Ziz has always had a tendency to express her ideas through metaphors in fiction that are familiar to her. We spoke at length about Contessa and Doctor Mother from Worm; the Wardens from World of Warcraft; Frisk, Sans, and especially Undyne from Undertale; Tassadar from Starcraft; Harry and Dumbledore from HPMOR; Iji.
Does “read a second book” apply here, or is this a “read a first book” situation?
He showed up at my blog to talk math back in the ancient days when I had a comment section. And he’s active on Mastodon a fair bit.
This is a serious blow to coolness, from which not even drugs will easily recover.
When we’re all too tired for “let them fight”.
New random positivity thread:
Epistemic status: it’s aphids, man, aphids everywhere. I asked ChatGPT. They’re aphids. They’re in my hair, on my skin, in my lungs. And the pain, Barris, it’s unreasonable. They’re all over the place. Oh, they’ve completely gotten Millie too.
In knavin’
Habryka quoting Yud:
From my perspective, my whole life has been, when you raise the banner to oppose the apocalypse, crazy people gather around making things worse
“Crazy people”? That’s hardly a nice way to describe your biggest fans.
The third derivative… ah yes, the jerk
The Golgafrinchans shipped off the B Ark and then died of a plague (book 2). The Shoe Event Horizon happened on Brontitall (radio series) or Frogstar World B (book 2).
And it’s not like Orwell wrote a book about talking animals that is required reading in schools across the land.
Impenetrable layers of posts for which the prequisites include a BFSM fanfic, written in the style of forum threads, based on an offshoot of Homework: The Game.
Ah, so it’s Mythos that will create the nanobotsdiamondoid bacteria
It would be beneath my dignity as a childhood reader of Heinlein and Orwell
Life is too short to be that pompous
There is no cost-cutting in Ba Sing Se
All their doom scenarios are made-up sci-fi bullshit, so of course they have free rein to pontificate about the right and wrong ways to prevent them. And because they are high on their own sci-fi, they downplay or neglect or misunderstand the real harms of the rising slop sea. Consequently, they fail to grasp the real social reaction to acts of violence.
The only people I trust as little as I trust the owners of corporate social media are the politicians who have decided to cash in on the moment by “regulating” them. I mean, here in progressive Massachusetts, the state house of representatives just this week passed a bill that, depending on the whims of the Attorney General, would require awful.systems to verify the ages of its users by gathering their government-issued IDs or biometrics. We are, you see, a “public website, online service, online application or mobile application that displays content primarily generated by users and allows users to create, share and view user-generated content with other users”. And so we would have to “implement an age assurance or verification system to determine whether a current or prospective user on the social media platform” is 16 or older. (Or 14 or 15 with parental consent, but your humble mods lack the resources to parse divorce laws in all localities worldwide, sort out issues of disputed guardianship, etc., etc.) The meaning of what “practicable” age verification is supposed to be would depend upon regulations that the Attorney General has yet to write.
So, yeah, as an old-school listserv nerd who had the I am not on Facebook T-shirt 15 years ago, I don’t trust any of these people.
From what appears to be the guy’s Substack:
East Asian people are on average more intelligent than Black people. Which is factual based on the vast majority of tests we have developed and observed over the decades.
And:
I am an advocate for ending mass migration and initiating mass deportations for illegal migrants in western countries. Not because I am a white supremacist (I am not white) or because I believe there is necessarily anything innately special about being white. I believe these things for three reasons. First, nations have the right to preserve their ethnic identity, and second low skill immigration saturates the job markets of these countries making jobs which could once earn a living wage become unlivable, increasing the amount of value draining people in society by both importing them and undercutting low skill natives. lastly, generally, whiteness in these countries is a decent correlative to some of the things I value.
And:
It is true that many of the features which white supremacist value have little to do with the genetic predisposition to European ancestry and instead have to do with higher IQ; which is relatively more common among whites than most other groups.
So, a common-or-garden guy who is not left-wing or right-wing but a secret third thing that is also right-wing.
I feel a bit regretful sometimes that none of my copious fanfic output has inspired anyone to draw fanart. But at least no one has gotten weird about it, either.