what else? in The Simpsons, "beer".
nuclear weapons, giant meteor, and other ways of extincting humanity would also solve all the world's problems, but it's hard to make the case that that any of them cause all the world's problems.
although violent revenge ("justice") for past violence is common, violence or a cycle of violence is usually a symptom of a deeper underlying problem, perhaps resource shortage.
set yourself up with a mortgage and mouths to feed, so that you may do the horrible thing that you want to do.
(expanding from "yuppie Nuremberg defense".)
Prey (2022) presented a neat concept. fanfic, attempting to improve (despite not having watched the movie):
backstories, not sure what order they should go in.
Predator hunts a grizzly bear. Predator struggles mightily but is victorious. (because grizzly bears are monstrously strong, monumentally tough animals.) (mostly unrelated comment from elsewhere: is it wrong to root for the bear in The Revenant?) depower Predator as necessary so that the fight is close: Predators of this era have yet to develop all the technologies seen in the 1987 film. it takes its hard-won bear skull as a trophy.
a Comanche hunting group hunts anything but a bear (that comes later). the group is mostly male and is lead by a male, but the protagonist, Naru, is one of several female hunters in the group. the group treats the inclusion of females as completely unremarkable. Naru demonstrates extraordinary skill. the hunting group leader retires. the tribe chooses Naru to be their new hunting leader by universal acclamation based on respect for her skill.
the retired hunting group leader mentors Naru on leadership and teaches her more hunting wisdom. this all establishes context that the group functions well, including transferring knowledge. perhaps there is a little bit of gender commentary: the elders note that it has been many generations since the hunting group has been lead by a female, but it is not without precedent. it has been foretold that when a female rises to leader, something special will happen.
Naru leads the group to hunt a grizzly bear, because reasons. unlike Predator's earlier struggle, the Comanche are efficient and effective. they use teamwork; they use terrain to their advantage; they anticipate the grizzly's behavior; they get maximum effectiveness out of their weapons and technology. the grizzly never stands a chance. perhaps Predator in camouflage witnesses the hunt. perhaps this is the moment it decides that humans, not grizzlies, (not xenomorphs), are the most worthy opponents on the planet, or in the universe.
the Comanche take and use all parts of the grizzly.
despite having killed the grizzly smoothly, Naru reviews the hunt, identifies weaknesses and inefficiencies, and works -- leads -- at correcting and improving them. the contrasting grizzly hunts foreshadow that the Comanche are going to win the plot-inevitable battle against Predator. perhaps the audience even wonders how badly Predator is going to get destroyed by this well functioning hunting team.
(this mirrors the setup of the 1987 film. Predator did not go up against a random group of humans, but rather a competent military team.)
Predator goes (FTL is involved) and gets some tech upgrades, so maybe it won't be defeated so badly. the upgraded Predator steps off its ship and the showdown begins, or so it believes.
surprise, the Comanche, in part through Naru's extraordinary perception, have already long been aware of Predator, both from the obvious clue of the decapitated abandoned bear carcass from earlier, and through using their tracking skills to discern Predator's presence, behavior, abilities, and habits, despite its camouflage. this was one of the reasons Naru pushed her team to keep getting better, even though their grizzly hunt had been a walk in the park. they have already deduced much about Predator despite no direct interaction. perhaps they have modified the environment to their advantage, constructing traps.
surprise, one of the first things the Comanche do is disable Predator's ship, having deduced its existence, capabilities, and weaknesses. Predator is now trapped on the planet. both parties must now kill or be killed. who is predator? who is prey? title card drop.
action happens, the Comanche win, yay. coup de grace is delivered by a bear. legacy, denouement, etc.
perhaps a subplot about even though hunting is glorious, killing kills a little bit of your soul each time.
post-credits humor: Predator has an easy time killing idiotic French fur traders in Rube Goldberg-style human traps.
meta gender commentary: is it better to depict a world functioning well without gender discrimination, or a world with discrimination but women battling it and succeeding? our fanfic does the first, original Prey did the second. (Star Trek did the first and was lauded for it.) in original Prey, the protagonist having to simultaneously fight the patriarchy and Predator, and succeeding against both stretches credulity. but our fanfic invites accusations of Mary Sue (future post ihbpggqd).
among animals that play, how much less play do the adults do than the young? (how to quantify amount of play?) how does the seemingly dramatic decrease in play by adult humans compare with other animals?
is it only animals that play?
phobia: irrational fear of the unfamiliar.
philia: irrational lack of fear of the familiar. (this definition is a bit of a stretch.)
when is either irrational? quantify how irrational.
variations on the classic artificial intelligence task of mimicking a specific human (the Target) while being questioned by an Interrogator:
with or without the Target's prior cooperation.
with or without the Interrogator suspecting they might be interacting with an AI; i.e., is it an adversarial interrogation?
communication medium could be text, audio, or audiovisual.
