Asking if people could spot the antichrist has always seemed paradoxical to me. Isn’t the antichrist’s defining thing that he will deceive people into following him? Lost cause imo

I NEED this for my next in-person PI Planning

Hrrmm. Webrings it is. But also, the search engine problem seems like one calling out for a creative solution. I’ll try to look into it some more I guess. Maybe there’s a way that you could distribute which peer indexes which sites. I would even be fine sharing some local processing power when I browse to run a local page ranking that then gets shared with peers…maybe it could be done in a way where attributes of the page are measured by prevalence and then the relative positive or negative weighting of those attributes could be adjusted per-user.

Hope it’s not annoying for me to spitball ideas in random Lemmy comments.

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Never heard of Kagi before, article convinced me I don’t wanna use it anyways…lol.

Wasn’t the original Google search algorithm published in a research paper? Maybe someone with more domain knowledge than I could help me understand this: is there any obstacle to starting a search engine today that just works like that? No AI, no login, no crazy business…just something nice and rudimentary. I do understand all the ways that system could be gamed, but given Google/Bing etc.'s dominance, I feel like a smaller search engine doesn’t really need to worry about people trying to game it’s algorithm.

Hah, I should have known better than to pull an example from something I’ve only played a little of. But you’re right, from the bug’s perspective, the humans are like the bugs. And indeed, this analogy hits on many of the problems with what I’m saying.

That’s definitely the best one to start with! You’re welcome and I hope you enjoy it. There’s some metaphors and moments from it that still stuck with me.

What I always find most striking about this picture is the insane, obvious, over-the-top evilness of it. But then I remember that at the time there was no prior insane evilness for that kind of iconography to be associated with. It’s a design language, a trend, and just like anything else it can be popular or unpopular depending on the context. One decade baggy pants look cool, then they look stupid, then they look cool again, and so on. At the time that that first went on display, it probably didn’t seem so obviously evil.

For a long time I thought the most valuable lesson that picture can teach is that evil can always wear a new disguise, and a mere visual similarity is not enough to identify it. You have to be able to look behind the disguise and see what is really there.

But it seems that this generation of evil is not so creative.

I dunno. A lot of times my house (first one) feels like a gigantic golden shackle. I can’t easily move, I can’t easily leave the country, I can’t easily get jobs elsewhere, I have much more expensive obligations. The fact that I have a loan and not a lease means I can be massively in debt. There are random unexpected costs which makes it hard to budget, some of which are huge. It gives you more space, which you inevitably fill with useless garbage that just ties you down even more.

Home ownership is kinda overrated. I have wished for years now that I was back in an apartment. Am debating selling this, but it sucks that it would be such a financial loss (another thing you don’t have to worry about with apartments. If my home value goes down by 100k, im basically trapped there for life).

I think having a house is worth it if you are really sure you want to “lock in” the current settings of your life for the next 5 years, minimum. You gain a lot of freedoms with what you do with the property, but you lose a lot of freedoms everywhere else.

The original story was intended as a depiction of a punishment. The spin of imagining him happy was Albert Camus’s contribution. Although it wasn’t quite about finding joy in a never-ending repetitive process per se, but more about finding joy in the absence of meaning. The boulder process represents the individual’s repeated, doomed efforts to find meaning, and the rolling back down is the realization that despite their efforts, there was still no meaning to be had. Yet, the human cannot resist trying again, which is clearly absurd - hence why this is called “The Absurd”. The main idea is that the struggle itself towards meaning, although absurd, is enough to make someone happy, even if meaning does not exist. I would not want to conflate that sentiment with acceptance of repetitive, dull processes in real life. Nietzsche would have a lot to say about that, and not coincidentally, Nietzsche and Camus have a lot of overlapping thinking. If you like this stuff, I’d recommend reading Camus’s The Stranger, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus.

Platypeople! Platypeople!

Yeah, that’s a good point about Christmas. I guess the reality of whether something is religious or not really just depends on the way that it’s practiced culturally. I feel like the majority of marriages still involve altars and vows and all of the Christian trappings, so I think that they have a lot more of their original Christianity retained than Christmas does… Especially since the most iconic elements of Christmas were pilfered from earlier religions (which probably contributes to why Christians don’t want to complain about it that much).

It really is as simple as just having a clear distinction between secular and religious marriage like you said. I think that if someone is licensed to perform a legal marriage, they should not be able to turn down a customer on account of them being gay. But I do agree that a religious marriage should be able to turn down gay people. The problem of course, is that the boundaries between the two are so muddied - and it’s only the Christians that are doing the muddying. I used to be more of the " let them do their own thing" type of atheist, but I think the real key thing to watch out for there is that a core tenet of most religions involves spreading itself to others whether they like it or not. They believe they have a moral imperative authority over your private behavior. It kind of reminds me of the bugs in Factorio if you’ve ever played that. Like, at first it seems fine for me to just let them chill and breed their little hive off in the corner of the map, since we both leave each other alone. But the problem is that the intrinsic nature of those bugs is that they’ll eventually come and fuck up my factory - they can’t and won’t leave me alone. When it comes to Christianity at least, I’ve started to see it more like this:

If they’re leaving me alone right now, it’s just because they’re incubating power to force upon me later.

First of all. Thank you so much for refusing to fight against strawman arguments and putting forward what people actually believe. It’s much more productive, and interesting to talk about. I hate religion and I hate their stupid arguments, but I wish that criticisms would focus on the stupid arguments they actually make, instead of stupid arguments they don’t make.

On the marriage front, and I know it’s not your beliefs I’m rebutting here, that argument has always especially bothered me. Because it’s like. Yes, actually, I do think gay marriage is nonsensical. Marriage is indeed a religious concept, and all of the religions that promote it condemn homosexuality. I hate marriage in general and wish nobody would get married. Yet it still happens, why? Why do gay people even care about being married then?

