TheRtRevKaiser's recent activity

  1. Comment on Excerpts from actual one-star Amazon.com reviews of books from Time’s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present in ~books

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link
    Hemingway do be like that, though

    The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
    Here’s the first half of the book: ‘We had dinner and a few drinks. We went to a cafe and talked and had some drinks. We ate dinner and had a few drinks. Dinner. Drinks. More dinner. More drinks. We took a cab here (or there) in Paris and had some drinks, and maybe we danced and flirted and talked sh*t about somebody. More dinner. More drinks. I love you, I hate you, maybe you should come up to my room, no you can’t’… I flipped through the second half of the book a day or two later and saw the words ‘dinner’ and ‘drinks’ on nearly every page and figured it wasn’t worth the risk.

    Hemingway do be like that, though

    30 votes

  2. Comment on What do folks carry in their hiking/backpacking/camping first aid kits these days? in ~hobbies

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link Parent
    Depending on where/when you're hiking in the US, even if it's national or state forest/parkland, hunting may be allowed. It's not completely unheard of for hikers to be shot at, although I don't...

    unless you expect the trees to shoot at you

    Depending on where/when you're hiking in the US, even if it's national or state forest/parkland, hunting may be allowed. It's not completely unheard of for hikers to be shot at, although I don't think it's a particularly common occurrence by any means.

    9 votes

  3. Comment on MP3 player recommendations in ~tech

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link
    I was going to recommend the SanDisk Clip Jam that my 7th grader keeps with him pretty much all the time, but it seems to not be available any longer.

    I was going to recommend the SanDisk Clip Jam that my 7th grader keeps with him pretty much all the time, but it seems to not be available any longer.

    5 votes

  4. Comment on US Government UFO document release in ~society

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link
    Why does that web page look like it's from a 2005-era COD ARG? It's like a video-game brained LARP of a government website...

    Why does that web page look like it's from a 2005-era COD ARG? It's like a video-game brained LARP of a government website...

    19 votes

  5. Comment on Did wokeness leave us worse off? (gifted link) in ~society

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link Parent
    From looking at the discussion on this thread, it kind of seems like everyone's perception of this whole topic has been primarily shaped by online "discourse" to the point where the whole thing...

    But the people who seemed most riled up about 'all these pronouns being forced on us' seem to hang out online more than offline.

    From looking at the discussion on this thread, it kind of seems like everyone's perception of this whole topic has been primarily shaped by online "discourse" to the point where the whole thing seems incredibly warped. And you can't just say "online isn't real life" because of course it is - an increasingly significant proportion of our time is spent in online spaces, which is something that I am coming to believe may be much more of a negative than a positive.

    But I think Twitter in particular probably had an outsized effect on shaping people's thinking about this subject, and Twitter is such a distortion of reality. It functioned to amplify the loudest, most strident voices in every discussion, and was prone to forming mobs about every topic, not just this one. There are a lot of comments about progressives "crucifying" people for getting pronouns wrong, and I don't doubt that happened, but I suspect it was primarily driven by Twitter and similar online spaces. I think a huge component of our current political/social disfunction is mainly due all of us being subjected to a social experiment where me move all of our collective discourse onto a set of platforms that seem to have been the worst possible places for those discussions to take place in any meaningful, substantive way.

    4 votes

  6. Comment on Did wokeness leave us worse off? (gifted link) in ~society

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link Parent
    I spent an inordinate amount of time for a couple of years on 4chan in the mid 2000s. I'm not sure what drew me there, and I'm not sure why I stayed, but there was a lot of what I perceived to be...

    Ironic racism is still racism.

    I spent an inordinate amount of time for a couple of years on 4chan in the mid 2000s. I'm not sure what drew me there, and I'm not sure why I stayed, but there was a lot of what I perceived to be "ironic" hate there, and I thought it was very funny and edgy at the time. It wasn't until later that I really processed that: 1. It didn't actually seem to be ironic for an appreciable portion of the userbase. And 2. It was becoming less ironic in myself.

    I got out of that space, mostly because I started dating seriously and rediscovered an irl social life, and it took years to unpack attitudes that I had picked up without realizing them, all from what I perceived as stuff that was purely "for the lulz".

