Enough to block the instance now. (I’m so glad Lemmy provides that to users now!)

Personally I’ll embrace the technology by putting tire puncturing strips all over the place.

OK, so I did a bit of research (as is my obsessive self’s wont) and can answer for “gender”.

Our modern understanding of sexual matters is far more subtle and nuanced than the old-fashioned notions most of us grew up with¹. What follows is a simplified take on things. The reality is more complicated and has many more axes than I’m highlighting.

At the lay level you can think of there being three axes of sex-related issues:

1. Sex. This is whether you’re dangling wedding tackle or not. Your physical sexual characteristics.
2. Orientation. This is the sex (or, more broadly, gender for which q.v.) you are attracted to for sexual activity.
3. Gender. This is the mental model you have of which sex you are.

Gender is in most cases oriented to match your sex (cisgender) and in opposition to your orientation (heterosexual). Because, however, the body, and various parts of the brain grow at different times, it’s possible for these three axes to differ due to hormonal differences in the mother’s body (external factors) or to activated genetic influences (a mix of external and internal factors). If one of these factors activates at one point in development, the part of the brain that regulates sexual desire flips the switch and your orientation is different². If one of them activates at another point in development, the part of the brain that models your internal view of your sex flips and you now have that thing called “gender dysphoria”.

And after literally centuries of trying to “fix” people with gender dysphoria through abuse, through religious counselling (c.f. “abuse”), and through therapy, it’s pretty much well-established that gender dysphoria has no talking (nor abusive) “solution”. Thus the kindest thing to do is to let people whose gender doesn’t match their physical sex to present the gender they feel themselves to be by behaviour, manner of dress, and ultimately, as far as is practical, physically. Anything else is abusive and cruel.

Note, again, I stress this is the very simplified model, and it’s filtered through my inexpert, non-practitioner understanding of things. (I’m open to correction by those with actual expertise in the field, obviously!) As such it doesn’t address the huge forest of orientations (which I alluded to in the footnote below), it doesn’t address intersex issues, and it doesn’t address gender issues like the “non-binary”. And indeed I don’t, to cite Orwell again, “bellyfeel” gender dysphoria, enbies, aces, etc. … but in the end it doesn’t fucking matter. There is literally zero impact on me if someone wants to call themselves “non-binary” or “trans” or “ace” or whatever. So even if I don’t “get” it, what I do “get” is that these people are profoundly unhappy in the circumstances they find themselves in and if transitioning helps them, all the fucking power in the world to them!

¹ Why “most of us”? Because there are cultures out there that have more nuanced models than the strict binary. Look up terms like “hijra” for the Indian sub-continent, the role of eunuchs, M→F gender-swapping actors, and F→M cross-dressing characters in heroic lore in ancient China, the กะเทย/kathoey of Thailand, the whole allure of “fox spirits” all over the east Asian sphere, the “two-spirit” peoples of North American natives, etc.

² For instance that part of my brain flipped me to a “2” on the old-timey Kinsey scale (nominally heterosexual), though on more modern classifications that the kiddies would use I’d be a het-leaning pansexual.

I think anything that I could say on this subject has already been said with far greater clarity by Orwell. Should that not be enough, or if you’d like it worded in a more punchy way, Northrop Frye has got you covered.

I’m confused. You say it’s non-political for left and right, then you name two right-wing parties.

I’m kinda partial to this vibe for my games:

Or this vibe:

As stated by other people here, the first rule is simple:

1. Do not accept outside investment. Ever. Plan your business through organic growth, not through investors.

But aside from that, there are other things to consider.

2. Inspect your incentives. Enshittification is the inevitable outcome of perverse incentives. This means don’t pay anybody based on share performance in any form, for example: there’s too many ways to briefly boost share values in ways that can be gamed. (This is true whether the company is private or public.) Pay by performance, yes, but make sure that you’re measuring real performance, not short-term hits that cause long-term pain.

3. Foster a culture of equality. Don’t be an arrogant asshole that says “I’m the boss, so I’m smarter than you”. The people who do the actual work for you often know far more than you do about the fine details of the company’s operations; listen to them with an open mind and set aside your ego. They may save your company. As an example of this, I told my boss back in 2021 that we needed to stop taking American clients. He listened to my (counter-intuitive) advice and did a modified thing of what I’d recommended. We kept the ones we had, but we simply stopped taking new American business and instead branched out into other countries. I think that has made us more competitive in our little niche now that the USA has become a toxic shithole that other companies are joining us in avoiding: we already have relationships in the countries they’d avoided.)