Primarily, it’s because the Christians forced their religious construct to become so intertwined with legal and financial benefits that are otherwise unobtainable, that you put yourself at an objective disadvantage as a couple, economically, medically, legally, if you do not get married. The problem is that once marriage passed from the religious conceptual realm where it gestated, and into the political sphere, it should have become a separate, secular concept under the idea of separation of church and state. But of course the Christians can’t accept that kind of compromise either. They want to have it all, all, all. So if Christians didn’t want gay people to want to get married, then they shouldn’t have enshrined their religious concept unfairly above others in the governmental system. Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, motherfuckers.

Yeah I definitely don’t think someone’s game preferences are enough to determine their political preferences.

That said… I would imagine a neural network could probably do a good job if it given someone’s entire Steam library and associated playtime…but my intuition tells me Soulslikes in particular would not be a powerful indicator even then. It would likely be things like TLOU2, Celeste, etc…that would make for reliable predictors.

I don’t think there is a causal effect - people tend to consume media that appeals to them for some reason or another. If someone enjoys a Soulslike because they like being the simultaneously strong and weak underdog conquering strange foreign monsters, that’s just their pre-existing fascist tendencies being the reason they enjoy the game. Many different tendencies might cause different people to enjoy the same game for different reasons.

Now, I do think media can shape a culture. But in the case of Soulslikes, any latent fascist messaging seems too subjective and subtle to be doing that.

It’s more likely that rising fascism contributes to the popularity of Soulslikes, which I think is at least plausible - just like how rising nationalism could easily contribute to the rise of team FPS games. But there are so many other viable causes for the popularity of Soulslikes that it seems extremely presumptuous to single out that one.

I was under the impression they were using alpha/beta not as prescriptive classifications of people, but rather as descriptive labels of the roles the right wing chooses for themselves. Many people on the right wing do believe in the idiotic alpha/beta junk, and as a result they act on it accordingly, thus making their own imaginary dynamics real within their own world. They pigeonhole themselves, artificially, into these categories - which ironically makes them useful terms for outsiders to segment them with.

I don’t think this is the cause behind the proliferation of Soulslikes, but I do think Alyssa has accurately identified the distinction between the appeal of these games to right wing people. I’m not sure that this is intrinsically the message of Soulslikes, although I do think that games like CoD are pretty undeniably transmitting a nationalistic message. And this is fitting, because the “alpha jock” nationalists tend to do a lot less mental gymnastics and warping things to fit their views than the pseudo-intellectual fascists. Nationalism isn’t great, but it’s also very simple and rooted in a fundamental truth, which is that your nation is out for itself, and the rule of force is your ultimate unavoidable defense and offense - as a result of this nationalism doesn’t need to perform any mental gymnastics, it just needs to establish a connection between the well-being of the nation and the individual. Similarly in these games there is typically no non-combative way to win (vs. games where pacifist playthroughs are possible), and there are clear red-blue team distinctions. Soulslikes, on the other hand, definitely send the message that success is entirely in your hands, and establish a notion of skill hierarchy and underdog-ness. Your enemy is the world, not just some other group of people. This is appealing to any mentality that perceives itself (accurately or not) as oppressed by an outside force. So I feel like the intrinsic message of the Soulslike genre is one of rebellion against powers-that-be through unrelenting individualism. This message is a bit more asymmetric and suggestive of objective heroes and villains, whereas the nationalist game seems more honest about it’s nihilistic and relativistic context, e.g: " when you’re on the red team you want the red team to win, when you’re on the blue team, you want the blue team to win. It’s not about what the teams are, it’s just about what team you find yourself on". But the asymmetry of a Soulslike implies that your enemy is not “the same as me, but just against me” - rather the enemy is fundamentally different from me. This is a more moralized narrative, and one which requires an oppressive outside force for you to act as a noble underdog against. This hits home with a lot of people, sometimes justifiably so, but sometimes only via mental gymnastics. It’s also interesting that the power fantasy of the Soulslike is more self-contradictory - you want to be powerful, but you also want to be the underdog facing a great challenge. The nationalist+team fps fantasy is more about crushing your enemy unflinchingly, obliterating their puny inferior forces with ease. The fascist+Soulslike fantasy is about prevailing despite your enemy’s advantage. But of course, if you are always prevailing, then can we really say your enemy has an advantage over you? Exactly like any challenge-oriented gamer understands: you have the most fun when you’re doing well, but only if you believe you are in danger of doing poorly. If you know you can beat a boss flawlessly, it becomes boring. You want to be in a flow state. Fascist propaganda can maybe be understood as game-designing a flow state in the populace where the enemy feels terrifying and threatening, but still defeatable enough to give a rush of superiority. You have intrinsic superiority (skill, strategy), the opposition has extrinsic superiority (more powerful weapons, environments) is one way to express this, but it can also be done with mutual intrinsic ability, where the protagonist is differentiated by their superior dedication, etc.

Ultimately, it still seems like the Soulslike genre is more about overcoming oppression, and the way that it appeals to fascists is via their imagined oppression. In reality, the Soulslike genre seems very anti-fascist to me, maybe anarchist if anything. It’s kind of perfectly fitting that the way the genre fits their worldview is with the same persecution complex they employ for so many other purposes.

These will also work great for our future subterranean climate-apocalypse societies!

Yooooooo what he’s the Flashbulb!? Crazy lol. I’ve loved his music for years now. Did not at all realize it was the same guy. Taste goes with taste I suppose

Oh yeah I know. I just thought it was a good point in light of the main idea of the post