tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90871035078755746692024-03-05T16:07:02.623-08:00Minute LogicThis is my blog, where I talk about whatever I like. Generally it's politics for this blog.BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.comBlogger83125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-81293879703906480272023-03-19T16:35:00.001-07:002023-03-19T16:35:18.868-07:00Why Populism Is Cancer<p>Populism is defined as "a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups" but taking a definition of it at face value is pointless because what populists do when they get in power, how they try to achieve it, and the real world consequences of their actions shows the true picture of what populism is. Populists sometimes pride themselves as 'beyond ideology' but ends up being their weakness because without any ideology there is no foundation from which goals and prescriptions. Instead it comes from whatever the fuck they want it to come from.</p><p>Populism is a divisive narrative that consolidates power by unifying the majority against some group and blaming all society’s problems on them; using the church as a tool of the state to unify the masses, often to provide a pious-sounding justification a war or persecution of an unpopular and relatively powerless minority; fostering rabid anti-intellectualism, not just against snobs who think they know more than you but also against subject matter experts who actually DO know more than you; and a disdain for the due process and rule of law, institutions which are rife with examples of injustice—but still far better than the alternatives.</p><p>Practice vs Theory</p><p>Saying you're "for the people" is not helpful because all politicians claim to be "for the people". Trump got elected on 'draining the swamp' but ended up being the most corrupt, swampy president ever even though he ran on a populist platform supported by populists. People can have feelings about how they're being screwed over but they don't exactly know how so they want to burn down the system, even if destroying law, order, civilization is just part of the lols.</p><p>In practice populism is more of a cleansing process that doesn't offer any real solutions to current problems and often leaves behind a wasteland to clean up. It feeds people shallow ideas they want to hear that are heavily biased towards their worldview without discerning truth from falsehoods. It allows us to cling on to our base instincts of believing what we want to believe, making us more suscepitble to misinformation from malicious actors.</p><p>Anti-Intellectualism</p><p>Ideally a representative democracy allows everyone to seek expert opinions and learn about the risks and benefits of various legislation based on outcomes rather than the ideaological method. In practice the typical person working 40 hours a week doesn't have time, interest, or energy to learn all the issues which is itself a full time job. In practice people vote based on soundbites and phrases that appeal to them emotionally.</p><p>In a typical classroom the students will outnumber the teachert. If populism reigned, you probably wouldn't learn much in this environment. We don't want "the people" to directly vote on everything. Should the people mopping the floors at TSMC headquarters have a say on how their latest process node should be carried out? Should the janitor of a hospital decide how heart bypass should be done? Should overly emotional consumers of fearmongering news get to essentially carry out vigilante justice towards alleged criminals?</p><p>The lack of respect for rule of law and institutions led to Donald Trump getting elected, trying to overturn the result of the 2020 elections, and the storm on the White House. We were lucky that Trump is incompetant at gaining power. We might not be so lucky again. Trump taught us that a lot of what we take for granted in government comes from norms which populists are all too happy to break if it serves their interest. We can't see people in other groups, socialeconomic status or otherwise, as the evil and us as the 'the good guys'. Different people can have different life experiences and interests than you but not be evil. But seeing them as evil makes violating norms and rule of law easier.</p><p>Populist political leaders are demagogues: a political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument. It's true that well educated, well-to-do people might have different concerns and priorities in spite of or against the interests of very poor people. It's also true that very poor, uneducated people have a poor understanding of banking regulation or the difficulties of implementing a wealth tax.</p><p>Neither might the common man vote in favor of what must be done even if they knew and believe all the facts. Austerity measures may be necessary to get the country out of an economic slump, but people are never going to be okay with earning less and paying more taxes, by and large.</p><p>Nuance</p><p>Populism destroys nuance. Anything that isn't simple and easy to digest and immedaitely makes people feel good gets dismissed in favor of idea that their concensus leads to correctness. Everything is framed as their pet issue. In this case it's elites vs comman man. We must eat the rich and tax the rich, but how exactly that should be done in a lawful manner is not important. Just do it, somehow. Specifics of policies are boring and yelling for death to rich people is sexy. This lack of nuance leads some populists to believe in some savior who will solve all their problems. This allows for cunning, opportunistic leaders to come in. Anybody who disagrees with them is part of the establishment!</p><p>"Me First"</p><p>Too often populism ends up being a 'me first' form of politics no different than what "the elites" practice. Looking at various prominent populist leaders like Hitler, Lenin, Chavez, Trump, bad outcomes were associated with every one of them. "The people" ends up being "my group of people" who are the "real Americans" that need more focus than other groups of people. It's the same self-centered politics dressed up as being more. Other times, populism comes at a cost of ignoring all people who have experiences who run contrary to the mainstream view. </p><p>Democracy</p><p>Liberal Democracy is about accepting pluralism. We have different views, opinions, and morals but we can find some common ground so each side gets some of what they want and neither side is happy. By painting others as the enemy and their solution as being the unfalliable and the only, there is no space for debate.</p><p>Complex problems have complex and boring solutions. The world is too complicated to be analyzed through any one lens or for its solution to be one solution. Capitalism, feminism, socialism, populism, and yes, establishtarianism: None of these are a cure-all for all of society's issues. Don't reduce every issue to your pet cause and try to understand the difference between how we wish the world is, the specifics of how we should try to make it so, and why government is slow rather than run by Twitter polls.</p><p>Platitudes don't fix the world. Boring, carefully crafted legislation based on what actually works to achieve the outcomes we want, passed through infuriating give-and-take process of politics is what actually takes some steps towards fixing the world. It's not sexy and often involves compromise which nobody wants to do.</p>BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-30765625910830215462021-09-04T14:46:00.001-07:002021-09-04T14:48:43.108-07:00Thoughts on Public Proposals for Marriage<p> I think proposing publicly is coercive. Such proposals are usually not discussed ahead of time, and making the proposal public runs the risk of rejection. The opens themselves up to being devastated in front of everyone, but the power to decide their fate would rest on the person being proposed to. If the proposee rejects the proposer, they would look like a bad person who devastate the poor proposer publicly. It goes without saying proposing in public in hope that element of coercion is enough to get somebody to say yes is an incredibly stupid idea, not to even speak of morality. They will resent you forever for it even if it did work. (Though I suppose some people are messed up enough not to care what they think.)<br /><br />People should be able to make such an important decisions as carefully as possible without unnecessary outside influence or even eyes on their conversation. It would be less bad if the proposer manages to get the proposee's opinions on public proposals ahead of time.</p><p>The proposer in a relationship is usually the guy in the relationship if there is a guy. To be fair to them, guys have been bombarded with movies and TV shows where public proposals work and the girl is swept off her feet from being so happy. Real life is not like Hollywood, but it can be hard to understand fact from fiction (especially for more sheltered guys who don't talk to many women). Women are affected by media just as much, especially when it comes to body image. Men have a problems as well.</p><p><br /></p><p>Even when it comes to a video game marriage, I am very cautious of public proposals. People often like to trivial feelings which arise from video game, saying 'it's just a video game'. Video games can be a huge part of somebody's life. For some it's their only place to socialize and we all know how lonely people can get these days, especially with Covid and longtime trends like prevalence of social media. Imagine spending time with somebody you enjoy spending time with for most days of the week for years, and you overcome challenges together. While online interactions are not the same as real life interactions, to say they can't amount to much is absurd. Sometimes the person saying 'it's just a video game' is the very person feeling the emotions themselves, as if telling themselves that over and over will decrease the stakes and make them take things less seriously. When it comes to interpersonal relationships, feelings are feelings. They are real, and refusing to deal with it by saying they don't exist isn't helpful.</p><p>When I see a person holding a surprise proposal who actually is interested romantically with my friend who I know is not looking for a relationship, I get worried. I don't want her to feel uncomfortable. I want her to always feel okay to say no. I worry that one person does not understand what the other one wants from the online marriage. I worry that he will develop stronger feelings for her when she cannot be invested in people that way right now.<br /><br />At the same time, it is their relationship. I hope for the best for them.</p>BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-87581222617405693792019-11-18T18:32:00.002-08:002019-11-18T18:32:35.211-08:00A Postmodern Critique of Gender<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i>A Postmodern Critique of Gender<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The answer to
justifying transgender identities beyond appealing to their suffering is a
postmodern critique of gender and language. This is my core argument for the
validity of trans people. Don't bother reading if you're not going to read the entire thing. Let us begin.<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>"You don't
become a woman the first time you put on a dress. You become a woman the first
time an older female relative turns to you at a restaurant and says, 'You know,
maybe you should order the salad sweetie.'"<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Sex and Science<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sex is bimodal, not binary. There are common options (modes)
and many rare exceptions. Binary systems only have room for two things. Binary
code works with 0s and 1s, not 0s, 1s, and sometimes 2s. Intersex people exist.
There is roughly the same amount of redheads as there are intersex people.
Ignoring trans and intersex people in our analysis of sex and gender is like
saying we shouldn't build wheelchair accessible ramps because most people can
just walk. Sex is about reproduction and deals with genitals and gametes.
Secondarily, it deals with things associated with those things like
chromosomes, hormones, and secondary sexual characteristics. XY chromosomes
aren't universally indicative of being male, since not all animals with sexual dimorphism
go with XY chromosomes. Intersex conditions exist but from my understanding,
one set of reproductive organs tends to work far better than the other. One
person might bring up that a woman without a uterus or vagina is still
considered to be of the female sex. Somebody else might argue it's not a
perfect example for why a trans women who underwent genital surgery is a woman
in terms of sex, because the woman without a uterus is obviously a woman
without a uterus, and the trans woman with surgery done is a man who got
surgery done. Then again, what if we've pumped that trans woman with hormones
and their epigenetics and brain have changed as a result of that? There are
many grey areas and exceptions when we try to sort through nature. There's no
need to force trans people into one category or the other.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Sex Isn’t Even Binary<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A man is currently 30. At 10 years old he was boy, but at 30
he is a man. At what point is the boy a man? There is no single dividing line
when that occurs. The brain doesn’t like that, which is why it prefers binaries
to spectrums. It’s also why many cultures have rituals to mark the instant a
boy turns into a man. A rabbit is a rabbit, and its parents are rabbits too.
But go back far enough and we don’t see a rabbit anymore. Something is or isn’t
a rabbit, but that binary system is a feature of language and biology doesn’t
care about our language. This is why evolution is hard to grasp. The boundaries
of the concept ‘rabbit’ seem easy to grasp but actually setting those
boundaries fail. This is the case for pretty much anything.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
If we have to define man or woman by biological
characteristics, what makes a man? If being a man is determined by genitals,
then a man who lost their penis and a trans woman who had SRS are both not men.
If one argues they're both men because of their chromosomes, then the goal post
has been moved. Is being a man determined by genitals or not? If it's
determined by chromosomes, what about people with atypical chromosomal makeup?
Those with Swyer Syndrome have XY chromosomes yet are born with uterus,
fallopian tubes, cervix, and vagina.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
If we start writing up a checklist of characteristics which
define a man or a woman, none of which alone are necessary or sufficient to
define what it means to be a man, then we’re just making it up as we go along
based on opinions. If we’re going to make stuff up, let’s do it in a way that’s
more useful.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But fine. Let’s draw up a list of anatomical features like
chromosomes, gonads, genitals, hormones, and secondary sex characteristics.
Let’s say a female is a person with XX chromosomes, ovaries, vagina, a certain
hormone balance, and secondary sex characteristics like breasts and soft skin.
But wait, there are transsexual women with female secondary sexual
characteristics, hormone levels, and genitals, but no ovaries or XX
chromosomes. Insisting on a binary system for sex leaves unable to accurately
describe the anatomy people who don’t conform to our preset categories. There
will always be exceptions to a rule so trying to rigidly categorize people is
futile.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If a person knows all this and still insists sex is binary,
then they are forcing reality to fit their preconceived notions rather than
adapting their concepts to fit reality. But none of that really matters,
because defining man or woman in a social context has nothing to do with
biology in practice or theory. A really simple and not entirely adequate saying
here nonetheless gets the point across: Sex is what you have down there, and
gender is what you have up here in your brain. Gender is about society.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Social Constructs & Language: Turtles All the Way
Down</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Categories of 'man' and 'woman' are social constructs. It
doesn't mean those things don't exist, are useless, or must be totally
arbitrary. Money is a social construct and should exist. If I ran out of money
the effects on me would be as profound and tangible as the laws of gravity.
However, gravity affects me the same way regardless of how humans behave,
whereas the existence of money is contingent on shared human behaviors and
beliefs. Investigating gold’s chemical properties to determine its monetary
value is stupid. Instead one should investigate the economic behavior of human
beings and the symbolic function of gold in our society. The same goes for
gender. Peering into chromosomes and genitals doesn’t tell us which gender
wears lipstick.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Is language prescriptive (dictionary tells us how to speak)
or is it descriptive (based on how people actually speak)? It's the latter. The
dictionary gets updated because language has updated since people feel like
speaking differently. Otherwise language would never evolve, which is clearly
does. Language is a human invention that changes over time. The definition of
‘literally’ in Merriam-Webster's dictionary includes "figuratively"
because people keep using the word that way. The dictionary is a usage guide,
not the Bible. In the internet age new words constantly get invented (often for
little rhyme or reason). If somebody insists using Old English, then they end
up being a crazy unintelligible person.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If language is descriptive, then I am to be referred to with
female pronouns because that's what people tend to do around me. If language is
prescriptive and we default to linguistic tradition, then whether I am a man or
a woman can't have anything to do with chromosomes because they weren't
discovered when those words came into existence. As soon as we start
cherry-picking how far we want linguistic traditions to go before they're
invalid to our society, we are making value judgements and the entire deference
to linguistic tradition dies.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Conservatives are concerned about postmodern critiques of
society because they have low openness to experience and prefer rigid, defined
hierarchies. Unfortunately, the world is under no obligation to be comforting
to us. Even basic questions like what a human is rise from the realm of mental
masturbation into practical and important discussions when dealing with
abortion. When is a person a person? Is it the moment of conception? A zygote?
After the first trimester? When they are born? What IS a person? It didn’t use
to include black people. Then they became 3/5ths of a person, and then
eventually an entire person. White in America used to only mean Anglo-Saxans.
The deeper we go the fuzzier things get. In the future when humans would be mostly
machine, are they still human? If a machine seems to exhibit the same behaviors
I do are they just a human in a machine? Time and space seem like simple enough
concepts, but if I approach the speed of light my mass shoots up towards
infinity as I travel into the future because… space-time and Einstein and
stuff.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Common sense deals with realms common to us. Push anything
to the extremes and the results become confusing and muddled. Life is not clean
and easy. It is difficult, messy, and constantly changing.</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our models of the world both in hard sciences and society in
general are best guesses that get revised constantly as we learn more. That
includes gender. If you’re never interested in rewriting the definition of
gender then you’re not interested in learning because you are in principle
closed off to change.</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Why is it surprising that gender can change based on
interpretation when so many cultures around the world have alternate views on
gender? In our own American culture, the appropriate attire, colors, and
hobbies for boys and girls have changed over time. It’s normal. Holding onto
outdated ideas that we know might serve as an adequate security blanket, but
then we lose all right to say facts don’t care about our feelings. Fear of
change is a feeling.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Gender as It’s Actually
Used</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Male and female in a scientific sense provides utility to
use by broadly describing the differences between a dimorphic species. It is
useful in the realm of science but not necessarily in other domains. Man and
woman in a gender sense very broadly describes a bimodal distribution of
features in society. But that’s all they are. They’re not derived from science
in a strict way.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The utility of categories of man or woman is not about their
reproductive roles in society. Not all men or women are fertile yet they don’t
get lumped together into a third category of infertile people. If I told you I
met a woman from work and we’re hanging out later, you don’t know what her
reproductive capability is. A ton of women are on menopause. Maybe she’s my
age, but I still have to ask if they can have (or want) children regardless of
gender identity. There are women with atypical sets of chromosomes that have no
idea they were atypical in any way because they’ve never been tested or tried
to have a baby. These are basic questions that have to be asked in a
relationship either way. No matter how we reconstruct gender, that’s not a
problem.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If I were to point out a cis man convincingly dressed as a
woman in a red dress, I would refer to them as ‘the woman in the red dress’
because here man and woman are just categories of typical features people have
and it’s convenient to just call them a woman in the red dress. Doing the
opposite increases confusion. It’s funny to see Ben Shapiro fail at misgendering
Caitlyn Jenner because he too operates under my description of how we define
men or women. I don’t insist on calling Ben Shapiro Benjamin Shapiro due to his
birth certificate because I realize names in practice usually deal with
identity and not legal documentation. Calling him Ben Shapiro is not denying the
law. Calling me a woman is not denial or disagreement about biology. It’s a
disagreement about how language is used.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To say that categories of man and woman deal with
reproduction first and foremost means people are looking at others constantly
and thinking about whether they take sperm or give it. When I go to a clothing
store and I see men’s clothes, it doesn’t mean “clothing meant people who reproduce
on this side of the dimorphic dichotomy instead of the other”. There I think of
a man as a person who wears certain types of clothing, exhibit certain types of
behaviors with hair done a certain way and legs unshaven. It means a bunch of
traits that a person may not actually exhibit.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That is how most people judge other people's gender in day
to day life. While I don't look very masculine, people can still tell I'm trans
because of my voice and Adam's Apple. Yet, people still mostly use female
pronouns. Are all those people deluded about my biology? If so, then I'd expect
more masculine-looking trans women to be gendered male and feminine-looking
women which can still be clocked as trans to be gendered male at the same
rates. That's not what happens. The more feminine I look and the more obvious I
am trying to present femininely, the more I get gendered female in
conversation. People gender others based on the vibe they give off rather than
chromosomal tests or genital inspection. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>The Pitch & The
Pushback<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Language is a social construct and that gives us the power
to modify it as we see fit. We should modify our language to provide the most
utility to the most people possible. And to that end, I submit to you that
calling trans women, women, is the correct decision because the upside
outweighs the downside (of which there is none).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Some insist ‘trans woman’ is its own separate group apart
from man and woman. The point of transitioning is to fit in better to the category
of man or woman, and to insist they are their own separate category in all
cases undermines that. Besides, we consider gay men to be men even though they can’t
reproduce with other men, are at risk for different diseases, have different
life experiences, and are more likely to commit suicide or be homeless. Just
because we can add another adjective to a gender to give extra context doesn’t
mean it must be a different category. We can sub-divide categories.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We can be inclusive in the way we group gender by starting
with men, women, and other. And of the women there are cis and trans women,
both of which are women based on the way they perform gender in society. Women
would be a broader umbrella category under which different women have different
experiences. When required, greater specificity can be given. If you’re my
doctor, my file should state I am a trans woman because giving me care for cis
men would be harmful. If we’re dating you would want to know about my biology.
Otherwise, my biology is really none of your business. And just like that, we
have helped trans people feel like they fit in better with society without
harming cis folk.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>It is not I who
misunderstands biology; it is you who misunderstands language.</i></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
It might be edgy to say no matter how much an adoptive
parent loves and cares for their baby, they’ll never be a parent because the
person is not their biological parent. Adoptive parents are just glorified
child kidnappers! That would be impolite and also wrong. An adoptive parent is
socially and functionally as real of a parent as a biological parent. It's a
similar thing here. I live my life as a woman. All the people close to me know
me as a woman. Strangers call me she. To make a point in calling me “he” is
really just politically motivated pedantry and sophistry masked with a veneer
of cold, hard logic. It's out of touch with the reality of how language is
used. I refuse to let Shapiro deceptively frame the debate as a debate about
biology.</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Pedantry can look like logic because it deals with
definitions of things as if it's a mathematical proof. Such analogies don’t
work for something as fluid as language. It has the <i>aesthetics</i> of
logic, but it’s a distraction from the actual substance. It's like when
fascists argue they're not fascists because they don't follow Benito Mussolini
and fascism is the movement from the 1930s... blah blah blah. When normal
people use that word they mean an authoritarian racist populist. To use such a
narrow definition of fascism to dodge criticism is to use sleight of hand not
logic.</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is not enough to say trans women are not women because to
say so would be akin to saying A = not A. We’re dealing with how we feel like
setting up society and group people (biology vs gender expression vs identity)
and not deductive logic. When we consider a chair a table based on the way it’s
used, we aren’t breaking fundamental rules of logic. We’re just changing how we
define chair or table. Tautologies like ‘men are men’ are never useful
arguments of their position either.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Debating pronouns is dumb because we're really arguing about
values and how society should be. Both sides are political, it's just Shapiro
isn't honest and forthright about it. It comes down to his wish to instill
rigid, conservative gender roles because liberalism leads to deterioration of
the 'social fabric'. Change scares him. I want pronouns my way because it's
more practical and I want the world to be more open minded about different
types of people. The conservative argument is the pinnacle of a feels over
reals argument. The idea of the 'deterioration of the social fabric' or just
garden-variety disgust towards sexual and gender minorities is based on
feelings, not facts. They claim a postmodern critique of gender and language
somehow destroys biology but they cannot concretely explain how. They start
with a feeling (trans people are weird) and then justify it after (something
incoherent about definitions of words and how homosexuality is bad for
society). They learn that men have wee wees and women have boobies and they
think they have the gender argument down pat.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Don’t conflate the question of whether trans woman should be
allowed to be considered a woman and how we should refer to a person. I call
people what they want to be called. I call Ben Shapiro Ben Shapiro instead of
Benjamin Shapiro. We can have butch women who act like men but we still call
women because they want us to because we realize gender is one giant meme that
probably shouldn’t exist. At the same time, we can believe that trans woman
should allowed to be considered women. These are not contradictory.</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Random Closing
Thoughts<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Language is just an absurd, made up thing that’s full of
contradictions. Languages like German or Spanish assign gender to all kinds of
animate objects. In English most objects have no gender, but men often gender
their cars and ships female when they clearly don't have the right chromosomes
or genitals. It's very dehumanizing for people to go out of their way to gender
and name their boats but not call me a she or use my changed legal name. In
Finnish there is just one generic pronoun for people. Maybe Finnish people all
have the same genitals. I’ll get back to you on that. <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Did you know that girls used to be a catch-all term for
children of a young age? It was a gender-neutral term. But if Ben Shapiro from
that era time traveled to our era, he would say… <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I would be unwilling to change a biological fact of human experience.
Girls are people of any gender up to 4-5 years of age. That’s just a biological
fact, an immutable characteristic of human nature. The idea of only calling
children which will be ladies after 4-5 years of age is ridiculous. What then
do we call the young girl that would later become a man?! Do we just call them
a ‘boy’? This is a ridiculous fundamental re-writing of a basic component of
human nature! This goes against everything we understand and I will not kowtow
to the general notion of re-writing human nature to appease the left.</i></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
What does it mean to be a man or a woman? These are
philosophical questions, and we all know the defining feature of philosophical
questions is they have no final answer. Gender roles today are inadequate and outdated, but that leads to gender abolitionism instead of traditional notions of gender. That is a topic for another day.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Summary</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Categories of man and woman (gender) are socially
constructed categories in that we chose to make these categories because it
gives us utility. Its primary function isn’t to signal reproductive status in
practice. Given how fuzzy sex and especially gender are, there is room to
increase utility for everyone by grouping the two primary genders by their
general characteristics, of which both cis and trans people of that gender
reside. To supplement that we call people what they wish to be called and that
takes priority. The upside outweighs the downside.<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-42381360518709297892019-08-19T14:31:00.001-07:002019-09-19T15:34:20.323-07:00More Than a DisagreementMy mother not supporting me in my trans journey is not the same as us having a disagreement about something. There's a reason why my ex-friend's family used to be the closest thing I had to a family. Trans people with supportive family and friends decreases the chance of reported attempted suicides, which surprises nobody. There is nothing my mom can say or do that can turn me cis or turn me away from transitioning. It's happening whether she likes it or not. Given that fact, standing in my way is nonsensical. She can't change my gender identity, so the only thing she can change is the way she treats me. She can choose to be supportive and show her love unconditionally. Maybe we could've been daughter and mother, and gone out shopping for clothes together. That sounds like fun.<br />
<br />
Instead, she decided not to support me. She decided to ignore the fact that her support decreases the chance of my suicide because she'd rather have a dead son than a living daughter. Her discomfort around sexual and gender minorities outweighs her wish for me to be happy. She decided not to protect me against a government which seeks to take away my rights or strangers who would abuse me. I feel betrayed.<br />
<br />
Some might say, "Oh, but what if you regret your decision later on?". What about it? I'm already 2 years into hormone therapy. Almost all of the breast growth has already happened. If I stop hormones now instead of 5 years later, the reversal process is very close. The reverse is not true; if I start now versus start later, there is a penalty because older people have worse transition outcomes. And if I realize I have to transition when I'm older and already have a spouse, that might destroy the relationship. It is easier to change things now than much later when I'm settled in. Perhaps longer estrogen exposures increases breast cancer risk, and I know conservatives are hypersensitive to danger. Would she feel equally as uneasy if I were born female and I was exposed to estrogen my entire life instead? Would her worries about breast cancer go away if I meticulously research the science and found no good evidence of harm? No, and she said so as much.<br />
<br />
So what really is her motivation for wanting me to stop hormones? Bigotry, of course. And bigots don't often like to say they are bigots, so I have to disprove every one of her stated reasons for disliking HRT before I can finally call it bigotry.<br />
<br />
Her attitude towards LGBT people let me know even as a kid in elementary school, that there was no way I could tell my mom I wanted to be a girl. In fact, I never told her anything. She didn't care about how I felt and I couldn't trust her with any secret. And so, I bottled up my feelings. All the guilt and shame and embarrassment. Because of this, it took me much longer to realize I was trans and to transitioning medically. Eventually I was too old for my mother to have direct control over my life. But by then it was already too late; it was already past puberty and the best window of opportunity for transitioning has past. I will have to deal with the physical consequences of that for the rest of my life.<br />
<br />
So no: it's not just a disagreement. That's a rhetorical trick. It's a denial which perpetuates my oppression. It's a denial of a core part of who I am. It continues the idea that I should be ashamed and my feelings are wrong.<br />
<br />
And for all of that, I will never forgive her.<br />
<br />BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-89097474696244515532019-04-24T16:49:00.000-07:002019-08-09T23:35:09.274-07:00Why Banning Transgender People in the Military is HarmfulIt might be not be immediately obvious why banning trans people from the military is problematic for trans people. First, some people join the military because they are poor and need money or college paid. This is important at a time where housing and college costs are through the roof. Some join to be disciplined and get their lives in order. They get to see the world and get a renewed sense of purpose. Some do it to protect the country at a time where the military often comes up short on recruitment goals.<br />
<div>
<i><br /></i>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>'SEAL training was the great equalizer. Nothing mattered but your will to succeed. Not your color, ethnic background, education, or social status.' </i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>-Admiral William H. McRaven</i></div>
<br />
In combat soldiers don't care about the sexual orientation or gender of the person guarding their back. They only care if they can do their job. In times of stress it's easier to form bonds with the people you experienced it with, especially when those people helped safeguard your life. That makes it harder for veterans to dislike trans people as much because they served with a trans person. In America we have (or at least pretend to have) a huge fetish for veterans, and it's harder to attack a trans veteran. People will probably be a bit more willing to listen to a cis veteran said 'I served with those people, they're alright'.<br />
<br />
It's also bad optics. Each hot button trans issue is a battleground for trans rights. Losing one and not caring because I don't want to join the military is a mistake. It's like a tug of war, where the more protections and rights trans people have the more the rope is pulled to our side, and vice versa. The more ground we gain, the longer it takes for others to take it away from us. The ban reminds us our rights could be taken from us on the whim of the government.<br />
<br />
Visibility of trans people in culture is important for acceptance. It's harder to think I'm an abomination, pedophile, or fetishist if you actually meet me. When you actually get to know me you realize I'm actually in many ways like most people. We're all actually not that different from one another. Don't let cynical politicians divide Americans against each other to exploit you for political gain. Trans people often value love, family, commitment, integrity just like cis people. For our transgender troops, they also value protection of democracy, freedom, discipline, and protecting the country. With proper visibility people gradually realize their mental image of how trans people are all like is built on stereotypes and that there exist trans people of all sizes, colors, and personalities. They'll stop thinking trans people are merely caricatures of their gender.<br />
<br />
Separate but equal might be a familiar phrase if you understand American history. The courts eventually understood that was a fantasy. If the oppressed minority had equal rights and opportunities then almost by definition it means a lack of separation, because why would such separation be necessary? Like the tug of war for mindshare and rights, losing this battle is a loss for trans rights and acceptance. I don't want to tell a kid that when they grow up they can be anything they want. ...Except for the president or a military service member because people hate us. That kid probably gets shit all the time from kids to disapproving family members, so they probably have very low self esteem. They might worry they will never pass or they might start to hate themselves. The despair may be so deep, they consider self harm and threaten to tear apart the lives of not only themselves but their family and friends as well. One day they see trans people in the military being honored and valued. Perhaps I'm not so worthless after all. If they can do it, maybe I can too. Visibility gives voices to those who are silenced and visibility to the invisible.<br />
<br />
In reality when a group gets less rights than another group, the government sanctioned discrimination leads to more discrimination from ordinary citizens towards the group. That effect is insidious and affects all trans people, not only those who wish the serve.<br />
<br />
We can't on one hand argue bothering to give trans people rights is pointless because they are so rare and on the other hand complain they are so common in the military, they will cost too much in healthcare. If we really cared about saving money, don't do senseless regime change wars that cost trillions of dollars. The cost of Viagra the military spends far outweighs trans healthcare. It's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Isn't is suspicious nobody is talking about changing healthcare benefits for trans individuals if budget was actually a concern?<br />
<br />
If we really cared about logistics for hormone replacement therapy, then it is suspicious nobody is suggesting only banning trans men from the military due to the vials of testosterone they have to take. Trans women can take high-dosage pills, of which many can fit in a small pill bottle. We don't hear anything about the realities of logistics or the medications trans women vs trans men take because it's not about that.<br />
<br />
It's not about logistics. It's not about cost. It wasn't about water fountains in the 60s and it's not about bathrooms or logistics today. Trans people are an oppressed minority and as such the small inconvenience of having trans people serve alongside their cis brother and sisters is outweighed by the benefits of inclusion. Critics might claim the ban only really affects those diagnosed with gender dysphoria medically. Many trans people know this means very little, because that diagnosis is used to obtain hormone replacement therapy in the first place. Many people diagnosed with gender dysphoria don't actually have gender dysphoria in the clinical sense (checklist of symptoms including having trouble functioning in society) but rather dysphoria in the colloquial sense (any level of discomfort with their gender and body which often is not crippling). We're not sending useless tokens of social justice into battle, and that's why a trans service member made it to the Navy SEALs.<br />
<br />
Perhaps you are wary of transgender troops out of purely logistical or financial reasons even though most people who claim such are actually uneasy with trans people and looking for a reason to shut them down. Maybe you don't have such unconscious biases. But realize that most people do, and the transgender ban is being pushed by bigots who would take our rights away one step at a time if they could. Is this the company you want to keep, and the policies you want to support? Aren't you worried the government will do more to harm trans people and you just aided them on their quest?<br />
<br />
As the New Yorker said, aspiring tyrants like Trump exert control over the people because they can. It is abhorrent for Trump to take away the rights of soldiers who would die to protect him. Patriotism is shown through actions not worship of symbols. Our trans service members demonstrate patriotism in spades. If we care about supporting the troops, then support all of the troops. It's time for freedom-loving Republicans to show us just how much they care about justice and liberty for all. Our cause is just. You can still choose to be on the right side of history and choose love, not hate. Lord knows we already have too much of the latter.</div>
BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-75966923770090106342019-03-03T01:35:00.002-08:002019-03-03T02:38:40.881-08:00Some Arguments Against Free Market Capitalism in Some CasesIt was interesting how the viewers of Joe Rogan think we shouldn't force a baker to bake a cake for a gay customer because we need limited government, but when Alex Jones comes on the show, WE MUST REIGN IN THE BIG TECH COMPANIES CENSORING ELITE PHILOSOPHERS LIKE ALEX jOnEs and we require STRICTER REGULATION!!!!@@######<br />
<br />
Apparently the line for government involvement is drawn somewhere between gay rights on one hand and Alex Jones on the other.<br />
<br />
<h3>
<b>Wedding Cakes for Gay People</b></h3>
I think people who make free market capitalist arguments for letting the baker discriminate against gay people are very naive about how the world works. It's like Dave Rubin talking points, where it sounds like he's an edgy 15 year old who just stumbled on an Ayn Rand book and thinks they've figured out how to solve the world. Dave would have 2 arguments:<br />
<br />
1. A baker who pisses off too many of their customers won't be in business, so they can't discriminate too much. <br />
<br />
How much is 'too much'? I'd argue any amount is 'too much' because it just shouldn't happen. The reason we protect minorities is because they are a minority - as in, not the majority. They on their own cannot shape policy or render a business bankrupt via boycott (and boycotts just in general don't work for anything... see fast fashion and child labor, etc). What we'd end up with is a minority constantly getting bullied with nobody caring. The only other solution is to ratchet up social justice tenfold, but half the country thinks we are getting too politically correct and Donald Trump is literally the president. That's not happening.<br />
<br />
2. It affects personal liberty too much. <br />
<br />
What about the liberty of gay people not to feel like shit in day to day life? Applying basic standards of nondiscrimination in places of business (ie, not kicking your customers out) is very little to ask. This isn't about your personal life. The same arguments have been used in the past to discriminate against black or trans people in the past. In the case of rights of black people, we had the civil rights movement which in part involved forcing people to serve black people and it made the world a better place. We do that, but for gay and now trans people.<br />
<br />
One might have a better argument about rejecting the gay cake job if the cake is supposed to have a giant penis and asshole printed on the top of the cake. For the most part though, wedding cakes are just normal (albeit fancy) cakes.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Building Codes </h3>
<div>
The worst Dave Rubin meltdown for me was coincidentally also when he was on the Joe Rogan show, where he argued we don't need building codes because we have Yelp. It sounds like I'm exaggerating to make fun of him, but I'm not and that's the funny part. We need building codes because we don't want to live in a world where we have to be an expert on everything to know whether what we buy will kill or maim us. Buildings would be expensive to inspect and easy to scam with by cheapening out here and there and we'd be none-the-wiser. By the time a contractor is known to have a bad reputation, many people have lost their life savings in houses which are now worthless or even worse, died in fires or earthquakes like a third world country. We live in a world where people believe in homeopathy, religions, and vaccines cause autism. Do we really want to leave every important decision to individual research when people are this stupid? Do we also trust the contractors to be honest enough to think about their reputation long term, or will they fall into the human impulse of short term gain and go into another field to run another scam somewhere else? People are cheaters. They cheat first, cover it up second, and justify it later.<br />
<br />
People like Dave Rubin generalize so much ("government NEVER does anything well") and push easy solutions (free market capitalism) when like many things in life, the devil is in the details. Theories painting a free market utopia are largely pointless if it doesn't work in reality. For people like Dave Rubin, one would be tempted to argue he is pushing feels over facts. For him specifically though I would call it 'Koch money over facts' instead.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Pollution/Global Warming</h3>
And finally, I have qualms with extreme free market capitalism when it comes to pollution or climate change. The idea that companies which pollute too much would be forced to pollute less for their own health or because people will boycott their company is ridiculous (the latter of which is already covered). This is especially true for climate change, which seems like an impossible to fix problem with negatives which come slowly and gradually, making it easy to deny or put off. When companies find out they can make more money by polluting more, they will pollute more. They care only about money, and if they don't do it, others will and have an advantage over them. This is a race to the bottom, but once we've trashed the entire planet at least we've generated good shareholder value! I'm sure when a mother's children died in the first earthquake their house encountered due to poor building codes and her husband died drinking poisoned water, she can sue for enough cash to resurrect all of them. /s<br />
<br />
We can even try to fix this within a capitalist framework like cap and trade, which used to be championed by Republicans... except now apparently they don't even believe global warming is real now? What the hell is up with that?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<i>Free Market Capitalism: When you have a hammer, every problem begins to look like nails.</i></div>
BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-52800585887281755402019-01-13T03:15:00.000-08:002019-01-13T03:15:03.976-08:00Pondering on Sexual Harassment<div>
I will talk about dynamics between men and women now. First story is about Twitch boob streamers. Second is about a sexual harassment complaint and prostitution. Third is about domestic violence. None of these sections feature very insightful or amazing analyses, but here we go.<br /><br />---</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Twitch boob streamers are female streamers who stream on a video game streaming site called Twitch. Usually people play games live while a the audience interacts with the streamer. Some enterprising young women started streaming themselves doing various activities while being scantily clad. Essentially they are women who try to turn guys on so they can give them money.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The problem this causes is mostly Twitch's fault in my opinion. Twitch's TOS doesn't allow for sexual content, but they poorly enforce their terms. They can't seem to decide if they want to allow boobie streamers. This creates confusion, and people who are angry that somebody is profiting from breaking the rules of Twitch. While the line between a woman removing a few buttons on her shirt to get some more viewers and a booby streamer is blurred, there are extremes which Twitch still turns a blind eye to.<br /><br />This is a problem of expectations. Nobody gets mad a cam girl in a porn site gets money. That's because it's allowed on the site and the entire point of the site. People get what they expect. I might like Big Macs, but if I go to a 3 Michelin starred place and get a Big Mac, I'm going to be pretty upset. It's not because the Big Mac is all of a sudden disgusting. It's because I didn't get what I was advertised. What does Twitch want to be about? Is it a gaming only site, or will it allow "IRL", whatever that means?<br /><br />But also, I think a good chunk of the blowback is really from a bunch of horny men who are jealous some beautiful women get to get paid and coveted for being who they are. (To be fair, being beautiful all the time is actually kind of time consuming. This isn't as simple as printing money.) Some people are disgusted by women who appear sexually promiscuous. Harassing women for that is total bullshit. That should go without saying.<br /><br />As a trans person I can really identify with the jealousy part though. There are a lot of men who never find women who really adore them and covet them like they might covet many women. As a trans woman, I'm never getting that treatment. To some extent I think women who are ugly can relate. (In general though, women find it much easier to get sex if they want it than men... unless you're a trans woman. That, and the whole issue with envy of women from trans people, makes the experience a little different.)<br /><br />Booby streamers don't often say they are booby streamers. They like to play it off like they are getting viewers for their amazing personality or skills at a game. This dishonesty is to some extent Twitch's fault due to their TOS which is oddly enforced, but I'm sure some women use their sexuality to make money but don't want to be confronted with the fact that it makes them a porn actor. Similarly, women who exchange sex for plane tickets, fancy dinners, and a rich husband, might be prostitutes or 'wife for hires' don't want to acknowledge that that is who they are.<br /><br />But there's nothing really wrong with that. Women should be allowed to profit off of their sexuality. It's unfair that a lot of people can't do that, but life isn't fair. Personally I find the idea of 'paid love' kind of dishonest and distasteful because I have idealistic views about romance and love, but if an arrangement works out between two people, then good for them.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
--</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
A man offers initially to pay for tickets for a woman's trip to GDQ, which is a charity event where people who try to play games are quickly as possible try to raise donations for a charity. She would be staying over for free with him in his hotel room.</div>
<div>
<br />It's not entirely clear if there were clear terms struck, but it seems the agreement was she would at least be his cuddle buddy in bed to make it up to her. Eventually their exchanges got extremely sexual, with the woman talking about all kinds of sexual stuff. She said she will be his sex toy for the week.<br /><br />On the first night he cuddled her. The guy claims he put his arms over her breasts, and she lifted her shirt up, and things escalated from there. We only have his side of the story, and parts of it at that. On the second day she slept on the floor. Eventually he kicked her our of his room, though he did pay for her flight home. The woman complained about sexual harassment to GDQ.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The woman herself is a shady person who tried to get into GDQ with an expired pass, receiving a 2 year ban. She tried to come back yet again this year. The man's ex-girlfriend posted screenshots showing him saying he's trying to get her busted. It is his ex though.<br /></div>
When it comes to intimacy between men/women especially, it becomes weird. Some people are hell-bent on blaming men or women for everything and calling things rape or sexual assault when it was barely anything. Some other people have very weird, anti-women perspectives on things. Context matters when judging behavior. (What's okay off work at a bar is not okay at work.) Young people make stupid mistakes together and often it ends up being he-said she-said. People interpret things differently, human memory is unreliable, and people often lie. It's sad. Consent is tricky. But I for one would be okay with explicit consent the first time... literally asking if they'd be okay with sex. It's considered socially awkward and for many people it kills the mood but I think it simplifies things. If authorities keep attacking men by default over every sexual mishap, it will increase resentment in men. It's really a case by case basis kind of thing. It's possible to host a family-friendly event that looks out for LGBT people and women while not attacking men. GDQ has banned the man indefinitely, though it's unclear if the investigation is ongoing, and GDQ has better information than we do.<br /><br />If a woman offers sex in exchange for the man paying for her accommodations and travel expenses to an event, she is literally a prostitute. Prostitution doesn't mean the prostitute is forced to have sex with her client. She gets to change her mind and walk out. But she doesn't get to take a guy's money and walk out without having sex with him. That's a scam. If the client refuses to let her go and insists on sex, that is sexual harassment.<br /><br />The guy is stupid for thinking a girl's going to be willing to have sex over some plane tickets and not just hiring some cheap prostitute instead. The girl is stupid for agreeing to have sex with a man she's never met before, giving him all of her power in the situation knowingly, and not thinking to have an alternative ready in case the plane ticket deal falls through. I don't think it's fair to shit on the guy for being very lonely and wanting sex, just like I don't think it's really fair to shit on the girl for being willing to sell her body.<br /><br />Do we believe the accuser by default? It's tricky. I don't know what the statistics are on false accusations, and maybe nobody knows. The crime of falsely accusing somebody of a crime on purpose ought to be as bad as the punishment for said crime, if not worse. But how do we know what happened if we weren't there? Having a long line of accusers certainly tips the scales, but in many cases it isn't like that. In the case of Kavanaugh, it was a job interview for which we had a very long line of competent judges. The Supreme Court justices serve for life. It's better to be safe than sorry in that case. His behavior during the hearings, from his lack of control of his emotions to his blatant dishonesty, demonstrate he was unfit for the office. (Lying under oath isn't just bad. It's illegal. He should be in jail right now.) In this case, I really don't know. I really depends on what happened in the hotel room on that day.<br /><br />---<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There was another man vs woman incident in gaming, when a Twitch streamer slapped his wife off camera after the woman was very upset that he wouldn't drop his stream to eat dinner with his family. She threw various objects, most of which didn't get shown on camera. She was very persistent and very annoying. The man was apprehended by police, and I believe charged.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I'm not sure that a man should lose his family for a single slap. It doesn't make the slap okay. Throwing objects at your husband also isn't okay. To be fair, none of the objects sounded like it was very dangerous. There were no sounds of glass shattering or metal objects crashing through.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I wouldn't be surprised if the justice system was biased against men. People kept talking about how he 'beat the shit out of her'. If one slap counts as 'beating the shit' out of someone, maybe you've never played a video game or watched a violent movie in your entire life. If you got the shit beat out of you and you stop crying 3 seconds later and have the vitality to continue throwing random objects at somebody, then you weren't hit that hard. Does it make slapping people okay? No. But we shouldn't be so loose with out language. It's like the people who call everything 'sexual assault', trivializing actual cases of sexual assault.<br /><br />Men are on average stronger than women. Not all men are stronger than women. For many years of my life I lived as a guy and most girls could beat me up if they really wanted to. People look at domestic violence from the lens of gender, not power. Even when men are stronger than women, they are not so exponentially stronger to the point where they are incapable of inflicting violence that hurts but doesn't injure. It's not like men are so strong, they helplessly destroy a woman by flicking their fingers or accidentally bumping into them.<br /><br />Women are not mentally retarded. They are adults just like men. They should be subjected to the same standards for better and for worse.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