4. Develop a fine touch for management. Some people need close management (usually junior people): make sure you provide it to them. Some people need a light touch in management: back off and let them work independently, just monitor their progress and offer minor course correction here and there. Some people need micromanagement: let them go (humanely) because this is not a fit for their talents. In the end management is a people skill, not a technical one. If you lack people skills, hire a manager who has them; don’t try it yourself.

5. In any conflict between your employees and a customer, consider carefully: one customer who is unhappy will badmouth you to a few friends. One employee who is unhappy will generate a dozen or more unhappy customers. If you throw your employee under the bus in such a conflict, you will have an unhappy employee (or more than one!). If the employee is in the right, support them. If the employee is in the wrong, guide them. Don’t throw them under the bus.

6. Related: remember that you can (and should!) fire some customers. There are customers who will generate nothing but horrible drama for your company; drop them. Send them to your competition if they’re really bad and you hate your competition enough. Personal anecdote time again: we had a customer who felt that by paying us he was entitled to micromanage every step of our process. He was constantly calling in and demanding people drop work to cater to him. Finally our department manager compiled a document that listed each time he’d done that in the past 30 days, estimated the direct cost in time and the indirect cost in lost productivity attributable to his behaviour. It outweighed (by far!) the amount of money he was bringing in. My then-boss called him up on the phone and told him that we would not be continuing in the contract; that he could take his business elsewhere. (Weirdly enough the people who’d been hounded by this asshole were extremely loyal to said boss later when business took a downturn.)

7. Never, ever, drop the “we’re a family” line. No business is your family and attempts to make it a family are just plain-old abuse. Your business is a place of employment. The people you hire have their own lives outside that business with their own family, their own friends, and their own time. Do not try to encroach on that space for cynical purposes like getting unpaid labour out of them. It may work in the short term, but it leads to burnout, embitterment, and backlash. As soon as I see “we’re a family” in business, these days, I start looking for another job.

8. Related: don’t ever demand free labour. Either hire enough people to do the work, or pay the overtime. I did marketing for a software company in Ottawa and watched as they sucked the life out of their developers by not only forcing overtime, but having that overtime be caused by the developers having to do mindless, bureaucratic make-work like scheduling their own meeting spaces and times, making their own copies, etc. (They had developers being paid in high five figures standing in front of seriously intimidating copying machines and trying to figure them out instead of having someone paid in low five figures doing the work for them expertly.) For the cost of a single person paid in low five figures they could have freed the developers to do the work they’re actually there to perform all within the span of an ordinary workday. Instead they did the “penny wise, pound foolish” thing of grinding their developers into hamburger, burning them out, and losing them. Pay for your excess labour or, even better, run your business intelligently so that you don’t have to!

This is the response I was going to make.

If you accept outside money, you will enshittify. There is no exception to this rule. Externally-funded companies are in one of two states: in the process of enshittifying or enshittified.

Make your business with an eye toward self-sustenance. If you accept outside ownership your business is gone.

Yes. “Creations.” That’s what I would call AI (=Always Incorrect) music. A “creation”. Not “a bunch of talentless twits feigning being artists”.

Equilibrium was underrated. I liked it much better than The Matrix (which felt like some pretty shallow people trying to be deep while rehashing SF themes dating back to about the time I was born). I mean Equilibrium wasn’t especially original either (part Brave New World, part 1984, and part Fahrenheit 451) but it didn’t try to pretend to be deeper than it really was.

Drag Me To Hell was good fun.

Love Never Dies … I … it never grabbed me. Musically it was weak, IMO, which is fatal for, you know, a musical. (Same for that Rocky Horror Picture Show sequel Shock Therapy.)

Dog Soldiers was very good indeed; I should probably watch it again.

The rest are either things I’ve never heard of, or things I’ve heard of but am not interested in.

And again you missed entirely the elephant in the room that I’ve pointed out five times.

I’m out of here. Don’t bring this fucking white boy “well akschually!” catnip topic into my mentions again, please.

