Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary

A roleplayer frustrated at the structure of our society. She/her.

Blog: pteryx.dreamwidth.org

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nprofile1qqsrz56tmrajcpchaaxelcps08lsaj68ugl4xm0vx6smndc2um5dj5qpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds04d3ds

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Last Notes

2026-03-23 09:24:54 GMT

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I would guess that he's referring to what I'd call the "being" end of what, in turn, I call the "doing vs. being" scale.
It's a scale I noticed in large part due to some time trying a particular freeform fandom RP community which turned out to live so heavily at the "being" end of the scale that their usage of characters who actually *did things* in the stories they're taken from is incongruous.

2026-03-02 11:08:59 GMT

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...This leaves me curious as to whether someone did this to you. >_>;

2026-01-21 02:53:49 GMT

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It's been pointed out that this happens a *lot* with robot characters. Data's a particularly good execution of a pretty common pattern. It's one of *many* points touched on in OSP's Trope Talk about robots, for example.

2026-01-14 18:30:09 GMT

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I will note that the reason DriveThruRPG does *not* have DRM, instead relying on watermarking, is because of the outcry around it having first opened *with* DRM back in 2004. I was part of that outcry, and pointed out that it is not normal to force the entire table to buy their own copies of a TTRPG book instead of getting one or two copies and then passing them around the table. And it worked!
I fear that same outcry would not have happened had it opened ten years later.

2026-01-10 00:42:34 GMT

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Black activism *especially* seems to have this problem IME. One gets the sense that Black people don't *reeeaaally* want white allies, because they assume that every single white person is an enthusiastic racist ready and eager to backstab them deep down.
1/2

2026-01-09 01:50:19 GMT

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...I suppose another piece of context needs explaining: the kinds of people taking the Satanic Panic seriously in the US back then are the same kinds of people who think what's happening here *now* is God's will being done.

2026-01-09 01:36:23 GMT

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Yeah, and many parts of the US had it a lot worse. D&D book burnings and such.
Even after the Satanic Panic passed, this *still* affected D&D's reputation, and therefore the kinds of people who played it, for years. It's quite possible that a part of what affected the game's trajectory in the 90s, outside of market share being stolen by more efficient combat games, was it having a disproportionate number of "bad boys" in its player base.

2026-01-09 01:33:28 GMT

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That part, sure, but then he insisted that assembling decks for a card game out of known singles still meant doing something "sleazy" (paying money for *known* equipment) for the sake of engaging with a game that was itself "gambly" because card draws are random. Hence my turning up the heat.

2026-01-09 01:18:36 GMT

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See, now we're just cycling back around to "all card playing is gambling and therefore evil". Equating *deckbuilding* to gambling is especially disingenuous. What next, calling every video game in existence "gambling" because you have to buy a computer of some description to play them? Demonizing the use of dice in TTRPGs so Amber is the only one that passes your holiness test?
Please take your crusade to people who are actually hurting themselves.

2026-01-08 20:59:35 GMT

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Back when I played Magic, I never went for the whole "buy an entire box of boosters and hope" approach you seem to be referring to here. If I needed specific cards, I bought singles, which weren't particularly hard to come by if you weren't very, very specifically trying to build the "correct" competitive decks. So I still think equating enjoyment of CCGs to gambling addiction is just demonization, because *especially* casually, it's not a requirement.

2026-01-08 18:40:53 GMT

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Well, sometimes Pathfinder Society is available too, but that falls into the "that's fine to also call Kleenex" range.
(Really, PFS seems to be worse in that they seem to have more influence over the default rules of the game for everyone else, so, for example, Pathfinder 2nd Edition has absolutely terrible crafting rules simply because PFS hate hate HATES crafting.)

