• 10 Posts
  • 170 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2023

help-circle
rss
  • I don’t think that argument makes a lot of sense. If sexual deviance was seen as a primary definition for strength then gay people would be seen as a strong group to be emulated. It seems far more likely that it’s simple in groups vs out groups and the traditional rules for thee but not for me playing out. And certain kinds of sexual deviance is an easy way to define an out group.

    Along perhaps with projection based on priests continually being proven to be the exact sort of homosexual groomer pedophiles they claim to be most afraid of. Something like “if our ‘influencers’ are this bad, the other sides influencers must be worse”.






  • Ehh. That’s like accident billboards. I maintain that most people don’t know they can block ads, and a large part of the masses who have heard of it think it’s complicated or too hard for them.

    With ad blocking I have a small tension that if I know a sort of thing exists, I presumably will find it when I search for it. So I don’t want another vacuum ad.

    If I don’t know something exists then I have to stumble on it somehow.

    The bigger problem would be if they didn’t block their own ads. I honestly didn’t even know they did ads so my blocking, of which they’re a part, apparently is working.
















  • I hear this a lot, but what would beating the Taliban involve? While the US was there, the Taliban was at best in hiding, it was not holding territory. If you mean removing the very idea of the Taliban from the world? That is both hard to do and arguably also a genocide, at least a cultural one. The US has been good at that, but it’s also frowned on in the current world - see Gaza headlines.

    This is also why I’d suggest it’s kind of impossible to both not be the worst of the colonialist systems and stop terrorism (and it’s kind of unclear that even the colonial cultural suppression / conversion / excesses / crimes actually would stop terrorism).



  • Gaming - too much hassle for me, and I just wasn’t even using my PS4 much. I don’t know if I’d call it outgrowing it exactly though… this one is borderline to me.

    What I have outgrown is cable news like CNN etc. Or they went way to clickbait for me. Maybe both happened. Similar with the NYT, they keep getting things wrong that they just shouldn’t and then the more history I read the less I really trust their reporting. The more boring the news source, like AP, the more likely it is to be accurate from what I can tell.

    Similar things happened with certain influencers / podcasters. As I learned more I just found they were continually making the same mistakes on things that they should have known better / learned better by now. Sam Harris was a big one, and I narrowly avoided the beginnings of Brett Weinsteins Dark Horse and now it’s completely off the rails.

    Certain “nonfiction” authors followed the same path - as I got older I realized how made up the Ancient Aliens thing was, I think I bought in hard in my late teen years and then when I was 25 I had an epiphany that it just has to be crap or more people would believe it, and when I re looked at the “evidence” I was like - oh, well if you just go by the book, sure it sounds compelling - but if you search alternative explanations all of a sudden you’re like, oh yea, that is far more plausible.

    Consumer Reports happened about a decade ago. The reason was I always was a little annoyed by their biases that they didn’t really make clear. What really killed it for me though was comparing laptops primarily on screen size. Looking back now, it’s a little less ridiculous than I initially thought, but to not have separate Mac and Windows categories let to the Mac winning over the windows competitor when the Mac was like 3x the price. This all seemed like a crazy result to anyone who knew anything about computers, especially like in 2014 when for something like 95% of the population, the Mac would not run 99% of the software they could possibly want to run, or know about. A great build quality, performance and size doesn’t matter if the computer doesn’t do the computation you need.

    In the last 3 years non anime TV shows - mostly because of a mix of already been done better, no FOMO with streaming, and because of all the channels etc no water cooler talk about the 3 shows that were on last night / this week / whatever dragging me to be up to date. Now that there’s so many choices, I don’t have to take “mildly entertaining” as my bar for watching a show, it’s way way higher now. And as the individual shows get longer on streaming for many - it’s harder to set aside 55-90 minutes depending on show. Even 42 minutes is harder as more is going on now for me. I think the only reason I do more Anime is it’s ~20 minute chunks, and I have less experience with it (for half my life I didn’t know it existed, and for the next quarter it was kind of hard to come by) so I am just starting to get more picky about the shows and the “this was done better before”. Konosuba for instance is IMHO a worse version of Slayers series in a lot of ways.

    Magazines - I just got tired of both trying to keep up, the rising costs, and then the increase in ads so there was so little there there, along with what to do when I was done with the weeks / months issue? I get a lot of that kind of content now from online anyway.

    Physical books - similar. Unless I want to get a collectors edition for the object, the content is much better as an e-book IMO, cheaper, less paper waste, less piles of stuff taking up space etc. I’ve really come back around on the novel contents though - lots of bang for you buck in time vs dollar spent, way more variety in stories than ever get made into TV shows, can be stored locally easily on the device so you’re not burning data like with streaming… Easy to keep place with a decent app, easy to read for 3 minutes or 3 hours.