clawsofpropinquity:

nostalgebraist:

Reading sexbot discourse makes me wonder if anyone has extended the same arguments (about objectification, creepiness, etc.) to the imaginary people in ordinary sexual fantasies – like the ones in your head – who, after all, we just place into arbitrary situations according to our moment-by-moment whims, much like dolls / action figures except that we don’t have to manipulate them with our physical hands

… like, that popped into my head as an objection to the analogous sexbot argument, but maybe there’s someone for whom that modus tollens is a modus ponens, what do I know

I have heard rumours on twitter about an obscure forum called wddp.org, that was set up as an off-topic discussion forum for the cynical SomethingAwful troll board Helldump, only to be overrun by by exiles from  the more idealistic troll board Laissez’s Faire which had itself been destroyed following an admin sanctioned raid by the edgiest of the troll-boards, FYAD. This dramatic origin left it’s inhabitants factitious and paranoid, and they quickly splintered into various cults and forums. 

One rumour concerns the poster slashie, mod of the successor forum post place, who convinced her followers that sexual fantasies violated the consent of the imagined and were thus reactionary (anime had been anathematized much earlier, and thus did not enter into their calculus). The following custom thus arose among them: each poster distributed among their fellows certain explicit photos of themselves, and received similar images in return; thereafter if they wished to fantasize they would simply send an AIM to a member of their circle asking if permission to masturbate to a mental image of them. Naturally, they did not assume consent based on prior yeses but begged permission each time. This went on until they fell apart for unrelated reasons.

(Obviously this is to be taken with an enormous pinch of salt, as I’ve never posted on wddp.org or postplace and am basing this on stories told by ex-Something Awful posters, who were early innovators in an aspect of our internet hellscape that has become horribly relevant in recent years: that the line between ‘deadpan satirical drabble’ and ‘straight-up lies’ can be very thin, and when the intended message is “this person sucks” neither the intended audience nor the writer have much interest in clarifications)

I googled this and got as far as some thread on another forum containing the paragraph

the wddp split is so funny because each branch has its own unique reputation for insanity now, like the posthaven branch has got the dogfuckers and the slashie anime wars, while the zzone division has the dprk/lion assad stuyff and “actually, it’s leftist to vote for trump.” thats certainly how it all appears to bemused outsiders anyway

and then thought “I’m glad I’m in a mental and emotional place, these days, where I can look at something like this and be amused for five seconds and then close the tab, rather than diving headlong in the rabbit hole out of some combination of ‘fear that I am these people, in a bad way’ and ‘fear that I am not these people, in a bad way’”

Anyway, I’ve closed that tab, and I’ve also downed the recommended enormous pinch of salt, but still, interesting stuff

(via clawsofpropinquity)

human interaction, according to code geass

nostalgebraist:

C. C. saves Lelouch’s life twice, and grants him a magical ability that is instrumental in his rise to power

After the second time she saves him, Lelouch makes this big speech about how he’s about to say something that he will never say again and it sounds really heavy and dramatic and then he just says … “thank you”

C. C. responds by exclaiming “no one’s ever thanked me before!” and then bursting into tears of joy

I was re-reading old posts and this one struck me as very reminiscent of Dunk and Abby’s interactions in The Sky is Yours (thanks again to @the-thrill-be-damned for recommending this book to me)

One of my recent mantras has been “much that is complex is shit”

Which is primarily meant to be a caution against over-complex theorizing, but I enjoy how it works at different levels verbally – many complicated ideas are bad via overfitting (shit in the figurative sense), but also, when a correct account of something has to be complicated (high Kolmogorov complexity), it’s often because that thing was part of the meaningless variegated noise of physical reality (such as literal fecal matter, which contains a lot of bacterial diversity etc. if you happen to care) – things that aren’t compressible aren’t eo ipso important to us, in fact frequently it’s the opposite

There was something wonderful about that brief period after people on my tumblr dash had started getting into arguments about “antis,” but before I got wise to what the word “anti” meant in that context, so that it was possible for me to entertain the idea that I was witnessing a Skub-style abstractification of all human disputes

There will (almost surely) be no new Almost Nowhere chapter tonight – I’ve been feeling kinda depressed all afternoon and evening (same thing that’s been coming and going all winter), which makes it impossible to write.

I really really don’t want to fall off the wagon of frequent updates (or frequent by my standards, anyway), so I’ll try to write whenever I can in the coming week  and see what happens.  (“When I can” is pretty constrained on weekdays, though.)

nostalgebraist:

Reading sexbot discourse makes me wonder if anyone has extended the same arguments (about objectification, creepiness, etc.) to the imaginary people in ordinary sexual fantasies – like the ones in your head – who, after all, we just place into arbitrary situations according to our moment-by-moment whims, much like dolls / action figures except that we don’t have to manipulate them with our physical hands

… like, that popped into my head as an objection to the analogous sexbot argument, but maybe there’s someone for whom that modus tollens is a modus ponens, what do I know

A number of people responded to this by talking about people who moralizing attraction to imaginary people, like fictional characters.

That isn’t what I’m talking about.  I’m aware that people disapprove of certain sexual fantasies, even if they stay in fantasy.  I’m talking about disapproval of the very act of having sexual fantasies, on the grounds that we interact with fantasy characters (sexual or not) in a way that resembles how we interact, outside our minds, with objects like dolls.  Placing them in medias res in whatever situations we choose, jump-cutting from one situation to another the moment it strikes our fancy, etc.

(I realize that objecting to these kinds of things is not the only anti-sexbot argument, maybe it’s even a straw man, I don’t know, I’m not actually trying to parse the sexbot discourse here, just make a weird tangential riff on it)

Now, Giant Despair had a wife, and her name was Diffidence.

When children take a standardized test shortly after a neighborhood murder, their scores suffer.