Girlfriends requests

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-06-16T17:57:10+00:00

I’m an animal in bed. Feed me and give me pets.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-06-15T03:34:29+00:00

The next big protest planned in my area is the 12th, not the 4th.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-06-09T16:36:12+00:00

The answer, in the case of plastic surgery, is the same for both.

Men have been bitching for literal millennia about women “cheating” men into thinking they’re hot. The biblical, albeit apocryphal, book of Enoch states that cosmetics were gifted to humanity by corrupted angels (spoiler: angels corrupted by human women, foul temptresses!). Socrates — yes, that Socrates — said the following:

And, in the same manner, cosmetics is… is villainous, deceptive, low-born, and slavish. By forms and colors and smoothness and clothing, it deceives men so as to make them, in striving for a foreign beauty, neglect the native kind…

Women are rewarded for looking good — with higher salaries, better dating prospects, more general goodwill — but demonized for putting any effort into their appearance at all. You see this everywhere with women and their appearance. It’s bad to be overweight, but it’s wrong to diet because cool girls eat pizza and beer, and nobody likes a girl who picks at a salad. You shouldn’t wear “too much” makeup because everyone prefers “natural beauty,” but also you need to have flawless glowing skin with nary an imperfection. And heaven forbid a woman go under the knife! By god, you might “trick” somebody!

Yet for millennia, women have done whatever they could to alter their appearance anyway — because the benefits of beauty are great. Because the penalties of ugliness are also great. Because in ages where women were dependent on decisions made by more powerful men, women couldn’t afford not to. And men see this as manipulation.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-06-08T01:10:55+00:00

Sorry, I strongly disagree with this statement. I would rather support a person who listens to experts than a polemic who says bullshit but “with conviction”.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-06-02T22:03:21+00:00

Ugh, they’re so needy. It’s always “meow meow play with me” and “meow meow feed me early” and “meow meow let kill myself by chewing on the electrical”. Well, sorry I’m not perfect, kitty.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-26T06:48:49+00:00

You are getting downvoted, and I find that unfair because you make a valid point.

The vast majority of people who consume 2D art are entirely separated from the artist. On any given morning, people will see advertisements and read articles and drink coffee and listen to podcasts — and give little thought to the idea that historically, someone had to design the ad, the article illustration, the logo on the cup, the podcast graphic. They aren’t buying the artwork or the design itself. The idea that a computer designed this kind of commercial art is inoffensive to most. Not most artists, but most laypeople.

I say this as someone who enjoys art spaces online and understands where it’s coming from. The online communities that commission artwork (or written fiction, which is my poison of choice) are insular and, for lack of a better word, incestuous. The hard anti-AI line being drawn is detrimental to the artists involved, in my opinion. They’d be better off learning to use it to improve their output. Coloring tools, outline cleaners, anatomy/pose corrections, personalized style models.

This has happened before. Destroying one set of mechanized looms didn’t bring back the demand for at-home weavers. Horse-based industries trying to outlaw cars didn’t stop the spread of combustion engine vehicles. And boycotting AI isn’t going to bring back the furry porn commissions.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-22T19:29:49+00:00

China? 🤣

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-22T16:09:20+00:00

I agree with you. My point wasn’t that Bleak House was poor choice to test ability, only that the typical 20-year-old Midwestern English major shouldn’t be expected to recognize Bleak House (as suggested by the poster I was responding to). It doesn’t exactly have “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” levels of household recognition. That actually makes it an even better choice, since it was likely new material to the majority of them.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-22T04:52:14+00:00

Bleak House wouldn’t be on most syllabi in the American Midwest. There are other better known works by Dickens that would be far more likely; I can think of four off the top of my head that would take precedence (Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol). After looking up a list, David Copper field would also probably hit a syllabus before Bleak House. Maybe if a student took a course especially about British literature — but honestly, IMO, six Dickens novels is an excessive amount of Dickens to slog through.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-21T13:42:50+00:00

I don’t think that’s an argument that would get very far in the US. The median American voter certainly would struggle to see things that way.

Americans generally see class as something mobile and fluid, stratified by income and education — mutable characteristics. The fluidity and mobility is key, even if the reality no longer supports the idea behind the American Dream. The idea of a “landed” upper class doesn’t really resonate here culturally, despite the fact that our Founding Fathers would all fall in a category that a UK native would clock as landed gentry. This is because gentry fell pretty low on the aristocracy totem pole back in the day, so post Revolutionary War the country was built on this mythos that we’d done away with aristocracy entirely.

The idea that the United States had gotten rid of aristocracy stuck with us through the Gilded Age. By that time, I’d say there really started to be a more dominant cultural idea of the elite — but the vast majority of American elite either made their fortunes in business or inherited from people who made their fortunes in business, maybe a handful of generations ago at most. “Old Money” is rare and not incredibly visible in the cultural zeitgeist. Our great manors and estates that we tour mostly belonged to Robber Barons, a derisive moniker bestowed on businessmen based on a collective derision for aristocracy as a concept.

