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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   2048 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 27, 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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Following up on Rear Window, I watched The Birds (1963) yesterday. Apparently Netflix licensed a bunch of Alfred Hitchcock movies; good to know.

Some thoughts:

  • We never find out why the birds are attacking, though the trailer implies they are rebelling against human abuse.
  • You know how modern horror movies will make you spend twenty minutes with jerks before the monster shows up and starts fucking people up? This movie takes a whole hour for the first major bird attack to take place; that's half of its runtime!
  • FMC is adventurous, perhaps a little too much so; lying at the drop of a hat, breaking into LI's home for a prank, etc.
  • The shot of the lovebirds leaning with the car turns was amusing.
  • LI's jaw could cut diamonds.
  • Smoker culture is prevalent, with people offering strangers cigarettes as they would a glass of water.
  • Phone calls are expensive enough that FMC offers to pay for them, but cheap enough that the postmaster eats the cost.
  • Special effects are a little dated; it's very easy to tell that the actors are in one layer and the birds in another.
  • Scariest part of the movie? The post office with a sign saying that dog licenses are issued there. "Oi, mate! Ya got a loicense for dat pupper?"

Does your municipality not do dog licenses? I thought they were common everywhere.

Paging @SecureSignals

https://instagram.com/reel/DLepu9TsVNE/

That's funny, it's the inverse of a common Revisionist joke about why people are so upset over the good news that ~3 million Jews weren't gassed inside shower rooms. "Rabbi, good news..."

You might want to remove the part of that link after ”?igsh=”, because it’s showing me your insta account.

Thanks for the heads up.

This July 4 thinking of renting a car and driving up to Gettysburg to do a run on the battlefield. Hopefully if I go early enough won't run into too many re-enacters. Hoping to do some hill repeats up cemetery ridge and little roundtop.

Why do repeats when the whole trail iirc from 20 years ago in boy scouts is around 12 miles?

I will probably do most of the trail (planning a ten mile run). Just have hill repeats in my plan and thought it would be cool to understand a little more what Pickett's charge is like.

When is the best time to go where there aren’t other people?

What The Motte theme are you running?

I'm usually partial to blue (dramblr).

I'm using the "4chan" one with some custom CSS I found at some point. idk what it does at this point but it works and I'm not changing it.

Always Windows 98 of course. Check my flare.

I tried the dark theme at one point, but it's not as good as TheMotte theme with DarkReader, so I just use that.

win98 is pretty cool though.

There are themes?

This was also my reaction.

I am disappointed that the tron theme doesn't look anything like the movie Tron.

I remember there are themes every time I get logged out and my retinas are seared. Dark mode has spoiled the shit out of me.

I honestly can't relate to people who complain about not-dark mode. I don't find it hard on the eyes at all, so it's difficult for me to understand how anyone could be so fervently bothered by it. To each their own I suppose.

I'm being hyperbolic of course, because I was making a joke - it's a minor thing, but it actually physically hurts when you go from darkness to bright light. Like after taking off sunglasses or getting high beamed on the highway.

They're in your settings. Note that there's a "themes are not officially supported" warning messsage.

That's pretty cool, I never realized!

Dunno if it's fun but phailyoor will probably blow his gasket at the PM of Albania using ChatGPT so obviously to write out his argument: https://x.com/ediramaal/status/1938739319168024656

Albania's an irrelevant country and English is probably not his native language but really... See this is why I think it's so naive to go 'just tear out the plug'. If ASI or AGI or powerful AI is hostile, it'd be like ripping out your own spinal cord. It'll be AI in your comms, AI needed to even execute the order, AI needed to verify the security of your transmissions and your identity as a legit commander.

Reading updates - fable edition. Do post if you are reading anything this weekend.

I begun reading watership down and its been nice so far. Anytime I read something, it seemds to be mostly old or older than our current times. Besides non fiction like the very enjoyable Masters of Doom, I keep coming back to the question of art and why modern art is not as good. Paul Graham's essay Hackers and Painters give a paraller of painting and hacking wherein paintings peaked at a point and its been worse since, modern times being the age of hacking. What causes such peaks and declines? Is it due to the innate biology of the people, the social environemtns, combination of both or just the story of life.

Rabbits are small cute little creatures that live very short lives. We may look down upon fables, I certaintly did and I am somehwat pleased to say that I have a better understadning now due to this book suggestion. There are two great fables in the Hindu tradition, Pancatantra and Hitopadesa. I read the first as a child and loved it, though I did not remember any stories, you could sense that it affected or at least encapsuated a lot of the vlaues of the time. During a recent discussion I was made aware of how it conceals very harsh truths that would get you isolated from broader society due to them being true.

Which brings me to Richard Adams watership down which is an epic that involves rabbits in a believable world. I bought on the suggestion of my mentor and was surprised to see that the publication logo featured a smaller version the tux like penguin of penguin publications since this book is sold by their childrends division puffin. As an adult, you can appreciate the story quite a bit, the undertones and themse in many similar texts go beyond what kids can understand whilst imaprting them with some appreciation for these values. I watched Lord of the Rings as an adult, by the end of the movie, I could feel the things Tolkien held dear and saw as virtous. Good texts need to be passed down,, even if you cannot grasp them fully, you embody a lot of the underlynig tones.

Despite their being infinitely more entertainment avalible to us, we mostly seem to consume the worst sorts. I hope more kids grow up reading these stories. By time I get done reading something really good, I always gain a better feel for the world, anytime I spend time online, even though it seems helpful to keep up with tech news, I come back feeling worse. The subtext for good texts has an element of heroic valor whilst modern internet subtext is that of envy, lethargy, learned helplessness. Texts for the longest time were not a revenue stream the way modern books are. This is not some novel piece of information, I wanted to write out some things I felt to be true.

Gift your kids books, these fables do a lot of good modern media cannot. The world needs more heroes.

I am currently reading Private Citizen, by Tony Tulathimutte, on @FtttG's recommendation. (We had some discussion about his collection, Rejection, not long ago, in which appeared his most talked-about story, The Feminist).

So far, Private Citizen is quite entertaining with the same clever and descriptive wordcrafting and vivid descriptions of a certain caste of Millenial. They are all striving fail-trackers in San Francisco, messed up in various ways, and while I enjoy the true-to-life and often hilarious slices of their lives - self-involved neurotic would-be PMCs-in-denial at the bottom end of the social spectrum in the proto-woke era - gods, they're annoying. So far not much of a plot has emerged, but that was true of many of his short stories as well- they were more like "Here is a Certain Type of person and how they end up." It will be a super-dated book in ten years (it's already showing its age) but some things will probably remain timeless, such as the brutal takes on sexual relations. (The "nojob" is cringey and physically painful to read.)

On a less highbrow note, my current audiobook is The Air War, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This is the eighth book in his Shadows of the Apt series. I wish more people knew about Adrian Tchaikovsky. He's obviously a big seller, and he has two Hugo nominations this year, so he's not exactly a nobody, yet you rarely see him talked about with other big names in fantasy and science fiction. I suppose it's because in some ways, he's not a super-memorable writer; his prose doesn't leap out at you, and he writes so much that it's hard to say he's notable for any one thing or series (he isn't even a "fantasy" or a "science fiction" author - he is very much both, something many authors try to do but few pull off well), other than writing a lot of books. He also seems to be aiming for that inoffensive middle ground where his books are very people-pleasing and as an author, he's an enthusiastic science and gaming nerd but mostly seems to stay out of the culture wars and SFF politics.

But boy does he produce, his output is at Brandon Sanderson or Stephen King levels, and I have read about 20 of his books now and not one let me down. He switches between epic fantasy and space opera and writes long series. I think Sanderson is his closest comparison, and IMO he is a much better writer than Sanderson in every way.