2026-01-08 08:26:59 GMT

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Which does make me wonder if TTRPGs were even the kind of thing they wanted to play in the first place, or if their participation in something so *cooperative* was more of an imposition from their perspective. Kind of like how even today, there are wallflower "players" who only "play" because that's what the rest of the group is doing.
(I mean, I don't mind audience members, but they shouldn't pretend to be players...)

2026-01-08 08:00:27 GMT

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What gets me is how the reaction to CCGs, and then to online gaming, has not been "we need to do what only TTRPGs can do better than ever!", but "we need to appeal to competitive combat-obsessed types despite the other media stealing our market share by doing that being better-suited for it!"
I'd thus be inclined to blame various suits who control pursestrings for the decline of TTRPGs more so than the actual CCGs and online games.

2026-01-08 06:53:02 GMT

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Not sure how gambling addiction (or demonization of all card-playing as equivalent to risking money) really relates to optimization, but I can certainly see how deckbuilding does. Though video games are arguably a better medium for just scratching the powergaming itch; they can get away with more intricate systems to exploit than any analog game could ever hope to match.
Even though I play and like the 3.x games, I still want *roleplaying* in my TTRPGs.

2026-01-08 03:07:19 GMT

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Ahh, I see what you're getting at. Notably, one of the big changes in D&D and its culture that roughly coincided with the shift from TSR to WotC (though possibly coincidentally, as the Player's Option stuff and even some early 3.0 planning predates that) was a shift from optimization being treated as entirely immature, selfish, and shameful to being encouraged. And I definitely see how that can be a turnoff.
1/2

2026-01-08 02:32:18 GMT

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It seems a bit disingenuous to conflate simply knowing the rules at all with "system mastery". It furthermore seems to be a conceit unique to TTRPGs that they can be, or even in some people's opinion *should* be, played without knowing or thinking about the rules. I'm not necessarily calling that a bad thing, but it *is* something that sticks out as different from any other kind of game.

2026-01-08 01:03:32 GMT

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Or, to give a second such example of my idea of system mastery... looking at the Magewright NPC class from D&D 3.5's Eberron Campaign Setting on one hand, a list of 1st-level spells from Pathfinder 1e on the other, and coming to the conclusion that the spells Ant Haul, Fastidiousness, and Invisibility Alarm should be added to the Magewright spell list, because those are utility spells with working-class applications, which is what Magewright is all about.

2026-01-08 00:54:04 GMT

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And again, this isn't even because they've achieved what I'd consider system mastery.
What I'd call system mastery involves, to give a 3.5 example... being able to casually refer to an "oil of mending", an item that has never seen print, because you know that oils are the topical variant of potions in the rules, Mending is a cantrip in the rules that perfectly fixes an object with a single clean fracture, and those who can't cast spells would want to do that.

2026-01-07 22:57:46 GMT

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What bugs me the most is that *because* of a combination D&D tunnel vision and people's refusal to learn new systems (which is less about "system mastery" as *I* understand the term and more about sheer laziness combined with a failure to understand the concept of "right tool for the right job"), people *try to design games* that are supposed to be very different from D&D, yet use 5e mechanics because they don't understand the distinction between them and RP.

2026-01-07 20:55:40 GMT

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It's worth noting that these sorts tend to also specifically insist that the "ranger problem" is a combat effectiveness problem, and lack both the historical perspective on D&D specifically and the critical mindset generally to question this simplistic view.
So even if I played 5e or "5e", most of D&Dtube *still* wouldn't even be that valuable to me.

2026-01-07 16:56:05 GMT

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The scary thing to me is that as near as I can tell, 30% of people, or at least Americans, *literally don't want to think*, and therefore would find a ban on thought a *relief*.
How much of that is actually natural? How much of it is a reaction to a world that hurts to think about? How much is people being trained that thinking is a side-effect of original sin or the like?

2026-01-07 15:56:36 GMT

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One thing that really stuck out to me when I was in school: a lot of people seem to not get the *point* of sentence structure, spelling, or punctuation. They think that such things exist purely as hoops to jump through to stave off the wrath of a teacher, rather than as legibility aids. When they don't perfectly map to the spoken word, they're seen as even more arbitrary.
Writing good dialogue involves learning how to make legible text that still sounds like real speech.

