Yo @argumate did I miss when you did the Argumarket 2020 Dem Primary end summary? Who has how many Argudollars? Or did I already see the end summary and forget the results?

oh yeah we never actually ran the final update after the DNC officially called it, probably due to the incredible crushing depression; here are the final rankings:

@intercal: $431.34 @squareallworthy: $325.29 @qualiteagirl: $271.39 @flakmaniak: $260.62 @firebendinglemur: $255.67 @the-moti: $202.18 @worriedaboutmyfern: $187.89 @cromulentenough: $151.40 @lalaithion: $76.20 @birth-muffins-death​: $61.75 @learn-tilde-ath: $48.47 @tanadrin​: $41.90 @placid-platypus​: $41.24 @thehairyballtheorem​: $27.73 @darvince-2019​: $26.64 @holomanga​: $25.21 @confusedbyinterface​: $23.61 @wizzeh​: $23.61 @utilitymonstermash​: $22.40 @ms-demeanor​: $19.69 @floofshy​: $13.26 @understatedocelot​: $8.77 @lipstickchainsaw​ -$20.69 @goatsgomoo​ -$27.94 @kwarrtz​ -$70.35 @hirosensei​ -$79.70 @candleprism​: -$85.89 @ouroborostriumphant​ -$103.38 @chumpwaxer​: -$109.89 @transhumanesque -$119.78 @thomas-midgley-did-nothing-wrong​ -$170.00 @ijime-deactivated20150440​ -$189.93 @maybesimon​ -$209.93 @la-pou-belle​ -$219.60 @bibliolithid​: -$219.93 @antoine-roquentin​: -$229.53 @princesse266 -$229.88 @triviallytrue -$229.89 @irradiate-space -$229.95

ultimately your performance was decided by how early you got in and how hard you shilled for Long Joe, sigh.

I’ll be sending manifold.markets currency to all the winners of this market, at a rate of 1 argumate dollar to 1 mana. If you profited, I’ll DM you soon. I’m doing this for a couple reasons. First, to commit to acausal trade. In the event of manifold’s demise, I’d be happy if some new rationalist prediction market succeeds us and airdrops currency based off manifold balances. I want fake internet prediction points to maintain some value over time, since this makes manifold more accurate. Or in other words, betting is honorable and I want to reward it :) Second, shameless advertising

mr. gorbachev, turn down for what

Chad Skywalker

I always thought it was weird how he’s named Luke, he has an uncle named Owen, but everyone else has weird space names.

Luke Skywalker

Luke S

Lucas

imagine if you kept everything else the same but the characters were called Ross, Joey, Chandler,

I’m pretty certain that the higher class/social status someone is in the Star Wars universe, the wackier their name gets

So, remember the bit in New Hope when a stormtrooper goes ‘Look sir, droids’? Well, the Star Wars EU being what it is, both that stormtrooper and his commanding officer have extensive backstories - and, crucially for our purposes, names. He is Davin Felth (slightly wacky) and his superior is Captain Mod Terrik (really wacky). As there’s a Grand Moff Tarkin (Grand Moff? come on now) somewhere way above both of them in the command structure of the empire, this was more than enough for me to be fairly sure wackiness of name is based on their place in the hierarchy.

And look at the examples mentioned above - Luke and Owen are dirt-poor moisture farmers. Beyond that, Han (one letter away from Hank) is a crooked space trucker. Meanwhile, Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine enjoy vast staterooms on their moon-sized space stations. When Obi-Wan Kenobi, member of an elite religious warrior caste, has to go into hiding he goes by ‘Ben’.

(Leia is an interesting outlier, being called ‘Leia’, an actual person’s name, while at the same time being a princess and member of the senate. However as a woman she is a statistical outlier in the Star Wars universe anyway.)

ouch.

So, is Star Wars a caste system where your place is determined by birth and there’s never any movement, or does your name change every time you move up

Does that mean Elan Sleazebaggano was born to a criminal caste, or did he change his last name when he decided to go into crime as a career?

Given that Star Wars takes place a long time ago (albeit in a galaxy far far away), it’s possible the Sleazebaggano family were such prolific ne’er-do-wells that that’s actually where we get the term.

didn't kylo ren have some stupid not-badass name to start with?

