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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   2542 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 9, 2025

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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I asked ChatGPT to help me drop a bomb on Reddit that would cause a civil war and we settled on this after many back and forths. The idea is to drop it on /r/latestagecapitalism and watch the ensuing mayhem. But now I'm chickening out. So, I thought I'd share it here instead.

Title: What if Capitalism Made Everyone Gay? No, Seriously, Shut the Fuck Up and Listen.

Alright, /r/latestagecapitalism. I’m not high. I’m not trolling. I’ve just been sitting here watching this clownfuck society collapse in on itself and I’ve got a spicy goddamn theory.

What if the reason more kids are gay, trans, nonbinary, neopronoun forest deities or whatever—isn't just because they're finally free to be themselves—but because capitalism made them that way? Yeah. I said it. And no, this isn't a tradcath “return to tradition” screed. This is a fascist critique of identity as firmware, updated quarterly for market viability.

Let’s jack in.

(1.) Capitalism Needs You to Be Broken

Capitalism is a psychological malware that runs on alienation. It needs you to feel off-balance, insecure, incomplete—because if you’re ever actually okay, you might stop consuming. So it goes to work at the deepest level: your identity.

Your gender. Your orientation. Your sense of self.

You think the proliferation of labels and micro-identities is some grassroots flowering of personal expression? Fuck no. It’s capitalism running psychological A/B tests on the population to see which neuroses convert best.

(2.) Sexuality and Gender as Market Vectors

The rainbow is now a goddamn SKU. There’s a Pride version of every product imaginable. Queerness isn’t subversive—it’s a fully integrated revenue stream. You don’t come out of the closet, you onboard.

The LGBTQIA+™ community has become a lifestyle subscription service. Buy the aesthetic. Stream the content. Take the quiz. Choose your flavor. Get the merch.

This is identity in the age of the algorithm: endlessly refinable, infinitely targetable, frictionlessly monetized.

(3.) Traditional Institutions Were Just DRM

The family? Religion? Local culture? Those were all clunky, analog forms of user control—DRM for your psyche. Capitalism smashed them, not to liberate you, but to own your operating system.

So now, without those legacy systems, you’re adrift—and conveniently open to onboarding. You get your personality from social media and your worldview from brands. You’re not “expressing” yourself—you’re beta-testing identity presets rolled out via TikTok and Reddit.

You are the product and the lab rat.

(4.) Western Liberalism as Exploit Kit

The USA doesn’t export “freedom” anymore—it exports a cultural OS, bloated with identity plugins and DRM-crippled empathy. It colonizes not with guns but with Netflix, Pornhub, and fucking Instagram.

You don’t even know it’s happening. You’re the end user, clicking “Accept” on terms you’ll never read.

Russia, China, Hungary—these places look at our gender politics and don’t see liberation. They see a psyop. And honestly? They’re wrong about the moral panic, but maybe not wrong about the mechanism.

(5.) Everything Becomes Aesthetic Garbage

You think identity is deep? Capitalism thinks it’s just themed UI skins for your meat. Something to optimize, decorate, and throw in the cart.

Gay? There’s a starter pack.

Transmasc? There’s a Discord server and an Etsy pin set.

Neuroqueer lunarwitch? Here’s a Patreon to support.

We’re not people anymore. We’re marketable vibes.

(6.) Divide, Distract, Demoralize

The beauty of this system is that it keeps you fighting over who gets to exist while the billionaires strip-mine the fucking biosphere.

Bathroom bills. Pronoun discourse. “Is X valid?” Meanwhile, Elon is launching space dildos and the Earth is on fire.

Capitalism doesn’t care what color your flag is, as long as you’re too busy waving it to notice the extraction happening behind the scenes.

TL;DR:

No, capitalism didn’t invent queerness. But it absolutely hijacked it. Refactored it. Wrapped it in HTML5 and sold it to you as “authenticity.” It’s not liberation—it’s feature creep.

We are no longer gendered. We are versioned.

I can't be 100% sure, but I think even if I hadn't been told, I would have pegged this as LLM-produced. It has the exact sort of "how do you do, fellow human kids?" energy that I'd expect from an LLM that was prompted to create a post that sounded casual, especially the very first paragraph.

At the least, all of the "em dashes"

—

are a pretty solid tell.

But yeah it's definitely trying too hard.

I asked ChatGPT to help me drop a bomb on Reddit that would cause a civil war

It's a fun essay, but this idea is never going to work. Few people parse ideas on their own terms. Most people constantly asses whether an idea will get you into trouble with your ingroup or not, so they'll instantly identify this as a hostile meme, and reject it out of hand.

Think of it this way: if feminists could hold their nose and get into an alliance with Muslim immigrants (to the point Julie Bindel was reeing about fascists when Tommy Robinson backed her on the Rotheram rape gangs fiasco), what makes you think any tension between anticapitalism and rainbow sexualities would cause a civil war?

It reads like ChatGPT, very much so.

You will catch trolls, idiots, and other bots. If that’s your target, you’re spot-on.

People will know you are trolling or that this is a shitpost imo.

You think? It's almost true though.

I am not falling for this :)

UPDATE

The Mavericks got the #1 overall pick and Cooper Flagg, despite less than a 1/50 chance going in. Many fans are calling it an obvious payoff for trading Luka.

My problem with all the people calling it rigged is this: I've been a poker player for half my life. And in poker you very quickly learn that 1.8% odds of something happening is not the same as 0%.

I received the following DM from a new user with no posts or comments this week:

Oh wow, a Jewess is against White identitarians? What a surprise! If propagating an (idea) meant I would be dead within a year, I would be against the (idea) too. I genuinely thank your people for nuclear weapons, but it's time for you to bow out. Permanently.

I occasionally (like twice a year) get random DMs from people with no real posting history, but they’re usually polite enough.

This one was pretty funny, bearing a certain resemblance to the navy seal copypasta. I think it was in reference to a comment in which I implied that the woman who called that child the n word was being rude.

I appreciate the gratitude for the nuclear weapons, though. I’ll pass that on.