    I know it's a cliche, but I think that's because it's true, that you eventually "become the mask you wear" or whatever. I know that's not universal, but it's something I think about a lot. I've been trying over the years to just say the things I feel, and not try and wrap everything in layers of irony until nobody knows what I actually think or feel (including myself). I think it's just better if we can be earnest, and fuck it if that makes me cringe.

    11 votes

  7. Comment on Did wokeness leave us worse off? (gifted link) in ~society

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link Parent
    God, I wanted to hear this more than anything, lol. I was so excited for the possibility that the writers were setting up a hero that didn't have a lineage. So many of the themes in TLJ were so...

    said something that fans didn't want to hear (that Rey was nobody)

    God, I wanted to hear this more than anything, lol. I was so excited for the possibility that the writers were setting up a hero that didn't have a lineage. So many of the themes in TLJ were so fresh in SW and it was so invigorating to me. The reaction was genuinely disheartening, and the (total lack of) follow up basically killed any interest I had in Star Wars for years.

    10 votes

  8. Comment on Did wokeness leave us worse off? (gifted link) in ~society

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link Parent
    I'm like, 75% sure it was an attack helicopter thing

    I'm like, 75% sure it was an attack helicopter thing

    3 votes

  9. Comment on Did wokeness leave us worse off? (gifted link) in ~society

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link Parent
    I mean, there are plenty of situations where you might be in a group setting, talking about something that someone present did or said. Like, a work meeting where you say something like, "I asked...

    I mean, there are plenty of situations where you might be in a group setting, talking about something that someone present did or said. Like, a work meeting where you say something like, "I asked Brenda to research x topic, and she will be reporting on her findings in a moment" or whatever. It's not that far fetched. I agree that people's problems with pronouns are way overblown, but it's not that hard to imagine lots of scenarios where you might use a pronoun for someone in a casual setting where there are more than 2 people involved.

    6 votes

  10. Comment on Did wokeness leave us worse off? (gifted link) in ~society

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link Parent
    Yeah college is definitely a space where people should be able to experiment with identity and figure out what works for them. I assume that means that sometimes you get people who are a little...

    Yeah college is definitely a space where people should be able to experiment with identity and figure out what works for them. I assume that means that sometimes you get people who are a little annoying with how they're putting that out into the world, but that's to be expected and honestly "a little annoying" isn't exactly the end of the world. Young people are frequently a little annoying, it goes with the territory. I'm glad your students have somebody safe they can try pronouns out with.

    The only genuinely off-putting experience I've had surrounding pronouns was someone insisting that others should use capitalized pronouns because this individual identified as divine, and accusing people of transphobia when they balked at that (or just didn't clock that "They/Them" was different than "they/them" to this person). It blew over pretty quickly, though, and this was in a pretty obscure, very lefty online space so it's not like that's anybody's daily experience.

    I guess in the long run, I don't think any of this should be that big of a deal to anybody. Sure there might be some friction with having to remember someone's pronouns or being corrected, but social friction and etiquette are a thing that people deal all the time, and have dealt with forever. In some modern societies, you need to be conscious of someone's age, gender, and social status to know how you need to address them, after all, but American's get SO mad about the singular they, of all things.

    2 votes

  11. Comment on Did wokeness leave us worse off? (gifted link) in ~society

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link Parent
    Another fucking installment in "the right has no agency". I'm so fucking sick of braindead legacy media takes blaming the (sometimes annoying) twitter-left for people embracing literal Nazi...

    Another fucking installment in "the right has no agency". I'm so fucking sick of braindead legacy media takes blaming the (sometimes annoying) twitter-left for people embracing literal Nazi ideology like they have no control over their own goddamn actions and beliefs.

    42 votes

  12. Comment on Did wokeness leave us worse off? (gifted link) in ~society

    TheRtRevKaiser
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've encountered a person who insisted on neopronouns and didn't also include they/them as an option, and every time I did it was in some...