2026-01-07 08:09:55 GMT

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The argument that GMs are very designer-like but "consumer"-facing "content" sells games to *players*, though I may hate the terminology used, does still have a point that reminds me of a common GM lament: "I have so many *other* games I want to run, but my players refuse to play anything but D&D!"

2026-01-06 21:30:51 GMT

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I dunno, honoring suckers tricked or manipulated into doing evil things seems inappropriate.

2026-01-06 19:26:12 GMT

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Some of the issue is that if we don't *win*, the trauma doesn't stop (though it might slow down, weaken, or change form). At least, "the trauma stops" is how *I'd* define a win big enough to count.
And yes, it doesn't help that there isn't much I can think of in terms of in-between steps that I'm not already doing (seriously, I've never been employed because our socioeconomic system is *that bad*; how am I supposed to participate in a general strike?).

2026-01-01 20:01:04 GMT

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Seems like the sort of landscape I'd expect on a hanging scroll in Japan.

2025-12-24 17:08:53 GMT

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Pinterest always bugged me even before that, for pretty much hijacking all image results and making it harder to find out where any given image originally *came* from.
I have heard others complain about it becoming overwhelmed by diffusion model slop though, yeah.

2025-12-23 20:50:00 GMT

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Friend Computer, not that I mean to question you, but I don't understand why a 2.4% drop in happiness would require a 100% replacement of oxygen. To my mere human mind, it would seem like a mere 2.4% replacement would suffice.

2025-12-21 00:11:33 GMT

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My roommate has pointed out in the past that back in the 80s, no one could have predicted that Weird Al would remain musically and culturally relevant for longer than Michael Jackson.

2025-12-19 21:04:13 GMT

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Be careful. Forgiving someone who has no regrets does carry danger. She may see it as permission to keep abusing you. You yourself may process it as a duty to *allow* said further abuse, because "it's not her fault".

2025-12-17 20:51:31 GMT

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Sounds like someone I should look into.

2025-12-16 18:49:38 GMT

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Frankly, I'd say I've changed less than many people... and one thing that struck me about 2020 as the sense that everyone around me had finally *caught up* to where I was in 1990.
June of 1990, I should note, was the moment I was hit with the traumatic shock of just *how* badly the school system was stacked against me in particular... a realization that transferred all too well to looking at the rest of society as a whole.

2025-12-16 18:24:59 GMT

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"It's not inevitable that things get better, but the opportunity exists" is a phrasing I am very grateful to see. It frankly drives me *nuts* that so many people are treating the omnicrisis as just another "this too shall pass" moment when there are people with the means, motive, and opportunity to make it last for *another* span of a thousand years... and the detachment to not grasp that they'll also doom themselves in the process.
I'm still not sure how I can help, but.

2025-12-15 18:09:18 GMT

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There is a reason I tend to describe social trial and error as "trial and trauma". Social situations are minefields that no one admits are minefields. You're just urged to run out into the barbed-wire-fenced acre, because it's "welcoming!" And then it's "your fault" when your leg gets blown off.

2025-12-15 18:04:28 GMT

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Heh, seems your mind went in a different direction than mine concerning what expectation is not being met.
My complaint is more that "welcoming" is inexplicably used as a substitute for *describing the social dynamics*.
I suspect that most social groups lack the self-awareness necessary to actually describe themselves usefully.

2025-12-15 17:32:59 GMT

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Oh, RL is the *last* place I'd expect to find a starting point... though it *has* gotten distinctly harder to find good starting points online in recent years.
And it doesn't help that people always say the same useless thing about their communities if you try to ask about them: "Oh, it's very welcoming."
A welcome only describes how things *start*. How does it continue from there? Do you *listen* to yourselves?!

