This month, the ace journal club discussed an article about gender detachment.  And I wrote an article on the game design of my game.

Epstein Files Reveal How Pathetic Richard Dawkins & Other Men Are | Rebecca Watson (video + transcript, 27 min) – I get readers from outside FTB who have little background with the skeptical and atheist movements, and who don’t get what that means for us.  Here it is.  This is where we came from.  This is what we rejected.  These pathetic thought leaders who were enraged by a woman speaking, and turned around to seek bad advice from then-convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.  First we wanted better, and then eventually we just wanted out.

The Fascists are Lying about ICE Murdering an Innocent Women | Rebecca Watson (video + transcript, 27 min) – Another cathartic video from Rebecca, also featuring a cameo from Michael Shermer.  Fun fact: Michael Shermer got me into the skeptical movement, and fun fact two: he’s a terrible person.

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This month, the ace journal club discussed a quoiromantic manifesto, translated from Japanese!  Probably not the easiest read if you don’t have prior familiarity, but we thought it was great stuff.

The World of Pride and Prejudice is Not the World of Purity Culture | Tell Me Why the World is Weird – Christian purity culture frames itself as a continuation of centuries-old practice, but if you look back at history there are many differences.  This is a pretty insightful look at the idiosyncrasies of purity culture, by way of comparison to Jane Austen’s famous 1813 novel.

Exposing a $10,000,000,000 Debt Industry | Coffeezilla (video, 16 min) – Hey, I know a bit about the debt settlement industry.  When someone is having trouble with debt, a debt settlement company will offer to step in between the lender and debtor, and negotiate to pay only a fraction of the debt (maybe about half).  In return, the debt settlement company takes a cut.  It ruins your credit score, but could in theory reduce your debt.  But I wasn’t familiar with the abuses and scams in the industry.  That’s something that should be pursued by the consumer financial protection bureau (CFPB) as a violation of UDAAP oh wait

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Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger Episode 1-4 | Video, 2 hours, via – An old television show, talking about the interpretation of European painting.  Episode 1 talks about the mistique placed on traditional art, episode 2 is tropes vs women in oil painting, episode 3 talks about the function of art as a class signifier, and episode 4 compares the tradition of oil painting to the modern tradition of advertisement.  Pretty fun and insightful.

What struck me was that for all the cultural reverence placed on traditional oil painting, we (as in the general public) have a fairly poor understanding of where it came from, and how its original context made it the way that it is.  And yet the origin is precisely what makes those paintings valuable in the first place.  So what does that say about art?  Do we value origin stories, or do we not?

How Dan Trachtenberg Built a Grand Unified Theory of Predator | Second Wind (video, 50 min) – I knew absolutely nothing about Predator before, so I learned a lot!  Darren Mooney discusses how it’s basically a slasher film where most of the victims are manly men, and also basically Vietnam soldiers.  I had no idea that this horror series I was barely aware of had such commentary on masculinity, and now I’m glad I don’t have to watch them to learn about it.

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I’m later than usual with this link roundup.  Not apologizing, just observing.

Last month, on The Asexual Agenda, I published “From definitions to motivations“, which argues the importance of explaining the motivations for why people identify the way they do.

The Ace Community Survey also published its report on the 2024 survey.

Why TERFs don’t like Asexuals either: An Analysis | venatrixlunaris – In case you didn’t know, TERFs are quite consistently anti-ace too, reusing a lot of the same arguments they use against trans people.  This post includes an extensive collection of examples of TERF/GC comments about asexuality.  I do not recommend reading any more examples than you have to to get the point.  If you ever wonder, “What are asexuals fighting for?” one answer is simply trans rights.  Trans solidarity is important.

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My video game, Moon Garden Optimizer, just released a demo on Steam.  If you’ve already tried previous versions, it’s not new.  Otherwise… try it!  Looking forward to a full release soon.

The Ace Journal Club this month talked about global ace solidarity.  It’s a very good discussion of how queer activists around the world can support each other, as well as the specter of cultural imperialism.  Great article, although maybe I’m biased because the article praises a blog series that I ran ten years ago.

The Many Schools of the Rationality Debate | A Failure to Disagree – This article discusses several different stances in the “rationality debate” in psychology.  There’s the classical view of decision-making that assumes people are following economic decision theory.  Then there’s the idea that people follow heuristics which cause them to be biased.  There’s the “Fast and Frugal” view which points out that heuristics are often rational.  It is rationally incorrect to calculate the exact trajectory of a ball in order to catch it; you’ve already failed to catch the ball at that point.  The author advocates a fourth school of thought, which is based more on empirical study of how experts really make decisions.

For all that skeptics have discussed rationality and tried to advocate good epistemological practices, they largely stopped at the heuristics and biases viewpoint.  Nobody ever talked about computational costs or its implications on best epistemological practices.

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My PC is out of commission right now, so no origami this month.  Still got a handful of links.

Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults | Ozy Brennan – When we talk about Rationalist cults, no we’re not describing Rationalism itself as a cult, we’re talking about specific groups of people with isolationist and dysfunctional social dynamics.  Such as the Zizians, a trans vegan cult that recently murdered a landlord.  Ozy interviews former members to get a sense of what they were like and where they went wrong.

Many of the cults seem to have had a practice of exhausting multi-hour sessions, where they would read far too deeply into minor domestic behaviors.  That… really reminds me of Barefoot Bum’s description of the Kerista Commune (the cult known for coining “polyfidelity”).  It was not a Rationalist group at all, but had institutionalized a very similar practice.

Videogame politics for a burning world | Unwinnable – An interview with Ajay Singh Chaudhary, who offers an interesting perspective on climate change.  He frames climate change not as a future apocalypse, but rather as a thing that is happening right now–“all the things you hate about the present getting worse and then being stuck that way”.  Since this is a video game periodical, the latter half of the interview turns towards video games, and their role in climate change.  We have to ask, is the extravagance of large commercial video games necessary?

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