The Open Thread is a place for open discussion among my readers. Post anything you feel like sharing! From now on, the Open Thread will no longer be monthly. Instead, there will be a new Open Thread whenever it is adequate. The stage is yours. Go ahead!
The latest Open Thread is made ‘sticky’ to improve access.
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I really like the aesthetics of Blue Protocol:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K60yqRLdvU
This is not really my kind of game but if there is no pay-to-win b.s., I could imagine giving it a try when it comes out in the West next year, simply because of how pleasant this game is to look at. System requirements are quite low. Here is an overview of the game:
Is this the same game? I found this clip of a super cute Chinese woman demonstrating motion capture: https://imgur.io/gallery/EDTK3I7
Cell-shading has become a lot more popular in recent years so it is not so easy to identify games by characters. I would have guessed that at least some of the characters in this clip are from Xenoblade Chronicles 2 or Genshin Impact, but as I have not played either of these games, I cannot tell for sure. However, I can say with certainty that this woman is a 10/10. I wonder why she spends her time doing mocap work. Why is she not in front of the camera, starring in games or movies?
Aaron,
Would you say that if a woman who gets tested for STDs once a year is equally as irresponsible as a woman who gets tested every 3 months or so? I’ve known quite a few sluts who claim to be using condoms but are getting tested every 3 months or so, and some get tested the next day after fucking some guy raw. I’ve also met couple of sluts who bang raw but only get tested once a year.
The amount of testing itself raises some red flags. Perhaps it is possible that she i having a more or less vanilla sex life with few partners and using condoms, but testing often because she is so very scared of STDs.
Now, in the real world I have not observed this. Girls who are apprehensive about STD will be veeery choosy about their sex partners to begin with, and very picky about what she does (I recently dated a girl like that. I was only the third guy she ever slept with, and she would not even do a blowjob without a condom on).
Testing very often means most likely that she has not been picky or careful, probably neither. For example, I usually test once a year, for the stuff that can be tested (HIV, Syphillis, Hepatitis, etc) unless there is a particular reason to get tested, if I have been exposed to some risky activity, for example if the condom broke or slid off (hey, shit happens).
I myself am pretty active, for a long time my yearly partner count has been in the double digits, to the point that I get rejected for blood donations (seriously, I am not allowed to donate blood – when you go, first thing you get asked is whats your partner count for the last 12 months, and as soon as I give a number I get rejected). 🙂
I amost never raw dog someone I dont know well, but if I do I will test afterwards. Getting tested the next day actually shows you how ignorant or stupid she is – anything you can contract from unprotected sex has an incubation period, so getting tested right after exposure is useless, you could have it brewing but it wont show up on the tests yet. You should wait at the very least 2 weeks until testing. Some things like HIV (a very low probability event, for sure) can take up to a year to incubate. Not sure about Hep, and I cannot be bothered to google it now (as I am kinda drunk right now lol)
I think that the underlying issue is that those women are whores. It does not matter if she gets tested every two weeks or once a year. In contrast, a chaste woman has no need to get checked for STDs.
Who has seen the documentary about Sylvester Stallone („sly“) on Netflix?
I was not even aware of it. Is Netflix going through all aging Hollywood stars? Quite recently they released a documentary on the life of Arnold Schwarzenegger, titled “Arnold”. I wrote an article on it.
EDIT: Netflix also released the documentaries Beckham, Harry and Meghan, and Stutz. At least these are the ones I found via quick search. “Stutz” is about a Jewish therapist. It is not quite clear why he was deserving of a movie, but Hollywood does not always make rational sense.
Pretending that there aren’t relatively universal standards of attractiveness is one of the dumbest ideas prevalent in western society.
Do people have attractiveness numbers stamped on their foreheads? No. Can relative attractiveness compared to the rest of the cohort be gauged and have a number put on it that says nothing other than ‘this is where a person sits in a room of 100 people’? Absolutely. Pretending it isn’t the case is absurd.
This fan-made concept of a Studio Ghibli-sytle anime of The Legend of Zelda is quite good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFL4qqG9dbw
Link looks somewhat unattractive, though.
Assassin’s Creed Codename Red, the new AC game set in feudal Japan, has two protagonists based on real historical persons for the first time. A black guy and a woman.
This is certainly a product of random chance, as Japanese history was largely formed and moved forward by blacks and women, and not at all a deliberate cherry-picking of historical characters by the studio that proudly announces that its games are made by sexual deviants and racial minorities as you start their games.