2025-12-15 17:10:28 GMT

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One difficult part about finding other people who who understand, IME, is that one *actually has to be good at people*. I'm not good at that. Worse, my roommate is *so* bad at it that for decades they mistook *me* for good at it, *and* seems to have developed a full-blown *phobia* of my leaving people behind when I inevitably end up with irreconcilable differences with them after a couple of years.

2025-12-08 15:50:18 GMT

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If you'll allow me a tinfoil hat for a moment, I do have to wonder whether the tendency to ruin shows and franchises over time is always actually accidental like it seems, or if sometimes it's a deliberate attempt to wreck community in order to further the cause of isolating people.
Probably not, given that's attributing to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence, but it says something about the state of our society that this is even *imaginable*.

2025-12-08 15:35:50 GMT

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Community has a lot to do with it.
An important thing to understand about the phenomenon of "fandom" as we know it today is that for some people, it's the only connection they have to other people. To abandon a particular show, they fear, would be to lose their friend group. Heck, in a lot of cases, to *disagree with popular takes* is to invite angry dogpiling and excommunication.

2025-12-07 15:30:25 GMT

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...At least when we recently did something like that in a game, the person interjecting was 1) *walking* in, 2) the current thrust of the conversation was of a sort she in particular has heard many permutations of throughout her life, 3) that topic was one that has bothered her for a long time, 4) she's a seer *and* highly intelligent, making her unusually suited to filling in the blanks, *and* 5) she wasn't clued into anything said *before* it turned to that topic.

2025-12-06 17:47:30 GMT

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See also the *intense* grudge-holding and negative reputation creation machine that's just one part of the toxic culture of one online RP community I've been in...

2025-11-19 14:59:40 GMT

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And some people are quite the opposite, like my father was. Part of what taught me to pay attention to my own emotions was seeing an example of someone who *didn't* and the harm that caused to people around him.

2025-11-19 14:47:13 GMT

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Keep in mind that *A LOT* of people have been shamed, shunned, or otherwise punished for daring to display their emotions, for a multitude of different possible reasons. Also keep in mind that there is a strong tradition of treating emotions as diametrically opposed to any kind of rational thought, and that therefore saying anything negative about emotions will automatically make you look like you're accusing someone of being irrational unless otherwise noted *right then*.

2025-11-19 14:30:38 GMT

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I do feel like blocks are an overly blunt instrument for many cases. Sometimes "delete this person from my reality and myself from theirs, even to the point of preventing me from even seeing conversations other people have with this person" is exactly the right tool for the job. But you'd think there'd also be a "prevent this person from replying to me, successfully @-ing me, following me, or being notified of anything I ever say, but don't unperson them" button.

2025-11-19 14:07:42 GMT

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In at least some cases, someone who wanted to at least keep hearing the other person's side.

2025-11-07 19:02:11 GMT

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I'd say there's a third noteworthy category too: those who realize they're going to die eventually, panic at the idea of not just their own cessation of existence but the idea that the world won't need *them specifically* in the long term, and go out of their way to simultaneously pursue means of immortality *and* try to blackmail society into helping them stay alive on pains of being left a worse place.

2025-11-05 18:46:20 GMT

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In particular, consider how someone who has had "debate" weaponized against them as a tool of control repeatedly as a child might feel about it.
(It's me, I'm that person.)

2025-10-28 05:26:06 GMT

...And you can be certain that among cats in the #RealmsOfPugmire , the belief that Man was able to control weather and the cycle of day and night continues unabated.
#Pugmire #MonarciesOfMau
https://cdn.masto.host/dicecamp/media_attachments/files/115/450/066/269/995/715/original/c6b16240253aa25c.png

2025-10-14 22:14:42 GMT

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Notably, it seems to be taken for granted that the consequences will be revenge and a complete reversal of fortune. The idea that making the best of a bad situation and/or reaching a compromise is an option is alien to a lot of people.

