FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
43m ago
I'd also argue they are in many such cases willfully entering a predominantly male subculture in order to increase their mating chances due to themselves not being able to find eligible mates the conventional way for whatever reason.
Oh yeah, this is a valid point. Big fish in a small pond.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
50m ago
For clarity, I don't think there's any intrinsic correlation between being (un)attractive and being the specific kind of funny necessary to be a successful standup comedian. My argument is that the only people who become successful standup comedians are people who are not unusually physically attractive, which doesn't imply that being unattractive in itself confers some kind of competitive advantage. Physical unattractiveness is necessary but not sufficient for a successful career in standup.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
There is no actual “Harvard undergrad in writing, Princeton PhD in comedy studies” comedian
Well, yes, I don't think there are any successful standup comedians who received formal university training in comedy. But it isn't remotely difficult to find examples of intelligent, university-educated comedians (whether comic actors or standups):
- Monty Python: Three members of the troupe studied at Cambridge (variously studying medicine, law and English literature), two studied at Oxford (studying English literature and history), and the sixth had a degree in political science from Occidental College.
- Fry and Laurie: Stephen Fry was offered a scholarship at Cambridge and studied English lit, where he met Hugh Laurie, who was studying archaeology and anthropology.
- Conan O'Brien graduated Harvard magna cum laude with a degree in history and literature.
- John Mulaney earned a BA in English lit from Georgetown.
- Mitchell and Webb: Like Fry and Laurie, they met at Cambridge, where Mitchell studied history and Webb studied English.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
This reminded me of something, and I realised that I once got a scolding here about how a joke that I told literally didn't qualify as a joke, per five criteria the commenter meticulously outlined in detail. Not just that my joke wasn't funny, or was offensive, or didn't make him laugh (which would be fine): that it literally didn't meet the prerequisite criteria to be considered a joke. So as not to embarrass him, I won't tag the user in question.
I'm also reminded of a commenter I saw on the /r/ireland subreddit who was complaining about other users criticising TV shows they didn't like, and saying their opinions didn't mean anything because they weren't qualified. I couldn't believe what I was reading. Are you seriously suggesting you need a BA in television studies before you're allowed to say "I didn't enjoy this show"?
I have a slightly more nuanced take on this, but I didn't sleep very well last night so it might come out a little disorganised.
It's emphatically not the case that women aren't funny. My current favourite standup comedian is Jordan Jensen, who I discovered via clips she shares on Instagram. When I saw her live, I could hardly breathe from laughing so hard.
Click on the link in the paragraph above. If you're a heterosexual man (as are most of the people who post here), I'm betting you didn't look at her picture and think "would". And indeed, Jensen constantly cracks self-deprecating jokes about her appearance, complains about how often she's mistaken for a lesbian, how she envies women who are more naturally feminine than she is, and how in many regards she's more masculine than the man she dates. She's also rib-crackingly hilarious. I posit that this is not an accident.
So it's not the case that women generally aren't funny. It is absolutely the case that hot women generally aren't funny.
The reason for this was cleverly illustrated by an old CollegeHumor sketch, "POV: Hot Girl". The titular character goes to a bar and meets a male childhood friend and two of his friends, one of them asks where she works, and she replies "I work for a PR firm. It's a living!", whereupon all three men laugh uproariously. We hear her internal monologue: "I should seriously consider doing standup comedy". The joke, obviously, is that the men aren't laughing at her lame joke because it's funny, but because they want to get in her pants. In social settings, hot women essentially never receive accurate feedback on which of their jokes are landing and which aren't, as people will laugh at their jokes for reasons unrelated to their comedic value ("boys will laugh at girls when they're not funny"), meaning attractive women never get opportunities to hone their comedic craft. In the tiny pool of female standup comedians successful enough to make a living off it, there are essentially zero lookers, despite physical attractiveness generally being considered an asset in the entertainment industry. (Amy Schumer isn't turning any heads even post-Ozempic.)
I know what you're going to say – sure, straight men have ulterior motives for laughing at a hot woman's unfunny jokes, but straight women don't, so hot women must still be receiving some accurate feedback on which material works and which doesn't. But I suspect the halo effect has a lot to answer for here, and in much the same way that attractive waitresses receive more tips even from other women, I imagine a straight woman might well laugh at an unfunny joke told by her hot friend. Women are also more conformist than men: if Plain Jane is at a party, Sexy Stacy tells an unfunny joke, and all the straight men in her vicinity laugh – Jane might well laugh along for the sake of fitting in.
