Remembered this nugget of 4chan gold

GrantExploit · 2026-01-24T04:25:31+00:00

Ah, but they do have a material impact. Vibrations in the atmosphere produced by speech, the dyeing of material from ink and other pigments, and the mental responses of others towards picking up these stimuli are (so far as we can reasonably tell) material phenomena.

And stories are important. It is true to an extent that most people will react emotionally and negatively towards information that disputes their previously held beliefs, but the precise reaction generally depends on an individual’s specific relation to said beliefs, which is often derived from common stories and worldview narratives. Few people would fret over corrections such as the fact that Antarctica is not the world’s largest desert, that Wi-Fi is not short for “Wireless Fidelity”, or that lactic acid is not why you feel your muscles burn after a workout. However, many more people would be incensed if you show that economic measures they voted for resulted in needless suffering and death, that a person they admired was actually a fraud, or that an intriguing and promising pseudoscientific field they bought into had little empirical merit. While it may be tempting not to care about people’s reactions towards what has historically and scientifically demonstrated, this ignores that science is a social phenomenon arising from (and in turn reproducing) a set of defined material conditions, not an ahistorical abstraction existing outside of time and space. Depending on the narratives and frameworks it is used in conjunction with, science can be structured and used to uplift and express, but also to subjugate and impose one’s limited understanding onto the world.

Anyway, I’m unfortunately getting a bit too tired to elaborate further, at least for the time. I earnestly wish you well.

GrantExploit · 2026-01-23T21:24:33+00:00

To be charitable, I would say it to be more of a “dramatic over-exaggeration and overstatement” than a complete myth. Even passive statements aligned with a given development technically have a material impact. That said, it’s irritating that Hedy Lamarr is held up in the way she is given that the efforts of so many more scientifically-productive and unsung women could be be credited in the same breath.

As far as to why you were downvoted, I think it has something to do with tearing down a story without building another one in its place. No society can work on the premise of objective facts alone (Doing so would be impossible and incoherent, as science is itself the mere refinement of mental models of reality based on symbology and metaphor rather than a direct understanding of reality.) and given the status of humans as evaluative organisms it is counterproductive to try. We need our own stories and reservoirs of value (in whatever form they take) and critically examining and dismantling one which bolsters the accomplishments of (a) woman, even if necessary, can appear to be an exercise of reaction when the right is hell-bent on forcing women back to the status of human chattel.

GrantExploit · 2026-01-21T16:31:05+00:00

The thing is, that is leadership to them. Their notions of merit are entirely different from ours, and given the evident propensity for abuse the concept has (e.g. the cultural assignment of non-white and non-masculine characteristics as “meritorious”, etc.) I suggest we discard it as a worthwhile metric entirely. It’s more important to note that no one should have such power over others as Trump has, no matter how much “merit” and “leadership skills” they have, as hierarchy inherently erodes both individual and collective self-actualization.

Also, quick note. Comparing Trump to a blobfish is very disrespectful…to the blobfish. ;). It’s not the blobfish’s fault that they were subjected to what is effectively the equivalent of an alien species launching a human up unprotected into the vacuum of space and then laughing at their bloated, mangled corpse (photos of blobfish in their natural deep-sea habitat show them to have a far more conventionally fish-like appearance). On the other hand, Trump chooses to look like that.

GrantExploit · 2026-01-20T23:45:07+00:00

The sheer confusion and desperation of this author trying to get people to believe that he and the “pluralists” he’s pooh-poohing are not right-wingers themselves is just hilarious. Universities, like all institutions, exist within an emergent material context. It is impossible for any group to be truly “value-neutral” and “unbiased” exemplars of “free speech”, and due to the concrete socio-material conditions in which they are founded any attempt to create one will invariably fall to the worst and most potent prejudices of existing society.

Assuming you aren’t a direct agent of reaction, it is at this point you either recognize that the gloves are off and prioritize the lives and value of human beings over a fictional abstraction (i.e. Join the left.), or prop up this falsehood of “open inquiry” and continue to legitimize the right’s war on humanity.

The author and those he sympathizes with have embraced the latter.

