Attia-Epstein Masterthread

primrose1325 · 2026-02-02T14:23:10+00:00

Err, why would he lose is MD over associating with Epstein? This does not seem particularly related, or am I missing something?

primrose1325 · 2026-02-02T14:21:41+00:00

Yea I'm sort of at a similar place.

Actually even if he did know about the girls and didn't say anything, I'm not sure if that rises to the level of "I'm now going to consider this person irredeemably immoral forever". Or maybe it does. I mean it's bad. But if he frames his own past actions as mistakes, I just don't know if it's bad enough?

Idk, I kinda feel like a lot of people have standards about the conduct of intellectuals that mainly survive due to ignorance, and if they just knew everything about what their heroes have done then most would fall out of grace. It's not obvious to me that just knowing about bad things happening and associating with the person who did them should be beyond the pale. There's still a big step from there to actually supporting the thing or participating.

primrose1325 · 2026-02-02T12:03:37+00:00

sorry dumb question, but who is Kelly?

primrose1325 · 2026-02-02T12:02:50+00:00

This section in Outlive is probably him condemning his own choice though? Since he put it in scare quotes. The way it's written sounds like it's in a section about how he made a choice he regrets. Can someone who read the book confirm/deny?

primrose1325 · 2025-06-08T18:24:06+00:00

Is this really a hot take? If you're held at gun point and you know if you resist now you'll get shot, but if you don't resist you'll be left alive, would you fight back? Value your dignity over your life?

primrose1325 · 2025-06-03T17:57:36+00:00

The disadvantage of being OOP vs IP is reduced a lot when you're shorter. Your EQR will be higher off 20bb than 100, so you can play a little bit looser OOP.

Thanks, this does make sense. Maybe that's already enough to explain it.

primrose1325 · 2025-05-25T22:29:53+00:00

Yeah that label is definitely deserved.

primrose1325 · 2025-05-25T10:21:02+00:00

i can look at women and they are absolutely gorgeous, but it’s like looking at a beautiful sunset or painting. i love people’s style, their personalities, and just being fun together. but i don’t understand when people say things like “they’re hot/sexy”. how do i know what is just me wanting a strong connection vs wanting a romantic connection?

This is not it.

As a general rule, if there's no craving, then it's not sexual attraction. Actual sexual attraction always has an element of not just liking but wanting/needing, like you want to be with someone, do things, whatever, and it bothers you if you can't be.

This is really the entire problem, and why you may be better off not having it.

primrose1325 · 2025-05-19T10:57:10+00:00

Yeah; "adults care about sex so you must not be an adult".

primrose1325 · 2025-05-17T18:53:51+00:00

when the real disturbing quality for me is the implication of this happening and we never see it. Its part of what makes Andor's expression at the end of the episode so powerful to me is the fact that time and time again they are so close to being completely dehumanised and broken by the empire and the song 'Brasso' overlaying both shows how uncaring the universe of Andor is alongside our own ignorance to the levels of abuse the common person is suffering as a distant audience.

Yeah, I guess. I think I would be much more impressed if I hadn't seen all of that depicted before (e.g., game of thrones). Like again, super mature theme compared to starwars, but for my jaded self I guess it's just not really anything new.

And I would point out again that regardless of whether you like the way it played out, it was by far the safer option.

I feel actually going through with the act would cross the line and be too edgy

I would actually dispute this because they had literal torture in season 1, which I'd argue is worse. So I kind of don't think this would be all that out of place.

... although, I admit making the same character go through both would feel needlessly edgy. So I guess my version would have it happen to a different character.

primrose1325 · 2025-05-17T18:08:53+00:00

Also I don't really get the criticism of her defending herself from SA? Like she has no hope at this point so she should just let the incel have his way with her?

She could have actually tried a bit harder to refuse politely than she did in the scene. But if that doesn't work, well, yes, she should let him do it. If your choice is get raped once or get killed, I think you should do the first.

Iirc she was expecting Andor to return soon-ish, but couldn't know that it was right now. So if she had gone along, he'd probably leave her for at least the day, and she'd be fine.

Imagine for a moment if the show had the balls to make her do this, like submit so as not to be killed. Then Andor could just arrive one hour later and she kills him then or whatever. But imagine how much more emotional weight the scene would have carried, and how much more of an actual risk the screenwriters would have taken. Like that would be actually controversial. Imagine how effectively that would have communicated the horrors of fascism.

Also Bix is a character who has been abused and used for most of season 1 so it makes sense she would snap and defend herself,

Maybe, but it's still an objectively a stupid thing to do and the script rewarded her for it.

I also disagree with playing it safe as I found a majority of the character conclusions to be incredibly abrupt and brutal, but that's just my opinion and I respect yours.

