SatanicNotMessianic

The fact that there’s not an easily defined name for it should tell you something.

The long and short of it is that emasculation is what happens when people think someone isn’t acting enough like “a man,” or is stopping someone from doing so.

In women, it’s generally acting too much like a man. Getting called “shrill” or “aggressive” is something that frequently brought against women who take an assertive role. I’ve also seen women who were in senior positions asked to take notes during a meeting, as if they were a personal assistant rather than a manager.

Emasculation is treating a man as less than a man. As if he were a woman. The equivalent for a woman is treating her like society has traditionally treated a woman. Our current best word for that is probably “misogyny,” but we can unfortunately also go with “normal.”

This is revisionist heresy. Gary Gygax, who is expected to be cannonized via a trebuchet in the next couple of years, explicitly said that the official books are more like guidelines than actual rules.

And I mean that I actually had beverages with Gary at a science fiction convention back in the early 90s, and he said stuff like “If you want to pack a healing kit that heals +5 damage, do it.” Being serious now, it’s about the story, not the rules. I know that’s the point of the joke, but it’s been almost 50 years now and people we are still arguing about rules lawyers.

I always thought the White Wolf games that called the DM the Storyteller and explicitly made dice rolls optional were the apex of the interactive story idea.

I love TES. I played so much Daggerfall that I almost failed out of my undergrad program, and that was one of the most bug-filled games I ever played. I loved Morrowind and I very much got into the lore by playing underclass characters with a chip on their shoulder. I didn’t like the console-inspired simplifications in Oblivion, but again I eventually let that go and got into the game. That goes double for Skyrim. With each release, Bethesda simplified the game and removed functionality that really added to my enjoyment, but I still ended up logging uncountable hours into the games. There’s 2080 hours in a work-year, and I’ve probably spent at least a few of those on Bethesda games, with about half going into TES.

That said, I am waiting on this one. I’ve mostly moved over to playing PC games on the steam deck, and I’ve heard nothing great about that. More than that, it looks like this one whipped with much less functionality than it should have had. Again, that’s typical of Bethesda, but I have too big of a backlog to worry about paying to be their beta tester. They can fix bugs while I finish BG 3 and Stray, and if it looks good at that point I’ll dive in.

I’m at a point in my life where spending $50 or $100 on a game isn’t a tough decision, and I’ve even had to become comfortable with the fact that, even having done that, I might never fire it up. That’s one reason I bought the deck, actually. But I’m not at the point that I’m going to buy a game that I know I’ll find unplayable (by my current standards) just to be one of the multiple millions of people who get to see it “first.”

I only check bags, for the exact same reason. I realized that some of my biggest stressors in traveling were getting everything to fit on a carryon-plus-backpack, and worrying about getting room in the overhead compartment. I’d rather stand around a carousel for fifteen minutes before walking to grab an uber than have to deal with that. I did the opposite for many years while business traveling on multiple flights weekly, and I just got tired of it. Different people have different tolerances for different things.

I do have to say that, after hundreds of flights, I had my bags lost exactly once. Fortunately it was on a flight home, so other than having to wait at the airport until midnight when they finally acknowledged they lost my suitcase, and having to receive my suitcase two days later at 10 pm from a sketchy guy in an unmarked white van that the airline sent out, it was okay. In that time, I’ve had two or three colleagues have their bags go missing on the way to a meeting /conference, and that’s with the combinatorial aspect to the problem. It’s a pain, but you wind up with a story and a new outfit, and most people you’re meeting with will understand the issue.

I think this is a great question. I’m going to take a stab at it. I’m also going to talk about it in the US, as I’m less familiar with other English speaking countries’ town names and am not at all familiar with the way other cultures name their towns.

First, a lot of US place names come from local indigenous culture. Indigenous languages have a lot of variability. I’m pretty sure every state has them, and the names will vary based on the local languages. Many of the state names have similar origins as well.

Second, many towns were named after people - either for the founders or for a notable person. The US Census Bureau estimates there’s about 150,000 common last names in the US, and only about 5100 common first names. Because towns named after people tend to use their family name (although it might be cool to live in a town named Steve), they’re drawing from a much larger pool than the first names.

Third, and related to that, last names stick around longer. First names go through fashions. Every generation has its own trendy names, which further reduces variability for the population at any given time. There aren’t a lot of girls getting named Elenor or Eunice these days, I’d suspect. We tend to mostly know people around our own age, give or take a decade or so, and therefore the number of first names you tend to encounter in your social circles will be small. Couple that with the fact that people living in culturally homogenous areas are very unlikely to run into a lot of foreign first names. I think your chances of being friends with a Puneet or a Rupak are fairly small if you’re from a small midwestern town, versus James or Scott.

So, basically, I hypothesize that it’s because they’re sourced and sampled differently.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind getting a notification when my washer is done. If I’m doing too many things at once, I can forget that I had laundry going and it ends up sitting there until it gets musty and needs a re-wash.

That said, I did disconnect my smart tv from the internet when I found out it was sending data, including captured ambient audio, to the tv manufacturer. I just use an apple tv. I know that I’m still populating data for each of my streaming services, but the tv manufacturer has no need for my watching habits, much less people talking in my living room.

The one that I’ve never figured out was the refrigerator that connects to twitter.

That makes sense. When I think “football,” the anatomical part that first comes to mind is “torso.”

Maybe all of the good representations of feet and balls were already taken.

Weren’t they also weapons smugglers? He talked about him and his dad flying with a plane load of contraband including AK-47s.

DARVO (deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender).

Edmund, Lord Blackadder, is hatching a scheme.

Yes, absolutely they should have rights.

In some countries (like France, iirc), chimps are recognized as having civil rights. They don’t have identical rights to humans of course. They don’t have the same rights as a human, but they are recognized as having rights as individuals.

Although the US hasn’t recognized that, yet, it has effectively banned chimpanzee research. You basically cannot get funded for chimpanzee research unless you a) demonstrate they are necessary for the research and b) you pass a review board similar to a human subjects review board who are charged with maintaining ethical research standards. I don’t do primate research, so I’m not sure of all of the details, but with human subjects boards you have to show that not only does your research. avoid harming humans, the subjects themselves must benefit from your work, if it is health related. When the new rules were passed, most research chimps were retired to preserves

So if there was a l other animal with fully human intelligence, there’s legal precedent to recognize that they have inherent dignity and rights.

I would think American leadership completely dysfunctional if they allowed that situation to occur. If they did not have enough command authority to trust that the US military wouldn’t confront Prince with immediate and overwhelming force when ordered, the US would be a laughingstock. The scenario is borderline unimaginable in a developed country with anything resembling a modern political infrastructure.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Russia. I was originally trained as a Sovietologist, when that was still a thing you could be an -ologist of. I could talk for hours about strategic weapons systems and Russian prep for NBC warfare and what the politics in the Kremlin were like under the troika approach and why the fascistic tendencies of Putin in rejecting Russian political history in favor of personal enrichment and plundering the nation have irrevocably broken Russian politics.

But that’s for another day. Putin responded the way dictators in developing nations do, not like someone who actually has command and control over their modern military forces. I mean, it’s a Russian tradition to threaten the families of people who publicly disagree with leadership. In the US, the forces brought to bear against Blackwater’s attempted putsch would have been so overwhelming that his own men would have arrested him. But as much as I hate Blackwater and think Prince should probably be in prison for war crimes, their cadre was recruited from a different class of people than Wagner.