There’s a key word: invariably. It’s a staggering coincidence that EVERY FUCKING TIME the policies hit visible minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ community.

EVERY FUCKING TIME.

If I picked up a gun and pretended to fire randomly and happened to hit a bullseye each time you’d likely suspect I’m aiming for the bullseye. Yet for some reason when the bullet hits visible minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ community EVERY FUCKING TIME you think it’s firing randomly.

That’s my point.

This is not an accident. After literally hundreds of times the bullet hitting the bullseye you still think the aim wasn’t to hit that bullseye. Because you aren’t the target. You can afford to pretend it’s all happenstance and a side effect of some other factor, treating this as a harmless little intellectual exercise. But those of us with that bullseye painted on us? We can’t afford that shit. Because the bullets keep ripping into us left, right, and centre while, mysteriously, the white, middle class left in particular pretends there’s nothing to see here. (And the right just continues being the blind man shooting at the world … and somehow having the bullets repeatedly strike the body politic of visible minorities, women, and the LGBQT+ community.)

The cruelty is very much the point. The cruelty is how they intend to control those they don’t approve of. You just can’t see it because you’re not the target of it.

And I’m out of this conversation. I’m oh-so-fucking-weary of talking to the dispassionate observers tut-tutting from the sideline.

Again you utterly fail to address the point I’ve repeated at least four times now.

Please come back when you’re willing to address the elephant in the room I keep pointing to. Until then I’m not going to bother responding because you are not listening.

I’m so absolutely and thoroughly weary of the detached attitude of those who are in no way meaningfully impacted by the policies in question and who can thus treat it as an intellectual exercise where it’s mere symbol manipulation.

It’s easy to remove race and sex from things when you’re not in the group that’s taking it in the neck.

The Tulsa Race Massacre wasn’t done by people performing “gross and abusive amassing of wealth”. It was done by ordinary white folk who didn’t like black folk enriching themselves in Greenwood (the so-called “Black Wall Street”). Again the cruelty was the point. It was specifically used to destroy hope for black folk. You can pontificate all day about the “real point” but at the end of the day all these “real points” are directed at specific people and cause cruel suffering to those specific people.

When does the pattern click for you?

Again, I say “by their fruits shall ye know them”.

There is always an excuse. There is always a reason. But it’s a staggering coincidence that these excuses and reasons are almost invariably pointed at and/or applied to subgroups who are not in favour: visible minorities, women, LGBTQ+, etc. Where are the policies that accidentally hurt, say, white men? Where are the policies that accidentally inconvenience wealthy people?

No, sorry, I don’t believe in that much coincidence. I know they don’t use the language of hurting visible minorities, women, the queer community, etc. but it completely beggars belief that they don’t a) know what the impact is, and b) want that very impact.

But again, what do I know? I’m just someone with skin in the game. I guess I should defer to the white dude who is my better because he has the clearer view from his purely theoretical stance.

Blade predates Vampire: The Masquerade by almost 20 years. V:TM was 1991. Blade was introduced in 1973. The iconic look of Blade was firmly established by the time V:TM was published; it’s far more likely that V:TM was at least partially influenced by Blade than vice versa.

The hierarchy of vampires also predates V:TM. Underworld came after, but the foundations of vampiric society were laid at the very least in Anne Rice’s œvre (the “Vampire Chronicles”) beginning, again, in the '70s. 1976 to be precise. And while Rein-Hagen claims (and I believe him) that he deliberately didn’t read Anne Rice until late in the development of V:TM, he also acknowledges that the vampire movies whose look he was borrowing from were likely very strongly influenced by Rice.

As was Underworld.

I think the “Grumpy Wizard” is grossly overstating the influence of RPGs on popular culture.

• Lynching.
• Jim Crow laws.
• Any “tough on crime” bills that seem to always wind up aimed mostly at black and Hispanic people. (Quite by “coincidence” I’m sure!)
• Any anti-terrorism laws that always seem to sweep up “terrorist speech” of minorities (esp. “Muslims”) yet somehow completely misses the terrorist speech of actual white terrorists who then proceed to do mass shootings (of minorities, natch!) or who blow up federal buildings.
• “War on Drugs” laws that seem to always go after the crack users, but hardly ever apply to the coke heads in Wall Street (or in fucking Congress for that matter!); laws that throw black and Hispanic people into jail (often for life after the “tough on crime” bills nail them for “three strikes”) while barely slapping the hand of middle-class suburban white dudes who are doing exactly the same thing: smoking a bit of weed.

