Go the Exo-Squad route. Colonize Mars and genetically engineer a race of superhumans to survive the harsh conditions. Then become terrified of your Mars-Engineered Children, reclassify them as a hostile alien species, and spend the next five years doing interstellar pogroms in cool mechs.
BashfulBob [none/use name]
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Cake day: August 9th, 2024
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William Shattner went to space and it just made him sad.
17·2 days agoWhat a waste. You could be using it to build a guillotine instead.
Why hide your hand when you’re sitting on a royal flush?
When you’re in the most propagandized country on Earth, leftists are few and far between
He matters in that he reveals the ideological hollowness and fecklessness of the Green Party.
They do that with their absolute inability to organize anything locally. They can’t function as a party. They only exist as a brand.
But that’s exactly why a guy like this doesn’t matter.
They have to at least be good in theory!
Greens cultivate an image of “naturalist” types. And that attracts people who believe everything from plastics to nuclear energy to vaccines to hormone replacement is sinful.
That’s a problem of the ideology. And it’s a tough nut to crack, because there’s a natural contradiction between ecological purity and industrial technology that I’ve yet to see a good simple way to navigate.
It’s not the only natural schism I see form in left-liberal circles.
The DSA chapter I flirt with from time to time inevitably has a nasty struggle session over AES states and whether or not they’re just another flavor of bourgeois imperialism. You get under the hood of these heated arguments, and a lot just ends with “Who do you believe?”
I don’t think you can get a “Good in Theory” candidate unless you can find a set of facts everyone can agree on. And as America is the most propagandized country on Earth, that’s a big ask.
He sucks, sure. But anyone you pick will inevitably disgust some number of Leftists for some take on a divisive issue.
It’s like climate change or lead poisoning. Billionaires making shit up to refute conclusions from their own engineers with their surplus cash.
Six very rich guys pay a thousand men in lab coats to fashion a new mythology of Dutch Ethnic Supremacy. And then the rest of us have to argue for scraps of human dignity in front of a priesthood that just slap the Book Proving You’re Not Human and saying “No, you get nothing.”
One of the reasons these “nuanced” discussions are so toxic is that they frame any kind of deviation from the WASP social norm as a cheat-code. This goes straight back to the fucking Negro Leagues, with “nuanced” sports writers insisting that race mixing would be unfair to white athletes.
It might as well be eugenics, another zombie field that liberals cannot ever get enough of.
Broadly speaking, I don’t think this guy matters. He’s the VP side of an also-ran ticket. He’s not particularly rich or influential (compared to an also ran VP like RFK Jr’s Silicon Valley divorcee Nicole Shanahan). In a better world, Stein would have… idk… used Juche Necromancy to bring back David Graeber or something and put him on the ticket. But right now, her primary appeal to voters is as a protest vote and not for anything she’s saying or doing beyond the generic “I think war is bad” truisms.
PSL remains the only national project worth investing in
If you’ve got a local chapter, that’s great. If you don’t, you work with what you have. But PSL isn’t on the ballot in a number of bigger states. I’m not going to blame someone for voting Green simply to register their discontent with the Big Two.
1·5 days agoyou simply mean “human inputs lead to various outputs”
More specifically, its to refer to an experimental device to gauge psychological responses through IO. Well made games attempt to collect and convey more complex information through the mechanic of IO.
By this definition a fucking mathematical function is a skinner box.
The original Skinner Box existed to devise mathematical functions through experimentation. The goal was to quantify behavior in a controlled setting.
Video games repurpose the tool for entertainment. But they are ultimately intended to be revelatory. Games exist to measure and eventually train behavior. A “good” game provides useful insights and beneficial behavior patterns. A “bad” one exists to extract vulnerabilities and exploit them to nefarious ends.
2·5 days agoI mean at that point what’re they gonna do, the Singaporean navy has 6 subs and 32 surface ships.
They’ve got the civilian infrastructure that allows one of the largest and most influential ports in the world to function. Might as well ask what the Longshoreman’s Union could do without an army. The US can ruin the port with naval power (in the same way the Houthis curtailed traffic through the Suze), but they can’t operate the port by the same means.