I left a comment on this game quite recently. This really is a bizarre choice, and even moreso now that even BlackRock is distancing themselves from ESG. Nonetheless, I hope that Ubisoft will push on. There is a cliff waiting for them to fall off, and it has their name written on it. Speaking of Ubisoft, they have the sequel of the allegedly critically acclaimed game Beyond Good & Evil in the works. It has only taken them over a decade to not produce anything. The director of this game died at the ripe old age of 40, probably due to the vaxx:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/beyond-good-evil-2-creative-director-emile-morel-dies-at-40
Ubisoft still believes in this game. They have probably already handed this franchise to a deserving member of an underrepresented minority.
One of the things I’ve noticed that even if you’re lucky enough to own, it’s not a HOUSE. Usually it’s a condominium. Small “houses” crammed together. Many don’t even have backyards.
A little while back I was looking at a picture of my dad from back in the day in our backyard. Lots of space, a Jacuzzi. I thought to myself, ahhhh that’s what it’s like to be middle class.
Oops. Meant to post this as a reply to Gerd’s comment about Al Bundy and Homer Simpson.
Aaron:
Ah, sorry if I just reproduced something you’ve already written, man. Atm I don’t have as much free time as I used to, so I don’t keep up very well with all the activity here. 🙁
Heh, I’m not surprised that Ubisoft keeps pushing the envelope on how to lose money on diversity. I do hope the company wakes up before it crashes, as they’ve produced good stuff in the past, but I’m not really holding my breath for it. It could go either way.
That’s the sad part about the diversity money pit – it’s easy for any company to just stop doing it. They don’t have to renounce their previous activities or anything, just stop doing it. They’d make more money that way (by ending up with better products).
But they just won’t. An idealistic person might say this is because they truly believe in their causes. A more cynical person might say that they persist in it because that’s the price of admission to the social circles they want to belong to.
Theres civil unrest and protest happening in Spain. Yet, I do not see any future doctors or engineers participating. Many protesters opposed the Spanish government negotiations with the Catalan Separatist Party.
https://www.euronews.com/video/2023/11/08/watch-thousands-of-right-wing-marchers-protest-outside-acting-prime-ministers-madrid-offic
There is significant unrest all over Europe at the moment. The mainstream media tries to pretend these do not happen as many of them are pro-Palestine, which implies that they are against a particular other country. I also know that various tech companies, primarily those that used to promote “diversity, inclusion, and equity”, have serious issues with managing their workforce as pro-Palestine supporters, both Muslims and white liberals, by far outnumber the other side. The joys of working at a diverse company include Jews refusing to work with Moslems, which numerically outnumber them, and the latter complaining to HR about discrimination. I have seen screenshots of internal chat groups that are quite something and adequately reflect the sentiment in the wider public. Highlights include Jews playing the “holocaust survivor” card and people completely ignoring it. Shlomo has yet to come to grips with this situation.
Aaron,
“Jews playing the “holocaust survivor” card…”
1. I’ve been reading on WWII lately. I remember coming across a documentary about a Jewish person who claimed that the Holocaust never happened. The mainstream media on the other hand loves to vilify Hitler. It seems like the Jews love to rewrite history from time to time. From the literature I’ve reading is argues that Hitler was trying to expel all Jews from Germany because they were trying to establish a central banking system and Germany at the time had a thriving economy.
“I also know that various tech companies, primarily those that used to promote “diversity, inclusion, and equity”, have serious issues with managing their workforce..”
2. Where I work at, I’m not so much exposed to this nonsense of diversity. I managed to move up the chain of command to get away from your typical low IQ normie and diversity. But I’ve heard plenty of stories of people complaining how they are oppressed because they are forced to work. We don’t have many issues with diversity at work. People are just to busy caught up on useless gossip – who’s sleeping with you, who’s going out with who…its predominantly Asians and Hispanics, with a few Blacks. Blacks are the worst they bitch about everything and use the race card. And lastly, there’s more faggot in our workforce than when I first started working. This is at the entry level.
I must say as someone who just came back from Vegas, I can definitely see why it’s such a popular place for pickup and why so many companies did/still do their bootcamps there. Place is loaded with easy, hot, targets. Only real downside was the flu I caught while there 🙁
What would be some of the other big cities that compare to Vegas for picking up? Of course, Vegas has the high tourist population at any given time and great club/party scene but hard to think of a place much better for game.