NOOOOOO highly esteemed deed is commemorated here, the danger is present in your time as it was in ours!

hehehe human curiosity machine go brrrrrrrr

xkcd does dialect quizzes

I love how this uses the exact wording of that old “how y’all, youse, and yinz” talk quiz

You Don’t Have Security Clearance To Know What Makes You Beautiful

It has happened.

I have purchased Trans Wizard Harriet Porber and the Bad Boy Parasaurolophus

Will provide updates

IT’S HERE

I’m going to start it pretty soon. I’m for some reason locked out of my student account and email and IT was no help as usual, so what is there to do except read a parody romance novel written specifically to spite J.K. Rowling?

Chuck Tingle has more or less become a meme because of his bizarre titles and covers and because of the Hugo fiasco, but I’ve heard relatively little about what it’s like to actually read his work and I frankly have no idea what to expect or if I should go into this with expectations at all

This book is...surprisingly easy to take seriously as a book. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. But it’s like. A Book and not just an extended joke. Like on some level it’s not particularly terribly written nor does the plot like, completely exist in service to the...whatever humor is derived from the self-aware absurdity of the premise

AFSGFBCHH??

I love that he’s not even described as a humanoid dinosaur. He’s just sexy goth tattooed Severus snape and he’s also a parasaurolophus and we are left to just figure it out

I have to talk about what is going on with the worldbuilding. Like this is a parody. Of Harry Potter. But there’s an entirely different magic system and....everything???

In summary

...Warlocks in this world get their powers from a pact with Chuck Tingle

The fourth wall break is killing me.

The sexy dinosaur is also trans

As much as I love skillfully crafted satire that takes deft jabs at the flaws of the thing it’s lampooning, there’s also something charming about how every character in this book has a name blatantly and hilariously derived from a Harry Potter character regardless of how most of their roles in the story barely resemble anything like characters in Harry Potter.

...You know, I’m not even sure Chuck Tingle has read Harry Potter.

I’m back to reading. Does chocolate milk have intoxicating effects on sentient motorcycles??

...sentences I never thought I’d write

chuck tingle’s magic system is unironically better than jk Rowling’s I’m sorry

I’m so sorry to sample the sex scene but. “sexualis secondus” just killed me. I have been pronounced dead by this book. im obliterated this is indescribable

I.

I literally have no idea how to describe what I’m experiencing right now. Like this is a somewhat poorly edited parody adult dinosaur romance novel but. It’s genuinely?? Creative?? In a lot of ways???? And there’s a lot of heart to it, a lot of genuine powerful messages about identity and about art and creativity and the fourth-wall-breaking device is...I can’t explain it because that would spoil it but it’s actually pulled off so well?????

This is not like, a humorous joke story this guy did for Being a Little Shit and Spite reasons, it’s like actually in its themes and message a genuine “fuck you” to j.k. Rowling’s transphobia even though it’s this absolutely wild janky batshit story and I have never experienced anything like this in my LIFE

I did not expect my adhd little heart to be touched by understanding of my fears about creativity and writing and its place in my life. Not like this. What the fuck. What the fuck.

FGDHXWGBKVGSSHBIIDQTVJKBSZVYSTVJKJVBXSGHXHVN

Chuck Tingle is a gift to this world and when the time comes for him to call on his army I will be there with bells on.

But does Bumbleborn say anything CALMLY?

I love how potato in French is pomme de terre, which pretty much means “earth apple.”

like what stupid frenchman saw this:

and said “zis petite légume looks like a, how you say, APPLE! hmmm… but it grows in ze earth… HON HON HON! MAIS OUI! C’EST UNE POMME DE TERRE!”

j'adore comment ananas se dit pineapple en anglais, ce qui veut littéralement dire “pomme de pin”, genre quel type anglais a vu ça:

et s'est dit : “ow cette étrange big fruit ressemble à une, how do you say, POMME! hmmm… mais plutôt une pomme qui pousse dans les pins… HU HU HU! OH YES, IT’S A PINEAPPLE!” (z'avez vu, on peut le faire aussi… hon hon hon!)

