Hatereading Jim of neoreactionary fame/infamy is one of Esther and my’s shared joys, and this recent post caused both of us to nearly collapse with laughter when I read it out loud today, so I feel I should broadcast its existence more widely

(CW for PUA stuff, and for very explicit racism out of the blue at the end, the “women really want [stuff] even if they say they don’t” attitude in full disturbing form, and for what I can only unhelpfully describe as “Jim being Jim”)

Contains a anecdote about Jim taking his girlfriend and her good friend to a resort in the hope of having a threesome, which goes about as well as you’d expect – but is only brought up to set the scene for, well, I’d better not spoil it

If you aren’t familiar with Jim of neoreactionary fame/infamy, he’s very … uh, distinctive, and that blog post is, yes, what he sounds like all the time

(I should not be on tumblr but I am posting this to get it out of my head)

One thing that is fun is when people who talk about IQ in casual conversations talk about “verbal IQ” as though it is “the part about being good at words as opposed to the part about being good at STEM stuff”

You probably know this already but on tests* where there is such a thing as a “verbal IQ” subscore, it corresponds to subtests that require verbal responses rather than just to those having to do with words – for instance, the Arithmetic subtest is categorized as “verbal.”

And when discrepancies between verbal IQ (VIQ) and performance IQ (PIQ, the other part) occur, the outcomes aren’t what you’d predict if you thought the two were “wordy stuff” and “mathy stuff”:

Tests of reading, spelling, and mathematics all yielded mean scores for the PIQ greater than VIQ group at a standard deviation below the mean for the VIQ greater than PIQ group.

And this result (in 11-year-olds) wasn’t just a consequence of one group having greater overall IQ than the other:

The absolute value of the VIQ-PIQ score discrepancy (regardless of discrepancy direction) was not significantly correlated with WISC-R Full Scale IQ score at the age of 7 years (r = .028, p > .05), at age 9 (r = .048, p > .05), or at age 11 (r = .042, p > .05). Thus, VIQ-PIQ discrepancies were considered without reference to level of performance.

(The bit about “absolute value” here is odd, but I’m assuming they did it the obvious way instead of the obviously wrong way)

*WISC and WAIS are the ones I know of, although the new versions like to split it further into 4 subscores and sometimes only the 4 are reported (AFAIK the old “VIQ” used the tests that are now divided into “Verbal Comprehension” and “Working Memory”)

Storming The Ivory on Homestuck again (I’m sorry, I am just fully embracing this blackrom crush now, why bottle up my resentment)

Cascade is, from the standpoint of the narrative, effectively a kind of Trickster Mode. Cascade represents a really dramatic set of leaps forward in the GAME THAT THE CHARACTERS ARE PLAYING where a lot seems to get resolved but very little beyond immediate game construct concerns are really fixed. God Tier gets a similar treatment: God Tier is positioned early on as a thing that will solve the problems of the players. Later on, however, this is called into question in a number of ways, such as the conversation where Karkat and Dave discuss the Gift of the Gab ability and Karkat’s assumption that it allows God Tier players to better communicate on an emotional level. It’s a great example of game abstractions taking the place, for the characters, of actual real attempts to deal with all the emotional baggage that they’re left with over the course of playing this awful fucked up hellgame.

[…]

And Homestuck as a narrative is difficult because the characters resist our own ideas of what’s best for them–our assumptions about whether or not they should complete their quests, who gets to count as the “real” version of a character, and what constitutes a sufficiently heroic and epic victory. (How dare they not heroically sacrifice themselves for our dramatic enjoyment! How dare they not resolve all of their problems in a neat and tidy way!)

[me, explaining that you and I should be treated as entirely interchangeable substitutes for other versions of ourselves who have had profoundly different experiences, rendering the difference between more and less mature instances of the same person moot, because we are all mere contributors to the same bodiless, timeless, immortal Ultimate Self – an insight I gained after getting permanently and non-consensually fused with another completely distinct person]: this is what real, tough personal growth looks like, without any fantasy bullshit quick fixes,

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Act 6 gets a lot of punishment in the fandom, and the ending of Homestuck has received a similar beatdown, and in a sense I can see why that’s the case, because ultimately Homestuck is a difficult, complex, and, yeah, literary work. But we’ve been experimenting with form and narrative for about a century now in literature. The idea of texts needing to follow absolute standards of Good Writing died pretty much the moment Ulysses hit the presses.

sorry sterne, sorry defoe and richardson, sorry shakespeare, sorry murasaki, sorry cervantes, sorry dante, sorry rabelais, sorry scoffing scholar of lanling, sorry every other pre-20C literary innovator, but actually, in this “retcon” timeline, everything followed perfect rigid conventions until the joyce nation attacked, and none of your funny little ideas ever caught on

I should not keep posting about how I think some new Storming The Ivory article is bad.  We get it, I don’t like that blog.