Las Vegas caters to an adult population and it has marketed itself as a city for partying and gambling. The slogan, “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” also helps. Interestingly, this is a deliberate marketing effort:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Happens_Here,_Stays_Here
You can certainly engage in similar kinds of debauchery in popular European tourist destinations. Also, let us not ignore college towns. Granted, to effectively pick up women there, you better be of college-age yourself and if you do not attend college, you will most certainly not do as well as many events will be off-limits to you. On that note, I recall one UK PUA from back in the days who claimed that he was picking up a lot of women in Oxford, as a non-student. This struck me as absurd as there is a very clear “town and gown” distinction, and the people going to college there tend to be rather elitist, so chances of some women who has built an identity around going to Oxford will simply ignore such guys.
Homer Simpson was supposed to be a shlub and Al Bundy was depicted as a total loser, but both had 2 cars and 3 bedroom houses in their 30s.
The housing situation of Homer Simpsons and Al Bundy and their families is an accurate reflection of their time. Today, buying, let alone building, a house is out of reach for almost everyone in their 40s or below. In contrast, a few decades ago this was not at all the case. Today, you require two incomes just to be able to make rent. This is a significant reason behind people just dropping out of the rat race and living off benefits instead. I do not condone this but I understand the motivation. After all, if it is completely unrealistic that you will ever own a home, why bother getting up in the morning to go to work? I wonder if financial engineering has anything to do with the messed up situation we are in.
Mad Magazine once said a rule of sitcoms is the family must live in a house at least ten times as expensive as their income would allow in the real world. Same with Friends (though I happily have never watched it), they all had shit jobs (like barista) yet lived in Manhattan.
A finance Twitter I follow often retweets videos of Millennial and Zoomer women sobbing about how work is hard and how does anyone afford to eat with all this inflation? The same people, of course, crawled over broken glass to vote D on Tuesday, then crowed about defeating white males who wanted to regulate their bodies (the vaccine mandates were different because reasons, and besides, we now know they never happened.)
Also, here’s some sadly prescient satire from 2004:
https://www.theonion.com/national-museum-of-the-middle-class-opens-in-schaumburg-1819567586
Damn that was funny. Museum of the middle class has me laughing already. I accidentally posted this in the wrong thread, but a little bit back I saw an old picture of my dad in the backyard of our house in Orange county. And I remembered what it was like to be middle class. We had lots of space, a Jacuzzi, the works. Today, if your lucky enough to own, it’s some tiny condominium.
On that note. One day I was explaining to a coworker about a head device you can put on a hose to make the water fumigate. She said, “you’ve had a hose?” Christ almighty………
A while ago I bought some gardening equipment from a boomer couple in the neighborhood. They were a bit talkative, so I learned a few things, such as the guy retiring early, with almost a full pension, in his 50s due to a deal between his employer and the government. This was quite common at that time. They also built (!) a new house after their 60th birthday because their old one was too large and did not fit their lifestyle anymore, and in his garage he had an oldtimer as a “fun car”. It was like stepping into an alternate reality, yet again. I know of very few cases among my peers where people built or bought a house. The two I am thinking of include old money in one case, and two well-above average incomes in the other. Besides, even if we ignore the loss of earning power in the recent decades, due to reduced job security it would be doubly risky for a lot of pepole to buy a house.
No idea about Al Bundy, I never watched that show, but I see it ran from 87 to 97 according to wiki. Likewise, the Simpsons began their run in 1987.
I would argue that the way of life these shows depicted was already increasingly not accurate by the time they aired, but they reflected the kind of world that their creators and writers grew up in in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
By then, the women were massively entering the university and the workforce, which leads society to the so called two-income trap. Basically, families get to have two incomes but most of that extra income is captured by other sectors in society, for example most of the wife´s salary goes to paying for daycare, nannies, takeout food or cleaning staff for the home she no longer has the time or energy to clean.
And at the same time, when both partners are working full time, you lose the disposable extra labor force that the stay-at-home spouse (almost always wife) represented in case an emergency came across. For example if the husband lost his job, the wife could go out find a temporary menial job to get through the rough patch, or if elderly parents had to be taken care of she could do it with no need to pay for expensive caregivers of shipping the parents off to a nursing home.
