Spikes!

The greatest of all sea urchins.

[indigosfindings]

how do you pronounce the honourific "Ms." in english

"miss"

"miz"

other

unsure/see results

Voting ended onMay 21

[mortalityplays]

really good "shocking number of people are confidently objectively demonstrably completely wrong" poll

[3liza]

i am losing my fucking mind

[avocado-moon]

#we dont use honorifics in my first language so whenever i have to select options (usually for flights) im always so confused#like what is actually the difference between miss and ms#i like miss bc it sounds more historical and im a historian so

"Miss" means an unmarried woman. "Mrs." means a married woman. (both of these have origins in the word "mistress" as in "mistress of the house".)

"Ms." - prounounced MIZ, btw - is a third option popularized by gloria steinem in the 70s - mainly through her feminist magazine Ms. - which is meant to be a neutral term, usable for any and all women regardless of marital status (hence the soul destroying irony of the tags above). it gained wider general acceptance when geraldine ferraro, the first woman to be nominated as VP on a national major party ticket, started using it widely to avoid confusion, since she was married but used her maiden name professionally. eventually over the years it came into common use though i do think the brits are a little more critical of it than americans (as far as i'm aware lol)

[avocado-moon]

"obscure facts only a tumblr user would know" and it's one of the most influential institutions of second wave american feminism. PLEASE open the schools

[onbearfeet]

Hi. I'm an unmarried woman in her forties. I use Ms. and pronounce it "miz", though I don't correct people who accidentally use a soft S. I use Ms. because it's no one's business but my own whether I'm married, to a man or anyone else, and that's what Ms. means. It means fuck off, my marital status is irrelevant, just as it is for every man who uses Mr.

I've had people (usually children) ask me at work if I'm a missus or a miss. I have replied that I am a miz, full stop. And when they pressed for which one I was REALLY, I have replied, "Why? Are you going to treat me differently depending on whether there's a ring somewhere?"

That's what Ms. is for. That is its linguistic function. It says, "This is an adult woman," and nothing else. Nothing else is necessary, and in my case, nothing else is desired.

I also use miz for other women unless and until they express a preference for something else because I don't magically know everyone else's marital status when I meet them. That's a courtesy—I'm declining to assume marital status and allowing them to decide whether they wish to declare it.

Also, I've taught English and worked as an editor for twenty years. I am quite literally the grammar police. This use of Ms. is a standard construction. If you didn't learn it in school, someone failed you.

[nuclearspaceheater]

If the goal is to actually change the language, then "Ms." ceasing to be marked as a political statement while "Mrs." instead becomes marked as old fashioned... isn't that just what winning looks like?

[garmbreak1]

yeah i was definitely taught "ms." was short for, and pronounced like, "miss" in school

I didn't encounter "miz" until I read Ex Machina

[uni-daioh]

I voted "miz" but that's not actually true because I pronounce it "miss". I just know how it's supposed to be pronounced.

[garmbreak1]

You know, in hindsight, it's really weird that there's a character in one of the Transformers movies whose entire deal is "despite being an adult i can fuck a minor due to a law whose text i keep on a laminated card in my wallet at all times"

[uni-daioh]

Wait what?

*checks*

...wait what?

[garmbreak1]

I'm trying to install Doki Doki Literature Club on my Android device, but I can't find it on the Play Store. Maybe it slept in again?

[uni-daioh]

If you're not asking this rhetorically it got banned. -_-

[doe-eyed-disaster]

explaining gamergate to future generations: so video games were looked down on for being toys meant for little boys to play with and they didn't like that, so they spent a lot of time and effort crafting elaborate arguments on forums far and wide that video games were serious art and deserved serious analysis, but then they were very unhappy when a woman did exactly that, so in order to prove they weren't a bunch of racist misogynists, they went on a years long harassment campaign against a bunch of women which both ruined the fun of criticizing the star wars sequels *and* eventually helped the United States get rid of federal abortion rights, but at the end of the day it was worth it because all of our video game news is written by ai instead of women with dyed hair

[robin-hood-for-freedom]

I've I said before, but I guess it bears repeating: Just because video games are art(they are), it in no way follows that we must accept, endorse, or agree with whatever some self-proclaimed 'critic' says about them.