But this new one is … really bad, and it’s about Homestuck, which is a topic where I don’t think I come in with unusually strong biases, unlike some other topics like Undertale, and … auughhhhh “social construct” is not an unfamiliar concept, you do not somehow have to be ignorant of this widely known concept to dislike the ending, people who talk about character arcs aren’t necessarily expecting rigid rules, and even if they did the rigid rules might not be Hero’s Journey rules which have their own specific problems that one can critique in specific without necessarily critiquing “rules” in general, who even is the audience of this post meant to be, it’s either extremely patronizing or aimed at a very weird specific subset of people, what the fuck

I’m sorry

To be actually just petty for a moment: I just flashed back to that one time Aaron Diaz patted himself on the back for foreshadowing some development ten years in advance (or roughly that number), like this was some feat of chessmaster plotting

Except that in panel count the foreshadowing was actually pretty recent, it only took ten years because Diaz updates so slowly

I keep wanting to post something about Aaron Diaz’s Will Eisner screwup, even though (1) I don’t actually have anything worthwhile to say about it and (2) I always feel bad when I diss someone who’s already getting widely dissed on the internet, because the internet can turn ugly on a dime once enough people are dissing someone, even if it’s totally justified

It’s just such a strange error he made, though, wow

He said Will Eisner was a “shining example of how far you can go when you’re a mediocre white man,” and I didn’t know what to make of this because I knew almost nothing about Will Eisner, so I looked up his Wikipedia page and immediately ran into stuff like

He grew up poor, and the family moved frequently.^[6] Young Eisner often got into physical confrontations when subject to antisemitism from his schoolmates.^[7]His family were not orthodox followers of Judaism; Eisner himself, while he prided his cultural background, turned against the religion when his family was denied entry to a synagogue over lack of money for admission.^[8]

The family situation was especially dire following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that marked the beginning of the Great Depression.^[12] In 1930, the situation was so desperate that Eisner’s mother demanded that he, at thirteen, find some way to contribute to the family’s income. He entered working life selling newspapers on street corners, a competitive job where the toughest boys fought for the best locations.^[13]

A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (Baronet Books, October 1978) is an early example of an American graphic novel, combining thematically linked short stories into a single square-bound volume. Eisner continued with a string of graphic novels that tell the history of New York’s immigrant communities, particularly Jews, including The Building, A Life Force, Dropsie Avenue and To the Heart of the Storm.

Which is just all so far from anything conjured up by the phrase “how far you can go when you’re a mediocre white man.”  Presumably a case could be made that Eisner is overrated, but it, uh, doesn’t exactly sound like he had his reputation handed to him on a silver platter on account of his ethnicity and overall privilege

I actually do not know how someone comes to make a statement like the one Diaz made?  That’s not meant as an extra-emphatic way of saying he’s wrong; I’m honestly confused.  My question is “what was he thinking?”, and it isn’t rhetorical

Thanks to one of those tumblr posts about his meetups, I have been hatereading Roosh V, and mostly just noticing the same old thing that always stands out to me when I read PUA types

… which is that their attitudes don’t even strike me as masculine according to the indices of masculinity I have in my head?  They’re close to a certain “sleeps around successfully and doesn’t care about women’s feelings” masculine archetype – which ofc would not be good even if they perfectly embodied it – but their version of it just seems off.  It’s like they’re boiling that lifestyle down to a small set of theoretical criteria, then optimizing hard for only those criteria, tossing out a lot of not-actually-incidental stuff in the process.

For instance Roosh seems obsessed with having orgasms – which he refers to as “getting his nut.”  He’s pretty explicit about the fact that for him women are simply vehicles for getting more pleasurable, err, nuts than he’d be able to through masturbation alone.  This leads to some strange choices of focus:

A man’s nut is sacred, and for her to impede that should be criminal. I’m serious. One time a girl postponed my nut and then I lost it completely. I couldn’t get it back and I was left with minor groin pain. I never contacted her again.

Not only is this hyperbolically whiny (minor groin pain, horror of horrors), it’s also just a really weird view of sex.  Sex has many facets and can be pleasurable in many ways; it’s not just thankless labor in the Orgasm Mines, all for naught if one’s “nut” is “lost completely.”  It comes off as the attitude of a horny teenager who still doesn’t have a perfectly accurate picture of how sex works.  (And thus precisely not like a worldly womanizer.  Just try to envision, say, James Bond talking this way.)

Oh cool, a “don’t fuck these men” post that has several points that basically imply “don’t fuck poor men” and then goes on to include an perfunctory nod to “undermining capitalism from the inside,” presented as a good thing the writer and reader are obviously doing

who hatereads the hatereaders?

Because this is just too WTF for me not to mention, WIlson’s other recent misdeeds include claiming that a woman he chose to house with an abuser when she was 13 is now not qualified to speak about her own abuse … because she clearly is in no position to judge what counts as normal sexual behavior … because her current husband once performed a video art piece in which he appeared nude.

If you can stomach the guy, he makes for top-shelf hatereading