---</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Does it really matter to me who was in the wrong in the specific cases I mentioned? No. I think it's useful to think about these situations and explore dynamics between men and women.</div>
BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-25603616564156353762018-12-09T00:31:00.003-08:002018-12-09T01:45:37.340-08:00Anti-SJWs and Pushing Back Against Social ConservativesBeing a SJW has gotten a bad reputation in the past several years. Instead of a person who cares about making the world a better place, we now think of a blue-haired female feminist yelling about something benign being unacceptably racist. I think it's time to push back a little bit against the 'anti-SJWs'... These are people who spend all of their time railing against SJWs.<br />
<br />
<b>Social Justice is a Good Thing</b><br />
What race or gender I am or where I was born were accidents of birth, purely up to chance. The best way for me to construct the rules of society is to construct it in a way such that I would feel okay being born with any race, gender, or at any location. That's what fairness and equality means. It's tough to achieve because people understand their own problems better than that of others, and give themselves excuses for their failures while refusing to give the same charity to others. We empathize with people like us.<br />
<br />
I think the way to re-frame the situation of somebody lecturing you about how calling people fags is not nice is to think about Colin Kaepernick. He knelt at the US flag during a football game instead of standing at attention with hand over heart. Arguably it's more respectful to kneel than to stand. The conservatives who constantly attacked liberals for being politically correct snowflakes and were scared of being deplatformed by offended college students all of a sudden felt what it was like to be on the other end of that situation. While it's okay for a Mississippi senator to joke about watching a public lynching (of black folk) or how some liberals should be prevented from voting so they can get a more favorable result, it's not okay to kneel in front of a flag in solidarity for black men killed by police officers. Whether or not you agree Kaepernick's opinion on police brutality, it's obvious the aims were noble.<br />
<br />
Why can't we just enjoy a football game without politics, some conservatives would ask. Well, the entire patriotic show during NFL games itself was and is a political game. We were scared of the godless commies, so we reacted by trying to be the exact opposite. The idea that people could just forget about politics when they don't feel like it is a perspective born out of privilege. If things are going okay for you, you don't have to worry about things all the time. If your life is a dumpster fire, any time is a good time to try to put the fire out. From the sofa in front of a TV, a white guy might feel annoyed or unreasonably triggered due to their constant hard-on for nationalism, but those people need to remember that it's hell of a lot better to be annoying in front of their big screen TV than to fear the police. There's a remarkable difference in what each side has to give up for this flag-kneeling situation to go their way: Some people have to spend 5 seconds watching a black man kneel, while many other people would be unable to voice their plight.<br />
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<b>Anti-SJWs</b><br />
Sargon of Akkad aka Carl Benjamin comes to mind. (What kind of weirdo names themselves after an old king, anyways?) When being a conservative or a Trumpist seems too shameful, I guess the trendy label now is 'classical liberal'. When all Carl does is praise Trump and ruthlessly attack SJWs and those who oppose Trump, it's not a surprise he attracts a conservative viewership. Oh, but I can't be responsible for my sexist audience! ...Or so he might say. Actually in a way, yes, you are Carl. His viewers have a strong conservative stance on things because Carl constantly makes fun of the other side, while never criticizing "his own side". How many times has Carl attacked Trump?<br />
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Yes, extreme political correctness is a problem. But political correctness itself isn't a problem. It exists because it's society way of shaming people with shitty opinions. When Carl told somebody he wouldn't even rape her, it wasn't politically correct. It was bad and he should've felt bad. But he didn't and stood by his statement. This is my point: Too many anti-SJWs aren't well-intentioned people who worry about a stifled public discourse. They're just conservative bullies.<br />
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A lot of conservatives put great emphasis on personal agency when in reality free will doesn't even exist. Personal agency is an illusion. We take responsibility for our successes and then give excuses for our failures. I'm rich because I studied hard in college. Oh wait, that ignores the fact that I can even afford college. Or that my personal life is stable enough to allow for that. Or that I was taught soft skills like showing up on time and getting along with people when I was young because my parents taught me those things. Or that I didn't grow up in a world of crime with no real role models.<br />
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There is where Carl would say that the solution for black poverty is to be married because married people are better off, as if causation is the same as correlation. Staying married is a sign of stability in life and wealth. Even if getting married is some sort of panacea for the problems which ails the black population, that's not how people make choices. Show me the law which says blacks aren't allowed to marry, he would say. Yeah, well, just because a law doesn't exist permitting racism or sexism that must mean it doesn't exist, right? These people have simple ideas to complex problems and people think they are 'telling it like it is'. No they're not.<br />
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Carl's not a centerist. When somebody agrees with almost every conservative position, they are conservative, even if they prefer to call themselves something else to come off as more objective and neutral. The extreme left aren't 'taking over' the left. Carl's a shitty contrarian man-child and a failure of a human being. He's a closet Republican who doesn't even live in America but cares about US politics because he's in a cult of Trump. Other anti-SJWs aren't as bad, but they still defend regressive people while constantly attacking SJWs over and over.<br />
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Dave Rubin also calls himself a classical liberal and probably feels better about himself for not aligning himself officially to any political party, yet he constantly defends or makes excuses for conservatives and grills liberals for everything. He keeps talking about 'having conversations', ie, talking about talking. But when it comes down to it, he only brings a certain type of person on his show. They're either conservative or people who have serious problems with PC culture.<br />
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The problem with people is they won't honestly tell you what they thing, who they align with, and what their motivations are. Dave Rubin is a careerist who had a sudden 180 on politics and went from TYT to PragerU. Carl Benjamin just likes to trigger SJWs (and said as much). Stefan Molyneux went from actual anarchist/libertarian to actual white supremacist who believes in the White Genocide conspiracy. The 'Race Realist' people who support a white ethnostate in America are actually just closet racists. A good example is Lauren Southern traveling to France to record a footage of her walking across an area with many brown people with ominous music in the background. <i>Nothing actually happens in the video. </i>What that means is the problem is there are brown people. Or maybe they don't speak French when talking to other brown people.<br />
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The 'free market of ideas' assumes everyone is well-read and open to having their opinions changed. That's rarely the case. When people allow shitty human beings like Nick Fuentes who think trans people should suffer electroshock therapy, gay people should be sterilized, or that white people are superior to non-whites without pushing back on their opinions, all that does is give those terrible ideas a new platform to spread. That's irresponsible.<br />
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And the Left is bad at their job. An older generation fought against the brunt of racism, and we just swept the rest under the rug. The election of Trump is a wake-up call because those bigots never left even after we shamed them into silence. They're still there, and they're voting. Oh look, now they're angry and they have Twitter and Youtube. We have to be able to destroy white supremacist talking points. It feels like we not longer know how to do that because we all figured the problem was gone, and now we've forgotten the relevant arguments.<br />
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And when idiots like Ben Shapiro repeats that 'facts don't care about your feelings', pundits have to call him out on his shtick: He talks at 100 miles per hour and lists many studies which we couldn't have possibly read ahead of time, but many of his 'facts' and studies aren't true or don't say what he wants them to say. It's actually pretty funny how quickly some of his studies fall apart because he obviously never read them, and he knows most people won't either. They'll just accept him at face value when he says 'this study shows...'.<br />
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The pundits also have to call him out on the idea that conservatives are the ones who take facts over feelings, because otherwise the image of a confident man who is good at debating is very attractive to many weak men who follow in kind. Being conservative is often about fear and not wanting change. That's how we get xenophobia, protectionism, and wanting strong national defense. Black people look different from us, so maybe they will give us diseases. Gay sex is disgusting and that feeling of disgust causes me to be against gay marriage. Trans people are different and defy what I am used to and maybe crazy people will exploit bathroom rights to rape others. Those are some pretty emotional ideas based on fear and disgust. It takes a lot of reason and evidence to suggest that the world is safer than ever or the fear of people abusing trans bathroom rights just never came to fruition despite all of the fear-mongering. It's far easier to fall back to our gut instincts which helped us survive a long time ago but cause us to reason miserably.<br />
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<b>Blah Blah Blah</b><br />
The only person I still give the benefit of the doubt to is Joe Rogan, because I've seen enough of his podcasts to know where he's coming from. He talks over and over about how SJWs ruin things or how trans movements are problematic for sports or for children as if it's a massive problem, when the biggest problem in the entire trans issue is the lack of basic human rights trans people have. He just won't have articulate trans people on his show to talk about this issue. If somebody puts 95% of their time talking about sports and children getting hormones too early instead of discrimination trans people face, then you know where their priorities lie.<br />
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This is why people get annoyed and say things like 'you're white, you don't get it'. Different people have different lived experiences. While it's possible to understand a situation from both sides through reason and evidence, that requires a lot of mental effort and people generally aren't up for the task. Over half of Americans think society has gone too far in accepting trans people or just right. This is a time where trans people have next to no protections federally and can be fired for being trans, and many attempt suicide due to discrimination and shame. Those people aren't all bigots. They're just ignorant and don't put themselves in other people's shoes. How many trans people are pro trans rights? How many non-trans people are pro trans rights? Lived experience still counts for something.<br />
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<b>More Shit Conservatives Say</b><br />
Rubin's talking about how we don't need building regulations and there's nothing the government does that is better than private enterprise (and backtracking each time he gets pummeled by Joe Rogan on his podcast). It's easy to build shoddy buildings which people won't find out until a major natural disaster, and by then you already earned so much money you might not even care if you get found out. Dave Rubin says that's fine because we have Yelp, and when pushed he said he just liked the idea philosophically of the free market doing everything. How many free market capitalists does it take to change a light bulb? None. The free market will take care of it. We don't live in Dave's free market utopia, but rather the real world where things get complicated and people do stupid things against their own interests thinking they can get away with it. That's why idiots go full autopilot in their Teslas and die and people steal money. Sometimes they do get away with it, because not everyone has the time or expertise to check all the reviews and understand what separates a good from a bad product. Even if Yelp for buildings works out in the long term, I sure as hell don't want to be an early buyer of a house, because those people get screwed.<br />
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Jordan Peterson said he didn't sleep for 25 days once after drinking apple cider, and that women wearing makeup is hypocritical because they don't want sexual harassment. Yeah. Let that sink in for a minute. Yes, makeup or high heels could be conscious displays of sexuality, but they could very well be nonsexual or unconscious. Maybe I want to put on makeup because prettier people get an easier go at life. As a trans person the idea of looking good to feel good about myself is totally obvious from a female perspective, but is totally foreign to many males. He puts the burden on the women to fix sexual harassment in the workplace, as if men will helplessly harass women if women present a certain way. Because it's unclear exactly what behavior is or isn't allowed, he reasons, women should just not have sexual displays to make it easy. Maybe men should start shaving and stop wearing suits, being handsome, or being funny, or having nice things which demonstrate wealth.<br />
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Or you know, let people have personal autonomy. See, this is the problem with Peterson. He makes a bunch of claims about how the world is and never says how to fix it, but he heavily implies how it should be done. He's so slippery. He complains about Bill C16 which was supposed to limit free speech by making it a crime to misgender somebody, when nobody ever got locked up. He complains about the 'postmodern neo-Marxist left' who want to define gender in all sorts of ways, but then he claims all atheists believe in god and comes up with a crazy definition of what god is.<br />
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<b>Conclusion</b><br />
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I'm done giving conservative thinkers the benefit of the doubt. Too many of them are dishonest or idiots. I unsubscribed from Dave Rubin and I didn't bother to listen to Rogan's latest podcast with Peterson. If all you do is complain about political correctness and you don't put any energy into attacking racists and homophobes, you're part of the problem.</div>
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I've been slowly having these thoughts over the past few years and Destiny on Youtube/Twitch really enunciated what I've been thinking but could not find the words to say.</div>
BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-58616014555322672672018-06-24T23:34:00.002-07:002018-11-15T21:16:13.958-08:00Death, Consequence, and The Hill of Thoughts<b>Death PT I</b><br />
Totalbiscuit died recently. While it's unfortunate he told somebody he hoped he got cancer and die and died to cancer himself, it by no means he deserved it. It's not eye for an eye at all, and even that makes the whole world blind. It's not the same to make an angry comment in the heat of the moment as it is to sincerely wish somebody has their life ended. It's one thing to know it's difficult to be on the receiving end of countless criticisms every day, and it's another to experience it. Our minds were evolved to handle input from our tribe, but while technology has given a voice to those who could not speak, it has allowed us to peer into a window into a never-ending cacophony of angry noises. Geography stops mattering in a way that must feel evolutionarily bizarre.<br />
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People see a sliver of somebody's life and personality and assume they know them. For sure he has changed his opinions as he came down with the illness, but on the internet people assume others never grow. This is literally death, and a painful one at that. It's years of painful fighting, knowing the whole time it could very well end all too soon. There's the dealing with the medical staff, but most of all there's his wife and disabled son that he left behind. To lose somebody that means the world to you is something nobody should have to go through. I don't know what I would do. Imagine watching people wither away, cachexia and all, hair lone gone. Totalbiscuit was an interesting video game critic/personality. The world is a little colder without him.<br />
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<b>Death PT II</b><br />
I've never seen him act this way. I thought he was the type that slept with different girls but never got attached to any of them. Turns out there was a girl he kind of liked. He told me how she was kind to people and gave to the homeless even when she had none for herself. But life was hard on her, and she had a drinking problem. When caught driving drunk, she couldn't drink anymore, so she turned to harder drugs: Cocaine. She admitted this when she came and visited him. 'Do you think what I'm doing is wrong?', she asked him. Being a counter-culture guy, he said no. Days later she died of an overdose.<br />
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'It's like nothing changed!', he remembered her saying. Her attention to detail impressed him. She remembers the way the house was, and the pets. It felt like she came back to him, and the world took her away. He feels guilty. He thought he should've put anti-overdose drugs in her purse, and told her not to take cocaine. I tried telling him that with things like this, it's usually very hard to stop or control. Other people in her life couldn't get through to her either, so his part was just one of many things that could have gone differently. We'll never know if anything he could've done would've made a difference... but he felt it was important for him to have at least tried.<br />
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Somebody once told me a story about my father decades ago, before I was born. He liked to ride his motorcycle, and it was legal to ride without a helmet. My aunt was annoyed that he didn't wear a helmet, and after many attempts at convincing him to get one, decided to buy one and gave it to him. He started wearing it since he got it for free without hassle. Later that week he got into an accident and got pushed off the motorcycle. He suffered a scar but came out okay. But if he landed poorly without a helmet that could've been it. It was a story told to say that sometimes one person can make all of the difference.<br />
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And that's life. Sometimes you never know. Sometimes bad things we can't predict happen and there's nothing we can do. Lack of control is scary, maybe even worse than guilt or what-ifs.<br />
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<i>A pill to make you numb </i></div>
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<i>A pill to make you dumb </i></div>
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<i>A pill to make you anybody else </i></div>
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<i>But all the drugs in this world </i></div>
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<i>Won't save her from herself</i></div>
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<b>Death PT III</b></div>
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Over time I've had different people confide in me their various life problems. If you have existential problems, you are not alone. Most people care a lot about what other people think of them, so they might bury their problems, thinking other people would think lesser of them if they ever come to light. Unless you really know a person you might not know how many skeletons are in their closet. This means most people can empathize with you on some level because they've got shit to deal with too.</div>
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You're not a loser because you have problems. Maybe the people you least expect are contemplating suicide right now. Life can be really hard sometimes with no easy way out. Sometimes it's flat out unfair. But whoever you are reading this, I hope you pull through. Even if I don't like you, stay safe.</div>
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<i>Strong people show weakness and survive.</i></div>
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<i>Weak people act tough yet perish anyways.</i></div>
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<b>Death PT IV</b></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">The following is loosely adapted from Time magazine.</span></div>
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With the recent death of Bourdain and Spade, we are reminded of the uselessness of envy. It is a miscalculation in the relative worth of things. We don't have our own TV show or fashion line, and that makes us think we aren't as hardworking or intelligent as they are. They must be better people than us. But this comparison is made with flawed data. People's lives are not as they appear. Bourdain's line is the epitome of this: 'What do you do after your dreams come true?'</div>
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<b>Life PT I</b></div>
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Transitioning has been unexpectedly difficult for me. Due to both hormones and life experience changing how I think, I've had to adjust to fluctuating emotions. It's not all bad. I don't take for granted showing who I really am instead of hiding, or not thinking testosterone ruined my body. Yet having a gender that aligns with sex is something over 99% of the population take for granted. It's like a diabetic. They don't take eating for granted because one careless day and it could be their last. So yes, it gives me joy sometimes when I feel feminine. Sometimes when I find something funny I laugh until there are literally tears in my eyes. Emotion flows more easily and I feel less pressured to act a certain way.</div>
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But sometimes things aren't so good. The realization that one is transgender is an opened Pandora's Box. Things will never be the same again no matter what you do. Sometimes I feel like nothing I do is ever enough. I will always be a fake, trying, wishing, to be female. Even with sex reassignment surgery, which itself comes with a whole host of potential problems, I would still be a shade of a natal female. There are things I can never take back because of when I started hormones. There are times when I see a normal female and get jealous. The flip side to unabashed joy is neuroticism and depression. At first I was surprised at how upset I was at various events, until it happened again, and again, and I realized how I processed emotions changed. Maybe it's a second puberty and it brings along with it some of the teenage angst, except when present as an adult others are less understanding.</div>
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<i>This too shall pass.</i></div>
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It's a Persian adage about the temporary nature of the human condition. If you are happy, it will fade. On the flip side if you are sad, that too, will pass. Well, life itself will pass. Change is the constant. Things don't stay the same. One could claw away and yearn for the past, but while it is a good place to visit, it's not a good place to stay.</div>
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Some very bad things happened very recently to me. Thankfully when suicidal thoughts enter my mind I know it's an empty threat. I still have much I want to do and experience. Self-transcending love. Sex. Friendship. The future of my transition. Cute outfits. The future of computer technology. The completion of my Skyrim work. Lazy day of hot chocolate and cuddling. Making lemonade. Skyrim while it rains outside. The smell of her hair.</div>
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I will pull through. I always have. This is not enough to stop me. Times like this, I rely on my close friends to lean on. These are people who I can say anything to without a filter and confide potentially life-destroying secrets without fear. People who actually care. That's rare. And when I find them, I don't want them to go.</div>
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Sometimes though, life wants to borrow them for a while. Full time job. School. Just stuff. Have you ever, in a hangout with friends, ever stop to think that this memory here, yes, this one, will be one which you look back on with fondness? Maybe it'll help people cherish what time they have. Because it will pass. It always does.</div>
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<span style="text-align: start;"><i>The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, </i></span></div>
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<span style="text-align: start;"><i>Miles to go before I sleep.</i></span></div>
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<b>Life PT II</b></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">The following is a quote from Sam Harris during a speech.</span></div>
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Most of us try our best not to think about death. But all of us knows that we're just a doctor's visit away from being starkly reminded of our own mortality. I'm sure many of you know somebody who has experienced this. You must know how uncanny it is to be thrown out of the normal course of your life, and just be given the full time job of not dying. The one thing people tend to realize at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time when life was normal. It's not just they spent too much time working or compulsively checking email. It's that they cared about the wrong things. They regret what they cared about. Their attention was bound up by petty concerns... year after year when life was normal.</div>
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And this is a paradox of course, because we all know this epiphany is coming. Don't you know this is coming? Don't you know that you'll look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention and you'll ask, what was I thinking? You know this, and if you're like most people, you'll spend most of the time in your life, tacitly presuming you will live forever. It's like watching a bad movie for the fourth time. These things only make sense in light of eternity. There better be a heaven if we're going waste our time like this. There are ways to really live in the present moment. What is the alternative? It is always now. However much you may feel the need to plan for the future or mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now. This may sound tripe, but it's the truth. And we spend most of our life repudiating it, overlooking it. The horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives. We're always anticipating what is coming next. We're always trying to solve a problem. It's possible to simply drop your problem, if only for a moment, and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present.</div>
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<b>Consequence PT I</b></div>
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Being transgender is confusing and many people don't immediately know what it all means. I was young, pushed to act a certain way, and didn't find good sources of information. I was a kid living in a time where LGBT support was still in the minority. It took me a long time of self-debate before I decided to call myself transgender and pursue hormone replacement therapy. So when I saw two people I thought might be transgender but did not know it, I asked them a few questions and gave a few of my thoughts. In both cases they realized they were transgender and decided to pursue or seriously consider pursuing HRT.</div>
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It is crazy how I can drastically affect of some people I talk to. Because I debated myself for so long, I knew what to say and how to think about the issue. A person recently thanked me for helping them discover themselves. I just wished somebody was there for me when I was young, because I would've started hormones earlier and hit puberty. At least I made a difference. That's special.</div>
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Would those people have found themselves without me eventually? Maybe. It's surprisingly hard to do so, even in this internet age. People harbor too many misconceptions about what it means to be transgender. And when they figure it out, they might be 40 and married with kids. Or they could figure it all out next year somehow.</div>
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<b>Consequence PT II</b></div>
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A long time ago in middle school, I wore the same clothes every day and got bullied by mean-spirited people that enjoyed the suffering of others. My self esteem was at an all time low in my entire life. Then I met a girl on Maplestory. We got along really well. She once confided in me that she got along with me better than her online 'boyfriend'. I went to visit my father in Taiwan for a month and forgot to tell her. I tried to contact her on Maplestory in Taiwan, but due to the IP block, I couldn't log on. By the time I got back to America, she was gone. Sometimes people enter our lives for a relatively brief period of time and leave footprints on our heart that stay forever. She taught me that I wasn't an undesirable bag of shit nobody could ever love. She probably don't remember me anymore. But I remember her and the impact she made on me, and that is enough.</div>
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<b>Hill of Thoughts</b></div>
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On the Joe Rogan podcast a guest brought up something interesting. He said to think of your mind as a hill. Your thoughts are sleds going down that hill. After a while after a lot of thoughts have gone down that hill, there will be these grooves, which get deeper and deeper... Until you can't go down the hill without slipping into those grooves. That's who we are in middle age. And what psychedelics do is flatten the snow. Lots of fresh powder. I found it a beautiful metaphor. And when people come out of a psychedelic experience and repeat these platitudes like 'love is what matters', it really is true. Platitudes are truths with all emotion sucked out of it. Sometimes we are looking so hard for novel ideas that we forget that some of the most basic ones are the most important.</div>
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BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-29032241840683160092018-04-26T01:56:00.002-07:002018-04-26T02:42:09.984-07:00Musings of the Past Half Year (Part 2 of 2): Rebuttal EditionThe second part of this two part series is about rebutting various ideas I've encountered. So... yeah. You know what you're getting into, so don't blame me.<br />
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<b>Validity</b><br />
For many trans people, acceptance from others is difficult. But something less often talked about is acceptance of oneself. There can be shame that they're a freak, that this is a fetish, or embarrassment because they think they look ridiculous. People don't want to be who they are because they are worried. I can see why I got the backlash I got on r/AskTransgender when I said I thought trans women are men sexually but women socially, and the latter is all that matters. A sense of validity goes to the core of one's being. If being trans is not valid, the truth is all of the suffering and effort transitioning were the efforts of a crazy person. The stakes are high when so much rests on one question: Am I valid?<br />
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This is why cavalier comparisons between transgenderism and transracialism are very offensive. Such charged and old topics need to be treated with reverence. Don't be a child that blurts out whatever their latest train of thought takes them.<br />
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We should respect people's boundaries and not assume that a trans person who refuses to debate is purely insecure. People have their own shit to deal with. The world's not going to run out of trans people for you to debate. Find another one.<br />
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<b>'Gay people forgot they were gay.'</b><br />
Somebody said gay people 'forgot their sexual orientations' in volleyball because in their experience, gay people can get vicious in volleyball. It could depend on the situation, but I can see most people playing volleyball seriously be vicious in volleyball. People are not one dimensional creatures, where a 'nice girl' is always nice and passive for example. We've all heard about tribalism and how it affects groups of people, and we know how some people can be when it comes to sports teams, for example.<br />
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Stereotyping large groups of people with little hesitation is a problem because it makes it acceptable to assume things about somebody without actually knowing them. Prejudice has led to terrible things in history. Beliefs about how gay people should act don't often lead to genocide but it can lead to problems with the norms of a society. People are not one-dimensional, but perhaps even more importantly, individuals vary more than the groups they belong in. This is why we judge people as individuals and not as groups. Failing that, our beliefs about how people are shapes how we treat others subconsciously, which itself can lead to a negative interaction between societal norms and individual behavior.<br />
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Our norms govern many things and I see how it has negatively impacted trans people for example. A lot of it can be remedied if we just think that people are people, and that is that. No point expecting a particular behavior from people you don't know.<br />
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<b>'Transgenderism is bad for our species if everyone becomes trans.'</b><br />
If everyone were women, we'd have an even bigger problem. That ends our species. If everyone were artists, we'd all starve. It doesn't mean artists are bad, it just means that not everybody can or should be artists.<br />
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WTF even is this argument?<br />
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<b>'*Insert incoherent noises here*'</b><br />
The most common misconception about trans people is that trans people share a similar story: They found out they were trans early on in life, and suffer serious depression... And they often get genital surgery. Somebody disputed me on this, saying that people who think this way are dumb and they're not that common. Wording matters; here I was talking about the most common misconception. That might or might not mean a majority of people. If 99% of people understand a concept and 1% have errors in understanding, the most common misconception is actually very rare.<br />
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A lot of people believe in stereotypes. Even if only 1% of the US population believes something, that's 3 million people. Often people don't have the mental capacity left from their day-to-day activities to learn about the nuances of some minority group and that's understandable. What's less understandable is discussing and debating the topic as if one is informed when they are not.<br />
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Stereotypes are also why I often hear people respond to people coming out as trans with 'but you never showed any signs'. Part of it is said out of surprise, but part of it is the expectation and stereotype that trans people exhibit different behavior from a relatively early age. This makes sense because my experience with the media about trans stories is they are all about people who knew they were trans from an early age. A significant portion of trans people realize much later for a plethora of reasons, and quite a good percentage had a lot of doubts about their gender. This is why r/AskTransgender contains countless threads of people asking if they are trans, 'trans enough', or if it's all just a fetish.<br />
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You don't need crushing dysphoria to be trans. To simplify, being trans means you think you should be the other sex. Dysphoria means you're upset that it's not working out perfectly. Some people don't get surgery or even hormone therapy, but those are complicated decisions each person needs to make based on their own financial, health, environmental, and mental health reasons.<br />
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The trans issue is not intuitively obvious to people. With homosexuality is pretty easy: For example, imagine how a girl is attracted to a man, and put that mindset into a man and voila, you have a homosexual. It's not a hard concept. But how many cisgender people experience gender dysphoria? I've seen various attempts by trans people to explain gender dysphoria but they are all clumsy. Imagine if you had to use your left hand from now on instead of your right. Imagine if everybody treated you like a boy when you were a girl, and calls you a he. None of these thought experiments work and language mostly fails.<br />
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The point is, people often have a poor understanding of trans people, and media narrative about the trans experience is accepted as the default. This leads to stereotypes.<br />
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I actually know somebody who thought I might've become trans because the daughter of some movie director came out as trans... As if I jumped onto the trans bandwagon. Somebody else I know once thought that trans people were gay but didn't want to admit it. Yeah.<br />
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<b>'y golddigers keep chasing me tho'</b><br />
Maybe you've met one of those rich boy frat kids who didn't earn a dime, gets drunk all day, and flashes their wealth. There's something insidious about flashing money and pretending like you're not because that amount was no big deal. Maybe if people wanted a relationship based on love and all things nice, don't make your net worth be a big factor in how you woo people.<br />
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Or maybe some kids live in such a bubble, they're sense of what's normal is totally twisted, even by first world standards. That's Mitt Romney levels of out-of-touch. These people who worry so much about how they're perceived by their peers think money talks everywhere. It doesn't. A rich asshole is still an asshole.<br />
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There's something uniquely abrasive about a thankless rich kid who sees interactions in terms of money all of the time.<br />
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<b>'2008 recession wasn't that bad.'</b><br />
It's called the Great Recession for a reason. Some people put so much stock in personal experience and anecdote, they make very inappropriate judgement when faced with good data. The median household income, personal savings rate, or employment rate are all statistics that track how people are doing financially. I don't know what else to say here. It's just so many levels of dumb to not realize this.<br />
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Yes, while some people lost their life savings, some other people elsewhere had none. But it's not like the recession only hit rich countries. If the implication is that because people who had savings were lucky, then there's a questionable lack of empathy with human suffering. If I lost my life savings and somebody shrugs it off, saying others have it worse, I would be incensed.<br />
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'<b>I don't want to visit America because of gun violence.'</b><br />
The most common cause of gun death is suicide. Do you intend to commit suicide on your vacation? Do you intend to visit downtown Detroit in the middle of the night? Do you intend to join a gang? It turns out crime rates differ from city to state to country. If we're going to be objective about it, you should fear a Big Mac more than a Glock 19.<br />
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Do you know what the leading causes of death in America are? In the year 2015, 633,842 people died to heart disease. 595,930 to cancer, 155,041 to chronic respiratory disease. 146,571 died to accidents, 140,323 to stroke, 110,561 to Alzheimer's, 79,535 to diabetes, 57,062 to influenza and pneumonia, 49,959 to kidney diseases, and 44,193 to suicide. Deaths to gun homicides? Less than 18,000. To maximize your chances of dying to gun deaths you have to live in America for the rest of your life, not just visit.<br />
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Modulate your behavior according to statistical probabilities. I know somebody who was apprehensive about visit America due to guns. Then I told her, you do realize that the homicide per 100,000 people is x3 higher in your country than where I live, right? If the homicide rate of your destination is lower than whence you came, then it's an upgrade, not a downgrade. The fact that people die by knives or bullets doesn't change that calculation. We make choices all the time that increases our chances of death, but we feel the benefits outweigh the harms.<br />
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<b>'I have little capital so I'm going to go risky on my investments.'</b><br />
Penny stocks are super volatile and the company may not exist in a year or two. Some people think having little capital means it makes sense to be super risky with it. I don't understand that logic. Either a way to do is the best use of money or it isn't, that doesn't change because you don't have billions to play with. If anything, having more capital gives you more room to be go risky some of the time, because you can actually survive if it comes crashing down.<br />
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If you can't scrape together $300 to buy a share of something decent, you probably shouldn't be investing in the first place.<br />
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<b>'Why are trans people so damn sensitive about being outed?'</b><br />
For one, it's just not cool to share secrets without consent. It takes a certain lack of empathy or integrity to violate that trust. In some places it is physically unsafe to be outed, and emotional trauma can be very real as well. It's still possible for some trans people to lose financial support from family, or for interpersonal relationships to deteriorate. Coming out is a very personal thing - somebody has trusted you, so please respect that.BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-3177809770878505302018-04-25T21:40:00.001-07:002018-04-26T02:53:30.104-07:00Musings of the Past Half Year (Part 1 of 2)If you're expecting a post like the last one, you're going to be disappointed.<br />
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<b>Birthdays</b><br />
I guess it struck me how differently some people get treated on their birthday. For a birthday, my friend and I traveled to a friend all the way in Las Vegas and stayed over for a bit. For my 18th birthday I ate food and played Fallout: New Vegas. For my 21st birthday, I braved San Francisco traffic to get my friend to a hotel to meet his girlfriend. I mean, my friend's mother usually takes me out to Dennys, but that's about it. Part of it is due to how my parents are, especially with them being so far away from me physically. Part of it is just the number of friends I have, and how I normally treat other people's birthdays. I can't expect others to give more than I give. Although, last time I bought Overwatch for a friend and wiped off $100 from another person's debt to me. So... as far as I'm concerned, I'm doing okay for now.<br />
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<b>Photography</b><br />
My philosophy with photography is its main goal is to document reality. This means trying to get a picture that is in focus for as much of the frame as possible, with as much detail as possible. I want to be able to zoom in on a picture of my entire body and outfit and look at the texture of the fabric of my dress in good detail. I currently own a Sony a5100 with kit lens, and the camera I'd like is the Sony a7r III. These are all mirrorless, so it gets rid of some bulk and weight. I am physically very weak. I can't and don't want to carry a lot of heavy camera gear in my purse. Perhaps I will get the a7r IV when it comes out. At maybe $1500 cost in depreciation when a new a7r comes out in 3-4 years, the cost per year of ownership isn't that high since glass doesn't not depreciate at that rate. There were good improvements in a7r III vs II, so I am hopeful the IV will be what I need.<br />
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The drawback with a wait-and-see strategy is I cannot go back in time and take pictures of things that already happened, like a birthday. I can't document my skin tone before I started taking medication. It is what it is. When I do take pictures outside, it might be in dark restaurants where I can only do a few takes. I'm still not satisfied with what cameras can do today.<br />
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Bokeh or image editing to make pictures pop are obviously not what I look for because... that's not documenting reality.<br />
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<b>Alcohol</b><br />
Isn't it interesting that a decade ago, people thought marijuana was more dangerous than alcohol? Some people can handle alcohol, and many people can't. It's just an inconvenient drug. People like to take alcohol during a meal out, but somebody has to drive the car back home. I suspect more often than not, people risk their own and other people's lives to drive home. Some people don't care at all, and some people think they are still sober enough to drive.<br />
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Alcohol is a very strange thing to me. It's a drug that most people seem to enjoy taking. It could be for its effects. My brother calls it 'liquid courage'. If the effects are what one is after, getting drunk on less alcohol is probably the best way to go, because it makes it cheaper to obtain the mental state they're looking for.<br />
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There's a certain drinking culture that is foreign to me, where people stereotype others based on how they hold their alcohol. At the very least, many people like to talk about how much alcohol it takes to get them drunk or passed out. To me, this is a stupid and pointless thing to do - except for the purpose of avoiding intoxication. No, I'm not stupid. I can trace the steps and see why people might like the things they do, but there's a difference between knowing why somebody likes to get drunk and understanding on a gut and emotional level.<br />
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As with photography, I want to see the world as it is. If I don't like the way the world looks, I change it. I don't take drugs to alter my brain to perceive the world differently. I might as an experiment, but I wouldn't as a habit.<br />
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Or maybe somebody takes alcohol because they like the taste. This makes even less sense because pretty much every alcoholic beverage I've had the displeasure of sipping tasted like garbage. I hear people talk about their favorite beer has this and this flavor, and while it sounds nice on paper I know on an actual tasting it would be a disappointment.<br />
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I've watched normal people take alcohol and then act like morons. They might be inappropriately intimate, say stupid things, walk into a tree, or start yelling for no reason. It's fucking stupid.<br />
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<b>Uncommon Interests</b><br />
I suppose one way to look at my interests throughout my life is to pick the interests that took up most of my time. That would be Runescape and Maplestory, and those are not fringe interests. But I'm not about that life anymore. Let's look at the hobbies I've been into over the past several years: Debating about religion (arguably not *that* niche), CPU overclocking threads (fringe enough for my thread to be the largest on the internet for the chips I covered), arguing about audio (and how the mainstream is wrong about amps and dacs), sorting Mugen (a vastly moddable 2D fighting game) characters by strength in AI vs AI matches (nobody, NOBODY cares), and Skyrim modding. For Skyrim I deal with picture comparisons of every half-decent texture mod, texture by texture, mod by mod. The reason why nobody has done it so far despite Skyrim modding being so mainstream is because it's a crazy task to attempt, and the large majority of people don't go texture by texture when deciding on mods. I've decided to assemble my own texture pack from the data.<br />
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It's normal for people to think the things I care about are abnormal because my interests occupy a niche inside of a niche. It's like nicheception and I'm lost in limbo.<br />
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<b>Social Frustrations</b><br />
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Sometimes I really don't understand what people are saying, or I can't follow their logic. Sometimes it baffles me how so much talking occurred but so little was said. Sometimes it annoys me when everyone else don't care about anything I care about, but they all care about something I see as tripe. For example, I might be on an imaginary soapbox talking into the abyss about gender dysphoria or bullying and get no response. Yet somebody talks about how tall their brother is and people come running out to chat about height. <i>Who cares?! </i>In what situation would the normal height of a person's sibling matter to people who will never encounter said sibling?</div>
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It's not just about the topic. It's also about how a topic is covered. I could talk about my height and somehow keep talking about it, but I could also talk about what height I'd like to be at, and what height I'd prefer in a mate. Would my preference change if I was taller or shorter?</div>
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Why do people use words that aren't in the English language and expect other people to know them? Why do people post stupid Jesus memes? Why do people think it's funny to troll people and tell them to kill themselves? Why do people keep changing their usernames? What is the point of posting the same sex joke over and over again? It wasn't funny the first time, and it just goes downhill from there. People can act silly, but they don't act silly in a way that I'm compatible with. This goes for online and at work. I never say anything to my coworkers because lame attempts at small talk don't get us anywhere conversationally. When somebody asks me what I'm up to or how I'm feeling while I'm doing work, what am I supposed to say? Hey, let me tell you about how gender dysphoria works so you can better understand my situation, friend! Just let me drop my podcast and my job so I can stand here and chat with you.</div>
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I almost want to put my hands up in the air and say that nobody cares about me and I don't care about what anybody else has to say, but I know neither of those things are true. It's really weird.</div>
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That, and other arguments and bullshit I've managed to get myself into lately just makes socializing all the harder. It pushes me more to be antisocial and dislike other people.</div>
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<b>Social Frustrations Pt II</b></div>
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In my experience people often turn a blind eye when their friend treats somebody else poorly. Part of it is selfishness and apathy - out of sight, out of mind. The other part is the context which may be missing, but if if a wrong is perceived then it's probably a good idea to seek clarification. Deliberately not knowing things about the conduct of your friend out of fear of what you'll find is well... not okay.</div>
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Some people are degenerates, with a damaged sense empathy and morality. It's one thing to do wrong to others, but it's another not to care. We all want to tell ourselves that we're a good person. Many bad people don't look in the mirror after waking up and tell themselves how bad they are. The people do and don't care are psycopaths, and the ones that do and do care live in pain. More commonly, people do bad things and justify it to themselves.</div>
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Checking messages in chatrooms for me is like how a lot of people talk about their phones or Twitter: You know you probably shouldn't do it so often, and it's being a net negative on your psyche but you keep doing it anyways. Yet, do you necessarily want to toss your phone away or nuke your Twitter account from orbit? Not really. Getting bored and checking messages is distracting, and too often now I see the outlines of a person I've blocked in a particular chatroom - and it upsets me. It upsets me that the person exists and is present, makes conversations seem one-sided and even harder to follow, and still manages to befriend people. Yes, it upsets me that other people don't see in him what I see.</div>
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<b>Hormones</b></div>