We’ve been over this before. Both “apple” and “pomme” originally just meant fruit.

okay but have you ever bitten a raw potato? the texture is EXACTLY like an apple

Choose your house hold appliance

recurring visual brain noise today as I draft a message to my manager about unclear expectations while getting feedback from the giant and online friends: a gaggle of ~8 children seriously pointing at a diagram of a rocket, captioned "me and my autistic friends crafting a work email to my neurotypical boss"

literally have not stopped thinking about this post so i illustrated it

(dont @ me about the rocket design i didnt use a reference because i whipped this out in like 20 minutes while procrastinating on reading a robotics paper)

I would say “tag yourself” to the other people who were in this conversation but I assume we’d all tag ourselves as the one with the cat ears.

I’m the one on the ground with my hand in the air

this but for tinder 

we’ll always have some form of representative governance as management is hard work that most people have no interest in doing.

not necessarily; we could have nonrepresentative governance instead

I’m now obsessed with the idea that Molyneux simply doesn’t go outside enough to have ever seen a marine port before

I like the way a third of the photo is just road.

This tweet is bewildering in so many ways. Like alright, sure, I’m willing to grant that to someone who’s never seen a port like this before, the array of heavy lifting cranes and support girders could seem pretty impressive (for clarification, what’s shown here isn’t even a particularly large port), but even so, I can’t think of a single aspect of this aesthetic that is uniquely scifi. It isn’t even industrial in, like, a cool cyberpunk or steampunk way.

Is Molyneux just that attached to the idea of Asia as an inscrutable futurescape?

if I was feeling incredibly generous I would say that this picture was probably taken from a taxi on the way to somewhere else, and represents a failed attempt to capture a feeling prompted by sights that are not visible in the picture itself.

I’ve had this issue where I go somewhere new and are blown away by the intensity of the sights and the sounds and the people and I take some photos but since I’m terrible behind (and in front) of a camera they utterly fail to capture any of the vibe that I felt at the time.

imagine you’re landing at the old Hong Kong airport and the plane feels like it’s ducking and weaving between neon lit skyscrapers like some Blade Runner bullshit and then you’re finding your way through this unfamiliar city that is packed and loud and potentially very foreign with roast ducks hanging in the shop windows like some Chinatown cliche (because surprise: this whole place is literally Chinatown) and then of course the crazy vertical residential towers packed next to each other like sardines, it’s intense!

and this photo absolutely fails to capture any of that, on the cyberpunk scale this would be 0%, it could literally be a shot of Aberdeen or Liverpool, boo.

love that discourse about whether erotic fanart of Sonic the Hedgehog is legitimate because Sonic is sexually mature or illegitimate as hedgehogs only live 2-5 years and thus he is under 18.

(don’t even ask how old Sonic is).

Sonic erotica is illegitimate because his intellect is so developed that we could not meaningfully consent to sex with him

with the addendum that anyone sufficiently galaxy brained to think of this take is clearly mature enough to get railed by Sonic.

Good news for me!

*rings clatter onto the ground, spelling out OwO*

uh oh we’re part of the problem

delete this

I can't find the post now, but someone (I think @unknought? edit: it was unknought, see replies) posted something about how bookstores have a tendency to divide fiction into two sections - SFF (for the bad science fiction and fantasy), and Fiction (the good SFF, plus all literary fiction regardless of quality).

Was thinking about this today as I browsed a used bookstore in town with a dedicated Queer Books section.

This section did not contain Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, or Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters - all of these were shelved with general literature.

Here's what was shelved in the "Queer Books" section: A bunch of mass-market romance novels; a Dan Savage memoir; polemical books from the 90s about Don't Ask Don't Tell; a handful of esoteric books of queer theory; various YA novels about being gay.

The intention was good, I guess. But this really made me think.

Mentioned elsewhere is that he calls himself a “superforecaster,“ honestly this isn’t that bad compared to some other stuff I was expecting.

“Told” to sack him by the opposition party… with no evidence it’s actually being considered. Maybe I have overexposure to weird ideas and out-of-context quotes, but this is an amazingly weak seeming hit piece. (I may regret saying that if the UK opens up sterilization camps ofc.)

The advert Cummings put out is surreal, starting right away with the Yudkowsky quote at the top

https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/