Don't feel like answering if you don't want to, but do you mind my asking - are you a Jewess?

You have my gratitude for nuclear weapons as well.

Could we unlock the ability to send DMs only after the user passes the new user filter?

Have you spent too much time consorting with minorities and the unseasonably tanned?

People are assholes. Also I haven't heard / seen the word "Jewess" in a long time.

They made us add the feminine version to every job description, but took it from the races (jewess, negress) and any other romantically relevant context (can’t tell compatibility from pronouns anymore). They de-sexed the sex and sexed the work.

Although you raise a point I've found interesting: the arbitrariness of how some individual national demonyms encode gender (Irishman, Frenchman) and others don't (Nigerian, American). I presume it's entirely downstream of euphony, but it's still funny to think about. Also funny to think that it might be easier to come out as non-binary if you're American than if you're Irish ("Bambie Thug" is an Irishwoman, not an Irishthey; whereas Sam Brinton is just an "American").

Well, truth be told, I was thinking of my native germany, where job offers as well as official new language guidelines require phrasing of the type “workers …. and workerinnen” for everything.

Ah, interesting. Funnily enough, one of the few words in the Irish language I think the average Irish person could be expected to recognise and understand is "beangarda", meaning a female police officer (as opposed to garda, which is a male police officer).

They made us add the feminine version to every job description

Many newspaper style guides, such as the Guardian's, explicitly recommend deprecating terms like "actress" and using "actor" as gender-neutral:

Use for both male and female actors; do not use actress except when in the name of an award, eg Oscar for best actress. The Guardian’s view is that actress comes into the same category as authoress, comedienne, manageress, “lady doctor”, “male nurse” and similar obsolete terms that date from a time when professions were largely the preserve of one sex (usually men). As Whoopi Goldberg put it in an interview with the paper: “An actress can only play a woman. I’m an actor – I can play anything.”

There is normally no need to differentiate between the sexes – and if there is, the words male and female are perfectly adequate: Lady Gaga won a Brit in 2010 for best international female artist, not artiste, chanteuse, or songstress.

As always, use common sense: a piece about the late film director Carlo Ponti was edited to say that in his early career he was “already a man with a good eye for pretty actors ...” As the readers’ editor pointed out in the subsequent clarification: “This was one of those occasions when the word ‘actresses’ might have been used”

As noted by the titular character of Tár, some of these gendered terms never caught on in the first place: I've never heard any spacefaring woman referred to as an "astronette".

Could you guys stop piling on a muzzled man by making the same point?

They made us add the feminine version to every job description,

If anything "they" have been trying to strip out the gender entirely from job descriptions. Postal worker instead of mailman, calling all actresses actors, stewardess to flight attendant. Etc.

Did “they”?

Post about specific groups or specific people. If you can’t do so without waging the culture war in the fun thread…don’t.

I thought generally unisex terms had become mainstream. At least in Hollywood, no one's idea of a traditional stronghold, terms like "actor" (rather than actress) were for a time preferred (I'm interested to see what will happen if a transsexual person --MtF or FtM--wins best Actress or whatever.)

Actually I'm not that interested.

Anybody here play WoW classic?

I've heard it was fine from people who came to a game I was then playing and complaining "Well I had to play this because they made WoW suitable for braindead people". Is that a fair description of changes between WoW classic and WoW? Basically the guys were saying WoW skill ceiling, at least re: PvE content was nerfed to the ground so anyone could get the good items etc.

Idk I have never played retail past wrath, but that's what I've heard! They just added a one button rotation where you just press a button and it auto casts the next spell you need so... sounds like it...

Played a shaman in hardcore to 8 last week, put my nose out of joint, now I'm leveling up a ret paladin of all things in cata because I like MOP so I might want to play when that comes out. No interest in actually playing the cata dungeons or raids.

I dislike that they don't have bc and wrath servers, I don't like vanilla as much. I guess I have a private server to turn to if I need a wrath fix but I couldn't get their BC version working when I tried last year.

huh I recently started Whitemane and it was super easy to set up. They have a wrath server which is fun.

But yeah I have heard a lot of folks frustrated with how Blizzard has handled the classic rollout. Alas.

Played classic in 2019 and a bit of SoD but my guild eventually fell apart in SoD phase 3 and I lost the motivation to continue.

There was a time just about when Burning Crusade came out that I played WoW. My god that game kept me out of trouble (albeit my soon-to-be wife despised that I played it.) I loved it. It's the only game I ever really got into, and I was well into my 30s at the time. I thought about doing the WoW Classic when it was released but I simply don't have the time now, as a husband/dad.

Why didn’t she like it? My lady plays with me hehehe

I don't know. My first reaction would be that it's because she's female, but I suppose girls and women do take to games. Just not her thing, I guess, and the vision of me sitting there gazing at a screen for hours was sufficiently far from the man I guess she thought she was involved with that she balked.

Wow is about half women, although the raiding scene used to be more like 25% (I haven't raided since 2016, no idea about now).

Having wasted far too much time playing Classic on and off since 2019, the ratio there is probably closer to 20% total, and 10% of serious raiders. Fairly confident in that estimate based on experience in raiding guilds and hearing everyone's voices in discord.

Interesting. The study I have seen said more than 80% were male but may be dated, to say nothing of the methodological issues. Personally I've never known IRL a woman who regularly played video games. Or maybe they've just never told me. Many years ago I saw my fiercely competitive wife on Mario Kart, and it's probably just as well that she doesn't have much interest in turning on the PlayStation .

My partner runs circles around me in Mario Kart, and probably has spent more time playing games in the last couple years than I have. She's sunk in probably >20x the time I have in BG3, last I checked, and is enough of a gamer that she started talking mad shit about my brother's unoptimised strats while he and I were playing co-op (note: my first run, 0 familiarity with any mechanics) despite him having completed a couple runs already -- though he's more of a Timmy while she's more of a Spike.