Especially when said critic has all but admitted that she doesnt actually play games and just went into the medium looking for things to criticize

[brazenautomaton]

"you see kids, as long as you hate nerds enough, it's okay to abuse people! when the entire progressive media establishment chooses to lie and cover for the abuser, only contemptible right-wingers would have any problem with that. people have never ever noticed or had a problem with any of the left's behavior and anyone who claims to have noticed the left's behavior is an incel."

[itsthebrokenheartthatdecides]

and who can forget how she criticized Hitman for endorsing the behavior of abusing women (prostitutes specifically), while the very clip she used in that video WAS PENALIZING THE PLAYER FOR DOING EXACTLY THAT.

not only did she not engage with the medium she was criticizing, she didn't even review the footage that she STOLE for her soapbox videos.

and oh yeah Anita, where are all the videos you promised in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars that were donated to you for that purpose? huh? no you just dropped the entire series without making even half the videos you crowd sourced for.

someone wanna explain to me why I'm supposed to trust her?

[uni-daioh]

Standard reminder that her actual argument was that Hitman rewards players for shooting women by animating the results of this, not by a gain or loss of in-game points.

[garmbreak1]

AI and TTRPGs

No, we did not teach sand to think and give it jobs and anxiety

Initially I bailed out of this article at

Now, this kinda of processing is powerful—in the right context. For example, being trained in massive imaging data from collected tissue samples, a model could be trained to correlate tiny changes undetectable by human eyes or markers, being able to predict pro-oncologic cells, to properly identify the real size of a tumor, etc. However, when was the last time you saw LLMs sold like that? Probably never, actually, because nobody doing that would present it as “AI”.

because i hear an ad for a local company that does AI-enhanced heart scans or something at least once a week

but i went back to it because, hey, i may as well give it a fair shot

anyway, I got to

The work is beyond awful. It is not even considered “work,” getting the cruel reality of microwork instead. The alienation from one’s own work crosses the human limits and into the realm of nightmare. You are doing absolutely nothing. There is only degeneration of your capacities, no value to your skills, and the tasks can barely be considered “tasks.” More repetitive than any factory labor, each task is broken down into seconds of labor, so abstracted that you have no hint, involving no conscious thought, that you speed through so you can make a dozen cents a hour. Not only is this work horrible, it pays so little that is not remotely liveable, so it preys on the most vulnerable of all humans—carceral laborers, refugees, child laborers, debt slaves, etc. Companies like Mechanical Turk and Clickworker love to settle on “death worlds” and offer “opportunities” to the un-people forced into them.

How true is this? My only familiarity with Mechanical Turk and Clickworker comes from many years before the AI rush, but at this point there's no way there's that much microwork involved in the modern LLM industry, right?

[uni-daioh]

There's definitely a lot of microwork involved in the modern LLM industry, but there's a bizarre... pair of hallucinations competing here. One is that the author tries their best to imply but without ever coming out and saying that there is no "AI", but actually when you submit an AI query you are just getting a human response from a slave somewhere. As this is obviously wrong, they avoid coming out and saying it, but a lot of their implications are made along these lines, or by otherwise implying there is *so much* microwork involved that it is indistinguishable from that. The other is that the amount of microwork involved is far smaller than being implied here - there's a lot of AI training work, in the $billions range, but given that AI investment in 2025 was in the $trillions range, it's only something like 1% of the AI investment budget. And that, of course, includes expert AI training work which pays much better than "so little that it is not remotely liveable."

[brazenautomaton]

"Gerard" is the deranged fantasy of eugenicists. No such individual has ever made an impact upon reality, as opposed to the genocidal crusade of Siskind, Yarvin, and Yudkowsky.

You made a new account, huh?

You should take your meds.

[cookingwithroxy]

can someone translate this into sanity for me?

[cookingwithroxy]

And no, weirdo asking the ask, it wasn't sane and submitting that it is into my submission box did not in fact make me feel more assured as to your sanity.