I see Tchaikovsky come up on /r/Fantasy and /r/PrintSF quite a bit, but almost nobody ever mentions Shadows of the Apt, which I still feel is his best work.

Tchaikovsky's not quite a Zahn or Pratchett-level writer, but he's pretty worthwhile; will definitely second if any of his books grasp you. I dunno that I'd say better than Sanderson -- Children of Time had more interesting characters and core ideas, but the plot and especially denouement was a muddled mush in a way that even the more trite Sanderson stuff (or even some 'better' Kevin J Anderson stuff!) never hits. But definitely at least on the same or similar tiers.

Sanderson writes very satisfying stories and he's known for sticking endings, but I think there is a sameness to his plot beats and his prose is definitely lukewarm, and I can never stop seeing the character sheets (and the Mormonism) floating around on the page. I agree that Tchaikovsky sometimes wanders off into self-indulgent tangents, but his ideas are exceptional and his writing is just better, especially in recent works.

I've only read Kevin J. Anderson once or twice and thought he was borderline awful.

Apologies, KJA's pretty much my central example of Extruded Book Product; the comparison's not a compliment to either of them.

Watership Down is a fantastic book. It does such a fantastic job of anthropomorphising the characters while still keeping them grounded in the reality of life as a rabbit. The British animated film is a pretty good adaptation too, although the death rabbit scared the everliving shit out of me as a kid. Plus it gave us Art Garfunkel's only excellent solo work - Bright Eyes.

So I just had a delivery guy brazenly steal the delivery ON CAMERA. The camera is not subtle. It points directly at the place she took her "Proof of Delivery" photo. And she just kinda put it down then looked around and picked it back up.

Sorta fun I suppose.

First time hearing of a woman doing this. I usually only see videos of dysgenic looking men do it. Did you file a complain?

I've seen quite a few porch pirates use their children to steal, so none of this surprises me any more. Lots of ragebait videos out there about this sort of thing if you go looking.

You're right though. In general I suspect women are better at following 'the rules' (agreeableness) which has downstream impacts on criminality. I remember once hearing about a SE Asian nation (Thailand?) only hiring women as traffic police because they wouldn't extort bribes like the men would.

Thailand is a good place, you see a lot of female uber drivers, food delivery drivers, something that I had never seen in India as that place is safe. Girls I met from the west who were tourists like me were surprised that they could walk the streets at any hour without worrying about any safety.

In general I suspect women are better at following 'the rules' which has downstream impacts on criminality

They are very agreeable which is also why they get exploited int the workplace more, ignore the diverstiy hires in large tech firms, life away from the ivory towers is pretty harsh if you are a woman. My mother works a lot more than my dad who techncially has to do jack all as he is a senior professor (no tenture in this nation but he is unfireable). My mother begrudginly agrees with a lot of requests whilst my dad made a name for himself for taking the uni to court and winning many times over, to the point where people respect him. Gender differences are quite apparent in workplaces not clouded by obvious globohomo ideas.

On the crime part, even in female prisons, trans women commit more rapes than males would in a male prison. The only crime I usually see from women is getting their husbands killed with their boyfriends which has been happening a whole lot more now.

I've seen quite a few porch pirates use their children to steal

Pathetic, disgusting. Using your child as a shield and making them do bad things. I have heard that some places like SF dont have felony charges unless you dont strike a threshold amount, meaning that you can legally send kids to steal a lot of stuff regularly and not face any consequences legally either.

The only crime I usually see from women is getting their husbands killed with their boyfriends which has been happening a whole lot more now.

Where did you get the indication this is happening more?

Pathetic, disgusting. Using your child as a shield and making them do bad things. I have heard that some places like SF dont have felony charges unless you dont strike a threshold amount, meaning that you can legally send kids to steal a lot of stuff regularly and not face any consequences legally either.

The use of minors to commit crimes is quite common; the main reason in the US that dads don't do this more often is that the criminal class are, uh, not very involved fathers. They do like to befriend fatherless adolescents(even ghetto mommas don't like their kids kids hanging around criminals much) to recruit them into being patsies though.

The only crime I usually see from women is getting their husbands killed with their boyfriends which has been happening a whole lot more now.

Women usually outsource their murders through a man like this. The unjust thing is that the man as the physical actor always gets a larger prison sentence.

Using your child as a shield and making them do bad things.

Men do this too, but there seems to be a theme where women use agents to act in their stead.

Fully refunded + $10 on the platform my wife ordered through. Not worth my time to file a police report, but who knows what their policy is. If cops come in the next 30 days and ask for the footage I will have it.

Yeah she's gone. What the heck was she thinking?

I'm surprised delivery drivers would be that brazen because of the traceability. But then again, we have sealed food order bags for the delivery apps for 'peace of mind', so its likely that this type of thing is common, even for low value goods. As long as there are multiple parties involved in the chain of custody then there is always someone else to point the finger out (in this care a 'mystery' porch pirate).

Can you give us an update later if they let you know of disciplinary action?

But then again, we have sealed food order bags for the delivery apps for 'peace of mind', so its likely that this type of thing is common, even for low value goods.

I suspect tamper proofing is less about drivers stealing and more about liability for the order coming through wrong.

How would sealing prevent putting the wrong items in the bag in the first place?

It doesn’t, but it passes the blame for ‘you lost something’ and both drivers and fast food workers are, uh, well.

It doesn't, but it (in theory, at least) absolves the driver from being responsible for checking the order for accuracy (Many restaurants find drivers checking the orders to be annoying, and that's before the driver starts asking for all the sauces/dips that get left out.) while having the happy side effect of keeping their grubby little hands away from the fries.

Like no-contact deliveries, it was a covid-ism that stuck around.

I will try but I have no idea how they work. We have had this happen one time before at our previous residence. The driver hung a bag over the fencing of the adjacent lot and took a picture then 3 minutes later I went to look for it and there was nothing. We never were told what happened in that case. I suspect unless I file my own police report (which I dont really have cause for because they fully refunded me) I would ever get any notice.

I know that on large purchases Amazon does file its own reports with local PD. But that is for over $1k at a single location, and then the PD will try to see if there is a camera and file charges. But for $50 of takeout we ordered because we both had really stressful Friday workdays? I doubt it.

How does someone that blatant stay employed long enough to reach your house?

Doorbell cameras are in 1/4 houses, and let's say half report it. That means she could get away with it 8ish times, or about one full day of normal deliveries. How unlucky do you have to be to be in the first eight(ish) thefts of her career? Alternatively, how bad can the companies be that they let her keep her job after getting caught?

Well, this has happened to us once before, so using these two (which are similar) incidents, I don't think these food delivery people are just stealing all the food. From what I can tell, in both instances it was the last delivery of the day and they just had reached a breaking point where they wanted food. There was food. And this seemed like a way to get free food at that time. Both times it has happened to me were around 9:00 PM which is about the end of these apps delivery windows. Both times were also on Fridays.

So these people are generally okay employees most of the week (I suspect). And what they do is if at the end of their shift they think they can get away with something, they try it. And they do get away with it mostly because despite the prevalence of ring cameras, most people are too lazy to follow up and the companies can't really fire them for stealing 1/50 orders a week because the pool of replacement labor is even worse. She will probably eventually be fired if this is a pattern. But she will just move to a different delivery app at that point.

Summer pool season started a few weeks ago. I'm on the board for the local pool. It is probably one of my most time consuming volunteer activities.

On the upside the board is mostly fun people who have real lives, so the meetings are often productive with a minimal amount of political jockeying. We drink at board meetings, and one of the guys on the board runs a local wine shop and does a yearly wine and dine event for board members.