But the more I think about it, I think the dynamic I'm describing might be even broader than this. When I saw Jordan Jensen live, there were two support acts prior to her. The second one was a short weaselly Jew (whose name escapes me), who was pretty funny. The first was a six-foot tall jock who looked like a J. Crew model, and he was hopeless.
Think about the most successful male standups in history. I daresay you will be hard pressed to find one that would be considered unequivocally handsome in strictly physical terms. (Shane Gillis himself is no head-turning beauty.) Louis CK, Dylan Moran, Patton Oswalt, Danny DeVito, Woody Allen, Rodney Dangerfield, Eddie "Suzy" Izzard, Mitch Hedberg, Bill Burr, Bill Hicks, Jerry Seinfeld, George Carlin – I could go on, but I think my point is abundantly clear (especially given how many of these comics' routines feature bits in which they vent about the frustrations of being sexually undesirable). Black comics fare a little better, but I still think it would be fair to describe Eddie Murphy or Chris Rock as "a little funny-looking". The dynamic is much the same as for hot women: when a physically attractive man tells a joke, people might laugh at that joke for reasons other than its comedic value (namely, the halo effect; because they find him generally charming; because they're a straight woman who wants to be his girlfriend/wife), which inevitably gives the man a misleading impression of how funny he really is and compromises his ability to hone his comedic instincts. The only people who can get constant, accurate, real-time feedback on which of their jokes are landing and which aren't are people whom no one has ulterior motives for laughing at: namely, people who are ugly and poor.
Let me illustrate it another way. There are many Hollywood actors who moonlight as models for fashion brands, watches, cologne etc. (e.g. Jake Gyllenhaal, Timothée Chalamet, Ben Affleck, to name the first three that came to mind). Can you name one person who first achieved fame as a standup comedian and who is still best-known for that vocation who does fashion modelling on the side? I honestly can't think of one.
Another potential rebuttal to my theory is that there are at least a handful of successful, attractive Hollywood actors who didn't come up through standup, but who turn in legitimately funny performances in comedy films. (Despite his reputation for portraying Literally Me™ in assorted serious indie dramas, Ryan Gosling was hysterical in The Nice Guys and Barbie.) The difference, I would argue, is that film is a fundamentally collaborative medium, and a lot of what makes a funny performance comes down to the chemistry between the actors, the director's coaxing of the performance from the actor, and judicious cutting in the editing suite. For standup, by contrast, the comedian is on his own, with no one to bounce off once the house lights go down. It's probably the purest kind of comedy there is, and to make it in that industry, you have to be really funny.
So, yeah. Being a jester is an uggo's game, because uggos are the only ones receiving accurate, real-time feedback on how funny they are which they can use to refine and improve their material.
Separate from this, I think there's a separate but related dynamic wherein men are sort of expected to be funnier than women. Guys go for looks, women go for status, and being funny and making other people laugh is one way a man can make himself seem higher in status and in turn make himself seem more attractive to the opposite sex. But even if an attractive woman could somehow make herself funny, that in itself wouldn't make herself more desirable to the opposite sex. People respond to incentives: if most men would rather date an unfunny twenty-two-year-old who's a 9 than a hilarious thirty-year-old who's a 3, most women intuitively understand that their time would be better spent making themselves hotter than making themselves funnier. The only women who invest any effort into being funny are women who have nothing else to fall back on to make themselves seem attractive i.e. unattractive women. In other words, there's more baseline competitive pressure for men to be funny than women.