2025-10-14 18:02:49 GMT

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This is one of my most personal beefs with society too. Heck, in my experience it's not *just* that it's not acceptable for adults (though it definitely is that), it's not considered acceptable for *children* either. I was regularly called "disruptive" for crying when i was upset, and insisted that I hurry up and get over it (implying time waste as one of the perceived problems too). Schools built little rooms specifically for me to cry in *twice*, to get me out of the way.

2025-10-13 17:30:35 GMT

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Of course, sometimes the issue isn't unfounded preconceptions, but false advertising... which sometimes stems from the writers not knowing what they wrote, sometimes from them actively trying to deceive the executives about what they *really* wrote, and sometimes is an attempt to prevent spoilers.

2025-10-13 17:26:25 GMT

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The one piece of media that jumps straight to mind for me as far as being a victim of focus groups is Final Fantasy 12.
The story clearly *ought* to be about Ashe.
The writers *wanted* the story to center around Bacsh.
...But focus groups insisted on a young boy protag, so we got Vaan, who had no real reason to be in that specific story... and who brought Penelo with him, whose only reason to be in the party was that Vaan was.
(I have other issues with FF12, but.)

2025-10-12 16:28:35 GMT

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One factor worth considering in all this, too: the immense lopsidedness in different sides' attitudes about violence. I worry that the left will die in droves before it gets over the idea that self-defense is an auto-loss of the entire war and a betrayal of everyone you hold dear... and frankly, it never *needed* that attitude to be reluctant to shoot people, because guess what? The left *already values human life*, where right-wingers value only obedience.

2025-10-08 20:30:03 GMT

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The reason I'm scared of "losing" isn't because the abstract concept of shame surrounds the abstract concept of defeat.
The reason I'm scared of "losing" is because all my friends will be dead and I'll be someone's rape toy, every book I have would be burned, and nobody else would be any better off.

2025-10-07 18:37:42 GMT

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On the surface, this seems like it's mostly talking about preventing violence rather than, say, making it so nobody will follow an order that causes more abstract harm.
(The iconic "how do we prevent *that?*" moment for me is that, when Louis DeJoy ordered some mailboxes in minority communities taken away to prevent mail-in voting, *people followed the order*.)

2025-10-07 17:00:40 GMT

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I've also gotten the distinct impression that even the perpetual culture-wide shaming has been largely misinterpreted by a lot of Germans. Instead of "oppressing and killing broad swaths of people is bad", many seem to have taken the message as "the Jews are a special people who must never be harmed or opposed no matter what they do".

2025-10-07 16:37:34 GMT

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As I'd said at the time, if it were just a matter of overthrowing 2000 or so corrupt politicians, corporate executives, and others in positions of power, that would be one thing... but the problem is so much bigger. It seems to me like about 30% of humans are lackeys by nature, without which the tiny percentage of would-be dictators wouldn't present a meaningful threat.
And you can't just *get rid of* 100 million people in a country of 330 million.

2025-10-07 16:28:16 GMT

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...and yet people recently seemed to think I was a baby trying to interfere with the adults trying to do "the real work" of overthrowing fascism by being worried about this kind of problem.
To be entirely fair, I didn't phrase it this well, partly because I'm so scared that any solution close to effective would get extreme.

2025-10-07 15:20:18 GMT

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And then there's the strain of people who got away with their crimes because they were capitalists and it was the beginning of the Cold War, as I understand it... though if "but we *can't* punish titans of industry!" repeats again, I'd expect it to be more because of the wealthy controlling the narrative too pervasively rather than because of fear of """letting communism win""" in a world order with the Soviet Union as an apparent threat.

2025-10-06 18:55:40 GMT

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From what I can see it's even worse than that. It's not even enough to be a victorious hero; you have to specifically be either a killer or bossing killers around. Protecting people and sustaining people (even the killers!) don't count.