On the downside the type of people that join the board are still generally busybodies. The treasurer is very opinionated on people following the rules and has a strong desire to punish rule breakers. She had a very Political-Managerial-Class idea of how to enforce rules though. Her latest idea was a strongly worded email to all the members with enumerated punishments for not following particular rules. I had to point out that the people breaking rules were probably least likely to read any such email, and that we already had the authority to punish them we didn't need to warn them first.

I would generally suggest people get involved with their local community. There will absolutely be people that disagree with politically. But if you are serving a common cause then that political difference gets papered over as irrelevant more than you'd think. And it's a good way to have things bent in a direction you'd prefer.

I will maybe share more board stories in the future. Some stories might be heavily more culture war oriented, like the little trans kid on the swim team, or the twelve year old that pulled a knife out on another kid in the park across from the pool. These stories are kind of uninteresting in the way that we are generally trying to optimize for non-controversy. None of us want to be in a media segment about trans kids on a local swim team.

The actual controversial stuff that people argue over during the board meetings are financial things. Money is tight, and it's hard to know how to beat spend it to maintain a good experience for the pool members.

So how DO you punish rulebreakers?

And more to the point, if the rulebreakers just ignore the punishment what's the ultimately sanction/enforcement mechanism?

We ban them from the pool. Short term bans at first and escalate to full membership removal. There have also been some party rentals that haven't cleaned up at all, cleaning fee for them.

By comparison to this forum I feel like there are way more options for punishment.

So what happens if someone shows up at the pool after a ban?

I'm just curious if there's a big burly guy that prevents these people from coming in, or you just call the cops and trespass them like most establishments.

Or maybe I'm envisioning this wrong and even the troublemakers are wiling to abide by punishment decisions, which doesn't explain why they break the rules so much in the first place.

Hasn't come up yet honestly. It would definitely be the call the cops option. Where we live they'd show up and actually deal with the problem and probably get a round of applause.

Troublemakers are most often teenagers being teenagers. Though recently it was an inebriated adult causing problems. Which pisses me off way more because now the pool will probably start cracking down on any kind of drinking at the pool, and thus ruining it for all the adults that can have a few beers on the sly and not become complete animals.

There is a checkin area so we will generally know if someone is trying to enter when they shouldn't, but yeah in the past people have apparently tried to dodge their punishments. Memberships at the pool are acquired as a family unit, so we can kinda get family's to punish bad teens by threatening to remove the entire family unit if a particular teen does not behave. If they are incapable of controlling their teen ... Well we have a wait-list for membership so they will be replaced by a better behaved family.

Yeah, I'm sort of gesturing at the absurdity that comes with these busybodies trying to enforce rules heavily, when the only way they can really make punishments stick is to literally have the cops show up and arrest them.

That is, if the troublemaker doesn't abide by the busybody's authoritah.

And getting arrested because you wouldn't stop running in the pool area or did too much horseplay is just a bit absurd.

Getting arrested for trespassing seems normal, and that would ultimately be the charge.

The usual progression for small organizations is:

  1. Some minor punishment
  2. Blacklist them, revoke their membership, ban them from the premises, etc.
  3. Commit to calling the cops if they return.

Any organization can (theoretically) do #2 on a whim and #3 if needed.

Following the discussion of work vans vs trucks in the US, here's an article about Nissan's attempt to sell a more truck-like van design in the US market: https://www.theautopian.com/nissan-once-tried-to-beat-the-big-three-at-building-a-better-work-van-only-to-fail-dramatically/

Some helpful perspectives in the comments.

Oh man, looking at the pictures I can totally see what they were going for but… it’s still so painfully ugly. I wonder if that’s one of those cases where if you stare at something long enough and tweak it in minor ways enough times you become blind to the overall impact it has on someone seeing it for the first time.

So I finally took profit on COIN and decided to get my driveway redone with some of the windfall. It's a fucking disaster, washed out, weeds coming through, you name it. Thinking of going with tar & chip to the house, and then recycled asphalt back to my workshop. It's about 400+ ft of driveway total and my first quote is about $11,000. I guess we'll see how this goes.

Tar & chip seems like a good method, if properly done. Tar should prevent weeds from taking root easily, also waterproof so if there's soil being created in there (and it will be getting created in there), you can poison the crap and not risk much getting into the soil. Ofc, bad contractors can fuck it up easily.

I spent three days this week paving a 10x10' area with flagstones at the dacha. The old outdoors table was mostly rotten. Just the bloody stones, about 1000 lbs of them cost us €120, but there's nothing like those in the ground around here and we didn't want just a concrete slab.

Digging the ground level, putting in sand, buying, moving and placing the not that even flagstone to be at most +- 1/8" off the sloping horizontal plane, at most and then filling the gaps with concrete took like three days total. Hopefully it'll last at least 30+ years like other similar flagstone-paved paths at the dacha. Maybe 2-3 pros would've done it in 8 hours, I think.

I spend more time than average in fast food subreddits. I have just been tickled pink by one recently submitted to /r/jerseymikes. For those who don't want to click through, it's a meme image of the ham they slice for their sandwiches with the following text:

"Is that ham processed? If it's processed, I don't want it".

Ma'am, that is an eleven-pound whole slab of deli ham. It has no bones, fat, or connective tissue. It is an amalgamation of the meat from several pigs, emulsified, liquified, strained, and ultimately inexorably joined into an unholy meat obelisk. Goad had no hand in the creation of this abhorrence. The fact that this ham monolith exists proves that God is either impotent to alter His universe or ignorant of the horrors taking place in His kingdom. This prism of pork is more than deli meat. It is a physical declaration of mankind's contempt for the natural order. It is hubris manifest.

We also have a lower sodium variety if you would prefer that.

In any case, I don't care about it being a loogie in the face of the Creator or an affront to my GP when looking at my blood pressure. I'm very opinionated about what makes a good sandwich, and I think Jersey Mike's absolutely crushes the nationwide competition. I still recall vividly my first taste of a true Italian (complete with prosciutto!) from Lenny's in the Memphis airport 20 years ago that changed my life. That place is now a shadow of its former self, but it's interesting how times have changed. These places couldn't even survive in ideal locations in the southeast back when I was a Subway sandwich artist and now they're thriving. Awesome, because my palate was built for thin ham.

(Side note - the humorous caption above is in fact mostly incorrect for at least Boar's Head. Their process involves using whole pieces of meat but forming them through force as opposed to ultra heavy processing.)

Quizno’s deserved a better fate.

Any Culver’s drama??

None that I know of, but the locations nearest to me are a drive. It's like a burger CFA in my opinion. The kid's burgers are the same size as their normal ones so if you're looking to save some $ that's the play.

Jersey Mike's is by far the best chain sandwich I've found!

I'll take a Jersey Mike's over most of the other sub shops, especially the execrable Subway.

But, much like @FiveHourMarathon, I identify as a Wawa Hypernationalist. When one factors in value in calories-per-dollar, Wawa is even more of the clear choice.

Now, if we're talking about ultra-premium sandwiches from traditional Italian joints, we have to confront the truth that the meats are secondary for overall quality to the bread itself and the freshness of the veggies, red wine vinegar, and olive oil. Tony Soprano ate his "gabagool" raw, or dipped directly into a mustard jar. Tony Soprano was a trash goblin from New Jersey who lived a caricature of his own life. This is not who you model your sandwich rubric on.

The great advantage of any given Wawa food item is it's situation within the context of the entire Wawa menu. At 2am drunk on the boardwalk with your friends, somebody wants coffee, somebody wants cigarettes, somebody wants a sandwich, somebody wants a burrito. You all go to Wawa.