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I am at a point now where if I stopped taking hormones I probably could not fully revert back to my original state. It doesn't bother me much though. I am lucky that I am a relatively feminine frame. While I can spot many flaws with my body all over, for the most part it is okayish as a mold to shape. My hips will not widen, my feet and hands are too large, my shoulders are too broad, and my Adam's Apple is just ridiculous. It is what it is. But the softer skin, the more feminine face, the slower growing body hair, the breasts, they are all something I like. It's nice to not doubt my gender constantly.</div>
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But the one thing that's a mixed bag are the emotional changes. In addition to the changes in intimacy noted last time, my sex drive decreased. I've cried more easily, whether from being upset or a sad story. I've grown lonelier, but that's not always a bad thing because it helps me appreciate aspects of life more. But I've also become more moody. Maybe this is due to the current transitioning process being somewhat like Puberty 2.0. I wonder if the swings in estradiol is causing low-key 24/7 PMS or something. I often feel upset and I'm not exactly sure why. It's not a major and common side effect of transitioning hormonally as far as I can tell, but I seem to have it. Objectively a teenager's life might be good, but subjectively it's hell because their brains are doing things to them. You're not just being put in a tougher position, your capacity for handling it is in question as your brain changes. When emotions stray too far from logic and reason it becomes hard to get them back into alignment.</div>
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My father is more or less okay with me being transgender, but my mom has troubles accepting it. If I like the body of a woman and women's clothing, why can't I just admire it from afar? Right, and if I like chocolate cake, why can't I just watch instead of eating it? Being a worrier at heart, she is also very worried about breast cancer and possible regret. The chance of a trans woman to get breast cancer is relatively low compared to cis women. When we think of cancer from hormones, we often think about post-menopausal women, possibly taking non-bioidentical estradiol. If you're old and you've been exposed to estrogen all of your life, yes, your chance of breast cancer is higher. But would my mother have been upset if I was born a cis female because I might get breast cancer?</div>
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On the matter of regret, I thankfully report none at this time. I am 24, not some 13 year old who is confused and ever-changing. I've had some transgender thoughts for a very long time. The decision to do nothing with regards to hormones is itself a decision, and it has risks and benefits just like taking hormones. I might regret taking hormones, but I also might regret not taking hormones. Imagine being locked in a marriage in middle age but feeling more and more that medical transition must happen. Would I be ready to lose my wife? By then transition outcomes are far inferior. I've already debated with myself about what to do. I have never given my parents reason to think I would recklessly go for medical transition.</div>
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<b>Misc Trans Stuff</b></div>
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I still remember when I came out and how self conscious I was. I remember crossdressing in college and being even more self concious, and quite nervous at the time. I feel like my friends have an easier time accepting me than I do accepting myself. It's not that I hated trans people... It's just that it's different when I'm the one that's trans. There was a lot of internalized shame and guilt which I won't go into at this time. Trans people were people you hear about on TV or read about on the newspaper. ME being one?! That's crazy. Yet I could retrace my steps to reach to my logical conclusion... And you know where that leads.</div>
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Here's a story I've retold too many times: I used to think a good percentage of guys were either jealous of girls or wanted to be them, and the reason why I never hear about it is because people were too scared about discussing it because it was taboo and embarrassing. I felt it said something about public discourse. Then... I realized eventually that most guys really don't think that way, and the entire thing said more about me than society. Those thoughts just felt intuitive - so I guess I assumed other people must've felt similar things.</div>
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It must seem weird to normal people that trans people care so much about being seen as a particular gender. While I feel what the people on r/AskTransgender feel, I don't want my beliefs about sex/gender to be totally self-serving. After the last stocks meltdown the other day, I went to the store to get groceries. Being dressed and going outside lifted my a mood a little bit. Being called a lady during a mix-up in the checkout isle was nice. Yeah, it's weird. Yeah, I could try harder to explain it, but today I'll just say: It is what it is. It just is.</div>
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Speaking of that subreddit, somebody made a good post: Contrary to popular belief, most trans people are not deep philosophers about the nature of sex and gender or nature vs nurture. They're born a particular way and just want to feel normal. It's interesting being part of a group which people often bring up in political debates and discussions.</div>
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<b>Boundaries of Comedy</b></div>
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Should we really allow anybody to say anything they want if it's supposed to be comedy? If so, then who gets to classify something as comedy or not? Based whether the person telling the joke claims it's a joke? It's laborious and an easy fallback for any racist or sexist. Or maybe we should base it on whether the joke is funny or not. But still, who decides if something is funny? Are comedians for niche audiences not comedians? It makes me uncomfortable to think what types of behaviors are okay is based in large part on how it is perceived (whether a joke is funny and therefore deserves protection, or whether a romantic advance is harassment or not based on the desirability of the person, etc). The answer? I don't fucking know. I don't have all the answers.</div>
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Yes, I think people should be able to joke about transgender people. However, I think people should understand how they can be perceived. Otherwise it's like making Holocaust jokes without really understanding what some Jews went through. One should understand something before mocking it.</div>
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<b>The New Generation</b></div>
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A chip that has been on my shoulder for many years is how I was supposed to be smart and achieve all these great things, none of which materialized. Then I see how some younger people know so much at their age, and it makes me feel like I'm the old and obsolete generation/person, who has to make way for the better new generation to come in.</div>
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While I have more money than a lot of people my age, my net worth is tied to the volatile stock market and it puts a lot of stress on me. My earnings from work are low, and many people struggling to make ends meet and stocking up on Cup Noodles in college will one day be far more successful than I am. I'm watching this happen and I already see it happening, so there's really nobody else to blame when it happens.</div>
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Does any of this seem cringe to you? That's because sometimes I am cringe and I fail and struggle. At least I'm honest about it.<br />
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<b>Stocks</b><br />
For now I have many times more money than my friends, but I don't expect that to last forever. I had a good head start, but cutting expenses and relying on dishwashing and compound interest to make gains is not going to beat somebody working full time in a good job.<br />
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I know long term investing is the way to go, but it's hard to refrain from looking at the day to day. I've gotten really unlucky the first year, and I made a mistake or two as well, costing me a good $10,000. January came with hype gains, followed by a February crash, a March recovery back to January, and a fall in April. Trump's big mouth, personal distaste for Jeff Bezos, and tariffs caused a lot of problems for me. It's one thing to be a bullshitter, cheater, and all-around vain individual, but it's another to directly impact my net worth negatively. My assets are disproportionate to my income... And while my calculations show I have a good chance of living a decent life by compounding interest for 10 years, there's a lot that can go wrong in 10 years.<br />
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I wonder which has a larger impact on my mood... stocks or hormones. It might actually be the stocks, because I remember a period of calm in January. Stocks going into the toilet is a pernicious threat because it bleeds into other parts of my life without me being aware of it.<br />
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It's one thing to know that things will *probably* be okay long term, and it's another to internalize it. Maybe that's the difference between knowledge and wisdom.<br />
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--<br />
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Maybe a while back I said I was losing interest in tech because I had other things to deal with. It's still true, but you know what? It takes my mind off. So... yeah.</div>
BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-37549692637155687132018-02-07T01:10:00.000-08:002018-09-26T02:54:06.336-07:00Recent Thoughts on Love, Intimacy, Sex, and... Personality Tests?<b>Personality tests:</b><br />
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On the Myers-Briggs test (MTBI) I often get placed as an INTJ, and after reading all of the categories I consider myself an INTJ with some INTP traits. If you aren't familiar with this personality test, it's a test developed by Myers based on Carl Jung's ideas. INTJs are often described as 'architects' or 'masterminds'. Sites like to list examples of people such as Elon Musk, Steven Hawking, and even Newton. It's important to remember two things though: Personality tests test personality and not intelligence, and what the purpose of personality tests are.<br />
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Think of it this way: An INTP that likes to develop new theories looking at the world just means that person likes to develop new theories. The theories might be good, but they might also be garbage. Just because the people best at this are people like Einstein in no way means an INTP is anything like Einstein. I find it funny how 16Personalities keeps talking about how some personality is rare. If you split the population into 16 categories, guess what? In all likelihood each group will be "rare", at less than 10% of the population. Big freakin' deal. I guess we all want to feel special, just like everybody else.<br />
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Personality tests like MTBI allow me to quickly describe my personality using four letters. It's convenient. Actually getting to know me requires you to interact with me in various situations. The people that watched me on my Maplestory streams back in the day saw one limited aspect of me, where I knew I was being watched and my moves scrutinized, trying to entertain an audience. The people that I interacted with in my guild knew me as I talked about random stuff and complained about being bored. The people on Discord see me type about my thoughts on some issues, or even hear me speak, recognizing my figures of speech and the qualities of my speech. But none of that lets you know how I do things in my house, or how I walk, act at work, or random mannerisms I make with my body. We are much more complicated than four letters.<br />
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MTBI can be misused. If I hired people based on a personality test, I might get a uniformity in thought that ends up being counterproductive. Personality tests are here for our convenience and to get us to think about ourselves. And even in the latter part of its function it can be misused. It is the job of the test to describe us, not for us to conform to the categories laid out by the test. Otherwise, we end up in a self-fulfilling prophecy where we end up as slaves to the test. And finally, be aware that humans in general have a lot of similarities since we are all the same species. It's possible to come up with a vague set of characteristics that fit most people (eg, I am social sometimes, but I have periods of introversion. In other words, every person ever.)<br />
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<b>How does this relate to love?</b><br />
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It makes sense that I would strive to obtain characteristics I want, meaning it makes sense I would be an INTJ since I value the strengths of INTJs. But for a while I internalized its weaknesses. I felt I didn't need anyone. I am the cold, rational INTJ! I let a test affect how I acted and that was a mistake.<br />
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I have never been really close to anyone, ever. My relationship with my father faded as I moved to America and my father stayed behind in Taiwan to hold the fort financially. My mother and I argued a lot about video games when I was younger. Part of it is just how I am. Maybe something's missing in my brain and I can't have very strong familial bonds. But I have been upset for quite a while over unrequited love. And in the case of that unrequited love, we weren't THAT close anyways. I think I am capable of deeply loving a romantic partner.<br />
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But I just didn't think about it that much. I wasn't suffering being alone, and while my mother and brother were worriers, I was more relaxed. I chucked it up to my emotional resilience. Maybe I am more emotionally resilient than the average person, but maybe not. Maybe I simply wasn't tested enough, having never lost somebody that meant everything to me. I felt it was good to be very independent, but after 6 months of not speaking to anyone, I ended up at a friend's house and the act of speaking started to feel strange. I would speak really quickly and end up with a word vomit. That's when I knew I had gone overboard.<br />
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Not feeling like I am missing out on that much means I feel like there isn't much of a problem. <i>However, that itself is the problem.</i> Not wanting intimacy a lot means I won't go out searching for a mate and reach these peak human experiences. It's very possible to not know what one is missing. I know physical intimacy will cause a rush of hormones to my brain that makes me feel the best I have ever felt in my entire life. Perhaps once I get a taste, I would not settle for less. Being okay with the okay dooms one to mediocrity.<br />
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But deeply loving somebody means opening myself up and being far more vulnerable to anyone than I have ever been in my life. Real vulnerability only comes with great highs, because if I had a terrible relationship I probably couldn't wait to get out of it instead. Pursuing intimacy and a love of my life means opening myself up to extreme highs and extreme lows.<br />
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We are all human. No matter your beliefs in the afterlife, the only life we can be sure of is this one. We're on this earth for several decades, and then we are gone. If only we could use this knowledge to stop our everyday neurosis about petty things that don't matter, and to truly love, laugh, and enjoy this life... We are born, we grow, we reach adulthood, and from there we slowly head towards death as the sun sets. Either I die or my wife dies first. There will be loss and extreme pain, but hopefully by then the love and happiness would've been worth it.<br />
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<b>Sex</b><br />
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I used to think post-orgasm, with prolactin spiking and dopamine crashing, that evolution has won again; here it has caused me to act in a way I otherwise would not. That's the wrong way to think about sexual appetite. I don't apply that train of thought to eating, for example. Evolution gave us these desires - to eat, sleep, drink, or fuck. It boils down to dopamine hits - so in a way, we are all drug addicts.<br />
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I think casual sex or prostitution is fine, but it has to be treated with caution. Physical intimacy can cause emotional intimacy. I worry in a friends-with-benefits situation that one of us will end up attached to the other, causing an awkward situation.<br />
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<b>Recent changes in opinion</b><br />
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After going on estrogen for a while, I was lying on my bed one day when all of a sudden I thought to myself, 'You know what would be nice right now? If there was somebody next to me in bed I could cuddle with.' This was interesting because I've never had that type of thought in my life before. Since then I've grown to crave physical intimacy, with sex just being a subset of that. I have a recurring fantasy recently where a girlfriend holds my waist from behind and kisses me on my neck. I could feel the warmth of her body as I turned around to smile.<br />
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While I was never only interested in sex, I feel that many men, and even myself to some extent, are/were too myopic when they just think about sex. Sex can also be about emotional bonding, as our brains swim in oxytocin. I would make sure my partner is enjoying it as much as I am, because not only is it important to me on a relationship level, it makes me very happy to make my partner happy. I am flexible in giving or receiving in foreplay, or to be the little or the big spoon.<br />
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This newfound craving for cuddling and to be held can be difficult because horniness can be fixed with porn. Human touch... not so much. This led to an increase in loneliness. And you know what? I'm not ashamed to say that. Sometimes people make lonely guys the butt of jokes. I'm a bit more sensitive to that now. Loneliness is a valid human emotion. We are social animals. We want to maximize human flourishing and minimize human suffering, and loneliness is a negative emotion. It almost feels more taboo to admit one is lonely than to admit one is depressed, when loneliness can cause depression.<br />
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Maybe the changes in my mental state weren't due to estrogen, and simply the act of going through with my transition caused me to evolve as a person. Probably both are contributing causes. Surely if estrogen therapy can shrink the volume of the brain, something is going on in there.<br />
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<b>Finding a mate</b><br />
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There are problems with reaching my objective. I am a trans woman that is still developing physically. I don't want to date today because it's not fair to my partner for changing on them a few years in. I would also be less desirable the more masculine I look. Even if transition goes well, lesbians are still nowhere near as common as straight women even when talking about women instead of men. Of the lesbians, even less are into transgender people. I might not even be into transgender people. A friend of mine recently responded well by saying that connecting with somebody else emotionally can often fill in the gaps and cause relationships to work.<br />
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We have this hypothetical girl in our minds that we would date, with numerous criteria, when in fact in life there is no one perfect soul mate, and we just find somebody we love and we stay with them. Of course, there are exceptions. I vaguely recalling somebody from OKCupid claiming that from crunching their numbers, despite people saying religion matters in their mate selection, it actually doesn't matter much. But if I go to Christian Mingle, I'm sure that would not be the case. I do not want a religious girlfriend for example, not just because it would drive me crazy due to that alone, but also because it is a symptom of a larger problem; it is an incompatible way of looking at the world.<br />
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How does one find a mate? Some people are lucky and the right person drops into their lap. Sometimes one has to go out and date constantly. Some people are just really unlucky. There are millions and millions of women in America alone, so there are probably multiple people I would totally be willing to spend the rest of my life with. But finding one...? It's like finding a needle in a haystack. I'd be swimming in a sea of possibilities, lost and washed ashore.<br />
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Emotionally I feel that the odds are very bad. Often we only like 1 or 2 people, and probably less than 10 in our lives. What are the chances that A likes B but B also likes A and it ends up working out long term? What are the odds?!<br />
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I don't meet new people anymore. I don't go to college. I'm just here at home in front of my computer, and I don't even play online video games much. I think a dating site would be the way to go, that way I can pre-screen out non-lesbians. This is one problem among many that transgender people face: Lifetime of loneliness because nobody wants them. It is what it is.<br />
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<b>Misc & Closing</b><br />
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A conversation on a stock trading Discord server ended up talking about how somebody doesn't want a partner because they are too expensive. I've always felt a relationship should be a 50/50 affair unless one side is far richer than the other. In that case the key is open, honest, and direct communication. But more importantly, my goal in life isn't to accumulate as much wealth as humanly possible. My goal is to be happy and live a fulfilling life. If we remove housing cost benefits of living together, remember that you can be happier and poorer or richer and miserable. I can't take my money with me when I die.<br />
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It's hard to say just how good of a girlfriend I would be, or how depressed I would be if I was dumped. Not only would I be trying to figure out how I would feel in a situation I've never been in, I would be doing so for a future version of me that's different than me today, because the experience of finding and being with somebody would surely change me as a person. It would probably give me plenty of new things to say about life at the very least.<br />
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Speaking of change, some guy on a pickup artist forum once said that high school relationships are not a waste of time even though most of them don't work out in the long run. That's because it is an experience which we learn, grow, and evolve from, just like any other major life experience.<br />
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I for one, agree.<br />
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Who will I be and how would I feel 5 years from now as I re-read this post from the future? I intend to find out.<br />
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<b><br /></b>BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-36485784191912724422018-01-05T01:35:00.003-08:002018-01-06T00:00:02.069-08:00The Transgender Echochamber & Are Trans Women, Women?In my time in Reddit r/asktransgender, much of my experiences there have been negative. People get very defensive when they find an opinion they really disagree with.<br />
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I understand why. Transgender topics are like the ultimate identity politics. When somebody willingly joins a political party and have that be part of their identity, it feels like it's totally their fault for choosing a team in the first place. For transgender people the topic deals with their sense of identity because it is literally about who they are. Some people come into subreddits suicidal, looking for help. There are people who troll these areas and pretend to want honest inquiry about transgender topics.<br />
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On the other hand, if a place is a designated 'safe space', it should be clear it is so. Safe space is basically an echochamber by definition. When an echochamber forms people become more sure and extreme in their views, causing them to view outside people who disagree as the outgroup. Sometimes people come in with self-doubt brought on by self-described radical feminists in Gender Critical, an antitrans feminists subreddit. The best defense against doubt stemming from their arguments is to present counterarguments which destroy theirs. Sometimes one just needs comforting, but sometimes people need to think about something the right way. Rational and logical arguments do help sometimes.<br />
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<b>I believe trans women are male sex-wise and female socially.</b> Sex is about chromosomes and gametes. An otherwise male person that is infertile is still a male. But here's the rub: It doesn't matter. Socially they are women. <b>Treat people how they want to be treated.</b> People should have free domain over their bodies. If they want to take hormones, so be it. Dress however you want for whatever reason, or go out naked. Sex is a classification people made up for scientific studies. Science does not dictate how we should treat other people, so sex doesn't matter. The people who keep yelling about how trans women are men often do it for anti-trans reasons, and this argument totally bypasses their main point. In this respect I find my point of view very positive. The people who keep repeating that trans women are men are half right because it is only true in sex. One has to wonder if they will start yelling at me if I called a tomato a vegetable when it's a fruit. You know what? I don't care that science calls tomato a fruit. I'm not in biology class. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and wants to be a duck, I'll call it a duck. Misnomers exist all the time. As Bret Weinstein puts it, no matter the causes leading to people being transgender, in terms of dealing with transgender people the answer is simple. They are still humans. They are reporting an excruciating pain they have and we need to have compassion. However, we do not need to sign up to biological fiction while we're at it. (The infighting where the Authoritarian Left called for the resignation of Bret Weinstein when he refused to be absent from Evergreen University because he was white in the Day of Absence loosely parallels the infighting that brought me down on Reddit.)<br />
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Most people don't realize that the transgender plight deals with exterior influences (discrimination from others, violence, etc), but also interior influences (self doubt, self hatred). Doubting if one is transgender, if it's just a fetish, if they will ever pass, or if their feelings are even valid is normal. So in this respect I can see why my lines of inquiry cause many transgender to go on the defensive. Still, I believe my point of view is a net positive. Don't worry if your gender identity is valid. Be whoever you want to be.<br />
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After presenting this opinion on r/asktransgender I received a waterfall of angry trans people. It's much easier to be one of the people in the angry mob than to be the person on the receiving end of all that abuse. I knew every reply I gave would be read in the most cynical way, and any aggression on my part would be evidence that I am the monster people paint me to be. To the onlookers of course, the angry mob was exempt from the same scrutiny because they were just fighting against intolerance. That day I came home from over 12 hours at work with a Christmas party the next day, yet I was up at 5 in the morning typing away. It felt like betrayal. I go outside and there are people that hate me. I go to transgender subreddits and I get even more hate. I get more hate from other trans people than cis people. I would like to think the trans community is diverse in thought and not the snowflakes their detractors claim. Perhaps the problem is concentrated in only a few transgender communities. I don't know.<br />
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There are a few things going on here. One of it is how well people can subdivide over and over until they find small differences between each other, where they then form groups. In those cases, small differences are seen as being worlds apart. From the outside we are all trans people who are pro-trans. From the inside, apparently we are mortal enemies. Another is identity politics, where a cause becomes too personal and a disagreement on an idea is received as a personal attack on their being. Yet another is how people who are like-minded tend to form a group, and the echochamber which ensues renders the view of their members more extreme.<br />
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The moderators of that subreddit feel that having an opinion which can be seen as going against the core beliefs that one is the sex of the gender they identify is invalidating and transphobic. Therefore, such talk is a bannable offense. I didn't get banned, but the negative episode made me not want to contribute anymore. This too, contributes to the subreddit being an echochamber; people who don't toe the line get kicked out one way or the other.<br />
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Then there's the word, 'transphobic'. We can think of it as being averse to transgender people, out of fear or hate. The problem comes when people overuse the word. When told to be more tolerant of alternative views on transgender topics, I get told they are under no obligation to be tolerant of intolerant ideas. The problem is, what is transphobic and intolerant seems to be in the eye of the beholder, and here it means 'things I don't want to hear'. It's a phrase tossed out like a trump card, losing its relatively narrow meaning. Just redefine the meaning of transphobia and I'd end up exhibiting it. It's also just a bad word to use in a conversation. Do we argue to convince others, or to vent and insult the other person? Calling people transphobic shuts down conversation by adding fuel to a fire. <u>When reasonable people with good intentions get blasted, the transgender community is killing off potential allies to their movement with their extremism.</u><br />
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Trying to counter particular arguments lobbed against me makes me look a bit petty, but one particular line was striking. A person suggested that if I was so sure about my ideas, why don't I go debate my ideas about sex and gender to a university instead? The irony is the people who are sure they are right are the people who insist trans women are biologically of female sex. I flipped flopped multiple times because I wasn't quite sure what the answer was. Clearly ideas of which sex they are matters, otherwise I wouldn't have had a giant angry crowd at me, so dismissing my ideas as irrelevant theory for the universities is even more confusing.<br />
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There were a few people who felt the attacks against me were unwarranted, two of which messaged me in private. The cost of defending me in public was too high. One person mentioned something which lines up with how I felt at that point: The backlash of having differences of opinion on key issues isn't worth it.<br />
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Reddit revolves around a voting system where one can upvote or downvote a post. Voting rules vary by subreddit, but in general I find downvoting because one disagrees with an opinion is a terrible thing to do. One man's bullshit is another man's gospel, and who makes us the ultimate arbiter of what is true? Instead, we should downvote posts because they close conversation or was made with malicious intent (or is otherwise lazy). Downvoting too much hides a post, essentially censoring it. A hilarious example of the hivemind of Reddit is the EA Ask Me Anything (AMA) thread about their Battlefront II game, where gamers were very angry at the business model of the game. Every answer EA gives gets downvoted into oblivion, making it very hard to read their responses. The irony is the entire point of that thread is to read answers to the question.<br />
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I'm not virtue signaling that I am the paragon of calm and reasoned debate. I am still human. I listened to Ben Shapiro talk over and over again about how bullying transgender people somehow doesn't lead to increase in suicide, or how sex reassignment surgery is akin to sawing off one's arm because one identifies as being one-armed. I've flipped through the comments of that video to unanimous disgust against trans people. I get defensive and annoyed and I don't want to hear much more of it. But guess what? I didn't go on an angry tirade with pitchforks. This is the last problem with it all; when small differences lead transgender people attack each other, the objections of the trans community seem more petty and authoritarian. We get so busy with infighting we fail to adequately address the actual bigots. And boy, they are out there for sure. Well, it's not like those trans people would have the tools to change any bigot's mind even if they tried harder.<br />
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I don't like dogma. I didn't like it in religion and I don't like it in transgender communities. <u>I try to believe things because they're true, not because they're comforting.</u> I think more often than not we can find peace with reality. When a loved one dies we can learn how to grieve instead of pretending death doesn't exist. When people insist that their sex is the same as their gender, they should instead realize that it's okay to be of a male sex and not let it define them. When somebody mentioned how he/she felt sad for me because he/she felt I was conflicted because I could not bring myself to call myself as of female sex, it reminded me of the Christians who felt bad for me because I believed nothing comes after death. The truth can be unsettling at times. For transitioning late my pelvic bones will never widen, my breasts never develop perfectly. For the wrong coin flip which determined my gender to whatever social and medical reasons that made me transgender, I will have to deal with this for the rest of my life. There will forever be people who hate me not for things I do but who I am. The bigots, limitations in my development, and the reality of my sex are real. <u>However, I can still live a happy and interesting life by trying to deal with the hand I was dealt.</u><br />
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I am of male sex but it matters not unless you're sleeping with me. I am of the female gender and I present as such. That's the part that matters. Are trans women women? Yes, because the sex part is irrelevant, making the social aspect the important part.<br />
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Over Christmas I managed to take my mind off this subject, providing some much needed relief. I see now that r/AskTransgender is not the place to be for me. Perhaps one day I will find a place where I belong.BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-87240058063565966292017-11-14T21:45:00.002-08:002017-11-14T21:47:41.449-08:00When Feminism & Crossdressing CollideThis blog post is brought to you by a negative experience I had discussing an issue on r/AskTransgender. It seems overly petty to dissect how the conversation went wrong, so instead let me go more macro on you. The question brought up is why women could wear men's clothes but not vice versa.<br />
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What dictates what men and women should wear, or how they should act, or which body parts are indecent when exposed in the public, are all pretty arbitrary. Maybe they had some genetic or evolutionary roots, but they're largely irrelevant. Pink used to be seen as manly and blue seemed more dainty and thus were more suitable for girls. Today it's the reverse, which shows just how arbitrary and malleable our opinions are on these things. It's malleable, but not perfectly so. For example, it took women having to chip in for the war effort at home while men bled abroad in order to break through the gender role of the woman staying at home and taking care of the kids. This, along with other movements, helped make it socially acceptable for woman to be the caretaker or a breadwinner.<br />
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<b>Reason 1: Lack of social movements for males to have the freedom to be themselves.</b><br />
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Men on the other hand did not have a social revolution to change things around. Yes, it was more convenient for the women to get their social change than the men for men to be able to do girly things, but I don't think that's a good enough excuse. Arguably men have been wimps in trying to get social change on their side too. It's a privilege women have that men do not, and one of the events that got the ball rolling/rolling faster was also due to female privilege: Not having to die out there. Since men's clothing are more utilitarian, the only other three reasons for dressing up as a female are: 1) Fetish 2) Transgender 3) Fashion. And in all three cases the public has one thing to say: Ew. How many men want their reputation to die on this hill by trying to start a movement for men for women's clothing? Besides, when a man brings up male issues they are seen as privileged folk who are anti-female-folk. Who wants to work out issues if that's the case? Sometimes it's hard to bring up issues men have without people trying to compare it to women's issues and declaring that men's issues are lesser and they should just suck it up.<br />
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Women used to have rigid roles and behaviors but that changed. That's good.<br />
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<b>Reason 1a: Rigid gender roles for males.</b><br />
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Men are locked into a masculine role and it's hard to get out. In middle school I remember when a male said he loved a friend he had to say 'I love you! ...No homo'. Yes, anti-homosexual sentiment was more common back then, but this kind of talk really only happened when a male was talking to another male. Why? Because they were stuck in masculine social roles.<br />
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This means being a manly, testosterone driven man. This man doesn't take shit from anybody. He liked girls and only girls. He sucks it up when shit happens, and never cries. He doesn't need emotional support.<br />
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This is how you end up with overly aggressive men that end up fucking up their lives. This is how you get homophobia, but only for male homosexuality while female homosexuality was fine. This is how males have a higher rate of successful suicides compared to the higher rate of suicide attempts by women. (My assumption is that women aren't too stupid to commit suicide properly, but rather some attempts are cries for help whereas men who attempt are actually done with the world.) You get higher risk taking and more risky behavior leading to more deaths. And more time in jail. The population of people in prison does not mirror the proportion of men vs women in the general population. To that I don't say the judicial system is biased against males (which may be the case), I just highlight the fact that men commit more crimes. Yes, I call out the guys when I think it's time.<br />
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To summarize this point: It's not about women being inferior. It's about men not having the freedom to be anything but men due to a dent of history.<br />
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<b>Reason 2: It is seen as a sexual perversion.</b><br />
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I'm the type of person that says gender roles hurt men and women, and men and women are different and act differently, but should be given the freedom to be themselves. So when I say women want this and this, I'm also going to say men act in a certain way too that's not desirable for which women are off the hook entirely. Men have higher sex drives and have a higher chance of having a crossdressing fetish. Some people will see men who crossdress as creepy men with an exhibitionist fetish trying to showcase their fetish to the entire world. Have you seen a sissy fetish forum? Maybe it's best if you haven't. There is no female counterpart to this.<br />
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Men can just simply be more creepy. Most sexual crimes are committed by males. Males are physically stronger, so if a man wants to rape somebody they are more likely to get their way than vice versa. It makes sense for women to be more worried about men than vice versa. When somebody dresses differently and people think it might be sexual, then that sets off many warning bells. This man is dangerous! (And if the man looks ridiculous then doubly so.)<br />
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<b>Reason 2a: Men's clothing are more utilitarian.</b><br />
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Because men's clothing are more utilitarian, men can't use that excuse for dressing up like a girl. It takes more effort for a man to present as a woman than a woman to present as a passable man that blends in. A man that dresses up as a woman either makes no effort (in which case he sticks out like a sore thumb from a mile away) or makes lots of effort (what is he hiding? why does he want to look like something he's not so badly? Does he want to rape my children?). Whereas, if a woman wants to wear guy's jeans she just says that she gets pockets now and she wants to look 'professional'. Baggy sweatpants and sweatshirts are already utilitarian, so how much of a leap is that to some men's jeans?<br /><br />You can imagine the man wearing makeup poorly, wearing a bra when obviously it has no utility to him. People are going to think bad things about him.<br />
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<b>Reason 2b: Women's clothing are more form-fitting.</b><br />
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Women's clothing tend to be more form-fitting and skimpy (or sexual) than male clothing. If a male has an ugly and hairy male body, then it looks ridiculous. If a lot of men just decided to wear women's clothes all of a sudden, it would be normalized and okay. But they won't. Our tastes for what looks good are probably far more malleable than we give it credit for. Most women actively leave men who dress like a girl. They're disgusted... because today we think men who dress like a girl without making a serious effort look creepy as fuck. That's an aesthetics thing, not a sexism/power thing. If it was about men degrading themselves and losing power by subjecting themselves to a weak feminine role, the emotions against male crossdressers would not be that of disgust for how they look aesthetically, but rather anger and disappointment. Ask random people why a man in a dress is bad, and they will say it's sick (perverted) and disgusting.<br />
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<b>Another Reason</b><br />
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Another reason is that femininity is seen as inferior and masculinity is seen as superior. Some people argue this point by saying that it's okay for women to wear men's clothing because they are seen as striving to be something better (masculine). Then some people turn around and argue that when women try to be assertive, they are seen as overly pushy and thus are viewed negatively. Which is it, do men like it when women try to be more masculine or not? You can't have it both ways.<br />
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Some point to the fact that masculine jobs tend to pay more than feminine jobs to try to prove femininity is seen as inferior. This makes no sense; the corporate world wants people who are willing to be a hollow breadwinner who ignores social life as they work up the food chain. This has real sacrifices. The sciences pay more because our smarts are what differentiated us from the other animals, and what will improve technology for the future. This isn't some well-crafted, super deep conspiracy to subdue women so men have all the power.<br />
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When people encourage women to join STEM fields, that too is not the patriarchy showing. Ironically some call this out as evidence that femininity is seen as inferior even though these policies are often championed by the feminist left. And I more or less agree with that line of thinking anyways: Praise the benefits of a STEM job. There might be workplace discrimination and part of that is due to quotas, giving women jobs because they are women (a blatant discrimination against men and the hours they've put in, along with promoting under-qualified people to jobs). But the other part might just be due to men being used to working with just men. If I had to go look for sexist men I'm sure I can find some. These are all factors, but I don't think any of them screams 'the society at large things femininity is inferior'.<br />
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If you consider feminine traits to be things like kindness, nurturing, daintiness, attention to aesthetics, being pretty, and graceful, you run counter to traits like ruthless, cold, calculating, dog-eats-dog corporate world. In that sense yes, femininity IS inferior in that environment. Femininity IS weaker. You may not want to include the traits you don't like associated with femininity, but historically that is what we think of when we think of femininity. But just because femininity might be inferior in a corporate setting doesn't make it actually inferior. If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree you're going to think all fishes are morons. There is a time and place for femininity and a time and place for masculinity. Men and women can learn from each other.<br />
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We're getting getting steps removed from the actual issue. This is because people are trying to wedge their identity politics into an issue where it doesn't really belong, and to do that you have to make contrived arguments that are several steps removed from the issue. You can see how this is a problem conversationally: I come up with reasons why male to female crossdressing is frowned upon that are to the point and hard to argue with, and somebody else comes in and brings in the entire feminism/patriarchy baggage. What am I supposed to do, disprove their feminist theory on the spot or accept they are right? On a conversational level it's a nightmare. It's a tragedy too, because a subreddit dedicated to transgender issues is supposed to be a place of support (it is even enshrined in the rules). Yet if I bring up an opinion contrary to the prevailing feminist leftist ideas, I get called out every time. And the way they make their point just encourages people who disagree to get sucked into a drawn out, irrelevant, and exhausting argument about feminism... which is not what I set out to discuss.<br />
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<b>The Problem</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
The problem with many feminists is that they don't just pick from a table of ideas based on what they think is right. They pick feminism and identify with it, such that critiquing feminism becomes personal. They see the world through a feminist lens. When you have a hammer everything looks like nails. When you know what the problem is a second into the conversation (misogyny) and the solution (yelling about it online), <u>what need is there to think any further about the topic</u>? I repeat: <b>Running straight for the feminist argument has caused people to stop thinking any further</b>. This is why this example is such a perfect case study for when identity politics and the feminist lens causes people to be myopic. They don't even try to think about other reasons why crossdressing one way is more socially acceptable than the other way around. Not once in the entire Reddit thread did anybody say 'it could be misogyny, AND something else'. No, it's ALWAYS misogyny and NEVER anything else. I think one hidden reason is that having a problem have more than one cause probably makes their feminist agenda seem less urgent, so there is no room for more than one cause.<br />
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Identity politics is how I got 'called out' for calling a girl a cunt who was clearly being a cunt. But had I called her a dick, it would've been fine. It's rude when it's a female body part, but when it's a guy's body part we're discussing, who cares? This is how people turn male problems into somehow women getting oppressed. To be honest, it really looks like mental gymnastics to me to go from A and get to Z. With enough effort almost anything can be about women being oppressed. But am I stretching my ideology to fit and explain something because I'm attached to it, or am I invoking it because it is the more logical and parsimonious explanation? Are women actually seen as objects and thus are not capable of being a pervert, or are men actually just more likely to be perverts and to commit perverted crimes (statistical fact)? If women are just objects then they should be barred from all jobs right now.<br />
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Feminists often get angry when other people question the veracity their experiences. I've had somebody accuse me of accusing other women of lying about their experiences, when in fact I typically just wonder if a situation is being interpreted correctly. A Republican and a Democrat can watch the same political speech and come away with very different conclusions. So it is striking when leftist feminists discount the experiences of male to female transgender women when they were living as a guy. Oh, they felt being a guy was limiting because they are transgender. There's something insidious about using one's transgender identity as an argument against them in this way. They'll probably come after my experiences next and say those aren't valid too.<br />
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And that's the question: If it were the reverse, what would happen? If a trans woman had said even living as a guy he felt he was super privileged, the feminists would take that as evidence that men are privileged. If it's the reverse, their experiences are invalid because they dislike their gender role as male because they were transgender. Let's try another one: If men could wear women's clothing but women couldn't wear men's clothing, would that falsify my ideas? Yes, so my ideas are falsifiable. Would the feminists in that subreddit feel that would falsify their ideas? Absolutely not. They would say that men are superior and women are prevented from reaching the top levels of society, so they are not worthy of being masculine and must remain as poor, subservient individuals. Do you see the problem here? You can never prove these ideas explicitly wrong so it can be used to explain almost anything.<br />
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The tendency to interject loudly and insistently that sexism against women is the root of most social issues along with the inability to falsify those ideas is what annoys many people about feminism. When identity politics is in the forefront it causes an equal and opposite reaction.<br />
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Circling back to my previous point: I only saw feminists claiming the problem was misogyny only, never misogyny and something else. Am I willing to claim it could be the reasons I outlined and some sort of prejudice against women? Yeah, that could be the case. Everybody has a ton of prejudices. A & B & C could all be true, but I want to highlight A & B because people don't want to talk about it or don't know about it, and I think A &B are the bigger reasons. For a tsunami of talk about how women are oppressed one can casually stroll Tumblr or many corners of the internet. Hopefully after reading this blog post you've read a selection of arguments from both sides.<br />
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Obviously not all feminists are alike. If what I say doesn't apply to you, then it doesn't apply to you. I've got enough feminists tripping up even over what I didn't say to last a long time.<br />
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<b>Ending Sentiment</b><br />
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Men are more in tune with the issues men face. Women are more in tune with the issues women face. This is because they live their life as a man or a woman. This means many feminists do not appreciate the problems men have, and lots of men really aren't in the business of complaining. But it also means many men do not appreciate the problems women go through well enough.<br />
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If you are a woman, traditional gender roles will have you stuck at home taking care of children. You'll be protected and people will value your lives over that of the man's, yes, but you will live a sheltered life without the freedom of being out there and doing whatever you want. You suffer a higher risk of sexual violence. If you are a man, yes, you might be seen as the head of the household. But you are expected to defend your children and woman, and think of yourself last. You suffer a greater risk of destroying your own body through stupid habits, prison, and getting killed on the job. You are expected to bring home the bacon and be a tough man in the corporate world, an empty shell there to increase the number in the checking account. Women are objectified for their looks whereas men are objectified for their utility.<br />
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But you know what would be interesting? A male to female trans woman who transitions late enough to live as a guy for a long time, but not so late as to render passing impossible. Wouldn't that give one a unique look at the world? ;)<br />
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Let's end with one of the comments in the Reddit thread, answering the core question today:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>'It's culture, which is what you call it when a bunch of people have the same habits and tell each other that's how it should be. It doesn't make sense, but it is changing. Change is very slow and will continue for decades to come, but it is happening.'</i></div>
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No matter which side of the debate you are on, hopefully you have a similar feeling too.BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-83641476926078827142017-10-27T01:02:00.004-07:002017-11-12T02:38:12.248-08:00Answering Tough Questions in the Transgender DebateI've done some thinking on transgender issues. I find it kind of interesting, and it's a hot topic these days so I decided to give this blog post a shot.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>What is male or female?</b><br />
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In my mind it's actually not entirely clear what makes somebody male or female. Part of it is because male or female is too vague. Here's how I look at it:<br />
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Sex: Physical components of sex. Chromosomes, genitals and their functions (ability to produce eggs or sperm).<br />
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Sex Characteristics: Includes things like fat distribution, voice, etc. Based on biology, but not really considered enough to prove somebody is of one sex and not the other.<br />
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Gender: A vague word that is better used to mean gender identity, meaning brain components of gender, and the subjective feeling that arises from that. Yes, the way a brain is wired is in some ways physical and kind of attached to sex as well.<br />