2025-10-03 14:11:01 GMT

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What disturbs me the most is that in our society, callousness, emotionlessness, and lack of empathy seem to be seen *AS MATURITY*, or at least as a necessary aspect of maturity. Caring is seen as childish, and is associated with the gender that's infantilized. Clearly you're supposed to perform some kind of dark necromantic ritual to kill all your emotions in order to transform you from a mere undesirable human into a proper exploitable workforce unit.

2025-10-01 20:33:36 GMT

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It also doesn't help that different groups mean different things when they say "middle class". For example, I'm pretty sure that when *politicians* talk about the "middle class", more often than not they only actually mean the upper middle class. This is why I also call that subset the "political middle class".
Distressingly, sometimes the "political middle class" extends upward out of the actual upper middle class and into the lowest end of the financially secure.

2025-10-01 19:57:16 GMT

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I'm pretty sure "lower middle class" is the usual term, yes... speaking as someone whose background basically boils down to "two lower-middle class parents make it into college, meet there, marry, end up with much better than lower-middle-class pay, have a kid, try to use their good pay to get their kid well-educated, end up forcing said kid into culture clashes with upper-middle-class institutions and communities, don't quite Get It when things go wrong".

2025-10-01 18:08:50 GMT

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One reason I respect my roommate's family: when one of them asked me that question, and I responded with a very tired "*please* don't ask that question"... that was the end of it. I never heard any question of the sort from them again.

2025-10-01 15:56:49 GMT

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There is a reason why increasingly, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" is being answered with angry snaps of "I don't dream of labor".

2025-09-23 14:53:25 GMT

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As I understand it, the basic problem with the power grid is that it's designed for top-down, imperialistic control of power. For a proper future, it needs to not just have battery stations bolted on, but to be refactored to be far more decentralized.

2025-09-08 19:32:18 GMT

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This seems related to the plague of impossible job requirements for allegedly "entry-level" jobs, wherein one is expected to have ten years of experience with a piece of equipment or programming language or the like that has only existed for five years, and somehow also have this experience already when fresh out of college (hence it being advertised as "entry-level" at all). As though the process knowledge they want can be conjured out of thin air somehow.

2025-08-19 19:22:50 GMT

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How do we keep the assholes from leveraging their advantage in a "start over from scratch" situation? Basically the big fear when it comes to Article V conventions is that the convention would be nothing but billionaires, think tanks and consultants with dreams of world domination, and a few centrist corporatist "Democrats" of the sort who think "democracy" means a shroud of legitimacy over warring noble houses.

2025-08-19 04:27:47 GMT

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I mean, there's a reason why I figure that *if* the US comes out the other end of this crisis intact, one of the *many* Constitutional amendments we need is something to the effect of "corporate entities are subject to the law and have no right to subvert the law, preempt the law, or replace sovereign government institutions with devices of their own design"...

2025-08-18 14:55:31 GMT

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For the morbidly curious (like I'm sure @npub1fdr…lvhs would be), the products in question are a series of stainless steel latched canisters, and the contradiction is that their descriptions all say they have airtight seals, but the specifications all say they don't. It seems weird to think that an airtight seal would have been "hallucinated" three out of three times, so I'm thoroughly confused. #enshittification
https://www.wayfair.com/kitchen-tabletop/pdp/prep-savour-damire-203-oz-food-storage-container-w110464423.html
https://www.wayfair.com/kitchen-tabletop/pdp/prep-savour-405oz-stainless-steel-food-storage-container-w004529204.html
https://www.wayfair.com/kitchen-tabletop/pdp/prep-savour-405oz-stainless-steel-food-storage-container-w004529204.html

2025-08-18 13:35:09 GMT

It's seeming like even online shopping — the one function of the Web you'd *think* the capitalists would try their best to keep smooth — is getting more difficult these days. I found an entire line of products where the description and listed specifications of them contradicted each other, so it's impossible to tell whether they're even worth buying or not. Uh, guys, if your intent is to get my money, how are you supposed to accomplish that without transactions happening? #enshittification

