Sexism, society, and political superheroes.

Could it be that younger women tend to be smarter because they have an easy way of socialising with older men?

I swear this idea isn't coming out of a sexist interpretation of reality; our society is literally sexist in this way. Because men have the majority of power, what they value in sexuality becomes de facto valuable to the society. I can easily imagine that in a female-dominated society we'd see a lot more twinks running around and serving as eye candy for the women in charge. But then those same young men would probably have to work twice as hard to be "taken seriously" in a world where the powerful are virtually blinded by their sexuality.

Maybe the lesson here is: women with power should be allowed to get theirs. Sex makes the individual more powerful because of the relationship it creates. But more than that, sex equalises people. We're all the same when we're naked and rubbing against each other.



My two favourite movies recently have been X-Men Apocalypse and Captain America Civil War. I think both of these films are spectacular achievements; the epitome of what superhero movies are and should be in 2016. JJ Abrams wishes he could do what Bryan Singer or the Russo brothers can do.

I understand it's an autistic thing; watching the same movie over and over. We easily obsess over anything complex enough that we can continue to learn from it. Video games are the same. Give me a complex system and I will learn the fuck out of it until I'm satisfied I have an effective grasp of the subject. Then I'll get bored until I find the next interesting thing.



Civil War is about government oversight and the rights of the individual to wield power. Captain America becomes a criminal because the government is more concerned with controlling him than trusting in his goodness. Good people end up at war with each other because they can't agree on what a peaceful society should look like. Cough congress.

X-Men Apocalypse is about extremism and the radicalisation of good people. Apocalypse is a terrorist.

Magneto's story is the central narrative in my opinion. He tries to live as a human but his compassion for others ends up "outing" him, leading to his society turning on him and creating the situation where Apocalypse was his only ally. Similarly with Apocalypse's generals, all powerful but socially downtrodden people granted self-actualisation simply by having a cause, any cause, to put their extraordinary abilities into.

Also I think some of the mutants might be gay.

But I still feel like both of these movies have story threads that I've yet to pick up on. I'll probably watch them a few times more at least before I get bored.

If anyone reading this has anything to add I'm interested in hearing it.

I'll just be ice, floating through space, like a comet.

I got around to reactivating my WoW subscription for 50k of my gold. Seems like our inflation is finally back. Well done on that guys. It explains their decision last year when the price was 20k to restrict the amount of time you can buy to a year's worth.

I'm playing a Shaman again, just doing some levelling, that being the only type of content that is not repetitive as fuck. I mean sure I've done it all before, but only about a dozen times unlike everything in the current endgame content which is probably closer to three or four times that number.

I wonder how typical this pattern of activity is among WoW players. Does this make me more "casual" or more "hardcore"? Or do we all already know how meaningless those words have become.

When I get enthusiastic about a class I always start thinking about playing it in a competitive raid. But since every single thing that can be changed in the next expansion is being changed in the next expansion -- fucking again -- I must remind myself that the game I'm currently playing will only sort-of exist a few months from now, and again realise that nothing actually matters because not even the creators of this world seem to give a flying fuck about its ongoing consistency.

I just want to feel like I can care about something again without having to wonder whether anyone else does.

Life is a joke, so make sure you're in on it.

Crossing the line. Breaking the barrier. This is powerful. You have boundaries to what you see yourself as capable of. When you break one of these barriers, you grow as a person.

To meaningfully break a barrier is probably one of those things that gets progressively harder to achieve the more space one inhabits within ones understood universe. There must be a decision to be made about whether to focus on growing yourself or growing the size your universe.

 

I feel like I learn more about humans from watching their mating behaviour than from anything else. 

It's the same joke over and over. The joke was that we thought it wasn't all about sex. 

I think I figured out the meaning of the female orgasm. It's meaningless. Pleasure for pleasure's sake. They can do it as much or as little as they feel like. Men can make no claim to this lack of function. All we do must serve the one true purpose. We live to die. Or to kill. Or to be the one that survives? We um, we go home and fuck the prom queen. Yeah, that sounds right.

This is the most fundamental difference between women and men; the climax. Freedom and responsibility. Progress and conservatism. Pointlessness and Death. Life is the thing that creates space in between these universal concepts. The fact that space exists is less interesting than the shapes that the space creates.