[brazenautomaton]

it's that wacko who thinks the Worm fandom willingly killed 30 million people, since Worm is read by people who are called "rationalists," Scott Alexander / Siskind is considered a "rationalist," JD Vance read a couple of Scott's posts, Vance is Trump's vice president, and Elon Musk under Trump cut the PEPFAR program which may end up killing 30 million due to lack of AIDS treatment.

[cookingwithroxy]

They sent me a submission, which honestly prompted me to turn OFF submissions, but with the text of

'Fine. The idea that a single nefarious individual has spread slander against the Rationalists is a deflection they use from their actual heinous crimes, namely, driving a woman to suicide, murdering six in a killing spree, and orchestrating foreign aid cuts designed to kill 14,000,000. The individual in question, meanwhile, only ever commented on Roko's Basilisk as slander goes.'

[cookingwithroxy]

And I still have no fucking clus what the fucking suicide or killing spree were!

I should have fucking cut my losses the moment any idiot mentioned the stupidity that is 'Roko's Basilisk'

[uni-daioh]

The suicide and killing spree are likely both Zizian-related things: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/ziz-rationalism-lasota-pasek-20323332.php for the suicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians for the killing spree

But, given OP's tendency to conflate mostly-unrelated things, there might be other women who have committed suicide sometime in the last twenty years, and I do not in any case think those deaths are particularly tied to "the Rationalists."

[brazenautomaton]

Launching harassment campaigns in reaction to accusations that one is launching harassment campaigns turned out to not be a winning move. Who could have guessed!

(I have some sympathy for your version of events, Quinn sounds like a real piece of work, and games journalism had been famously bad for a very long time. This does not justify acting like that is the whole or even most of the story.)

These guys got together and said they would claim there was a harassment campaign against their friend so they could make people stop talking about all the awful things she did. They said this before it happened. Before they alleged harassment campaign occurred, they had decided to say that a harassment campaign occurred. They showed that they would say there was a harassment campaign regardless of one's occurrence.

Then, wow, what are the odds, there was by pure happenstance a harassment campaign that organically rose up just at exactly the time they decided to lie about there being one! What a wonderful coincidence that was. Sure, they were caught over and over and over and over manufacturing harassment of themselves, and, I cannot stress this enough, Zoe Quinn and Randi Lee Harper operated a botnet to send harassing gamer messages to people, what a remarkable coincidence that this real harassment campaigned just happened to take the exact size and shape of the lies they told about a harassment campaign.

You cannot even allow yourself to make the most obvious inference possible -- a person said they were going to lie about a thing happening, then they said that thing happened, I should not trust them when they say that -- because the lie is so important it annihilates your ability to not believe it.

[uni-daioh]

I have mentioned this elsewhere before, but the thing that most radicalized me about Gamergate was seeing specific people I knew were okay with, if not outright advocates of, harassment campaigns, suddenly clutching their pearls about internet harassment.

Like I'm not just casting vague aspersions I mean straight up RequiresHate fans.

[balaclava-trismegistus]

Honest to God one of the fucking dumbest things American leftists ever did in this century was taking the Gadsden flag -- a symbol of American identity which predates the United States itself and represents the nominal cultural values of individual liberty, self-determination, and what was community defense -- and making all kinds of edits where giant black boots covered in Soviet iconography stomp on the snake, or other animals kill and eat the snake, while generally communicating some affect of 'I'm gonna invade your space and do whatever I want to you'. Like. What are you even gaining from this other than parading around communicating that you're exactly the cartoon bad guy they've decided you are? What's even the point? Why are you even engaging with the symbolism if you're only doing it in a way that says "I'm exactly the hypothetical bad guy you imagine threatening this snake that represents the ideal freedom-loving American"? Are you fucking stupid?

[evil-fact-checker]

Look, the Gadsden flag is a symbol that’s been co-opted and contested for decades. The fact that some on the left remix it to critique an outdated, romanticized idea of "freedom" isn’t about being the "cartoon bad guy"—it’s about challenging a narrative that no longer fits our complex reality.

Symbols evolve, and reinterpreting them is part of the cultural dialogue. If your take is that any change is "dumb," then maybe you’re clinging too hard to a version of American identity that’s been sanitized for nostalgia. The modifications you scoff at aren’t just for shock value—they’re a deliberate provocation meant to question who benefits when we uncritically hold on to old symbols.