It wouldn't surprise me if this fundamental dynamic likewise explains the underrepresentation of women in rock music and similar. Single-minded devotion to one's artistic muse is only one reason of many that people join rock bands, and probably not even very high up on the list: a big part is the desire to be a rock star i.e. to be seen as locally higher in status i.e. to get groupies into bed. I think most people intuitively understand that a smelly dude with a guitar is more attractive to women than a smelly dude without one, whereas a hot girl who plays in a band isn't necessarily more attractive to men than a hot girl who doesn't play in a band. If a woman is trying to nab herself a husband, her effort is better spent trying to make herself more physically attractive. It follows that the only women who'll join rock bands are either a) women who simply cannot resist following their artistic muses, or b) physically unattractive women desperate for something to make them seem more attractive or higher in status than they otherwise would be: no man really wants to date a girl who's a 4, but if you had to date a 4, a 4 who plays in a band might seem that bit cooler than a 4 who doesn't.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
I understand thinking the euphemism is stupid. I was baffled by the way this guy (in my brother's telling) actually lowered his voice to say "the N-word", as if that phrase in itself constituted a hateful racial slur.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
7hr ago
Yesterday I started reading Gerald Posner's Case Closed, about the assassination of JFK. Right now he's describing Oswald's abortive attempt to defect to the Soviet Union. After his request was declined, Oswald unsuccessfully tried to kill himself, whereupon the Soviets took pity on him and allowed him to stay in Minsk as a stateless person:
On January 13, Oswald began his job as a metalworker at the Belorussian Radio and Television Factory, an enormous complex that employed over five thousand workers. He was initially disappointed with his work, since he had told Soviet officials he was instead interested in going back to school to study economics, philosophy and politics.
Oswald literally did the meme.
My brother attended college with a woke Millennial from the states, who felt uncomfortable saying the N-word.
To clarify, I don't mean he felt uncomfortable saying "nigger", which is hardly unusual. I mean he felt uncomfortable saying the phrase "the N-word".
R.J. Mitte, the actor best-known for playing Walter Jr. in Breaking Bad, killed himself two days ago.
Does anyone find it kind of weird that I know he killed himself, that this fact is being reported openly? Are media outlets just not concerned about the Werther effect anymore? Maybe they think that, in the age of social media, trying to keep this sort of thing quiet is a fool's errand. I'm trying to remember how long it's been like this – when James Ransome killed himself last December, I remember feeling a bit startled that this fact was being reported openly. I know of several celebrities who killed themselves in the decade+ prior (among them Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington and Robin Williams), but I can't remember if the fact that they took their own lives was openly stated by respectable media outlets at the time.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
New Year's resolution check-in:
- Went to the gym three times last week. I can deadlift 1.82x my bodyweight, squat 1.33x and bench press 0.82x.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
It is for this reason I think that, in the coming years, we're going to see a huge resurgence in music recorded without a click track and keeping studio trickery to a minimum. Even music performed by human beings will sound like it could have been AI-generated if it's been ruthlessly quantized, sample-replaced and Auto-Tuned. Warts-and-all music is going to come back in style. It wouldn't surprise me if people go so far as to deliberately play their instruments slightly out of tune just to prove they had no LLM assistance.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Funnily enough, you've had more Quality Contributions in the year to date than in the entirety of 2025.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Yesterday I began sending out query letters again. I know I'm setting myself up for disappointment and frustration, but I have to be able to say I gave it my best shot.
I bought a survival horror game awhile back called Tormented Souls. For the season that's in it, I fired it up last night.
I abandoned it half an hour later. Too horny to be scary, inexcusably bad dialogue and voice acting, the player character's mincing walk cycle seems preposterous when she's supposed to be frightened out of her wits (which she keeps telling us).
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Yudkowsky isn't actually a "tech worker" is he?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Rat-adjacent tech workers living in the Bay Area hold their nose around Steve Bannon? This is news to me.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I loved Hard-boiled Wonderland. I was painfully underwhelmed by The Trial.
META: Is it easier or harder to secure a Quality Contribution than it used to be?
I am a pathologically insecure person whose thirst for validation is omnipresent and unquenchable. It was for this reason that I shared the links to every Quality Contribution Roundup in the year to date with ChatGPT and asked it to build a leaderboard of Quality Contributions by user. Suffice it to say that it gave me the answer I was looking for.
Without showing the breakdown by user, here is a monthly breakdown of how many Quality Contributions there have been so far this year:
| Month | # AAQCs |
|---|---|
| January 2026 | 39 |
| February 2026 | 30 |
| March 2026 | 32 |
| April 2026 | 32 |
| May 2026 | 37 |
| June 2026 | 25 |
| July 2026 | 33 |
| August 2026 | 34 |
| September 2026 | 30 |
| Sub-total | 292 |
But I was curious, and asked it to do the same for all of last year's roundups:
| Month | # AAQCs |
|---|---|
| January 2025 | 44 |
| February 2025 | 41 |
| March 2025 | 39 |
| April 2025 | 30 |
| May 2025 | 39 |
| June 2025 | 41 |
| July 2025 | 43 |
| August 2025 | 34 |
| September 2025 | 35 |
| October 2025 | 40 |
| November 2025 | 36 |
| December 2025 | 33 |
| Total | 455 |
As you can see, there has been a substantial drop in the volume of Quality Contributions year-on-year. The monthly average for 2025 was 38 AAQCs, which has fallen to 32 this year. 2025 saw five months with forty Quality Contributions or more, which hasn't happened even once so far this year. Similarly, last year's floor was 30 quality contributions in a month, while this year's is 25 (granted, that month was the only month with less than 30).
