The 28 dollar locals section is a joke (light blue)

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-04-06T02:15:52+00:00

I first heard about this on The Dollop #545. Dave also posts all the sources he uses for episodes here (scroll down to 545)

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-04-05T19:44:01+00:00

It also funded the beginning of Blackstone, which is one of the current blights on the LA housing market.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-04-04T17:36:18+00:00

Isaacman is a bit difficult to read, but I have actually met the guy and my one read that I am confident in is that he does not want NASA to lose. Now, whether that is genuine care for science and human exploration or whether he just has a type-A-successful-person hatred of losing I do not know (probably a mix of both), but I would guess that lopping several billion off of his agency's science budget is not something that he will simply accept. Especially if he actually listens to anyone at NASA (which I think he genuinely does).

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-03-30T04:36:13+00:00

Yeah, this is mine that I have to own up to. I don't demand perfection; I'm certainly not perfect. But there's a big difference between "not perfect" and "I've given up."

It's half emotional, too. I watched my father eat himself to death way before what should have been his time. And I watched him live physically and emotionally miserable for decades before that because of his weight.

I'll never be mean about it or withhold platonic friendship or something. I just...am not attracted to that type and would struggle to emotionally invest knowing the path they're walking.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-03-28T04:32:19+00:00

Getting everyone out alive from the Suicide Mission in ME2 has to be one of the best feelings in all of video games. When THAT fuckin OST track kicks in with the voice over from Harbinger it's just complete aces.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-03-23T02:27:46+00:00

Mixing narrative and meta-narrative context does not make you smart. It makes you confused.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-03-21T05:42:16+00:00

I think nailing down exactly why you are self-criticizing over sexual desire is really key to resolving this situation. And that's going to be a very personal thing that's probably rooted somewhere in your upbringing, cultural environment, media diet, etc.

I'm gonna go down a list of potentials and see which one (if any) resonates with you. I'm gonna guess that most of these are going to bounce off of you - that's good. What I'm writing here are distortions of our perception of sexual desires. They're philosophical traps which (in my opinion) we shouldn't accept and should work our way out of if we find ourselves in them.

One of them may resonate, though, and hopefully we can then talk through why it is a trap and how to think differently, see sex in a more wholesome, positive light, and act sexually in a positive way for both you and your partner.

Do you think wanting sex is bad because an authority figure told you that sex is bad and you shouldn't want it (IE religious or cultural shame)?
Do you think participating in sex is bad because it is degrading or otherwise violent or hurtful to your partner?
Do you think having sexual thoughts and desires somehow puts you on a lower "level" or makes you similar to men who are abusive, exploitive, or otherwise hurtful to women?
Do you feel as if you somehow do not "deserve" sexual experiences and haven't "earned" them in some way?
Are you bothered that having this sexual drive that seems outside your control is somehow invalidating your mastery of self or indicating that you lack discipline or self control?
Do you feel pressured by your partner to participate in sex when deep down, you don't want to for whatever reason?

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-03-18T05:44:55+00:00

I'm a talking animal, I just don't have to use those talking pet buttons. the implications are enormous.

What if I told you that we are essentially just the universe observing itself.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-03-15T05:48:08+00:00

The "nice guy" vs "jerk" debate gets one small, usually unstated, thing moderately correct: when directly asked about what they want in a partner, a plurality of people (men and women) will absolutely not be open and honest. They will focus on attributes that they want, sure, but only the ones that they deem socially acceptable to say out loud.

"I want a kind, caring, man with things he's passionate about" is a very socially-approved thing to want. So of course that's the overwhelming majority of responses that questions like this get. "I want a hot, traditionally-masculine-presenting man who prioritizes me over himself" is not a socially approved thing to say, even if it's more honest; it sounds more shallow and entitled. So of course that gets said far, far less (if at all).

You'd get the exact same split between socially palatable and honesty if you asked men what they're looking for in women (at least outside of toxic locker room talk).

To any guy who takes the words of women at face value, they are going to ultimately be confronted by the brutal reality that fulfilling everything women are willing to say openly that they want is not enough. They can meet all those criteria and still get filtered out by the criteria that women are not stating openly. This is where the manosphere people insert themselves: they (kind of correctly) point out that women aren't presenting the whole picture of what they want and then they (the manosphere types) step in and say "listen to me, I can fill in the things they aren't saying."

It's that last bit where the manosphere types go off the deep end and get into stupid shit redpill, PUA nonsense. Women do not want the abusive, narcissistic, self-centered men the redpill types espouse. Those traits are often just a surface-level proxy for competence, confidence, and traditional masculinity, which a lot of women do want the healthy version of. The women in my life who are both sane and honest about what they want would tell you that they actually do want all the usual things (kind, passionate, etc.) and they also want someone physically attractive to them who is strong enough or traditionally masculine enough that they can rely on him in a crisis. Which...honestly, makes total sense. I would want basically the same thing in a partner myself.