Oh, and, naturally, of course:

• every single fucking time an old white dude decides to legislate a woman’s uterus.

“By their fruits shall ye know them,” as the Bible says. You can claim that every one of this (very small sample) list of policies and laws has a “real point” … yet that real point is almost always held to the throat of an out group. Women are too uppity for the modern conservative, so practical biological enslavement is introduced. Not to stop termination of unwanted pregnancies (sex education has been proven time and time and time again to be far more effective at this!, not to mention that the support for the life of the child ends the moment the baby pops out of the mother…), but to keep women where “they belong”: under the thumb of powerful white men. You can claim that all the crime and drug bills are aimed at reducing crime, but the numbers show that these are quite thoroughly debunked as a way of actually reducing crime, and they also show that they’re disproportionately aimed at minorities that, get this, conservative assholes hate, even if the laws’ wording is “neutral”. We’ve seen the “real point” of all these laws and many more, and it points not to “law and order” as the real goal, but rather the control of out-group people through terror. The cruelty is, in fact, the actual point.

It’s all very nice for a white dude to sit there, look at the wording, and treat this as an intellectual exercise. White brodudes hardly ever feel the consequences of these nice intellectual puzzles, after all. Their skin isn’t in the game. “The law’s wording doesn’t reference hatred of minorities or of women, so it must have another point.” But those of us who get that point shoved deep into our body politic while watching it completely bypass white folk and especially white men get the intended message: “fear us and don’t step out of line”.

The cruelty is the point.

I quit my job (working marketing for a tech firm) and then-career in very late 1999 without any parachute or soft landing zone. I just couldn’t pedal lies for a living any longer and had to get out. I then spent a year burning through my (stock-option inflated) savings as I thought about what I could do instead.

In early 2001 I made my choice. I would sell almost everything I owned, I would burn all my career bridges behind me, and I would go to China to teach “for a year or two” and get in touch with half of my family roots. EVERYBODY thought I was crazy making that choice, and my mother in particular was frantic because she’d spent her youth trying to escape China.

I’m now in my 23rd year of my stay “for a year or two”, 16 of which I spent teaching before stepping back into marketing for a firm run by a guy I love working for. (Officially on paper I’m his PA, but in reality I’m the de facto head of market research for our little consulting firm.)

That’s two major career changes, one at age 36, and one at age 52, that I’ve made in my life after leaving school. And in that first one I not only left without a safety net, I’d also very carefully burned all my career options behind me just to make sure that I didn’t get tempted to go back to working in Hell.

So congratulations! You did what I did, only with even MORE guts involved. Kudos!

“Real point” sounds very … “no true Scotsman”-ish. It sounds like the kind of diversion you use which can be applied to literally every situation. It sounds, in fact, very similar to the COVID-19 deniers saying “they didn’t die of COVID-19, they died with COVID-19”. It’s intrinsically impossible to prove after the fact and is thus a perfect diversion.

When the “real point” from a body of people seems to always, with almost no exception, include cruelty to some target—doubly so when it’s always the same target!—that whole “real point” thing starts to wear thin. It sounds very much like a diversion of a particularly ugly sort: the kind of diversion that people with no skin in the game make while treating human lives as just a data point in an intellectual exercise.

Is my language strong here? Yes. Because I’m in several of the fucking target demographics of much of the “not the real point” cruelty: female, (half-)Asian, and bi. It’s not some hypothetical mental exercise for me when I see one policy after another whose “real point” seems to always be aimed “by coincidence” at me and mine. At women. At visible minorities (Asians—especially the perceived-Chinese—in my case). At the queer community. And I can’t help but be amazed at how these “real points” always seem to have one of a small set of sub-groups in the cross-hairs. But it’s all by coincidence, of course.

The cruelty isn’t the point. It’s just coincidentally always the outcome. Aimed at the same targets. Of course.

Oh, every epithet gets misapplied. “Misgendering is literally violence!” “<insert person mildly conservative> is a literal Nazi!” “<insert ever so slightly social policy> is literally communism!” It is not even slightly surprising to hear that people are misusing “the cruelty is the point”.