So before you dismiss these edits as mere stupidity, consider that they might be an honest attempt to expose how even cherished emblems can be used to oppress or exclude. If that makes you the "cartoon bad guy," well, maybe it's time to reexamine what you consider true freedom and liberty.

[brazenautomaton]

But what happened with this symbol, as with most symbols that have "evolved" and been "reinterpreted." is that the left saw more than zero people it didn't like using the symbol and so decided that it was only supposed to be used by bad people first, and then did not talk to anyone who used the symbol. Then they made up a bunch of bad things to believe about people who used the symbol without ever talking to anyone who used the symbol. Then they screamed at people who used the symbol without ever talking to anyone who used the symbol. The majority of people who ever liked the symbol now hate the left, and are correct to do so, but the left doesn't even really know that because their assessment of how the symbol has been fully co-opted is based on talking to each other about how much they agree the symbol is co-opted, and never talking to anyone using the symbol.

When you and your friends decide that a symbol has been co-opted, it is not an observation of something that has already happened. It is not an assessment of reality. It is instead deciding that they are going to violently expel that symbol and everyone and everything attached to it. Then they will alienate more people, reveal themselves to be even crazier and more hateful than others thought, and say "See, look, that symbol is only used by Bad Wrongthinkers who don't agree with us!"

[evil-fact-checker]

Your argument reduces a complex, ongoing cultural debate into a simplistic conspiracy of "expelling" symbols, and that's where it falls apart. Cultural symbols, like the Gadsden flag, have long been contested and reinterpreted as society evolves. It’s not that the left has decided, out of thin air, that anyone using the flag is now a bad actor; rather, they’re critiquing how that symbol is being deployed to promote reactionary, exclusionary ideologies.

When you claim that the left never talks to actual flag users and just makes up bad assumptions, you're projecting a closed-minded echo chamber onto an entire movement. In reality, discussions around symbolism involve nuanced debates over identity, history, and power. The left isn’t arbitrarily assigning guilt to everyone who displays the flag—they’re questioning what values are being celebrated and who benefits from that celebration.

Moreover, your argument suggests that the left’s assessment is detached from reality, but the very nature of cultural evolution means meanings shift over time. The left’s reinterpretations aren’t a manufactured consensus; they’re part of a broader dialogue that includes voices from all sides. If you dismiss these critiques as mere echo chamber rhetoric, you ignore the legitimate concerns about how symbols can be used to enforce outdated power structures.

In short, reducing the debate to “we must expel everyone who disagrees” not only oversimplifies the issue, it also shows a refusal to engage with the real substance of these discussions.

[brazenautomaton]

The left's assessment of what is a "reactionary, exclusionary ideology" cannot be trusted. The substance of these discussions is illusory, something always alluded to but never shown. We do not trust your theory and do not trust your scholarship because it is always wrong in ways we have observed.

I know you say you have "legitimate concerns about how symbols can be used to enforce outdated power structures." I am not unaware of them, I reject them. This is an insane thing to think and it has no value and your conclusions are wrong. You are displaying the mindset you think you are rebuking.

[uni-daioh]

Brazen, that's a chatbot. Of course its posts have no value and its conclusions are wrong.

[garmbreak1]

Is it better for all of the VAs in a dub to pronounce things wrong in the same way, or for only some of them to get it right?

[uni-daioh]

The former, the latter is horrendous because you can just imagine them talking about some setting-specific term to each other and pronouncing it differently each time and not coming to an agreement like they would in real life.

[samueldays]

That Which Does Not Want To Be Named

There is a Thing of many names and none, which used to be called D&I, standing for "Diversity and Inclusion", later DEI with the addition of "Equity", later DEIA with the addition of "Accessibility", sometimes also "Office of Multicultural Affairs", and more names too, including sometimes "affirmative action", and called "tokenism" and "quota hiring" by its enemies too.

