I’m always a little surprised when I look into the population MMR distribution for games I play a lot. I’m often in like the top 5% or better in the kind of games I play a lot. But… I suck at them. I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing and when I look at streamers who are actually good at the game, it’s not like they’re just a more refined version of me, it’s like they’re playing a different game.
So I like to describe myself as being “the top of the trash heap.”
One time when I was a kid, my friend and I decided to take random stuff from the pantry and just mix it all together into one drink. That was genuinely heinous.
Oh. Apologies for the US-defaultism. That’s the context I see this in.
As for book stuff, do you have any recommendations of good recommenders? I’ve recently picked up reading novels again after kind of a while of just reading non-fiction. At the moment I’ve just been going to the library and grabbing something off the shelf a bit randomly.
Idk about other people, but I just built snacks into my schedule. Breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, dessert. I’ve been told that spreading out your food intake like that is better. It all still adds up to the same calories each day and I’ve been slowly but steadily losing weight, so it’s been working for me and I don’t feel hungry much.
Thinking in terms of “need” is wrong for a business. They aren’t there to make a good product and the money is just to cover all the costs. Their goal is profit maximization. If there’s profit they could be extracting, but aren’t, they won’t make the numbers bigger and the shareholders will be sad.
Ads are a gas. They expand to fill all available space. If there’s a place an ad COULD go, then it WILL go there eventually.
It’s different for different people. At the end of the day, all the status quo needs to continue is a lack of effective organized resistance, not full support.
That said, from some anecdotal experience: Some of them just don’t care. Politics comes up with my parents a lot. They’re Democrats, but if you talk to them long enough, you realize they’re just functionally Republicans who are embarrassed by the aesthetics of the GOP. The problems they’ve had with people like Trump or Bush have essentially nothing to do with their awful policies and more to do with them looking stupid. They pretty much unquestionably support US imperialism and are depressingly Zionist. Sometimes this seems like it’s down to a lack of historical knowledge, but honestly if you push them on it enough you eventually break out of the loop of America always being the good guy to just a basic “might makes right” and “it’s us vs them” mentality which you’d normally associate with conservatives.
For example, when I’ve spoken to my Dad about Iran, his position ultimately boiled down to “They’re the bad guys. Trump should be attacking them, he’s just doing it in a stupid way that isn’t working.” The fact that the US isn’t merely not waging an effective war, but actively committing war crimes like bombing schools? Unimportant. The fact that we only have the current Iranian government because of previous US meddling? “That was so long ago.” The fact that the last time they were told a country we were targeting had WMDs, it was a lie? Doesn’t even register. When he said someone should do something about them having nukes, I asked if someone should do something about the US since we have the most nukes and he said something like “I’d like to see them try.” The fact that we are currently allied with a literal monarchy in the region? /shrug. When the conversation drifted briefly to Vietnam, he said that either we shouldn’t have gotten involved or we should have done even more. We just didn’t try hard enough to win… There are still children being born in Vietnam with birth defects due to agent orange. But yeah, we totally didn’t inflict enough violence on them.
To the extent that either of them does take an interest in history, it is almost solely through the lens of documentaries glazing the “great men” of our history while ignoring or downplaying their atrocities.
I think my analysis of their kind of politics is that they have enough shame to maintain their ignorance in order to have cover for supporting the things they actually want. You push that ignorance hard enough and the “freedom and democracy” mask slips off to reveal what amounts to little more than support for white supremacy and fascism as long as it doesn’t affect them or make them look bad.
I’m sure there are others that are simply ignorant and could be convinced with enough evidence. I suppose I was one of them. How could I not be? I grew up with the propaganda version of American history where we were the good guys, except for the times when we weren’t, but those are in the past and we’re better now. It wasn’t until near the end of HS that I started getting a more nuanced view of history and once I understood that my politics weren’t actually aligned with my values, I changed. But even then, the effects of the propaganda are so strong that even today, knowing what I know, I just don’t get the visceral reaction to these past atrocities that they deserve. I know they’re wrong, I just am so removed from them that it’s hard to fully empathize beyond a conscious, intellectual level.
There may be more types, but those are my primary experiences. People who are either currently misinformed or people who actively delude themselves so they don’t look like or believe themselves to be similar to the vulgar hicks they view the Republicans as.
EDIT: I also always want to caution against equating the voters with the people at large. The vast majority of the country doesn’t vote. Only some of that is apathetic people. A lot of people are pushed out by deliberate voter suppression tactics. I’d wager that those voters are way more likely to be anti-imperialists, but they don’t get represented by the ballots and media.
The US didn’t just magically turn out this way because everyone wanted it. From the very founding of the country, the system of government that was set up was explicitly designed to limit the influence of popular opinion. You’ve definitely learned about this in school, but it was probably framed to you in terms of “Not letting a majority oppress a minority” without explaining that the “minorities” the founders wanted to protect were white, protestant, land owning men who then turned around and oppressed all the real minorities.