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Gender Expression: Expression of femininity, masculinity, etc in presentation (clothing, makeup, etc). Partially genetic, but very heavily influenced by society.<br />
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When we call somebody male or female (and by extension, man or woman) what are we really implying? That the person's sex is male? Sex characteristics? Gender? Perhaps gender expression? This vagueness in language makes discussion confusing. Yes, transgender people are the minority, so for most of our lives we can just call people male or female and not have to specify anything. But if we're purposefully trying to talk about transgender issues where the language often gets squirrly ideally we should be specific.<br />
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Based on brain scans male to female transgender people have brains in between male and female, possibly leaning a bit towards the female side. With hormone therapy the brain continues to change to be more similar to a female brain. (More on this on the next blog post.)<br />
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What makes somebody of a female sex? I believe there are two points that trans critics have that have some merit. The first is the ability to produce eggs or sperm. More specifically, it's the ability to produce eggs or sperm had the person been born without abnormalities. This shuts down arguments about women who had their reproductive organs removed due to cancer, for example. The other has to do with chromosomes. Instead of saying that males are XX and females are XY and thus being susceptible to the XXY, XXX arguments trans advocates make, they instead say that the presence of the Y chromosome means male and vice versa.<br />
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These are very strong versions of arguments from trans critics, but they are not perfect. First, people with chromosomal abnormalities are generally classified as 'intersex', which is some sort of grey area in between male or female sex. This lends some credence to the idea that examined closely, once previously obvious distinctions get blurry. While in humans intersex people who are really ambiguously male or female and are able to reproduce with themselves are very rare, they are documented in other animals. In these cases it becomes harder and harder to figure out if something is male or female sex. These are rare cases of course, and most situations don't ever deal with rare situations by definition. But also rare are transgender people, and exceptions which break a rule should have us reconsidering whether our rule is as foolproof as we thought it was.<br />
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Here's how I'd put it: Sex relates to chromosomes and genitals. A trans woman can undergo surgery so that her genitals are close to a cis woman's, especially externally. It's not perfect. In either chromosomes and genitalia a trans woman cannot be equivalent to a cis woman. However, to me a woman is more than just her chromosome and genitals. It includes other aspects of her body, like her breasts, hips, skin, etc. If<br />
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Second, sex itself is a classification humans made up to serve various purposes. There's the technicality and there's the practicality. How we treat people shouldn't be contingent on a person's ability to make eggs, for example. It doesn't change how the person wants to be treated or called. If we could pin sex to simply chromosomes and completely ignore the expressions of those chromosomes and the gender of the brain, then biological sex ceases to be a distinction that makes a difference.<br />
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The brain is the thinker of thoughts, and what puts us ahead of all other animals on the planet. If somebody's brain is of the wrong gender relative to their physical bodies, then I argue it makes sense to treat somebody like the gender in their brain instead of going by a dry definition of sex.<br />
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What matters is treating other people with respect. The power balance is different, and so are the compromises people have to make to accommodate each other. Is it really so hard to use the correct pronoun if it's just a simple change from she to he or vice versa? If somebody wants other people to change their pronouns on them in real time or use new pronouns I can see the struggle. If you respect somebody enough then you will respect their decision to go by whatever they want. The point here is that the annoyance of using she instead of he is far less than the annoyance and sadness of being misgendered. If you understand the suffering transgender people go through then perhaps you will be willing to make some compromises... especially if the pronoun to use is dead obvious.<br />
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<b>The pronoun legislation in Canada is out of control!</b><br />
I believe in free speech. I have a preferred pronoun, but if you use the wrong one I should not be able to sue you. It doesn't bother me much personally, but if somebody uses the wrong pronoun as a backhand way to make some stupid statement about sex or gender, then I would be annoyed. Free speech means little if we just ban speech we don't like. It's a double edged sword. People should have the right to be terrible human beings verbally.<br />
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As I mentioned, the harder it is for a reasonable person to use the preferred pronoun, the more slack I give that person. People who have atypical preferred pronouns should be understanding of the fact that the public probably met somebody like them for the first time. I don't actually think it's very unreasonable to request somebody use a pronoun, just like how I don't think it's unreasonable to request somebody call you by your name. I don't think making up pronouns is that ridiculous, just like how people make up names. Words have to get made up from somewhere in some period of history. If a trend doesn't catch on, then don't expect strangers to get your pronoun on the first try. Again, they're not entitled to use your preferred pronoun... or name.<br />
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<b>How can one feel like the other sex/gender if they've never been it before?:</b><br />
One could argue that a person who is transgender feels like they are the other gender/sex because they already are. It's a subjective feeling. Maybe it's worth thinking about how one would feel if they woke up as the other sex. I know many men claim everything would be all wrong. The feeling that one should be the other sex could be summarized as 'I feel like the other gender' by some.<br />
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<b>Transgenderism vs Transracialism:</b><br />
Since I consider a MtF to be technically a male with a female mind who should be considered for all intents and purposes a female, I am able to sidestep the issue of transracialism. A person without the genetic factors proximate to somebody native to another part of the world can't claim to be of a race similar to people from there. However, they can claim to be born or steeped in their culture and thus 'identify' with that culture. Race is a gnarly thing because it's hard to categorize people genetically. Albinism does nothing for this debate because it is a disorder that merely affects pigments of the skin.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Transgenderism vs Otherkin</b><br />
Talk about otherkin gets tiring for many transgender folks because they often get compared to otherkin as for why their belliefs/etc are ridiculous. Two things here: One, be careful of the slippery slope fallacy. It was a similar thing with gay marriage: If we let gays marry what's stopping people from marrying their dogs? No, they are different things and one doesn't get to pull an extreme to block off any change. We can simply draw the line at human identification. Two: Being literally a dog is like a mild form of murder because we are reducing the capability of a human and bringing it down to a dog level. There is a reason why other animals in the animal kingdom have lives worth less than a single human. If one wants to be a dog/human creature with the intelligence of a dog, there is no medical intervention that can do that. Transgenderism on the other hand is different.<br />
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If these are all mental illnesses should we encourage such behavior and thoughts? Usually this is followed by an example of a man wanting to cut his arm off, comparing it to a man having his genitals cut off.<br />
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It depends on how one reaches the most fulfillment from life and gets the least suffering based on our current technology. Sure, it's easy to say 'don't give in to delusions', but one also has to look at the realistic harms to themselves and others (and lots of harm I still believe has to do with society seeing the problems as sick, which calling it a sickness ironically reinforces). If somebody truly gets the most fulfillment from life being a dog, holy shit, go be a dog. One has to wonder if these debates from the Right come from a genuine place of concern or disgust of the transgender person or the Left.<br />
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As for the arm example, if prosthetic arms are as good if not better than a regular arm, then it makes sense to cut off your arm for a biological one. Of course, that doesn't fully translate to the castration example. But remember that most transgender people never undergo SRS. They usually stop at hormones, and starting early already gives very good results.<br />
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If a person can still function with SRS, one has to wonder what the boundaries for surgery should be. If we think transgender people who get SRS have a mental illness and should not be allowed to, should we also ban women from getting double G cup breast augmentation surgery?<br />
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The question is how useful treatment like therapy is. We've been down that path for homosexuality and got to a dark place. Also recall that there is some evidence to suggest that transgender people do tend to have different brains than their cisgender peers, being in between both sexes or closer to the one they identify as. There is no evidence of a similar thing with the Otherkin, who typically pick a cool animal instead of some ugly one. It's easier to believe on has a different gendered brain due to some chemical or developmental hitch than somebody having a fox brain.<br />
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If somebody is an Otherkin my guess is it's not really a problem since they're not identifying as a wolf and killing random people on the street. Nobody is ENTITLED to respect in the colloquial sense. We should treat humans well because of the extent of their experiences, but as far as most people are concerned, we treat humans well because they are our fellow man and that's that. If one wants to say they are their fellow dog, don't be TOO surprised if one gets treated like a dog. I can't change how everybody thinks.<br />
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<b>Cis Women not wanting dicks in changing rooms:</b><br />
The idea is Cis-women have experience a ton of men sending dick pictures, sexual harassment, and some rape. This makes women not want to see penises, and having trans-women with penises in locker rooms makes them uncomfortable.<br />
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That sort of logic can be applied to almost anything. A woman is raped by a black woman. Therefore, she is traumatized by black people and don't want black people in changing rooms. The fact is your neighborhood MtF transgender person who took hormones is physically weak with libido probably slashed. The men who traumatize women are pretty much cis-men, not MtF trans women, yet the latter get hurt by what the other group of people do. This is a problem for MtF because it's a problem with who they are rather than what they've done or are even capable of doing (violently holding down a woman for rape). Yes, it's possible for a trans woman to get SRS on the genitals, but that is a surgically intensive and expensive procedure most people cannot do.<br />
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The other question is whether we're going to treat trans women as women or not. Yes or no? Because what other choice is there? Do we send trans women with breasts into the male changing room? Do we feel that trans women are second class relative to cis females? Transgender women suffer violence, both normal and sexual, at greater rates than cisgender women, so if anything putting them in men's rooms is worse. Which is worse: Being triggered by a penis or being raped by one in the men's locker room?<br />
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The stereotype for women who come up with these types of arguments are what the transgender community labels as "terfs", which stands for "trans-exclusionary radical feminist". This is a subreddit of these people in r/GenderCritical. It contains many women saying 'I used to be a trans supporter until... *insert negative experience with a transgender person here*'. Most of the time their claims ring hollow to me. It seems like such a trope: The former trans ally that is now very critical. Were they REALLY allies of the trans community, or did they just tolerate them?<br />
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I was never a fan of radical feminists in the first place, so you can see where I'm starting from mentally.<br />
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<b>Transgenderism is a mental illness:</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
DSM V defines mental illness as a behavioral or psychological syndrome reflecting underlying psychobiological dysfunction. It cause clinically significant distress or disability but cannot be an expectable response to common stressors (culturally sanctioned behavior to particular event like trance states in religious rituals are exempt). It cannot be primarily a result of social deviance or conflicts with society.<br />
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It's true that for many transgender people, transgenderism causes significant distress due to gender dysphoria. Disability is generally not a problem until depression is extreme, and by then it already met the criteria for significant distress anyways.<br />
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It is psychobiological. The pieces fit. I think transgenderism is a mental illness if enough gender dysphoria is present. But a few things must be mentioned here: Not all transgender people have extreme dysphoria. Experiences vary. Also, mental illness is a classification, here defined by the DSM. It doesn't automatically tell us how to treat and deal with transgender people. There is a risk of stigma that could be counterproductive even if for some the classification fits. As I've mentioned already, previous attempts to 'fix gay people' ended up down a dark alley. One can argue that the correct treatment for transgenderism is medical transition.<br />
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People get mental illnesses. It happens. Sometimes your body hurts. Sometimes your mind hurts. It's not always something to be ashamed of. We all have struggles in life. That's how I look at it. As long as I don't dump my personal problems on others, it's not a problem for them.<br />
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<b>Something something bathroom rights:</b><br />
Why must the many change and cave to the few? Why must many cisgender people have to bother with the problems of the few transgender people and their bathroom rights?<br />
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In terms of bathrooms the tradeoffs are not symmetrical in intensity. Transgender people have been using your bathrooms before you did and they will continue to do so, only now they're not going to be carried off like a pervert committing a crime. In other words, the sacrifice of the many is very little if none. On the other hand, what is a transgender person to do? If they use one, they stick out like a sore thumb, and they are already statistically more likely to be sexually assaulted (far more likely that way than vice versa). Fundamentally I'm not even sure we need to have bathrooms sectioned off for one gender or the other so you already know my inclinations from the start.<br />
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Not much stops a man from crossdressing, entering a bathroom, and raping some young girl. The sign on the door saying 'female gender' instead of 'female sex' won't stop them. If a woman wishes to be more defensive if they spot a masculine looking person in their bathroom, go for it. Confront people acting strangely or possibly illegally. Finally, I find the concept of gender specific bathrooms without stalls to be dumb. The more rare instance where a building has such facilities we decide to section it off so less people can use it?<br />
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<b>Should MtF people be allowed to show their breasts in public?</b><br />
I feel people should be allowed to go nude. But if we want to play by the weird social rules of 21st century America, then the answer is no. Which is it, are you a male or female? Either trans and cis women should be allowed to show their chest, or neither.<br />
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<b>It's just a fetish!</b><br />
Addressed in the last blog post about Blanchard.<br />
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<b>Should transgender people be allowed to serve in the military?</b><br />
I think so. I think it's ridiculous to suggest transgender people in general cannot aim a gun or strategize. If people are worried about health coverage that is a seperate issue.<br />
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On selective service, that entire system is a giant middle finger to all men. I don't think MtF or FtM or males or females should be in that system. It's all or nothing.<br />
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Male, female, or anything in between, people joining should fulfill some test. If they pass, they're in. If they fail (and it doesn't matter the reason), they're out. I don't care if it's biology which one can change or not. The test must be equal for all or it is discrimination.<br />
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<b>It's disgusting!</b><br />
Yeah, so are you, and old people having sex but you don't see me complaining. :^) Is this America or what? Land of the free? Pursue happiness as you see fit.<br />
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<b>Ben Shapiro:</b><br />
Ben Shapiro claims that transgender people are humans and that he wishes them the best in fixing their own personal problems. However, he believes trans women for example, are men, and he is not willing to call men women or use the female pronoun. That alone is a defensible position, but it's a very PG version of what he really thinks. For example, his arguments against the validity of transgenderism is often that people cannot call themselves 60 years old if they are not 60, or that they cannot identify as a moose and expect others to call them a moose. As mentioned already, it is entirely possible that there is such thing as a male brain and a female brain. At the very least, we know there are biological markers that suggest that somebody is transgender or cisgender. There is no such thing for somebody identifying as being 60 years old or a moose.<br />
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Ben also believes that the 40% attempted suicide rate of transgender people is evidence that transgenderism is a mental illness. Again, already discussed is that severe gender dysphoria might make it as a mental illness but not all trans people have gender dysphoria. Yes, attempted suicide rate of transgender people are high, but it's ridiculous to suggest that acceptance of transgender people has no effect in attempted suicide rates.<br />
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The real problem are the people who make fun of transgender people, with comments like 'I identify as a helicopter'. Again, these people make light of serious problems because they have never experienced it. Even if transgenderism is a mental illness, attacking trans people is not right.BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-68078928189701665742017-10-25T22:45:00.005-07:002017-10-26T00:41:07.014-07:00Critiquing Blanchard's Autogynephilia TheoryRay Blanchard pushed the idea of autogynephilia, which is defined as 'a man's paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman'. He separates male-to-female transgender people into two categories: Homosexual and non-homosexual men. According to him, gay men go transgender to have sex with other men, while straight men do so because they're turned on by the thought of themselves being feminine. In other words, there are gay transgender MtF who want to knock up guys and straight MtF who have a fetish. Needless to say, Blanchard ideas are... heavily contested.<br />
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On top of the lifelong problems with acceptance throughout life, the sex lives of a MtF would be affected as well. The amount of people willing to date a transgender person is still relatively small, and the lack of testosterone can hamper sex drive. If any male tries to transition to female medically solely for a kink, they will find themselves ostracized and without a mate or sex drive. It becomes their nightmare. We would expect detransition rates to be very high but that's not the case. Instead, anti-androgens are taken with practically all hormone replacement therapies (HRT). For some, simply shedding some masculine characteristics and attaining a more androgynous appearance could keep dysphoria at bay, something that makes no sense if it was simply a fetish.<br />
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If somebody wants to be a sexy nurse, they can just buy a costume instead of going through medical school to visit random patients for 40 hours a week. If a guy wants to have sex with other guys, there are ways to do so, especially with gay acceptance at an all time high. Go to a gay bar. Trying to transition to a girl to attract guys is an ineffective and indirect route. Trying to transition medically for the sake of a fetish is signing up for a world of pain for something can be satisfied privately on the weekends.<br />
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The definition of paraphilia has been redefined in DSM V to mean 'persistent and intense atypical arousal pattern accompanied by clinically significant stress or impairment'. In my experience, transgender people who got turned on with feminization or crossdressing who transitioned lose their attraction to those things after it gets normalized. That's not very persistent. It's also not very impairing in the sense that arousal occurs from other sources for every transgender person I've come across (their ability to be aroused does not require a specific kink). The thought process of MtF people seem to suggest that a fetish for crossdressing is a normal phase that many transgender people go through.<br />
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But that's not even needed. In Blanchard's world there are only two types of male to female transgender people, and none of the reasons really involve identification with another gender or gender dysphoria, which is insane. It might be nice to 'solve' such complicated issues with such simple and neat little boxes, but it doesn't correlate with reality.<br />
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Here's an alternate explanation that is worth considering: A straight biological male before hormones is attracted to femininity. It may be a part of why a man might want to be a woman. Wearing clothes that are taboo to wear, feels different, and reminds the man of women probably would turn many guys on. On the other hand, there is also a pull to dress oneself make oneself pretty and presentable both for oneself and others just like cisgender females. Add in possible gender dysphoria which may be extreme or not exist at all.<br />
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It's possible to find a girl's form pretty aesthetically, as if it was a piece of fine art. It's also possible to be incredibly turned on by a pretty girl, or to prefer her form because one finds their own form disgusting. There are different possible reasons for wanting one thing. A similar idea works for crossdressing. It's possible to dress for purely fetish reasons or purely fashion reasons, or a mix of both. When it's purely one thing then the motivations are probably more obvious, but when it's a complex mix of both it's silly to say it's 'just a fetish'.<br />
<br />
Finally, I want to highlight just how anti-trans Blanchard is. He said that the male partner of a straight MtF is 'usually a vague, anonymous figure rather than a real person and probably has little excitatory function beyond that of completing the fantasy of vaginal intercourse in the female role'. Blachard believes that since straight MtF have their core identity built on autogynephilia (fetish), MtFs are 'focused upon an imaginary partner who is faceless or quite abstract, and seems to be present primarily to validate the femininity of the person having the fantasy, rather than as a desirable partner in his own right'. The quote just now is from Lawrence, Blanchard's partner in crime (although Blanchard himself echos these beliefs). From what I could see, the straight MtF relationships actually tend to be more stable than homosexual MtF relationships. Since Blachard says that straight MtF suffer in their relationships because the foundations of their relationships are based on a fetish and the ones from homosexual MtF are not, we would expect the exact reverse by a large margin.<br />
<br />
Is it still possible that many MtF transition due to a fetish which then manifests in ways which destroys their ability to enjoy that fetish via a super long and convoluted process? ...I guess, but there's no evidence to suggest that.<br />
<br />
Often the difference between a fetish and a larger gender identity issue is that identity issues affects a person's life outside of sex. What starts as a sexual fantasy can change how one views themselves, affecting their life in other ways. This is because sexual experience is often private and personal, making it a safe place to explore things that one might not consider exploring in other parts of life. It's possible for one's brain, feelings, and opinions to change through self discovery, and that self discovery can come from many different things. The source isn't always the reason behind the new discovery just because it was discovered from it.<br />
<br />
Finally, there is a growing pile of serious critique against Blanchard (http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-real-autogynephilia-deniers.html). My favorite is the study of autogynephilia in cis-women, and based on a self-reported survey similar to Blanchards. almost a quarter of women would be autogynephilic. If people accuse the 'liberal media' of being biased for 'the standard transgender narrative', then Blanchard's study and conclusions were heavily biased due to this obvious bias against transgender men. I'm almost waiting for the day where Blanchard just yells 'IT'S ALL JUST A FETISH, OKAY?', while people are contemplating suicide from hatred of their own bodies... over a fetish? That must be a hell of a fetish.<br />
<br />
Unlike Blanchard I will say this: Dress publicly for sexual or non-sexual reaons in private or public if you want. Roleplay online for arousal, curiosity, or comfort if you want. Mull over the idea of what it means to be a woman every day and reflect on whether that would be wonderful in every way or if it's wonderful because it's sexy. It's all okay. Be mindful of the consequences of your actions, don't harm others, and try to enjoy life by living for yourself instead of others. Your time on this earth is limited.<br />
<br />
Sources:<br />
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00918369.2010.486241<br />
https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/3ewh26/im_a_gender_therapist_at_an_informed_consent/<br />
http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-real-autogynephilia-deniers.html<br />
<br />BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-68585777745332398382017-07-14T00:59:00.000-07:002017-08-05T03:16:48.671-07:00Ruminations of an INTJ Pt II: Memories of Maple<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 1: Nostalgia">Part 1: Nostalgia</a>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 2: Purpose & Self Esteem (Background)">Part 2: Purpose & Self Esteem (Background)</a>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 3: Pre-Foot Times (More Background)">Part 3: Pre-Foot Times (More Background)</a>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 4: Boss Squad">Part 4: Boss Squad</a>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 5: Game Mechanics: Class Balancing">Part 5: Game Mechanics: Class Balancing</a>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 6: Economy and the Black Market">Part 6: Economy and the Black Market</a><br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 7: Reboot">Part 7: Reboot</a><br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 8: Maplestory Statistics">Part 8: Maplestory Statistics</a><br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 9: Grinding & Competition">Part 9: Grinding & Competition</a>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 10: Carry Culture">Part 10: Carry Culture</a>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 11: Bossing">Part 11: Bossing</a>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 12: Nexon's Failures">Part 12: Nexon's Failures</a>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 13: Livestreaming & Public Shaming">Part 13: Livestreaming & Public Shaming</a>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 14: Guild Dynamics">Part 14: Guild Dynamics</a>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 15: Enemies">Part 15: Enemies</a>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 16: Guild Dynamics II">Part 16: Guild Dynamics II</a>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 17: Post Reboot">Part 17: Post Reboot</a>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html#Part 18: The End">Part 18: The End</a><br />
<br />
Note: Opening a picture in a new tab allows you to view a picture more closely.<br />
<h2>
<br />Part 1: Nostalgia</h2>
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Even as a person that has spent time down memory lane, I understand that reading about other people's nostalgia is boring. Nostalgia is a deeply personal thing. It’s about who a
person was… what it felt like, the music, smell, environment, thoughts,
conflicts… And I know being nostalgia over video games isn’t a unique thing. On
occasion I’ve browsed for tracks for Runescape on Youtube and the comments are
full of people reminiscing about the past.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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‘My childhood’s home I see again,<o:p></o:p></div>
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And saddened with the
view;<o:p></o:p></div>
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And still, as memory
crowds my brain,<o:p></o:p></div>
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There is pleasure in
it too.’<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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That is how Abraham Lincoln’s poem began and is one of my
favorite stanzas as far as poems go. The video on nostalgia by Vsauce is great here. In 1688
Johannes Hofer coined the term ‘nostalgia’ by combined the Greek words nostos
(returning home) and algos (pain). It was originally seen as a quite serious
medical condition, affecting soldiers who missed home so much they broke down
and were unable to fulfill their duties. The only cure as Hoffer saw it was to
return to their home..<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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If you take the Memory Retrieval Curve as mentioned in
Vsauce’s video to heart, people tend to remember memories encoded during later
childhood to early adulthood. This is the time period where people form their
self-identifies. Because we want our continuous identities to be positive, we
tend to be nostalgic for positive things. This leads people to remember the
past as better than it actually was… or to ‘view the world with rose-tinted
glasses’ as I like to call it.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve said multiple times in the past that the human brain
when it comes to memory is like a hard drive with data integrity issues. In
some ways it’s actually worse, because the brain often fills in details when
recalling them whereas a corrupted file on a hard drive just throws up an
error. Like worsening eyesight, degrading memories happen gradually. This makes
the problem worse than many people give it credit for. I have not been as good
as I should have when it comes to writing down what happened in the past. For
sure I have forgotten so many jokes and failures and friends and enemies from
the old days of Runescape. It’s gotten so bad, it’s getting difficult to be
nostalgic about a past I no longer remember. If only there was a way to visit
the past like the pensieve from Harry Potter!<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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Some say to know who you are you have to know where you came
from. How have past events changed you as a person? After forgetting details of
my past it feels like I am cruising along in my life without being entirely
sure where I came from or where I am going. The time I spent that did not
directly contribute to my career or intellect I might have had fun… People say
that time one enjoyed wasting wasn’t wasting, but what if I have a hard time
remembering now that I had enjoyment?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 2: Purpose & Self Esteem (Background)"></a>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<h2>
Part 2: Purpose & Self Esteem (Background)</h2>
Many people are looking for a purpose to their life. Without
a purpose, things can slide uncomfortably towards nihilism. For me that problem
was easily solved: The purpose is to be very good at something. When I was in 6<sup>th</sup> grade we had a
chart for how many books we read and passed a test for. So, I read a single 250
paged book a day, day after day.<br />
<br />
Some say life is in some ways the ultimate game. It's a very complicated game. Actions today may have unknown effects far into the future. In a MMORPG getting more money typically has a direct, measurable, and reliable increase in stats. And instead of working hard and hopefully getting a good job and having it all over a decade later, in a MMORPG it's possible to be at the top of the food chain in months or years at most. I think this makes MMORPGs appealing to people who feel like life is out of their control. In their world of the video game they are in control. They can live a second life where their accomplishments mean something and others can recognize that fact.<br />
<br />
While that might sound sad, I can present a better case for MMORPGs. This is something I don't think the older generations understand. These damn kids, they are spending all of their time at their computers! They need to go out and play! ...Of course, there are advantages to going outside and having some exercise, for example. Time you enjoy wasting was not wasted. Some level of bonding in a game and the wonder of exploring a game can help make a childhood. The particular game that is triggering the nostalgia differs, especially from generation to generation, but it's real. I still remember walking to school one morning to my elementary school, humming the main theme to Runescape. Many people say that Runescape is not what it used to be, pointing to bad updates that ruined the game. But the truth is even if Runescape took a time machine and traveled back in time 10 years, it still wouldn't be the same for us because we have changed.<br />
<br />
Most people have a childhood they remember with fond memories. Maybe life wasn't perfect back then, but we want to keep our rose tinted glasses on for a while. When I talk about my past I know it's something other people don't care about, and I don't expect them to. Do you ever associate some piece of music with a period of time in your life? Usually it happens because it's a new song I'm listening to and I play it a lot. Whenever I play the first few lines of The Truth by Tristam I remember when I first started giving out carries at Hard Hilla.<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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After I quit Runescape to study for college and I couldn’t
get my head into college, things got weird. For once in my life there wasn’t a
central obsession which all other things go around to accommodate. Waking up
with the idea of just doing whatever struck my fancy that day was a strange
feeling. Over time, I pass the time by
wandering from project to project… from religion to audio to computers. It keeps me preoccupied. I have a reason to live because there are projects to do and different hobbies to pursue.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My time in Runescape started at 5<sup>th</sup> grade and
ended after high school. While it was the dominant game in terms of hours
spent, my memory of those times is compromised. This time I’d like to talk more
about Maplestory. My time in Maplestory started at 7<sup>th</sup> or 8<sup>th</sup>
grade, and ended in a year. Then, it began a year after high school for a year
(2012-2013), another half a year (2014-2015), and finally yet another half a
year (2016).<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In middle school my
self-esteem was at the lowest it ever got in my life. I wore the same clothes
every day and some kids were nasty about that fact. Some people are just mean. They would attack me for what seemed like
no reason at all. It was a time when hormones were going insane, so I was very irritable and horny all of the time. It was probably the lowest point in my life for my self esteem. I just wanted to get through any given day of middle school without
screwing up and getting laughed at. I couldn't approach any girl I liked. It just wasn't in the cards. Objectively perhaps my life wasn’t that bad, but
subjectively it was pretty terrible.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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On Maplestory I met a girl I had a lot of fun playing the
game with. One day she told me that she liked me more than her boyfriend.
Eventually I went to visit my father in Taiwan for a month and failed to tell
her for some reason. I wanted to log back on at Taiwan to tell her why I went
missing but Maplestory was split into regions and I couldn’t log onto North
American Maplestory in Taiwan. When I came back to America, she was gone. That
brief period of time showed me that I wasn’t terrible and infinitely
uncharismatic. It’s possible for a normal person to like me (or in that case,
my personality since she never saw my face). I don’t know what happened to her
and whether she thought about me at all once I went missing. It’s very likely
she has forgotten me. Sometimes people make a small gesture to you at the right
time and it has a lasting effect. I never managed to contact her
again, and at this point I’m not even sure I remembered her username correctly
anymore. She is among the graveyard that is my friend list on Maplestory.
Listening to ‘Missing You’ (Ellinia Slime Tree) reminds me of her.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While I seem to be a little more resilient to depression and loneliness than than the average person, I cannot pretend to be the model INTJ and say I'm a perfectly logical machine. Logic gets you far in life but emotion makes it worth living. Finding something I was good at with a guild of people to boot fit a hole in my life. I wouldn't exaggerate and say we were a family, but it was still something, and something I would understand better myself if my memory was better. It's still a bit weird as a guy to talk about feelings, but sometimes things are important enough such that awkwardness should be ignored.<br />
<br />
I don't have many friends left and what few I have left it is often getting harder to relate to them and talk to them. Most of them were spread out over California, with no way to reach them by car. (You're reading about a guy that drove off the map - LITERALLY - in less than a 30 minute drive to his friend's uncle's house. Road trips are not a thing in my world.)<br />
<br />
It's possible to not know what one is missing. It's possible to have a vague feeling (or even lack of feeling since the entire problem slips by unnoticed) that life is not quite perfect, that there is something missing.<br />
<br />
I go on Facebook and I see people complain about their emotional problems and they all seem to get attention, but communicating everything in this blog post... I would not get any attention at all.<br />
<br /></div>
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<h2>
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 3: Pre-Foot Times (More Background)"></a>
Part 3: Pre-Foot Times (More Background)</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After middle school I didn’t go back to Maplestory until a
bit after high school. The game has changed dramatically since then and
achieving maximum level (200) became much easier. At this point I was still
strapped for real life cash so I never went crazy with buying in game currency.
I do recall training in a ridiculous 48-hour grind fest, where I went from
level 120-198. (There was double experience day for two entire days, which was
unprecedented… so I responded in kind with an unprecedented training spree.) I
met people like Lyoriex and Ciciz. I remember trolling Lyoriex in her Skype
call by never saying anything with my microphone on so she can only hear me
type. When she was about to leave I’d say ‘She’s leaving? I guess there’s no
point in talking anymore’ and she would hop right back to her computer and stay
there. I still remember being Buns Taiwan and low key flirting.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The other person is Ciciz. I actually met her when I stepped
into a general store in the game during Miracle Time. In Maplestory most of
people’s strength relies on their gear instead of their level, and to improve
armor the best way of doing that is to “cube” it. That means using a cube from
the cash shop to reset the potential of an item. A potential is a set of
bonuses a piece of gear gives. You want all 3 possible lines of bonuses to be
the best possible, but the chance is astronomically low. The cash shop is a
place where players can spend a currency called “NX” to buy items, some of
which are cosmetic. There is also a megaphone that allows the player to speak
to the entire server one time. NX is purchased with real life currency (USD,
etc). Miracle Time is a rare event where the chance of tier up and getting
offered a better set of equipment effects is doubled.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ciciz had a bigger guild (named Rhetoric) than Lyoriex and
was a very high level player herself, far beyond me at the time. What appealed
to me about her wasn’t her status though, it was her personality. She was among
the kindest person I have ever interacted with. When I stepped into a general
store one day during Miracle Time. I chatted with her about Miracle Time and
she offered to use a special scroll that would tier up my gear for free. I
decided to take a leap of faith and gave her my item. (The only way for her to
use the scroll is to have the item in her inventory, so I had to give it to
her.) Of course, she gave it back and the scroll succeeded. Imagine just handing
out free stuff to people randomly just because you are nice. This is somebody
who, after complaining about being defamed by somebody, sent me 330 million
mesos worth of envelopes to bring my fame back and then some. (Fame is a value
that can be increased or decreased by other player. De-faming players is a way
to troll others.) She would call me her dodo bird. Somebody even wrote a poem
about Ciciz. Unfortunately I lost the screenshot.<br />
<br />
In the end, Ciciz vanished and the guild fell apart. Later on I found out that
she got hacked. Somebody went around hacking people to sell their items for
real life cash. Some people are just bad people. They will lie and cheat and
steal. Sometimes they ruin the lives of people you know.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was in this time period that I experimented with hacking,
although not hacking as in compromising other people’s accounts. I paid for a
tool that allowed me to manipulate monsters on the map and automate the
training process. Eventually I got banned and started a new account. I went
clean since then.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Finally, I also met a girl who ended up liking me. Being
quite young, she got really excited when it turns out we lived near her and I
was driving to her to hang out. We had a mutual friend chatting with us, when
she asked me if I have a girlfriend. After saying I didn’t, she said I should
since lots of girls like me. My natural response was ‘how would you know?’, to
which our mutual friend replied, ‘She likes you, you silly. She says lots of
girls like you because she’s one of them’. That logic blew my mind. Anyways,
being young, she got over me after about 3 months. But it was an interesting
experience.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<h2>
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 4: Boss Squad"></a>
Part 4: Boss Squad</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This was when I really got serious about being strong. I
first joined Foot. I still remember my ill-fated Gollux boss run with
Specialest. Gollux was one of the few bosses in the game that took away player
XP when dying, so dying over and over again at a higher level means losing a
lot of time. I lost all of my lives and said I would never do Gollux again. Of
course, I did eventually do Gollux again. Foot was run by a guy named Danny. My
own dealings with him haven’t been terrible, but he was always an odd one in my
book. He asked me to join out of the blue, but requires people who ask to join
to submit to an interview. What he could hope to learn from such an interview
is mostly beyond me… especially since I was simply let in. At that time I was
not well-known or remarkable in any way. It seemed like a dumb and
contradictory way of trying to make a guild more exclusive.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Also in the guild was Mort1ca, WALKEDya, Hankduals, and
SauceyKaiser. That was us: The Six. We went out killing bosses together and
having fun. Hankduals and WALKEDya in particular had a great sense of humor.
Eventually Danny wanted to have a new guild HQ, which basically was a place
guild members would AFK at. Sometimes a person is out doing something in real
life, like sleeping or going to the store; they can park their character along
with others somewhere. I really like Sleepywood, so I voted Sleepywood. I made
an offhand joke about paying people to vote for Sleepywood as the guild HQ,
which I guess Danny thought meant I might actually go and do it. When I got
back home from work, it turns out most of my friends have left Foot thinking
Danny threw out the vote over totally baseless accusations of voter fraud. It
was a real stretch to think I would actually cheat, and throwing out the vote
before talking to me was the wrong move. Still, the accusation wasn’t conjured
out of thin air. Apparently Danny had sufficiently annoyed or creeped out my
friends and this was the last straw.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
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<br /></div>
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We all left for a guild WALKEDya’s friend made. His name is
Kenny and he liked to make really anti-PC jokes. The guild had basically
himself in it, but now it housed us and some of our friends we poached from
Foot. It was very nice to have a guild of just friends. We were GUILDLESS (odd
choice for a guild name).<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nothing is every perfect, and while things were good people
get used to the good and take the good for granted. I’m no exception. I
remember getting quite annoyed and Mort1ca. The problem is that the game
revolves around daily cycles and resets at a certain time of day (at the time
it was 12am PST). Boss kills and daily activities often reset during this time.
That means whatever I wanted to get done needed to get done before the reset. I
was doing some event and got very annoyed because Mor1ca was suggesting an
inefficient and flawed way of getting things done. Part of it was due to lack
of knowledge, knowledge I actually didn’t have at the time. There were a set of
maps that looked the same before and after a given quest, but are actually
technically different maps with stronger versions of the same monsters. This
made it impossible to meet up with Mor1ca to get the event done on time. So, I
ragequitted on my own to try to get it done and failed. I want to get things
done efficiently when I am short on time and have to go to work the entire day
the next day. That’s what gets me impatient.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
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<br /></div>
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Then there’s the grinding aspect. As I’ve mentioned earlier,
the strength of a player depends mostly on their gear instead of their level.
Gear is mostly improved by spending real life money while training still
involved old fashion grinding at a map and killing monsters. So, what I spend
most of my time doing in the game was training even though it affected my
damage much less than my gear. Often music reminds me of a certain time period,
and I still remember the songs associate with this time period… I had a Final
Fantasy 13-2 music playing often, along with ‘Waiting All Night’. Tracks like
Ronald Jenkee’s Piano Wire remind me of striving for the best. Polish Girl reminded me of earlier times at
Foot, Animals by Martin Garrix was played during bosses. Oh, can’t forget Final
Fantasy 14’s Footsteps in the Snow which I was in love with at the time.
Finally, there was Cloudlight. To pass the time I listened to random Youtube
videos, including music.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I cannot fail to mention one of the biggest issues of that
time though: Money. Spending real life money was what made me by far the
strongest player out of all of my friends. This led to imbalances: Instead of
working together, I was carrying everything.<br />
<br />
Farming all day long I started asking myself sometimes, 'well, what is the point?'. My brain slides a bit towards the nihilistic abyss. I remember bringing this up back when Christii still played. It reminds me of when I spent $4000 or so in Bera. I was playing Dearly Beloved on Youtube and doing the jump quest for the tiger title. <i>What am I doing? </i>I was supposed to study and do something great. Then one thing led to the next, and I'm spending significant amounts of money playing this video game. And it's all temporary. That was the epiphany I had, which caused everything to crash downwards.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
People don’t want to play the piano well. They like the idea
of playing the piano well. If they truly wanted to play the piano, they would
have already practiced and gotten good at it. When a person sees a person
playing with skill what they don’t see are the hours of practice that went on
behind the scenes. The same can be said about being strong in a MMORPG. We are
talking about games where stats matter more than skill and perseverance is
constantly rewarded. Either a person wants it badly enough or they don’t.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
It gets annoying to get a compliment and slowly realize that the person just gives out compliments too often. Then I realize what I got wasn't worth anything, and I wasted my time thinking about the whole thing.<br />
<br />
It's nice to get compliments, but there's a cost associated with it. Obviously it costs a lot of time or money to maintain a high standard that makes it worth of a compliment in the first place. The suffering mostly takes place out of sight and out of mind. But to get compliments itself is to give me a certain type of burden as well. It makes me expect compliments, and the lack of compliments starts to become disappointing. The high is not high anymore, it's normal. One can accuse me of living too much for others instead of myself at this point.<br />
<br />
It's not a good feeling for people praising you to catch up more and more, until they no longer need you. When I give carries (kill a boss for somebody else to help them) I know I am accelerating that process, but I won't that sort of toxic competition deny others what I wished other gave to me. Being sensitive, jealous, and uptight about other people and how they are doing in the game makes me a worse person to be around and that's not good.<br />
<br />
Everything in moderation. The end goal is to be happy in life. How do we maximize happiness and minimize suffering?<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The main problem with Maplestory is that it is incredibly
pay to win. This means that spending real life money was a far better way of
getting stronger than playing the game to the point where it becomes like
comparing who has spent more money. There are stories of Koreans spending over
$50,000 on the game.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I recall talking to Kenny about spending so much money on
the game. I bought Mesos because it’s what I want right? So no problem, it’s
what makes me happy. Well, is it really? It’s possible to do things that aren’t
healthy to oneself. It’s possible to do things that are nice in the short run
but terrible in the long run. It’s also possible to do things despite knowing
it’s not the right choice to begin with. Or to misevaluate what brings about
happiness. Does having it all in Maplestory really bring about happiness? I was
working extra shifts at work to supplement my cash since all of it went to
Maplestory. Was this what I wanted? I think I got what I asked for but not what
I truly wanted.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the end I bid everyone farewell. Enough was enough. I
went and sold my gear. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
When I log back to Bera in Maplestory I can barely stand it. GUILDLESS and my friend list are graveyards. Then I log back out.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 5: Game Mechanics: Class Balancing"></a>
<br />
<h2>
Part 5: Game Mechanics: Class Balancing</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Maplestory is a game that requires the player to pick a
class, and that class affects everything the person does. The way a class
plays, how strong the player ends up being, and the equipment all vary from
class to class. Maplestory has A LOT of classes and Nexon is not very good at
balancing the game. This is very problematic. If Nexon leaves everything alone,
there will be classes nobody ever plays. Not only is that a joke, a lot of the
content Nexon works on would be neglected and the time spent would be wasted.
If Nexon attempts to balance classes, it upsets the status quo and upsets
everybody affected by a change.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There two ways of making a class more relevant. The first is
to buff a class so it is stronger in some way. This can be from something like
utility to others. Being able to buff other players so they are stronger in a
party makes an otherwise lackluster class useful. A popular buff is Holy
Symbol, which increases XP gained by 50%. People used to pay for ‘HS’ service,
where a Bishop enters a party just to buff the entire party with HS and gets
paid for it. There were dedicated spots in training parties for a Bishop for
the sought after HS buff. Another type of utility apart from buffing would be
debuffing the enemy. The primary example of this are called ‘binds’. They are
abilities that freeze a boss, rendering it unable to attack for several
seconds. In some situations, those several seconds can be decisive.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The other way to buff a class is to simply make it stronger
somehow. Or, Nexon could debuff every other class instead. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If class A gets buffed, then my class gets weaker compared
to class A. However, I can take some comfort in the fact that the same problem
occurs for class B, C, D, and E. Those guys are hit too because they are
weaker compared to class A. The only guys that can upset the old balance are
the guys in class A, so they are still a minority. Then, it just means a buff
to A means a smaller nerf to all other classes.<br />
<br />
If my class gets nerfed then all other classes are stronger relative to me.