Trump has ordered an end to the Thing. One of the reactions by Thingists has been to generate more new names to hide behind, and then say they're not doing the literal name Trump tried to ban. This reaction was probably anticipated, as Trump's executive order included the following instruction:

and an assessment of whether these positions, committees, programs, services, activities, budgets, and expenditures have been misleadingly relabeled in an attempt to preserve their pre-November 4, 2024 function;

Another reaction by Thingists has been malicious compliance by equivocating between the Thing's name of quote "Diversity, equity and inclusion" unquote, and any activity which could be described as diverse, equitable or inclusive. Then they pretend that Trump's order bans the second and is overbroad or illegal.

Paul Krugman says:

About the broad attack on the civil service: The Trump administration has ordered an immediate end to all diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across the federal government. That’s pretty shocking, especially because it’s open-ended. What counts as D.E.I.? Is it forbidden even to mention anything involving race, gender or socioeconomic status? Probably. Public health agencies, even more than the rest of the government, are in the firing line. You can’t talk seriously about health policy without taking race and gender into account; yet according to the New York Times, one contractor collecting demographic data for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has already been told to stop work, and the results of an already completed survey won’t be released.

What counts? I wish the Thingists had been honest about that, instead of playing name-games. But they dragged everyone into their stupid games and now everyone wins stupid prizes. Trump is working to remove the Thing, which has superglued itself to institutions to make it hard to remove, and when it's pulled off then those institutions are going to get some metaphorical torn skin as acceptable collateral damage. Public health agencies are in the firing line because Thingists used public health agencies as a hostage, deliberately conflating public health in general (goes back millennia) with That Which Does Not Want To Be Named (summoned sometime last century).

[morlock-holmes]

Okay, I know it's bad form to post under someone who I've blocked, but this is total horseshit right out the gate.

Imagine someone saying,

"There is a *thing*. Sometimes that thing is called "Nativism" and sometimes it is called "blood and soil" and sometimes it is called "nationalism" and sometimes it is called "racism" and sometimes it is called "border control". The Democrats are against the thing, and proponents of the thing keep inventing new names for it to hide behind."

You would immediately see how fundamentally dishonest that argument is. Even if you grant that all the things I just named spring from the same source (Itself immediately debatable), "border control" is a real function of the government that cannot simply be conflated with nationalism.

DEI, affirmative action, and critical race theory are all specific things. Do they spring from the same source? Yes. Is there a general effort to prevent people from coming up with a name for that source? Also yes.

But it is appalling to respond to intellectual dishonesty with more dishonesty. Affirmative action has been gutted by the courts and DEI initiatives are attempts to market towards people who don't like the fact that actual affirmative action policies are largely illegal in this country. If you throw accessibility on the back-end you now have to address the fact that the ADA mandates certain accessibility policies.

Quotas are an actual thing! Colleges tried explicit racial quotas in the late 70s and the Supreme Court slapped them down!

The people who conflate all these things are deliberately crippling their ability to reason about what is happening in the country, and particularly their ability to coherently understand their own victories.

[uni-daioh]

So I kind of get what you're getting at here but like.

Imagine someone saying,

"There is a *thing*. Sometimes that thing is called "Nativism" and sometimes it is called "blood and soil" and sometimes it is called "nationalism" and sometimes it is called "racism" and sometimes it is called "border control". The Democrats are against the thing, and proponents of the thing keep inventing new names for it to hide behind."

This is very easy and normal for me to imagine - the big differences are that they have a name for it, Naziism or fascism, and that the person saying it is more likely to say "we are all" against the thing even if the Democrats are unfortunately and uselessly not.

Like that would be a perfectly normal thing to say.

[brazenautomaton]

The community for a game I play (Dominions) pretty much counts - sure, the one major Discord which runs on dumbass SJ rules is still a thing, but it's the only one of its kind, and it's a punchline in the community nowadays. (Note that this is only about SJ - my primary server's mods go by Marx and Stalin joke names, but it is 0% a space for SJ cruelty.)

did it used to not be a joke? is it still a joke outside of the separate discord servers you made to flee from it?

[uni-daioh]

(Same user, just going off anon here) Yeah it used to be the main community server. Now it's still got the highest user population (including inactive) for legacy reasons but only equivalent games running with any given other server, which says the active playerbase is pretty well-distributed, and it's no longer the only server to get officially advertised, nor even the one that gets top billing on the Steam community links anymore.