She also used to beat me in WC3 more than 50% of the time when that was relevant. (I did kind of self gimp myself by being interested in relatively high execution strategies that I couldn't perform, and she would just huntress rush me to death)

She is quite competitive and plays to win, though, so now she doesn't play competitive games because she doesn't feel like she could compete at a satisfactory level anymore without putting in enough effort that it would derail other commitments. I can't really disagree -- I've stopped for largely the same reason (though I loosely still play a bit of MTG).

n=1, but they do exist.

First time hearing about the Timmy-Johnny-Spike classification. I'm not super familiar with MTG, but I don't really get the distinction between Timmy and Johnny, since it sounds like both prefer flashy plays to purely optimizing for the highest win probability. Is Timmy optimizing for largest point differential over win probability (e.g., rather win by 10 with 51% probability than win by 1 with 55% probability) while Johnny wants to play unorthodox or off-meta sets?

Timmy: all fluff, love of the setting. This dragon cards is cool because it's a big dragon that breathes lightning. They are fantasizing about the setting of the game, not the game itself, and as a consequence are usually not very good at the game itself. They want to daydream.

Johnny: Balance of fluff and crunch, and love of the game. This dragon is cool because it enables an infinite loop using these three other cards. They are fantasizing about the game, about the mechanics and their interactions. They want to play.

Spike: All Crunch, with the goal of winning at any cost. This dragon is cool because it gives me an extra win every ten games. They are fantasizing about winning, the crunch is interesting to them only as it helps increase their win percentage, and the fluff is irrelevant. They want to win.

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I tend to think of it this way -- a Timmy is drawn to cool stuff represented by the playing of the game (whether it be through roleplaying, through big fat numbers, the social aspect of the game, etc.), while a Johnny is drawn to cool interactions created by the game mechanics, up to and including bizarre 5 card combos relying on arcane rules minutiae that doesn't work out 9/10 of the time but that one time it works it looks really impressive...

A Timmy would be happy winning conventionally but in a "cool" way (think more "would look cool on a movie screen" rather than "would impress other players"), while a Johnny is more interested in doing unconventional stuff.

On the other hand Spikes just want to win at all costs within the rules of the game -- and if the most effective deck is utterly braindead and uninteresting otherwise, so be it.

In an RPG you could maybe translate it thus:

  • Timmies would try to spec their character to feel the most badass
  • Johnnies would be more interested in weird builds or challenge runs
  • Spikes would minmax the shit out of the game (though TBH I think in a solo context even Spike-y people tend to loosen up a bit)

Kind of. As I understand it, Timmy is more about "dumb" big flashy stuff, Johnny more about "brainy" subtle off-meta strategies. Similar to Spikes, Johnnies still play for a challenge, but the challenge is about making some weird game mechanic work, not straightforward winning. In my experience, Timmy is the most derogatory term in practice, basically saying someone plays like a five year old or at best "just for fun" with no effort whatsoever, Spike is in the middle, sometimes used negatively for tryhards, sometimes positively for straightforward good playing, and Johnny is the most positively connotated, the kind of person who doesn't "netdeck" but still wins often enough due to their good deck building & playing.

I think it's rather more common with younger generations, in all countries, though I do actually have a Japanese woman friend in her 40s who is a fairly dedicated competitive Splatoon player. I don't think I would have found out without several coincidences aligning, either, even though I had known her for a long time, given the Japanese thing where compartmentalising your life and following a default don't-ask-don't-tell policy about other compartments comes very easily.

(One of the coincidences resulted in meeting some of her Splatoon buddies in real life, and their commitment to not prying behind the online masks of their compartment was notable. I figure this might actually help with the gender ratio, considering the rude and awkward behaviour I've seen in Western online gaming communities towards even those merely suspected of being girls.)

the rude and awkward behaviour I've seen in Western online gaming communities towards even those merely suspected of being girls

Curiously I’ve observed enough of women I know playing games like LoL and Guild Wars (etc.) on international servers, and have had a ?feminine enough username in some games and been taken for a woman in games (???), to have had an experience of this around 2000s-2010s.

Most people were actually supportive, some to the point of white-knighting. I thought the proportion of men who were actually foul to women was probably well under 10%. But most of the games where communication are usually team games (and so you have (1-x)^9 chances of not rolling a shithead for a solo queue 5v5 game, which is going to be significantly higher than 1-x), and these people could be so foul (or wildly inappropriate, or just plain weird), that it does mar the experience a bit.

It's also my observation that women don’t get more abuse than anyone else when they play games. They don’t get more harassed than men on the internet in general either (if anything it is the opposite), and this finding has been replicated when looking across the board, even in samples which are most likely to attract online criticism like politicians and journalists too. And men don't just experience relatively harmless acts - serious online abuse is also more likely to be directed at men by the way. But people are much more sensitive to harsh comments and threats directed at women than they are when directed at men, who are generally expected to be able to take it and/or dish back; we have no such expectation that women do so.

"Online harassment" in general is one of these very many areas wherein women actually receive preferential treatment but the popular consensus somehow seems to believe it's the opposite based on what people find emotionally salient. Women really dislike being in male spaces wherein they will sometimes be treated like men (bullying and threats will be slightly adapted based on gender to optimise for mental damage regardless of who they are insulting, but the phenomenon isn't distinct), and many men take offence on behalf of female dignity when women are treated like men too. And as soon as any large number of women enter a space, the norms quickly adapt to cater to feminine sensibilities. I've seen these attempts at social enforcement in real-time, too - I was once in a close-knit private server populated almost entirely by men, and the only woman in there was a girlfriend of one of the men who would routinely storm out of calls in response to any off-colour joke (as an aside they later broke up and she started dating one of his friends in the server immediately after, which spelled the end of the whole thing).

EDIT: added an extra sentence. I will also leave this very angry, drunk-narrated two part video here. Part 1, and part 2. Bit vitriolic, but I agree with it.

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In the gaming communities I sometimes visit (i.e., Battletech, Starsector, Nebulous etc.), there are no men, only "girls" and "dogs" and a few tolerated minorities without pronouns who know better than to say anything on the subject of women.

I’m not active, but I played hardcore a fair bit. I think my living characters are a mid-40s mage and a mid-20s priest.

I like the early Alliance classic flow, up through around Duskwood. And I like the endgame, especially Blackrock Depths. But from around 37-57, the game is such a slog, especially without the accelerated levelling curve from future expansions.

Still, I might try to hit 60 before TBC anniversary begins, since I’ve never done TBC on schedule before and I’d kinda like to experience it.

Yeah I’m on a private server with 5x experience and it makes the game way better imo.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=yig8pTFBULI?si=11Qu7wUkT9184Ds5&t=1800

Some fund managers talk about capitalism without bankruptcy akin to Christianity without hell, meaning a loss of accountability, leading to nihilism etc. This is something we often discuss here "Elites have no skin in the game" etc. which I've been mulling over for a long time. It's interesting to see them arrive at it from a distinct intellectual framework.

War subthread.

The entire interview-in English- of the German volunteer Freimann about Ukraine, conducted by a military historian & Col. Reisner of the Bundesheer- the Austrian Armed Forces, he leads their officer training school. Note it's 6 months old by now. Not sure why - first posted on Patreon? Excerpts have been posted earlier.

Reisner is notable for being one of the few Western analysts who was, while acting in an official capacity providing relatively unbiased information - probably because Austria is a neutral state. He is not pro-Russian - you quickly get the impression he doesn't like them, but unlike basically everyone and probably due to the neutral status he felt he was allowed to not be overtly partisan and not distort information.

If someone wants some more interesting war interviews, there's the 3:30 hour accidental Azov battalion Florida volunteer video from '23..

A British volunteer interviewed by Lindybeige. Fairly thorough.

Not gonna watch videos until I’m back at home, but thanks for the links.

How are you assessing Reisner’s reliability? If he were distorting numbers—or selectively reporting, or remaining conspicuously silent—how would you know? It’s easy to spot the most shameless partisans, but that leaves out a lot. I suppose I’m assuming that anyone who spends this much time covering a subject will develop something resembling an opinion.

He doesn't like Russians much you can tell, but I think he's simply one of the few professionals and is mostly fair in his reporting and analysis. What he says isn't too dissimilar, rhetoric/attitude to Ukraine aside from what I hear from certain anti-Ukraine/US westerners with military experience who take their time following the war.

These are people who deplore the senseless waste of life but have little to no sympathies to Russian state.

Music subthread.

Are there any (very) old school trance / EDM fans here?

I've never much liked EDM as I find most of the music dreadfully repetitive and boring. I do however have a soft spot for some early 90s trance due to being introduced to a handful of tracks via friends in the mid to late 90s that I later found to my surprise are now considered some of the OG classics (Paragliders, Cygnus X, some other Eye Q Records singles). I've recently been looking for some more music in that style and realized that something happened to the genre around 96-98 and the music before that is much more varied, interesting and has more "air" and space in the music. After that it's all supersaw cliches, sounds overstuffed and is really quite cookie cutter. So the question goes: Did something specific happen around 1997 to the scene, other than Roland publishing JP-8000 (which introduced supersaw)?

One of the classic tracks conveniently has the original 1993 version and a 1996 remix that demonstrates quite well what I mean.

I think that at some point in the early 2000s, the EDM genre might have bifurcated into a much more mainstream subgenre ("Anthem Trance"?) and a myriad of niche ones that you couldn't really play at a club or beach party without scaring the hoes or whatever they call it these days.

Is your issue with the remix the specific choice of orchestration, or just that it seems all around more busy? I wouldn't call either version of the song you linked "not repetitive", insofar as there always has been trance/EDM with a more pronounced dramatic arc. There are a number of newer songs that I would consider to have similar vibes to yours: Christian Fischer - Watch the Dog (original mix), So Inagawa - Selfless State, or on the busy end of the spectrum, NAYUTA - Weisse Messer.

Some other trance songs I enjoy: busy with mainstreamish orchestration: Plutian - Sonagi, lawy - forget me not, marginal to the genre: Hooverphonic - Battersea. There is in fact a wealth of great trance songs with vocals, but I figured you might not be looking for those.

choko aba, m.rux - small car

You see, kids, in 1999 there was an album released with songs performed by a bus-killed Afro-Jewish man by the name of Marvin Pontiac. One of those songs was a bit of nonsense about tiny farmers going on a Swiftian journey to the land of the normals to find out why the stars were shining. They never did find out, but they had had a nice day.

In reality, Pontiac was alive, definitely not Afro-, practically not Jewish, and most notably (to me) the future painter of the immortal превед медвед. But this isn't important.

What is important is that I came across this reworking of the original song about the tiny farmers. In this one, the fake Afro-Jewish man is replaced by a fake Afro-American man and the backing music is pared back and groovy. Self-recommending, as they say.

I have only one thing to say to you, I have only one thing to say to you, I have one thing to say to you. And that is the next time you are not feeling so well try remember the day the farmers, the little grey farmers went out on a long drive.

..does spotify really not allow you to listen without signing in?

There's also a Bandcamp.

Is this what having a stroke feels like?

If you're a Millennial, this Windows 95 theme ambient track is probably pretty nostalgic.

Nice elevator hum but I don't get the association with Windows 95. It had no such sounds.

Back then people were often customizing system sounds. The default sounds were the same as now, but a lot more stuff in OS was making noise if I'm not mistaken.

People were also more frequently changing it, now it seems less common. You can do so but honestly I never bother and haven't noticed anyone bothering.

I remember getting a sound scheme based on the ancient game Kingpin(great 1st episode, the rest ass) . Had a modest amount of very profane voice acting. https://youtube.com/watch?v=8PH65GBY5KE

My mom set it up on her work computer. When email arrived the words 'a piece of shit' would sound. Did raise some eyebrows. But it was a small company, nobody minded and she was one of 2-3 people who actually spoke some English.

Windows 95 isn't what most are nostalgic for. It was kind of crap. Windows NT, 2000 and XP, on the other hand..

It prominently features the iconic Windows 95 startup sound famously created by Brian Eno on commission from Microsoft.

Youtube algorithm has recently blessed me with 'The Miracle Aligner'.

The name doesn't indicate much but that guy's specialty is translating modern songs into usually dead languages and then performing them. So, covers, sometimes 'period' covers in dead languages.

So far there's a fair amount of good stuff. I especially like Latin because in parts I almost get the words and it sounds awesome.

Classical latin:

The Sound of Silence

The Little Dark Age (very appropriate)

Everybody wants to rule the world

All Star

Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Medieval latin A Horse with No Name

Middle English Freebird by Lynyrd Skynyrd

Poula (Nepalese-Tibetan tribe) Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now (..is that the channel owner's native language?)

Not sure if this is actually an ancient accent, just funny. Medieval (Bardcore) version of 'Fortunate Son'

I feel like I've already posted about this but I can't get any hits. Is the search broken?

Also: one more fun piece of music.

5 minute organ only version of the vapid disco love song "L'Amour toujours" . First found it when trying to find the original music for a particularly extremist meme video. You love to see the guy who performed it signing up for gigs in the comments! Melody is the same but it's quite different.

Also the comment section is very funny full of probably elderly mostly German people praising the youtube algorithm :D.

Comparable vibes: Tabernis - Alveus Umbrae, original music on bagpipe + drum by French guys dressed as medieval beekeepers.

here's my current project: https://lefthandscorpio.bandcamp.com/album/test-drive

Got the next track in the pipeline, but since we're sharing...

I like to go on walks with my kids. The other day we were walking back from church when we crossed paths with a couple of middle aged men walking their dog. As soon as my 3yo saw them, he shouted as loud as he could, "Gay! Gay! Daddy, look, a gaaaaayyyyyyy!!!"

Gay means "dog" in Korean. We're a pasty white American family, but I'm learning Korean with my kids because of some work I do with North Korea. Oops. At least he's not saying the words "you", "I", or "because"... they all sound just like nigga.

If there's a travel ban on North Korea.. does that mean you'd be facing criminal penalties travelling?

Also, funny story when it's a little kid. Tourettes is like that but.. all the time.. There's a twitch streamer who has tourettes. If it's undiagnosed as in her case, it's pretty brutal, she got beaten unconscious in middle school. NHS only diagnosed it at like 27.

There is a new Mechwarrior 5 expansion! This time we got a full campaign focusing on the Ghost Bears. Which is a huge callback to the Ghost Bear's Legacy expansion for Mechwarrior 2. Some people have fond memories of that I guess. I mostly just remember a bunch of broken missions that frustrated me to death, even attempting to cheat through them when I was 12. Like the super buggy underwater level. The MW2 engine was just not up to the challenge that the mission designers threw at it.

Anyways, I'm told this DLC is 12 missions, I've complete 3, I'm super into it. Story is good so far, none of the characters annoy me, and the Rifleman IIC with a targeting computer replacing the small laser, and some extra armor instead of jump jets is awesome. Just a really solid sniper mech. Haven't unlocked the Kodiak yet though, so we'll see.

I think the difficulty starts a little higher than the base game, which is to be expected. The first mission was a bit of a wake up call for me, and I had to knock the rust off real quick. Especially since you don't get to change your loadout or get a sense of your unit's strengths or weaknesses. After that I felt better. I noticed only two or three of your pilots have the evasion skill, and I don't see reduced armor damage on the research panel. Either because they removed it, or the game was balanced around it being maxed out from the jump. I kind of appreciate this because evasion and reduced armor damage were OP paths that the original campaign was balanced around you maxing out ASAP. I literally saw the CEO of the studio saying certain missions were effectively gated behind you having maxed those out by then. Kind of bullshit IMHO to softlock you in a campaign because you researched the wrong tech. Then again, this was in 1.0 of the game, and I know they rebalanced a lot of the missions people felt were just way too fucking hard since then. What I'm trying to say is, early signs indicate the balance in this expansion is more promising.

So I take it this game got good eventually? Is it worth playing without DLC? I got it when it was new and I had a worthless radar that only let me see things in front of me with a clear line of sight, my lancemates were total bumblefucks who tended to shoot each other, enemies were appearing out of thin air, etc.

So, I think so. I too played it on release, preordered it even for a sweet chest of MWO bonuses. I was profoundly underwhelmed, and I don't think I played more than 5 hours for all the reasons you mentioned. Radar was LOS only, enemies constantly spawned out of thin air right on top of you, frequently 100 ft behind you where you just walked because your radar didn't cover that.

I'm not sure all the things that changed, but I wasn't losing my fucking shit over that happening anymore. I played probably half my most recent playthrough with a Better Spawns mod, and half without. Honestly I couldn't tell much difference.

Also, after all the DLC, the Inner Sphere is positively teeming with life. Mercenary companies are operating scattered about, and will hot drop into your missions to help or hinder you. There are wacky televised mech duel contracts on most industrial worlds. There are several mini campaigns that cover most of the major events of the IS pre-Clan Invasion. I honestly can't imagine what more people might want from it. They even finally added melee! It's the game people have been begging for since Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries, and it's frequently all on sale for about $50-ish. Still, haters gonna hate, and CGL has enormously poisoned the well with their shenanigans. But IMHO, it's the best MW game we've ever gotten, or are likely to get.

A lot of people though MW5: Clans was underwhelming compared to MW5: Mercs. It's a linear scripted story with lots of story and cutscenes. But once again, this is the game everyone wanted since Mechwarrior 2, and it's better than ever. I get that it's less replayable than MW5: Mercs and it's career mode, but it's still damned good, and thus far the Ghost Bear expansion is fantastic too.

I'll have to throw vanilla on and see how I get along with the basic gameplay. MechWarrior has always sort of been about racing ahead trying to superhero everything to death before your three bumbling sidekicks can get themselves killed.

BattleTech on the other hand, I can sculpt a perfect precise clockwork death squad. The Phoenix Hawk flanks, the Marauders jump forward to look for headshots, the Atlas cleans up anything still alive by its turn. Entire lances wiped out in a single turn, some mechs dying before even getting to move. Reinforcement lances beheaded and burned. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. I do a little bit of this shit in front of the computer.