Nobody really benefits from a Singapore that ceases to function. Its a lose-lose, and Beijing bureaucrats know that.
the idea now is to blockade the Singapore straight, 3000 kilometers to the south, and cut off Chinese shipping from the world markets…
It almost seems more practically to close the Suez and Panama canals to Chinese trade. I can’t imagine the folks that run Singapore would be thrilled at a nose dive in shipping traffic. Would they even play ball?
that is to say, the nation that doesn’t produce anything but excel spreadsheets thinks it can win a war
The US manufacturing capacity that continues to exist is entirely bound up in military construction and engineering. It’s the one thing we still actually do and do reasonably well.
Does the US stand to benefit from a protracted naval conflict with another superpower? Of course not. But I have no doubt they could do at least as much damage as Russia has endured in its conflict with Ukraine.
Goosebumps choose your own adventure novels.
Primitive, but closer to the mark.
So what? Why does “I have some agency in this story” make a story bad?
I don’t think it does. The box is just a mechanism. In the same way that a book or a painting can be good or bad, a gameplay loop can, too.
What actually are you getting at here?
You can have a Beautiful Skinner Box in the same way you can have a Van Gogh or a Tolstoy novel.
We would never actually endorse a genocide. But, you know, we expect you to be Zionists.
No. There’s no human input that determines the response.
Games are experiences, they’re stories that can be more immersive than a movie or a book and if they’re done well, holy shit are they good!
They’re still feedback loops of input and reward. That the reward is “compelling narrative” rather than “loud ding with big number go up” changes the quality of the treat dispensed but not the nature of the box.
Games are (can be) amazing
Skinner Boxes are tools to gauge the behaviors of their subjects.
The form can still be artistic and the reward for interaction can be sublime and the thing itself can still be what it is.
predatory business practices preying on vulnerable people
Krogers employs predatory business practices on people. What are you going to tell them? “Don’t eat!”
People play these games to escape the horrid reality of daily life.
Skinner box game mechanics suck and are just hollow “entertainment”
All Vidya Gamez are fundamentally Skinner Boxes. At the same time, when you’re trapped in a cube all day, it’s nice to get a food pellet. Stop shaming people for food pelleting themselves.
Hated every minute of it but just couldn’t stop myself until someone hacked my Activision account and stole it breaking me out of the cycle.
My original experience with online games was in a big social circle that whittled away over time. It’s less the game pass model itself (which always just descends into “How much pop culture can we shove into your generic Blood Gulch shooter/looter?”) than the fact that I’m playing with an endless parade of anonymous that nobodies I ultimately find so upsetting.
I play chess with a co-worker every lunch break we’re free, and it’s far more fun and fulfilling than the time I spent grinding amid a sea of faceless nobodies.
At the same time, it feels cruel to tell people who don’t have an active social circle to just not be online at all.
The only thing worse than the Skinner Box is solitary confinement.
They’re trying to hit a call-quota. The people on the other end of the line don’t actually care if you vote or who you vote for. They just want to make their 1000th call and go home. You’ll notice you still keep getting called so its not like anyone is registering what you’re saying.
When I dabbled in electoralism I used to see this on the other end. There would just be a line of phone numbers getting dialed. 90% of them wouldn’t pick up. Anyone who answered the phone promoted you with a “R / D / Undecided / Other” option menu. If someone on the other end of the line is saying “I won’t vote for genocide!” what do I select? Undecided/Other. But that doesn’t take you off the phone list, it just spits you into the “Try again later” queue.
The best way to get these calls to stop is to identify who is making them and say you’re staunchly supporting the other one. That still doesn’t work too well, because you’re getting called independently from Presidential, Senatorial, and House phone bankers who don’t bother to coordinate because that would mean functioning as a party rather than a random assortment of self-centered egomaniacs. But it does at least get the network you said “I’m voting for the other guy” on to flag you as “Opposition, do not call again”.