I dunno how the story goes on "made to flee from it" honestly - I only really joined the community in 2024 with the release of the newest game, and a lot of the other servers were clearly made for other reasons.

[brazenautomaton]

powerscaling is stupid in a way applicable to more than just powerscaling. there is maybe a point to this post but it's after a bunch of dumb bullshit you likely don't care about so I am putting it under a cut

got into an argument with a powerscaler on reddit. his argument was "because of these feats dante would mathematically beat homelander since he's so much faster and stronger" and my argument was "that's stupid nothing works like that"

key to his argument was a scene where dante throws his sword off the top of a tower, the sword starts heating up and glowing red in the atmosphere, and then dante runs down the side of the tower and catches up to it. since "re-entry speed" is 17,500 mph, and the sword was heating up from atmospheric re-entry, dante must therefore be capable of running at 17,500 miles per hour

and this is stupid because no he can't. he's not running 17,500 miles per hour in that scene because the tower isn't 300 miles high and he doesn't hit the ground in that scene (he gets swallowed by a flying whale so he can have a level inside a gross flying whale). more to the point he doesn't behave like someone who has the ability to travel at 17,500 miles per hour, because when there are things that he genuinely wants and he's not just fucking around, and the ability to run at 17,500 miles per hour would allow him to get what he wanted, he doesn't do that. the people involved don't behave like it's true.

powerscaling is all about taking one detail, interpreting that detail in isolation, making an inference from that interpretation, then proclaiming it ironclad mathematical truth without checking if it matches up with the actual thing you're talking about and whether people behave like it's true. "one interpretation of this shot is that the sword is experiencing atmospheric re-entry, atmospheric re-entry requires this level of speed, therefore it is traveling at this level of speed regardless of any other indications of what might be happening."

and it's notable to point out in the case of powerscaling because it's not a selfish deception, not a selective presentation to get away with something you want. it's not motivated reasoning to arrive at a predestined conclusion or to dismiss a new upsetting idea. this dude had these numbers ready to go, someone sat down and said "I want to know how fast this guy can go," and then made those inferences, concluded it was 17.5k, and said "well done, this is good information I can use to place this guy on a scale." any theory of this being intentional and self-serving obviously isn't true.

and the reason to point out that this isn't intentional and self-serving is that this problem is also the same problem as a shit-zillion political explanations! make an inference about one detail, work only from that detail, make a conclusion, don't check if it matches anything else.

it's obviously common to conspiracy theories, "this is one explanation for one thing that happened, so it means that happened, and I don't need to look at how it fits into anything else," but it can't be particular to conspiracy theories, since powerscalers aren't conspiracy theorists! you can see how people would engage in motivated reasoning or intentionally decieve you that way, but that's not what powerscalers are doing!

so like that one argument back when hogwarts legacy came out, when what's his face was saying "the game is antisemitic, that is the obvious inference to make based on the promotional material saying the game is about quashing a goblin rebellion" even after being told that the game was out and we didn't have to make inferences about its content, we can see its content, and that's not what's in it; that was this same thing. "I made this inference, i KNOW there is more information that contradicts it, but my inference is true." this is by far from the only political example I could use, you can think of some yourself. and most of them are of the form "if that was true, why do the people involved not act like that was true, even though if it was true they would?"

it's not even confirmation bias or being stubborn, because, like, when you won't change your mind based on new information you generally have a reason you don't think that information is trustworthy. this isn't that! people aren't saying "this is why the other things being contradictory doesn't matter," they are saying "this is a valid inference to draw if we only look at this information, therefore, the inference is true regardless of what other information we have." is there a name for this? is there even a point to making this post? no there isn't

[uni-daioh]

my 'favorite' powerscaling thing is people with massively hypersonic speed because they dodge or parry lightning, rather than concluding that it's much easier in that setting to dodge or parry lightning than our science would indicate

[garmbreak1]

what kind of sick fuck makes a deckbuilder that isn't a roguelike

[uni-daioh]

erannorth's dev I guess

[morlock-holmes]

I guess I need to read Veblen now, having some disconnected thoughts about conspicuous consumption.