Whereas in the first scenario I am in the majority who gets screwed by class A
and I am still competitive with most people, now I am simply worse off than I
had been compared to anybody else. Therefore, it means a nerf to my class is a
buff to everyone else. It also means that the first situation is bad but not
nearly as bad as the second situation.<br />
<br />
Most people just want buffs and don't think about how changing the game
constantly or rampant buffing could negatively affect their standing. In some
MMORPGs players are buffed too much to the point where it is obnoxious. It
leads to rampant inflation. Any progress made today is worth less tomorrow and
even less the day after that. If I have to think about situations in the past,
I have to recall the time period it took place or I wouldn't have a grasp on
just how momentous the occasion was. If everybody is strong then nobody is
strong. Seeing higher lines of damage might give a cheap rush, but at the end
of the day it just means the boss one is now able to overcome is worth less.<br />
<br />
In Maplestory it is one of the worst I've seen. I was tired of seeing damage
inflation producing numbers so large, my brain could not keep track of all the
digits. It became like knowing the age of the universe. The number is so large,
it just becomes numbers and my brain can't compare them with ease.<br />
<br />
The constant pressure of maintaining my lead by acquiring more and more wealth
along with an ever-changing game with new mechanics and bosses got worse with
every character constantly shuffling around and changing relative to each
other. In a MMORPG if my class was nerfed, I could not change classes. It meant
I simply had to take it. It is unsettling to know that anything could happen
next year and if I want a change I have to drop everything I've worked for to
start anew, and of course even that has no guarantees. I prayed just to get the
status quo. Don't even buff me, just don't screw me over.<br />
<br />
When Kaisers got nerfed in Maplestory with their combo system essentially
destroyed it wasn't just a significant nerf. It removed a game mechanic that
changed the way I had to play the game. It did this by drastically slowing down
my ability to transform (which was one of the main highlights of the class) and
my way of dodging. It didn’t just nerf Kaiser’s strength, it nerfed its fun.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is true that the most balanced class system would
objectively be the most boring class system. That’s the only way to be sure
something is perfectly balanced. But once a class is over double the damage
output of another class doing the same exact type of things, something is
seriously wrong with the game. Having this class system makes gameplay more
interesting and introduces many new play styles a person may identify with, but
there are drawbacks to this approach too.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Risk aversion is the tendency to avoid risk. A person might
turn down a fair bet simply because the person would rather prevent losses.
Losing $5 might feel more bad than it feels good to earn $5. It is an idea used
in economics and finance. I see it as the tendency to want the status quo.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 6: Economy and the Black Market"></a>
<br />
<h2>
Part 6: Economy and the Black Market</h2>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The problem with Maplestory’s economy is inflation due to
hackers. 1 billion Mesos costs only $2.50 on the black market today. Money is
generated by selling loot to NPCs or picking up Mesos directly from monster
drops. No legitimate player on any non-Reboot server can ever hope to make 1
billion Mesos from this method. More on Reboot in a bit. The value of game
currency on the black market tells us the state of inflation in the game. If
money is cheap that means, it’s easy to obtain a lot of it and vice versa.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Maplestory is not like Runescape, where there are many
skills to train and intermediate goods along the way. For example, in Runescape
a log is cut with an axe, then fletched into a bow. Somebody else picks up flax
and strings it into a bow string and sells it to the fletcher. The fletcher
then assembles the bow, then gets more wood, fletches arrow shafts from the
logs, and buys arrow tips from a smith who has to mine the ore and smelt the
ore and then finally smith it into tips. Instead in Maplestory two things are
traded: gear of varying qualities and NX. Let’s go over both.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the interesting parts of Maplestory is the way the
equipment system is set up. For example, with a weapon we have the stats of the
sword which gives say, +50 strength and +100 attack. Do you know how much
strength a single point of attack is worth? There is a formula for that. Then
there’s the matter of set effects. Sometimes wearing multiple bits of gear in a
set gives varying amounts of bonuses and more than one set effect would often
be in effect on a player at any time. Then there’s scrolling. You use a scroll
on a weapon and it has a set change to succeed. Fail, and some scrolls destroy
the item. Otherwise, the use up a slot.
If a slot was used up due to a failure it can be remedied with a clean slate
scroll which costs a significant amount of cash. Different scrolls fetch
different prices and have different effects.
Scrolling can even be done via traces, but I won’t get into that. Once scrolling
is done a person might enhance the weapon, which involves paying a sum of cash
for a set change of success, with higher bonuses and expenses as you move up.
As you move up close to the maximum, the price goes up drastically and a chance
of item destruction is added. Then there are souls, which charge up to give the
player various effects or attacks. And finally, there are potentials. You can
have up to 3 lines of potential, and there is a set of possible potentials for
a given tier of potential, each with a beneficial effect. Potential can be
rerolled via cubes which generally have to be bought with NX with real life
money. Each time a potential is rerolled there is a chance to increase the
tier, with Miracle Time doubling the chance. And then there’s bonus potential,
which are basically 3 extra lines of potential with inferior bonuses. Suffice
to say, gear can be of vastly different qualities. A red cape can be worth so
much more than another red cape of the same kind based on the improvements the
cape went through.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are NX. NX can mean the currency in the game shop to
buy things which come from real life money or the cosmetic outfits from that
shop. People buy NX and offer to sell it to players for mesos. What we end up
with is a hyper-inflated currency that dictates the value of NX which in turn
affects everything in the game. The main source of gear improvement comes from
cubes which primarily come from the cash shop which can only be purchased via
NX. Even if you sidestep NX and try to buy a piece of gear with mesos you can
only afford the inflated asking price because everything was inflated to begin
with and your money came from a person hacking. Buying NX outfits and selling
them for mesos is technically legal, yet buying gear or Mesos with cash is
technically illegal; but in this topsy turvy world of pay to win madness, I
don’t think any of those 3 are worse than the other 2.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
During the time with Foot I spent $5000 on the game. It was
absolutely insane. If it’s more efficient to buy cash than to work for it, then
it just makes sense to work for real life money to buy Mesos. But that leads
down a slippery slope of buying more Mesos than one has made and just getting
sucked dry. And since this is the black market, not everything is on the up and
up. If a person is a scammer, too bad. However, I am happy to say that I have
not been scammed in my time on Bera server with Foot. I have bought and sold
most of my gear without a hitch. I did not scam others and others did not scam
me.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The black market is a revolving door between the eager noobs
walking to try to get good and the disillusioned veterans walking out after
they realized being the best wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. We know how
money is in real life; strive to earn 50k, achieve the goal, then your goal
just shifts to 100k. It’s like trying to solve a problem that never ends. You
will never be happy this way. While caring about getting better at the game was
the impetus to play and enjoy the game in the first place, too much of a good
thing becomes a bad thing. There’s a real price to pay for being at the top of
the game which most people don’t understand. This is why I recommended others
to enjoy their time and not be overly envious of my position.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<h2>
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 7: Reboot"></a>
Part 7: Reboot</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
April 31<sup>st</sup> – October 2016<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Going chronologically, we finally have Reboot. Reboot is a
server propped up sometime late 2015. Maplestory is separated into servers. A
person can create characters in different servers but barring exceptions they
cannot ever meet. It’s generally the same game across different servers but
with varying population and economies. Channels on the other hand are different
instances of a server which players of that server can change. Channel 1 is always the most populated channel. If a
person is walking along and their favorite training spot is taken they can “cc”
or “change channels” to find one where that spot is empty. I used to be in Bera
only, which for a long time was the second most populous server. Reboot is a
very different server and plays be unique rules.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The biggest difference is the lack of free trade. The iconic
free market with player owned shops are no longer a thing. Without an effective
way of trading goods people have to rely on their providing for their own
equipment. Real world trading where a person sends some money via Paypal and
the other person meets you at some random free market channel to hand you
billions of mesos.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are other changes. For example, training in Reboot is
easier because the monsters give more experience. Getting good gear is already
hard to get since a person has to make the gear themselves, but also because
bonus potential and scrolling has been removed entirely. Instead of spending
real life money on cubes to cube equipment or gear through the black market,
the typical way of improving one’s “range” or damage, is by killing monsters
over and over, picking up their money, and spending it on cubes instead. Yes,
in Reboot cubes are bought with in game currency instead of real life money.
Cosmetics still all require NX instead of mesos, but Nexon has to keep the
lights on somehow.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The point is, Reboot is not a pay to win server. You are not
supposed to be able to walk in, spend $10,000, and all of a sudden become super
strong. This, along with my friend Mark deciding to play on Reboot, are the
reasons why I came back to Maplestory.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mark is a real life friend and we have had a hard time
getting back together. It’s worse now that he’s a hundred of miles away. We no
longer play Runescape and him deciding to play Reboot was a good way to get
back into the groove again.<br />
<br />
At first we made matching characters. We both played the new Kinesis class, and I was named Gamsky while he was named Ivanchuk. They are names of chess grandmasters. Kinesis' secondary weapon is a chess piece, so we thought it was fitting. While Mark later decided to play as a Paladin for support's sake as Asuramaru, I decided to make another Kaiser like the one in Bera. Stockfish is the #1 chess engine in the world, and that engine got its name from the food item stockfish, which is a type of air dried fish.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
I decided to buy a bunch of NX boxes one day hoping for Orchid's outfit. Because there is no free trade the only way to get a specific outfit is to open a ton of boxes and hope I get the outfit I want. IN the end I decided to run with whatever I got.<br />
<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Much later on I decided to go back to a crazy chicken costume for comedic effect and decided to stay with the look. From then on I was Stockfishies the Chicken Kaiser.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately this story will not feature Mark because he stopped playing a month in. I specifically requested that he continue playing with me, because he had a track record of leaving me behind in Maplestory to play by myself. I left Bera because I decided Maplestory was not healthy for my mental well-being and if I were to join back then things have to be different this time around.<br />
<br />
He left as he told me later, because I was always ahead. Having me carry him is not as fun as working together. In a MMORPG that means we would forever be hobbled by the slowest person in the group. If I was ahead I had to wait until he caught up. Imagine if one of us couldn't play for a week or two. What is the other person going to do? I don't think I'm as crafty and remarkably efficient as Mark said I was when I looked at the change logs and participated in the events that I found gave me the best rewards. It's a matter of simply reading the material and trying what seems promising. Still, there was a gap between us and I was always going to put in more effort than he was willing. Plus, he had other games to play.<br />
<br />
We met from playing Runescape. If somebody has only a few hobbies and I can't play the same game with them anymore then I struggle to find a way to fix the situation. I guess I sometimes assume people I get along with have similar hobbies as I do and find similar things interesting, which is not always the case. Today I lack the will to get back into MMORPGs. The constant grinding is too much, and I have other things I would rather do with my time. When I work on Skyrim textures, I am more sure that my work will not go to waste. With MMORPGs like Maplestory, one day it's worth the world, and the next day it's totally irrelevant. This means I can't make myself play some MMORPG Mark wants to play anymore. I know how I treat MMORPGs and the baggage that comes with that. How many times and I going to go in and go out before I say no more?<br />
<br />
The question with somebody like Mark, and the problems with people from Bera, are problems I can't find a good solution to. People just scatter and for one reason or the other they just drift away. It makes it seem like no relationship ever lasts and everything ends sooner rather than later.<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 8: Maplestory Statistics"></a>
<br />
<h2>
Part 8: Maplestory Statistics</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I try to approach Maplestory in a paint-by-numbers approach.
This shouldn’t be surprising given I was a cheerleader for Time Value Cutoff in
Runescape as a method of increasing efficiency. There are two main problems I
see when it comes to efficiency in Maplestory. The first is the fact that there
are many different stats which have a relatively complex relationship with each
other and the enemy’s stats, making it unclear to most people what stats are
better for what. The second problem has to do with probability and its role in
cubing.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I won’t go into the nitty gritty details but I will list
some of the things I did look at while figuring out the stats. Different
classes use either strength, intelligence, dexterity, or luck as their primary
stat. They also have a secondary stat that is worth about a fifth of their
primary stat. There are exceptions which is to be expected given the numerous
amount of classes in the game. For example, Demon Avengers use health as their
main stat and Xenon benefit similarly from any of the 4 basic stats. There is
also attack, which is most commonly found on weapons (although some special
capes and such can have the stat as well). A single point of attack is always
worth more than a single point of a primary stat like str (strength), but the
value of one attack relative to points in str is a ratio that depends on how
much str and attack one has in total. Lines from potential can give % bonuses.
If you have +10% str you can add up all of your strength and add 10% to that
result to get your actual amount of str. The same can be said for % attack. The
consequence of all this is that these four elements (primary stat, stat %,
attack, attack %) are all related and the value of one relative to the other
changes as your stats or gear changes.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then there’s % damage, or %dmg for short. If you were going
to do 10 damage, +10% dmg means you will now do 11 damage. The fundamental
truth of how % dmg and % attack work is that they are equal if you have the
same amounts of both. However, that never pans out in reality as it is far
easier to obtain huge amounts of %dmg compared to %atk. If I have +300% dmg and
I get another +30% dmg I have +330% dmg, but the actual net increase in damage
is actually only 10%. If I had no %dmg to start with and I now have +30% dmg
then my net increase in damage is actually 30%.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
One has to add up all of the stats of each item they have
but also all of the small miscellaneous bonuses like codex, character cards,
link skills, class specific passive and active buffs, and buffs from gear
(active skills granted from a few select lines of potential). There is an ability in Reboot all players have that increases a person's %dmg by 1% for every 2 levels gained. At level 220 that means +110% dmg alone from this ability. This causes %atk to be far more valuable than %dmg.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then there’s critical damage. When I was playing critical
damage was split between 3 factors: critical chance, minimum critical damage,
and maximum critical damage. Critical chance is just the change of triggering
critical damage. Take the average of minimum and maximum critical damage to
find average critical damage. Then to figure out the value of +10% critical
damage or chance you can simply do some basic math.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There’s also enemy damage reduction and ignore enemy
reduction. Here the terminology is a little confusing. PDR stands for ‘physical
damage reduction’, but since generally bosses have the same physical or magical
damage reduction PDR really just means PDR + MDR or simply ‘DR’ for damage
reduction. The problem with calling it DR is that DR is already used as an
abbreviation for ‘damage reflection’. Even more confusingly, ‘physical damage
reduction’ really means ‘ignore enemy physical damage reduction’ colloquially,
even though it makes no sense. The true name for ignoring enemy defense is IED.
PDR really means what it its words stands for contrary to the loose language
some people use. If I will do 100 damage and the enemy has 50% PDR, then I will
do 50 damage. However, IED allows me to ignore some of the enemy PDR. If I have
50% IED and would normally do 100 damage but the enemy has 50% PDR I will do 75
damage. The higher leveled bosses all assume the player has ample IED since
they have above 100% PDR. So if I had no IED I would always do 1 damage.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To add to the complexity, IED is described as a percentage
but lines of IED bonuses do not combine additively. There is actually a formula
for calculating ending IED. It is better to have 1 bonus of 30% IED rather than
2 bonuses of 15% IED. Because IED is often a line for potential and there are
only so many lines of potential each piece of equipment can have and there is a
limit to the amount of equipment a player can wear, IED has an opportunity
cost. If we know that the maximum line of IED bonus is 45% and that the maximum
line for %atk is 21%, the question then becomes whether 45% IED is better or
21% atk. The player has to take into account how IED bonuses add up or ‘stack’
and the PDR of the boss in question. I prefer to assume the worst case which
all of the toughest bosses have, which is around 300% PDR. Believe it or not
there are other stats to consider and things to calculate but I have covered
the most important bits here.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And finally there’s probability. Probability’s a funny
thing. I believe statistics as a field of study is a relatively new field,
which just shows us how unintuitive it is to the human mind. Casinos exploit
this fact for their gain. Serious statistics is arcane, but one doesn’t need a
major in statistics to see that it is a valid field and use basic concepts to
make decisions.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When cubing in an attempt to tier up the potential level to
get access to a better pool of effects there are two main cubes people use.
There is the red cube and the black cube. The black cube costs more but has a
higher rate of tiering up along with the ability to pick to keep the old
potential. To be more clear about how the tiering process works: Using a cube
on an item with rare (most basic potential level) will reset its potential to
some random lines of effects. Every time it is reset there is a chance the item
will go up a tier. In other words, if my goal is to reach legendary tier and I
have the funds to see it through I don’t really care if I get a cool rare or
epic or unique potential. It will be lost as soon as I try to tier up again.
It’s very possible for a particular rare potential to beat an epic one. For
example: If I am a warrior and I use str and I get %str effect on rare
potential due to sheer luck and I get %int from epic tier then the rare effect
is better for damage. But the maximum bonuses of rare is very low so I should
only stick with the better effect with the lower potential tier if I am afraid
I don’t have the money to tier up and get something decent. So anybody well
prepared for an extended cubing session should have the funds to hit legendary,
which means the ability for a black cube to allow the player to stay with the
old potential is useless.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And I’d argue even with legendary potential using black
cubes is dumb. Part of the appeal of black cubes is its higher rate of tiering
up. If we’re at max tier, there’s no benefit there. Yes, if I get a really good
roll for my legendary tier I might be tempted to play it safe with black cubes
and keep using black cubes and reverting back to the old potential until
something better comes along. But that has a cost. A black cube costs almost
double of a red cube. By choosing to play it safe a person is deciding to
almost halve their chances of getting anything better. In the long run a better
effect will always come. It’s just a matter of having enough funds lined up to
minimize risk.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then there’s a bonus argument: Black cubes grant a higher
chance to get better lines. Note the distinction between better lines and a
higher chance of tier up. In the grand scheme of things tiering up a minor part
of a top player’s Maplestory career. Once a person tiers everything to
legendary tiering no longer matters. But chasing the best lines possible at
legendary tier is a never-ending quest. I was very skeptical of this claim
about better lines from black cubes. The evidence I was given was anecdotal.
The plural of anecdote is not data. I have not gone back to look at the latest
testing however.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Pages and pages of calculations... Maybe some of it was trash, but in the end I had to think about the game objectively with numbers.</i></div>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At any rate, my main frustration is with people’s tendency
for superstition and self-deception. People tend to think their experiences are
far more important than they really are. If I know a hard drive has a failure
rate of 1% and I get hard drive that is dead out of the box, I would not
recommend it to others. Yet if other hard drives have similar or higher failure
rates it would irrational to do so. I would have to get many dead hard drives
out of the box in order for me to contact the manufacturer about a possible
defective batch. Even then that is not enough sample size to change the failure
statistic. So when people say they get “lucky” with red cubes or black cubes
they are simply telling me their experiences instead of rigorous data. It’s
easy to remember the hits and ignore the misses when one has a bias and poor
data is not data at all. As I said: The plural of anecdote is not data.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The solution to stupid ideas like lucky cubing spots or some
cubes being lucky is to use many cubes and log the results. Lenria, Christii,
and I decided to combine our data and form a Google spreadsheet. We counted
every single cube we used. In the event of Miracle Time where the chance of
tier up is doubled each cube that did not tier up was counted as two, and each
that did tier up was counted as 1.5. A cube that tiered up in Miracle Time
might have tiered up with 2 cubes normally or just 1. The average is 1.5. We
managed to get several thousand cubes and managed a decent sample size.
Combined with data from Reddit we have figured out that for the purposes of
tiering up red and blacks are similar enough.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
The other bit when it comes to probability is starring of
Tyrants. Normally enhancing a piece of armor is relatively cheap and brings
with it relatively little gain. Tyrants follow their own unique path, with each
stage of enhancement far costlier and harder to obtain. The benefit is the
unique attack bonuses of each enhancement. Enhancing Tyrants is very expensive
in Reboot. Going to 10 stars (stage 10) is a very difficult thing to achieve.
The chance of destruction is quite high. While the benefits for each star is
the same for each Tyrant item, different Tyrant items can be easier or harder
to obtain relative to other Tyrants. The order from easiest to hardest to
obtain is Cape -> Boots -> Belt -> Gloves. Not only is the cost high
in mesos, it is costly in terms of gear. The chance for a Tyrant piece to be
destroyed goes up with each star past 5.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
A person can try to measure the typical cost per range
improvement with this chart. This type of analysis makes much more sense for
starring capes because they are easily replaceable.<br />
<br />
The many facets to gear improvement (potential, scrolling, enhancing, souls, sets) and other types of character improvement (traits, character cards, link skills, codex) really appealed to me. The best gear for a given task was relatively simple in Runescape but not as much in Maplestory. The ability to fine tune equipment along with anviling an item to look like something else really gave each piece of gear its own unique flair. Something like link skills involves training other characters of different classes to certain levels, which helps introduce the many classes to the player and discover new ways of playing the game. It is also an opportunity to train with friends who otherwise would not be training with you, since high level training today is a very solo affair.<br />
<br />
One more example I point to to demonstrate the objective and efficiency orientated way I looked at the game is what I called 'the pen method' when farming. As a Phantom, there is a cycle that is optimal for profit. Money has to be collected from the ground within 2 minutes of it showing up or it will disappear and the platter and illusion attacks stay in place with different timers. This means I would replace only illusion for 2 runs, and on the third replace both platter and illusion while gathering money on the way. I had to know which part of the cycle I was in. In order to do this, I placed a pen on my desk. Every time I had to move around again I checked the position of my pen and rotated it one more time clockwise. The direction the pen points lets me know exactly which part of the cycle I was on.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<h2>
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 9: Grinding & Competition"></a>
Part 9: Grinding & Competition</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then there’s the grinding. There is
no way to be at the top of your game without farming no matter what you do. Even if you hack for money you will be caught... eventually. Farming at NH (Northern Heights) was the best source of money. It’s one of
those maps that KMS (Korean Maplestory) did not have which dropped a lot of
mesos. (Maplestory is Korean and they get the updates before we do, although
there is regional exclusive content.) Let’s quickly run some numbers here. The
average amount of mesos to reach legendary tier from rare would be about 1b (1
billion mesos). An hour of effective farming in the era I was playing was about
280m per hour. The rates varied depending on the specific time period we are
analyzing but there’s no need to go that much into the weeds. Okay, killing the
daily bosses on character nets what, 50-60m at the most? That’s more than 16
days of daily bosses for one legendary tier. And then there are what, 22 items
that need to be legendary? That’s just the start, too. Getting to legendary
just means getting to the best pool of possible stats, it’s another thing
entirely to get something totally awesome after getting legendary tier. That’s
352 days of daily bossing just to get legendary tier on everything. A year for something that should be completed in a month.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
First there’s the fact that NH
is a single map that can only be farmed effectively by a single person.
There are 20 channels in each server, so only 20 people can be farming at
maximum capacity at any time in Reboot. Since getting mesos is a more effective
way of improving one’s strength than training, people are generally looking to farm. NH maps were hotly contested. Once June, July, August
came around things got bad. Maplestory becomes far more crowded during summer
time and this was the first summer with Reboot, so Reboot became the most
populated server during that period of time. It was very hard to find NH maps
that were open. Once a person is able to find one they generally want to stay
there for a very long time otherwise the bother of getting the map in the first
place wouldn’t be worth it. This forces people into very long and grueling
shifts. And during those peak months holding the map still meant dealing with
incoming ksers (kill stealers). A map is held if somebody is actively attacking in the map.
It’s a social contract more than anything else. People decided that we should
form a line at the bank and that the people in front get to go before the
people in the back. Whether a person gets to leave the line to use the bathroom
and go back to their previous position in line is up to social negotiation. It’s the same here: People have
decided that as long as you are fighting in the map you are holding the map and
anybody that contests for control of the map is kill stealing, or trying to
steal the map from you. Lines get a little blurry when it comes to using the
bathroom, meaning your character isn’t attacking but rather standing still.
Another grey area is losing connection, and sometimes this is the players fault
but can just as easily be Nexon’s fault as the game is not that stable to begin
with. Kill stealing is generally not allowed in guilds, but some people try to skirt around that by having their farmer character not be in any guilds so nobody knows who the person is.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Imagine sitting there farming for 12 hour shifts while
random people pop up into your map. You don’t know if they will come by and
quickly try to change the channel or if they are here to fuck up your day. When they try the latter I always try to fight back. My philosophy is that if
nobody gave an inch to people who steal maps then nobody will ever steal maps
because it would be less costly to find a map like a normal human being instead
of stealing other people’s maps. Sometimes I enlisted the help of others in my
guild to try to totally smash the earnings of the person trying to take my map. The response to a kser is to stop kishing the map so the spawns go down and do everything I can to decrease the earnings of the kser. When I have helpers I tell them to never admit out loud that they are getting bored, because that gives the kser hope that people will leave and he will gain control of the map. As a Phantom, I can control the right side with two arrow platters which no legitimate player can defeat due to Arrow Platter being amazing for ksing/kicking out ksers and my ping being very low. The left side is controlled with Arrow Illusion, which is a weak spot.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After summer was over the population in Maple fell but
Reboot was still pretty crowded since it remained the most popular server. Then
the hackers came in. There was a hacker hacking openly on his main character in
some guild. After surviving for a very long period of time I believe others got
emboldened. The hacking really started to ramp up. At its worst, half of all
channels were taken by hackers in NH. Up until now hackers existed, but they
never dared to step foot in NH. Remember, NH is THE farming map in Reboot. It
should have been patrolled around the clock by GMs (Maplestory staff). In some cases,
it took over 12 hours of nonstop hacking in the hottest map to get caught. It
should have been suicide for hackers to step in that area, and the fact that it
wasn’t told us that Nexon (once again) was doing a terrible job at managing
their own game. Towards the end though the hacking died down a bit at NH and I
was actually (finally) able to find a map in NH in the middle of the night
usually at my first try once I checked every channel.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Because farming is such a central part of Reboot and NH at
the time was the only real map to farm in, people have taken time to try to
optimize farming at NH. While nobody went so far as to list the exact procedure
to optimize every facet of farming, we did know that there were two main
classes that worked for farming: Kanna and Phantom. Because of this, most people
made characters just for farming, which is sad because the XP from killing the
monsters, while relatively little, add up over time. And before one can
properly farm they must have dumped a few billion mesos on drop rate gear.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Anyways: Phantom’s ability to steal some skills of other
classes means that they are able to deploy the skills that are important to
attacking as much of the map as possible at one time with minimal downtime. So,
a phantom would drop an arrow platter up on the upper right, then set down
Arrow Illusion on the left entrance, go back down to the bottom right corner
and hold the final arrow platter down. The downside to a phantom is that they
cannot steal Kanna’s famous kishin ability which increases the amount of spawns
and decreases the spawn time. The remedy is to have another computer and
account ready to kishin for you.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now this is a grey area. Logging in with two computers is
might not be explicitly illegal but Nexon has taken basic protections to
prevent a legitimate player from opening two instances of Maple at one time on
a single computer. Still, Nexon has not really pursued people who dual log in
on two accounts. It is seen as more legitimate to have two computers and two
instances of Maple than to have dual login on a single computer, bypassing
Nexon’s protections. There’s also the matter of the actual act of kishin. A
person can put a weigh on a space bar to spam kishin automatically, but that is
considered macroing and is actually illegal. It’s a hardware macro instead of a
software macro like botting.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So, I put together a crappy desktop with a Pentium
Anniversary Edition chip, a z97 motherboard, basic ram with my old power supply
and case. I got a crappy monitor for $8 from Craigslist and to quickly switch
between the two accounts I hooked up my kishin PC with Teamviewer, allowing
remote access of the computer so I can quickly change windows and press kishin.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7QBqJZ4vjuZ37fHjcdGI1mWhTWJUxrF123nCoMMtrVh3N9v4AbEQ8Z9i4lrXxzVqG6RGivKgXfJCiP3nALJk1SnWU31kwUlp3nkqlAeH52BfidVMa1z4W3yuLFdDcp0iXwVhD0KrDzg/s1600/DSC00684.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1004" data-original-width="1501" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7QBqJZ4vjuZ37fHjcdGI1mWhTWJUxrF123nCoMMtrVh3N9v4AbEQ8Z9i4lrXxzVqG6RGivKgXfJCiP3nALJk1SnWU31kwUlp3nkqlAeH52BfidVMa1z4W3yuLFdDcp0iXwVhD0KrDzg/s400/DSC00684.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Me building the Kishin PC, racing against the Horntail clock before I got kicked out (for fun) with Eva.</i></div>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then there’s the fact that in order to work towards Tyrant
Gloves at the time, I had to report for a Kritias Invasion, or just invasion
for short. The actual work required in such an invasion is very minor
especially for a person like me with loaded drop gear (which improves drop rate
of items). Invasions start every 2 hours from I believe 8am to 10pm. If I farm
during an invasion I have to leave for it and park my kanna at NH while I go
off to do the invasion. Without a kanna there holding a map my map would be
lost. As soon as a person pops into my NH map I had to very quickly pretend I
am farming in the map. If I farmed in the early morning hours of the day to try
to find a map when most people were sleeping, I will end up wanting to go to
sleep after a very long shift when invasions are going off every 2 hours.
Waking up every 2 hours was extremely taxing on me physically. I had to somehow squeeze in daily activities in with that schedule. Needless to say, all of my other hobbies were put in the back burner.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The boredom was top
notch. I was sitting there doing the same thing for 12 hours a day, 2 days a
week. Games are supposed to be for fun and I was not having fun. But I could
still quickly switch podcasts or reply my favorite farming playlist. I even
streamed a farming run and talked to the chat. I could talk to people on
Discord. Still, by no means was it easy. A big chunk of life was forfeit to farming and invasions, and that would be the case for the foreseeable future. All of the wealth a person has in real life is irrelevant in Reboot, and that is both the blessing and curse of this server. I came into Reboot thinking that it would be better since I had to farm for mesos and it would prevent me from spending too much money at the onset. But while Bera sucked my money, Reboot sucked my soul and my health. As a person with sleep apnea, I wake up multiple times when I sleep, and those are just the times where I remember waking up. Less severe blockages of breathing kick me to a lighter stage of sleep, still decreasing the efficiency of my sleep. I lost weight and my boss asked me if I was sick. I was sitting for 12 hours at a time. Once I didn’t eat for a bit over 24 hours and after a farming shift it felt SO GOOD just to be able to eat something and drink Gatorade.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In Bera people were in awe and wanted to get on my level but I tell them to just enjoy the game, hoping they would lose the damage race but win happiness. There’s a toxic part of my personality that forced me to try to constantly up my game and chase higher and higher damage. I just couldn’t play the game casually. While I was farming here in NH I was farming in real life at work for money to buy better gear via real world trading in Bera. I was really in the same situation as the past only worked even more to death.</div>
<br />
It is harder to be be halfway decent in strength outside of Reboot but not very hard to get strong if one is willing to open his wallet. In Reboot it's the reverse. It is easy to be halfway decent but approaching the end becomes exponentially more difficult. Without spending real life money it's very hard to improve one's potentials in Bera. In Reboot killing bosses and training nets enough money to lift a person out of poverty. A big reason is because mesos dropped by monsters are in much higher quantity in Reboot.<br />
<br />
The reason why getting to the top in Reboot was much harder takes a little longer to explain. First there's the stuff like bonus potentials which don't exist in Reboot, yet the bosses don't get easier. Gear is harder to get because there isn't free trade, and currency isn't inflated for the same reason. Farming takes a long time and can only go so fast. There are also the Tyrants. Outside of Reboot the normal way to enhance Tyrants (which add a lot of attack) is to use a Cash Shop scroll to prevent a scroll from being expended should the scroll fail, and then to use an enhancement scroll with no chance of destruction on failure. It is an expensive procedure but far cheaper than farming constantly for mesos and hoping a normal enhancement will take. If a normal enhancement fails the player loses a star, not to mention the chance of destruction. For this reason Tyrants are extremely expensive.<br />
<br />
I bring up this fact to highlight the role which luck has to do with Reboot. Outside of Reboot it is very easy to sidestep chance: Just go buy gear that has already been finished. I understand the idea behind 'regression to the mean'. Over the long haul everyone has average luck statistically. But that assumes we get to the long haul in the first place. If we're dealing with enhancing Tyrant Belt or Tyrant Gloves we are dealing with months of work which can turn into dust based on chance alone. It can be very discouraging to lose so much time and effort in this way. Gambling with games of chance might be a way Nexon tried to get people hooked on buying cubes in other servers, but here in Reboot is serves as just never-ending dejection.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The truth is that if somebody wanted to get on my level they
already would be on my level unless they were just starting out. People like
the idea of being strong but they don’t want the grueling hours of work that it
requires to get to that level. Most people have had every chance in the world
to go and farm and get to where they say they want to be but they chose not to.
You either make it happen or you don’t. Rich or poor, you have to get in line and get down to
work in Reboot if you want to make a name for yourself.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And sometimes there are up and coming new people that are
making waves and making gains. Kawaiienoz and Exeseed for a while looked like
they would be the successors once I left. I once thought GenoLightbringer was
strong but he remained very stagnant and was soon overtaken. He left
Undertale after feeling like he was doing all of the work in the guild since
the founder was off Maple. Exeseed left Undertale not long after as did MelloD.
Kawaiienoz was around for all of the invasions but didn’t farm much after a
while. He did bring up paying for carries, saying that tons of people did it,
which was a topic I was reluctant to discuss because it implicated me as well
to some extent. See, getting carries illegitimately was happening in the
background and it would be naïve to think otherwise. It just wasn’t a thing
people discussed though. In my mind I held a somewhat contradictory position of
justifying my own actions yet looking more harshly on others who did the same
things for the same reasons. It seems like a human thing to do.<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Shadeke started making some gains and then exploded which I
will explain later. In the end it was Douwe who kept going after Altaire died.
Good for him. I still remember when I first hung out with Exeseed and Douwe,
and Douwe was weaker than Exeseed. Douwe was on stream and I took them to Chaos
Pink Bean.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My position as at one point the strongest person in the
entire alliance was not one I took for granted of course. I knew any week I
take off is a week others get to catch up. For some reason I was more competitive with the people in my alliance than outside of it. I suppose it was because I was in contact with those people more often. Maybe if I was in a bossing guild with the top players, I could not hope to compare with them and I would not feel the need to compare myself to other people in the guild. I didn't really like the big Maplestory streams, and part of that was probably jealousy. They were strong and they were famous. It's not healthy to live in constant fear of being beaten.<br />
<br />
I was not willing to give up my part
time job at the weekends despite the fact that double xp weekends were mostly
at weekends though (hence the name). If you think NH was full during summertime
at 3 in the morning you’re going to love NH during double xp (since it’s also
double drop time). For those segments if I was free I would train with double
xp bonuses to try to quadruple xp, etc. NH is absolutely toxic during double xp
so I stayed well away.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The truth is we were
jockeying for position in some way or the other. If other people were too
strong relative to me then I would not be seen as the clear strong person in
the alliance. If other people were too week relative to me then I don’t have
committed people I can rely on to tackle difficult bosses. It’s not the end of
the world, as staying in Altaire in a post-Sunny era means I am choosing
friends over having access to the strongest people on the server in one of the
top guilds like Elite or Spring. It’s not to say that I could never be friends
with those people, but I had friends here.<br />
<br />
<br />
Everything passes, everything changes, everything palls. In
retrospect feeling jealously or anxiety about my strength relative to others in
the guild was a net negative. Jealousy can be good in that it inspires one to
get off their ass and get things done, but too much jealousy is
self-destructive. After all is said and done and Altaire is functionally dead what was the point? The positions of power and
respect came partially from my damage yes, but mostly from other people’s
opinion on my character. Even if I was alliance leader once again (guilds have
Jr Master who can kick and invite, a single leader, and an alliance is formed
of multiple guilds, and each leader in a guild is a Jr in the alliance with a
single leader of the alliance being the leader of everything) what would that
have given me? I’d be a king of a lunchbox. A leader of nothing.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I actually wanted to quit Reboot thrice. During the first time I was still not even level 200, and to decide whether I was going to quit or not I enhanced my Ghost Ship Exorcist to 15 stars. The cumulative chance of item destruction was coming up to 10% and I knew the gains going from 12 to 15 stars (the area with chance of destruction) was very small. I also know it was the best badge at the time and it was unlikely that a new one will come along any time soon. There was no replacement for the badge should it have exploded. But as fate would have it, I passed the 15 stars.<br />
<br />
The second time
was because I got tired of having to chase Dojo rankings. Dojo is a minigame
and success in that minigame depends primarily on damage output. One of the
main rewards were Dojo Gloves, which were awarded to people who placed first in
the server that week, first for their class, or second for their class. The
gloves were valuable to me, so it ended up pushing me to try to be the best
Kaiser in Reboot. You can see how this pushed me into doing things I didn't want to do. I began to know
who each Kaiser was on the leaderboards. Ultrosmaveth lost interest in the game. We talked for a brief
period of time and that was about it. While I held my position on the
leaderboards the pressure was great because there were always new people trying
to take my spot. I know I wasn’t hacking, but I didn’t know if others were or
not. At least one of them were, and in that case Nexon actually banned the guy
(mhmyup).<br />
<br />
I did not want to compare myself to people outside of the alliance. That would be a game I could never win. Being #1 in a class means nothing to me. A person's utility in a party is what matters. Anybody could play a class that sucks and doesn't have any players, making it easy to be #1 in that class according to the Dojo. I did not want to be #1 Kaiser on Reboot. I just wanted to be very strong. The problem was the Dojo changed that.<br />
<br />
I recall snapping at Gavin (Blooboo) because he linked me a video of a Korean Kaiser player who spent tens of thousands of dollars on the game and became insanely powerful. Good for him. It's not relevant to me in any way. I was fighting my own battles on Reboot, the last thing I wanted to do was compare myself to a player halfway across the world playing a different game than I was (KMS). I don't want people to compare me to Ultrosmaveth, who used to be the strongest Kaiser in Reboot. I am my own man. I am not a shitter version of Ultrosmaveth. I am reminded of the time when Ultrosmaveth became the first Kaiser on Reboot to finish the entire Dojo. When that happened people sent sever wide messages congratulating him, and my own alliance responded by asking how I would respond. It reminded me of something: All of the competition I freely explain from my point of view is to a good extent present in other people and the way they think... they just don't decide to talk about it.<br />
<br />
The problem with Dojo to summarize was twofold: 1) It maintained a constant, weekly pressure to perform at a high level and to keep up. 2) It forced me to compare myself to others.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Later on I found out that my obsession with the gloves was
wrong because my calculations showed that critical damage lines available on
Tyrant gloves as potential outweigh the bonuses of the Dojo Gloves. It was
Taliky who originally suggested this idea to me, which I originally resisted
due to inaccurate calculations. After more thought while farming I realized my error and realized I was free. Well, free might be
overstating it. The pressure of the Dojo was great, but losing a Tyrant Glove
while enhancing it… was a liability I had to live with. Losing the gloves meant not being able to cube it for the critical damage lines I wanted in addition to losing months of painful work. It was getting harder to maintain my rank in the Dojo, as no matter how hard I tried others kept catching up. Without the Tyrant Gloves I was pushed back into the Dojo.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I always wanted to be the best and I was willing to go far
to make sure that happened, even if it meant having dealings with the black
market. However, given the choice to eradicate cheating even if it means I
could never cheat, I would take it every time. I don’t want there to be
cheating in games. I wish it was never possible and hacks were never created. I
believe MMORPGs should be about time and skill instead of real life wealth. We
play a game to have fun and get away from reality. Some cheaters rationalize
their cheating by saying that some people get good at games by playing it, some
get good at it by making money and spending it on the game. Not good enough.
This is not what games are for. Games are for playing. This is not the stock
market or the bank. Buying your way out of everything should not be possible.
But it was.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/WhJwXIR.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/WhJwXIR.png" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="800" height="408" width="640" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<h2>
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 10: Carry Culture"></a>
Part 10: Carry Culture</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Because the strongest players in the servers cannot flood
the market with a ton of high level gear in Reboot, gear that used to be cheap
and easy to come by end up being hard to get. Some gear sets which people
traditionally skipped are now viable stopgaps before hitting the next tier of
gear. Some of what I will now begin to talk about are no longer as relevant to
Reboot, but they were reality when I was playing. While it’s not possible to
directly trade in the game, it’s possible to offer to kill a boss for somebody
and let them loot the gear. This is called a ‘carry’. It brings up the obvious
loophole in the idea of a non-p2win (pay to win) server. A person can offer to
give the person carrying them monetary incentives to help them out. The
strictly illegal way is to pay somebody real life money to help you. To top it
off it is general considered even more illegal to hire a hacker to carry you.
The grey area is paying somebody NX or gifting them NX items in exchange for your
help. The pretty legitimate route is to kiss up to somebody who is strong, beg
them for help, or try to help them in some way. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The less obvious problem has to do with friends or
acquaintances begging for carries. Different people approach carries differently.