I've noticed the quality at my local jersey Mike's has declined precipitously since the PE buyout. I've basically abandoned the place.

Which is a shame as they used to send us dozens of BOGO coupons that made them fairly affordable.

It's been a pretty short time since the buyout relatively speaking, but that's a bummer.

For anyone with the app, I believe the code jmmissesyou is an evergreen code for $2 off a regular.

It could just be our location for whatever reason, but I have very little reason to keep going there after two mediocre sandwiches in a row.

These types of oddly existential/cosmic horror-laced memes are basically 90% of the videos on burialgoods' channel. Pretty sure he has actually done a voiceover of the processed ham meme at one point.

Jimmy John's has superior cold sandos to Jersey Mikes, but no one can top the Big Kahuna cheesesteak from Mikey.

I hate to say it but I just disagree, and I say this as a big fan of JJs who will never turn one away.

I had the privilege of nerding out for an hour and a half with a dude driving a 720s whose vanity plate read frkyfst Both places use the same suppliers for meat, but the cuts are thicker at JJs, along with those for veggies. Their misfire on a bread redux, along with them now being on version 3 of the sublime kickin' ranch shows how much jacking of the formula the PE firm has been doing. The new toasted subs are absolutely hot garbage and destroy crew throughput. I have appreciated one or two of the LTOs though.

In comparison, I've found the bread at JMs to be more consistent and the veggies more generous. I have to beg the guys on the line at JJs to give me a reasonable number of tomatoes.

Jersey Mike's just doesn't have any subs that I actually enjoy, so JJ wins by default. However, Erbert & Gerbert's (a sub chain in Wisconsin and I believe other midwestern states) blows both out of the water. It's just a shame that I can't get them any more where I live.

So I got Pikmin 4 for Christmas from my wife, and finally started playing it. Parenthood can be like that sometimes.

I've loved Pikmin since I played the first one on my secondhand Gamecube in college. It has subtly evolved over time, and while I'm going through the motions on this 4th one, something of the spark from the first one seems missing.

The time limit is gone. This is controversial, and the series seems to alternate between having one or not. Despite the time limit putting me off from even trying the first game until I'd played virtually every other Gamecube game worth playing... I think I really like having it. The second game got rid of it, the third game brought it back, now the fourth game has gotten rid of it again. Definitely takes some of the pep out of your step, knowing you have as long as you want.

The game also feels enormously easier? I think I went almost 10 days before I lost a single Pikmin. I don't know when this change happened. Maybe I'm just that good at Pikmin these days, but I recall Pikmin 1 was a constant war of attrition the Pikmin were so oblivious and easily killed by everything. Pikmin 2 even more so. There was a constant need to grow your Pikmin population to cope with this. I actually don't remember how hard Pikmin 3 was in this regard, but Pikmin 4 is effortless so far. I think I still have a lot left though, more than half, so I suppose I'll see how that keeps up.

I keep going back and forth about what I think about the controls. The Gamecube title's used the C-Stick to send your hoard of Pikmin at enemies and around obstacles. Outside of that Pikmin were dumb as a rock and would happily kill themselves all sorts of creative ways. Now you can have all your Pikmin ride on a dog with you, and even outside of that they seem to have pretty good pathfinding? On the one hand, probably solid quality of life features. On the other hand, they trivialize or completely remove types of puzzles to solve from previous games. And I'm not sure the loss of these aspects is replaced by anything enabled by this QOL features.

I'll probably post again after I beat it, but my feelings about it now are that it's not bad, but it's pretty mid for a Pikmin game.

Play it for the vibe not the challenge.

I generally think time limits are bad in games, with a few exceptions. The fundamental problem is that it's a threat. It's a threat that, if you do poorly, you're going to have to restart the entire game from scratch. Like a final boss that, if it kills you, deletes your save file (though less volatile). I don't want to get 90% of the way through a 20 hour game only to have to start over from scratch. I rarely play games a second time unless they are exceptionally good, I'm not replaying the entirety of your game over again just because I wasn't quite good enough the first time.

The main exception I have to this is if there's meta-progression, like in Roguelites, or like Dead Rising. If you've got a 1-2 hour turn around, and I unlock new stuff every time, and the entire game is built around randomized content so it's not just the same thing again, then we're good. Or like in Dead Rising if I get stronger and it's basically a new game plus where I can solve all the problems that happened the first time around there's wayyy less risk of failing the second time around, I can take that. What I don't want is the game to tell me that the last 20 hours of play time were pointless and none of it counts for anything.

That said, I didn't have to replay Pikmin 1, because I didn't fail. If the time limit is generous enough then the majority of players don't run afoul of it. The threat looms in the background, but isn't implemented. If it's set just right then it creates stakes and pressure: the player has to act strategically and not mess up and get their party slaughtered too many times or it'll take too long to repopulate, so it feels more important to perform well. But if it's too generous then players don't feel this pressure and the time limit might as well not even exist. But Pikmin 2 was able to have a lot more content in part because of the lack of a time limit: you can keep playing the game after you "beat" it and go explore and get every last piece of treasure because there's nothing stopping you from continuing to play.

I have not yet played Pikmin 3 or 4, so I can't comment on it there, though I intend to eventually. I anticipate that the time limit in 3 will either be obnoxious if its strict, or superfluous if it's easy. There's very rarely middle ground.

The main exception I have to this is if there's meta-progression, like in Roguelites, or like Dead Rising.

IMO most roguelites would be better if everything was unlocked from the start and there was no meta-progression. None of this "Wow, looks like you're having a great run but this next area was tuned for people who've unlocked way more stuff so you're probably going to die anyway. Tough luck, I guess you should have died 20 times before having a good run."

If it's well-designed then a good run that gets cut short only due to scaling should yield a huge amount of meta-currency and reward you with faster progression. There's nothing that kills a roguelite for me faster than winning on literally the first try because of some combination of luck and the game being too easy on the base difficulty.

I think the main problem is that Roguelites are appealing to two different demographics simultaneously. There are the hardcore gamers who want to challenge their wits and skills and slam their heads into a wall over and over again until they get it: people who play Souls games and lots of multiplayer PvP and brutally unforgiving games, and Roguelites are often good at that. And then there are more RPG-leaning gamers like me who want to grind out levels and currency and overcome challenges through a combination of skill and tenacity, with the ability to fungibly trade one for the other. Skill should be rewarded, but skill and progress should both grow concurrently until the sum combination is enough, so that I can take risks without failures being a literally pointless waste of time with nothing to show for it. And also have an endlessly increasing difficulty so that through progress and rewards I can eventually tackle and overcome higher and higher challenges that used to be literally impossible from the beginning of the game. If the hardest challenge of your game can be beaten in 1 hour by a player of sufficient skill level, then once you reach that skill level the game has no replay value. But if you never reach that skill level then you can never clear the game no matter how hard you try. In my opinion. I understand that lots of people have different preferences than me. But this is the weird sort of interplay, where roguelites are (trying or accidentally? not sure) appealing to both types of players at the same time under the same label. So a lot of roguelites throw some token but short and unimportant meta-progression in there and just scale it so the hardcore players can quickly unlock everything and then balance the game under that assumption, which partially satisfies but partially annoys both types of players.

Did you ever play Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter? That had a really cool meta progression system tied to it, but the gameplay didn't really get fun until you got dragon powers - like 15 hours in. I wish more games did stuff like that though, Dead Rising lost so much charm when it dropped the time limit (although I still enjoyed the fourth game in a mindless way.)

Pikmin 4 was definitely a major disappointment. I did complete it, although in my defense I was sick at the time and didn't have the energy to do anything but sit on the couch and play video games. Especially after Pikmin 3 Deluxe (the Switch release) having full 2-player co-op support, the "little brother" mode in Pikmin 4 manages to even further trivialize the difficulty.

