samueldays

[samueldays]

Notepad++

not including “directly into ao3 text editor” because i think you need help and i refuse to enable your sick and twisted lifestyle

#all

[samueldays]

#chef's hat and bon appetit #all #meme bandwagon

[samueldays]

Seems extremely unlikely to me, because "the queers" is bait-and-switch category.

At one end is the leftist party line from 20 years ago that it's none of your business what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms etcetera, and I think most of the potential right-leaning coalition has accepted this level of tolerance and internalized it in complaints that "the queers" should have been satisfied with that,

and at the other end is "Bake the cake" lawsuits demanding that one must express support for queerness as a condition of running a business. This looks to me like part leftist clientage to keep queers on the plantation by inciting hatred, part leftist flex to see how far they can push, both of which exist only due to a left-leaning coalition in power, and would rapidly cease to exist under a right-leaning coalition.

Man, if we switch from a left-leaning coalition based on racial and ethnic identitarian grievance politics to a multi-racial right-leaning coalition held together by hating on "the queers," it's gonna be so annoying.

It seems unlikely, but possible.

#all #politics

[samueldays]

Good post.

First Substack-exclusive post (still free to access) looks at a good but one-sided Harper’s piece that linked January 6th to the right having abandoned coherent political narratives.

#all #politics

[samueldays]

Ehhhh only in a vague sense that people are cheering Jesus and then people are booing Jesus a week later, IMO. I'd say there's some difference in usage that Milkshake Duck is mostly about a shift due to a cultural taboo coming to light, whereas Holy Week features more overt maneuvering and shaping of opinion by authorities for governance reasons.

The Roman side of the government thinks Jesus might lead an insurrection and considers a harsh crackdown, the Jewish side of the government thinks "we're all going to be collateral damage if the Romans crack down" and decide to get Jesus out of the way, several conflicting plans and motives crash into each other.

am i just sleep-deprived or is holy week milkshake duck for jesus?

I'm sleep deprived myself, but that checks out for me.

#all #christianity

[samueldays]

"When libertarians say" "they mean" are u libertarian or not?

The short version is that there's two relevant parts of libertarianism:

Libertarians have particular analysis about how government works and its blunt-instrument-ness, which I mostly endorse.

Libertarians have particular morals about "therefore, abolish government", which I mostly reject.

#all #asks #politics

[samueldays]

I sometimes think about writing a isekai featuring a guy who's the second summoned hero, asked to help fix all the problems caused by the well-meaning first guy packing several centuries of social upheaval into a few years of attempted uplift.

First guy's trajectory was roughly: "I should introduce the printing press and mass literacy" (mass propaganda) "and the gun" (several species hunted to extinction) "and assembly lines" (Luddite riots) "and democracy" (revolution) "why is everything on fire?"

#all #idle thoughts #literature

[samueldays]

Your flattery might be more effective if you didn't mix it with sneering, moving goalposts, and commie talking points.

For nationalism, my argument against it (besides the "playing with fire" bit above) typically is that it is fucking pathetic and unworthy of an enlightened mind.

Oh, the irony of that coming out of your mouth! You are playing with a gate to Hell while you insult the people warming themselves at a fire.

Nationalism typically functions to paper over class antagonisms

Begging the question. Here is the statement from another POV: communists typically incite class hatred to undermine nations.

Communists should stop inciting hatred.

It's not hard to find articles on Norway wealth inequality.

It's not relevant to find articles on Norway wealth inequality. Norwegians have low stress and high enrichment as indicated both by strong indirect evidence about quality of life, and by direct-but-dubious surveys asking about stress itself. Norway is still nationalist. Wealth inequality is not stress.

Wealth inequality is neutral in principle, as it goes both up and down with both good and bad things, being an extremely noisy measure. Wealth inequality is deserving of defense in practice because levellers are prone to Harrison Bergeron levelling, and because targeting it as a measure is extremely prone to Goodhart's Law. For example, Norway's inequality would go down if it expelled and stopped admitting African migrants, who tend to be poorer than the Norwegian average.

Treating inequality as a bad thing in its own right is a sign of communistic thought, and communists are down there with kleptomaniacs as people whose stress is a sign of a diseased mind. They should not be indulged.

*sees nationalism* This is actually not natural behaviour, humans only do that when stressed out or not provided with adequate enrichment.

#all #politics

[samueldays]

Hey OP I invite you to visit Norway in about a month's time, 17 May, Norway's national day, when the streets fill with flags.

Stress or lack of enrichment are not problems for Norway, which has been at peace* since WW2, ranks highly on both wealth and happiness measures, has a lively media production, and is generally a good place to live.

*technically Norway contributed a few soldiers to international coalition operations such as the Libyan Civil War in 2011, but this was such a non-threat that the Norwegian force did not suffer losses, let alone risk any threat to Norway as a nation. Norwegians had the experience of peace, even if they were at war on paper.