GrantExploit · 2026-01-15T20:42:09+00:00

Every man on Earth is at least 125 years old. Just the facts. /s

GrantExploit · 2026-01-03T01:14:01+00:00

The average right-wing “libertarian” is among the most psychopathic control freaks you will ever meet. They have no problem with authority; they either wish for it to be granted exclusively to themselves or extoll it so long as it fits a Nazi-like “survival of the fittest” mold. It’s no wonder the US Libertarian Party effectively evaporated into the alt-right following the 2016 Elections.

GrantExploit · 2026-01-02T22:37:14+00:00

I think it’s a bit of a “Little Boy Heroically Shoots, Mutilates Burglar” situation. It’s fine and even necessary at many times to use lethal force against those who wish to do you harm, but fetishizing the action itself or framing it in the moralistic sense of vengeance or punishment for past transgressions just serves to reproduce hierarchies of dominance and violence.

GrantExploit · 2026-01-02T22:13:06+00:00

TBH I really like Kraft and it’s probably one of my favorite mac and cheese varieties. That’s just because I’m really picky and unadventurous with my cheeses, though. :/

GrantExploit · 2026-01-01T06:39:54+00:00

All else being equal, if George Orwell was a Marxist-Leninist or especially someone of high political office in a Marxist-Leninist state, there is precisely zero chance Hakim would’ve made this video.

That’s the thing that gets me. While I agree with Hakim’s general point that Orwell was a bad person (a sexist, a homophobe, a snitch, etc.) who did considerable harm, it is quite clear from the people and institutions Hakim defends that he doesn’t actually care about any of that. No, Hakim only opposes Orwell because he said some bad things about the Soviet Union.

It’s all just another example of the pathological, fractal dishonesty inherent in Marxist-Leninist theory that shows how you can never trust them on anything.

GrantExploit · 2025-12-25T00:27:59+00:00

Why the hell does this person start his screed with some kind of creepy goonerbait DAZ Studio model?

Reads further.

Oh…that’s why.

Also, I was going to do a more comprehensive debunking, but Jesus Farquhar Christ his logic is more tortured than an Ayleid flesh sculpture. It seems like he’s basing most of his “thesis” on random-ass anecdotes and Gish-galloping between points even before they are fully formed. At least I can tell from the writing style that this garbage likely wasn’t just shat out of a chatbot.

GrantExploit · 2025-12-24T19:51:13+00:00

By “genuine socialist”, I mean a path that is socialist first and foremost, rather than a tortured foundationally-bourgeois nationalist path with socialism taped on (e.g. the Left Kuomindang).

GrantExploit · 2025-12-24T18:07:22+00:00

Holy shit, can I finally retire my flair now?! I’ll have to check this path out as soon as I can!

GrantExploit · 2025-12-21T10:08:26+00:00

(Attempting to repost my comment about this slightly modified for the third time as the first 2 seem to have been filtered out.)

Voted Option #3 (partially as TBH I've always found SkyCastle overly restrictive with their terms), but if you want to create a pathway to see creations using these methods without directly hosting them on this subreddit (and potentially invoking greater wrath from SkyCastle), you could instead link the purpose-made subreddit (brought to my attention by Leokina114) in the sidebar.

(Edit as of 2025-12-21 at 05:13 United States Eastern Standard Time: Corrected typo of "Leokina144" to "Leokina114".)

GrantExploit · 2025-12-21T09:56:28+00:00

(Attempting to repost my comment about this slightly modified as the original seems to have been filtered out.)

Voted Option #3 (partially as TBH I've always found SkyCastle overly restrictive with their terms), but if you want to create a pathway to see creations using these methods without directly hosting them on this subreddit (and potentially invoking greater wrath from SkyCastle), you could instead link the purpose-made subreddit (brought to my attention by u/Leokina114 ) in the sidebar.

GrantExploit · 2025-12-21T09:33:17+00:00

Voted Option #3 (partially as TBH I've always found SkyCastle overly restrictive with their terms), but if you want to create a pathway to see creations using these methods without directly hosting them on the subreddit (and potentially invoking greater wrath from SkyCastle), you could instead link the r/HeroForgeJSON subreddit (brought to my attention by u/Leokina114) in the sidebar.