I feel like it had a ridiculous amount of hand-holding and railroading. I understand having a little of that for a tutorial section at the start, but it never felt like there was a lot in the way of choices to make, which is especially weird for a game series where one of the main interesting mechanics is splitting your party and exploring.

Pikmin is such a strange game for me. I was obsessed with the visual design and marketing, read so much about it.... but never really played it. The time limit wrinkle was such a big deal and one of the things that I thought was interesting. To this day it's still the game with the highest obsession/time-played ratio.

Strategy games in particular always have an interesting tension with QoL features that aren't apparent unless you're really into the genre. In Company of Heroes 1 and for most of 2's life, for instance, AT guns would fire at infantry despite being almost totally ineffective. Tank destroyers would do the same. Members of the community argued almost entirely against these units being smart enough to prioritize what they were best at automatically. The compromise was a toggle that allowed you to control the target validity algorithm. FWIW it's a feature that I'm still stunned anyone put up with not being in the game to start.

The Bell Curve Meme strikes again, cinema history edition!

I had long known of the Reddit midwit, clickbait anti-American, hipster propaganda factoid that Sergio Leone's seminal A Fistful of Dollars, the film which made Clint Eastwood a star, was nothing but an unlicensed ripoff of Kurosawa's Yojimbo. headlines tell us that Leone "ripped off" Kurosawa, or "Plagiarized" his movie. Notably, Kurosawa would get a 15% stake in Dollars after a lawsuit, and made more money off that 15% than he had off of Yojimbo. I'd long accepted this as a fact: the superior Japanese Samurai film was ripped off by the inferior Western cowboy movie!

But, then I started an audiobook of Dashiell Hammett's 1929 noir Red Harvest, one of his Continental Op books. And what is Red Harvest about? A Mercenary protagonist, middle aged and experienced, nameless, hired or co-opted by crooked criminal warlords in an oppressed town, who plays them off against each other to clean up Personville (Poisonville). It's Yojimbo! Kurosawa acknowledged the influence of another Hammett novel/film adaptation, The Glass Key, in his creation of Yojimbo, but when you read Red Harvest it's obvious that the plot is the same. Dollars might be Yojimbo in the Southwest, but Yojimbo in turn took Red Harvest out of the 1920s Southwest and moved it back in time and across the Pacific.

And it's interesting to me for a few reasons.

The universality of Western culture and globalization of culture earlier and earlier. I've said before that Don Quixote is the proper recipient of the title First Novel, in that it is the first book with a novelistic structure that everything afterward was influenced by, there is no author anywhere after 1945 writing novels who hadn't either read Cervantes or was influenced by people who had; where something like The Tale of Genji can't make a similar claim (though arguably one could make that claim about Genji for authors born after 1985 or so). Kurosawa is iconically Japanese, and iconically among westerners a sort of saint of foreign art film vs Hollywood schlock; but his ideas were often influenced by Western originators. Everything is much more intertwined than people would have you believe.

The way this claim has been used as a bludgeon by a certain kind of cinema hipster, to point to the originality and superiority of Kurosawa over the cowboy movies made in the West. How is that claim impacted by Kurosawa in turn taking Hammett's Noir and turning it into Samurai fare? Hammett in turn was original, in that he drew directly from his work with the Pinkerton's and his involvement in leftist politics for his inspirations. But is anyone really original? Dostoyevsky said that there were only two stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. So at some level nothing is ever going to be original-original, that's not the nature of human culture. Not that I question the Kurosawa-Leone monetary settlement, hey he deserved it for the shot-for-shot remake, that was worth some money. But the cultural credit he receives, and the subsequent scorn heaped on the Westerns, seems excessive.

Just one of those clever factoids that's missing the "fact."

the superior Japanese Samurai film was ripped off by the inferior Western cowboy movie!

Very similar dialogue occurs regarding Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, though of course The Magnificent Seven was a licensed rip-off of Seven Samurai. If you go even deeper down the rabbit-hole, Seven Samurai was an unlicensed fan-fiction based on High Noon (point of departure - what if Marshal Kane succeeded in getting a posse together), which itself is the plot of A Man for All Seasons put into the American west, and so-on and so-forth until you get back down to the Epic of Gilgamesh which was probably a rip-off of a popular folk tale that probably originated with some people from the next valley over.

Fistful of Dollars is the weakest entry in the trilogy, and Red Harvest is an overrated novel that I quit reading as soon as I figured out where it was going. I haven't seen Yojimbo, but I have no interest in watching it if it's just another "guy plays two gangs off of one another for personal reasons with a big showdown at the end* film. I mean, seriously, you don't need to be a clairvoyant to see how obvious these plotlines are and how at a certain point you're just waiting for the whole thing to play out.

Great observation, human beings also innately have some desires that cannot be verbalised properly by most except for a handful of blessed minds. Epics everywhere despite not being epxlicitly related have shown similar themes time and time again. Goethe referenced Kalidasa who himself referenced ancient texts here that themelsves had a lot of references from the origin of the Indo europeans. Some part of modern day steppe effectively influenced a seminal author who himself influenced the world and these things came from different parts but did have some shared ancestry.

I often ask myself if the reason behind the world not having good art now is due to the fact that like everything in life, things begin, peak and then plateau before thier end or because society truly is so bad socially and biologically that these things cannot be done again. Technology is a good example of this wherein the fastest pace of progress we saw was a cetntuy ago which allows silicon valley to LARP as tech innovators whilst making b2b saas trinkets that do not do very much.

On the same note as what OP mentioned, Moldbug famously avoids reading anything written by other NRx (neoreactionaries) to avoid copying thier ideas but they all reference the same people modlbug references anyway.

This is a very good point given that we have IP laws now yet things are staler than before. One more thing that maybe has an impact on this is that authors today need to sell a lot of copies to make money and get status, something that was not true for a long time thanks to patronage and fixed classes/castes.

Is there any objective evidence that Leone saw Yojimbo before making A Fistful of Dollars, or for that matter that Kurosawa read Red Harvest before making Yojimbo?

On the topic of plagiarism: myself and the missus were recently listening to a Marvin Gaye compilation album, and I mentioned that it infuriates me that the Gaye family's suit against Robin Thicke for ripping off "Got to Give it Up" to make "Blurred Lines" was successful, whereas their suit against Ed Sheeran for ripping off "Let's Get It On" to make "Thinking Out Loud" wasn't. The latter seems a far more blatant rip than the former.

Yes. Leone literally decided to make the film while discussing Yojimbo with a colleague immediately after seeing it. Kurosawa's inspiration is less clear, but he was known to be a fan of noir and Hammett in particular, with Red Harvest being one of Hammett's best and most famous works. It seems unlikely that he missed it.

I heard the criticism that Kurosawa was himself just copying foreigners and too western, true traditional japanese cinema would be three frames per hour of a tea ceremony.

had long known of the Reddit midwit, clickbait anti-American, hipster propaganda factoid that Sergio Leone's seminal A Fistful of Dollars

I mean, Leone is italian. It’s kind of amazing that europeans took a quintessentially american genre and produced a slew of parody-homage-knockoffs that were, for my cheap european money, better than the real thing.

Ultimately, the original inventor does not matter as much as the quality of the end product. It’s the Tarantino Versus Welles dichotomy. Tarantino may just be recycling old B-movies: but they were mediocre, while his are eminently watchable. Orson Welles gets a lot of credit for innovative techniques, but his movies aren’t compelling. I'm sorry, The Third Man is objectively a better movie than Citizen Kane, history of cinema be damned.

...aren't Kurosawa and Leone basically currently at the same "they made seminal classic movies but let's face it, appreciating them doesn't really make you a cinephile as such by itself" status?