The term, as widely used in pop culture, brings to mind the purchase of expensive things to demonstrate wealth.

And, of course, as advertising became more advanced in the 20th century brands realized that you could signal all kinds of things through consumption, they could associate themselves with a "lifestyle" that is more particularly defined than just "rich", such as "rugged outdoorsman".

Feel like nowadays there is a certain kind of conspicuous consumption that is primarily about expressing grievance, or even more specifically "You can't tell me what to do".

By purchasing a product you can signal that someone else, who you don't like, has been unable to stop you from purchasing it.

Primarily thinking of GameStop stock here, which kind of went from "Rational Contrarian investment gamble" to "Frightening cult" in a way that seems very new for, you know, a publicly traded stock.

[uni-daioh]

At least personally I think this is bound up with an increase in other people, who I don't like, actually trying to stop me from purchasing things. Not that this wasn't always a thing to some extent, I imagine it drove a lot of people's dads buying print copies of the Anarchist's Cookbook or whatnot.

[thydungeongal]

"D&D 4e was too much like a video game,"

[thydungeongal]

From this day on this blog is a certified D&D 2024 hater space.

[dailyadventureprompts]

This is what they meant by the game needing to be monetized

[mandisawesome]

how dare they sell their product

[thydungeongal]

This is about more than selling product. This is about implementing the worst, FOMO-inducing practices of the video game industry into D&D. It is predatory and I personally think we should not normalize this as WotC just "selling their product."

[thydungeongal]

I mean, for the record, I do think WotC should also be punished for trying to sell their product, because their product is bad. But that is not the issue right now,

[nuclearspaceheater]

WotC also makes an NFT gacha game (Magic: the Gathering), so this shouldn't be that surprising.

More surprising it took them this long.

[barryogg]

Like I get where you're coming from but the cards are very much fungible

[brazenautomaton]

"I'm upset, any negative adjective I can attach is accurate"

was topps operating an NFT gacha scam in the 1950s with baseball cards?

[suntzuanime]

I mean yes, clearly. You can argue about the "scam" aspect I guess, you really did get a jpeg of a baseball player, and a quick listing of his stats which would have been more handy to have when you couldn't just pop over to baseball-reference.com on your phone. But it was an NFT gacha potentially-unwanted-business-model.

These business models are nothing new, the term "gacha" comes from the noise a vending machine makes when it spits out a blind pull that probably wasn't the prize you actually wanted. The difference is now its being done at greater scale and hooking into more stuff rather than being just a machine in the corner of the laundromat to drain a kid's allowance while he waits for his mom to do the laundry.

[brazenautomaton]

attaching new emotionally-loaded words to describe old and completely uncontroversial things in order to try and change the assessment of those things is bullshit. always has been bullshit and always will be bullshit.

trading cards did not retroactively become bad because people who were pissed at overwatch loot boxes accidentally started a moral panic.

[witch-hattery]

Trading cards didn't become retroactively bad, they were bad from the moment TCGs started doing the things gacha has since copied. Gacha games are just using more advanced techniques to try and squeeze money out of people.

[brazenautomaton]

the people they're squeezing money out of are mostly imaginary. people envision the Most Emotionally Fragile Human Possible and imagine everything exploiting that guy. other people like things you think they shouldn't, get over it

[thydungeongal]

While I think the whole conversation about gacha games and TCGs is mostly a digression in this context I don't think we should be normalizing the predatory practices used in gacha games via "let people enjoy things" either

[brazenautomaton]

it was completely uncontroversially fine, and then people started a moral panic about gacha games, and then you tried to retroactively make a thing that was uncontroversially fine into something predatory

when Evangelicals said that Pokemon cards were going to be a way to get kids hooked on gambling, we laughed at them and we were right to do so. you're saying exactly the same thing, about exactly the same thing.

[uni-daioh]

Wait, hold up, don't we know that's basically true about gacha games? At least insofar as they not infrequently end up costing people thousands of dollars - in fact, chasing that market is how they make their money - and some fraction of those people are not capable of affording it handily, and instead overspending in a financially unhealthy way? I've personally known people who were engaging in what they would agree were negative behaviors of the type "gambling addiction" typically describes because of gacha games. That is, as far as I know, something gacha shares with actual gambling. (I don't agree that CCGs are that bad by and large, because the secondary market means that the gameplay and gambling elements don't need to intersect.)