What could be the cause of this? A few possible explanations come to mind.
- Lower volume of comments: Let's compare September 2026 with September 2025. The five Culture War Roundup threads* in September 2026 received a total of 6,812 comments, while the corresponding CWRs in the previous year received 9,221 comments, a fall of 26%. (Not every Quality Contribution originates in the CWRs, but they tend to be the busiest threads, making them a useful proxy for site activity.) If there was a perfect linear correlation between volume of comments and volume of Quality Contributions, a 26% decline in comments would predict only 26 Quality Contributions in September 2026. But in fact, there were 30 Quality Contributions in September 2026, suggesting that the site is selecting for quality over quantity. (The ratio of CWR comments:Quality Contributions in September 2025 was 0.003, while in September 2026 it was 0.004.) Alternatively, it could mean that (contra the next bullet), the mods are becoming less selective over time and it's actually easier to be included in a Quality Contribution roundup than it used to be.
- Increased mod selectivity: Perhaps the decline in the number of Quality Contributions year-on-year is not indicative of a decline in the quality of the discourse. It could well be that the comments are just as good as ever, but the mods are more selective about those they think are deserving of being included in a Quality Contributions Roundup. Most of the top-level posts in the CWRs fall into one of a handful of familiar topics (AI, trans, Israel, Trump's latest antics, immigrant crime etc.) and many of the same arguments are rehashed and reiterated each time. (I'm as guilty of this as anyone, if not more so.) Over time, the low-hanging fruit gets picked, the mods see comments containing familiar arguments getting nominated for AAQCs, and they don't feel comfortable about including a comment in the Roundup which rehashes an argument previously expressed more eloquently by someone else. They expect more of us.
- Regression to the mean: A boring and obvious explanation I'm including for completeness's sake. Maybe 2025 was an unusually high-quality year and 2026 is more typical. One would need to look at the volume of Quality Contributions in 2024, 2023 and so on to confirm.
- Dean is not as active as he once was: Last year, @Dean made so many posts or comments which were included in Quality Contributions Roundups that many commenters independently made the facetious suggestion to rename the Quality Contributions Roundups to the "Dean's list". My analysis bore this out: he easily topped the 2025 leaderboard with one-third more contributions than the second-place contributor, and was the only person in either 2025 or 2026 to produce 5 distinct Quality Contributions in a single month. I guess real life got in the way because he hasn't been as active a commenter this year.
*Based on eyeballing the total comments for the CWRs for August 31, September 7, September 14, September 21 and September 28. Obviously these threads contain some comments posted before or after September, but I'm too lazy to go digging through them to identify which comments were posted in what period. It's a good enough proxy metric, nothing more.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
So How Not to Write a Novel made a bigger impression on you than you let on, then!
In general, male writers describing female characters put much more emphasis on the characters' secondary sexual characteristics than female writers do. Even if the character doesn't have a real set of badonkers, her medium-sized (or even small) breasts will be mentioned more prominently than they would be had the writer been female. Female writers generally only describe a female characters' breasts, legs, arse etc. if it's relevant to the story in some way.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Hmm, let's see.
- Searching "bestselling mystery novels of all time" brought me to this list of the hundred best crime novels of all time. By my count 68 entries on the list are solely credited to a male novelist.
- Time has a similar list of the hundred best mystery/thriller novels ever, with the caveat that they only include one novel per author (so Christie only appears once). Of these, 46% are male, bearing out your hypothesis.
- This article lists the seven best-selling mystery books in history, of which four were written by men.
- Wikipedia has a list of the best-selling books of any genre. Searching "crime", "mystery" and "detective" returns ten entries, 7 of which were written by male authors.
- Penguin polled their readers on the hundred best crime books, of which 47 were written exclusively by male authors.
I think you have a point, books in the crime/mystery genre have a more even gender split than I thought.
"TNW". You know that famous song by Jay-Z and Kanye West, "T-N-Dubyas in Paris".
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