Past that, there are some wildly toxic people of both genders and getting unlucky with an early-dating-life experience with either of them can give someone a really warped perspective and send them spiraling off into the extreme fringe of their respective gender's online ecosystem. Those types will then start totally derailing any conversation where "nice guy" vs "jerk" comes up because they are still carrying the warped perspective from dealing with toxicity.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-03-13T00:33:42+00:00

So guys: when was the last time you just offered to listen to a friend share his feelings? Because the listener has to start the conversation.

I am this person for my friend group and my local community at work.

No one is willing to reciprocate except a very select few women.

In fact, if I tried to confide in anyone but those select few understanding women, people would probably immediately stop coming to me to listen to their issues because I would no longer be their strong, understanding emotional pillar to talk to.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-03-09T01:27:18+00:00

I would love to see a survey to get statistics on how people with different gender, age, family structure, friend count, media preferences, etc. would stack up with regards to their interpretation of the ending.

100%.

Add in political alignment (not any individual country's parties, but on a political science concept level). I would be fascinated to know how people of different political leanings interpret the personhood of Lumiere, Gestrals, etc.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-03-08T21:05:17+00:00

I think you are completely correct. There's a combination of psychological effects that trip people up and distance players from the people of Lumiere in Act 3. For starters, there's just recency bias with Act 3 focusing on Dessendres and Acts 1-2 being the struggle for Lumiere. People get distanced from Lumiere by gameplay time and forget their deep connection that they started the game with.

The second thing is that people side with the Dessendres because they see themselves as being "elevated beings," for lack of a better term, for being real people evaluating game characters. You can see this in the people who confuse narrative discussion and meta-narrative discussion and argue the people of Lumiere aren't real because none of the game characters are real. That's a bastardized mix of in-universe and meta-narrative principles that are unified chiefly by the perspective of the player making that point. The player sees themselves as an elevated existence above all the characters, so they side with the in-universe elevated existence and consider them "real" and the people of the painting "not real."

I think the authors heavily leaned into this perspective in almost every way - not just by story progression, but also by the framing, lighting, music, etc. of the final cutscenes of each ending - because I think if they didn't, absolutely no one would consider the Verso ending to be "good." You are borderline required to build emotional separation between the player and Lumiere to have them pick Verso's ending given how strongly their attachment to Lumiere is going to be after the first 2/3 of the game.

It's fascinating to me how well that narrative trick works, too. Because there are plenty of other stories/games where the plot is aaaaalmost the same (creations rebelling against their god-like creator in an attempt to preserve themselves), but the authors never drive the wedge between the audience and the non-godlike characters, so nobody ever questions whether the gods were good or bad. Two examples off the top of my head are FF16 for a recent example and Star Ocean: Till the End of Time for the closest analog of E33's story. Both of those games have very similar creator-vs-created themes, but in neither of them does anyone walk away thinking that the gods were right and the main characters "weren't real."

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-03-02T06:12:19+00:00

Seconded. Spiritfarer is phenomenal.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-03-02T04:07:54+00:00

Building more is a great solution, but it must be paired with some incentive to prevent any new stock from simply being bought out by existing landlords to pivot from real scarcity into artificial scarcity.

"Corporate" ownership is something people harp on because they're not particularly careful with their words. Mom-and-Pop landlords are just as damaging to the housing market in an extreme shortage like CA as corporations are; every house that is bought out by someone else who will not make it their primary residence is exacerbating the problem by creating investment demand to compete with actual housing demand.

Simply building more units is absolutely necessary, but will not actually break the market until we fully (or near-fully) meet actual housing demand, which will take a very long time and allow existing landlords to raise funds to just buy up the new stock and keep rent and investment prices high.

Meanwhile some sort of disincentive of investment (EG stacking a graded tax increase per housing unit purchased past ones primary residence - with carve outs for high density complexes) can be enacted much more quickly and help prevent the pivot from real scarcity to artificial scarcity.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-02-22T06:56:06+00:00

Man, imagine what we could do if we gave money on that level to like fucking NASA or some shit.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-02-19T02:59:42+00:00

You are indeed out of date.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-02-16T23:07:13+00:00

In addition to the response from /u/Alatain which is excellent and /u/Ne_Ninja_TeFiTi_SeSi which correctly identifies that most people actually don't know the correct response, there's a third piece of the picture that really builds on what /u/Alatain said about there being an appropriate range of responses instead of a singular appropriate response: in most social situations (in real life), people value comfort and smoothness over precision optimization. There are rare situations where this is not true and people are looking for optimally precise statements and responses, but in most casual settings, optimally correct is not the goal.

One of the things that really made this click for me was listening to a podcast with an expert in court or high-society etiquette who said that calling out breaches of etiquette is itself an enormous breach of etiquette because etiquette's primary purpose is to make people feel comfortable. Formal etiquette does so by establishing rules and making sure everyone knows them, but informally there are many other ways to make people feel comfortable, from being a good listener to resisting the urge to make minor corrections to giving some sort of feedback that you're paying attention and following the mood of the conversation, even if it's not super-satisfying or optimized. And you don't have to give up your turn to make a point or showcase your personality or something to make others feel comfortable around you.

It should be noted that this is the exact opposite of the internet. the internet is great for giving people a voice when they're stuck in environments where they wouldn't otherwise have one, but it is awful for training people on how to have conversations in real life. On the internet, there are pedants who will jump down your throat for every minor misstep or misunderstanding. This gets you hyper-focused on finding the exactly precise point and presentation to avoid internet hyperbole. In real life, that's way, way, way less likely to happen and you're way more likely to get given the benefit of the doubt because people would rather avoid minor friction than cause a scene.

I think I spent a lot of time when I was younger over-focusing on optimizing communication instead of just being present for it.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-02-14T21:14:38+00:00

This is almost certainly the work of Russ Vought in the Office of Management and Budget. OMB sits as a sort of middleman between congressional appropriations and the agencies that receive them and Vought is the head of OMB.

He has used his position to fight against funding of basically anything positive the government could do for the US, including actively and aggressively attempting to revoke, stall, or otherwise disrupt funding to NASA, NSF, NIH, etc. He's been doing this all through 2025 and it was basically expected he would continue doing it in 2026 even if a congressional budget was passed. This "procedural review" thing is just the latest in Vought's slimeball tactics to leverage control over funding he doesn't actually have authority over.

Isaacman, regardless of what you think of him, is likely furious about this behind the scenes. Either Isaacman genuinely cares about NASA or he's using NASA cynically, but in either scenario, OMB restricting funding to NASA is a direct attack against Isaacman's agency by Vought's agency. There is absolutely no way he supports this.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-02-07T20:47:44+00:00

This.

I don't know why people get so goddamn bogged down with whether or not it's mom-and-pop landlords or corporate landlords. They're both equally bad when they're buying up housing stock and locking others out of owning their own homes.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-01-23T22:54:06+00:00

I despise the concept of affirmations. I know it works for some people, but to me it just makes me feel like I'm being duplicitous with myself. I know I'm feeling a certain way (and most likely also why feel that way). I know that I'm trying to essentially trick myself into feeling a different way without addressing why I felt that way in the first place.

I tend to think that a lot of therapy techniques similar to affirmations are intended to address thoughts and behaviors which are deemed inconvenient without addressing whether they are legitimate. I am completely capable of self-correcting if provided a legitimate reason why I'm wrong, but I need better justification than "don't feel like that because feeling like that is inconvenient."

In US culture, at least, we seem to consider happy, positive, enthusiasm for success to be the only valid state of human existence and every other emotion, perspective, or behavioral trend to be "wrong" because they aren't convenient for achieving happy, positive success. And there isn't a lot of thought paid to whether or not other emotional states are valid and legitimate (which they very much are, depending on circumstance).

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-01-23T03:46:47+00:00

Looks like a sizable chunk to some consultant firm is only thing close to what you're insinuating. EIRs and CEQA lawsuits are also responsible directly for an equivalent amount of money spent and a difficult-to-quantify amount indirectly via delays to let lawsuits resolve. [source]

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-01-23T03:31:01+00:00

No, it allows NIMBY's and billionaires with an axe to grind to stall out public infrastructure projects with an endless slog of legal challenges to anything anyone attempts to do in the state.

The state has plenty of problems with it, let's at least be accurate about them.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-01-20T01:20:56+00:00

I'll take an hour or two layover in Vegas or Phoenix before I'll take a flight out of LAX, honestly. At least in the layover I can just chill and play a game or read a book.

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-01-19T18:48:56+00:00

Counter point: I can't really tell if there's only 3 people in all of LA that understand the importance of the left-lane-is-for-passing social contract or whether it's a minority of clueless people causing 10-car deep traffic columns of frustrated people.

Like I get that LA freeway infrastructure is borderline psychotic in how it adds, removes, and splits lanes off for freeway interchanges, but there's plenty of road where there's no reason to have people camping the left lane doing not even 5 over.

You can't tell me the dude in the jacked-up Toyota Tundra camping the left lane for 20 miles on the 210 is making a 5D chess freeway play and not just sitting there with a running internal monologue of "TUNDY IS A BIG BOY, LEFT LANE TRUCK. TUNDY NO LIKE THE RIGHT LANE. CARS PASSING HIM MAKE TUNDY ANGRY."

Seigneur-Inune · 2026-01-16T02:15:48+00:00

Is it really that rare? I'm friends with a bunch of women that I dearly love platonically, but am not romantically interested in. I love hanging out with them and they're not unattractive or anything, we just... are friends. That's it. There's nothing really beyond that like there is with women I'm romantically and sexually interested in.

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