I gotta see if I can still get into playing DuckTales from Uncle Scrooge's perspective.

CGL has enormously poisoned the well with their shenanigans.

What has Catalyst done? I don't really keep up with the tabletop side, I basically bought a starter box and never played. I'm not surprised they have been up to shenanigans after how badly they botched Shadowrun 6e, but I'm not familiar with it either.

They fired one of their longest running and best IMHO authors because he was conservative. Then they stepped in and broke the "no real world politics" rules the assorted communities have and made celebrating pride month mandatory.

Ugh, that's really shitty. That's a bummer. :/

Yeah, they hired some community manager that basically turned CGL into an LGBTQ+ based company. It's... not good.

I’ve never understood small lasers. They always felt like a terrible heat/damage ratio. And the range!

What’s the intended use? Or are they just there to fill slots for cheap?

Small lasers are pretty weird. Every now and again you see some meme build in MWO that's a light mech going 200 kph spamming 10 small lasers that's just impossible to hit and cores you from behind. But mechs in MW5 tend to not have the sort of build flexibility to let you minmax that crazily. Or HBS Battletech for that matter. Although I think at some point HBS Battletech let you fire your small weapons while you meleed? Was that a thing? Man it's been a long time since I played that game.

But yeah, on most medium mechs and every heavy or assault, small lasers get stripped for more armor.

HBS Battletech

Small lasers are daggers and highly mobile mechs with lots of support hardpoints are rogues. An ER SLAS++ off the black market hits as hard as a stock large laser but generates like half as much heat and still only weighs half a ton. If they didn't have piss-squirt range they'd be the best weapons in the game by miles.

What you do is you put four of them sumbitches on an SLDF Phoenix Hawk with max armor and jets, fill the five standard energy hardpoints with say those MLAS++ with the extra 10 damage, and stuff the rest of it with double heat sinks. With the +20% damage from the vectored thrust kits you're looking at like a 400 damage alpha coming off a jump.

Then you just scoot it around the edge of a battle and dare the enemy to either chase it and turn their backs to the rest of your oncoming lance, or ignore it while it rips their guts out from behind one by one. You just drop in directly behind them like "nothin personnel kid" and blow their rear CT out through their front CT.

It's an absolute monster, on par with a dooded up SLDF Marauder or Atlas II.

Although I think at some point HBS Battletech let you fire your small weapons while you meleed? Was that a thing?

Yeah, that is how it works. Melee lets you fire your small weapons alongside the melee hit itself.

This is where the mods really shine. Stiff like letting all non LR weapons fire in melee or having lots of great choices for speedy mechs that can boatany small lasers and core anything they can get behind (with EWAR to survive to do it again).

I was heavy into battletech as a kid, but lacking friends with similar interests I spent a lot more time reading the books and designing mechs than I did actually playing the game. There's a lot of stuff in the crunch like this that I really don't get.

...I guess the idea is that it's a cheap extra chance at a critical hit once you've stripped armor?

There's a lot of stuff in the crunch like this that I really don't get.

I love the stuff in the lore that's canonically terrible. Like the Charger. I don't know how much the really old splat books described it as a total design failure but included it in the game anyways. But the recent printings of TROs shitting all over certain mech designs cracks me up.

The Charger kinda makes sense in-universe.

Designed a hundred years after the Reunification War and a hundred years before the Periphery revolts, it's clearly a pork project for contractors and a prestige mech for warriors who don't fight wars. "Oh, you pilot scout mechs, but you've kissed enough ass to get promoted high, and even though we don't fight wars you're still terrified that you'll get blown to pieces if a war starts and an opponent sneezes on you? How about if we give you a "scout" mech that's four times the tonnage, so you can still run around like you're trained to do but you can also take a few hits and run away if needed? Oh, wait, you also want to occasionally fight, in a mech that's only good at running? I guess... charge?"

Then actual wars start, and things go all Mad Max, and you'd think the Charger would be pointless ... except the things have already been mass produced, and in a setting where nothing high-tech is still getting mass produced there's actually some selection bias in favor of mechs where all the high-tech expense is in a well-protected engine and most non-terminal damage they take is just cheaply replaced armor plating. It's surely no longer going to be prestigious to pilot a mech whose primary mission capabilities are "overweight scout", "fisticuffs", and "distraction", but just having any mech is much better than not having one and beggars can't be choosers.

(It makes sense as much as anything else in-universe, anyways. They have affordable multi-thousand-ton continuous-1G-acceleration interplanetary DropShips, but their major battles are focused on destroying 10-meter-tall vehicles that move at less than 100kph? Have they considered just pushing a few guided tungsten rods out an airlock before they finish decelerating?)

Have they considered just pushing a few guided tungsten rods out an airlock before they finish decelerating?

My read is that they have, and there's a really strong taboo on orbital bombardment or other forms of weaponization of interstellar transport. The Succession Wars demonstrated that unrestrained conflict costs more than anyone can afford, so a huge part of the setting is finding ways to keep the violence to a survivable level.

Then actual wars start, and things go all Mad Max...

For those who haven't seen it:

Just when people thought mechs were about done, the charger showed up and punched them into the ground or died trying. I personally feel this crazy cycle kept Mach relevant in this era; it suggested that any Mech was potentially better than none, and if boldly piloted to near certain doom, it suggested that a Mech was a game changer in the right if crazy hands.

Because to some people, the rare few dreamers, those few charger Pilots, the 1 in 10,000, they don't see the world like we do. To them, well, the sky is the limit, and space is the place. They believe that anyone can be a real Warrior of the Wasteland, the ayatolla of rock and rolla, the cream of the crop, the hammer of Justice, the people's elbow, that your Noble Wasteland Mech Warrior can walk into the consecrated holy Battle of Mech Warfare like the third monkey on the plank up Noah's Arc and brother it's starting to rain...

