• 1 Post
  • 38 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • Thank you! I wasn’t sure it’s appropriate to ping ernest - or what the approved bug reporting mechanism was here.

    It may be worth linking to this thread? I think that whatever is going on with the sort-of-deleted-post there is what’s causing the inbox errors.


    And thanks!, re the username. It was my handle on Reddit, too, snagged when only like two books in the series were out. At the time it was a couple niche fantasy novels and he was a side character that only appeared briefly in the first book, whose name sounded cool when said out loud. …Now that the whole series is out, wildly popular, and the character played a massive role, I feel like the kid who picked “superman” as his super-original internet username.









  • I criticized you for jumping to conclusions and fabricating narrative to support them. And apparently you got so offended by the criticism that … you went and did it all over again, targeting me, committing even harder to the bit.

    You just wrote a bunch of wild fanfiction about me and then tried to have an argument with that imaginary version of me. Might as well just yell at ghosts in the shower if you’re that desperate to feel like you’ve snatched some petty victory from the jaws of self-inflicted defeat that is this thread.

    You’re the problem with your own experience.

    This response is hugely excessive for the “provocation” and yet I’m sure you’ll storm off imagining that I’m the big meanie here and you were some completely reasonable and utterly justified saint of good behaviour - for absolutely going off on someone who gently mocked your very serious demands for everyone to be nicer to you and meaner to the people you dislike. And you’ve done that to everyone who wasn’t fawningly positive towards you in this thread - that you started by being hateful and childish towards a site you just left and the userbase of the site you just joined.

    Even with the tiny sample size I can see why you have so many encounters with “toxic” people. You antagonize and attack people, then pretend they were the toxic ones if they defend themselves.

    It’s not hard to miss that you’ve just happened to call me all of the things that other people have told you about yourself in this thread. Hell, this whole little speech would have been far more appropriate as something someone said to you, if they were trying to hurt your feelings; so given how off the mark it was when directed at me, it’s easy to wonder if maybe you’re projecting a little here.



  • The idea that Reddit is staging some nefarious conspiracy to “poison” fediverse spaces … is losing the whole plot.

    OP’s straight up writing fanfiction trying to cast a site they just left as villains in some swashbuckling coming-of-age story. It’s a nine-hour-old account, and they’re already embracing the Us vs Them mentality and trying to sell it with prose.

    I don’t know how OP managed to pick fights within a couple hours of signing up for their account, but I’d suggest that if they left Reddit for “toxicity” only to immediately find it here too … maybe they’re carrying it around with them?


  • Whole lot of people here have cut off other people, but no one’s yet shared a story about what got them cut off. This one’s mine.

    I was unceremoniously removed from The List by a group of folks I was close with for years, after clashing with a couple of new additions to the group for a few months. We collectively ran a bit of a sketchy party scene and had been hosting stuff out of the weird end of town for a year or two when it all blew up - we weren’t quite on the scale of underground warehouse raves, but we were like the training-wheels version. We’d get a lead on a place that was slated to be vacant for a month or a commercial building gone dark, arrange a couple bands and an escape plan, and pull a couple hundred bucks each in entry charge and dodgy beer.

    They were great friends in addition to being sort-of in business together, and we had some absolutely great times.

    Except one couple who’d been with us from the start and were OG team members met a new crowd of people. They wanted to bring their friends, we said sure, and … shit started going downhill. The couple weren’t bad. Their friends weren’t bad. Their friends’ friends were awful. I didn’t like the new crowd’s vibe, I didn’t like who they were bringing in, what they were up to, and I didn’t get along with the initial connections in the slightest. I thought they were assholes, they thought I was an asshole, and in hindsight we were both correct.

    As much as each new member of our little scene was more money at the end of an event, I didn’t want them there. I spent a lot of time and everyone’s patience arguing why I felt these specific new people needed to be shown a door and firmly told to be on the other side of it, and I definitely went out of my way to cut them out of anything I had control over. My friends were frustrated, I was frustrated, and everyone was on edge - I was convinced these people were going absolutely ruin what we’d built, my friends were frustrated I wouldn’t drop the grudge and didn’t see the problem I was focused on.