Now that that's shown OP is wrong, so we aren't engaged in Bulverism, let's consider what is wrong with OP.

Have you ever seen those bluechecked idiots on twitter who confidently say something dumb, and go "Russian trolls are out in force today!" when they get pushback?

*sees nationalism* This is actually not natural behaviour, humans only do that when stressed out or not provided with adequate enrichment.

I contend this is the same sort of thing as "Russian trolls are out in force today!" because it dismisses the possibility of reasoned disagreement. Instead, it frames disagreement with the speaker as something that results from brute material circumstances, something that should be removed by altering the circumstances of discourse instead of arguing to convince people.

*sees nationalism* This is actually not natural behaviour, humans only do that when stressed out or not provided with adequate enrichment.

#all #politics #bad post op

[samueldays]

High Honesty Society

I commute to work by Norwegian public transport, which has a wide variety of people on it. A typical Norwegian train has two sorts of labeled cars: [Prior ticket only] and [Tickets sold aboard]. If you have bought a ticket, you can enter either one. A controller walks up and down the train, checking tickets for everyone and selling tickets to new passengers in the latter cars. Persons found without a ticket in the former cars will be fined.

A scene I've witnessed several times is that of the controller slacking off (standing in place, or walking past without checking, because most people have prior tickets) and then a passenger will call for the controller and say "I need to buy a ticket".

Sometimes I feel like there's a disproportionate amount of talk about "high trust society" and less about "high honesty society" to build that trust on, because trusting dishonest people is a bad idea. Some places report problems with turnstile jumpers and fare evaders putting effort into it, here's people putting effort into paying when they could have remained silent. But how does one build honesty?

#all #essaying

[samueldays]

Most of post is good, and towards the end it takes this awful swerve.

We go looking for why the art we love is moral even if the art we love is a donut. I think this is the pressure of the Elders of Zion on time –

That's how you sound bitching about "capitalism", which is part commie hallucination, part blaming real but innocent people. Scarcity is not unique to capitalism. Wanting to get more things done in less time was not invented by capitalists.

“The way I personally stay true to the story I started down on is to give myself permission to not teach anyone anything. I’m not writing a manual. I’m not delivering bromides. I know that a lot of people do take enormous pleasure and relief in lines or phrases or ideas from stories that ring true to their own lives, but it’s important for me that I tell a story and that I’m not writing Chicken Soup for the Necromantic Soul. It is getting harder and harder again, especially for authors from marginalised places or backgrounds, to write works where the takeaway isn’t ‘this is to succour all my marginalised people’. For anyone on the female-identified axis this is especially hard because it seems to me that most books by anyone female-adjacent have an expectation that they will comfort the uncomfortable and discomfit the comfortable etc., whereas a guy can just tell an adventure story and be done with it. This ties in with an idea that I think nowadays that good art is moral and bad art is immoral: i.e. if a story is bad it actually has to be because the lessons are bad, and if a story is good it must somehow be beautiful on the moral scale. We go looking for why the art we love is moral even if the art we love is a donut. I think this is the pressure of capitalism on time – that everything has to double or triple up in benefit compared to the time we take on it: if we’re prepared to waste eight hours on a book we had better be able to tot up at the end how that book was also feeding us in some way. That’s brand time we just used.“  (Tamsyn Muir) Holy shit, Ms. Muir, marry me.

#all

[samueldays]

One of my philosophical considerations as I get older is appreciating how much moral virtue rules overlap with long-term pragmatism. Lying, for example, is a wicked thing to do, and also usually a bad idea and trying to spot the exceptions is unreliable. The more one generalizes utilitarianism across time and people, the more it looks like virtue.

Hundreds of philosophers have written on the edge cases of trying to pry these apart with deliberately constructed scenarios, which I feel get increasingly artificial as philosophy runs out of low-hanging fruit. "But if we suppose that the child is going to die unless an all-seeing oracle had predicted that you would..." -nah.

Recently I read an argument that such prying apart is itself a bad habit tending to wickedness. It is not a pragmatic thing to do, it worsens people's moral faculty by drawing an unreasonable amount of attention to an exception that is rare at best and physically impossible at worst, sometimes it glosses over another offense in the scenario construction. Philosophers will defend this glossing-over because in principle the other offense is a distraction from the point the philosopher wants to make, but pragmatically this inspires a mental habit of ignoring crimes to score dunks.

This was manifest in a fascinating retort to Amartya Sen that I want to share.

Amartya's constructed scenario in The Idea of Justice features three children presenting competing claims to a flute: Anne on the utilitarian grounds that she is a musician and will produce the most joy with it, Bob on the egalitarian grounds that he is poor and has no other toys, Carla on the libertarian grounds that she made it and the other two stole it. Amartya thinks this is a very difficult puzzle that shows there is no single right answer because he cannot decide between the competing claims.

