Notices by sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Friday, 28-Feb-2025 12:25:24 JST 
sj_zero
At 41% of the word target for my next book tonight. Which probably means I'm going to overshoot my word target since I'm still in the first of four arcs. Still pretty happy to see things are moving along, I've only got one more major scene to complete in the first arc. Might end up not mattering as much since I might trim some fat as I edit. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Feb-2025 19:51:04 JST
sj_zero
We're in the middle of a trade war these idiot Liberals started by acting like mean girls to the president of the united states for the past 8 years, and they're like "Oh, I know! Vote for us! We'll be even meaner! That'll help!"
How about you shut the fuck up, Freeland? You've 'helped' enough. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Feb-2025 19:45:20 JST
sj_zero
In trying to imagine the future for my novel, I really had to dial down the hypersexuality we see today. Instead of treating every woman like she's potentially going to make love to you right this second, the idea is you need to control yourself, but there's other parts of life where things are much less repressed.
Today men and women can barely talk because the hypersexualization has made it so awkward. Hell -- men and other men can barely talk because the hypersexualization has made it so awkward nobody wants to be accused of "the gay", and that's not just from stereotypical homophobes -- the lgbt community has done everything in their power to re frame every single male relationship over the past 8000 years of recorded history as actually being gay lovers.
So of course basically everyone is walking on eggshells among pretty much everyone because nobody wants to be accused of hitting on someone they don’t want to. With a little self-control, people could actually chill it out so they only hit on people they’re trying to hit on and we could have social connections again. It turns out we humans require social connections other than trying to bang like a bunch of bonobos on MDMA, or we get super depressed... like a bunch of bonobos after an MDMA bender.
The way to actually do that is to have social rituals that separate out this piece of your life. So you can have a discussion with someone and if they aren’t initiating the social rituals, you’re safe to just treat them like another human being, as opposed to a potential romantic partner at all times. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 25-Feb-2025 08:07:29 JST
sj_zero
I saw a video asking why the boys liked Powerpuff girls, with the underlying assumption of the video being that Powerpuff girls was actually intended for girls.
In the book Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, they talk about the concept of mu. This idea is that it doesn't matter what answer you give to a question, because the question is wrong. So in this video you are trying to answer the question of "why were the Powerpuff girls popular with boys even though it was a show meant for girls", and the answer is to unask the question because the question is wrong.
Powerpuff girls was never intended for girls, it was always intended for boys. It is right in the story of its creation, that the show creator put together a set of designs for their brother's birthday. The designs were not feminine to speak of, they were very male coded. Three girls who represent sort of idyllic fantasies of femininity (in 8 year old form) participating in wanton violence against monsters of the week.
This isn't a new idea, of creating a mythology of warrior women pointed at men. In antiquity, the story of the Amazons was essentially aimed at men, not so much women who don't care about fighting. In the middle ages, the story of Joan of Arc may have been empowering for women, but it was a story aimed at men. Japan being a modern civilization that has not yet fallen into postmodernism, quite frequently has women in their shounen stories, which are definitely pointed at young men, and of course postmodernism will always take the opportunity to subvert expectations, though I would argue that Powerpuff girls isn't necessarily a postmodern story since a lot of it's underlying superstructure is modernist in nature.
So at the end of the day, boys like Powerpuff girls because it's a well made cartoon for boys, not because they are somehow subverting expectations.
One of my favorite examples of this from anime which is a modernist art form, is the Rozen maiden series, particularly the first and second seasons of the first series. It felt very peculiar watching a show where almost every character is a woman, but when you look at the show as a whole it is clear it is almost exclusively designed for men, and the root message is about men. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 23-Feb-2025 01:22:23 JST
sj_zero
Tim bits or robins eggs up here, depending on if you get them from Tim Hortons or robins doughnuts. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 23-Feb-2025 01:22:21 JST
sj_zero
lol
"t-t-t-timmy and the jeets" -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Feb-2025 20:34:55 JST
sj_zero
I just realized, in 2020 the bank of canada explicitly told the government and therefore the people, "don't worry, rates aren't going up".
People who "trusted the experts" went in on 0.99% variable rate mortgages thinking they'd never go up (which are now 6%). People who trusted their own discipline would have seen stagflation coming and prepared for higher interest rates. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 16-Feb-2025 14:49:59 JST
sj_zero
You're not wrong.
Sometimes I head over and it's like "oh yeah, these aren't actually people, they're just preprogrammed dialog trees"
It's like talking to a less advanced version of eliza -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 16-Feb-2025 14:40:56 JST
sj_zero
Already happened.
One of my mutuals ran a based instance called wolfballs. The instance was one of 2 on Lemmy worth talking to, and to this day despite having been down for years most Lemmy instances block both by default. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 08:04:31 JST
sj_zero
I'm aware there are people who are basically totally "normal" -- say a girl who thinks she's a girl and she likes guys -- but call themselves "queer", and it's purely a political thing, identitying as part of a tribe.
Of course as with everything related to postmodernism, it's pretty stupid -- in order to combat boundaries, a bunch of people place themselves within a set boundary.