[fujoshiwarrior]

question:

think of the most annoying, insufferable person imaginable--whatever that looks like to you. just an absolute dog shit personality, stupid opinions, bad attitude, the whole package. they constantly talk shit about other people, they're constantly picking fights, they're smug, self-righteous, hypocritical, etc. however, nothing this person has done or said has ever actually harmed anyone else. they are not reactionary or bigoted, they are not predatory, and despite picking fights with people and stirring up trouble on purpose, they have never directly harassed or threatened anyone else. however, they are still an absolutely insufferable human being down to their core.

does this person deserve to get banned from whatever internet space(s) they use?

yes

no

nuance answer

Voting ended onJun 23, 2024

also please justify/explain your answer

[shieldfoss]

nuance answer "what the fuck does 'deserve' mean."

I'd block them on tumblr but it'd be wild overreach to ban them from tumblr-the-website.

[samueldays]

nuance answer "question is contradictory and/or smuggles in an unstated definition of harm"

TL;DR Most annoying insufferable person that I can imagine would be a kind of spammer among other attributes, and spamming a website until people abandon it is a harm, composed of individually harmless actions, with philosophical problems attached.

This feels like it's close to a Sorites Paradox: No single grain makes a heap, and no single shameless plug makes a spam-ridden wasteland; but intuitively there is such a thing as a heap, and there is such a thing as a forum or comment section abandoned due to spammers.

(Note: Some places legally define "spam" as being unsolicited commercial bulk messaging. I'm using "spam" more broadly about unsolicited bulk messaging, including from political parties or from the most annoying person in the world picking fights with everyone.)

So when I read both:

they constantly talk shit about other people, they're constantly picking fights

This behavior, at some point, adds up to spam-like harm.

nothing this person has done or said has ever actually harmed anyone else

yet?

There's a paradox-verging-on-contradiction here where one has to use judgment about how much spam constitutes "harm", so the question is a matter of opinion and hard to pin down, and the stipulations in the questions as phrased say "no harm" while describing behavior that accumulates to harm. I am in favor of banning spammers, and I've also seen admins invoke the "spammer" category to ban loquacious posters.

[uni-daioh]

This one also has a weird issue where... like, again, this is just internet posting, so how is being "reactionary or bigoted" a harm while spamming and picking fights is not? In fact, for the most part the reason I ban people for having stupid opinions about the joos is that it's a predictable sign that they will be insufferable in other ways, not because I'm okay with people constantly drooling over the prospect of political violence, but only so long as it's not specifically racist political violence.

[brazenautomaton]

I thiiiink that the idea of Roko's Basilisk is twofold. 1. The super AI will torture people who didn't help make it in response to it not coming into existence faster, since its existence is really good for humanity and it not coming into existence faster will mean potentially millions of avoidable deaths happening. 2. There's fundamentally no difference between the original you and a clone of you since the clone will think its consciousness and memories are the exact same as the original's.

why do people see me saying "the only people who cared about roko's basilisk are people with clinical anxiety disorders" and take it to mean "the specifics of roko's basilisk are an important thing we should litigate?"

[uni-daioh]

Asker is wrong anyway, the anxiety-inducing part was (what I personally feel is) a dumb-ass conclusion off the simulation hypothesis that the reason to fear mistreatment of simulated clones of you is that, on the basis of probability, you are almost certainly a simulated clone of you, and thus you may be subject to mistreatment by an AI. This part is probably broader than the specific basilisk and extends to the simulation hypothesis in general, but...

Well, despite having a clinical anxiety disorder earlier in life, I always found this self-evidently retarded so I never really considered ways to philosophically refute it as opposed to "Naah, I know I'm real, just as I know I'm not a brain in a vat, and likewise I know that all of my senses are not being deceived by a near-omnipotent demon lurking inside my nervous system."

Sadly, this self-confidence is not possible to convince other people of in that way, I don't think.