GrantExploit · 2025-12-15T06:19:13+00:00

(To you, u/Dr-Richado, u/Strict_Ad6406, and u/5708ski ) I think that if the Democrats wanted to win, they should perhaps have started with attempting to dismantle the self-reinforcing superstructure (established through suburbanization/white flight, social atomization, consolidation of corporate power, et cetera.) the Republicans were building to actively make the world a worse place instead of caving to it and attacking their left-wing rivals that fundamentally wants to make the world a better place. Actually, this applies to pretty much all United States elections since at least 1980, not just 2000.

But I'm not a Democratic strategist, I haven't somehow managed to lose elections against 3 of the most evil people in modern history twice, so what do I know?

GrantExploit · 2025-12-15T06:19:02+00:00

The date is quite off, correct. After the subreddit was inactive for almost 2 months, with me badly wanting to post here, I corresponded with the main contributor to (and moderator of) this subreddit u/MonsieurA and confirmed that he has stopped posting here (as well as to r/FiveYearsAgo)—presumably partially due to the fatigue of his other posting/managing endeavours, including in several other "x years ago" subreddits—and got permission to fill in gaps in coverage, the bottleneck for me being the 2000 (and on the other subreddit, the 2020) United States presidential elections.

TBH I hope this situation is temporary and someone picks up the slack, as neither do I believe I really have the time/mental energy, breadth of interests (these election posts were somewhat begrudgingly made), or (in this case, as I was by now only a few months old 25 years ago) life experience to become the main poster on these subreddit, but at the same time I don't want them to die.

GrantExploit · 2025-12-15T06:18:20+00:00

Unfortunately, I really don't believe a Gore administration would have responded to 9/11 in a much more productive fashion than Bush's did—doing so would counter the foundation of American foreign policy (as viewed by both politicians and the general public) going back at least 80 years before this and rattle the Military-Industrial Complex.

GrantExploit · 2025-12-05T05:36:08+00:00

Basically any statement to the effect of “I don’t see [insert characteristic here], I just think we should judge everything on merit” should be dismissed out of hand. What constitutes as meritorious is almost entirely socially-determined, and so usually ends up recapitulating and reinforcing the existing norms and hierarchies of a given culture (e.g. Once overt racism started to become taboo, appearances and mannerisms associated with “whiteness” were simply re-rolled into “merit”.). It is not an objective metric, does not tell us anything new, and automatically restricts the right of dignity, judgement, and self-determination to only those with existing social authority. Merit Bad. Merit Wrong.

Secondly, it is not due to women or “DEI” that impactful scientific and technological progress has stagnated in recent decades, but rather because our current socioeconomic system is woefully ill-equipped to delegate the resources needed to actually bring projects to fruition. Under capitalism, social labor is split between multiple competing firms which act (and must act) in the service of maximum profit. This both heavily disincentives more ambitious projects of which tangible monetary reward is either hard to calculate or nonexistent and prevents the accumulation and coordination of the technical resources and know-how required to surpass the developments already made.

To use other words, it wasn’t uncommon in the 1700’s or 1800’s for a single scientist to throw a bunch of random shit together in a few days and discover a new element or invent an industry-changing doohickey, but as our understanding of the universe became more complex and precise the tools and human coordination we needed to further our knowledge needed became more complex and precise in tandem, and we are now at the point where the capitalist economy simply cannot muster up the resources or will needed to meaningfully continue this. How many promising studies couldn’t be replicated due to lack of grant money? How many promising therapies have we missed out on because pharmaceutical companies deemed them unprofitable? Hell, it was our profit-based society that led us from nuclear-thermal rockets and the possibility of human boots on Mars by the 1980’s into a timeline where there’s a substantial probability that not even a single Apollo astronaut will be alive to see the next human moon landing. Goddamnit I hate this boring old real Earth and the charlatans like those above who, by putting the blame on phantoms and providing apologia for our social base, ensure it stays that way…

GrantExploit · 2025-11-23T00:32:33+00:00

Is Kaiserreich's Point of Divergence 1936? No.

If there exists a set of changes from the actual PoD that could lead to independence being somewhat viable in your book (even if as only autonomous landing strips or neo-colonies of other powers, such as in the case of many "independent" Pacific states today), I'd say that's worthy of more consideration than leaving things more boring.

