fuck us."
i have not had sex but from what i can gather from experts it seems to be a form of grownup playtime
flipping the tables at the temple is a crucial part of the run, but obviously every npc in the area will aggro on you as soon as you do it, which is a problem because the crucifixion exploit only works on a pacifist run. that's why we picked up those cords from the leatherworker earlier in the chapter. we can craft those into a whip and drive out the merchants, as long as we don't accidentally kill one of them. this is the only weapon in the game that doesn't proc the "violence" effect due to an oversight in the code, so this will essentially allow us to complete the tableflip glitch without breaking our pacifist run. once every table is flipped, the physics engine won't know how to handle it and some key values will be altered that will later allow us to clip through golgotha directly into hell-
woke up this morning with the mental image of jesus' last words on the cross being "speedrun strats" and the thought wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote this
Hey, so--we cooled your boyfriend down to a hundredth of a kelvin above absolute zero. Yeah, it was so cold that all of the chemical reactions in his body ceased. Sorry. We, uh, yeah, we used him as a dielectric material in a tiny qubit. And then we quantum-entangled him with another qubit, just to see if we could. Sorry. Yeah, anyway, we thawed him out after two weeks and apparently he's doing fine now. Didn't really teach us anything about how quantum processes work in biological systems, but it sure was, uh, cool. If you'll pardon the pun.
this is literally Schrodinger's cat. Like, the whole premise of that thought experiment is that quantum superpositions are stupid because they don't make sense when you apply them to complex systems, but apparently you can actually do that.
the paper also has a pic of the tardigrade after they revived it
Okay but they didn't really entangle the tardigrade, nor is it anything close to Schrodinger's cat. They used it's frozen dessicated body as the dielectric material in a capacitor and then entangled that capacitor with another.
It's interesting, sure. But I don't know if it's correct to say that the coupling is between the animal and a capacitor. It's still between two capacitors, and what has been demonstrated is that there is pretty wild latitude in the choice of dielectric which can sustain entanglement.
So I didn't want to pile in to the original post bc I can do without the aggro but there's one going around rn about how dumb it is that when you call white people in wherever a coloniser they will try to get out of it by saying they're Scottish or something.
And sure, that's silly, in that there's not a meaningful difference between an Australian or an American or something with Scottish ancestry vs English, however:
I do think that part of what's happening here is that people are reaching for bad justifications for something that they correctly intuit to be correct: namely, that while it's fair to talk about their occupying relatively-privileged positions in a racist system, and fair to identify the legacy of colonialism in that system, fair to call indigenous people today still colonised even, it actually isn't fair or reasonable to call some random contemporary white person a coloniser!
They were literally just born there, same as you. They did not get a say in whether they were born there, or who their parents were. There is no such thing as ancestral guilt. There is no such thing as the crime or moral wrong of being a white person who happens to have been born outside of Europe, because you can't be morally culpable for things you had no control over.*
There is some level on which justice can never be done. The perpetrators of horrific crimes have already died rich and there is nothing we can do about that. Tryna hold random quantum descendents personally accountable isn't going to change that. All that can be done is to try to approach the situation from where we are now and try to make things better and more equal for the people that exist now.
I don't see how this framing is helpful to anyone. All it is is a driver of white guilt, and white guilt doesn't actually help anyone.
I have nothing useful to say about I/P that you haven't read anywhere else already, and I have tried not to dunk on people who also have noting useful or insightful to say. There are many out there who don't know anything I don't know, and have no access to special information, but who nonetheless produce a priori bad takes, and I am trying not to signal-boost them.
Because that's the problem: The only meaningful contribution, the only verifiable information I can provide is identifying a priori bad takes.
On the bright side, identifying a priori bad takes is fun and engaging.
That's the problem. It boosts takes all my followers already agree are bad!
But what's the point of an echo chamber if you don't make noise?
But what's the point of an echo chamber if you don't make noise?
we really went from "women and girls can do anything" to im just a girl i only do girl math im a passenger princess i dont drive i dont eat i just do haha girl dinner im so sillyyyy i wear makeup bc i want to i also try and define all women into categories that are marketable omg what if we were just girls and we were so useless and helpless
also if anyone wants to do some reading about this, it's a genuine phenomenon that occurs within most counter cultures. the main hegemony (capitalism) absorbs any part of the movement, and makes it something that can't cause harm to the existing power.
so yes, these quips start off as jokes, but if jokes weren't impactful then we wouldn't have spent so much time criminializing comedians, historically.
louis althusser came up with the idea of ideological state apparatuses, and there's an explanation of it here. it shows how we are systematically programmed through multiple facets of our everyday life.
these are my own notes about hegemonies
theres also this amazing excerpt from this pdf about counter culture being absorbed back into the dominant culture, which is capitalism
I think the marxist explanation is mostly unnecessary - the ideas presented in OP's post, of women giving in fully to feminine gender roles, are deeply attractive to lots of women for obvious reasons. A lot of people really like the idea of living out those roles
I think feminism repeatedly runs into a brick wall where it assumes that female gender roles and the way society treats women and societal expectations of women are always, strictly, consistently Bad and Undesirable.
You could probably argue that they are, generally, in total, on net, more bad and undesirable than not, but that's never going to be distributed evenly - it's not all going to be undesirable for every individual in there.
And as it happens, there are a lot of women (importantly not all of them!) who Really Like It. Men, too - I think it's a pretty big part of MtF transgenderism that people will see Gender Roles and The Way Society Treats Gender, and look at the way society treats women, and think, in some way, "God I wish that were me". Because while some of it is unenviable, a lot of it is pretty enviable. Not for every individual in society, but certainly not a negligible proportion.
hey guys come check out my explorer, Cyril Brown, who's very into British history
Candela Obscura takes place in 1907, focuses on a secret society, and encourages distinctly modern sensibilities, which implies that the views of modern Americans are also the views of this 1907 secret society, which is
interesting
What is this from? It seems to be asking old timey medicine to not be racist and ableist.