People say women are less funny than men. Well, they aren't. Except for that in reality they are. But you have to understand that in a historical context blah blah blah see this is why; in a universe where nothing exists independent of context, everything is connected with everything else, except for in the ways that they aren't.

That was the punchline.

On anuses

Many if not most people dislike or are ashamed of their anuses.

We associate them with shit, which at first glance seems fair enough, but also misses the point completely. That shit doesn't come from your anus, it comes from you. That shit is you. It's all the useless garbage you consumed without realising it was garbage, and which would literally kill you if your body couldn't shit it out.

Your anus does exactly the opposite of what you think it does. Your anus keeps your shit in. Every single one of us has shit inside us right now. Your anus exists to give you the ability to keep it to yourself.

Have you ever seen a fish shit? They make do with a very simple cloaca. They eat food, get whatever combination of matter they use to fuel themselves out of it, and the rest comes almost immediately out the other end in a long translucent trail. And it just becomes part of the water.

Anyone who's ever dealt with aquariums will tell you the nitrogen levels in the water need to be maintained. What they're talking about is that aquarium fish literally swim in their own shit, and it will literally kill them if they stay in the same water for too long.

(It's worth pointing out that this fish problem I'm describing is actually caused by us, ignorantly confining a living being in an environment which does not naturally meet its needs.)

Humans are more evolved than fish; we have anuses. We have the ability to not leave an indiscriminate trail of shit behind us as we move through life. We manage our own shit. We keep it to ourselves, and everywhere you go you will find special rooms for dealing with it in private. Have you ever noticed that the (vastly underappreciated) human need for selective privacy is also served by these rooms? We use them to manage our own shit.

Because social stigma is more damaging than anyone who practices it realises, and the person who can believe that you don't shit will probably never notice you doing it. You have your anus to thank for that.


Today's song is from 1996, Frenzal Rhomb's Punch in the Face.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbHdDGdKS-8

That which can be explained by incompetence

The only thing that makes you wrong is thinking you're right.

People seem unable to accept how little control they have over the world around them. We invent so many insane childish rules just to resolve reality into some semblance of understandability. Reality will prove over and over and over until the end of time that nobody is immune to ignorance.

Pride precedes the fall. It doesn't matter how much is at stake or how many people are relying on your decision. Sometimes you will fail. Sometimes you will fail in a way that nobody could possibly have anticipated. You might not understand why you failed. Maybe nobody will ever know why.

The universe is hard enough to understand that we often see genius in an improbable guess, once the guess has been proven correct. Guess right twice in a row and some people might start to think you're magic. Guess right enough times and you might even fool yourself into thinking you're magic.

Just try not to be wrong. Ever.

Because in the end we have only ourselves to blame for ever trusting someone who was in hindsight so clearly and deliberately wrong. People really need to learn to not be wrong so much of the time.

Today's song is Time Cube by Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmsXsT0kbbg

I hate Valor

It's a grind. It's busy work. It's a cheap way to get people to play more. It's a slapdash points system the only purpose of which is to purchase a different kind of points.

In effect, each character now needs to "unlock" 140 of the ilevels on their gear set. You get 6 ilevels worth of points for each Mythic dungeon you do, but you can only use them in chunks of 5.

I think other types of gameplay probably give you points too but I don't know what they are. Is the Raid Finder still a thing? I mean the thing everyone used to call "LFR" with such regularity that even Blizzard PR kept forgetting it was called anything else.

ilevel unlocking is also an effective nerf to offspec roles, (depending on your level of dedication) which pisses me off only slightly less than the first reason.

Forsaken spec

I used my boost on a Forsaken Hunter. I don't know if I'll end up doing any raiding, but I'm having fun running around Tanaan in greens never getting hit because Hunters are just that easy to play.

I'm also enjoying Survival before they remove the spec completely and attach the name to some new melee spec, which I suppose will probably make some attempt at thematic consistency to justify removing the other spec. I thought we didn't care about classes all having exactly three specs now? Why are hunters losing a ranged spec when they don't need to?

Maybe Blizzard is simply unable to tell an unbiased truth any more. Corporations, like a horny male on a date, always seem so very embarrassed to admit what everyone already knows their true purpose is.

Anyway if it's anyone's fault, blame those damn shareholders for forcing all the poor billion-dollar corporations to make compromises in the of name their selfish short term gains, which by coincidence happen to also be the corporation's short term gains.