Yeah, pretty much. But there's no peak nor end to cinephilia or any other arena of art-snobbery. I'm sure among cinephiles you'd find those who look down on people who think Tarkovsky's 'Nostalghia' isn't actually self-indulgent artsy trash and a true person of taste and discernment likes some more obscure indeciphrable film with better cinematography.

I wouldn't be plugged into the cinephile universe enough to tell you, just enough to have heard the factoid and been amused to find out it was, as ever, more nuanced than that.

Ufc 317 this weekend and highly encourage you all watch it. @Tanista comment on lat weeks thread about Jon Jones, one of the better mma fighters, behind only the likes of GSP, Fedor etc retired after holding up the worst division, heavyweight, for two years has made people who watch the sport happy.

Ilia Topuria, Payton Talbott and Joshua Van are three entertaining young fighters who are blockbuster entertainment whilst also being extremely talented.

Topuria was the featherweight champ and knocked the last two greats out in succession, something that is unprecedented and this was likely the greatest title run in the UFC impact wise for the division. Topuria is a pressure fighter, defensively sound, sleeps people with one punch and wants to be in the pocket. He fights a now past his prime Charles Oliveira who himself was the pressure fighting guy at lightweight, the division Topuria is fighting in now.

Talbott is a very online young guy and the first fighter to tweet about Sam Hyde incessantly making him someone I root for now. He fights at 135, a division above Van who's at 125. Mma is very stale, boring and not worth watching now. The UFC wants no big superstars to emerge as they want a total monopoly on the business so that they pay fighters as little as possible. The thinking of this kind has made the peak we saw in 2016-17 look like a different world.

The other fight in this card features 125ers who can sleep people. Lower weight classes are a treat to watch. As a long time fan, I hope you folks tune in, buy, pirate, watch it at a bar, whatever. Ufc 317 is on this Saturday, you can watch the embedded vlogs ufc produces to get some more context about the fights if you wish to.

Has anyone ever described the motivation for watching fights, or what people get out of it ? I greatly respect anyone who is crazy enough to get into such a fight, unless they're obviously crazy and unprepared.

But watching the fight itself is completely different to being in a fight, which to me is a very exhilarating experience judging by serious grade school fights or some kinetic sparring I've done a few times.. but that's sadly too risky and I generally prefer to avoid doing it- especially the 'real' fights with hot blood. There's just nothing there, sure it's somewhat more interesting than the fake fights in films, but it's only a very 'academic' interest.

Clearly, that's not other people's attitude so I'm wondering what's going on.

If people healed like in computer games, I'd probably be very much into MMA, but we sadly don't.

Has anyone ever described the motivation for watching fights, or what people get out of it ?

It's the motivation for watching any sporting event + a few additional benefits:

  1. It appeals to the apparently ineradicable male urge to debate Star Destroyers vs the Enterprise/Lebron vs Kobe/whatever. It's basically a simulation to find the best styles/fighters and to see how they match up. You can have the hypothetical discussion in a barbershop about how good a karate guy matches up against a Muay Thai guy or how useful aikido is or you can watch UFC.
  2. It's all of the benefits of watching any competition except fighting is the competition, the last argument. There's just a sort of additional, primal oomph. As Rogan says, you lose a basketball game you say "I'd kick your ass". You lose the ensuing fight and you just lost. An MMA fight is the last stop, not just fighting but fighting with the smallest set of constraints America can stand.

Yeah plus it has real consequences, if you lose a fight, you may never be the same again as your chin diminishes, you can pick up a career ending injury or you can learn from it and come back better.

Violence is an essential part of the human condition, hand to hand combat is totally useless unless you wish to act like a dick in bars, the large practical impact it had was proving that there were certain styles and certain ways of making them work. All combat sports work, Karate works if you have no walls, bjj works if the other guy does not know anything about grappling at all and has no friends, wrestling works if you have no issues getting murder charges for slamming a guy into the pavement, muay thai works. People watch it for the reason as most sports, the resolution of a story, a man's dream gets destroyed to fulfill anothers. The wierd side effect of that has made combat sports around the world better as everyone can cross train now.

Violence has always been something people have been fascinated by as viewers. The NFL offers a watered down much worse version of it, mma is just more honest about it.

I personally watch it because I like seeing how people solve problems, how a set of techniques and strategies can best another.

Will speak as a fan.

MMA is really the only bloodsport I watch. First, I love the progression from the prelims to the main event, with the latter often being not worth watching at all. It's very fun to watch in a group with 8 light beers and a pizza showing up.

What it's not: A way to fantasize about my own fighting capability

What it is: A way to observe the pinnacle of human achievement in pain tolerance and performance. Making our bodies into weapons is an insane counterpoint to modern western living. Sure you can get like... 60% of that experience by being a traditional athlete, but nothing comes close to the insane violence in MMA. It gets my blood pumping, and even the women's events are a type of masculinity that the elites have done their best to smother everywhere.

Seconding this.

And if you have a decent amount of training in some of the disciplines on display, you can actually sort of comprehend what's going on in that tangle of appendages, and understand why that particular spinning kick-into-right-cross combo took a lot of skill to unleash, even if it didn't land.

I learnt MMA after watching it for a while. It helped me appreciate how hard the sport really is. I still have an obsession with it that i wish I did not have but I have never really liekd any other sport as much.

Mma is very stale, boring and not worth watching now.

then

As a long time fan, I hope you folks tune in, buy, pirate, watch it at a bar, whatever.

Getting some mixed messages man.

Anyhow, I will be watching it at a bar with a bunch of guy friends, as much an excuse to be social as anything.

Have to agree with the general assessment of UFC logic. At best, I'm ambivalent on Dana White, he's clearly done a lot to get the sport mainstreamed but so many of his basic tactical decisions with regard to the business are hare-brained from my perspective. The commentary on the fights tends to be ass, the officiating has been questionable (a bit better of late?), they won't adopt new gloves to prevent eye pokes, and it is really unclear if they want to market as a brand of semi-family-friendly entertainment (they're on ESPN now, after all) or keep things 'gritty' and amp the bro-ish, violent and unapologetically masculine nature of it. They still have Octagon girls in skimpy outfits, the fighters curse regularly in ring interviews, most of their sponsors are likewise still aimed at the Titties 'n' Beer crowd.

Like, you ask me, the entire point of UFC is to set up the most interesting fights/matchups possible and encourage the top contenders to fight as hard as possible for a win, and generally avoid safe, riskless approaches. Big purses and other monetary incentives are a good method. Bring in the best talent from across the globe and get them to give their best performance.

Yet they sideline or outright oust their most effective, driven fighters half the time. Thinking specifically of Mighty Mouse and Ngannou.

Maybe there is some logic to mitigating the chances of a fighter reaching superstar status, once they're popular and wealthy enough they tend to dictate their own terms on when/if they fight. Like McGregor. If the UFC can keep them on a tighter leash then in theory that means they can arrange and actually deliver good matchups consistently, if the talent is there.

But also the actual fighting is getting to a point where the 'optimal' style is somewhat predetermined. Unless you're a talented kickbox-wrestle-jitsu practitioner, you're going to get stomped by someone who is more well rounded than you, no matter how good you are at your particular niche. Maybe that's how it should be, but its just a fact now that "MMA" is not literally "mixed martial arts" but really it is a style unto itself, it isn't really about pitting different styles against each other anymore.

I wonder if they should start introducing different obstacles to the octagon, or adding in strange conditions. "In round 1 they're covered in cooking grease. In round 2 they'll have an eyepatch over one eye. In round 3, their legs will be tied together with a two foot rope to limit movement and kicks. Round 4, they fight while each gripping a Bandana as hard as they can.