Not sure how much the entry of women into the labor force drove down the salaries of men, I am sure it must have to some degree (more labor supply = lower wages, works with immigrants as well) but at the same time they dont compete with men for a lot of the same jobs. I suspect that this impact is felt much more in the professional white collar class than among blue collars, you dont see all too many females on the construction sites, oil rigs, or factory floors.
One more factor, specific to the US: skyrocketing costs of university education mean you will usually enter the labor force several thousand dollars in debt, so you are not starting from scratch really, you start below zero and have to try and dig yourself out.
Mike Rowe from “Dirty Jobs” often points out that you can make a very decent living if you skip college and go into the trades, assuming you choose well. Several million open job positions go unfilled for years (i remember him mentioning welders as an example) because people waste time and money chasing a degree that will increasingle make little difference in their earning potential (or no difference at all). People underestimate the opportunity cost, thats 4-5 years you are not being productive and cashing checks every month!!
Hey, Alek, if you don’t mind, what’s your current opinion on the best skincare routine?
I think in the past you wrote that sunscreen, adapalene and peptides is the way to go. But I have a couple of questions:
There are many retinoids. Why adapalene and not, for example, tretinoin?
Do you still believe in retinoids? I found your post when you say that retinoids are a waste of time for people who can get HIFU instead. https://blog.aaronsleazy.com/index.php/2023/09/10/sticky-open-thread-312/#comment-152648
I got into skincare thanks to your comments, so far I’m doing sunscreen, tretinoin 0.5%, and vitamin C serum (not actually sure if that one does anything).
Adapelene because it’s over the counter, easy to get, and has much less side effects than tretinoin. It’s like 95% as effective as tretinoin, but 10x less side-effects (or none at all). And from what I’ve learned recently, it also (unlike other retinoids) isn’t broken down by the sun, so it’s not as big of an issue to use it during the day.
Tl;dr = Tretinoin is a pain in the ass for an extra 5% benefits (maybe).
=====
I should have probably qualified that. I meant in the context if you’re in a hurry to get quick results, and my mind was on the idea of using 10 different things to get quicker results, when you can just use hifu pro.
The comment you’re reffering to was was before I arrived at a more minimal 90/10 approach, where you only use a few things and get great results.
– If one can afford Hifu pro, I would do that
– And use the minimal routine until next hifu pro (peptides, retinoid)
P.S In the meantime I discovered one more secret
One of the things that skincare doesn’t do is bring volume back, and some even claim high-energy devices can burn some fat (which you don’t want). So I discovered this looksmaxxing youtuber talking about this thing (volufilline) that does bring volume (facial fat) back. If it does indeed work, that is the missing piece
– Do hifu pro on the areas that are more aged (like eyes, nasolabials)
– Apply Volufilline to bring volume back
– And use a general minimal skincare routine year round (peptides, retinoids)
Volufilline sounds very promising, although half of reviews are “this shit is almost too powerful, be careful” and another half is “this did nothing at all”. I have frown lines which I want to get rid of, I think I might try Volufilline before getting a filler, because apparently fillers in this area are considered high risk
Yeah exactly. I would never do a filler like that, even if the risk is 0.001%; just not worth it.
If Volufilline works, that sounds good. I did look up the studies (you can ask bard), and it does seem to work in studies. So at least the “doesn’t do anything” part shouldn’t be true. As for “does too much”, don’t know what to think of it. Maybe we have to wait until it gets more popular and more people have established how much to put under eyes.
We’ve talked here before about how 4 year universities in the US are mostly a scam. But it’s even worse than you think. Here in California it’s well known that the vast majority of people drop out in the first couple of weeks. Not kidding. You can set your clock by it.
The first two weeks you CAN NOT find parking. Anywhere. You drive up and down the parking structures. Nothing. I resorted to trying to find parking at the dorms. Even those filled up illegally. People parked in spots that weren’t even parking spots. Cars wait at the entrance for students returning from class to give them a ride to their car so they can get their spot. I almost ran out of gas looking for a spot one time. It’s madness.
You have to get there an hour ahead of time to land a spot. But only for the first two weeks. I remember freaking about it when I first started. My sister assured me it only lasts 2 weeks. I didn’t believe her. But she was right, after the first 2 weeks you can find parking any damn place you please. It happens every time. But this was many moons ago. Hopefully things have changed. If it’s the same all of those parking structures are yet more American university waste.
That’s true for universities everywhere I think. On the first 2 weeks of classes there are literally not even enough places to sit, so people have to sit on the floor and lean against walls.