This is the irony and it might be the deconstruction of postmodernism, the fact that ideologies utilizing postmodernism are not actually postmodernists, they are modernist for themselves and postmodernist for everything else. It isn't that they have a problem with grand narratives or objective truths, it's just that they have a problem with everyone else's grand narratives and everyone else's objective truths.
(Sending way later than expected, thought I already sent send on this) -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 07:15:18 JST
sj_zero
The fact that some places still have covid signs up shows how often those spots are actually cleaned post-covid. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Feb-2025 11:54:17 JST
sj_zero
Democracy dies in the darkness they provide
Zerohedges motto was super clever 20 years ago when fight club came out. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Feb-2025 11:54:16 JST
sj_zero
Redpill theatre: we only play fight club and the good parts of the matrix trilogy -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 03-Feb-2025 13:22:58 JST
sj_zero
Some people think the incoming 25% tariffs are Trump bullying Canada and that he didn't expect Trudeau and Canada to fight back.
I'd argue the opposite.
Canada's Liberals are bullies. Massive bullies. They bully their own MPs and ministers, they bully their own people, and when they felt like they could get away with it they bullied the US president. And they spent 10 years spitting on the guy in charge of the United States, And now they're shocked that he is punching back (and he's got a way stronger punch).
We'd be in a totally different scenario if we had a leader like Chretien in charge, he dealt with the bully George W. Bush by being wily and clever, not by trying to out-bully the bully. But that's not how der fuhrer Trudeau functions. He only has one mode, and it doesn't work when he's not the most powerful person in the room. His little toadies only know the same language by the way. Freeland is claiming she should be the next party leader because Trump is afraid of her. I don't believe she has the level of self-deception to actually believe honestly that Trump is scared of her, it's more likely intended to continue the game the liberals have been playing, a stupid game but one that worked well for her until reality hit.
Trump isn't like a native justice minister, Trudeau can't just kick him out of the party for not doing as he's told. He can't tell Trump to sit down and shut up like he did his first secretary. He can't demote Trump like he did to Freeland when she didn't go along with his vote buying scheme late last year. When he's not able to do that, the pathetic nature of his one note bullying becomes clear. In reality, Canada's exports go 70% to the US, and US exports go 13% to Canada. Regardless of whatever power Trudeau pretends to hold, Canada disproportionately will be harmed in a trade war, and Trudeau didn't just win an election on a platform of tariffs. In fact, his political career is nearly over.
There are at least two forms of bullying. One is when a person is on the bottom of the heap and they bully to climb the heap. The other is when the person is at the top of the heap and they bully to try to keep their position at the top. Trudeau's treatment of Trump is the latter. It's similar to how hot girls become mean girls to ensure they stay the top of the roost.
He went out of his way to try to attack and belittle Trump because the president of the united states is obviously more powerful than the prime minister of Canada but Trudeau wanted to stay the cosmopolitan hero to the globalist lib left. The problem is that Trump isn't a woman, and so once he got a real mandate, reality hit like a ton of bricks. The fact is, Canada needs the US more than the US needs Canada, and so a trade war will result in the US winning.
One of the most important keys here is that multiple games are being played that correlate, and Trudeau is only good at one of them, the globalist elite game. His domestic governance has self-evidently gone sour (there's a whole superposition one can analyze there, but I'm simplifying for the purpose of argument as you'd expect given the blurriness heuristic), his global diplomacy has been catastrophic in a number of ways (In terms of diplomacy, Canada's actually made some really bad strides. We're not doing well with China, we're not doing well with India, and those are also great powers we need to be doing somewhat well with), per capita productivity has been in recession for years now, and now trade with the US is facing massive tariffs. Trump is playing more of these games, just not the one Trudeau is good at, but at this moment Trump isn't the same 2016 Trump that Trudeau could just bully because even Trump's own party didn't really support him, in 2025 Trump has laid a lot more groundwork to exercise the power of his office, and so scoffing at him and attacking him doesn't have the same outlook -- but that's the only game Trudeau and his lackeys know how to play. Ironically, in many ways Trudeau is looking more like Trump did in 2016, with a party that doesn't support him, a media that's losing confidence in him, and a new global elite that really opposes him rising.
The right thing would be to quit trying to win the globalist elite game and try instead to start doing better domestically and in terms of the diplomacy game. Chretien had some great stories about convincing George W. Bush not to implement tariffs, "Mr. President you're still eating PEI Potatoes", and I think Poilievre has a good strategy of showing how both Canada and the US can win.
Unfortunately, it's a powerful truth that Trudeau has played every card in his hand to make sure there aren't many options. He prorogued parliament to prevent a spring election (which his platform in 2015 explicitly said he would never do), and so he's basically sitting there on his own until March as the Liberals try to run a leadership campaign prior to the next election in a hail Mary play to try to deal with the catastrophic electoral collapse that polls are suggesting -- the liberals will get to third place, behind the Bloc Quebecois, a regional party with 0 votes outside of the province of Quebec. For such a party to become the official opposition (#2 in seats) as they are projected would be an absolute denouncement of the liberals and NDP who are national parties.