Some people felt that people should earn their carries. I understand that
constantly offering carries is like offering free stuff to other people. A
person can be spoiled and feel entitled to my help. When I joined Altaire Sunny
was already tired of carrying people and there was some strain the
relationships in the higher ups about how to handle boss runs. (You might notice a parallel between this and the strain in the relationship between Perpaloo and myself when I failed to get the Hard Magnus runs I wanted. Boss runs had to be done in my view, and a guild ideally should get them scheduled in the best way possible.)<br />
<br />
I look at the problem largely from the opposite perspective. When I was weak
nobody offered to carry me. Could I have sucked up to people to try to get them
to help me? Yes. Could I ask to inconvenience others for my sake? Yes. But I
decided not to, it just wasn’t worth it to me. Instead I turned to the help of
people in the black market (who were hackers) to carry me instead. It
doesn’t make it right, but I can see the logic in that and I can see others
thinking along similar lines. If people have to gain strength quickly and
nobody around them wants to help, more often than not they will turn to less
legitimate ways of getting what they want. That in turn affects not just the
player but also the prestige and atmosphere of the entire guild.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
I remember when Christi and I began farming together, and we egged each other to be better. I didn't know what I would feel about carries later on. Most people go into carries willing to help others, but it's the problems that crop out later on that make some people dislike giving carries.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then I became strong, among the strongest in my guild and
alliance. I wanted to give what others never bothered to give to me. And it’s
not always a straightforward greed that makes somebody want a carry. In order
to make money normally one has to pick up money from the ground after they have
killed a monster. That’s a very annoying process and drastically slows down
mesos gained per hour. Instead, a person can opt to get pet(s) which will
autoloot for them. A person can choose to buy pets from the cash shop with real
life money, or they can kill Hard Hilla who usually drops a pet. But if you are
weak you cannot take on Hard Hilla alone. So, without a pet a person’s ability
to help themselves is drastically reduced. In my eyes getting people pets is
making sure other people around me get the bare necessities to play the game.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There’s also a very real opportunity cost in having better
gear later on. While most of the strength of a player comes from their gear and
most of the strength of a piece of gear comes from their potential, upgrading
to a better set of armor has very real gains that add up over time. It’s not
wise to spend a gazillion hours pimping out a weapon of a subpar tier because
all of that work will not directly migrate over into a stronger piece of gear.
Yes, there is a transposition system which I will not get into here. Still, a
question looming over the minds of many players is: Do I save up and wait until
I finally get the good gear and go HAM on the upgrading or do I upgrade my gear
now? It is a tough position to be in.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If I were to look at carry culture very selfishly I would
say that I worked hard for what I have and others should do the same. For
reasons I already outlined it’s not that simple. In addition, these are my
friends, guild mates, and alliance members. These are not strangers.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Still, I have experienced the result of a person who has
been given everything they have. A boss I used to carry was Gollux. Gollux is a
weird boss because you can pick the difficulty of the boss and in turn the tier
of the rewards by killing various body parts before engaging the head, which is
where the real fight begins. There I was one day, carrying somebody and I asked
them to clear out one of the body parts for me while I was working on the other
end of the body. He did not follow my instructions. After meeting him at the
center I asked him why. He told me he didn’t know if he could kill the body part
I asked him to help me with (as a time saving measure). The exact details are a
bit fuzzy to me but let me throw you some numbers.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We were probably killing normal or hard level Gollux, and to
carry somebody through this effectively they must be able to kill Gollux with
10% of health left so I can leave the party and not use up a clear. (A person
can only clear Gollux once a day but may attempt multiple times, letting my
carry multiple people so long as I leave the party and don’t clear Gollux at
the last minute.) Such a person would need to have around 300k range. The
requirement to kill Gollux body parts would probably be around a third or sixth
of that. Yet, this person did not know this, and there is only one possible
reason why: This guy has never even TRIED to do Gollux on his own. He never
bothered to learn how to do the boss since he expected everyone else to hand
carries down to him. This is why he didn’t know he could easily kill the body
parts I asked him to kill.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Quick word about following directions. I provide help to
those who need it, but I expect people to follow my directions. That means do
what I say when I say in the manner I described. What I tell others to do I do
for a reason and openly questioning them just sows discord and confusion among
the entire party. To get the ball rolling quickly people have to pay attention
and follow simple directions. Needless to say, it annoyed me when people
refused to do what I asked. It was also annoying to have people show up for a carry unprepared (sometimes people didn't even do the necessary prequest to even do the boss).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<h2>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 11: Bossing"></a>
Part 11: Bossing</h2>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="MsoNormal">
The toughest realistic carry at the time was CRA, which is
Chaos Root Abyss. Chaos means it’s hard mode. CRA is a slew of 4 different
bosses, each dropping a different piece of gear in the CRA equipment set. The
hardest boss there is called Cvel, or Chaos Vellum. I have wanted to be able to
solo the boss for a long time to provide the rest of the alliance with CRA
weapons, which for most people would be the weapons can stop at. The problem is
that Cvel is a very difficult boss to kill.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
A group effort requires a group of people, and there was not
a lot of people able to help me in any meaningful way. There was OverpricedFP
who I will talk about later. This guy was not interested in helping any of us.
Echo was in Overpriced’s guild and left to play a private server. Sunny was
long gone by the time I was able to do any meaningful damage, and Taliky was
off doing his own thing with his new guild. Eventually I started attempting
Cvel with DIVERTIDO. For most of that time I was very bad at doing Cvel and
failed miserably, spending hours getting nowhere. We have Cvel glitch out once
when we could have killed it, and me dying at the very end to a stray explosion
and failing the run. While I eventually got better and succeeded 2 out of 2
times with SasukeLord, that was at the very end of my Reboot career and the sun
was setting.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I could not simply grab a party of 6 and hope for the best.
A weak party member is a liability because it’s one more person to have to
organize and having them with me inside the boss room makes things harder for
me. Not only would there be more animations flying everywhere making things
harder to see, the amount of tails increases with more party member. Cvel is a
giant crazy lizard man and his tails protrude from the ground, and getting
caught is instant death. The more people there are inside the room the more
tails the entire party has to avoid. With a party of 6 inside the boss room it
becomes pretty ridiculous.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cvel for quite a while was my arch nemesis. Cvel is a boss unlike
Magnus. Dying in Magnus can often be attributed to bad luck as often as it is
to bad skill or slow reaction times. Dying in Cvel is the player’s fault most
of the time. There you are directly confronted in a contest of skill. Failure
brings the sad fact of your inadequacy from your periphery vision to your
focus. While I was streaming and there were 25-50 people watching me, people
saw me begin practicing at Vellum and failing. Look, in the end I am probably
not retarded. Most people are around average. The bell curve is a thing. If
others can do it, so can I. I just needed to work harder.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A person can watch videos on how to swim or drive a car
until their eyes roll over, but that alone is not enough to learn how to drive
or swim with any measure of proficiency. True, there are small details an
observant individual can pick up which others have to learn by experience. But
theory only gets one so far. Funnily enough, the same can be said for my
mathematical approach to the game; most of it is overshadowed by skill or lack
of skill as the dominant factor. Hell, I had real troubles clearing Chaos Queen
before I knew that her mirror attack only shows up during the heart phase and
only once per heart phase. So yes, sometimes good intelligence can go a long way
compared to frustrated repetition. Theory and practice are two sides of a coin.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Anyways, at the end of the day a person has to actually swim
or drive for theory to coalesce into something tangible. The same is for Cvel.
Over time my reactions got better and I needed to think less about what to do.
Things are moving along in real time. I have to watch out for tails, head,
falling rocks, green puddles (and falling rock indicators that get buried under
the green puddles), and the giant fire attack. In the meantime, my buffs will
have to be recharged, and I have to swap gear on the fly to use the buffs the
items give me. I also have to be constantly aware and in the zone for at least
10 minutes.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Whereas in Bera I could hide behind the excuse that I just
didn’t spend enough money to be strong enough, I now I could have gone a lot
farther had I known exactly what I was doing. A moron driving a race car can go
quickly but they’re not going to win the Daytona 500.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The annoyance level was pretty high. On one long 7 hour Cvel
session of failure after failure with DIVERTIDO I started to feel everything
was pointless. It was weird and I can’t quite explain that of all things was
what got to me instead of the bazillion hours I spent farming at NH.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As you can imagine, when theory and experience came together
and I was able to become a serious team member in a party for Cvel I was proud
and glad I finally got to where I wanted to go. In the end I could take out
maybe 78% of Cvel’s health before the timer ran out. Then having paired up with
SasukeLord we managed to destroy Cvel.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s not just rewarding when practice meets experience. It’s
also rewarding when the fruits of my NH farming labor are evident. When I am
able to take on a boss I did not know I was able kill, it is always a moment of
discovery and joy. This is what the person taking handouts at Gollux did not
ever experience. I knew I wasn’t a retard, but over time when I achieve things
like Cvel or Chaos Zakum I prove it to myself. And while people mouthed me off
over failing at Cvel, I believe I was simply being candid about the
difficulties I faced and I showed others that if I could do it despite taking
so long, so could others. In the end I got to where I wanted to be.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
DIVERTIDO, Taliky, and I had some ups and downs killing Hard
Magnus together. It was a boss that needed to be killed twice a week to try to
get more Tyrant equipment. Since destruction of Tyrant gear while enhancing
them is inevitable and the limit is only 1 kill per week with another kill per
week with a reset ticket, we could not afford to miss a week. Since Sunny
ravaged the guild and Overpriced was a douche, I ended up having the pick up
the pieces and try to work out a bossing party that worked. For a while
Christii ran off with some people she knows to boss. With Perpaloo as the
leader barely playing the game I got frustrated. Later on I managed to boss
with DIVERTIDO and we were the duo. But before that we ran a few times with
Taliky. There were a few notable runs of Hard Magnus.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On one run I managed to last the entire Hard Magnus run
dying only once; and that one time was at the start. Hard Magnus had
restrictions put in place at the time to prevent hackers. Hard Magnus used to
be impossible but that time is long gone, yet the restrictions stayed in place
and began to make less and less sense. For example, killing Magnus before 15
minutes is up results in no good drops. DIVERTIDO and I actually killed him
<3 seconds too early once. Sometimes Hard Magnus would just glitch out. He
would stop attacking and if somebody keeps attacking him everyone will be
kicked out of the map. This, along with the 5 minute maximum respawn timer made
it difficult to carry people since lives are shared. This is a roundabout way
for me to say I essentially killed Hard Magnus in a party without really dying
at all. Unfortunately, it was the one time I failed to record with FRAPS.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Another run was on FRAPS. It was right after a change to
Hard Magnus as implemented. Magnus had a blue field around him. Any person
standing out of the area around him will deal 10% of their normal damage and
potions will only heal 10% of their normal amount (there is a potion cooldown
so this can be dangerous). While engaging Magnus outside of the zone was
ineffective, stepping outside of the zone was an important resource for dodging
falling boulders and paralyzing poison gas. A change was brought over from KMS
which made it so stepping outside of the blue zone dealt 10% of the players HP
every second. This made the boss much more difficult and made some previous
strategies no longer viable. This was a dubious decision from Nexon in my view.
They moved over the penalty outside of the blue zone yet did not remove the
pointless restrictions KMS took off (15-minute timer, etc). What’s more, KMS
had access to better gear than GMS players like us had. In other words, Nexon
gave us the worst of both worlds. Taliky and I went to Magnus right after the
change and things were looking very bad. Then, on the very end with only 4
lives left combined, we all decided (runs had to be in groups of 3s or more,
any less and all good drops are denied due again, to stupid restrictions) to do
one last Hail Mary. We double bound. A bind is a valuable ability that locks
most bosses into place, stunning them for a short time. Magnus gets much more
dangerous as his health depletes since the amount of failing boulders increase
as the fight goes on. By the last 25% things start to look apocalyptic and it
was a full time job to not die. Being able to lock Magnus into place at the end
was critical because it removed Magnus’ attacks which allowed us to focus on
attacking him. We still had to dodge boulders, but the bind was good and poison
gas had no way to reach us. After the bind was over from the 3<sup>rd</sup>
person who up until now did very little, Taliky followed up with his own bind.
And that was it: We managed to take out 15-20% of his health with one last Hail
Mary.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
On a more fun note, I remember Divertido and I both donning chicken costumes and jumping Hard Magnus. That was fun. There was one more time where I survived for a very long time before the out of blue zone damage update was implemented. Skill is important, but there is a real element of luck here. For example, a Kaiser attacking Magnus cannot ever dodge his spin or forward slash attack unless he is transformed as a dragon (in which case teleporting out of the way is possible). What a transformed Kaiser loses in precision in where he will land (a big problem in Cvel), he gains in just sheer distance covered in a sudden burst movement. Stacking transform with a bind to inflict maximum damage (along with other details like Angelic Buster link skill) is important. Details like the left side having two poison gas areas while the right side only has one are also important. Binding Magnus onto the gas kills the entire team, since it is extremely hard to dodge the gas without stepping outside of the blue zone for too long and dying. If Magnus is insistent on sitting on the gas then everyone must lure him closer to the center.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I still remember playing The Truth by Tristan while doing my
original carries for Hard Hilla. I still have video footage of that… old
alliance members who are now gone, DkforDays hanging around for fun… Hard Hilla
is one of those bosses where dying means losing XP compared to most other
bosses which did not, so there were some stakes in dying. The technique needed
work but it turned out alright.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Most of my bossing experiences were positive, as people worked together to overcome obstacles. There were always problems, like trying to come up with a party to clear Hard Magnus, but once I managed to duo Hard Magnus or Cvel the problems went away.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<h2>
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 12: Nexon's Failures"></a>
Part 12: Nexon's Failures</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Maplestory just wasn’t managed well by Nexon. In normal
servers we have the most pay to win game I have ever played, with a currency so
inflated a billion mesos went on sale for less than 3 dollars. The currency got
inflated because of hackers sucking in so much money from monster drops. People
would send server messages advertising the sale of game items for real world
money. In Bera the most famous hacker when I played was a guy named Cody who
sold items worth an immense amount of money. He got this from duping, which
means he managed to find a game glitch that allowed him to duplicate items.
Before his time there were items that were perfectly enhanced and crafted sold
for cheap prices which were duped as well. Most of those items simply vanished
one day, leaving the people who bought them hanging. For some reason Cody didn’t
get busted and went on to sell more and more things.<br />
<br />
I’ve already mentioned the
hacking problems in NH. Something else related to NH was the broken kishin. A
game update totally broke the effect of kishin. This had large effects on
players training in other servers but had a huge impact on Reboot. Farming is
the lifeblood of Reboot. No farming, no money, nobody gets anything. For a while
people managed to get some money from killing the Ursus boss due to a double
reward event. It was a contrast to farming which was very much a solo activity.
When that died the party was (temporarily) over. First kishin totally broke,
then it decreased spawn times. Eventually Nexon stated that this was as far as
kishin was going to go, since it was never meant to be as overpowered as it was
previously. What this means is Nexon knew kishin was overpowered and broken for
years, since kishin has existed for years. In other words, Nexon had a giant
glitch that drastically affected the game for years and never bothered to do anything
about it.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If kishin gets destroyed, the people who farmed for a long
time before the nerf will get a huge advantage over others. If farming became
barely faster than other forms of moneymaking, then the way of life for many
players will change. Needless to say, many people were very angry at Nexon and
lashed out at staff members. After a month Nexon finally caved. Farming at NH
was back to normal.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then there are the maintenances which occur weekly on
Thursdays. The only exception are weeks with content updates in which case an
update would occur on Wednesdays. Players have a very cynical view of ETAs for
maintenances and updates. While Nexon doesn’t flub every other maintenance,
they do have incidences that involve extended maintenances that take longer
than estimated, and extended extended maintenances and well… you get the point. Since logging back in at the very end of a maintenance to be the first in the free market area or in NH (depending on server) was important, I had to wake up before the end of a maintenance in case it ended early and be prepared to stick around for hours before I could log in... and only then could I start farming again.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The dojo was led by hackers week after week. Hackers posted
times which were impossible and nothing ever happened to them. Not only do
hackers and the black market wreck havoc with guild relationships causing
public and internal witch hunts with innocent causalities, inflate the
currency, and damage the value of the achievements of legitimate players, they
also deny first place title and gloves from hard working players by being the
first to finish the dojo for their class. The funniest example is for the Blaze
Wizard class, which is notorious for hacking. It’s rare to see a Blaze Wizard
that wasn’t hacking, and a peek at the dojo class rankings for Blaze Wizard
shows a giant line of people with impossible dojo times dominating the class
leaderboards.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I would have assumed that either Nexon would be overzealous
in their pursuit of hackers or the exact opposite would happen. Both have
upsides and downsides. Yet Nexon managed to screw it up; on one hand they
let a ton of hackers free even though it’s ridiculously obvious they were
hacking. On the other hand, famous players like Rhinne and Clanta were falsely
accused of cheating. These players were famous because they were strong and
skilled players but also because they livestreamed on Twitch. By banning them
Nexon is denying them a revenue source they once had. In the case of Rhinne he
got his vindication. There was a huge controversy surrounding his situation
because he was an outspoken opponent to hacking and he did have a bit of an ego
sometimes. A video circulated on Youtube purporting to show Rhinne hacking. Yet
the uploader was suspicious (enterprising and resourceful players traced the
owner of the Youtube account to a hacker who was likely busted by Rhinne in the
past in one of his public outings). Rhinne showed how the video could have been
faked and upon further investigation Nexon let Rhinne off the hook. Clanta got
banned long after I quit so I don’t have good details on that story. But
suffice to say my sources tell me he must have been innocent and had proof
beyond a shadow of a doubt. In the end that was not enough; he was permanently
banned.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<h2>
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 13: Livestreaming & Public Shaming"></a>
Part 13: Livestreaming & Public Shaming</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was on Discord, which is a communications platform
designed for gamers. I was talking to a few people while farming because it
helped pass the time. I believe Porktrump, Shadowneko, and CrazyTanuki were on
the chat with me but for a while I was talking while they simply responded with
text. I started talking about my opinions on various things. They apparently
enjoyed what I had to say and nicknamed it the ‘Stocky Podcast’. I still
remember the Studio Ghibli jazz remix playing in the background which Tanuki played via the bot. A few of those
guys suggested I start streaming on Twitch. Up until then I had never really
used Twitch. I have been on Twitch once when Nekopichuu, Perpaloo, Blueboo, and
I were having fun playing card games in Maple and doing some bosses but that
was about it. My first stream was a pilot stream that involved great amounts of
delay. A delay is inevitable, and it’s when what the viewers see happened quite
a bit after what actually happened in the game. For example, in a normal stream
what the viewers see is actually 30 seconds in the past. In that
case it was more like 10-15 minutes, and I was so preoccupied with tweaking the
stream and chatting on Discord to the point where I left a guy I was carrying
out in the cold. I did apologize later.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Streaming was a way of bringing attention to Altaire. Douwe streamed and got a few people into the guild from his stream. If I could do the same, all the better. Still, I never knew
where I was really going with streaming and I didn’t expect anybody to pay
attention to me. I was wrong.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There were a few reasons why my stream caught way more
attention than I anticipated. Maplestory still had a decent player base but the
ratio of players to streamers in GMS was favorable. There were very little
people streaming. There were dead zones where nobody of note was streaming
Maplestory. I was the only high level Kaiser that streamed. Playing Maplestory on a relatively high level was also an attraction. Having
known Douwe who was a streamer might have given me a small advantage as we
introduced both of our streams and interacted. Luck was certainly a huge
factor. But another big factor was timing. One reason timing was important is
that I had money lined up to start cubing soon after the streams began. I also
wanted to start practicing Cvel at around that time. This meant I was doing
more interesting things more often than normal instead of farming all of the
time.<br />
<br />
What I didn’t think was a factor was my personality. I’d like to think my
paint-by-numbers approach to Maplestory garnered some support but that’s likely
not the case. I don't think I'm that entertaining of a personality but then again many big streamers don't seem very entertaining to me either. I talked about this briefly with Porktrump after finishing Normal Magnus with him. Back then I didn't really use Twitch at all so I didn't fully get Twitch in the first place, so maybe that's one reason why I didn't understand the success of my own channel. That was after the second day of streaming, after I caught some attention since the first stream had no viewers.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
The streams I did were about 5 to 8 hours, once hitting 12-14 hours since I streamed part of farming. I remember finishing the stream one day, finally able to relax. Streaming in front of an audience means I had to watch how I behaved on camera. While I was doing playing the game I had to think about how I wanted to handle the chat and what to talk about next to keep the audience entertained. Having turned off the stream I could finally relax, and I remember pulling out my fresh salad and going back into the Discord voice chat. Streaming was a tough task for me. Private conversations could only happen off stream, so sometimes people started asking me if I was live before talking freely.<br />
<br />
People told me I was squinting like
crazy at the computer screen, which led me to wear my glasses (and to wear
glasses all the time later). I wore headphones so the sound from my speakers
didn’t go back into the microphone. I taught some people some things and I learned a few things from the people I was watching.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
There were three specific things that brought my stream to the attention of many people, trending me as the top post on the Maplestory subreddit twice. The first two were about the Absolab Shoulder and Hard Magnus glitching. The third is the booming of the Tyrant Gloves. I peaked at maybe 110 viewers after somebody hosted me (they stopped streaming and set their viewers to another stream).<br />
<br />
Right before I started streaming Damien
carries popped on the black market. I
knew it could not have involve a legitimate run because nobody
could defeat Damien in a party, let alone solo. (Funnily enough, shortly after
the controversy blew over Damien was defeated on Reboot for the first time
legitimately in a party.) It was possible to beat Damien in non-Reboot but not
Reboot.<br />
<br />
Damien has to be killed in order to get the Absolab Shoulder, which was the best shoulder. As context, there aren’t that many good shoulders in
Reboot. Tinkerers were out because it came from item boxes from the Cash Shop
which were removed for Reboot out of P2Win concerns. The Reverse Shoulder required enough Kritias Invasion currency to buy half of a Tyrant Glove
which was not feasible because a Tyrant Glove takes higher priority. The
Meister Shoulder would have been difficult to obtain, but the fact that making
a Meister Shoulder could result in an average, below average, or above average
shoulder added some risk… and drove me to aim for an above average
shoulder. The data is scarce on the chance of an above average shoulder, but I
knew it would likely involve at least 10 shoulders being made which would have
drove me insane. I could have continued to work on my then current Magnus
shoulder, but it was putting money into a dead end. That shoulder will have to
go sooner or later. I explored unorthodox alternatives like possible Empress
shoulders but it just wasn’t in the cards. And so, I bought a carry from a hacker.<br />
<br />
The Absolab Shoulder was better than any other shoulder, but shoulders themselves don't make a very large difference in range. Upgrading to an Absolab Shoulder by itself will never make or break anything. The advantage I got over others was very small, but on the other hand it was something I had over almost everyone else. Reboot makes it easy to increase one's range to decent levels, but much harder to raise it to the highest levels. Towards the end, what is there even to work on? Starring Tyrants which cost huge sums of money and make boom on a whim, causing me to wait another 1-2 months to obtain another? It's all chance, and if I get unlucky, there goes 20 hours of farming, doing the same thing all day. Cubing? At what str% are we going until it's ridiculous? 30%? A small % increase in str would require far more cubes.<br />
<br />
To summarize: While the Absolab Shoulder barely offered extra damage, the small amount is worth a lot because it's hard to improve past a certain point. Alternatives were very strenuous partly because I would not settle for merely an average Meister Shoulder. I already talked about how important progression was to me. Again, I was very painful as a person with sleep apnea to farm 10-12 hours and then wake up every 2 hours for invasion.<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was stupid and reckless of me
to decide to stream with an item stronger players knew was impossible to
obtain. Even if I hid it in the inventory the truth will get out sooner or
later. I didn’t expect much of anyone to visit my stream, so I guess
psychologically the danger didn’t feel very imminent.<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I remember the likes of WashingtonDK and Clantafamo
(abbreviated Clanta, called Clanta the Lightnord as an inside joke) asking me
about the shoulder. Washington must have felt some suspicion, but Clanta was
more openly suspicious. I still remember his face he character made when he
asked me how I got my shoulder when I ran into him… on stream. I don't know Clanta as a person, and with this I just shrug and go 'whatever'. I do remember Clanta telling Perpaloo about the shoulder, and Shadowneko told me that he talked to him too.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Some of the other people were less charitable. A
semi-notable person stalked me on air and kept spamming messages about how I am
a dirty hacker and shoulder be banned. Needless to say it made for a very
awkward situation. I tried to lose the guy but I was on air, so it really came
down to the guy getting bored. I had to ban a few people in my Twitch chat for
being out of line. Being thrown into the spotlight at that scale was off putting and I was on a foreign platform, live.
It was a scary situation.<br />
<br />
My philosophy about Twitch has
always been that the streamer is the final authority save for Twitch employees.
Going to somebody’s Twitch and starting shit up is like going to somebody’s
house and hosting a rally inside. Viewers ought to respect the rules of the
streamer otherwise they should leave. This is not the government, there is no
free speech.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Reboot was founded on the idea that pay to win should not be a thing. That meant not buying your way into success. The way the gameplay panned out was that farming over and over for mesos was the way to progress. These two things make people feel more self-made. This is why cheating is looked down upon in Reboot far more than in other servers. I remember people openly advertising the sale of gear for real life cash in Bera, which was par for the course. However, I heard that advertising carries for NX is very commonplace now. Still, I expect Reboot players to be more hostile against cheaters than in other servers.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The shoulder problem was exacerbated when DIVERTIDO and I
had a long streak of terrible Hard Magnus runs. It was just one of those bad
weeks that happen to anybody, except it was on air now. I even got angry at
DIVERTIDO because he started to leave for Cvel and had to go out, leaving me
hanging for Hard Magnus on stream. Organization is important and puts some stress on everyone. Part of it was a problem with communication,
since DIVERTIDO is from Brazil and his English is poor.<br />
<br />
After the stream was over I saw that I was the top trending post on the Maplestory subreddit. It showed a stream clip of me using Wingbeat and the tornado disappearing for no reason, and then the boulders dropping in Magnus freezing. (Magnus with frozen boulders is very easy to kill and freezing the boulders is a known tactic to hack Magnus.)<br />
<br />
I was very surprised of course, and asking
the stream if they saw this. My reaction was genuine and I think it looked
genuine. The takeaway from the chat was that somebody was hacking. Somebody on
Reddit accused me of accidentally hitting a shortcut on a trainer, triggering
the boulders to freeze. This is nonsense since there is no hotkey that
does such a thing on any trainer. This is the kind of defamation that people get away with posting on the subreddit since there is little accountability.<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
DIVERTIDO showed me that everything was normal on his end.
He got killed from what looked like nothing, which must have meant he got hit
by a boulder. I had some suspicions about the 3<sup>rd</sup> person, who we
were carrying. Our run after the incident was also glitched. I was getting
damage that I would normally get outside of the blue zone while inside the blue
zone, and no damage outside. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There used to be a stereotype of the Spanish speaking
players hacking, but I don’t think it has any bearing on reality anymore. That
didn’t stop some from accusing DIVERTIDO of hacking. At this point, not only
was I known as a high level Kaiser streaming, I was also known as the guy with
the impossible shoulder who is in a suspicious position in Hard Magnus. This was when I hit the peak viewership of 110 viewers. I went to Lotus, which also
has falling objects and saw that the falling objects accumulated up top and
failed to drop. I did so because I saw a video of members of Spring, perhaps
the most well regarded bossing guild, walk into a frozen debris situation in
Lotus where things failed to drop. Among them was Clanta. However, in that case
everybody in the party saw the glitch and promptly got out. Somebody suggested
I restarted my computer, since it had not been restarted for about 25 days
according to Whatpulse.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I closed the Stream and got ready to restart. I quickly
joined back to the voice chatroom on Discord. The others noticed the situation.
Tanuki asked me if I was really going to restart, losing a big chunk of my
viewers in the process. I felt there was no choice. I could not allow the glitch
to continue. The person stalking me on air messaged
Perpaloo and told him I was a hacker in an attempt to get me kicked from the guild. Perpaloo tried to blow him off by
sarcastically implying that Altaire is a ‘hacker only guild’. And thus, the
‘Hackataire’ meme was born. After restarting the glitch stopped.
After the stream I visited DIVERTIDO. While we had some frustrations due to
lack of communication and difficulty finding a time to boss together, in the
end we still had a good relationship. DIVERTIDO thought the best of me,
thinking that the frozen boulders were due to my computer and my shoulder was
from an event. (There was an event that gave an Absolab Shoulder to one person,
and who got it if any was and is still unknown.) I admitted that the shoulder
was less than legit, even though the freezing boulders made things worse for my
PR even though I was innocent of that crime. At the end of the day I think
DIVERTIDO didn’t think it was a really big deal, and while he was mentioned
negatively a few times by the public, he didn’t get much negativity and didn’t
think badly of me either.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The guy I bought my Damien carry from thought I was being
stupid by streaming with it, and told me his clients typically don’t even wear
it in public, save for bossing situations. What he thought was far more stupid
though, was the backlash I got. Since I was not bragging about my shoulder and
just trying to play the game, he felt I did not deserve the backlash I got.
Many of the people criticizing me themselves do not have clean hands. That’s
how the black market got so big in the first place. His philosophy is to screw
what others thought about me at this point and just to do whatever I want to be
happy. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. I felt I stood for a certain level
of ethics and I was doing my actions under Altaire’s name.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
That was one of the two times I trended the subreddit. Some people brought up the shoulder and decided that
since I had the shoulder I must have been a hacker and cheated on Magnus too.
The comments were basically there to slime me in every way possible. It was
kind of interesting; the people who knew nothing saw the falling boulders and
concluded I was a hacker. The people who knew some things knew about the
shoulder and accused me of being a hacker with the Magnus scandal being
confirming evidence. The people who really knew what was going on (the Fearcely
and Clantas of the world) knew that the Magnus scandal was probably
superfluous, but the shoulder was undeniable evidence of guilt. They were
right.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
time came where I had to make a choice on what I had to do. The accusations
were piling up and thus far the other two leaders of the guild, Perpaloo and
Sneko (Nekopichuu) have remained silent on this topic as far as I could tell.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And so, I decided to tell them what was going on in a group
private message. It felt like I was confessing
that I was a traitor to a 2-person committee.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
When hacks exist some people will use them and the ones who
do will beat the ones who do not. More people will use it as a result until
people who don’t want to cheat felt they had to cheat. I recognize that I was
harsher on others than myself. Other people just looked like cheaters who lied
to me. When it came to myself I understood my motivations and how I ended up
where I did. While Perpaloo had no problem
getting people who were caught cheating kicked from the guild, when it came to
me they gave me much more freedom to decide what I wanted to do. I did not know
for sure going into the conversation what was going to happen but I felt like I
had to do it.<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hackataire was funny but we all knew long term it was a
problem that was much less funny. There was no way to ‘anvil’ my shoulder,
which means to change is appearance so it looks like something else, because
the purpose of anviling is for cosmetic reasons for the character. Since
shoulders did not show up when looking at the character outside of the
equipment screen, there was no reason to allow anviling of shoulders. Long term a guild cannot retain its good name with memes about how it's a hacker guild. It was a problem and we all knew it.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Again, I don’t want to dramatize this on purpose so I have
things to write. But remember, <i>this was
my world</i>. The guild was my social circle. For a while I was so isolated in my house it started to feel weird speaking English. Maplestory was what I did every
day, day after day. It consumed all of my thoughts. I would not have gotten up
every 2 hours after farming respectively for 12 hours to do invasions
otherwise. People who don’t play games would have a hard time understand just
how seriously I took things. I lost weight farming at NH.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
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<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sneko replied first. She said that everyone I know knows how hard I work and she understood why I felt frustrated that other people were
catching up to me with a fraction of the effort. Stop comparing myself to others, try to be the best you can
be. Some people don’t care about Maple so they hack to reach end game so they
can move onto some other game. At the end of the day I had to decide where the
situation sits on my own moral code and I should act accordingly. But the
guild’s image will drop if I continue to stream with the shoulder.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Perpaloo responded with a private message between Clanta and
himself. There he heard that I admitted to getting carried by a
hacker on stream. Clanta said he heard that I admitted to getting carried on stream by a hacker. It was an awkward situation on the stream and I felt that by being honest
and admitting my mistake the audience would recognize the gesture of honesty
and authenticity. I was being naïve. Reddit tore me to pieces. As Clanta put
it, you cannot stream with the shoulder on, period. I did, so I got a good
bashing.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As Perpaloo put it, ‘No point in hiding it, everyone already
knows. No point in dropping it because people don’t let things go.’ Don’t hate
yourself because there are more important things in life like food or water.
But if you care about guild integrity you cannot stream with that shoulder on,
which sucks because some people actually like the stream. Sneko and Perpaloo
both agreed that hiding it would cause an even worse backlash sometime down the
road when I get discovered.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Fearcely was one of the strongest players on Reboot, and I
ran into him on one of the first few times I went to NH. I asked to add him to
my friend’s list so we could tell each other about open NH maps if we found
one. He was on his farming character so I didn’t know it was him. I discovered
that he had deleted me from friend’s list. I asked him why and he put it
succinctly: He does not want to associate with hackers.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was late Friday night after the stream. For most of the
weekend when I was working I was thinking about it. I had a hard time sleeping.
I felt conflicted. I wanted the shoulder but I knew it came with a very high
cost. The following Monday I dropped the shoulder on the stream. Being strong
was important, but also important was the welfare of the guild. Other people
should not suffer because of something I did. The people in the alliance deserve
better than that. Some people in the chat were laughing, thinking that dropping
it changed nothing. For anybody important it did though.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I never talked to Clanta since the incident. I can’t anymore since he is banned.
Fearcely added me back, since he felt dropping the shoulder was a genuine
gesture.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
To most of the public dropping the shoulder was an admission of guilt and didn't change the past. But what else could I have done?<br />
<br />
-<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I visited ImRhinne weeks after I quit. He still remembered
me and we didn’t have any bad blood. I think his take on the whole shoulder and
hacking controversy was that he didn’t know the details and didn’t care to know
the details. Maybe he was too tired of getting falsely accused to be interested
in whatever accusations people had against me. He later told me to leave the cancer game that is Maplestory and not come back. I guess that's his personality showing though. :) Rhinne and I used to be in the same alliance in my early days, so we've talked a little in the past, although not all that much.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On Reddit some people continued to talk shit about me, with
one go going so far as to impersonate me. Clearly some of these people need to
get a life. They are otherwise bullies too, and witchunting gives them a more
socially acceptable outlet to bring people down.<o:p></o:p>Cultures vary a lot from subreddit to subreddit. The Maple one well... you get the picture.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I guess I was lucky in a small way. Around that time Rhinne
came back with ‘Rhinnocent’, where he started to make his case that he was
innocent. A lot of attention soon came to him instead. Rhinne was still a much
bigger figure than I was and received far more hate and controversy. I have
always remained neutral in his case. But when he was vindicated later on, I
accepted that as proof that he was innocent all along.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It's one thing to watch a witch-hunt. It's another to be the victim of one. It really helps you put into perspective how terrible people can be, and how getting slimed by others affects what bystanders think of you. All of those people who judged me did not know me or my struggles. Nothing I can do. They've moved on by now, so that's what I go to for comfort.<br />
<br />
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<br /></div>
A seperate bit of drama was with my Tyrant Gloves. After sending a smega (super megaphone message to the entire server) that I was streaming the enhancing of my first pair of Tyrant Gloves, the stream got real crowded. Tons of people were egging me on to go more for stars than I did. I previously already got more stars on my belt and boots than I planned last stream, playing the Super Saiyan 3D music over and over. I boomed my Tyrant Gloves going to 8 stars after being egged on by the stream viewers. A few people came to me telling me not to do it.<br />
<br />
The viewers did not suffer the consequences of me losing my glove, and they wanted a show. Nothing is spicier than some high risk activity. It didn't take me long to realize that my decision to go for 8 stars on my gloves was stupid. My belt had 7 and since the belt was easier to obtain and costed the same to enhance, it made no sense to enhance the gloves to a higher star than the belt. Again, I trended Reddit. While a few people just accused me of somehow hacking my way into getting Tyrant Gloves, there wasn't much drama there. Shadowneko Googled 'Tyrant glove boom' and it turned out that the Reddit thread about me was the first result.<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
There was a side to streaming besides just hackusations and drama of course. Streaming was an opportunity to do something different. Playing a game in front of many people was a unique experience, one which many people do not have. I was able to teach the audience some things and the audience was able to return the favor. I assembled a large playlist of songs to play in the background as I played the game. It's always good when somebody discovers a song they really like from you. I remember singing Paradise by Coldplay one early morning when I was streaming. Boy, at that moment I was in a place I could not have imagined a year ago. Streaming in front of many people, singing publicly while farming on Maplestory? Talk about new experiences.<br />
<br />
While to this day I don't fully understand why people found my streams entertaining and worth watching, as long as people thought so then it was good. Whatever value they got out of my streams I was happy to deliver and am glad I was able to deliver. Some people recognized me from the streams. A few people came up to me and gave me words of encouragement, telling me how much they loved the stream. I remember popping back to my friend on the training grounds one day to chill with him. And his guild mate was surprised that he was a friend of me, the streamer. To be clear, I wasn't the hottest Maplestory celebrity. And the shame and the fame were both at a relatively mild level. But it gave me a taste of what it is like to be famous. Again, talk about new experiences.<br />
<br />
You can't have the good without the bad here, right? The fame comes with scrutiny. Can't try something new without a risk of failure.<br />
<br />
One final thing I'd say is that a few people wanted to criticize the way I played my class. I was always open to a better way of doing things. The only person that loses when I refuse to acknowledge facts is myself. The way I billed myself was I was a Kaiser that farmed a lot and tries to look at the game objectively. Nowhere in that description did I say I was some sort of super genius. When I was trying to look at the stats of Maplestory I often got things wrong. But criticizing my technique without offering a better alternative is not constructive.<br />
<br />
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<h3>
The Moral Calculus</h3>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What is acceptable or not in Reboot? That is a complicated question and different people will have varying opinions.<br />
<br />
Getting a carry from a hacker is not the same as hacking oneself. The most obvious difference is paying to get something done out of sight and out of mind compared to doing something yourself and putting yourself into the thick of it.<br />
<br />
An easy example is factory farming. Every time a person buys meat from factory farmed animals they are supporting an industry that is causing vast amounts of suffering to an unimaginable amount of animals. While I grant that a single human life is worth more than that of a cow, that comparison assumes we are dealing one one human life versus one cow life. In factory farming we are dealing with the lives of many animals, so the suffering compounds. Whether you like to think of it or not, by buying meat you are probably supporting animal abuse. Paying to have something done is not the same thing as doing it yourself.<br />
<br />
Intentions matter. I've already discussed how people can misread intentions and make assumptions about a person's character and it's to be expected. But intentions and remorse do matter. I don't believe in free will, so fundamentally I believe nobody actually deserves anything. We are simply a collection of atoms that act due to the laws of physics, like a very complicated machine which reacts to inputs in a chaotic way, but with no free will. So to me vengeance makes no sense. The other thing I would say about intentions is that whether a person chooses to get carried by a hacker or hack themselves can be a manifestation of a person's intentions. A person that gets a carry from a hacker is probably cheating just to get gear, like most people. (Again, Absolab is not the same as CRA so that is a factor as well.) A person hacking themselves knows how to operate the software and purchased a license. This is motivation to keep hacking. I believe people who would hack a boss themselves have a much higher chance of hacking their mesos as well, something I see as much worse. This is why when Clanta told Shadowneko I either got carried by a hacker or was a hacker myself, I felt those two options were distinctions with a difference. To just call all things not strictly legit (whatever that means) the same, to just paint it with a broad brush saying they are all just terrible, the end... I find that to be very sloppy thinking about ethics.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Paying for services with real life money is objectively illegal as far as game rules are concerned, but in many cases Nexon doesn’t care. It's unclear if if spending that real life money on NX and gifting NX is technically illegal. There is a difference between what is technically legal or not, what will be enforced, and what the public thinks is okay or not.<br />
<br />
I don't think there is a big moral distinction between paying money for a carry or paying NX. The idea is the same and the result is the same. If the person you are paying hacks to get the service done, then almost all people see it as bad. If the person got to where he is from hacking for performs the service legitimately I believe the line of accountability drops off when it comes to me.<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can hack in a way that does not directly hurt other people’s enjoyment of Maplestory, which is what happens with hacker carries. Or, I could clog up the game with hacks and render NH unusable to other people when I try to sell mesos to other people. While trading is not allowed in Reboot, buying accounts with money in them is a workaround.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
I already explained why the Absolab Shoulder was important to me, and what I thought about the fallout. I have described the emotions I went through. This is a luxury I have to the people I know. It's not a luxury I have for the Maplestory community at large. And it's mostly understandable.<br />
<br />
Did I provide the same benefit of the doubt to the hackers I kicked from Altaire? No. But to be fair, those members were mostly new members that didn't do much for the guild and almost always lied about the situation after I caught them. Did I lie about the shoulder? Technically no. I picked my words carefully: I said I got carried by a friend. The other half of the times when asked I answered frankly.<br />
<br />
Does the public have time to investigate what goes on behind closed doors after the streams? No. They read a post trending on Reddit and they make a snap judgement on things, just like everyone else. There's not enough time in life to carefully investigate everything every time. This is why it's understandable for somebody's reputation to drop when accused of something, even if they were found not guilty. Sure, innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the law is good, but humans don't really operate like that individually. Maybe it's mob mentality, but you do see people going off on other on Twitter over some sort of mistake or stupid thing somebody said. People get overly outraged, punishing that person disproportionately while everyone else gets off scot-free. Witch hunting might be necessary in some guild settings, but a group witch hunt is never helpful.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, the people who kept harassing me about the scandals were trolls. I mean this sincerely because I really do not believe those people were morally outraged at the scandals I was involved in. Maybe in the initial incident I had some people who fit that description. But the people who stuck around and kept shitposting on the stream and on Reddit were out to kill my reputation. They enjoy the process. If anybody really cared about the controversy, I offered to talk about the situation with them one on one. That's how you get my side of the story. Not a single person from the public took up the offer, and even offering to discuss the issue privately was a sign of naivete when dealing with a community like the Maplestory one. The people I've thus far encountered in my guild and alliances were for the large part okay people. Stepping outside of that is another matter. A guy went as far as making a fake account with my Maplestory username and writing idiotic comments to tarnish my reputation.<br />
<br />
It sort of puts me into the shoes of the people on the other side of a problem. I can sort of see how people come up with rumors and misunderstandings about how something happened. People might see my face in a video and come to their own conclusions, but they do not know me as a person. They don't understand me or the struggles I had, so they were not in a good position to make a good judgement about it.<br />
<br />
I've said it before: Without blood, sweat, and tears to back up carried gear, the player is going nowhere in Reboot. Unless if you hack... maybe. That's how a person bypasses the suffering I went through to get to where I was. Now, I understand why the shoulder put some doubt into the legitimacy of my farmed mesos, especially to the casual spectators. But I know I worked hard for what I had. This is my justification for kicking hackers without feeling like a giant hypocrite: The cost of a carry (legit or not legit) is far lower than the effort to get anywhere with farming. And so, bypassing the gear part with carries is not as bad as bypassing the farming process in my mind. Yes, the calculus is very complex and the fact that Absolab Shoulder was an impossible luxury made it different than CRA carry, which was seem as standard high level gear which made a much larger difference. Very little in the world is black and white.<br />
<br />
Is what I did really that bad though? The grey areas of the black market aside, I am just one person, and all I did that stood out was get an Absolab Shoulder and stream at the same time. There are people out there hacking away at some remote map in the game, making money (both real and virtual). The Dojo is topped by a bunch of hackers. I didn't taunt others with the shoulder or anything.<br />
<br />
People commit far worse crimes to their fellow humans all the time. I could say given the same situation I wouldn't do it again, but I don't know if that's perfectly honest. Without being thrust back into that competitive mentality of never ending progress I can't say I could say today what I really would do. Either way... food and water and crimes against humanity mattered but I was in my own world in Maplestory. It's easy look back in retrospect and declare the entire situation a ridiculous waste of time, but that gives no weight to human emotion. Logic only goes so far in curbing emotion. After my first rejection from a girl I was quite dejected. I knew in the long run everything will be okay despite whatever I felt then, but that couldn't override the sadness I felt.<br />
<br />
...I guess I just want to say that I tried to be a decent person to other people. I would not write this incredibly long blog post unless these issues really mattered to me. I really cared about the hacking controversy, both from its ethics standpoint and the guild's standpoint. Yeah, I made a mistake and to be perfectly frank, but back in the same situation with the same pressures I can't definitively say it wouldn't happen again. Given how fierce the competition was and how others are still getting ahead (questionably), I think it's an understandable mistake. But beating me up over and over about it is not going to achieve anything. The people running clients after clients, botting the crap out of Maplestory and making real life money off of it are the real villains.<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
</div>
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<a href="http://i.imgur.com/hyvTFrZ.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/hyvTFrZ.png" data-original-height="446" data-original-width="800" height="356" width="640" /></a></div>
<i>Shadyhex and I always joked about loving Christi (pictured) so much, we would do anything she wants. This is one of the few pictures I had of her character.</i><br />
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<h2>
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 14: Guild Dynamics"></a>
Part 14: Guild Dynamics</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There was one major fallout from the hacking scandal. First
let me explain to you how the guild came to be from my point of view. Altaire
was founded early on in Reboot, and in those times Sunny, Taliky, and Eva were
good players who went on to be among the first to kill Cvel in Reboot. The
further back you go in time, the more valuable a CRA carry is. Even today it is
very valuable.<br />
<br />
Imagine the flood of requests they must have gotten. Sunny got
tired of people asking for a carry, and there were tensions between them.