Or just go full Super Smash Bros. and let them opt to have Tasers, baseball bats, and small incendiary devices dropped into the octagon if a fight goes past 3 rounds. Or is that WWE's shtick?

I kid, but if you want to break out of the current local maxima for the current dominant fighting styles, you will have to adjust the parameters somewhere to force new optimizations.

Like, you ask me, the entire point of UFC is to set up the most interesting fights/matchups possible and encourage the top contenders to fight as hard as possible for a win, and generally avoid safe, riskless approaches. Big purses and other monetary incentives are a good method. Bring in the best talent from across the globe and get them to give their best performance.

This was the line when the UFC was growing and needed to compare itself positively to boxing. It's quite clear that, after the sale and the ESPN deal, the UFC simply doesn't care as much about this. It's nothing new: the strict USADA testing was implemented to clean up its image for a sale (GSP begged for it and was ignored until it was to the UFC's benefit) and then they eventually did away with it because why risk stars popping constantly? It's actually perversely rational: the UFC looks worse than sports that don't test so why bother?

And you can understand why. This isn't the WWE where you can script and the public often doesn't reward you at all for good fights. Mighty Mouse did incredible things in the ring but nobody ever cared. People would rather watch Sean O'Malley or whoever fight.

Making competitive fights is how a champ like GSP who brought along Montreal/Canada (one of the few countries that'll pay for PPVs) get knocked out by Matt Serra. Or 1m+ PPV seller Ronda Rousey ended up getting beaten to within an inch of her life by a Brazilian lesbian with a thick accent. She's probably not going to charm the audience on Colbert or get put in many films. The division - which was attracting normies who wanted a role model for young girls - never got as big again.

Now that they have no credible competition they've settled for squeezing money from their existing base and resting on their laurels.

But also the actual fighting is getting to a point where the 'optimal' style is somewhat predetermined. Unless you're a talented kickbox-wrestle-jitsu practitioner, you're going to get stomped by someone who is more well rounded than you, no matter how good you are at your particular niche. Maybe that's how it should be, but its just a fact now that "MMA" is not literally "mixed martial arts" but really it is a style unto itself, it isn't really about pitting different styles against each other anymore.

I don't think this is the case. People have been saying for years that MMA is destined to be dominated by "true" mixed martial artists like Rory MacDonald who've trained in blended styles from the start. But Rory never became champion and there's still a ton of people with a specific specialty they build on when they get to MMA

It may be that this should have happened but the very problem we're discussing prevents it: if you're a very athletic youth and you have options why would you want to focus specifically on MMA to make 10/10? There's a reason a lot of the top people are former wrestlers who've hit their ceiling and HW is so bad a division athletically (an athletic HW is probably going to gain more in other sports)

I don't think this is the case. People have been saying for years that MMA is destined to be dominated by "true" mixed martial artists like Rory MacDonald who've trained in blended styles from the start.

There are zero crossover champions right now in any promotion that had a serious pre MMA background. Adesanya and Pereira fight 185 and up which are shallow.

But Rory never became champion and there's still a ton of people with a specific specialty they build on when they get to MMA

He left the UFC due to low money and won the championship in bellator, the ufc guy at the time Tyron Woodley was someone he had beaten comprehensively and was for a point the world's best 170-pounder.

Yeah, it isn't lost on me that this is exactly what happens to virtually ANY product that obtains market dominance, and stops having to care about the original, 'hardcore' fans and thus can try to lower the quality of the product to increase profit margins.

There seem to be a confluence of factors going in:

  • The mainstream audience can't really tell a 'good' fight apart from one that is, shall we say, merely 'entertaining.' Hence they watch Jake Paul boxing matches.
  • Similarly, they'll back a relatively mediocre (for the elite level) fighter over a technically brilliant, masterful one if the mediocre one has charisma and good PR. Hence (some) people root for Jake Paul.
  • If you truly stack a division with talent, then you'd expect parity in skill so there'd rarely ever be a 'breakout' star that people can rally behind. Every champion would lose in short order.
  • So there's incentive to optimize for giving one charismatic guy with decent skill just enough of an edge that he can run his division for a while and attain some glory, then lose to the next upstart who will occupy his spot.
  • But don't give the guy so much of an edge that he is handily crushing fights so it looks rigged.
  • And definitely don't let him get so successful and popular that he can start trying to dictate terms to the league itself.
  • Keep the pay high enough to incentivize new talent to jump in, but low enough that they're 'stuck' once they're in.
  • Also do try to reward guys who do entertaining stuff in the fights. This is what the BMF belt is about, no?

So you're constantly adjusting the equilibrium of each division to make them look competitive but get someone who can stand out on top, and give your guys reasons to be entertaining and go over the top but still maintain the integrity of the skill involved.

If I'm accurate, you can see how they'd be taking pages from the Professional Wrestling playbook, except they can't outright script storylines and hand-pick a fighter's career, and instead you have to try and wrangle things with a series of incentives and nudges and creative publicity and hopes and prayers.

Long story short, UFC is modern day Gladiatorial combat, without the lions and without the executions. Entertain the proles and plebians enough to get their money. Put on a show. But to maintain the reputation as a legitimate fighting league (and to be clear, I'm not saying they're illegitimate) the sport has to be governed by stringent rules and have reliable rankings and keep things to a certain standard, so they can't go all in on spectacle and entertainment.

So Dana has them partnered with WWE, and buys into stuff like Powerslap or more recently UFC BJJ so the casual viewer can get entertained without having to know the ins and outs of a fairly complex sport.

And maybe the goal now is to just have the UFC as the 'flagship' product but use it mainly to attract in the wider viewership who can then be siphoned to a more controlled, profitable product that they can just mindlessly watch without the investment of a hardcore fan.

Holy cow, I just now realized how Powerslap is directly optimized to be fed to viewers in short-form videos so they can be part of your average normies' slop-scrolling experience.

Powerslap is the worst because no one good will ever compete in a sport with that low IQ. Plus, having zero defence means that everyone will get knocked the fuck out before becoming a star. You cannot have a dominant champion getting dethroned storyline ever. Dana is struggling to break through, as the UFC will need to allow fighter unions and two more divisions with fewer apex cards to let the sport make money.

UFC BJJ for instance, will always lose out to CJI because the people doing it are not phoning it in the way UFC is.

No, I'm agreeing with you.

I'm just realizing that They're trying to create content that can compete in the Tiktok environment.

Getting some mixed messages man.

Fighters are great, the management and the people running the business are short sighted.

Have to agree with the general assessment of UFC...........

Agree on all points. The speculative exit economy that ruined software follwoed mma. Dana is a scum who should have his assetes liquidated for lobbying and stealing money from fighters whilst never having done anything more than cardio kickboxing. UFC did not save MMA, it would have risen from Japan, they just made it worse via monopoly. They just wanted to sell it and the things like standard uniforms and stuff was just a way to convince investors

Like, you ask me, the entire point of UFC is to set up the most interesting fights/matchups possible and encourage the top contenders to fight as hard as possible for a win, and generally avoid safe, riskless approaches. Big purses and other monetary incentives are a good method. Bring in the best talent from across the globe and get them to give their best performance.

That is a cover for thier real incentive which is to sell tv rights to ESPN as PPVs keep sinking in the gutter. The Ali act that saves boxing cannot exist in MMA as fighters cannot unionize, this makes the fights worse as Dana and co dont want you to get too popular like mcgregor or want any independence like Fedor. They just want people who will take lifec hanging brain damage for 10k show and 10k win. Not a surprise they are business partners with another entity that loses relevance everyday, WWE.