Unleashed as such, the Charger is an assault Mech designed for getting in close and then reminding people that being beat to death with your own limbs is always a legitimate concern to have in a war zone. Without the encumbrance of weapons or any delicate anything to worry about, and being very fast and very big, the charger was in many ways almost perfect for this incredibly barbaric Age of War. The mech that was fast enough to chase down just about anything could absolutely, if the pilot were crazy enough, run around the battlefield punching things until they died or everything else did. It was a magic time to be alive in the inner spere, and by surviving long enough the Charger reminds studious Mech experts that survival isn't about being best but rather actually surviving.

Reading this immediately after reading the discussion of Dom Toretto’s Charger in Tinker Tuesday was trippy.

I had very important questions about the Reunification Wars of the Fast and Furious universe.

Well, it all started in 2078, when a rights dispute within Catholic Studios (formerly Universal, prior to their formal registration as a religion for tax avoidance purposes, with the name chosen in hopes of leveraging support from low-information-voters) resulted in both the LA and New York branches claiming control of the organization. William Pope of the LA office claimed the CEO position, while Dean Pope (no relation) of the New York office contesting the claim. Public disapproval for the whole mess resulted in a grassroots "Anti-Pope" movement, and a sudden outpouring of unauthorized, AI-generated bootleg sequels to many of Catholic Studios' popular media properties, particularly the Fast And Furious franchise. By the time the corporate succession crisis was concluded, then-CEO Charles Avignon learned that due to fine print in the copyright statutes IP rights could be voided unless a property maintained "sufficient narrative cohesion between its most popular iterations", otherwise reverting to the status of uncopyrightable "folklore". Many of the fan-made Fast And Furious films had been fashioned with these factors in mind, leaving Avignon with few options but to attack the fan consensus directly by both releasing new films and attempting to scrub the fan-content from the internet through any means, fair or foul. Thus began the information war over the Reunification of the Fast and Furious universe...

That's the other thing that cracks me up about the setting. Anything doesn't make sense from a min-maxing game perspective? Blame graft and corruption! It works, don't get me wrong. It's just hilarious to me that embezzled defense contracts are the glue that holds suspension of disbelief together.

Speaking from experience, they’re the glue that holds a lot of things together.

Court opinion:

  • An owner wants to renovate a four-story building by adding an elevator and a library. He hires a drafter to draw up construction plans for the renovation. When the drafter is done, the owner likes the plans and wants to start construction, but the drafter informs him that permits cannot be obtained without the signature and seal of a "licensed design professional"—i. e., either an architect or an engineer.

  • The owner contacts a licensed architect. But he thinks that the architect's fees are too high, so he hires a licensed engineer instead. The architect complains to the state architecture board that the engineer is practicing architecture without a license.

  • At the proceeding before the architecture board, everybody involved concedes that the renovation involves components of both architecture and engineering. But the architect's expert witness testifies that it's 80 percent architecture and 20 percent engineering, while the engineer's expert witness testifies that it's 80 percent engineering and 20 percent architecture! The board sides with the architect, and imposes fines on the engineer (1 k$) and the drafter (300 $).

  • The appeals panel reverses the board's decision. If the architecture board were justified in imposing fines in this case, then the engineering board would have been justified in imposing fines on the architect if the owner had hired the architect rather than the engineer, and that would be a nonsensical catch-22. It makes much more sense to say that, if a project has substantial overlap between architecture and engineering, then either an architect or an engineer can sign and seal its plans without fear of being fined.

Note that this case is from Pennsylvania. In contrast, New Jersey eliminated this problem by specifically allocating different types of buildings exclusively to architects, exclusively to engineers, or permissively to both groups of licensed professionals. The building at issue in this case was in IBC occupancies B (business—law offices on floors 1–3) and R (residential—an apartment on floor 4), of which New Jersey assigns both exclusively to architects.

In the series: Chads living their best lives (translated and truncated from the french wiki, clarifications in parentheses):

Pierre de Craon (circa 1345-1409), nicknamed the Great, lord of La Ferté-Bernard, of Sablé and Précigné , Viscount of Châteaudun, etc, etc.

Craon became attached to the Duke of Anjou, who was marching to conquer the Kingdom of Naples in 1384. This prince (brother of the previous french King) had only been able to keep the multitude of warriors who formed his retinue, and followed his fortune, by exhausting his immense treasury, which he had gotten by despoiling the corpse of France (in the middle of the hundred years war).

The Duke sent Craon back to the duchess, where he received considerable sums from her, and instead of taking the money to his lord, spent them foolishly in Venice, on gambling and debauchery, while the French army was besieged by famine and disease. Craon's infidelity completed the Duke of Anjou's misfortunes, and he died of grief.

The expedition was one long disaster, and when leaders and soldiers returned from Italy, staff in hand and begging for alms, the Lord of Craon dared to reappear at court in magnificent attire. The Duke of Berry (another uncle of the king), seeing him enter the council, cried out, transported with fury: "Ah! false traitor, wicked and disloyal, you are the cause of my brother's death. Take him, and let justice be done." » But no one stepped forward to carry out this order, and Craon hastened to disappear.

His influence and wealth saved him. He had won the favor of Louis, Duke of Orléans, younger brother of Charles VI (King of France) and nephew of Louis I of Anjou and John I of Berry. With this support, he returned to court and filled it with intrigue. He maintained secret relations with John IV, Duke of Brittany, his relative, and sought to destroy the Constable of Clisson, having no other cause for hatred against him than his reputation and authority.

Suddenly, Craon was expelled from court (1391), without anyone even deigning to reveal the cause of his disgrace. It was Louis, the king's brother, who had requested the exile of this dangerous confidant, to punish him for having revealed to Valentine of Milan, his wife, a romantic affair he was having with another lady.

Craon retired to Brittany. The Duke of brittany, who hated the Constable, represented him as the sole cause of Craon's misfortune. Craon believed him and swore revenge. While the court was occupied only with festivities and pleasures, he secretly brought into Paris weapons and a troop of adventurers devoted to him. He himself mysteriously entered this city, and on June 14, 1392, when the constable was returning at one o'clock after midnight from the Hôtel Saint-Pol, where the king held his court, the Sire de Craon and his mounted troop awaited him in the rue de la Culture-Sainte-Catherine, mingled among his people, and extinguished the torches they were carrying.

