Malnormalulo (any pronouns)

It has always bewildered me that mainstream progressivism has been so content to lean heavily on precedents which could so easily crumble, without pushing hard to explicitly codify them.

It seems valid to me to take the attitude that we should just lean in and embrace that. The written word isn't inherently superior to the spoken word. Today, both are equally recordable and portable. I don't necessarily *agree* with this position, but I don't see why it's absurd.

Okay so there's a lot of issues here but the basic premise of "media is shifting to video" is not wrong. Prevalence of reading/writing skill will change as a result (if it's not already) and this will indeed correlate with class (as it already does).

It's frightening that this is necessary, but it's also a great example of the kind of obstructionism that I would love to see from the federal legislature. Galling to see the DNC praise this while Congress Dems won't even deny unanimous consent.

Is the question of why the author made the curtains blue interesting? Sure, potentially. Is an obviously post hoc interpretation interesting? Sure, potentially. Is a purely aesthetic appraisal of the visual imagery interesting? Sure, potentially. It's all legitimate, whether or not it's BS.

An English professor once told me that the purpose of literary analysis is to make literature more interesting. Lit classes suddenly got way easier with that nugget of wisdom.

It feels like we should be making a bigger deal of “we actually did in fact find a cure for AIDS”

> The Economy is BOOMING under "TRUMP"

Am I to understand that "Trump" is a nickname? The assumed identity of an imposter? A contested self-appellation a la "so-called Islamic State"? What in the world could he possibly mean by putting his own name in quotes?

I've asked before and I'll keep asking: what the hell does he think quotation marks mean?

Some of the Marvel TV series acknowledged the events of the first Avengers movie as having serious human consequences. Even then, it felt...thin. Focused on the stories of a couple of ordinary people, not the scale of the tragedy.

7. What exactly does it mean for something to be "difficult"? How do you actually define that?

4. "Generic" systems are a bad idea. They always wind up trying to generalize things that really only work for a specific genre or tone.

Glad I found this sub thread, I was confused too — AMAB, took both home ec and... not wood shop actually but I do vaguely remember learning how to wire an electrical outlet

(1970) Huey P. Newton, “The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements” On August 15, 1970, Huey P. Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, gave a speech in New York City where he outlined the Party’s position on two emerging movements at the time, the women’s ...

Too much Marx, not enough later Marxists. I think about this speech from Huey Newton a lot — a model of necessary humility and openness to the unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
www.blackpast.org/african-amer...

A 16 HP Dragon | LaTorra.org Github version of my personal blog

3. "A 16 HP Dragon" is an excellent case study in the system utterly failing to help you create an interesting encounter. What we see there speaks to the quality of GMing, not the quality of the system.

For the uninitiated: www.latorra.org/2012/05/15/a...

2. D&D peaked with 3.5e because it at least had an interesting metagame.

1. Numbers are boring. All else being equal, systems are more engaging when they have fewer numbers in them.

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

one like = one unhinged TTRPG opinion (that i actually and sincerely believe in)

World-class athletic competition is more or less entirely a contest of who has the most inborn physical advantages. Trying to control for it is more than a little silly.

But even those two are doing *nothing*. Bare minimum, they could deny unanimous consent. They can make passing these bills tedious and frustrating.

A party of Charlie Browns trusting that THIS time Lucy will hold the football

Cory Booker went onto the Senate floor yelling and pretending to be furious about bills he then allowed to pass on unanimous consents, without objection.

There is an outside chance that voicing outrage with your vote will either shake up the two party system or shock the Democrats into changing strategy. There is no chance at all that VBNMW will have meaningfully different effects than just voting for the fascists.

We're at a point where abstaining in protest or voting for a hopeless third party is more likely to effect change, because voting in the Democrats accomplishes literally *nothing*.

Taylor: I had a six-figure income Substack until late 2023. I moved it first to Beehiiv then, because I didn't care for it, then to Ghost in late 2024. Each time the new site handled migration with no subscriber falloff and no income interruption. You are operating on bad information. Just move.

I legit do not know what to post on social media without in some way griping about other people

They can be used in compost as long as you balance them well against other ingredients. I think they can also be used to repel certain pests from gardens.

Sometimes assuming good faith produces interpretations that are barely less angering and way more frustrating.

I think this does amount to forgetting something, or more precisely repressing it, i.e., choosing not to remember it. The actual experience of suffering, its subjective reality, is buried beneath the justification. If a child is not a person, but I am a person, then that child was not me.