2025-08-15 20:32:24 GMT

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I suspect the intent is that this be parsed as:
"claims that [fraud, criminal misconduct, or gross negligence] caused [death or personal injury]"
In other words, something they can point at to attempt to debunk the idea that *they'll* have a Disney waiver incident, while still being able to stop you from suing over fraud, criminal misconduct, or gross negligence that had any result *not* involving blood, broken bones, or death.
They stole from you? Did you bleed? No? Tough.

2025-08-07 20:45:32 GMT

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And then there's the part where campaign contributions from the majority mostly get sucked away by grifters:
https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mothership-vortex-an-investigation

2025-08-07 20:07:51 GMT

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And don't forget the part where bras are luxury-priced, yet you need to change them regularly. Almost as though they're priced based on men's view of what a bra is (fetishwear) rather than a woman's (underwear)...

2025-07-28 23:18:28 GMT

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There are probably some types of running bamboo worth looking into, too. Plus, the nature of papermaking is such that you can add multiple kinds of fiber to the pulp, too.

2025-07-28 23:09:07 GMT

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I'm lucky enough to have a "Ken" in my own life, though I'm not sure they *fully* appreciate how valuable they are and how closely they guard our data just by the simple act of running a couple of servers out of our house. They have considered outsourcing the effort to a hosting service, and I've had to convince them not to.

2025-07-28 18:03:47 GMT

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Seriously, it's hard to have a more nerd-unfriendly environmentally extremist take than "printing books is evil!"

2025-07-28 17:56:38 GMT

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Somewhat related to this, I'm pretty sure one of the regulars on this server blocked me because... I'd like print copies of the TTRPG I'm making to exist, and to her the very concept of running a factory to print books when PDFs exist is unforgivable... never mind how much more ephemeral computer files can be than paper, that no one outside the hobby would find it that way, that factories can theoretically be run on clean energy, and that there are sources of pulp other than forests.

2025-07-14 19:14:21 GMT

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I understand there to have been efforts to try to do this sort of thing both in indie TTRPG licenses and the rules of said indie games themselves ("Nazis are not allowed to play this game") with even less success, especially since the OGL debacle resulted in the shattering of the license consensus. (CC-BY didn't catch on in any broader way among TTRPG studios, and just replaced the OGL for newer projects with original 5e D&D as the only prior reference.)

2025-07-12 22:28:35 GMT

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I don't feel like it's entirely the fault of the rank and file, mind you. Our culture has suffered a great deal from having crucial concepts surgically removed from it, like critical thinking and various nonviolent forms of direct action.
(As a postscript, I feel like @npub1fdr…lvhs might appreciate the term "Pollyanna-Rambo complex" for this very, very frustrating cultural problem that's keeping us from solving other problems.)
3/3

2025-07-12 22:27:23 GMT

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The idea of causing *trouble* causes the Pollyanna side to gasp, clutch their pearls, and assume you're a Rambo trying to find a way to get political violence past the radar. On the other end, Rambo types seem to think that if you're preparing to perform *any* kind of resistance that doesn't hurt or seriously risk hurting people, you're naïve and worthy of mockery and lumping in with the Pollyannas who are so sure that just *behaving harder* will solve the problem.
2/3

2025-07-12 22:26:50 GMT

A name occurs to me for one of the big cultural deficits/blind spots I've been frustrated by. especially recently when it's been most relevant:
The Pollyanna-Rambo Complex.
Which is to say, a lot of people seem to imagine that either everything is going to work out with at most some well-mannered and socially acceptable scolding/protest, or they think that every enemy needs to be mowed down and everything destroyed. Furthermore, you simply *must* take the "correct" side.
1/3

2025-07-02 20:34:28 GMT

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In the US, the focus was more on sensationalized stories about people pretending to be who they weren't, like child predators pretending to be children and arranging meetups, or FBI agents pretending to be children to catch the predators.
Those sorts of news media stories stopped abruptly when the news media discovered Twitter, a place where people talked blow-by-blow about things happening in their area, and fell in love. They still haven't gotten over it.