    In my defense, the new people were bringing in their crowd, and their crowd was bad news. It was like they were the scene where all the people other parties didn’t want wound up congregating. There was the sketchy “why are you here?” old dudes, there were the people who did too much of many drugs even for our standards, there was the massive collection of edgy at-risk middleschoolers, there were the aggro bros and the dealers with Connections … to me, inviting those people in the door was a massive heat score and absolutely ruining the vibe for the kind of people we wanted to attract. That said, in my friends’ defense - we had agreed we’d make decisions as a team, and I was outvoted but unwilling to let it go; and we didn’t have a problem with drugs or kids or even weird old dudes in general - half of us started in that community young and most absolutely dabbled in chemicals. We all were those kids a few years prior. My concerns read as hypocritical or gatekeep-y, rather than genuine, because I’d never been concerned about that shit prior.

    The last straw? I paid a guy I knew from the other side of town to drive his dad’s charger slowly past our venue a couple times, for several different events, so that people thought we might be about to get raided. Because the people I didn’t care for were pretty dodgy, they fucked off at the faintest hint of trouble.

    The other people in our crew found out, and I was excised from that group.

    In hindsight, we were both right. I was petty and sabotaged the group to get my way - and those new people did absolutely ruin shit for that scene within a couple years. I’ve connected individually with a few members of that group over the many years since, but am very formally persona non grata at shit they do as a group - I don’t think any of the people I still talk to even admit to the rest that they see me sometimes.

    I don’t want this to read like I was booted for taking some moral highground. I absolutely wasn’t. I took the low road and went behind my friends’ backs to undermine what we were doing, all because I wanted a specific group of people gone from our scene. As much as an adult’s perspective would make it easy to spin this as if I had moral objections to bringing hard drugs and hard druggies and middleschoolers into the same place for underground parties - I wasn’t concerned about those things, morally. Having middleschoolers get wasted at parties wasn’t a problem to me, or even having creepy dudes trying to pick them up, or people shooting hard shit in the living room … I just didn’t like how there was more of “them” than “us” and our events were slowly becoming that scene, instead of just having a little bit of it off in one corner.


  • This would make excellent satire, but it’s pretty dismal journalism.

    Ever since that day, I’ve consistently correlated success with the fluctuating number in my follower count. In fact, I would argue that every millennial who works on the internet has internalized the belief that resonance on Twitter is the only way to unlock progressively more illustrious opportunities—it somehow seems more relevant than your degree, your scoops, and even your endorsements.

    Speak for yourself, please.

    Many millennials who ‘work on the internet’ have understood in the past that Twitter follower counts did constitute a sort of abstracted measure of relevance, like pop culture equivalent of how often an academic article is cited by other academics. There was quite a while where that was, unfortunately, true: for example, your measure as a PR professional was tied to your ability to use your professional skills to boost your personal accounts. It was far from the only thing that counted, but it was certainly an excellent networking tool and having impressive high scores would result in more opportunities, better opportunities, and less hunting for them. There absolutely was an expectation that communications or marketing people would leverage their skills for their accounts, that they would show off what they could do for potential employers within the confines of their own internet footprint.

    You could still get work without that, I still got work without that - but work would come to you if you had an impressive social portfolio, not just on raw follower counts but on things like content and engagement as well. The total sum of your social media and online presence was the portfolio of communications or media field, same way designers are asked to provide examples of past work.

    And that’s still true - it’s just less and less likely to include someone’s twitter in that assessment.

    I think that’s why Elon’s reign of terror has been so bitterly ironic: Everything we’ve been taught about Twitter—and, frankly, social media in general—has proven to be an enormous lie. It was always volatile, and regrettably, we made it the locus of our careers.

    Things can be true in the past and false in the present. What this particular person was taught in the past was true at the time of teaching. And then this crazy thing called “change” occurred and it’s no longer true. Except, what he was taught - that conventional wisdom holds that journalists need their own personal brands - remains true. The secondary coaching, that a Twitter presence is part of that branding, is not necessarily true but also not abstractly false either.

    That the author struggles with the very concept of change, feels they were promised that Twitter would be permanent, and seems to believe that people who are successful now because of twitter activity then are somehow going to wind up on the streets is hilarious, if perhaps in a not particularly kind way.

    Everyone he talked to has a secure career or market position. Sure, they got there via twitter, or they feel twitter helped them achieve that - but they will be fine. Some of them might take earnings hits or need to make some uncomfortable pivots to off-twitter platforms, but none of those folks are teetering on the edge of a cardboard mansion lifestyle after sinking clearly-fruitless hours into twitter boosterism.

    Lorenz predicts something of a “Great Clout Reset” on the horizon—everyone emerging from the rubble, starting over at square one—and frankly, she can’t wait to see what happens. […] Maybe that’s the silver lining. Twitter might be dying, but maybe afterwards, we can try to become superstars all over again.

    Oh look, we can see how the author wound up thinking that Twitter was all-important and utterly permanent. They’re doing it all over again; and in ten years we’ll get the exact same article about whatever platform they think is actually the Real Deal right now, complaining about how it inevitably failed and Lorenz steered them wrong with bad career tips.


  • I feel like there is space for talking about games besides actually playing them, similar to sports.

    To refine further, I think there exists demand for a “middle ground” of games discourse that is talking about games as a whole, or as entries into their genre, in detail and with consideration - but without being a hyper-focused discussion of one specific game by it’s die-hards. We have both poles - there is lots of relatively superficial discussion of games, or game reviews, that aren’t giving a particularly detailed discussion of each game … and there’s lots of posts in a specific games’ space with ultra-specific and supremely detailed discourse from a highly-invested players’ perspective.

    But there’s not been a successful venue or single leading voice that’s really filling that niche. TB did for ages, and I don’t think anyone has come close to filling those shoes since.

    I personally want the kind of insights that come from putting a week into a game and playing a lot of other similar games, but not necessarily being a hardcore fan or hater of the game or the genre. Like, I’ll get a week into a game and start noticing that the core gameplay is good, but the economy seems off, or that gunplay is just a little jank when playing near obstacles - deeper than “better/worse than GAME1, while slower not as twitchy as COMPETITOR”.

    In similar sense, talking about games as a media and as offering within a media landscape - in that sense you talk about asking “what is fun”; looking at game systems and mechanics from a lens of media critique and systems design. How does this work, how do competitors solve this problem, what other problems does it introduce - how does the sum picture mesh and how cohesive is the end product.


  • If you are in fact a doppelganger you have no way of knowing and neither does the Anomander who died. And that is why I wouldn’t risk teleportation.

    Which, conversely, is also why I don’t care about teleportation. If I have no idea before and I have no idea after and for all intents and purposes I am still me in the new location … all the parts that I can engage with, all the parts I care about - they’re all coming up fine. I might as well have fallen asleep on a plane, or blacked out after a few too many at the pub. When consciousness returns, I am in a new location.

    In that explanation you quoted, I fall firmly into the former camp. I don’t think we have special-ness that transcends the meat, but that the consciousness is wholly rooted in it - and so I think that moving the meat from one place to another achieves the result of moving the consciousness from one place to another.

    My main difference is that I don’t believe a “soul” transported or transplanted - or exists to be lost. The consciousness that is my sense of ‘self’ is the sum of my meat and my memories, and those are preserved.



  • To me it has nothing to do with souls, it’s about continuity of experience. […] If I don’t get to continue to experience life because I’m dead and some clone with my exact thoughts etc is now me, it’s only the rest of the world who experiences that as me continuing to live. But I don’t get to.

    I think that distinction is artificial.