    I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've encountered a person who insisted on neopronouns and didn't also include they/them as an option, and every time I did it was in some very niche online space. And I'm not totally sure that at least one of those times wasn't someone doing an "attack helicopter" style troll, either. I'm not saying that people who only prefer neopronouns don't exist - and if I met someone who went by fae/faer of xe/xem I'd do my best to honor that, although I've always been a little iffy on how xe/xem is supposed to be pronounced so if it was irl I'd probably fumble it pretty hard - but it's got to be a vanishingly small percentage of the population as a whole for all the attention it gets.

    12 votes

  13. Comment on “Dungeon Crawler Carl” now available to libraries exclusively on Libby in ~books

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link
    Congrats to Matt Dinniman, I suppose, but it kind of sucks that it's going to be siloed to Overdrive's walled garden. My library system doesn't use Libby, we have access to Cloud Library and...

    Congrats to Matt Dinniman, I suppose, but it kind of sucks that it's going to be siloed to Overdrive's walled garden. My library system doesn't use Libby, we have access to Cloud Library and Hoopla, and I'm not thrilled about the exclusive nature of these apps - it seems to go against the whole ethos of public libraries, although I know that libraries are in a difficult spot when it comes to ebooks.

    15 votes

  14. Comment on Native American Indian porcupine quillwork, how to do porky quillwork in ~arts

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link
    This is really fascinating and the examples are beautiful. I was having a hard time visualizing how they went from porcupine quills to what I was seeing in the pictures, though, until I followed...

    This is really fascinating and the examples are beautiful. I was having a hard time visualizing how they went from porcupine quills to what I was seeing in the pictures, though, until I followed some of the links and realized that I was still thinking of the quills as hard/brittle when it (pretty clearly) states that they can be folded and wrapped. Very cool stuff, thank you for posting!

    6 votes

  15. Comment on Clayface | Official teaser in ~movies

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link Parent
    Yeah a warning would have been appreciated, although I noped out as soon as I saw somebody cutting on somebody else's face. No thank you, lol.

    Yeah a warning would have been appreciated, although I noped out as soon as I saw somebody cutting on somebody else's face. No thank you, lol.

    6 votes

  16. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of April 20 in ~society

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link Parent
    No you're right, it's definitely pretty mask off. It just seems like there's enough vagueness for them to say "well of course we didn't mean that" if pressed

    No you're right, it's definitely pretty mask off. It just seems like there's enough vagueness for them to say "well of course we didn't mean that" if pressed

    1 vote

  17. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of April 20 in ~society

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link Parent
    The whole thing is pretty vague - I suspect that's intentional to give them just enough cover to dodge specific accusations if needed while still appealing to techno-feudalists and conservatives....

    The whole thing is pretty vague - I suspect that's intentional to give them just enough cover to dodge specific accusations if needed while still appealing to techno-feudalists and conservatives. There's some language that seems to me to be trying to build more bridges between social conservatives and the tech right, which is troubling to me.

    1 vote

  18. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of April 20 in ~society

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link Parent
    Yeah I've been seeing a lot of chatter about reinstating a draft coming from the right recently, which is deeply concerning to me.

    Yeah I've been seeing a lot of chatter about reinstating a draft coming from the right recently, which is deeply concerning to me.

    4 votes

  19. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of April 20 in ~society

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link Parent
    Given the sentence about free email pointing toward silicon valley, and other places in the post where they point toward a perceived need for silicon valley to take more of a lead in defense and...

    Given the sentence about free email pointing toward silicon valley, and other places in the post where they point toward a perceived need for silicon valley to take more of a lead in defense and crime prevention (plus prior knowledge of the kinds of thought these yahoos are immersed in) I feel pretty comfortable with my reading of that section. Could be that I'm wrong.

    6 votes

  20. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of April 20 in ~society

    TheRtRevKaiser
    Link
    I wasn't sure the most appropriate place to post this article about Palantir's Manifesto that was posted over the weekend. There's nothing particularly surprising here if you've read much about...

    I wasn't sure the most appropriate place to post this article about Palantir's Manifesto that was posted over the weekend. There's nothing particularly surprising here if you've read much about Thiel's particular brand of Yarvinite madness, but it is surprising in how mask-off it is about a number of things.

    1. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

    This statement isn't the most extreme or specific, maybe, but it was the most surprising to me in that it seems to state plainly the feeling of this group that they are the "ruling class" of America.

    8 votes