Yeah, the tech thing makes sense. I used to get really excited by new pieces of tech. My first smart phone, a new game console, etc. Now? I couldn’t even tell you off hand what model iPhone I have nor what the newest one is. When will I get a new one? Probably when my old one breaks.
I think on the gaming side of things, the turning point might be around the Switch. Basically the point where Nintendo stopped experimenting with weird new things for their consoles. They basically just joined MS and Sony in releasing a standard console that could play modern games with the exception of it still having the motion controls from the Wii. The other companies also abandoned trying to do gimmick stuff like motion controls.
Something similar has been hitting me recently. I’m 30. So I was born is the last millennium, but you know, not by a lot. Most of my life has been the 20XXs. But even though it’s been 26 years of that, it just all feels so recent. Like it’s hard for me to call anything that happened after 2000 “old” because… old was last century/millennium. “That can’t be old, it happened just a few years ago!” Checks when it happened: 2012, 14 years ago…
Thinking about how we perceive the time we live through is weird. When you think about it, the lives of everyone alive today has been radically different than the vast majority of human history. There were times when things might not meaningfully change in your whole lifetime, maybe even several generations of people living the same way. Post-industrial revolution everything has happened so fast. Tech and culture changes so often that we conceptualize each decade in the 20th/21st century as being it’s own thing. (Obviously that wasn’t entirely the case, there’s all sorts of bleed over, but I’m just talking about how we think about it.) We talk about almost any other time in our history in terms of centuries and some key historical turning points.
I have now written way too much for a comment on a shitpost. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Here’s the thing that bothers me with the whole harm reduction/purity test/don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good argument when it comes to US politics:
Saying that I should vote for the person who agrees with me on some stuff even if it’s not everything kind of assumes that for some list of policy stances, they’re all essentially equivalent. Not saying mean things about minorities is put on the same level as continuing to run a massive, racist prison and policing system or a massive military that is essentially only used for killing foreigners to exploit their resources. It’s insane to argue that I should be able to overlook these truly reprehensible and harmful actions because they’re a bit better on some smaller thing.
Even if you ignore the bad things that are still done by the less bad party, structurally, the systems we have in place all but guarantee that we will repeatedly have more of the worse party every election or so and that they will have access to tools that let them abuse their power. So at best, voting for the lesser evil just slightly delays the greater evil. If we just go vote every few years then go back to brunch and trust that the people we elected will be doing a good job, nothing will ever change. We never see these blue no matter who people go “I know it sucks, lets do this for now, but here is the plan for the next few years to make sure we can get a better option in the future.”
The way things work now, even if a politician says they agree with you, you just have to trust them. There is no real recourse for holding them accountable if they were lying. You just have to let them do whatever they were going to do, maybe write some strongly worded letters, and then in 2/4/6 years you end up having to vote for them again because of the way the system is fucked. And as long as they are taking corporate money, they aren’t representing you. You can’t trust anything they say.
If a Democrat came around who:
Didn’t take corporate money and seemed trustworthy.
Promised significant democratic reforms in both how elections work and the government works so that we can actually have real choices next time.
Promised to significantly reduce the military so we couldn’t keep doing imperialism everywhere.
Promised to significantly reduce the police and surveillance state so that they won’t have the capacity to keep spying on us and disrupting real opposition.
Then I would 100% vote for them and even canvas for them even if I disagreed with them on some other issues that I cared about. At least then we’d be moving forward. We’d have a chance to do better in the future. But they’re not going to do that because the people who have made it into power benefit from things as they are, so they’re not going to change that. As things are now, we’re just stuck in an endless loop, slowly drifting towards oblivion.
To be clear, just not voting and doing nothing else isn’t super helpful either, but the key is we need to get everyone on board with an organized plan to fix things. The people who show up every election just to tell you that actually trying to organize a new party is bad, voting for the progressive in the party primary is dividing the party, and you can’t complain too much about the bad things the lesser evil does because it’ll hurt our chances next time are NOT HELPING.
The question then is how do we do this? We have a bunch of people who know the system is fucked, but there’s no direction for them to express that. How do they even begin to fight? “Let’s organize a new party for this purpose!” Ok now we have yet another 3rd party to divide the vote even further. (Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/) “Lets all pick this existing party and use it for this purpose!” Ok, which one? The DNC? They’re part of the problem and actively work against progressive candidates in primaries. Sure, we sometimes get the win, but those victories often take all of our time and attention just to secure one relatively small seat of power that is useless without winning way more of them. Another existing 3rd party? Can we get people to agree which one to join? This is where the leftist infighting argument holds some water. There are a few existing parties of varying lefty persuasion, but people aren’t necessarily going to agree with all their policies, so getting people to compromise on one of them when we have no central organized structure is borderline hopeless. And that’s before you even consider the collective action problem of getting enough people to take the leap that they aren’t worried about the splitting the vote issue.