Organizing bossing runs was getting more awkward as the guild expanded. They
had to spread out and do multiple runs. Sunny eventually grew to be stronger
and stronger than the rest. Sunny was always a bit self-righteous and stubborn.
To add to the problems, Eva once did Hell difficulty Gollux and took a pendant
drop (which was very valuable). The jury is out on whether Eva picked it up on
accident or if it was a miscommunication. Perhaps she took it out of
selfishness. Eva has apologized, but being weaker than Sunny by quite a margin
at this point, there was nothing she could do to make it back to Sunny. Sunny
no longer needed help with Gollux anyways. On top of all that, Taliky took a
break from Maplestory so it was just those two between them three.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is what I joined into when I came to Altaire. The
elements of frustrations were already there as all of those things have already
happened. I did watch Eva talk to Sunny and apologizing but it wasn’t good
enough. Back then I was just the hopeful fledgling Kaiser that has yet to make a name for myself. In normal guild chat people acted like not much was wrong. One day
Sunny left, and took a bunch of people from the guild with him. Most of the top
brass left with him. A stranger once whispered me and told me that Sunny wanted
to poach as many people as he could from Altaire to Elite which he joined and
took pleasure in it. I still have no idea who the stranger was or how he knew
me.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But what I did know was that Sunny talked to one of our
alliance guild leaders and the leader promptly pulled his guild out of our
alliance after the talk. Sunny talked to him about the Gollux drop and must
have given a very unflattering recount of events. Eva wasn’t on at that moment
to defend herself. In my eyes, Sunny was a major cause of an alliance guild
leaving and it was telling that the guild leader pulled out without ever trying
to get the story from Eva’s point of view.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I had since that time run into Sunny and said hi, only to
have him ignore me every time. The guild was getting weak. The old alliance
wanted to form a new one to get rid of the less active alliance guilds, but Eva
decided to stay behind. One of the guilds that left was Ravers, which is where
I met Rhinne. Eva struggled to fill the positions and one guild leaving was not
helping things. Taliky was still missing and only a few people left were of
decent strength. In other words, bossing at a high level was out of the
question. Eva played a Bishop so she was support. There was nobody there to do
the damage to kill the bosses. That was when Christii and I came onto the scene
and worked very hard to get stronger. I wanted to be able to do the carries to
support the guild.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Eva eventually left Maplestory and Perpaloo took over as the
leader. After summer though, he was inactive for a while and it was frustrating
because work needed to be done… alliances filled, bossing runs planned, etc.
So, I was left on my own for the most part as the most active member. Things
eventually picked up and got better as Perpaloo and Sneko really stepped up.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I do not have a favorable view of Sunny.
I believe he left and sabotaged Altaire, first by leaving and convincing others
to leave us, and second by getting an alliance guild to leave. Not once did I
ever get an apology or response from him. Any time I greeted him after running into him in the game he ignored me. A person on a burner character whispered me one day. The person complimented me by saying I wasn't "fake" (though I still don't know what that means) and then accused Sunny of purposefully poaching members from Altaire. It's as confusing to you as it is to me.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A week or so after Fearcely added me back I got a message
asking if I was there. I later responded and asked what’s up, and he said
nevermind, the situation is taken care of. Then I was talking to my friend
PreciousDB only to find out that Sunny wanted her to get kicked from Elite.
Fearcely, Sunny, and PreciousDB were all in Elite. Fearcely asked if I ever
carried PreciousDB, and I answered yes, for Hell Gollux. I did a run of it
live, so I demonstrated I could beat the boss. I forgot about carrying her for
Chaos Pink Bean, but that was a boss without consequential drops and was very
easy to beat for a Kaiser. Apparently Sunny said I carried PreciousDB for Cvel
so she could get her CRA weapon. I believe this is a willful lie. Sunny knows I
did Hell Gollux live and could clear it. Sunny also knows prior to that I was
practicing Cvel and failed epicly because I was just starting out. Sunny
accused me of helping her in the one carry I could not do on my stream on instead of
anything else. How coincidental. What’s more, Sunny himself carried PreciousDB
quite a while ago, so either Sunny knew this or had a short term memory.
PreciousDB was quite upset at this since it was guild protocol to get her
kicked. And because she was upset, I was upset. I am glad Fearcely came to my
defense on this matter since I dropped the Absolab Shoulder. I told him, yes, I
made a mistake and I owned up to it. But PreciousDB didn’t know I got the
shoulder and even if she did she of all people would not know the implications
of that fact. She was entirely innocent. Fearcely agreed with all of my
statements. In the end Sunny was forced to apologize to PreciousDB, but they
didn’t speak anymore.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In my eyes, Sunny sabotaged the guild I dropped my shoulder
for out of some stupid vendetta against it and Eva and willfully lied to get my
friend kicked out of Elite. PreciousDB and Sunny were even sort of friends too,
but nobody was spared from his wrath. Fearcely explained that he has always had
a serious hatred for those who hacked and in his eyes I was a cheater and
probably always will be. Fearcely reached out to me and offered to give a good
word to see if I can still join Elite despite what went down publicly (although
he could not prevent Sunny from speaking his mind), and suggested that perhaps
Clanta would accept me as well. In the end I began with Altaire and I ended
with Altaire.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
The entire hacking scandal was complicated and made more awkward by the fact that I caught many hackers. I’ve probably kicked at least five people from the guild. For example, Mariawnx. But he’s not somebody we interacted with. BlankLie however, we did. The name is kind of ironic. He was Sneko’s friend and I met him originally when he was attempting to kill Cvel. I was not much help because this was before I practiced Cvel. He joined the guild, and I not long after I got a whisper saying he was hacking in some random map in the middle of nowhere. He was kicked.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
BlankLie wanted to talk to Sneko, but Sneko felt a little awkward about the conversation. Perpaloo and I were in the Discord call with her, and Perpaloo got us to hide in the middle of nowhere, deep under the sea, where we hid in the corner of a map under a stalagmite. There BlankLie showed up along with his friend. BlankLie offered a sincere apology and said he did hack once, but only for a little bit months ago. He was hacking because he wanted materials to build a Meister Shoulder. I think Perpaloo at this point was screwing around and a bit of his body stuck out from the stalagmite. BlankLie’s friend then caught us on our act. Perpaloo continued to screw around and was asked to leave. At this point I was laughing my ass off. While the conversation continued, Perpaloo reentered the map as a snail somehow, and moonwalked backwards into BlankLie. It’s too bad it wasn’t on video (I hit the wrong key on FRAPS). Anyways, if you read my confession message in the picture several pages ago you would know I talked about him later on. He grew in strength at a pace that was impossible and rumors are that he got banned.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I even got word that InfiniteHTT was hacking. This is a tough one because he was married to Eva on Maplestory. Eva started the guild. I decided not to kick him, but I did demote him. However, later on he got his rank back. I confronted him with it, and he denies wrongdoing. The person who told me about the problem was InfiniteHTT’s friend and was able to locate him. Infinite was away from the keyboard, hacking the crap out of a random map with a Kinesis character. I recall what Eva said when she randomly popped back in one day. The rules stated that hacking will get kicked if CAUGHT. She said she herself along with many others did get carries that were not legit. Her regret is that the guild caught hurt by the controversy, but what’s done is done. She felt the guild would collapse without her. Whether this is true I don’t know. Had Sunny not crippled the guild and I lost interest and school start again, the guild would have been fine.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Look, I felt kicking hackers was my duty. I was helping the guild. I know to some extent I was being a hypocrite. I don’t like that hacks exist. But they do. I don’t want to have to go around suspecting fellow guildmates of wrongdoing. But there are consequences for failing to act on intel.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tanuki said in chat that he had a private topic he didn’t want to discuss publicly. We went to a private group chat where Tanuki said that Josh admitted to putting a weight on the space bar to spam attack and get money while he was away for 30 minutes. In the end the people decided I should breach the topic with Josh. Putting a weight on a space bar is macroing and counts as botting and cheating. It felt like Josh wasn’t sure that it was, and when I talked to him he started going on this negative feedback loop of negativity. I told him that if he wanted back into the guild he had to drop some of his gear to lower his range to show he was sorry and to remove whatever advantage he got from that macroing. (Obviously this idea was related to me dropping my shoulder.) He said he doesn’t ‘deserve Altaire’ and said he won’t rejoin after his ban lifted. I told him the offer is open should he change his mind. He didn’t. Later on Tanuki told me Josh went on to continue hacking. Maybe Josh felt remorse, but it just turned him into doing worse and worse things. I cannot say I view him positively after all of this.</div>
</div>
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<h2>
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 15: Enemies"></a>
Part 15: Enemies</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The final example me playing hacker cop is the most
infamous example: Shadeke. We used to be friends and he used to say I was the
best streamer ever. I keep track of the Dojo as I scout my competition. I
notice when somebody moves up the Dojo ladder way too quickly. That was Shadeke
in a nutshell. This is not equivalent to reading tea leaves. People do their
best in the Dojo and when their best doubles or triples in a short amount of
time there can only be one explanation: Cheating. I have been to most of the
top floors and I know that the difficulty of the stages he was covering were
way harder than the previous ones. He also managed to level his Jett to
incredible levels despite doing so netting him almost no gain practically.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
And just like that, Perpaloo banned him from the Discord.
Later one I caught his actual character hacking in New Leaf City. He never made
any amends.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is OverpricedFP. He was the leader of
Prestige. He went missing for a long time and after he logged on with his guild
dead, I talked to him. I requested a merge between Prestige and another guild.
I was carrying out what Sneko, Perpaloo, and I wanted to happen and Perpaloo
still holds the title of alliance leader. I felt I had authority to tell him
what to do which in retrospect was probably counterproductive with an ego like
Overpriced. He felt I was telling him what to do, and asked why he wasn’t told
about this. Well, the answer is obvious: He was gone for a long time and I had
no way of contacting him. I was going to tell him that I was telling him now,
but by then he already blocked me and removed Prestige from the alliance. He
had no problems with Shadeke hacking, by the way.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Since I already talked about Sunny, I guess there are really only a few things left to cover. There's the lying some people did (or purposefully keeping me in the dark about things). Outright boasting was relatively rare, although we all know we were watching how each other were doing. Some people did brag about how they had a super secret farming spot better than NH which they won't tell me about -- which I view as not only a lie, but also a brag. There was even a guy who felt anybody who got over 2m range was a cheater... which simply means that person cannot imagine anybody dedicating over a month on any task. Talk about short attention spans and lack of willpower.<br />
<br />
Yeah, it's a game. But any time you add in people to the mix, things get more complicated.<br />
<h2>
<br />
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 16: Guild Dynamics II"></a>
Part 16: Guild Dynamics II</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The name of the alliance when Perpaloo was in charge was called Starbound. He along with a few others quickly set up the Starbound Discord channel. It was a cool thing... We organized players by changing their username to reflect their guild. When had a channel for introducing ourselves. I remember saying how I am Stockfishies, Jr. Master of Altaire.<br />
<br />
We had conversations in the voice channels. A few guys had a movie night or two. Perpaloo and Sneko talked a lot, and the group chat I started to talk about the shoulder ended up being a place to chat between just us three. I mentioned the time Perpaloo, Sneko, Blueboo, and I went to play cards. It was funny, because I didn't realize my microphone wasn't working until hours into the stream. They taught me how to play the games in games area of Maplestory.<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
Instead of running for the best free market location in Bera, after maintenance I always find an empty NH map. I always succeed because my computer was relatively fast. Once before the maintenance the usual crew along with Douwe went to play some sketching game and some other random games. It was random and at the wee hours of the morning. We were all dead exhausted I decided what the hell, I'll just stay up with these guys.<br />
<br />
There's also the Stocky podcast... I remember coming out of Sneko's Sleepgeon (AFK channel) and seeing others on in Discord. There was another channel called 'Perpaloo's Fungeon'. Later on I made a channel called 'Stocky's STREAM HOWSE'. Sadly today most of the people are gone and Starbound Discord isn't the vibrant place it once was. However, a few of us are still around. Not much, but it's something.<br />
<br />
Having a high guild contribution helps the guild with guild skills which was important for Dojo. Contribution is primarily earned through killing bosses. And since almost all bosses have a daily kill limit, we would do our daily boss runs, or 'dailies'. We would ask around to see if anybody needed help on some boss, like Normal Magnus. It was a chance to do something together on Maplestory, be we sure as hell aren't going to farm together (poor efficiency).<br />
<br />
When I was farming in NH I remember OmgitzChelz or DKforDays popping up just to talk at the start. I remember DK just standing there with no motivation to play the game, although he did jump to help kick out ksers trying to steal the map. To this day I'm still throwing dumplings in his general direction for his jam. :)<br />
<br />
With DK after Maplestory I watched him stream The Last Remnant while I taught him how to play the game, and then he streamed some Final Fantasy 15. But after that he felt there wasn't much to stream, and we didn't have that many common interests. I've said early on in this blog post already: It's a real struggle when we leave a game and we find out there's actually not that much to talk about anymore. I can't just assume everyone I got along with had the same interests as me. I guess that really brings up the question of how well I really knew anybody online. In the end I'm not sure I know anyone else in the entire world that well to be honest. It's always a bit harder online because we were not evolved to socialize over the internet.<br />
<br />
And it's also the fact that people see just one aspect of somebody else's personality. The people viewing my stream got a very limited view of who I am and the way I thought about things. Behind closed doors with my friends they got to see another side. Internally there were things I wasn't ready to communicate. Outside of gaming there are other aspects of me that come through, some which you could predict given the way I act (if I'm charting cubing and ranting about sample size I'm more likely to chart people's overclocks for their CPUs on a forum for example). And I act one way in real life to people I don't know and people I do know, and even that is a broad generalization. Do we really KNOW anybody else?<br />
<br />
Anyways, with somebody like Shadowneko, we've still talked since, since he still plays Maplestory had is sometimes looking for something to pass the time. So once in a while we watch a movie or listen to a podcast. A shared interest in computers and some interest in stocks also help.<br />
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The other thing worth discussing is honesty. In the case of Shadowneko, I skirted the truth because I wasn't sure how I was going to approach the issue. I was being hit with a lot of things at that time, and eventually I fessed up to everyone. But in all honesty, I really do try to be honest whenever I can. I think a lot of problems people get into stem from lying when they didn't need to (but felt like they did). Obviously when I dealt with hackers I was dealing with deception and outright lies, but I did have to deal with alliance members lying to me.<br />
<br />
On my death bed, what will be my regret? Will it be that I didn't farm more mesos or that I wasn't rich enough? Probably not. We all know that the end is coming, yet we act tacitly as if we will live forever, as we bicker over the small things in life. I'm no exception. I wish one day I could really see the bigger picture. Maybe then I will say the things that needed to be said and cut out the crap that I didn't need to say.<br />
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<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 17: Post Reboot"></a>
Part 17: Post Reboot</h2>
There still seems to be some confusion about my why I quit among people outside of my inner circle. I quit because I was tired of farming all day at NH because I could not play the game casually. The other reason why I quit was because the guild was falling apart. I was the official leader of the alliance for a very short period of time. For fun I renamed the alliance leader rank to 'chicken'. Evaraia's still offline today with the rank of 'chicken'.</div>
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I decided to sell my account. My kishin PC costed $200 and I
wanted to cash out. I eventually sold my account for $400, netting me back
$600. Then I get a message from Hookie that the guy I sold the account to trade
the account for his and then took cheated him by taking both accounts. I had to
convince him that I was no scammer and managed to do so due to the scammer
leaving a trail I managed to find. Having cleared my name and proven that the
scammer (VVelqis) was the scammer, I was free to take back my account from
VVelqis in the eyes of the staff at the black market site. So I did. I was not
interested in having my money chargebacked from Paypal a month later, losing my
money. Vvelqis then complained about getting ‘scammed’, to which I told him now
he knows how it feels. A Google search I neglected to do earlier showed a
history of scamming. That was a stupid mistake on my part. I guess I had too
much faith in humanity from selling my assets in Bera.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Somehow news got out that I was selling the account AND that
I ‘scammed’ somebody. I have no idea how this got out and I don’t believe
Hookie would slander my name in that way. Of course, once I tried to set those
people straight on the situation, the trolls didn’t care for the truth. They
only care about smearing me even more in shit. Jeffery mentioned that these
trolls were well… trolls. Jeffery was a person that was pretty technical minded
when it came to Maplestory and left due to college reasons. He made a farewell
thread in which some people dumped on him for. That’s how people are. People
don’t give a shit about your story and some people will have you know that very
well.<br />
<br />
The final messages on the private chat I started to address the shoulder controversy which turned into a chat between the leaders of the guild ended this way:</div>
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‘I thought you’ll be playing a bit more.’<br />
':('<br />
‘Me too.’<br />
‘I had a lot of fun with you guys.’<br />
':('</div>
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<br />
Without a leader, Altaire died. At the time of this writing Douwe is still in Altaire, although the inability to manage Noblesse skills is leading to some tension. You once again, might notice a parallel between this and the strains in scheduling bosses. They are different, but similar in that the guild is expected to provide something, and without it relations suffer.<br />
<br />
I talked to Eva, who now maintains her position as alliance and guild leader. She wasn't willing to hand it over to anyone else to assign Noblesse, yet she wasn't willing to log in every week to assign the points. She feels the guild declined because she wasn't the leader... so she ended the guild on her terms by kicking most people. She even told Douwe not to add new people to the guild, an instruction he did not follow. It's weird. At the end of the day I didn't push Douwe's issue with Eva. Most of my time in Altaire was after she left Maplestory. I do not expect my words to carry any weight.<br />
<br />
That's the other thing. To some extent I hoped that my position in Altaire gave me some negotiating power to sway things my way. It's not a dictatorship and I wouldn't want that anyways, not to mention the fact that people will just leave. But I hope that having been given the position and power I was, that I filled in those shoes and handled the power fairly. We all have days when we are great and days when we are down, but on average I think I did fine... and I'm talking about a personal relationship level as well. Maybe respect is the word I'm looking for.<br />
<br />
She never changed the rank title of alliance leader though. I changed it to 'chicken'. That was amusing. I sort of wish I spent more time talking to her to figure out how she thinks and what she thinks.<br />
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</h2>
<a href="http://minutelogic.blogspot.com/2017/05/ruminations-of-intj-pt-ii-memories-of.html" name="Part 18: The End"></a>
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Part 18: The End</h2>
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Was it all worth it? Yes. I have no regrets. The events
happened the way they did and I cannot change the past. They made me the person
I am and this Reboot run gave me new life experiences, playing for a bunch of
people. There were trolls but there were people who approached me in the game
who I never knew and told me how much they enjoyed the stream.</div>
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<br />
You can say I am still cynical about the race to the top and the eventual downfall/retirement. It all goes on without me. The black market will continue being a revolving door. I'm Stockfishies, but I'm not God. I did some things but I had my day. Like I said to Taliky one time in Sleepywood, he was the old guard, and I was the new guard. I ran the things in Altaire now. Now being back then of course. There were people stronger than me but they were irrelevant, possibly because they stopped playing. And now I've stopped playing and I am irrelevant to the up and coming players, hungry to get to the top. I'm a washed-up has-been.<br />
<br />
I got some notoriety/fame, but it was on a small scale compared to many people. My life is not as exciting as some other people's, but it is my story, my experiences, my life. It matters to me. On the other hand, I don't want repeat the same old stories, like I'm some old guy telling the young kids 'Back in my day...'. I was relevant when I was relevant. Taliky was relevant when he was relevant. Both of our times have passed.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Today it still annoys me to talk about what happens on Maplestory today. The power creep and the newbies getting things easier than their predecessors ticked me off. People don't factor in the time period when they think about accomplishments, so what I accomplished will not stand the test of time. The standard always gets higher (more time since Reboot started means people had more time to farm and range goes up and people seek to outdo each other), and sometimes it's simply due to new gear coming out.<br />
<br />
The Starbound Discord was set up very quickly and the four colors represented the four guilds that came together to form the alliance. It was full of inside jokes taken out of context. Today it is a shadow of what it once was. When I log back into Bera I am reminded of what an empty graveyard the place is. GUIDLESS is full of people that haven't logged on in ages and my friends list shows nobody online. Seeing the emptiness, I could hardly bear it anymore, so I logged off.<br />
<br />
This is what every person who farmed in Reboot signed up for. They join knowing full well that none of this will go on forever, and once they quit Maplestory their mesos would be for naught. Everything is transient and ever-changing, nothing is ever standing still. If you are still you are old and forgotten. Continue farming and there is no end to farming.</div>
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Today I am largely forgotten, and the Magnus and Absolab controversies feel so like a distant memory. At this point I don't think anybody else cares, but the things that happened happened to me... so I care. Stocky is not cool, just lukewarm and dead fish! :P<br />
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When I came to Maplestory I thought I would be proud of how
strong my character would be. I won't lie. I am proud that I got to the level I did. But I am also proud of the
esteem which others held for me as a person for determination but also loyalty
and moral character. I was challenged with tensions in the alliance which came
and went and I have gained life experience from it. I went pretty far given the era I was playing in. I was never the best in the game, but I was good enough. I will hold onto these
memories even when my life continues to change.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Friends… well they come and go. When times are good I guess I don't really notice them. It's after it's all over that I realize those were the moments that I want to remember, yet I was still bogged down by relatively petty concerns. Never did I stop and think... 'You know what? The memories we are making right now, they are the ones I will look back on with fondness.' I’ve always said that
community college can quickly be an oxymoron if you let it. Without living with
students it is easy to go to class and go straight home, and for community
college to turn into antisocial college.Friends scatter after high school. That’s why I
came to Reboot, because Mark wanted to play Maplestory. And as much as I look
back on the past I am forgetting with fondness and zero regrets, I don’t know
if others look at it the same way. In my experience from Bera those friends I
had fun with will scatter as the game goes away. The game was the glue that
bound us together. It gave me friends from different walks of life, but after it was over we were left thinking about how little we had in common. Maybe that is the punchline for our generation: More friends but they are all less reliable. No matter how many jokes we had, how much fun we had, in the
end everything comes to an end.<br />
<br />
Although really, the same can be said for our
lives. So, maybe try not to be sad that it happened… be glad it happened. And
if you’ll allow me one more cheesy line, maybe I did not go where I intended to
go, but I ended up where I needed to be. A person once said that just because a high school romantic relationship didn't last didn't mean the entire enterprise was a waste of time. Through it, a person learns and grows and experiences new things. The same can be said for Maplestory. This is probably something the older generations don't understand. It's a game, but it's more than just that. The people and experiences were real.<br />
<br />
We all know it all ends sooner or later. And when that day comes we will realize that we spent our time doing and caring about the wrong things. We know this epiphany is coming yet we bicker and we let out neurosis run astray. The reality of life is now and it's important to connect with the present moment. The past is a decent place to visit but not a good place to stay, and hopefully fully describing what took place in the past I can move on to the future.</div>
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Il0v3yo0h, Sean7788, Ciciz, Lyoriex, Mort1ca, WalkedYa, Hankduals, Specialest,
SauceyKaiser, Perpaloo, Nekopichuu, Porktrump, DkforDays, Shadowneko<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>This is the best compliment I have ever received in my life.</i></div>
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BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-4532036157696303832017-07-09T00:35:00.000-07:002017-07-09T00:41:51.573-07:00Let's Casually Talk About: TrumpThe truth is my blog is not going to turn into a place where I post the best of the best content that have been fact checked and carefully written. It's a weird balance: When is a Facebook comment long enough and fleshed out enough to be a blog post? That's something I still have not figured out yet. But no worries!<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3>
Trump</h3>
<div>
Remember the title of this blog post as I continue. The last election has left me kind of drained. When Trump jumped onto the election scene it looked like a joke, but the joke kept going on until I realized it wasn't a joke, this entire show was serious. So I guess I'll just put this here for reference: I have serious qualms about the left, especially the politically correct, victim mentality left. But compared to the Trumpian right, I would come running back to the left. What I am saying is, I am not a cheerleader for any party.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Trump exhibits many traits which I have been criticizing about others for quite a while. There's the incredible narcissism. There's the likely sexism (or at least, trivialization of sexism for no good reason). Then finally and most importantly for me, his total disregard for facts and honesty.</div>
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I have been criticizing the common mistakes people make when discussing controversial issues on social media sites like Facebook. Twitter is a thing, but it's a pretty hilarious platform to be having a debate on. I wanted to understand how conversations unravel into the nonconstructive mess that they often end up being but often came up short. But I see people share political memes like they are supposed to prove something. The notion that a person could compress a nuanced and well-researched point of view on a topic into a single picture is itself laughable. Imagine having to write an essay on the economy in the US and simply printing out a meme from Facebook instead. That kind of bullshit won't fly. Yet when good evidence and good arguments and a honest attempt at conversation matters (IE, in the real world instead of the classroom), that is exactly the type of behavior that is socially acceptable. I think it's very important to point out how strange that is.</div>
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<br /></div>
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While I do heavily criticize people I find to be egregious offenders, I typically don't do so in front of them. This isn't "talking behind their back", it's just a difference in approach. Insulting someone head one is often not constructive. I try to keep that in mind when I engage in a debate with someone.</div>
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There are facts in the world, and they matter. The idea of a 'post-fact society' is not funny, it's horrifying. Even if we disagree, our disagreements should be based on facts, not fake news.</div>
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<div>
As Sam Harris perceptively notes, Donald Trump is a person that would look more crazy if he was less crazy. Each individual scandal related to him from threatening to jail a political opponent to belittling the other Republican candidate could individually bring down a candidate. Yet add them all up, you end up with a man who is seemingly invulnerable to criticism because that's just who he is, and we've all accepted it by now. When Donald called Marcobot 'Little Marco' for example, that's a sign that our political discourse has gone off the rails. How the country should be run turned into a spectacle, and the Republicans chose to nominate a serial bully.<br />
<br />
Donald Trump gave off the veneer of being frank and 'telling it like it is'. In fact all he did was pander to what people actually wanted to hear, a tactic that was especially effective given the very politically correct left. But honest people who tell it like it is admit when they are wrong. That's something you won't see from Trump.</div>
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<br /></div>
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We should be careful about what we claim, and the more power and influence we have, the more careful we have to be about our sources. A president does not get to say 'I heard so and so did so and so'. Facebook users should feel the burden of showing a statistic without explaining how the statistic was derived.</div>
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<h3>
Supply and Demand</h3>
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Somebody tried to make the argument that the Kardashians are just appealing to their audience, Mcdonalds is just appealing to their fat customers, and Trump is just acting the way he does to get what he wants. What's the problem here, these guys are the top of their game because they appeal to their audience!</div>
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The problem is that ethics is a thing. We cannot simply celebrate and look up to success for success' sake alone. Some talents improve the world, some do the opposite, and some success is just up to luck.</div>
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Either Trump acts like a douchebag because that's who he really is (which is sad), or he carefully crafts everything he says and does to get what he wants (which makes him a psychopath). I'm more inclined to take the former and run with that.</div>
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When Trump breaks the conventions we have for how a presidential candidate or president should act, he is showing that there is a path to the most important seat on the planet being dishonest and disrespectful. It's not a stretch to say that this will cause more people to try his method, and shape how people respond to this type of behavior. It's not an amoral supply and demand problem. In this case the supply affects the demand.</div>
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If I was given the opportunity to make large sums of money by attacking the freedom of the press for example, I hope I would have the moral courage to decline.</div>
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I can turn off the TV when the Kardashians get overbearing, but I can't shut down the White House. And as for Mcdonalds, obesity is a real problem in America and I hope for everybody's sake that everybody get healthier.</div>
BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-19051369374882804102017-04-13T05:05:00.001-07:002017-07-28T03:45:43.898-07:00In Defense of E-PeenE-peen stands for electronic penis. Much like how caring too much about how well endowed their penis is is ridiculous, the phrase 'e-peen' has been used pejoratively to mean somebody who is overly obsessed with looking good on the internet. Often this has to do with very vain things, like having a big house or having the most expensive computer. With computers the performance gained from upgrading to higher and higher end parts tend to be smaller and smaller despite higher costs. This is results in worse and worse price to performance but nets (usually) higher performance. This is the idea of the Law of Diminishing Returns.<br />
<br />
I want to push back a bit on 'e-peen', especially as its used in the context of computing. Sometimes a person buys something with very low price/performance and barely higher performance. Sometimes a person may buy something with higher performance at a point where any higher performance would not be perceivable to the user. The first is a question about value and the second is a problem about OCD and possibly placebo.<br />
<br />
We are all different. Given a sum of money we would all spend it in different ways on different things. We have different interests and where we have the same interests we vary in our comittment to those interests. Deciding whether a purchase is worth it depends on factors like frugality, wealth, income, outlook on the future, and perceived value of the object in question. Every one of these factors can be more complicated once we look closely at it. For example, frugality is determined by upbringing, social class, impulsiveness, and other aspects of one's personality. Regardless, all of these factors are subjected to irrationality and emotion to some degree. We are human after all, not machines. It is a complicated set of factors that determine a person's perception of what a good buy is.<br />
<br />
Let's bring it closer to the actual hardware for just a moment. Graphics card A costs $700 and graphics card B costs $1200 but is 5-15% faster than graphics card A. Is it worth it? Well, that depends on many things even when looking solely at objective factors. For example, how long will it be until a new generation of graphics cards come out, rendering A and B obsolete? What are the resale values of A and B? But also, do I even need the 5-15% increase in performance or am I perfectly happy with where I am right now? Maybe I am at a framerate where a small increase in performance results in a much better experience.<br />
<br />
People are used to the world they are in and they assume that's the way the world is. Anybody reading this blog post are probably among the top 10% of the world financially yet that doesn't register emotionally as fact. If $1200 is a lot to a person and the people the person comes in contact with then it seems absurd to spend $1200 on a graphics card. It seems like not too large of a leap then, for this type of person to attack others for being reckless with their money or simply stupid for spending that much. Still, it is a stupid leap. How many people make fun of Bill Gates for having a private jet? Yet when it comes to something much cheaper more people feel entitled to insult others. This is a problem about subjective value judgments not of objective facts.<br />
<br />
Yet, when a person decides to smoke cigarettes, an activity known to cause cancer among a host of other issues like emphysema, it seems like an acceptable use of money. A person smoking a pack a day for 20 years will spend about $45,000. Convert that into an activity like computing which has much less of a collateral damage and that buys many generations of graphics cards and then some. A person that cares more about high end graphics is more willing to save more money to buy a high end graphics card in the first place.<br />
<br />
When I see people getting outraged over new $1200 graphics cards displacing old $1200 graphics cards I tend to see people who never even bought such a graphics cards in the first place. Funnily enough the people who actually buy such cards understand what they were getting themselves into: An expensive card with poor price to performance which no longer becomes the best in a year's time. In other words, some people are getting outraged seemingly on behalf of people who would spend $1200 on a graphics card. And when people do buy such a card far too many people are tempted to attack the buyer, claiming they have 'more money than sense'. On the contrary, the people frequenting such computer forums which these arguments take place are often among the most knowledgeable. The frequency in which poorer enthusiasts attack others who buy expensive cards and their self-righteousness is concerning. It may be born out of jealously on a subconscious level, and the person deals with it by lashing out.<br />
<br />
While graphics cards depreciate at a rate faster than objects involved in other hobbies, it is still a cheap hobby compared to many others, like home improvement or cars. The value judgement of enjoyment from the card versus its costs is a subjective one. The problem with buying an expensive card is not with others having a very different value judgement than mine; the problem is with people who buy with the wrong information, expecting the card to do things it cannot.<br />
<br />
A car analogy is often way too convoluted to be a useful analogy but it is very fitting here: Nobody would be tempted to attack a person buying an Audi because it's expensive and a Toyota can get you to work just as quickly due to speed limits. Functionally a Toyota and an Audi are not that far apart. People recognize that people care about different things and have different abilities to pay for things. The same is true from cars to graphics cards.<br />
<br />
A company may offer more expensive product lines to cater to different audiences. It both addresses a demand the consumers have and increases product segmentation leading to higher profits. One purpose of a 'halo card', which is a top of the line graphics card which hardly anyone can afford due to its extravagance is to show the consumers what their company can do. Perhaps you will now aspire to get that card one day, but there are cheaper products in the meantime. It is a legitimate business strategy and is a product of product segmentation which the consumers want. Pushing the boundaries of what is possible has always been the driver for innovation and success. PC gamers ought to know this better than anyone. Their precious graphics cards are a product of many years of company rivalries, each with a rabid fan base. Competition is good; attack the free market at your own peril. Top of the line graphics cards are not an essential good and no one company has a monopoly on it. In fact, when it comes to add-in-board-partners like EVGA and Asus, the competition is actually quite healthy with many companies in the ring.<br />
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<br />
Being obsessed with something or someone has been my way of life for half of my life. It gives me a reason to go on. After I quit Runescape and Maplestory and I was done with high school I had to do some soul searching. Being unable to concentrate in school and making that my next obsession could have been crushing. I was able to occupy myself from wandering from project to project.<br />
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I build computers not just because I want to get the best possible experience playing video games. It quickly became more than a means to an end. I have spent time planning my next build and even went so far as to make a Powerpoint slide showcasing a roadmap of computer progression. Each computer has a name and the name has a background attached to it. Dreaming about what the next build might bring and the pride and craftsmanship on a level I hope I can reach makes me joyous just at the thought of it before any work has even been done.<br />
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Even if that extra 5-15% performance improvement from graphics card B doesn't make sense objectively, subjectively it might. Sometimes we want to best and that could be from simply wanting the best or OCD. Not everything everybody does is for other people. Sometimes people do things for themselves. Often it is a complicated mixture of both. To simplify my decision to spend a significant amount of time and money to plan a computer build because it is bad price to performance is to insult me about my priorities and aspirations. I spend a ton of time worth far more than graphics card B working on Skyrim textures yet nobody calls that e-peen. It's only called e-peen if it's something others might get jealous of. My months of discussions about my latest custom watercooling loop project is proof positive that this goes beyond scoring internet points. I never make fun of people who are not as fortunate as me or cannot bother with the planning and responsibilities of maintaining a custom watercooling loop. I give a level of understanding to others, and I expect it reciprocated.<br />
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I don't deny that it's human nature to exaggerate and to boast. My Intel CPU charts designed to chart the overclocks of various people have guidelines that must be followed for entry because I am well aware of the tendency of people to embellish their overclocks. This tendency is born out of the wish to be higher in social standing but also of the wish to be a master at a craft. Jealously can ruin a friendship but that same energy could also be used to improve oneself. It is motivation and fuel to do better next time.<br />
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Sometimes people do and buy things that would be irresponsible out of context. But approached with sufficient planning, caution, and financial responsibility, such actions can give life meaning. Money allows you to live; your hobbies and friends make it worth living. We all have times where we boast and feel proud of our accomplishments. When that happens we often want to share it with others. It's a very human thing to do. Of course, it is very possible to be overly jealous or boastful in a way that is disgusting and an impediment to one's or others' well being, but almost anything in excess in this world can be bad.BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-26181073251996608962017-02-22T01:33:00.001-08:002017-02-22T08:04:04.265-08:00Brain Droppings: On Finances, Tuition, and StocksFrom now on I've decided for informal life updates to have the title "Brain Droppings". That way anybody viewing know what to expect. These posts just contain whatever has been on my mind lately and some of the facts are not researched at all.<br />
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<b>Budgeting:</b><br />
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I've been fortunate to have been given several thousand dollars by my mother a few years ago. Basically I got that check and afterwards I'm on my own as far as my parents are concerned. They're not paying for college, it's up to me to pay for college with that money, or choose not to. College is a funny thing. It costs say, 30k a year for all expenses. So for two years (two since I am not accounting for general education), that's 60k. Well, I currently only have 56k. So am I rich or am I poor? Am I +56k or am I -4k?<br />
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I hear stories of people barely able to afford college. They rack up debt and they have to work part time, even full time while they studied. In both their case and mine it's not entirely clear what I'll get out of college, and whether there will be some nice job waiting for me on the other end. Me, I've been taking a break from college for now. I hear Joe Rogan about how he was living paycheck to paycheck when he was young and having a check to pay for his expenses for a year just lifted this huge weight from his shoulders. I don't know what that's really like because I've never been in those shoes before.<br />
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Some people try to romanticize the broke college life and make jokes about. I think the truth is that nobody wants to be like that. It's only notable because it was a period of growth, doing dumb things, and trying to go somewhere in life. Being broke like a college kid outside of college is not cool anymore, it's just sad. And while young adults in college try to make it seem like a hard but cool life, they probably only do it to make themselves feel better.<br />
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Earning 10k a year goes an awful long way if you don't have to pay for insurance or rent or electricity.<br />
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When it comes to buying stuff I've always had a more conservative view of things. The idea of spending every last dollar just wasn't a thing. It wasn't an option. Of course, it's easy for me to say 'never borrow, just buy when you have saved up cash' when I can basically afford whatever trinkets I want. On the other hand people have a too high expectation of what necessities of life are. You might need a phone service for your job and for internet for many odds and ends. But you don't need an AC and you don't need a heater in San Jose. I have more money than a decent amount of people already and I drive a 96' Corolla hand-me-down with two broken windows and a cracked windshield. Why? A good car is a luxury. If I spent more time in a car a better driving experience would be more appreciated of course. I drive nice and slowly and I spent about $19 per month on gas. But anyways. While a cell phone might be important and necessary for some, nobody NEEDS a high end cell phone. Personally, I bought a $25 cell phone just for listening to podcasts and for an alarm clock.<br />
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<b>Stocks:</b><br />
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For many years GPUs were stuck on a 28nm process. I knew that last year would finally be the year where the process goes 16nm. Basically, I knew ahead of time that last year would have been a big year for GPUs. AMD stock grew seven-fold and Nvidia grew four-fold over the last year. Granted, with AMD it was riskier due to their finances. Had I invested all of my money I would've been at a quarter of a million dollars. Realistically if I were to invest I probably would have gained 10-20k.<br />
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I really only thought about this because a Final Fantasy Discord channel I was talking in was talking about stocks for a bit in the tech channel. It sort of lit a fire on my ass to get me to start investing and looking at money and how to manage it. My current idea is to invest in mostly Silicon Valley companies. Facebook, Google, Nvidia, AMD. Computer companies are Silicon Valley companies and are companies I tend to know a bit more well. We all know there's no way Apple or Facebook would go under next year.<br />
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While I am generally not a betting man, if the odds are sufficiently in my favor I would take up a bet. I've had beliefs that were strong enough to the point where I was willing to bet at 10 to 1 odds. My friends who would be on the other end of that bet typically declined. In all of those cases I ended up being correct. But that's neither here nor there.<br />
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On my radar: AMD's Zen processor reveal, with Nvidia and AMD GPU releases sometime in Q1-Q2 most likely. Also, Snapchat's IPO.<br />
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Look, the point here is that I'm not totally retarded. I think I'm relatively competent. I can hardcore derp and I can be a slow learner at times. But over time I can do things as well as anyone. The stock market in general is above 50/50 odds. By putting 50k in my bank I am losing money to inflation.<br />
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The way these stock services work is you pay a flat fee per transaction. This means buying a single cheap stock is a dumb idea because a huge amount of that cost will be paying the service.<br />
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<b>Credit Cards:</b><br />
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Speaking of inflation, I discovered that the interest rate of credit card balance is only 0.01-0.06%. In other words, at 55k balance I would only earn $25 year after year. The amount of money required to live off of interest would be insane. $10M would only net $6000 a year.<br />
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Credit cards give cash back though. The Bank of America way is to give 1% for all purchases, 2% for groceries, and 3% for gas. I discovered the statistics tab on my bank page, and based on data from the last year that would be about $70 in cash back a year. That comes with a gain in credit score, for whenever I need it for some reason.<br />
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The real problem is getting such a credit card in the first place. Bank of America's ridiculous paper system means waiting 10 days for mail to come my way to figure out why I got rejected. They want me to have a secure version of the card, which requires a deposit and has a $40 yearly fee. Perhaps what I have to do is to go for it, take the hit but still come out a net positive due to cash back, and switch to the normal card once my credit score is good enough. It's pretty dumb how I have 50k+ in my bank and I've been good with my finances year after year but that is not factored in into my application.<br />
