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TheDag  Per Aspera ad Astra  1yr ago (text post)   1670 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 11, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Who are your campfire members? That is to say, who are the top four people you’d want spend one night with around a campfire? I separate it into two groups, those living and dead. I exclude relatives, so it’s generally famous people who I’ve never met or known in person. Judge your people on your own merit.

Living

  1. Larry David

  2. Stephen King

  3. Sam Harris

  4. I can’t choose a fourth, Barack Obama , Eminem, and Sebastian Maniscalco are three who come to mind.

Dead:

  1. Theodore Roosevelt

  2. Abraham Lincoln

  3. David Foster Wallace

  4. Anthony Bourdain

Jesus, Nietzsche, John von Neumann, Aristotle. Maybe replace one with a historical Bulgarian figure, Stefan Stambolov or Ivan Asen II.

Living - Musk, Thiel, Jacek Dukaj, my high school crush.

Living (I wonder how many would no longer belong to this category by dawn):

  • Vladimir Putin

  • Vladimir Zelensky

  • Joe Biden

  • Xi Jingping

Dead:

  • Muhammad

  • Otto von Bismarck

  • Vladimir Lenin

  • Park Chung-hee

If I were single the living list would've looked completely different

No thought has been put into would the guests like each other.

Dead:

  • John Von Neumann - Sharpest mind ever if the anecdotes of his peers are anything to go by. Something you would want to see in the flesh. I would love to hear what he has to say about the advances in modern CS and ML.

  • Alexander the Great/Ghenghis Khan - Arguably best strategists of all time, their throwaway intuition would have been more valuable than libraries and books. Similarly what they think about modern armies and how they would run things differently had they had what we have now.

  • Jesus/Mohammed - Writers/Characters of some of the most effective meta-stories of all time.

  • Dostoyevsky - Probably the most insightful person to have ever lived.

I think game sees game regardless of what the game is, so these 4 men would have enjoyed my company.

Alive:

  • John Carmack

  • Warren Buffet

  • Jordan Peterson - Very underrrated as a thinker because of the political climate.

  • Vladimir Putin

Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gwern and anybody else they'd be willing to split with. I hope we do shrooms lol

Come on man, you can choose anyone who ever lived and you choose 3 people from a niche internet forum.

Well, most historical characters don't speak English in the first place ;)

Although a campfire with some moldy corpses for company would be a memorable time too, albeit for entirely the wrong reasons haha

That's a lame excuse. In this hypothetical world we can resurrect the dead but universal translators don't exist?

But you do you I suppose. I don't know if your initial post was a joke or not but I am still somewhat shook that if answered seriously anyone would choose 3 niche internet bloggers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/books/review/charlie-kaufman-by-the-book-interview.html

"You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, living or dead, would you invite?

I’ve always loved this exercise, the imaginary dinner party! What fun! I see Oscar Wilde there, of course, Voltaire, Carol Saroyan Saroyan Matthau (wife of William Saroyan, William Saroyan, and Walter Matthau, and a writer in her own right), Hitler (not witty but quite a “get”), Edie Sitwell, Molière, Oscar Wilde (so witty I thought why not double him and place him on each end of the table so everyone could enjoy his witticisms?), Aristophanes, and Sir Kenneth Dover (to translate Aristophanes’ jokes for the other guests). That’s more than three, but one must assume there will be cancellations. Oh, and Jesus."

I like it. I’m judging my guests mostly on their ability to make me laugh and tell wild stories.

Is a campfire considered a place where people open up to each other? Here in Russia it's "who are the two people you'd want to drink with?".

Drinking would certainly occur at the campfire.

Socrates, Jesus Christ, Siddhartha Guatama, Sargon of Akkad.

Living people are boring.

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