And regardless of what path we decide to take, how do we spread this message to get people on board? All of the major channels for mass communication are captured by corporate interests. Even social media, which had the hope of being a place where the people could talk to each other directly, has become almost useless for that function since the corporations that own them control the algorithms that allow messages to spread beyond their starting group.
And I already know someone is going to say something to the effect of “Don’t worry about the big picture. It’s too big for you to handle, so try to do things locally that are more possible.” To that I say: Holy shit we are running out of time. The government keeps getting more and more fascist, he environment is falling apart and will kill us at some point, and technological advances in surveillance and military technology are going to keep making it easier for the powerful to cling onto power without care for what people want. Getting on your town’s school board or something sounds nice and all, but it’s like being on the Titanic and telling people to grab some buckets. Like I said earlier, even winning a single seat in congress doesn’t mean much if it took our entire movement’s collective effort to get that seat while the capitalists used their money to win the rest of them.
I really don’t know what to do, but I’m so fucking sick of hearing people chastising people for not wanting to just keep doing what we’ve always been doing when that clearly hasn’t been working and not only not helping to change things, but actively working to disrupt the efforts of people who do want to try to change things.
EDIT: Just to add my own personal anecdote to this: In 2020 I both volunteered for Bernie’s campaign and worked on the campaign for a progressive congressional candidate in my district. The mood felt so optimistic. We were all working so hard to try to change things and for a while it seemed like it had a chance… and then we just straight up lost both elections to some absolute pieces of shit. Our incumbent representative was such a fucking terrible person he might as well have been a Republican.
Not that this has any bearing on the broader argument, I just want to share how my own experiences have shaped my feelings on this, but the broader pattern kind of reinforces that.
On the internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog their wife. (Joking. Or am I? :P)
Huh. I don’t think I’ve seen a band where the drummer was the singer before.
Well, except for small, unimportant things like sending people to another country to go kill people.
Surely a second hand wedding ring must be cursed or something right? Why was it available in the first place? Did they die? Get divorced? Lose their hands and or fingers in some fetish play gone horribly wrong?
Better to just avoid the whole situation and get a cat.
Idk. Individuals are all different and if it makes the happy juices flow then I guess it’s enjoyable for them. For me there are a handful of people that’s true for but for most other interactions I feel similar to you.
That said: Humans developed a brain that could invent languages to make it easier to communicate and coordinate with each other. It’s probably up there with tool usage for advantages we had. So I don’t think it should be that surprising that our brains usually reward us for it if everything is going right.
To add to the anime recs, there’s a whole sub genre of “Cute girls do the author’s special interest” that can be a fun way to incidentally learn some stuff you’d never have thought to interact with otherwise.
The one that comes to mind at the moment is “Ruri Rocks” which is about geology.
EDIT: I thought of some more:
Ascendance of a Bookworm: A woman is reincarnated into a medieval fantasy world. She loves books, but can’t get any because without the printing press books are super expensive. So she sets out to make her own. There’s a lot more going on in the story as well as them eventually getting into magic stuff, but at least the first part or spends a decent amount of time talking about different methods of writing, printing, etc.
A Place Further Than the Universe: A group of girls go on a trip to Antarctica with a research team. So you get to learn a bit about the place and everything that goes into preparing to get there and survive.
Keep You Hands off Eizouken: About making anime/animation.
Golden Kamuy: Historical fiction set in the northern parts of sometime after the Russo-Japanese War during the Meiji period. You end up learning a lot about the Indigenous people who lived there before Japan basically wiped them out.
I didn’t really enjoy it enough to keep watching, but there was a whole anime that was just about the author’s obsession with this one specific model of moped. It’s called “Super Cub.” You want to see an anime girl read the user manual for an old scooter and then fix it with a lot of detail? This is your show I guess.
I’d be shocked if there wasn’t an anime about trains. I know of one set on a train, but the particulars of how the train works isn’t the focus, it’s just the vehicle that gets them from one story to another. If anyone knows of any I’d love to hear it.
I’ll believe that they’re stupid instead of just malicious when they actually start to lose their wealth and power. Until such a time, any dumb statements or actions can’t compare to the overall long term success of their campaign to horde more wealth and power.
Other people have good real answers, so here’s my joke answer:
Clothes and fire. Humans evolved to live in the climate of Africa, then one day some genius had to invent stuff that let them move to everywhere else in the world, and now thousands of years later, I’m freezing my ass off and my skin is dry for like a third of the year.
Thanks. I never thought of that. /s
Depression. Lots of depression. And anxiety. And probably some other stuff.
Tried tons of different treatments and nothing has really worked. Going to try therapy again on recommendation of my psychiatrist, but I’ve only had negative experiences with therapy and I still really don’t see how it’s going to fix anything.
I’m a bit confused what the issue is. I just bookmark the page and from there any links stay on the old version. Is that not working for you for some reason?