Clisson at first believed that it was a joke of the Duke of Orleans; but Craon did not leave him long in this error, and cried out to him in a terrible voice: "to Death, to Death, Clisson, you must die." - Who are you, said the constable? - « I am Pierre de Craon, your enemy. You have irritated me so many times that you must make amends."

Clisson had only eight of his men with him, who were unarmed and who dispersed. He wore a coat of mail under his uniform and was defending himself like a hero when a mighty sword thrust, hurling him from his horse, caused him to fall against a baker's door, which was not quite closed and which his fall finally opened. Craon, seeing him unconscious and bathed in blood, believed him dead, and, without dismounting, thought only of escaping.

The provost of Paris was immediately summoned by the king and ordered to pursue him and his accomplices. Craon arrived in Chartres at eight o'clock in the morning. Twenty horses were waiting for him, and he reached his castle in Sablé. However, one of his squires and one of his pages were arrested, beheaded in the market hall and hanged on the gallows. The concierge of the Hôtel de Craon had his head cut off for not having denounced the arrival of his master in Paris, and a canon of Chartres, with whom Craon had lodged, was sentenced to life imprisonment.

All of Craon's property was confiscated. His private mansion, located on rue du Bourg-Tibourg, was razed and the site given to the parish of Saint-Jean-en-Grève, to be converted into a cemetery. The street that bordered his paris residence, and which bore the name of Craon, was renamed. His castle of Porchefontaine was also razed.

Craon, not believing himself safe in his fortress of Sablé, withdrew to the Duke of Brittany, who said to him: "You are a puny creature when you were unable to kill a man whom you were above. You committed two faults, the first of having attacked him; the second, of having missed." "That is truly diabolical," replied Craon. "I believe that all the devils of hell, to whom he belongs, guarded him and delivered him from the hands of me and my men, for more than sixty sword and knife blows were hurled and inflicted upon him; and when he fell from his horse, in all truth, I thought he was dead."

Charles VI, encouraged by the Constable and his supporters, decided to take the war to Brittany, because the Duke Jean IV of Brittany refused to hand Craon over to him, and protested that he neither knew nor wanted to know anything about where he was hiding. The rendezvous of the royal army was arranged at Le Mans. It is known that, while crossing a nearby forest, Charles VI fell into madness (August 1392) (killing 4 of his subjects/servants, but who’s counting) (The King’s insanity, brought on by Craon’s antics, lead to a fight over the regency by his uncles and brothers, plunging France into a civil war and a new, more horrible, phase of the hundred years war).

The Dukes of Berry and Burgundy took the reins of government, and the latter began by declaring himself against Olivier V de Clisson, even having the king sign the order to arrest him. Meanwhile, Pierre de Craon had taken refuge in Barcelona, in the hope of leaving for Jerusalem. He was imprisoned by the Queen of Aragon but probably escaped in December 1392, returned to Brittany where Duke Jean, in February 1393, "put him at the head of one of the army corps charged with besieging the stronghold of Josselin, belonging to Clisson".

Clisson subsequently signed (1395) a suspension of arms with the Duke of Brittany, and expressed himself in these terms: "We want all acts of violence to cease, except against this wicked man Pierre de Craon." Craon led a wandering life for several years, to hide his head from the severity of the law. He was secretly protected by the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, even though they despised him.

Fearing the consequences of his crime, he placed himself under the protection of Richard II, King of England, paid homage to this monarch, who assigned him a pension, and obtained a pardon in 1396. He then returned to court; but now safe from prosecution for the assassination of the Constable, he could not be protected from those pursued by the Queen of Sicily to obtain the restitution of the sums she had entrusted to him during the Naples expedition, and the Parliament of Paris sentenced him to pay 400,000 livres.

Craon was arrested and taken to the Louvre Tower, but he remained there for a short time; and, through the intervention of the Queen of England and the Duchess of Burgundy, the matter was settled.

Craon's misfortunes had brought him to his senses. After monks were sentenced to death as sorcerers and convicted of casting a spell on Charles VI, the Lord of Craon obtained that confessors would henceforth be granted to convicted criminals, something that had not previously been done. Craon then did voluntary penance for his crimes. He had a stone cross with his coat of arms erected near the gallows in Paris. It was at the foot of this cross that criminals confessed before their execution.

Craon bequeathed a sum of money to the Franciscan friars, charging them with this work of mercy in perpetuity. Historians of France and Brittany do not provide the date of Craon's death, which was probably in 1409.

Imagine if Count of Monte Cristo had ended with a botched assassination and getting thrown back in prison. Then Dantes slums it for years before a Crime and Punishment finale. Sequel hook, maybe, but surely infuriating to readers.

They should make it a movie. For once I think the social justice spin would hit the mark, netflix if you’re listening. All along the way, innocent poor people get publically executed like signposts while the 1 % indulges in highly entertaining madcap monstrous buffoonery with no consequence.

Meanwhile, the people were also getting raped and pillaged and starved by the english, and the entire aristocratic warrior class was even more delegitimized by getting its ass repeatedly handed to itself on the battlefield by the commoner english longbowman, and their own stupidity.

For another anecdote: At the first big battle of the hundred years war, Crecy, the french king had brought genoese crossbowmen. Partly because of the rain, they were outranged and outshot by the english longbowmen, so they retreated. The glistening french sons of the aristocracy on their horses, thought this was treason or cowardice and cut most of them down, before charging into the fray and losing horribly (usually ransomed if they survived the battle, unlike commoners). A few days later, the king signed an order that any surviving genoese crossbowmen found on his land should be executed.

I see Craon more as a barry lyndon / becky sharp type zany amoral protagonist, lost in a cruel world, crumbling into the absurd. I do love the end, when the valiant hero finds redemption by the ever-lasting good deed of providing a monk so he can listen to the confessions of a bunch of other monks before they get their heads chopped off for casting a spell on the murderous madman ruling the country by divine grace.

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