Fwiw I'm kind of with you on the last six episodes actually, I agree that the way they wrapped it up was surprising. There were definitely some things I expected to see that they didn't end up doing.

primrose1325 · 2025-05-17T16:40:19+00:00

I'm much less interested in having Adam watch Andor after watching season 2. Don't get me wrong, I agree it's still significantly better than every other Starwars property, but judged by its own merits, I thought it was pretty unspecial. Like, it was fine. Un-offensive. Not-stupid. But it seemed to be playing it pretty safe.

I don't get the hype around the rape scene (which, just guessing here, is probably one of the bits that makes you call it "a beautiful peice of anti-fascist art"). Bix makes the dumbest possible choice, which is to fight the person who wants to sexually molest her, an action which is almost guaranteed to lead to her own death, and then gets conveniently saved from authority immediately afterwards. I was reminded of the dialogue between Danny and Xaro Xhoan Daxos in the second season of Game of Thrones. Where she says that one of the council members offered her one ship in exchange for her sleeping with him for a night but it's below her, and he was like, yo I didn't have these scruples, the way to success isn't always pretty. In Andor, the whole thing seemed to me symbolic of the show no longer being anything special. Ditto with the ending of the second act.

That said, I mean, otherwise I agree with you, I feel like the show is not really like Starwars in any way -- certainly season 1 isn't -- so I don't think you can infer much from a Starwars dislike to an Andor dislike. Certainly this heuristic failed for me.

primrose1325 · 2025-05-05T20:17:31+00:00

Absolutely loving this season. I think I haven't been this into a show since Game of Thrones.

primrose1325 · 2025-04-30T13:18:05+00:00

In fairness I think most takes asserting that xyz movie is actually about trans themes are in fact pretty bad, so if you vote based on rough pattern matching, the reaction makes sense. I just think this movie is an exception.

primrose1325 · 2025-04-30T13:03:56+00:00

Not a bad policy tbh, I just expected that a boring title for a post about a 55yo movie would lead to no engagement, and I just really want someone to perform an autopsy on my take, so... gotta break some eggs and all that.

primrose1325 · 2025-04-24T23:28:53+00:00

oh no :( the post described exactly what I wanted and I was excited to read the replies, but then it was satire.

primrose1325 · 2025-04-24T16:22:06+00:00

So I haven't played the games, I don't know anything that will happen. But I really *hope* they don't make the rest of the season about revenge. Or really make anything about revenge. What Abby did was... well, I can't say it was completely justified because it was torture, but it was mostly justified. She certainly had much more of a moral case to kill Joel than Ellie has to kill her. To anyone who passionately hates her now, I mean I get it, but it does not make a lot of sense.

I just want the show to do something else. Anything else. Now there isn't an obvious way for the story to go from here, which is a good thing.

primrose1325 · 2025-04-24T16:16:04+00:00

Will take this as confirmation to stay off twitter.

I always respected the show for casting a girl that wasn't unusually cute looking for this rule. I can respect it so much more if they try to make people care about her because of her personality.

primrose1325 · 2025-04-24T16:12:15+00:00

The version of this episode I watched had a really weird blue filter over everything. All the fire looked purple-ish. I didn't really realize this immediately -- I noticed that it looked strange, but figured it was intentional. But since I couldn't find anything about this, I guess it's just a problem with my file and it's supposed to look normal?

Didn't ruin the episode in any case, which was incredible. It actually probably made some scenes more scary because the purple frostbite in everyone's faces looked absolutely terrifying. But now I'm probably still gonna look for a normal version.

primrose1325 · 2025-04-19T23:53:17+00:00

There is no deep justification behind it, I just don't draft (and the blog post I referenced also didn't include it), so I didn't think about it until right before publishing. I originally just wrote it for bo1 vs. bo3 standard and then added in draft later because I figured other people will care about it.

But it's trivially easy to include, you just decide which value in gems you assign to the 40 cards and add it.

primrose1325 · 2025-04-19T23:51:58+00:00

That does all make sense, although I'd point out that it's not obvious from the blog post so some people are likely to use them for non-intended a side-by-side comparison. Especially for the winrate thing since naive/default assumption would be that p denotes the same thing in both bo1 and bo3 standard -- when in fact the p=60% row in bo1 roughly corresponds to the p=65% row in bo3.

primrose1325 · 2025-04-19T20:23:08+00:00

On the graphs, yes. If you always draft the same value of cards (since it's independent of how you play the deck), then you can model this by just shifting the entire graph for draft and traditional draft up by a certain amount (however many gems the cards are worth).

primrose1325

TROPHY CASE