The firebreathing retort: The flute should be returned to Carla, and Amartya ought to be punished as for theft or conversion, because by framing the scenario in terms of mulling over whose claim he should respect he has arrogated to himself the power of disposing of Carla's flute!

#all #philosophy #ethics

[samueldays]

Terrestrial Martial Arts, from Exalted which has TMA/CMA/SMA in increasing order of power

"tme" "tma" need to go back on the shelf. i can count the number of posts containing them that aren't deranged inane circular firing squad insanity on one hand.

#all #shitpost

[samueldays]

I feel like the "measured through smartphone data" bit should be on the main legend, in larger font, with more explicit phrasing that this is the average MOVEMENT OF SMARTPHONES.

Mean daily steps between countries measured through smartphone data from 111 countries with at least 100 users, 2017.

#all #damn lies and statistics

[samueldays]

Maybe Buster should be counted as one of those Template Things in this comparison since all Princesses get it and get a specific Upgrade.

And while you're nitpicking the count, it's arguably 12 or 13, because if you trade three affinity Upgrades for two non-affinity Upgrades and select two different charms with them, you get 2 more "granted to" Upgrades.

7 free picks is probably fine, it's suffering from success if there's so many cool things that a player wants all the cool things, and they need substance to be numerous and different.

re: Vampire Disciplines and Princess Charms comparison @brazenautomaton

You do need more upgrades than you do disciplines since each discipline dot does more as a self-contained thing

maybe I'm looking at an underpowered Vampire edition, but I went to check in Vampire:Requiem, and the first discipline looks like this

Animalism 1 - talks to an animal. Basically this is Natural Plea. Animalism 2 - raises a dead animal as temporary zombie/ghoul. No direct comparison, maybe Natural Plea + Conjure Wild to have a summonable animal minion? Animalism 3 - calls several animals to hunt someone or destroy something you spilled Vitae on. Similar to Natural Sweeping Plea. Animalism 4 - drives nearby animals and humans into a violent frenzy, attacking each other or a target of the vampire's choice. Not something Princesses do, but Natural Sweeping Plea + Face-Melting Anthem seems broadly similar. Animalism 5 - spend lots of blood to mark a territory where you can command people and animals freely and extensively. To jury-rig this with Princess powers, something like Natural Sweeping Plea + Secret Face-Melting Window-Rattling Anthem + Tireless's function from Tireless Step of becoming free to repeat after large upfront payment.

So that's 5 dots scaling sorta like 7 upgrades, and Princesses are more limited in that they have to ask, Vampires command, but I feel the discipline dots are not doing 3x as much for Vampires to start with 3 dots and Princesses with 10+ upgrades.

#all #rpg #pthce

[samueldays]

re: Vampire Disciplines and Princess Charms comparison @brazenautomaton

You do need more upgrades than you do disciplines since each discipline dot does more as a self-contained thing

maybe I'm looking at an underpowered Vampire edition, but I went to check in Vampire:Requiem, and the first discipline looks like this

Animalism 1 - talks to an animal. Basically this is Natural Plea. Animalism 2 - raises a dead animal as temporary zombie/ghoul. No direct comparison, maybe Natural Plea + Conjure Wild to have a summonable animal minion? Animalism 3 - calls several animals to hunt someone or destroy something you spilled Vitae on. Similar to Natural Sweeping Plea. Animalism 4 - drives nearby animals and humans into a violent frenzy, attacking each other or a target of the vampire's choice. Not something Princesses do, but Natural Sweeping Plea + Face-Melting Anthem seems broadly similar. Animalism 5 - spend lots of blood to mark a territory where you can command people and animals freely and extensively. To jury-rig this with Princess powers, something like Natural Sweeping Plea + Secret Face-Melting Window-Rattling Anthem + Tireless's function from Tireless Step of becoming free to repeat after large upfront payment.

So that's 5 dots scaling sorta like 7 upgrades, and Princesses are more limited in that they have to ask, Vampires command, but I feel the discipline dots are not doing 3x as much for Vampires to start with 3 dots and Princesses with 10+ upgrades.

#all #pthce #rpg

[samueldays]

Fun trivia I read about wheat recently: the tall wheat one sees in children's books and sheave symbology and old paintings is becoming increasingly rare due to Norman Borlaug and his team in the Green Revolution. I'd vaguely heard of them before, but one of their specific products was breeding a dwarf wheat that used less energy on growing tall, more energy on growing grain, and the short stalk was better able to hold up a heavy head of grain in storms.

A drawback is that it's harder to harvest when there's less margin between the ground and the grain, but we have machines for that now.

Last Sunday, we read about the corn of wheat that needs to fall into the ground and die. In the children's service, they planted little corns of wheat. The corns have sprouted much faster than I expected (I'm used to tomatoes, which need 8-10 days), and it seems that my 4y/o planted a few corns extra 😅

#all #trivia #tangential rambling