Candela Obsura
"don't play a eugenicist" isn't exactly an unusual ask, but I feel like this issue could've been avoided if you didn't set your game in 1907 and make Doctor a... class? i assume class, i'm still reading
I mean, that said I don't think this is a ridiculous desire? 1907 Britain has certain stage dressing and culture that would get lost if it was set in the modern day; sometimes people want to play spies like James Bond in 60s Vienna and they want to do a scene where they flirt with the hot bartender while ordering a drink, except the bartenders a guy named Michael Makelove, and they don't want to do some down-low type stuff, they want the fantasy of being an open charismatic hottie, so in this version of the 60s they're still doing The Spy Who Came In From the Cold but they're cool about gay people.
The highlighted portion is clearly running the Can't Look Bad On Twitter phrasing. But this is also the sort of game that will attract guys playing a Fu Manchu Character with a less-than-PC accent and it understandably helps to have something to point to so you can skip arguing over historical realism in your game about secret societies fighting Cosmic Horror
For some reason it has become incumbent on RPG authors to make that point as badly as possible.
You know, I'm not saying I necessarily want to go back to the days of the original AD&D, where the rulebook seems to be written for people who already have years of experience playing AD&D, but I'm a grown-up, I am capable of estimating the comfort level of the people I play with, and nobody else's comfort matters.
Yeah as is often the case its not about the concept - in fact this has always been true for all TTRPGs that history is sanitized for modern sensibilities. Imagine walking into a new group of D&D players and being like "sweet post battle I start raping the women as was typical for a sack of a city at this time", you absolutely do not that (you don't even use the word rape!) unless you know its that kind of campaign you all talked about ahead of time. We change a ton of things because they won't be enjoyable to roleplay.
Its just that the object-level things they are asking for are very dumb. Exploring other cultures is fine, when you don't know much about those cultures like in the past that was a good and cool thing to do. You could maybe not pilfer their ancient artifacts for British museums? Which would be a very specific thing to say, but like comprehensible, most people agree. Saying "don't explore other cultures" is just something a weirdo racist says. And when people roleplay, sometimes, they roleplay other cultures, which means they will dress like them as a medium. Pretending you can't do that is also weird racism. (The Doctor request is a bit preachy but it wouldn't stand out compared to the others in isolation imo, most players aren't going to dig into that kind of stuff, but if its a class yeah you should encourage healthy exploration, not condemn)
This stuff is starting to grate on me because I feel like it's being written worse and worse. Explorers don't really "appropriate other cultures" and, "Give your explorer a profound disinterest in any culture aside from their own, you know, in order to avoid the harmful stereotypes of early 20th century literature" is just profoundly silly to the point where I am genuinely unsure what is even meant.
Like, it can't possibly mean, "Your British explorer should exhibit a total disinterest in African culture" because that would be... like... duh...
My best guess is either it means "don't steal the artifacts of other cultures (but do steal your own culture's artifacts?)" or "Try to avoid Dances With Wolves or Tarzan situations" but like... write it better! Think it through a little bit!
Clumsy, poorly thought out lecturing about what kind of characters are appropriate is a long tradition in RPGs, admittedly, but the increasingly political nature makes it even more grating to me somehow.
Yeah, the weird preachiness is typically mitigated by the fact that you can always ignore it (the Pathfinder 2e Players Handbook says some rather presumptuous things about how PCs are not permitted to, for example, purchase a slave, but if the players and the GM agree they can hardly send the pathfinder police in to go stop you). Whether or not the book agrees, you can always do whatever you want at your table with your friends if you all agree with it and there's nothing they can say to stop you.
Though the weird preachiness does carry over, in the specific case of this game in particular, into the game mechanics. There's a pretty central mechanic where a consequence of taking damage is that you get permanent disabilities, though the actual mechanical effect of it isn't actually detrimental, you increase a stat by 1 and lower a stat by 1.
The rules for this are hidden beneath about 60% of the page being pre-emptively chiding the player for being Ableist (where the ableism in question is usually just, like, "bringing up uncomfortable topics" from the perspective of someone who is uncomfortable with every topic.)
Okay now it's starting to sound less like player advice and more like someone told the author(s) "They're going to go after you on Twitter for this game, better start playing defense immediately"
A dis-integrated circuit project to make a complete, working transistor-scale replica of the classic MOS 6502 microprocessor.
when will it end..... when will we be free......
considering you dont have to sneak into the furry fandom bro shouldve just called it i spent 200 days wasting my time
the concept of this video is this dude wanted to "prove the existence" of furry orgies at cons (as if its hard to find this information) so he pretended to be a furry and filmed himself going to orgies he didnt want to go to and then was like i didnt want to go to them or have sex and filmed the people at the orgies without their knowledge and was like it was so crazy the people at the orgies were fucking. good fucking god. And then he says "most furries know they're cringe and are neurodivergent <3" bro you just snuck into a fucking private sex event and filmed it
It's so crazy watching normies feel guilty about their weird obsession with the behaviors of strange people but be intent on justifying it. They're like well furries are cool cuz they're neurodivergent freaks who cant make friends elsewhere :( we can still make fun of them but it would be so mean to make their lives bad. Except for the fact that they have sex. Neurodivergent people having sex is like really fucking funny and crazy. Obviously by having sex in private these neurodivergent people have crossed the line into Freak zone and we can just go ham