AI getting good at mimicking a human in full audio and video ("deepfakes") will cause problems with remote authentication. (such AI will break one method of establishing identity in porn, now used by many sites.) such AI seems likely to be accessible to normal people in the near future. like any other tool, AI can be used for good or evil. good: you could have an avatar.
previously, transmitting a program of a person.
both people lying on their side, next to each other. 4 possibilities: big spoon, little spoon, face to face, back to back. we do not count mirror images (who is on which side), even though maybe we should because which hand is free (the dextrous one or not) might matter for touching activities in cuddle.
bodies stacked vertically, each person facing up or down: 8 possibilities.
the above do not consider variations of where the legs go (future post tiohqbtv).
one person on their front or back, other person on their side facing in: 4 possibilities.
one person on their back, knees up and legs resting on top of other person's legs, other person on their side facing in, legs underneath the other person's knees: 2 possibilities. we do consider legs (distinguishing from the above 4) because they make a big difference on how the position feels -- here, the person on their back feels very much on top. the person on their side gets good access with their free arm to the other person's genitals.
below are some more, similar in spirit to side-by-side back-to-back counted above. possibly less exciting, but mere physical contact can be entertaining.
one person on their front or back, other person on their side facing away: 4 possibilities.
one person on their front or back, other person on their front or back, side by side: 4 possibilities.
26 total. perhaps they can be mapped to letters of the alphabet.
not considering non-parallel bodies or bodies not aligned head to toe, for example, 69.
the title is a 5-word short story of a similar theme as, but one word shorter than, "for sale: baby shoes, never worn".
joke: my invented religion is better than yours because we get 72 and a half virgins. if you are wondering what half a virgin is, let's just say my invented God is worse than your invented God. a lot worse: integers are not the only thing that sum to the first 72.
* * *
72 virgins is story that Americans love to demonize Islam with, because it is an incentive we especially relate well to. that we keep bringing it up says more about American society than it does about Islam. we can easily imagine a society that structurally denies a some social classes access to high quality women, and then that class becoming so frustrated with their situation that incentives like 72 virgins would be highly effective. we can easily imagine such a society because it is our own, one that a great many of us regularly experience as incels or actively participate as perpetrators of involuntary celibacy or as allies of perpetrators.
what other societies are structured this way? (or, which aren't?) presumably whoever was the target audience of those sections of Quran and hadith.
at least our society isn't a lot worse: a hypothetical society in which the privileged dismember young girls and has sex with their mutilated remains would be one that would relate well to an incentive of 72 1/2 virgins.
trial by combat might become agreed to be an acceptable method of justice in certain situations if it is agreed that other available "more civilized" methods of justice are horribly unfair, and improving them seems impossible.
inspired by Game of Thrones.
was this ever historically the case? on one hand, it would be a bit surprising for upper and lower classes to agree on such an issue. on the other hand, it's not too difficult to imagine everyone agreeing that, in certain situations, all other existing non-combat systems of justice cannot administer justice fairly. such a situation can happen when one party in the legal conflict has a huge amount of control and power over the non-combat justice systems.
people also have to agree that fairness is a desirable goal of a justice system.
sometimes it might look like a combat justice system is just letting the poor fight along themselves, unwilling to devote resources to either party. but this could fit within this framework. determining the truth might be extremely difficult (expensive), and society, or the litigants, do not have the resources to do it, or changing society to allocate resources to determine the truth regarding conflicts among the poor is extremely difficult. attempting to administer justice in a non-combat way when there aren't resources to discover truth would result in whoever can bullshit better winning, which could be universally regarded as unfair.
are we in such a situation now? it's getting close to universally agreed that the American justice system is horribly unfair to (certain) African-Americans, and improving things seems very difficult. imagine the astronomically minuscule legal chances of a lower-class African-American man accused of a sex crime against a Pretty White Woman (cf. Missing White Woman syndrome): law enforcement violently coercing confessions, fabricating evidence, losing exonerating evidence, character witnesses willing to lie and purport the angelic and devilish characteristics to the victim and defendant respectively, and the defendant not having financial resources to legally defend himself from these perversions of the justice system. he's better off taking his chances in trial by combat. (or is he? even if he wins trial by combat, white society would come after him in a lynch mob.)
trial by combat is substantially different from letting God administer justice. if you want God to administer justice, better is to let a delicate random event decide: a coin flip, or the entrails of a randomly selected sacrificial animal. these have also been done. (when does society deem randomness to be an acceptable form of justice?)