I suspect that this is part of Trump's calculus, basically putting a thumb on the scale of a failing government to help keep things moving towards what will be for him a much friendlier regime in the Conservatives. Unfortunately, that thumb will be a giant deus ex machina for many Canadians until the election can finally take place and some real diplomacy can start. When I say "deus ex machina", I'm invoking the imagery of a giant hand from a machine that imposes power at the end of a story rather than a specific thing that's going to magically end Trudeau when he was actually ok otherwise. The next Liberal leader will have to explain how they can go to (trade) war with the 900lb gorilla and expect to come out victorious, whereas Poilievre is already working to ensure the narrative out of his government is one focusing on mutual benefit in trade.
I fully expect that the Liberals will eventually recover from this current situation, but many smart former liberals are estimating it could take decades. Both the liberals and NDP will need to go back to the drawing board, but I suspect only the liberals will successfully do so, and it'll look like them trying to find a center-left position they used to hold before Trudeau. Unfortunately, they'll be fighting to regain trust the whole way. The NDP by contrast will keep thinking they need to just double down on their current ideas and they just didn't go hard enough.
I fully expect that once Poilievre is in, his new team will be able to talk Trump down from the ledge in part by having policies Trump will agree with, and in part by showing respect to the President instead of immediately talking about how much they hate him. We'll see how much damage is caused in the interim. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 02-Feb-2025 13:03:44 JST
sj_zero
I've officially got it set up so I can cast audio over youtube or whatever to the stereo in the back yard. Chromecast to an HDMI to AV converter plugged into the line-in on the amp.
It was actually tougher than it sounds. The house is stucco and therefore surrounded by a wire mesh, so most radio signals don't get far. I started with an older powerline ethernet module, but it was pretty bad. I moved to something newer, then plugged in a really great 802.11ac router I had, and the setup is still limited to 32mbps according to speedtest, but that's more than enough for streaming from multiple devices.
(For people wondering "why not a chromecast audio?", two things: First, you can't just cast youtube to chromecast audio, you have to use youtube music. Second, they don't actually manufacture chromecast audio anymore)
Didn't expect to do this in the middle of winter, but it turns out little guy knows the speakers play music, so we're stomping around in the snow and he's asking for his favorite songs. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 02-Feb-2025 01:48:39 JST
sj_zero
The whole hormone levels argument reminds me of something I said in response to that idjit Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
He made the hormones argument, and I'm like "So if you have a hydrogen atom and a helium atom, the atomic weight is different, so you just need to add neutrons and then the atomic weight for tritum is the same as helium-3, so tritium is helium-3, and if you knock a neutron off your helium-3, then it's just deuterium!"
Which is obviously wrong, it's about the number of protons.
Ironically, whether you're a man is generally selected by a number too -- the number of X Chromosomes you have. If you have two, you're a woman, if you have one you're a man. There's a tiny minority of people who have different outcomes, but that's a tragic medical error, not some wonderful proof that postmodern conceptions of sex are true. You don't celebrate that in the same way you don't celebrate having cancer -- because cancer sucks.
(And hey -- it doesn't mean we treat people with cancer badly or anything, but nobody's trying to argue that cancer is a superior state of being because it aligns with someone's politics)
Once I was talking about this concept and someone tried to counter me by saying "I like how you admit that it goes for everyone except the people it doesn’t go for. Solid grounding." I responded by going "Yes, well good arguments require taking into account all the facts. Bad arguments refuse to consider facts that don't fit." People who live in the real world have to deal with reality, and reality is messy sometimes. Sometimes stuff that never happens happens. It doesn't mean that the rule isn't a general rule, just that sometimes the universe surprises us. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 22:52:49 JST
sj_zero
https://youtu.be/J7XuGz5NFB4
Very real video. Lots of the time you want people to think you're broke and deeply in debt because Crabs in a bucket is real and once people think you have money they're like "oh can I borrow some money?" But it isn't a loan, you'll never see that money again. One good reason not just to be frugal, but humble and not braggadocios when you succeed. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 01:52:56 JST
sj_zero
I've been using the amazfit bip for years because my pebble watches all died, but the pebble was head and shoulders better in many ways. More conventional smart watches are actually terrible and non-starters. I'm not charging my watch every night, that's stupid. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Jan-2025 07:19:09 JST
sj_zero
Funny story.
Our daycare isn't run by an illegal immigrant. It's run by a girl whose family has probably been in this country for hundreds of years. She learned how to run a daycare from her mother, who also runs a daycare in this city.
But interesting thing. Thanks in part to Trudeau's immigration policy which has filled every available space with people from other countries, this young lady is shutting down her daycare, and shes leaving the city she was born and raised in. He's doing that because she can't find a place to live and run her business at essentially any reasonable price.
Food for thought when the rich and powerful on the left go on TV to bemoan their poor unloved indentured servant class who pick their cotton and raise their kids for them. Many stories have more than one side. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 27-Jan-2025 09:31:26 JST
sj_zero
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEgwnhLHy3g
Really cool 3d printer design
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