2025-07-02 13:53:16 GMT

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I'm pretty sure the anti-Internet push by the legacy media stopped cold when said legacy media fell in love with early Twitter.

2025-06-27 13:34:43 GMT

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I would also count as detachment the idea that they're immune to the consequences of their actions beyond gaining money and power, and therefore think they don't need to care about them and *do* need to stop these pesky p-zombies around them from interfering with their plans just because they'll die. (Though they're not well-read enough to know what a p-zombie is, so they co-opted "NPC" instead...)

2025-06-27 13:27:36 GMT

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I get the sense that the wealthy — and I count politicians in corrupt countries like ours among them — have three major derangements that make them a threat to all other life: greed, powerlust, and detachment. It's not *just* that they want everything and want to control everyone, it's that they don't even see other living things as anything but resources to be exploited, let alone people as people. They can't even imagine that we need food, or tools that actually work.

2025-06-26 21:35:58 GMT

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"Many progressives cheered the emergence of the young and charismatic Mamdani, whose candidacy caught on with viral campaign videos and a focus on the cost of living. But the party’s more pragmatic wing —"
This is where the record scratch hits for me — the idea that addressing cost of living is somehow some fantasy consideration rather than trying to make an unworkable reality workable. What exactly is more pragmatic in our society than "I need to be able to pay my bills"?

2025-06-19 13:51:32 GMT

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Seems the situation has just changed in any case due to public outcry:
https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/114709820512537821

2025-06-19 05:23:10 GMT

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You do still have until the end of the month.

2025-06-13 06:42:09 GMT

This is something I've *definitely* noticed that the right no longer understands.
#MemesFromOutside
https://cdn.masto.host/dicecamp/media_attachments/files/114/674/674/911/928/716/original/743270efd3f3252a.png

2025-04-17 07:15:15 GMT

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I couldn't get past the first chapter, myself. The focus character was too much of an asshole.

2025-04-13 19:12:15 GMT

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The academics aren't, but the middleman publications are.

2025-04-13 18:32:29 GMT

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Though profit motive has been interfering with the dissemination of accurate, verifiable knowledge...

2025-03-30 19:48:26 GMT

Huh. I have over 500 followers. How'd that happen?

2025-03-28 18:19:03 GMT

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Yeah. Last night it was to the point that I was outright saying "fuck off, bot-hugger" and this was somehow interpreted as an invitation to double down on the sales pitch...

2025-03-28 09:06:19 GMT

...What is it with "AI"-lovers and their inability to parse hostility?

2025-03-20 20:00:13 GMT

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Yeah, the military strikes me as a major wild card in all this. I don't feel like I can predict what they'll do either way (unlike police, whom I can pretty confidently say will fall on the fascist side).
Will the military back Trump out of fear and/or misplaced loyalty? Will they overthrow him in a military coup? Will they fragment between those two goals and descend into infighting, and if so what will the balance of power between the sides be?

2025-03-20 19:54:05 GMT

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Thirding. It seems to be a common foreign misconception that the US's general public is in a position to violently overthrow the Federal government at a moment's notice. We're not, for several reasons.

2025-02-12 02:31:23 GMT

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Really, having a kid in this day and age seems like the act of a sadist.

2024-12-19 18:34:38 GMT

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One noteworthy example of "but not like that" I had to go through after dropping out: treating an offspring's activities as valid only if they constitute a path to a job.
I had to basically go out of my way to look like I was doing nothing for years because my father had this tendency to CLING DESPERATELY to any indication that I was doing or learning anything, because that might be me Getting A Job finally!!!