who wins trial by combat? it's partially luck (or God), but unlike a coin flip, there's a lot of humanness involved, especially if both sides can call on champions to fight (and die) on their behalf. whether one person can recruit someone else as their champion may depend on the truths of the underlying conflict that a non-combat justice system cannot accurately extract (imperfect information).
recruiting a champion seems vaguely similar to recruiting a pro bono lawyer to be your champion in a non-combat justice system. however, the kind of person who can recruit a strong pro bono lawyer seems very different to someone who can recruit someone strong in combat.
war is of course another instance of conflict being solved by violence, and the question "who wins a war?" gets to similar issues as "who wins trial by combat?" but trial by combat has a feeling of being intentionally limited: the many parties who have stake in the outcome all agree that this one battle should decide the conflict, agree not to interfere with the battle beyond what the rules permit, and agree to stand by its outcome. in contrast, war does not have a feeling of being intentionally limited.
Masterworks/Creating a Champion includes an illustration of nude Link from early concept art for Breath of the Wild, nude because they hadn't yet figured out what he was going to wear. he's completely smooth down there because eventually he was going to have clothes.
it does inspire a game concept, perhaps a very ambitious mod, that allows and makes sense for the character to be nude. the concept is of a character completely alone -- no NPCs -- in a post-apocalyptic (but beautiful) world. Calamity was much worse than in Breath of the Wild: everyone died. the good news is, there is no one around to react to Link being nude.
this is doomed to be a less entertaining game because humans inherently like interacting with humans, but this game concept removes that.
replace all villages with ruins. add memories of how those places used to be alive and vibrant.
shop-only items naturally spawn and respawn elsewhere. this includes armor, including Grante's shop. (Link can be nude but doesn't have to be.) certain items start to naturally spawn only after activating some trigger.
similar to cuccos laying eggs, attacking an unkillable Hateno cow yields a bottle of milk. roasting milk on an open flame yields goat butter. (don't think about this.) you can also get milk from other (feral) domesticated mammals.
stables have a horse registration and teleportation vending machine.
replace appropriate side quest and shrine quest NPCs with books found in nearby ruins, or with the unidentified disembodied text overlay addressing Link. (this will get boring. NPCs had made the game fun.) side quests which must involve NPCs, for example, Tarry Town, are gone.
replace tech labs, great fairies, Hestu, and champion's weaponsmiths with crafting tables.
solving a Korok puzzle yields a Korok seed, but no floating Korok.
upgrade your house with your own hands.
you need to get to and into divine beasts without assistance.
rupees exist (for example, in treasure chests) but are completely useless.
minigame rules are explained in a book in nearby ruins.
Yiga clan hideout is a dungeon full of booby traps. Kohga is gone: just take (and permanently keep) the Thunder Helm after beating the traps. Yiga as a recurring enemy are gone.
the only characters other than monsters are the spirits of the Old Man and the Champions, the shrine monks, and, at the end, Zelda.
like Skyward Sword, it is implied that Link and Zelda then go on to repopulate the earth. Link therefore can't be all smooth down there.
according to the Starr report, after White House intern Monica Lewinsky gave President Bill Clinton a blowjob (with some of his ejaculate becoming historically preserved on her blue dress), he offered to reciprocate the oral sex, but she turned him down.
create porn in which she doesn't, because that would be interesting. the initial scenario of a young woman of low power sexually servicing a powerful man is so trite as to be boring. but the reciprocation, the reversal of the roles, the young woman then sitting in the most powerful chair in the world, in the most powerful room in the world, with the most powerful man in the world on his knees in front of her giving her sexual pleasure, is a mind-boggling inversion of the trope. what's going through her mind? (acting can hypothetically answer this.) how do sex and power interact? (writing and directing can hypothetically answer this.) (the real-life encounter didn't happen in the Oval Office, but porn can fix that.)
AL East:
Red Sox
Blue Sox
Orange Sox
Devil Sox
Pinstripe Sox
AL Central: Black Sox
both the Cardinals and Orioles were formerly the Brown Sox. (Red Birds, Orange Birds, Blue Birds.)
Colorado Purple Sox
many other Soxes exist among minor league baseball teams.