    My continuity of experience is interrupted every night, among others - and I don’t worry that my experience as being me is somehow invalid now, or fear sleeping lest a doppelganger take my body overnight and wake up ‘as me’ the next morning. The idea that this would be different is resting on the notion that there is something other than mere meat and electricity that would be lost when the teleport interrupts consciousness, and I think that assumption is something that needs direct challenge.

    I think you would experience life continuing from the moment consciousness resumes in the new location, the exact same as how you experience life ‘continuing’ when you wake up each day. All the ways that you experience your own consciousness would simply have relocated. Without assuming a soul, there is no subjective distinction between pre/post teleporter any more than there’s a distinction between pre/post nap.


  • This presumes that there is something special in this model that doesn’t resume when your mind resumes running in it’s new location. Or, in other terms, “a soul”.

    That is ridiculous.

    So you do see my point.

    People aren’t computers, so getting all worked up about how software models instances still isn’t a valid modelling for human consciousness.

    When you kill a process and you re-run a program, even if you saved the full state of the memory elsewhere, you don’t say that it’s the same process. Is another process with identical content. There’s no need of a metaphysical entity. It’s another instance.

    But this is so hair-splittingly pedantic it’s almost doubled back to be incorrect. If you ask 99.999% of the world, they’ll be like “yeah I closed outlook and then I opened outlook” - to them, it’s still the same program. They’re launching the same software again. No one is like “oh well once you quit Skyrim it’s all over because even if you reopen it later, it’s a new instance and the old one is dead” … no. That’s ridiculous. It’s the same program, the same save file, resumed from save at a later date.

    Your focus on “Process” instead of “Program” is making the soul argument. The “process” you’re arguing for is a soul. Something intangible and irrelevant to the end user, that does get terminated on shutdown, that cannot be restored from save. Consciousness is the software, not the process itself. Memories are the save file. There is nothing in OP’s model of teleporting that suggests “process” itself is the sacred portion - when the hardware & software of “Dave” gets paused and resumed flawlessly.

    You’re deeply, sorely mistaken. Even in a deep, unconscious state, the mind keeps working, even if the degree of consciousness is different. That we’re not 100% certain of what the brain does in those moments doesn’t mean that it stops working.

    Not at all. Consciousness is interrupted. Unless we’re assuming that the “process” itself is sacred - what happens to consciousness is all that matters in either case. If your ability to perceive yourself as a conscious being stops - it doesn’t matter to your experience of your own consciousness if the ‘process’ stopped or went to sleep during the gap.


  • That’s absolutely the issue.

    Your body is copied as a file.

    Your mind is a process running in a body created from that file.

    When the process stops, you are effectively dead. Another copy of your body runs another process with an identical content. He has your body, but he’s not you.

    This presumes that there is something special in this model that doesn’t resume when your mind resumes running in it’s new location. Or, in other terms, “a soul”. The idea that an identical consciousness in an identical body is “not you” is based wholly on the assumption that “you” is something other than the consciousness.

    And your mind, or my mind, are both “processes” that stop regularly already - are you claiming that old you dies each night and a completely new but otherwise identical person lives each morning?


  • or in a real teleport where you are disassembled, you’re gone the moment

    I love how this was said completely unironically.

    We’re talking about something that only exists in sci-fi stories and you’re trying to argue about souls as if one outcome of teleports is clearly more real than another.

    you’re gone the moment you teleport and the “you” that remains is another different person with exactly your thoughts, feelings, motivations, memories, etc

    Ship of Thesius, though. If it’s exactly my thoughts, exactly my feelings, exactly my motivations, my memories, my body … That’s me. There’s no other parts that got left out.

    But consciousness was interrupted briefly when the transport happened? That happens to me every night - except in the morning I wake up in the same place instead of a different one. For all worthwhile intents and purposes, everything tangible and real that makes a person a person is relocated and the person remains. Getting lost in whether or not “you” “survive” is wasting angst on the existence of a soul.