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Looking at the statistics window let me know that I was paying $5 a month on my savings account since it did not have $300 balance. Scrolling at the history showed that it was constantly fighting the $5 charge month after month and barely gaining. Here's the rub: It was getting close to the $300 requirement. So I added money into it, and now I should be fine.<br />
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And finally, the tier on credit card depends on the balance. So it's basic at 0-25k, gold at 25-50k, platinum at 50-100k, and platinum honor at 100k+. The higher the tier the better the cash back. It could go from $70 to $100 since I can't enter platinum honor territory. The issue is that my funds are not very far from 50k. If I have 56k and 3k go away for investing, that's already 53k. Minus 2k for water cooling and that's 1k left. That limits what I can do with investing.</div>
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I think the plan right now is to sign up for a better savings account, dump most of the money in there and hit platinum tier, and get a credit card going. Not having to live paycheck to paycheck I guess I didn't have that much of an incentive to stay on top of things. I see all these footnotes and terms and conditions and I just got turned off from the walls of text and jargon I had to look up.<br />
<br />BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-54434020417706810142016-12-18T01:45:00.000-08:002016-12-18T01:59:03.710-08:00Free Will Pt 2: Response to a ResponseI made a comment 10 months ago on a Joe Rogan podcast with Sam Harris on Youtube. That podcast was about free will. I thought I could summarize what Sam was really saying in a very short format, and so I did. It's been quiet for a long time, but I got a new message from that comment thread yesterday. Nothing like that to drag me back into the fray. Let me restate my thoughts on free will here:<br />
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<i>Anything and everything we can and will do is bound by the state of molecules in the universe before our birth. Physics does the rest. We are like a computer which reacts to inputs, doing different things depending on the state of the molecules inside the computer. What the computer will do can be predicted. If we break it down to quantum mechanics, we simply get more chaos and uncertainty, not more free will. </i></div>
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<i>We are the sum of our experiences and physiology which we get by chance. Free will is an illusion. When a brain tumor forces a man to kill his family, we understand the man is simply unlucky. Similarly, I see criminals as malfunctioning people who got the wrong environment, the wrong genetics, the wrong physical causalities that compels a person to commit the crime they did. They could not have done otherwise given those inputs. </i></div>
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<i>This doesn't mean that punishment is therefore useless. Nothing good is lost and something good is gained. We now have a basis for incredible amounts of empathy. Vengeance now makes no sense. Our goal now is to rehabilitate, not to punish for the sake of it.</i></div>
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The argument was that if there was no free will and humans are just products of their biology and environment then humans would be doomed to repeating the same actions over and over again. In other words, there will never be moral progress, for example.<br />
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To me the fact that humans are a product of the environment and biology (and biology ultimately being a product of physics) seems obvious. What other possible answer could there be? Even if you believe god breathes life into dust we come shooting out, we did not choose our soul. You're starting out from the premise that you are given a brain/soul/etc that you did not choose which will more or less determine everything you do or think to do.<br />
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To address the actual argument, I think humans are far too complex for us to end up repeating the same actions like a dumb computer. People are an amalgamation of a wide range of motivations, failings, and idiosyncrasies. The world is full of varied environments, and even identical twins living in the same household have different epigenetics. When we look even deeper, the twins do not have identical atomic structures, and neither is the environment exactly the same for both twins down onto the micro level. This is just a very pretentious way for me to say that there are always very small differences in everything (chaos theory).<br />
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So, everybody's atoms are different, their environments are different, and they affect other humans (such as passing on of history and past failings) to form this super complicated system that allows for so much diversity in human behavior and history. (But in some cases, it seems like history repeats itself.)<br />
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Thinking back about the computer analogy reminds me of chess engines. Strong chess engines are non-deterministic, in other words they do not always do the same move or analysis if you rewind the position again. The chess engine has no free will. It is just the interaction between lines of code and the cores of the processor. And over time differences emerge, and the position just deviates from there until we get something totally new. Imagine a chess game with idiosyncratic and error-prone humans whose actions and feelings change from day to day and hour by hour. Now imagine 7 billion people all playing this gigantic game of chess. Anything can happen.<br />
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A hypothetical posed by the commenter is as follows: If we know that murderers are simply malfunctioning people, since there is no free will it must be due to genetics or environment. Can we then start killing the person's offspring to stop future murderers?<br />
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Well, no. We can, but we shouldn't. We don't know if the cause of the murder was due to genetics or the environment or some vague mixture of the two which we cannot untangle. Obviously if the problem is environmental killing the baby is as dumb as killing yourself to prevent cancer. We also don't know that the murder gene will pass on and manifest in the same way to their offspring. Ideally we would rehabilitate criminals but the world is not ideal and we do not have the time, resources, or means to fix criminals. 'Rehabilitation' can very well involve punishment, it's just that punishment for the sake of vengeance makes little sense. It may very well be that a child will respond to a scolding or grounding after being caught with his hand in the cookie jar, for example. So when I mentioned 'rehabilitation' I don't always mean a life of free food and Xbox inside the same room all day. The question is what gives the best results, but who the hell knows?</div>
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There is also a social cost of killing off offspring even if we knew they would grow up to be problematic. There is always a cost when you break the social order. A great example is brought up by Sam Harris himself in another podcast. We know that donating a kidney or some bone marrow won't kill you but can very well save the life of somebody. Yet, doctors do not suddenly grab patients and forcibly cut their kidney out. Why? Because there is a cost to society when you live in such uncertainty. If you can just kill children that are in high risk areas then not only you do inevitably murder innocent babies that would have grown up to be innocent, you end up with a world where we trust the culling of humans based on some people's judgement. That is the world where babies are torn from their mother's hands due to the baby failing some sort of test. A simple, straight utilitarian viewpoint fails because the world is not simple.BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-86049611855990912632016-11-27T22:14:00.001-08:002016-11-28T16:51:32.324-08:00Some Thoughts I've Been Having Lately<b>Gay Marriage, Bestiality, & Pedophilia Pt II</b><br />
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I was watching Louis Rossman's stream (he runs a board repair shop somewhere on the east coast), where he was dissecting the newest Macbook "pro". The discussion touched on gay rights for a bit. We have that classical baker problem, right? Should somebody be able to deny service to a gay person if it goes against their religious beliefs? Some people believe they should purely on a freedom perspective... people should have the right to deny service to anybody for any reason, just like how the customer gets to rant about it online and try to bankrupt the business. Louis replied by saying that he thought that's just not a good idea. Would denying service to somebody because they are gay make the world a better or a worse place, he asked. When it comes to gays, my favorite thing to say is my own made up line: Sex preference is like coffee preference. Why people care about by coffee preference is beyond me.<br />
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Then the conversation touched on bestiality and pedophilia. Obviously, the chatbox wasn't the perfect place to discuss these matters deeply. To me the answer is obvious. Bestiality is sex of another animal, and there is no consent. So it's a no go. Pedophilia is not molestation and molestation is not rape. Let's not get our terms twisted here.<br />
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I've talked about this in the past. I don't believe in free will. A person was unlucky enough to be born with the environment, brain chemistry, alignment of synapses, that causes a person to like what they like. Most people are into the opposite sex. Some are into the same sex. Some are into old people. Some are into children. Raping or molesting old people is not okay, and okay, we can make the argument that doing the same type of crime on a child is worse. <br />
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But the assumption here is that anybody that is into children molests children? Because that's just a stupid thing to say. Of course there are people into children that recognize rape and molestation are not okay, and many of them struggle with the guilt their entire lives. It's a paraphilia with no upsides. <br />
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By banning pedophilia you are banning thoughts and preferences and that doesn't sit right with me for more than one reason. <br />
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By banning molestation and rape of children (as if it wasn't already) we are saying no to these things when there is no consent (and, a strong case can be made that no consent could even be given in this particular case, which is in some ways similar to bestiality). <br />
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Finally, molestation and bestiality are not the same as gay sex. The slippery slope argument here is just ridiculous. First think about the gay sex issue on its own. Then when we have the time we can think about how society should deal with bestiality and 'pedophilia'. I can do the reverse-slope argument: Anything not strictly by the book sex leads a slippery slope into gay sex, then pedophilia, then bestiality, then the entire world goes to hell because Satan wins. <br />
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What a great argument, no?<br />
<b><br />My Next Computer Build (Named Undelwalt) </b><br />
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I still haven't decided whether I want to do a custom loop for my next build yet. If I'm going to do a custom loop, I'm going all out. I see little reason to get the inconveniences of a custom loop without reaping its main benefit: the best performance. But that would mean maybe a $1,000 project depending on how it is done. Water cooling is its own seperate world and there are many choices and places to go wrong. Specifically for me, the choice is between a mora (external thingy with a lot of radiators mounted) or a more expensive, some ways elegant, some ways less elegant, traditional radiator setup in my case. My case wasn't designed for serious water cooling, it was designed for serious air cooling (it's even in the name of the case). I don't even know what case to get for triple 480mm radiators, and how I'm going to feed it only the coolest air. A mora would help bypass those issues, but something about it doesn't sit right with me... It's more about quantity over quality, which admittedly is not really a problem when all that really matters in the end of measurable performance. <br />
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At any rate, I don't want to name my next computer Undelwalt if it features no custom loop. There is no HBM for Pascal, and no custom loop? Comon, sure, upgrade, but it is not worthy of that name.<br />
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<b>Temperature</b><br />
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So... we don't really feel temperature, right. We feel the rate in which heat is transferred from one object to the other. That's why a metal plate feels colder than a plastic plate at room temperature. The metal conducts heat away from us faster. In room temperature they would be at the same temperature, which is room temperature. If we put an ice cube on both plates, the ice cube would melt faster on the metal plate despite feeling colder to the touch because it transfers heat to the ice cube faster than the plastic one.<br />
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Then I'm thinking about my hands. They feel so cold. Surely if it's as cold as my senses are telling me it is, I would have a frostbite. Given what I know, my cold hands must be pretty warm. But they don't feel that way. My brain is screaming 'SO YOUR HANDS MUST BE A GOOD THERMAL CONDUCTOR BRUH'.<br />
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How is it, that when I game my armpits are hot but my hands are freezing cold? RIP intelligent design.<br />
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<b>Intelligence vs Kindness</b><br />
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Several years ago I valued reason, logic, intelligence, education a whole lot. To me it was almost the primary judge of a person's worth as a human being. Over time some of my views have mellowed out a bit. If everybody thought and acted the way I did, then the world would be kind of a shitty place. The world needs some people willing to help others and do charity work.<br />
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<b>Books</b><br />
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To finish off my collection of Skyrim books, I will purchase the third volume of The Skyrim Library (and skipping the Skyrim Special Edition Guide Collector's Edition since my older guide is the same, just with a different cover and bookmark). It's $1.40 off the $25 price required to get free shipping from Amazon for books though. I think I will buy Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence... This is the book I've heard Elon Musk read when it comes to fears about AI. Sam Harris said he got the impetus to look into it from Elon, and I've heard CGP Grey read the book too.<br />
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Just by purchasing the book and telling the world about it I get the satisfaction of reading the book without ever opening it. ;)<br />
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<b>Intelligence and Judging of Others</b><br />
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Look, different people have very different opinions about my intelligence and worth as a human being. Really. A good example was with the whole religion thing. There were people who sent me some pretty angry hate mail. On the other hand, there was a guy who was beyond impressed that I wrote a book about religion... Surely he didn't believe in a god, but if he did, it felt like it would be me.<br />
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But okay, I already digressed. I don't need to be super duper genius to judge somebody to be less intelligent or reasonable than I am. Sure, it is easy to see one subject in which one is unreasonable and be tempted to judge their entire character based on that. But some people you know well enough to pass a judgement on. We judge people all the time. If it's not consciously (wow you are a saint), then unconsciously. It's just that, on occasion I have the balls and the honesty to tell somebody what I really think about them when I feel it is important. Now, I'm not going to turn my blog into a place where I rail against people I've had disagreements with, don't worry. I won't even offer details here.<br />
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I'm just saying. To illustrate my point I will just use IQ, and just pretend IQ is the perfect measure of intelligence for the sake of argument. If a guy is 80 IQ and I am 100 IQ, I can see that the other guy is dumb. Both below average and below my intelligence. But I don't need to be 140 IQ to see that 80 IQ guy is not all that bright.<br />
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Does this mean I will treat the 80 IQ guy like garbage? Of course not. I just probably won't value his opinions on some matters as much as the other people I know. Or, if I find his opinions to be so stupid as to be toxic, I will just not bring up or refuse to discuss some type of topics.<br />
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When somebody calls me arrogant for saying I think I am smarter than they are, they are really saying that they are smarter than I think they are. That's really all there is to it. I'm sure we could find people we both agree are morons, and get no pushback for saying so and so is dumb. The reason one the former makes me arrogant and the latter doesn't is because the guy being told he's not smart or as smart as he think he is is insulted and doesn't feel the same way about himself.<br />
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Do I ask for agreement? No. Feel free to disagree. And if so and so Mr. 80 IQ thinks I'm the 80 IQ guy then great, I didn't want to talk about hard topics with him in the first place (albeit for the reverse reason, but hell, it all works out).<br />
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I'm being exceptionally blunt here because I feel like it right now. And after reading this some will probably still think I'm an arrogant asshole. <br />
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Again: We all judge people. Some just have the honesty to say what they think when the time comes. And while I am blunt here I will try to be more... euphemistic... nice... etc, to try not to get the other guy to be pissed off at me. The fact that I even have to tell somebody what I think about them when it comes to this, often is a negative indicator of their awareness level. <br />
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<b>Other Stuff</b><br />
Meh. Thanksgiving was a disaster, but I managed to get home without being stranded in the middle of nowhere, so that's good. I bought some jeans for like $15 from JCP because my pants were all disintegrating. I read a bit about spin wash cycles, permanent press, and other stuff...<br />
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Skyrim SE is still coming along. It seems clear that it is the future. I'm seeing others working on a project with a somewhat similar to mine (take pictures of every texture in the game to compare texture packs). Makes my project feel... not special, lol.<br />
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FF15 comes out this week. I hope my crush on Luna won't be destroyed by oddly inhuman dialogue that is in Kingsglaive. Cliched, cheesy, bad dialogue makes me cringe, so I hope to see some compelling stories.<br />
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I hope to finish the Skyrim texture project by Feburary 2017. First I want to finish my The Last Remnant hard mode playthrough. After Skyrim SE I will play some Fallout 4 DLC, Skyrim SE (SURPRISE YOU CAN ACTUALLY PLAY THE GAME INSTEAD OF JUST MODDING IT!!!)... And my next task, returning to Mugen testing, this time running many shorter matches more akin to a chess rating list. That way I can tally how much A wins over B and have that affect elo rating.<br />
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What am I going to do with school? Hell if I know. Let's not think about that right now.<br />
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If I keep typing, everything is going to go downhill from here so let's stop.<br />
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Buh bye.BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-11408449298925169982016-10-31T01:42:00.001-07:002016-10-31T03:25:01.724-07:00Early Thoughts on the Male Contraception Shot<br />
Some early thoughts about the 'male birth control shot':<br />
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-It seems to me that all articles fail to describe notable details in the trial.<br />
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-There were 320 participants. Only 20 of them (6.25%) left the trial due to actual adverse effects of the drug. 8 of them withdrew for more than one reason.<br />
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-It is easier for me to see just how feminists and anti-feminists end up in this hellhole together. Reading again and again stuff like how men don't get it, men are babies, men are too fragile for office, medicine is inherently sexist, it makes it easy to make it feel like I'm the one being accused. In some cases these people clarify which men they are talking about, but for some I can't help wonder if they're talking about all men. On the other hand, I went to the Blue Pill subreddit and saw some ridiculous BS too, like 'men don't get pregnant, why should they have to worry about contraception, any side effect is too much'.<br />
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-In March an independent committee established by WHO/RHR and CONRAD determined that the risks reported outweighed the harms in the study. I wonder what that actually means. Can they just do another study later on? How easy would that process be?<br />
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-To my understanding, it is the job of the participants to report all side effects, even side effects that might not even have to do with the drug. Reporting acne is not the same as complaining about acne and crying about it to mommie. And it's unclear how severe their problems were.<br />
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-It's unclear to me what 'severe' acne or libido increase even means. Acne can vary from normal to disfiguring. Although, I have to wonder just how high libido one's libido has to be for it to be 'severe'.<br />
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-One person in the study committed suicide. Study finds this was probably not due to the drug.<br />
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-A 'nonfatal serious adverse effect' was depression for one person, rated as probably related. In the past I've had the displeasure of encountering a person who got super triggered at me for talking about suicide and depression in a slightly slack way, Telling this guy to 'suck it up' might be dangerous for his mental health. But to be fair, this is an isolated incidence even though it was rated as serious.<br />
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-In another one of these types of cases, a man got tachycardia with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, rated as possibly related.<br />
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-Finally, the last 'nonfatal serious adverse effect' was a guy who attempted suicide, rated as 'probably related'. Did you read this in the media? No, I don't think so.<br />
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-According to the study, a person has not recovered fertility after 4 years. 8 of the participants took over a year. This is a serious side effect that needs to be noted.<br />
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-75% of men responded positively to the survey and said they would give this method of contraception a shot. The person writing the results of the study thinks this supports further development of this contraception approach. I agree. Clearly most men like it.<br />
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-In the end I think the person who can avoid pregnancy the easiest ought to do the contraception, be it the male or the female. Of course, I'm not going to tell people how to have sex. A couple should discuss together what they want. Maybe they want to mix the shot with the pill.<br />
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-It is not beyond the drug companies' morals to try to leverage social justice/accusations of sexism to try to get a drug passed. Not to say that it is being done here. But it seems people oversimplify the science behind drugs. For example, calling Flianserin 'female viagra' and denying it from store shelves sounds like a possible case of sexism but close inspection of the data shows why it was not allowed.<br />
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-Were there possible serious side effects due to the drug? Yes. Were there probably babies? Yes, some of the men in the trial were probably wusses. But they were the minority. I wish I had more details to judge more accurately, but I do not. Then again, neither do the people ranting on FB.<br />
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-The figure quoted is a 4% chance of failure. It's unclear exactly what the 4% figure means. If each use there is a 4% chance of failure then the contraceptive method is terrible. More likely it's 4% failure rate when used over a typical year. Jury's out on what a 'typical year' means.<br />
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-My final question is this: What percentage of females left studies regarding the pill due to side effects? We know what this study showed that 5% of men left the study due to side effects without specific information on how bad the side effects where. What of females in a similar situation? Surely we need data from both sides to see if there's even a problem here. Without adequate data it seems people are reading headlines (or even articles, albeit terrible ones) and believing what they want to believe without no further investigation.<br />
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-My conclusion is that I don't know, and more data is needed. While it is true that some men do need to be reminded of the problems (and even the benefits) of the pill, I got that after the first post and scrolling more and more I only see that with some angry voices and very little specifics on the study. Remember, the angrier both sides get, the less both sides listen to each other. I have a cool head right now and it really is the best way to go when discussing these issues. Plus, it sucks to comment on studies without reading it first (although everyone is guilty of that, including me). If Healthcare Triage makes a video on this topic I will post an update later as necessary.<br />
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-The link to the summary of the study is here: http://press.endocrine.org/doi/pdf/10.1210/jc.2016-2141BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-64115791714323166552016-06-21T07:40:00.002-07:002016-06-21T08:08:19.959-07:00Scientific Studies and Journalism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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You've probably seen those headlines: Latest study shows eggs are good for you. Latest study shows eggs are bad for you. Cell phones might cause cancer. Scientists discover a way to make plastic out of pollution. These headlines are confusing because it seems like the scientific community can't make up its mind about anything, with contradictory information every other day. Many of the touted miracles and breakthroughs don't ever show up in the real world.<br />
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What this is is a symptom of terrible journalism... Journalism so bad, many of the writers of those types of articles should be fired. While the readers are stumbling around, confused and distrusting of science with all its seemingly abundant contradictions, the writers of those articles are busy trying to get clicks and eyeballs on their content. While it frustrates me that people who read these articles can't see past them or ask any basic and relevant questions, I don't really blame them. Science is complicated. If it weren't, we could all be scientists. People don't have the time to look at the specifics of every study, and even if they wanted to they often have to pay to have access to the studies. Not only do people need a background in the particular field that is being studied, they also need to understand how studies work in general. That's not even considering the dogmas people hold about many subjects and just plain irrationality. And boy, those things are in no short supply.<br />
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Let's explore the many ways words and sentences can trick you into believing things that are not true when it comes to medicine.<br />
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<i>'The World Health Organization has categorized processed meats as a group 1 carcinogen, the same category as tobacco.'</i></div>
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One has to ask, what exactly does 'group 1 carcinogen' even mean? It's normal to assume the worst. The WHO uses the IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) system. There is a difference between 'hazard' and 'risk'. The former explains the likelihood that something can give cancer while the latter tells us the intensity of the effects from a given thing. The categories from IARC for cancer hazard are as follows: definite, probable, possible, don't know, probably not. The fact that processed meats and tobacco are both considered to be definitely carcinogenic does not tell us how much of an impact those things actually have. It just tells us the link between those things and cancer are believed to be strong. Also in the 'definite' category are things like alcohol, sunlight, birth-control pills, and Chinese-styled salted fish. Nobody recommends never stepping outside. There isn't a worldwide ban on birth-control pills. It takes a lots of sun over time or a ridiculous amount of birth-control pills to get cancer. It doesn't take that much tobacco to have a seriously negative impact on your health.</div>
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Another problem with the bacon hysteria is on the purported 18% risk of cancer for consuming processed meats like bacon. 18% risk of cancer for consuming how much bacon? It turns out consuming 2 sticks of bacon a day, every day, has an 18% relative risk for colorectal cancer. The 18% figure headlines like to stick in your face is relative risk. The chance of getting colorectal cancer over your lifetime is about 5%. An 18% relative risk brings that up to 0.05*1.18 or 5.9% chance of getting colorectal cancer over your lifetime. That is an absolute risk increase of about 0.9%. In other words, the risk is very small. That's not to say that people should go heavy on the bacon of course. Cancer is not the only ailment a person can have. Obesity or high blood pressure are problems too. It's probably not a good idea to eat a lot of processed meats all the time.</div>
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<i>'Study finds video games increase aggression'.</i></div>
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What is 'aggression'? When I lose in a video game, I get angry. Being angry makes me aggressive. I also get angry at people that can't drive or people who can't read a study before jumping to conclusions. Also somewhat relevant is that fact that the latest study does not nullify all of the older studies. A positive study also doesn't 'cancel out' a negative study. The specifics of the studies matter. Even if all of the studies hold up to scrutiny, the objective viewpoint is to consider it as what it is: contradictory data in a debatable field of study. I understand that people don't like nuance or uncertainty, but that is reality much of the time.</div>
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<i>'Latest study finds that mice and rats exposed to cell phone radiation have an increased risk of brain and heart cancers.'</i></div>
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If you have been keeping up with the latest news, you probably know which study I am referencing here. This is the study published in March done by the US government where 2,000 rats and mice were subjected to signals modulated to GSMA and GSM standards at 900 and 1200mhz frequencies. After two years, the researchers report a 'low incidence' of brain and heart cancers. (The data has not been released.) Not surprisingly, people who believed cell phones caused cancer jumped onto this study without actually reading it.</div>
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To first state the obvious: Mice and rats are not humans. Studies that are done on mice cannot be directly ported over to humans, otherwise nobody would ever do human trials. Let's assume the results of rat studies are directly comparable to human studies for the sake of argument though. Following the results of this study, female humans are immune to cell phone radiation, whereas males need to be careful. You will get more brain and heart cancers, but you will also live <i>longer</i>. (But only if you use the cell phone to talk to your friends for nine hours a day to get the full benefit!)</div>
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The rats in the study also did not behave normally. The type of cancers the radiation-doused mice received were typical of older mice of that species. Since the control mice (the ones that got no radiation) died early, they might have gotten the same cancers had they lived long enough. This study also wasn't peer reviewed. Well, technically picking out the peers you want to review your study is peer review in that the people are your peers and they reviewed it, but that is not the peer review people typically mean when it comes to science. When published to a pre-publication site, it got hammered.</div>
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Also worth noting is that the cell phone has a real value. What absolute risk of cancer one is willing to tolerate for a given activity varies for each person. But if you are really worried about non-ionizing radiation, you should probably be more scared about the giant nuclear reactor people often get exposed to, causing a cancer that will kill about 10,000 people in the US alone. It fires both ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. You meet it every time you go outside. It's called the sun.</div>
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<i>'Study finds an 87% increased risk for autism for babies who's mothers took anti-depressants during pregnancy.'</i></div>
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As you might guess, that 87% figure is a relative risk increase. The risk of getting an autistic baby is about 1%. That makes the absolute risk increase a little bit less than 1%. There are other things to consider. Maybe the anti-depressants aren't the cause, it's the depression or the things depressed mothers have to go through. Maybe abstaining from anti-depressants will cause harms elsewhere (like self-harm). Everybody has heard of the phrase, 'correlation is not causation'. However, most people don't seem to believe it. They sure don't act like they do. Sometimes looking at a link between two things is not enough to get the full story. The world is more complicated than that.</div>
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There are two types of studies: observational studies and experimental studies. Cohort and case control studies are studies that look at some group of people and in an attempt to look for correlations. On the other hand, a randomized controlled trial is an experimental study. They both have strengths and weaknesses. RCTs are expensive and have a smaller sample size than observational studies. If people are studying a rare phenomenon, it would be hard to gather a large enough group of people for RCTs to show anything. If the thing studied takes a long time to show results, then it would be extremely time consuming to follow people over the years. It's also unethical to do some RCTs on humans. However, RCTs are still the golden standard of research today. People are gathered randomly, with one group given a control (for example, a placebo) and another given the real pill. RCTs are not prone to many of the confounding factors of cohort studies. If we look at people's life expectancy on or off heart medication who have hypertension, we might not be controlling for factors like race, age, ethnicity, sex, socioeconomic status, or other factors. People who take medication might simply be the type of people who are more sick to begin with or are more willing to exercise or eat right.</div>
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There are many possible confounding factors for a study. Even if a study is done correctly, the conclusions one draws from a study may be incorrect. We have to consider sample size, correlation vs causation, and whether the study is directly applicable to humans. Mouse studies are not the same thing as human studies. My point about sample size might seem like useless ranting, but in fact it is a huge problem when it comes to studies on diet. The sample size of many diet studies is downright shameful. For example, one of the commonly quoted studies for the anti-artificial-sweeteners crowd is a study looking at people and their gut bacteria. Turns out, the study randomly took 7 people and dosed them with FDA's maximum allowed levels of saccharide for six days straight. This is the type of studies we are dealing with: Groups of less than 10 people, often with little control. A study is only as good as how well it's done. A meta-analysis (analysis of many studies) is only as good as the studies included for the analysis.</div>
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Science is very complicated and it takes a decent background in a particular field to be able to make heads or tails of a study by oneself. I totally understand why people would fall for a bacon scare headline. But many people I have met over the years seem to believe they are the experts on diet and exercise. When I challenge their beliefs and invite them to sit down with me and look at the studies regarding to our debate, they always turn it down. Many people are underqualified and overconfident, which is classic Dunning-Kruger. They want to have their worldview reinforced, not challenged.</div>
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Most of the blame goes to the science communicators: the people writing the headlines and articles online and in print. These people are paid to write factually correct information and to whip up informed opinions about various issues. The burden of crafting a headline that doesn't cause misconceptions to the person who only reads headlines is on the journalists. Unfortunately it seems like many of them are either intentionally incompetent or helplessly incompetent.</div>
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I was on a subreddit called 'Futurology' a couple of months ago. This is a subreddit that contains many posts about new and exciting headlines about the latest scientific 'breakthroughs'. One of the threads was about solar panels which generate electricity from falling raindrops. The headline sounded promising until we start to crunch the numbers on the efficiency penalty for developing such a solar panel. The amount of raindrops required for the solar panel to produce enough electricity to match a typical solar panel would be about 2 trillion drops per square meter, continuously. One commenter posted that future solar panels are almost guaranteed to be the type that can generate electricity from raindrops. To which I responded:</div>
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<i>Will and might are two very different things. Many things start out inefficient and end up inefficient. Science is a graveyard of dead ideas. People remember the hits and forget the misses. All that has to happen for this predicted future to never happen is for people to find a better way of getting power that doesn't involve raindrops. I'm not in the business of predicting the future for a good reason. Plenty of sensationalist headlines with little real world benefits to show for it just makes people doubt science.<br /><br />Many, many things are interesting and promising lines of research. But we should always be candid about the current obstacles that scientists face and how far they are from achieving what they want. Just saying 'future solar panels will be like this this and this' means either the person writing the headline is pointing to something so obvious as to render the headline useless, or the person is being sure of things they cannot be sure about.</i><br />
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Finally, I leave you with a segment from John Oliver about scientific studies. (Note: This is not a random video I threw in here to make my post look more snazzy, it's actually educational and entertaining.) Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go argue with more people about artificial sweeteners, GMOs, coffee, and soda.<br />
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BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087103507875574669.post-13471264159710183432016-04-06T04:16:00.003-07:002016-04-06T04:23:47.488-07:00Thoughts From VegasThis post is about the Vegas trip I took in January 2016. It contains pictures taken during the trip, all of the quips on Facebook I wrote during that time, and a little extra. On Facebook I experimented by turning Facebook into Twitter inspired by Neil deGrasse Tyson's Tweets.<br />
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I think a fitting song would be Two Step from Hell's 'Lost in Las Vegas'. It's a more quiet theme which is a departure from the movie trailer kind of stuff I'm used to them releasing.</div>
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Thoughts From Vegas</h3>
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Twilight means the sun has set, in that it is below the horizon. That doesn't mean everything is pitch dark, however. There are different phases of twilight based on how many degrees below the horizon the sun is (from 6 to 18 degrees). Dusk is a part of twilight.</div>
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Back to our favorite topic though: Nacho cheese. It is a processed cheese, aka a "cheese product". Doesn't sound nearly as appetizing when I call it that, yeah? Cheese products are not legally allowed to be called cheese in the United States. This means your Craft Singles "American Cheese-product" is not cheese.<br />
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Maybe one last comment about cheese before I start to look kooky. Did you know that the characteristic holes in Swiss Cheese used to be considered undesirable? In general, the larger the holes in the cheese, the more pronounced the flavor due to a longer fermentation process. If the holes are too large, it can be difficult to slice. Swiss Cheese without any holes is called "blind".</div>
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According to the text on a chopsticks wrapper, chopsticks originated during the Shang Dynasty (1766-1122 BC), as a substitute for knives at the table. Confucius equated knives as acts of aggression and are therefore unfit to dine.<br />
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Hot foods. Pain has never hurt so good. Ate some Thai food today. Got a spoon and made sure I got a nice mouthful of chili flakes.<br />
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But a mouthful of chili peppers is no match for the Carolina Reaper, which registers ~1.85 million Scoville Units. Even the amazing and fearsome Carolina Reaper is dwarfed by a pepper spray however. It weighs in at an impressive 5.5 million Scoville Units.<br />
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But maybe you like it hot. Like, life-threatening hot. No worries, I don't judge. Pure capsaicin is 16 million Scoville Units. It is a dangerous substance. Capsaicin can't get any hotter than pure capsaicin, but there are 'molecular analogues' that are more dangerous than it. A cactus found in Morocco contains a waxy substance that is essentially capsaicin on steroids. That substance is called Resiniferatoxin. Attaching itself to the receptors for abrasion and heat pain, this toxin causes an uncontrollable release of calcium ions at such intensity, the nerve cells die. Ironically, the hottest substances in the world... aren't hot.</div>
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Most casino games are basically arcade games for adults.</div>
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You see those traffic lights from Vegas? They have flashing yellow arrow turn signs. Flashing arrow signs.<br />
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You see those warriors from Hammerfell? They have curved swords. Curved swords. (I was going to make more Skyrim puns, but then I took an arrow in the knee.)</div>
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Fallout: New Vegas told me there would only be 4 casinos in Vegas. Where the hell are the securitrons?<br />
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Fallout taught me that with a lockpicking skill of 100, I can picklock the cashier's door and jack all their stuff. Unfortunately, lockpicking was not one of my tag skills and I never picked up a Locksmith's Reader.<br />
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OTHOUGHTS FROM VEGAS: on a scale ot drunkenness from 0 to 10 I'm at about 9001.<br />
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Saw the Trump Tower today. I guess Mexicans aren't allowed in there. Maybe Trump has set up a force field that instantly perforates any Mexicans within 500 feet of its premises.<br />
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I'm glad that even when I was about to puke while typing an earlier Facebook post about my drunkenness, I was able to use proper punctuation.<br />
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Went to a casino named Paris today. I guess that means I basically know all there is to know about France. French people must love gambling. Oh, and bands with loud music. And chocolate gift shops.<br />
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In chess, the French Defense probably just involves retreating all of your pieces.</div>
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All of my Facebook-turned-Twitter posts today are 110% serious.</div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Somebody opened a command prompt and spam typed "yolo" into it in Fry's.</span></div>
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If the pole is horizontal, she's a gymnast. if the pole is vertical, she's a stripper.</div>
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Thoughts from Home: Oh my god, my email inbox! It's a horror show!<br />
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Getting Drunk</h3>
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Due to some... complications, I didn't get drunk on the casino floor. Mark brought the goods when he came into my hotel room though. It was several days into the trip, and by then Mark's uncle and grandma came to join the fun. I was aware that I was the only person in the room that had not really drank alcohol before. I've taken a sip or two, but they were really just little sips and not enough to affect my cognitive functions at all. I digress.</div>
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I was aware that if anybody is going to get wasted, it's probably going to be me. I am male, but I am a very lightweight male with no tolerance to alcohol at all. My parents didn't strike me as super-duper drinkers either. Still, it wasn't enough to prevent me from what was to come.</div>
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We took a shot basically back to back, with only a few minutes of time in between. By the time I downed the second, I felt my face getting a bit warm. Apparently when an Asian person blushes due to alcohol, it is called 'Asian Glow'. More or less I acted the way I normally would despite the fact that I was getting more and more drunk. (I did consider saying things I normally wouldn't seriously consider, but I thought about how I would normally act and decided against it.) I tested my ability to walk in a straight line. By the 5th shot it was pretty compromised. After the 7th, Mark asked me to try shaking my head back and forth. It was disorienting enough to cause me to drop to one knee. Soon after I started seeing stars, and a minute after that I found myself puking into the toilet. Mark's uncle tried to comfort me by saying that this is all perfectly 'normal'. Not really any consolation though.</div>
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By drinking a ridiculous amount of fluids and puking over and over (some, on purpose), I managed to expel most of the alcohol that I ingested earlier. The puking took its toll on my throat though, as it began to hurt for a week afterwards. Alcohol causes blood vessels to dilate. This is why people blush and feel warmer when they drink. This improves circulation. (Chronic increased blood pressure from serious drinkers is not related to this effect.) This also moves blood closer to the skin, which is why the warmth is in some ways deceptive. The person is getting colder while feeling warmer. This effect was illustrated (kind of) in a Skyrim mod called 'Frostfall', where drinking alcohol decreases exposure for a limited period of time before the player gains back the exposure he lost and then some... Resulting in a net positive gain in exposure, bringing the player closer to hypothermia. But I digress again! So anyways, that's why I was shivering even though I didn't feel cold. Hours after the ordeal I managed to sleep. I woke later that day without a hangover because the alcohol ingested was purged and massive amounts of fluids came into my body.</div>
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Probably a person or two in the past have questioned why I don't like to drink alcohol. The answer about how I like to have my senses sharp is part of it. I can imagine a scenario where somebody goes out to eat and drinks an alcoholic beverage, with no legal way get home by car anymore. Many, many people die each year due to alcoholic consumption. Part of it is from traffic accidents. Another good reason why I don't drink alcohol is because it tastes like shit. I know some people drink for the effect and after a few times it doesn't seem so bad anymore. I'm not sure I <i>want</i> to like it though. And I certainly can't imagine paying money to get drunk. Given the choice to do it for free, I would typically pass.</div>
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Wrapping It Up</h3>
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If you know me well you know I rarely leave the house, and I'm not really the type of person that likes to take trips. Trips cost money. I dislike travel. By sleeping through the drive and having most of my expenses paid for me, most of my qualms are gone. Plus, it was the last time I could meet with a friend for a very long time. Perhaps the last meaningful thing we'll do together. We were there for an entire week. I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. Between photography and food and my laptop and just hanging out before it all ended, I managed to find something to do most of the time.</div>
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Hash browns, scrambled eggs, biscuits, and gravy. Sublime.</div>
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Photography... oh man. I bought a mirrorless Sony a5100 camera because the camera I had took the adjective 'potato' to a whole new level. I traded some flexibility for compactness and portability. Got it used for $350. However, the lack of the traditional viewfinder makes it hard to judge how the shot will come out. This caused some pictures to be too dark and outside scenes to be poorly color balanced. (No, the weather in Las Vegas doesn't turn everything blue.)</div>
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Thanks for sticking with me this far. Sometimes I really don't even know why people bother to read my blog. There are so many blogs out there to choose from. So that's that then. This was the 2016 trip to Las Vegas. Peace out.</div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">I was sad that I didn't get a clear picture here. The middle ring looks very pretty! Too bad it was like $900.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">I did get something before the trip ended though.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">I had to change iso and aperture on the fly really quickly, but this would've came out very nicely had the white balance not gone to shiiiiite. Can't bother to Aftereffects.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Nice little fountain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">It appears that some casinos take the Chinese zodiac seriously. Some garden shots for the year of the monkey. That clear concave bar you're seeing is actually just water shot through a relatively slow shutter speed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Last shot before I go.</span></div>
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BoredEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512859805823727522noreply@blogger.com0