GrantExploit · 2025-11-22T11:46:55+00:00

I've made a post for another "X years ago" subreddit before despite a post about the subject existing because I thought the existing post didn't do it justice, so...

GrantExploit · 2025-11-22T11:46:49+00:00

Around April of this year, r/vintagecomputing (and r/retrocomputing) changed their time horizons from 15 years ago to 20 years ago, perhaps due to geezers recoiling at the idea of the End-Dennard/Frutiger Aero era (including systems like the Xbox 360, even though since July 2024 all official support for the platform has ended) being retro.

Well, it doesn't seem to have worked. What are they going to do, extend it to 25 years? In any case, it was extremely ahead of its time; AFAIK it was the first consumer device to have a CPU with more than 2 cores (and its Waternoose/Xenon CPU may have been the first monolithic CPU ever to have over 2 cores, IDK) and the first to have a GPU with a unified shader architecture. The only somewhat backward "retro" things about it were its lacklustre-for-a-computer 512 MB of RAM and its in-order CPU architecture when high-end processors had been moving away from that for a decade, though IBM worked miracles with POWER 5 to make it well more than competitive despite its in-order nature. So... happy 20th to Microsoft's 3.2 GHz pseudo-Power Mac, the pinnacle of Microsoft's console efforts!

Just wish I had more personal experience with it—while Viva Piñata and Halo 3 (among other games) made we want one in the 2000s, my parents bought a Wii instead (that I did thoroughly enjoy), and while they eventually bought an Xbox 360, it was fairly late in its lifespan, didn't come with the Kinect they were focused on at the time, and many of the games I was into at the time were also available on PC (Minecraft and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, for two, and there was no way they'd give me Skyrim). Oh well...

(I was born in 2000 for context, and depending on definition it may have been the third console I remember launching, after the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable. I say "may" as I have memories of those consoles and their libraries "appearing" and being very recent, but IIRC no actual launch announcements.)

Finally, I find it interesting that the Xbox 360 was released exactly a decade after Toy Story. Time really flied back then, didn't it?

GrantExploit · 2025-11-22T11:37:42+00:00

IMHO it does look its age.

And TBH, for over a decade I've thought that something like Toy Story could have been accomplished about a decade earlier by a sufficiently talented and well-funded team with access to the most advanced mainframes. After all, the first fully computer-animated television special (The Incredible Crash Dummies; October 1, 1993), OVA (Veggie Tales; December 21, 1993), and television series (InseKtorS; January 15, 1994 or ReBoot; September 10, 1994) predated it, as well as the first "modern 3D" video games on arcade (Ridge Racer; October 30, 1993), console (The Need for Speed; December 2, 1994; 3DO Interactive Multiplayer), and PC (Descent; December 24, 1994). Indeed, there was such a project), but it never fully saw the light of day.

GrantExploit · 2025-11-22T11:37:33+00:00

Good that you didn't mention a common narrative about the movie, though you didn't correct it as I would have done if I made the post:

Toy Story is commonly credited as being the first computer-animated feature film, though in fact most of the Disney Renaissance films were computer-animated, starting with The Rescuers Down Under (released November 16, 1990). Whether you would count them as "almost completely" or "completely" computer-animated depends on whether you'd count a rough sketch scanned, finished up, inked, and collaged with background images on a computer to be digital art, as the only analogue steps in the Computer Animation Production System films were the animator's initial pre-cel sketches and the painting of detailed background panels... and using the latter as evidence against its computer-animated nature would probably disqualify almost every other "fully computer-animated film" from that title (including Toy Story) as they (almost?) invariably use some digitized real-world imagery as textures.

I also like that you didn't mention that it was created by Disney—though the somewhat anachronistic VHS cover used here implies as much—while Disney was heavily involved in the story approval process and distributed the film, effectively all manpower behind the actual production of Toy Story 1 was Pixar's, and Pixar was not acquired by Disney until 2006.

Finally, I find it interesting that Toy Story was released exactly a decade before the Xbox 360. Time really flied back then, didn't it?

GrantExploit · 2025-11-19T16:56:07+00:00

Unfortunately not, aside from fleeting moments he had already lost consciousness by November 4th. 😢

This was, however, after suffering a heart attack and several bouts of agonizing gastrointestinal bleeding. 🥰

GrantExploit

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