"you're Paul McCartney! Paul McCartney the goat fucker!"
if you tell this joke well one time, just one time, it may overshadow the rest of your career: https://youtu.be/A85ipUgy5B4
having fun is inherently enjoyable. then, having fun, especially in circumstances with adversity, also signals good mental health, high self-qi.
maybe having fun isn't ever inherently enjoyable: maybe it's this signaling that's only ever being enjoyed. would it be as much fun if you were alone and couldn't tell anyone?
what things require adversity to be fun? it wouldn't be as fun if the adversity were removed.
possible examples: scary amusement park rides, horror movies.
hazing.
previously similar: validation is fun.
future post: sex is fun.
in Ocean's 8, Qin Shaobo reprises his role from previous films of the franchise. but in having him, the producers missed a great opportunity to keep it an "all-female crew": there are a great many female gymnasts, acrobats, and contortionists who could have performed that (small) role, probably more available than male. some of them (e.g., Olympic gymnasts, Youtube stars) are even celebrities, if they wanted to follow the movie's theme of celebrity cameos all over the place.
a horror story's protagonist is a horror fiction writer (very meta). the protagonist writer realizes his writings are inspiring / causing "real" acts of violence in the world the fictional writer inhabits. but the writer cannot stop writing, because it is his source of income: he needs to eat. (horror trope: you are helpless to prevent bad.)
inspired by Stephen King, who was wealthy enough to cease publishing his novel Rage about a school shooting after reports that it inspired real school shootings. but what if he weren't?
the sequel:
the fictional horror writer thinks he has found a loophole to prevent his works from inducing violence: let his fictional perpetrators of violence be female. (he now co-authors with a woman in order to depict women accurately.)
this reflects how, in our real world, school shootings are disproportionately committed by males, and (therefore) although Stephen King has ceased publishing Rage, he has continued to make money off of Carrie, also a story of mass murder at a school by a troubled (female) student.
but back in the world of our fictional horror writer, things of course don't go as planned, because horror:
a "successful" women's rights movement happens in the fictional world of the horror writer, equalizing social conditions between men and women. women become just as likely to commit school shootings as men -- just as likely to become inspired to violence by fiction. perhaps the horror writer and his equally credited female co-author contributed to the success of the women's rights movement in their fictional world. (horror trope: you are your own undoing.)
(according to Wikipedia, Stephen King's wife helped him write Carrie from the perspective of a woman. she received dedication but not co-authorship.)
i strongly suspect there exists a large group of people who hold the following belief: the idea of anyone willingly consenting to have sex with me is preposterous. their belief is supported by their personal experiences of asking and being rejected, so is accurate.
for this group of people, the only realistic ways to achieve having sex are through force, psychological manipulation, deception, inducing or taking advantage of errors in judgment, or payment.
evaluate educational materials and policies advocating consent culture from the perspective of these people.
it might be horrifying to consider their point of view. on one hand, these people must exist. (look in yourself: there are people you don't want to have sex with. given the homogeneous nature of society, your preferences are likely correlated with those of other people in society. therefore, just among the people you don't want to have sex with, there is likely a good chunk of them that no one wants to have sex with.) on the other hand, these people may be so unpleasant to think about -- some may consider these people not worthy of human rights, people who should be destroyed -- that one may prefer to pretend they do not exist. i suspect a great many people, including policymakers, do the latter.
to these people, "consent culture" at best falls on deaf ears because consent is impossible. perhaps "deaf ears" plays out as follows: they ignore descriptions of what consent should be and instead calibrate "consent" to their own experiences, experiences populated with the non-consensual and not-very-consensual methods of achieving sex mentioned above. those experiences get calibrated as consent, objectively incorrect of course.
at worst, consent culture to these people may foster resentment against people who advocate consent culture: resentment against people who are ignorant (perhaps deliberately so, as described above) of this group of people, resentment against people who are using (or perceived to be using) consent culture as a weapon to make this group of people feel unwelcome, Othered.
inspired by considering a previously proposed method of advocating consent culture, one that focuses on encouraging people to avoid false accusations of rape. for these people, avoiding accusations of rape, whether false or true, would eliminate all possibility of having sex, so this avenue of advocacy would not be effective on them.
this group of people does not have a name. there is some overlap with incel (but there's a battle raging about whom that term encompasses, whether to characterize a group by its extremists, those who advocate violence), but this group also includes people who do achieve having sex, perhaps often, but through the non-consensual or not-very-consensual means listed above. "loser" might be pretty apt term though rarely precisely defined, though it too doesn't seem to encompass those who are good at force, deception, or manipulation.
both incel and loser are typically applied to men, but this group contains all genders.
possible difficulties with this model:
everyone has people who they want to have sex with, but the desire isn't mutual.
there are some people, on a good day, who will willingly consent to have sex with anybody, and this is well-known, so conversely nobody believes their chances are actually zero: you might get lucky. though perhaps the people who are the subject of this post (correctly) believe their chances of encountering or accessing (future post) such a person are zero.
here are digits in alphabetical order by their cardinal names in English zero, one, two, three, four, five,...