But also the actual fighting is getting to a point where the 'optimal' style is somewhat predetermined. Unless you're a talented kickbox-wrestle-jitsu practitioner, you're going to get stomped by someone who is more well rounded than you, no matter how good you are at your particular niche.

Its not set in stone. Beyond BJJ being made totally irrelevant (bjj not submission grappling, bjj is about guard play, something that will get you killed in an amateur fight), the "meta" keeps changing regularly. In the early days you had a mixed bag with wrestle-boxers dominating, then we shifted towards more kickboxing, it keeps swinging back and forth. The outputs per fighter is way higher now, prodigies who are good are defensively better. Every weight division has bigger fighters which means that you have more knockouts but also a higher willingness to step in the pocket and punch in combination. The bjj aproach of take pass guard has been replaced with dragging the guy to the corner of the cage, once your hips are not stationary, you cannot play guard. The sport is still fun, its that the UFC much like the WWE wants to kill the outliers who will demand what they are worth like they do in boxing.

Maybe that's how it should be, but its just a fact now that "MMA" is not literally "mixed martial arts" but really it is a style unto itself, it isn't really about pitting different styles against each other anymore.

Yeah but you do see a ton of flair. Caucasian wrestlers, kickboxers, american wrestlers, freestyle wrestlers, submission grapplers all are very different. The first true MMA only background guy was Rory Mcdonald funnily enough.

I wonder if they should start introducing different obstacles to the octagon, or adding in strange conditions. "In round 1 they're covered in cooking grease. In round 2 they'll have an eyepatch over one eye. In round 3, their legs will be tied together with a two foot rope to limit movement and kicks. Round 4, they fight while each gripping a Bandana as hard as they can.

Or they can introduce powerslap inside the octagon and lose them even more money lol. But jokes aside, they should add two more weightclasses between 155 and 185, pay scouts money like actual sports and remove weight cuts. Beyond that, allow kicks to the face on the ground, stand people up if they clinch too long on the fence and sign fighters late. Signing fighters via the contender series leads to people like Bo Nickal who cannot get good and end up as midlding fighters with no style. Luke rockhold had a style, you could see that he built it to kill wrestlers, could not have looked like had he been admitted earlier.

Or just go full Super Smash Bros. and let them opt to have Tasers, baseball bats, and small incendiary devices dropped into the octagon if a fight goes past 3 rounds. Or is that WWE's shtick?

Lol, pro wrestling is worse now because people know of mma so the scare factor goes out, beyond that the peak of it in the last 40 years, the attitude era was defined by adult themed storylines and outliers like Steve Austin, The Rock, which the WWE does not want more of. So they up the ante in the usage of fake weapons and falls but its not compelling because the two things i listed are simply not there anymore. You tell someone that you like pro wrestling now, you will be seen as a wierdo as the product is for kids. I do not watch it but Jim Cornettes podcast gives a fun rundown of why its bad now.

I kid, but if you want to break out of the current local maxima for the current dominant fighting styles, you will have to adjust the parameters somewhere to force new optimizations.

The current style is good. Every belt holder currently is someone who strikes and gets finishes. Less than a tenth of the roster is made up of wrestlers and wrestling defence gets better each year as anti wrestling is easier than trying to take people down. The UFC just needs to hire scouts, let fighters unionise, make more money. Boxing is very fun now. We have had superfights on the regular whilst Dana does not want Jon Jones to leave despite having a worse string of opponents in the past two years than Sam Alvey. His contender series is a terrible idea too.

pay scouts money like actual sports and remove weight cuts.

I don't think the UFC can compete with things like wrestling for lower weight classes or NFL on the high end. It'll never be as prestigious or profitable. And it simply doesn't have the number of fights to absorb all of the combat sports.

The best part of its model is that it leeches off other, more entrenched sports' scouting and training practices. What it should do is try to attract more athletes who want to cross over (like UFC fighters do with boxing) but the UFC is now in the WWE position and has no reason to innovate.

And it simply doesn't have the number of fights to absorb all of the combat sports.

I would never want that, people crossing over is ok in limited amounts, if everyone who did dutch kickboxing came over then dutch kickboxing would die out. Though MMA can be far bigger if the ali act was enforced here.

The best part of its model is that it leeches off other, more entrenched sports' scouting and training practices. What it should do is try to attract more athletes who want to cross over (like UFC fighters do with boxing) but the UFC is now in the WWE position and has no reason to innovate.

It did this for a while but the scouting thing is not the same. MMA does not have scouts, people just count on fighters sending their records and videos over to gyms and promotions. Actual scouting and ali act would fix the sport totally if you can remove weight cutting.

The UFC is like the WWE and both lose relevance daily despite better fighters in the UFCs case, all because of greedy businessmen who deserve decades behind bars for the damage they willingly caused. The UFC has class action lawsuits and I want it to lose all of them. They are both anti innovation because they dont want outliers. Their goal is to swindle networks into getting a deal.

The variation could at least be semi-realistic, to be in keeping with the original idea. Longer/no rounds, ground that really sucks to be on, 2v2, etc.

That'd be interesting. Recently watched a video that shows that Jiu Jitsu loses utility when you're not on soft/forgiving ground.

If it was 2 v. 2 I'd prefer some kind of tag-team format, since actual two v. twos inevitably turn into 1 v. 2s, which always end badly for the one.

They seem to be in a decent spot right now balancing overall safety for competitors while still allowing some bloodsport, and obviously it is in nobody's interest for competitors to get devastatingly hurt on the regular. It runs counter to their strategy of getting mainstream appeal, but I'd say they could afford to do fewer large events per year and focus more on really stacking the big ones up.

Recently watched a video...

I wonder how much you could condition yourself against abrasion. I know people can run on gravel at least.

If it was 2 v. 2 I'd prefer some kind of tag-team format, since actual two v. twos inevitably turn into 1 v. 2s, which always end badly for the one.

I did mean to see the dynamics defending multiple directions. Just make it so the team loses with the first knockout/tap.

There was a grappling tournament on a 5v5 format called quintet which made grappling really exicitng. I'm a purist in mma but we do need freakshow fights. Half of pride was the best vs the best and the other half being freakshows.

Yeah. Need to be exhibition rounds in UFC events that are just there to be a spectacle, not everything has to be completely serious.

If you're tired of the unrealistic peace treaties of Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Victoria, and Hearts of Iron, one enterprising company has published a board game about the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War One: Versailles 1919. Here are some of the 52 different "issues" that can be resolved as part of the game. (The players are UK, France, USA, and optionally Italy.)

Kurdistan (Middle East, 3 victory points):

  • French mandate: +1 to French empire, −1 to USA happiness, +1 to Middle East unrest, +1 to Balkans unrest

  • UK mandate: +1 to UK empire, −1 to US happiness, +2 to Middle East unrest

  • Independence: +1 to self-determination, −2 to French happiness, +2 to Middle East unrest

  • No Kurdistan: (no effect)

Palestine (Middle East, 4 victory points):

  • UK mandate: +1 to UK empire, +1 to Middle East unrest

  • French mandate: +1 to French empire, −1 to UK happiness, −1 to US happiness, +1 to Middle East unrest

  • Arab state: +1 to self-determination, −2 to UK happiness

  • Zionist state (28 years early!): +1 to UK happiness, +3 to Middle East unrest

Prussia (Europe, 5 victory points):

  • Germany: +1 to industry, −1 to French happiness, +2 to Europe unrest

  • Danzig corridor: +1 to German containment, +1 to Europe unrest

  • Poland: +2 to German containment, +2 to Europe unrest, −1 to US happiness

Slovenia and Croatia (Balkans, 5 victory points):

  • Both independent: +2 to self-determination, +1 to Italy happiness

  • