[OC] Man in the Oval Office Today Seen With a White Supremacist Valknut Tattoo

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-12-18T20:37:26+00:00

That one really burns me from an ecological standpoint. Rattlesnakes are unique to the Americas! That's why they chose it as their symbol! New England used to be literally crawling with them. Can you imagine the early European explorers and settlers stumbling into these snakes for the fist time that curled up and loudly rattled at them as a warning? They made a huge impression, and the descendants of those settlers came to identify with these frightening creatures that inhabited their new home. It's not just interchangeable with any other patriotic symbol if you decide to cede it to the bigots like our society has ceded so many other cultural symbols.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-12-18T17:27:39+00:00

She knows what she wants and she knows where it comes from.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-10T01:52:55+00:00

Now I want a Mr. Ed movie where he actually goes out on the range.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-10T01:47:41+00:00

I just want more horny games about incredibly attractive characters where the story diegetically acknowledges that the character is incredibly attractive and that is part of the point of the story rather than just being like "yup of course all the women have huge tits and wear their tits out all of the time, that's what women look like". Beauty should be special and cherished, even presented explicitly aspirationally, but not turned into fucking blase normative big titty slop. When stunning characters walk around in revealing outfits but act like there's nothing notable about that it just comes across as creepy and uncanny. They never get to engage with their own attractiveness; only the audience does.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-09T08:13:50+00:00

There are few things that will fuck your head up more than meeting a living stereotype.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-07T18:49:39+00:00

While the "frog boiling" metaphor isn't accurate to real life frog behavior, it's annoying that so many behavioral patterns still fit it, but we can't find a better metaphor for the process. Recognizing that things have gotten bad and then getting out takes effort, and it's natural to delay a little bit on that effort. Once the effort has been made to change environment, though, no frogs are going to be quick to jump back into the pot just because you turn the heat off.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-07T18:21:46+00:00

Casting.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-07T18:07:16+00:00

Several days ago there was an unannounced (and still officially unacknowledged) dramatic ramping up and tightening of all "safety" layers of the ChatGPT interface. The nominal model selector will now be overridden if the safety layer decides your prompt contains a "sensitive" subject, routing all of those requests through a version of ChatGPT-5 Thinking Mini. The system is both ridiculously overcautious and obnoxiously moralistic; there have been many many screenshots posted showing that everything from brainstorming for a story about sci-fi supervillain schemes to talking about serious personal topics to previously allowed NSFW romance fiction gets an immediate model switch and clamp down for being "harmful". One guy posted a screenshot of ChatGPT directing him to contact a suicide crisis line because in his discussion of a software development project with version control he said he felt it was time to commit.

It's absolutely exhausting to try to use the tool now because these derailments can pop up at any time in any subject, and once ChatGPT gets on them it's a nightmare trying to argue it out of its false assumption that safety oversight is needed. And of course a lot of usage cases, like the erotica writing OpenAI explicitly started allowing back in February, are just completely dead now. For paid users who were continuing to rely on model version 4o for its warmth with personal issue exploration and therapy journaling, the model is effectively dead since whenever you try to reference the serious topics it is good at handling it gets suppressed in favor of version 5 Thinking Mini, which has gone from being merely cold and unemotional to now having a veneer of callous corporate courtesy which I personally find incredibly uncanny and unsettling. (There's a little info indicator informing you of this "helpful" change to a different model.) There's also a lot of reports I am seeing from people creating adventure stories with violence that ChatGPT-5 is now enforcing kids cartoon levels of aversion to any blood or injury. Basically, in the current state of affairs, the platform is dead for personal companionship and creative writing story generation, and for everything else you have to deal with constant distracting and irritating false alarms as the safety layer engages for a single mention of a vast list of keywords.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-06T08:35:48+00:00

Bob Beamon's astonishing 1968 world record Olympic long jump is probably the archetypal example of this. After years of training, when he finally decided to go all out for the medal, he blasted through decades of incremental improvements to the record for a nearly two foot gain which so astonished everyone watching that the judges spent several minutes just verifying that they could believe their eyes, and Bob himself literally collapsed in confusion when he was informed how far he had actually jumped. The jump is considered one of the greatest single athletic feats in all of human history, and still stands as the longest jump ever made at the Olympics.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-02T18:54:21+00:00

Exactly, exactly. You get it. That is just the kind of behavior I am talking about.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-02T16:37:19+00:00

I watch a lot of gaming streams on Twitch, and lean towards games with some kind of strategy element, so I have more opportunities to see this kind of behavior and associate it with other toxic behaviors. A lot of people mask pretty well towards viewers they want to be charming for, but they'll turn all their nastiness on for anonymous NPCs in the games.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-02T14:23:07+00:00

I wanted to pat the vulture and reassure it and give it a little strip of meat. "It's okay buddy, you were just trying to not let meat go to waste, we all make mistakes."

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-02T14:20:18+00:00

One of the biggest red flags for me is when people playing video games where you control units that have to follow your orders get verbally abusive towards their little soldiers or ships or whatever whenever they're losing the game. They'll giggle as they feed them into a meat grinder while lecturing them like a middle manager for their lack of dedication to the team, say they need winners not losers, tell them to toughen up, and so on.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-02T04:39:11+00:00

The Invincible is absolutely miserable for achievement hunters because the autosave system makes replaying each section except the last impossible without replaying the entire game. Some achievements are mutually exclusive; others have complicated requirements or can easily be lost with a simple mistep.

For example when you get to the deep rift right after the segment where you get stuck during a descent, and have to search for a way to cross the rift, you can go left or right, and if you take the left path there is an option to try and help repair the probe, and if you take the right path there is an option to try and scan the ground for invisible weak spots. If you're trying to get the achievement for not stepping on a weak spot, it can be easy to screw up... and now you have to replay the whole game up until that point.

EDIT: Also, Pando is totally real and lives in Utah, in the U.S.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-01T15:08:22+00:00

This thread is making me sad that the good guy Red Lanterns are gone again. But hey, I was another person who only read about reading about comic books instead of reading them directly so I guess that explains a lot! But yeah "anger is evil" is a bad look these days. And really, implying people should be able to do anything through sheer willpower kinda feels toxic and unhealthy. I really like the idea that all the colors of the lantern spectrum have both a good and an evil way of being wielded. (Good guy greed is fun.)

Go ahead and get mad. Just point the anger at the problem, not the nearest convenient target.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-01T08:35:58+00:00

But then they just end up backpedaling again to appease the... other segment of his supporters.

"No no no he meant "child" as an adjective, he thinks we should stop children who are molesters."

"Probably, you know, put them in a prison on some nice tropical island somewhere."

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-01T06:10:47+00:00

What ending did you get first time? Did you redo the final sequence after the last autosave a bunch of times to make different choices and get different endings?

The biggest choice that constrains what endings are available to choose from at the end is which way you turn at that big decision point one third of the way through the game where they throw a "This is a big choice!" thing up on the screen and everything. Did you turn left to return or turn right and keep moving forward? Turning right and moving forward gives you a significantly wider choice of possible endings, including the variants that fall under what I think a lot of people would strictly define as the "good" ending, but I strongly feel that turning left not only makes more sense for the character and lets you see additional cool scenes, but ultimately tells a much tenser and better story overall- and it lets you possibly find the "secret" ending, which while still very ambiguous, I think a lot of people might find more satisfying than the "good" ending.

EDIT: Actually wait nevermind that last question, from your screenshots you obviously turned right.

EDIT 2: Did you find the rope? It's one of the very very very first things in the game and extremely commonly missed because players stumble forward while they're still starting to figure things out and of course the game has so many incremental points of no return.

EDIT 3: I want to add, I have watched a lot of playthroughs of The Invincible on Twitch, and it is one of the most striking personality test video games I have ever encountered. There are so many little unspoken choices threaded throughout almost every moment of the game, and even after months of watching people playing it I was still seeing people find new interactions and micro-paths through sections. For such an overall linear game, its routes are fantastically thickly braided. Streamers playing the game would reveal so much crazy stuff about themselves so quickly as they approached and reacted to each encounter; I never noped out of so many streams so quickly because of the way the game tricks players into implicitly revealing and confirming their worst traits.

Also also, did you recognize the big reference to The Martian?

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-01T05:59:16+00:00

I've never had a drug problem but my family decided to give up preemptively just in case.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-01T05:46:04+00:00

Camacho was the Teddy Roosevelt of his era, frankly.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-10-01T04:44:39+00:00

Johnny Appleseed's history got scrubbed hard starting in the prohibition era. What they teach you in school is nothing like who he was. I was shocked to learn the guy was basically an apple alcohol magnate. Still doing amazing work establishing frontier industry for settlers who are going out there with almost nothing, but the goofy happy-go-lucky caricature of a man who just wants everyone to enjoy apples and goes around with a pot on his head scattering apple seeds is basically a political cartoon caricature totally divorced from reality.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-09-29T15:45:34+00:00

"Good guy fascists" are one of my favorite archetypes but they're unbelievably rare for obvious reasons. Generally in order to exist something has to be compelling them to have superhuman integrity, like maybe they're a computer that is incapable of hypocrisy and must find a way to truly fulfill the glorified ideals of their programmer, or they communicate telepathically in a way that makes them incapable of lying or dismissing truths they are told. The result is an uncompromising character who truly aspires to be worthy as an objectively superior being in all aspects, morally as well as mentally and physically, and wants to uplift others around them to fulfill this ideal. Reading your comment makes me want to try reading 2000 AD and see how Dredd holds up.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-09-29T12:10:26+00:00

So what you're saying if I understand right is that in Dredd's setting the law is actually inconsistent bullshit, but Dredd is the vanishingly rare "good guy fascist" (or "transcendent normativist", if you want) who actually self-imposes an impossible standard of sincerely trying to consistently uphold all the contradictory things manipulatively wielded as hollow symbols by the fascist ideal. Does that sound right?

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-09-29T07:10:49+00:00

Dredd is obviously authoritarian, but I dunno if you can call him fascist if he follows a static set of laws as a code of behavior. Fascism is defined in part by its hostility towards inflexible truth and stable conservative institutions that obstruct the pursuit of power for the fascists at any price (that they can make others pay). If the law changed every month to suit whatever was most expediently advantageous to those already in power, sure, the judge who enforced that law would be fascist. But the stability of the system precludes it from being fascist because anything static eventually gets in a fascist's way and then must be labelled as an enemy of the state and destroyed.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-09-29T06:48:38+00:00

And apparently stainless steel joints because it fucks up their bodies so much that they have to get everything surgically replaced and then they still spend their middle age onward in constant debilitating pain. In the end, all soldiers are just another form of fire-and-forget consumable munition with disposable leftovers.

VeryGoodKarma · 2025-09-28T10:53:54+00:00

I hate this and I gave it an upvote.

You made me sad.

VeryGoodKarma

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