8 5 4 9 1 7 6 3 2 0
it is a permutation.
by their ordinal names zeroth, first, second, third, fourth, fifth,...
8 5 1 4 9 2 7 6 3 0
Latin ordinal numbers are primus secundus tertius quartus quintus sextus septimus octavus nonus decimus (no zero). English therefore has primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary, quinary, then what? probably something like sexary sextary sexnary sexanary sextanary sexenary sextenary, following Latin ordinals. one source says "senary", but I don't trust it, probably ashamed of "sex", or fearing censorship for it. (but "sedecim" not "sexdecim" is the Latin cardinal for 16, so there is precedent for shortening sex to se.) this matters because "senary" sorts before "septenary" in alphabetical order, but "sexary" sorts after. there might be similar disagreements about 7 through 9 (e.g., septenary or septinary or septary?), but they don't cause controversy in sorting.
for 0, we invent zeroary, because "nullary" belongs to a different sequence (with unary not primary, see below). zeroary means "the thing before primary", which seems nonsensical, but maybe there's a situation in which it makes sense. here are alphabetized Latin ordinals and zeroary:
9 8 1 4 5 2 7 6 3 0
but if we nevertheless use nullary instead of zeroary:
9 0 8 1 4 5 2 7 6 3
nullary, unary, binary, ternary, then Latin ordinals:
2 9 0 8 4 5 7 6 3 1
octal and octonary sort the same. (digression: it really should have been sedenary, not hexadecimal, but early computer scientists mixed up Greek and Latin.) but in that vein, if we let hexal and heximal win the battle between sexary and senary:
2 6 9 0 8 4 5 7 3 1
among those who are choosing not to be vaccinated against COVID-19 (future post mcbkqach) are those who belong to groups that have long been historically mistreated by the government. they don't trust the government in general, so they don't trust government propaganda encouraging vaccination.
expand government to mean "government and mainstream society" because the latter has also long been complicit in the mistreatment.
among the groups who have long been so historically mistreated by government and mainstream society are African-Americans. their mistreatment and cause for distrust of government includes things like the Tuskegee Experiment as well as their much more recent history of being murdered by government police (Black Lives Matter).
news reports indicate African-Americans have significantly lower COVID-19 vaccination rates than whites, with one of the main reasons being this distrust, as reflected in interviews. (note: other reasons include lack of easy access to vaccination sites, not having flexibility in life to deal with the day or two of incapacitation after each dose.)
rebuilding the trust is a topic for another day. (perhaps we avoid thinking about how to rebuild trust because of how frighteningly difficult the task (probably) is. after we (ever) decide to start, it might take centuries to complete, reflecting the centuries of mistreatment over which the trust was lost. it therefore might take centuries to achieve a vaccination rate high enough for herd immunity. this is how we pay for our sins.)
instead, we focus on something here and now: the rise of events and venues requiring proof of vaccination to participate or enter ("please provide a picture of your vaccination card"), and the accompanying rise of hatred toward those who refuse to be vaccinated.
in the context of African-Americans refusing vaccination as described above, this translates to barriers to entry for African-Americans, and hatred toward them.
this is how institutional racism plays out.
we hypothesize that this is how racism, systemic racism, and institutional racism have always played out. it's never just "I hate you for the color of your skin", "I exclude you for the color of your skin", or "I reject the notion that all men are created equal". it's always something more complicated: "I hate you, exclude you, reject you for your behavior", "something more urgent is on the line: public safety, life or death of people I care about, the ability for me and people I care about to live normal lives". (think about how the pandemic has affected education and courtship: think of the children.)
we often look back on racism in history and wonder, how could people be so horrible? this time, let's record why.
if you are promulgating policies requiring proof of vaccination, record your thoughts and reasoning. if you are hating on the anti-vaxxers, record your thoughts and reasoning. and remember, this is for posterity, so [please] be honest.
is it ignorance? "I was unaware that African-Americans distrust the government."
is it willful ignorance? "I do not care to know or understand what is going inside the minds of people resisting vaccination."
is it "us" versus "not one of us"? "the people resisting vaccination seem foreign to us, so excluding them from our community is fine." excluding the unvaccinated, "the unclean", "the wrong kind of people", African-Americans, might make your (primarily white) event more attractive, so there is perverse incentive to implement vaccination-required-for-entry policies, and to keep them in place as long as possible.
"it seemed like a good idea at the time."
how should COVID-19 vaccination policies be formulated to lessen institutional racism? explicit sunset clauses might help, but there remain devilish details.