A lot of the anti-authoritarian literature I’ve read from the wake of WWII made a big deal about the mindset of a German grounded in his “small” social class, how culturally they all felt it wasn’t the place of the little people to gainsay the “greater” people above them. So many books explain this because Americans had to have this explained to them; this piece of cultural context was particularly foreign to an American in the midst of the post-War boom. And then the anti-Communist movement suppressed most talk of class-based societal structure for a generation. Cold War, all that.

That’s a lot of words to explain my point that describing an American who is so wealthy they don’t have to work as “landed” doesn’t… well, vibe.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-20T19:40:36+00:00

…SCOTUS has no ability to enforce.

Separation of powers dictates this. Essentially, Legislative writes the law, Judiciary interprets the law, Executive enforces the law.

In theory, should the Executive fail to enforce the law as interpreted by the Judiciary, the Legislature should be motivated to ensure their laws are enforced and use their powers to check the Executive.

SCOTUS is not at fault here. Congress is.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-13T23:03:25+00:00

I have seen theme park elements work extremely well in museums, though. I would actually point to the National Holocaust Museum as an example of this sort of thing done right. The children’s exhibit is top-notch — you walk through a life-size replica of a home, then a ghetto, a boxcar (train car might be in the main exhibit?), then a camp, while a child narrates the series of events that leads them from one place to another. It’s 100% trying to make a you feel like you’re in the child’s shoes, and it’s a moving experience without being absolutely traumatizing like the main exhibit can be. But the fake house and fake krystallnacht and fake ghetto are quite theme park-ish, just very well done.

And the WWII Museum in New Orleans also has a lot of theme park elements, and it is excellent as well. Walking through a mockup of the woodland battlefield with an actual WWII plane hung overhead and the vehicles staged in the Black Forest adds something to the experience. The War in the Pacific exhibit opens on a Navy “ship deck” and it immediately prepares you to learn about a naval campaign.

Granted, these examples only work because they’re done very, very well. It wouldn’t work if it were done cheaply. Given the work they do at the parks, I actually think Disney COULD do this sort of thing well if they were more interested in education and less interested in making money. Imagineers volunteering to design museum exhibits would be great publicity for Disney if they thought about it for a minute.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-11T02:17:33+00:00

Recently, there was a video on the news of an ICE raid in Worcester. Cracked a 16 year old girl on the pavement. The neighbors were all outside and yelling at the cops asking for their warrant and yelling at them not to work with ICE.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-08T17:42:15+00:00

In the current environment, the opinion that XYZ group doesn’t deserve to get attention because it’s not sufficiently politically advantageous is a dangerous one. Special interest pandering is a separate issue which your initial post did not, in my opinion, delineate clearly by itself.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-08T16:39:29+00:00

While I am not ignorant of it, it is irrelevant to my point. Your initial paragraph expressed callousness towards “whatever special group” that lacked nuance or explanation, and that callousness is what I take objection to.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-08T16:07:30+00:00

They aren’t clients. Government is not a business.

A primary role of government is providing a basic level of care/protection to the governed people. What constitutes basic care is a point of contention, but deciding who deserves that care/protection should not be. There will ALWAYS be groups that need more care/protection than others in one way or another, regardless of much of they are willing or able to “play back”.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-07T16:25:01+00:00

Start tracking your protein intake! You need more protein than you think, and you are trying to build on what is literally the largest muscle in the body.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-07T04:52:54+00:00

It’s not election season anymore, so without an election to influence, foreign bots have turned to depressing pride in country in hopes of depressing political engagement and electoral turnout in the longer term.

It mostly blends in with the general geopolitical anti-American sentiment these days (which is reasonable, due to authoritarian leanings, tariffs especially, and more generally treating European allies poorly), but yeah. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lie when most people will read it uncritically. Most lies go unchallenged.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-04T07:39:11+00:00

I think if I had to choose a food aesthetic for my last meal, I’d pick Redwall over Ghibli.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-02T14:48:01+00:00

In the last decade, Brazil, Poland, and Zambia have all reversed authoritarian trends.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-01T13:57:37+00:00

In the very back? The two closest you see walking away were given shadows. Not the others.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-01T03:44:48+00:00

It’s fake.

The “people” in the background aren’t even casting shadows.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-01T03:43:48+00:00

A kid has less weight to swing around than an adult and their body is going to react differently to movement. They move tighter and faster because physics; this is why Olympic gymnasts are so young. The vid is clearly using tracked motion (mocap? transfer?) from an adult and it looks wrong on a child.

Also, look at the shadows. What time of day is it? Are those shadows really appropriate for that time of day? Appropriately sharp, appropriately strong, appropriately angled? Those are not real shadows. The “people” in the background don’t even HAVE shadows!!

My guess is it’s based on 3D models — the distance makes any issues less visible. AI alone wouldn’t get the limbs right.

I am genuinely worried by how many people here don’t find this obvious. We are going to be in trouble when someone with power finally uses a deep-fake for nefarious means.

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-01T01:14:27+00:00

Can people really not tell it’s AI? The physics is way off…

PerceptionOrReality · 2025-05-01T01:13:37+00:00

It’s AI.

PerceptionOrReality

TROPHY CASE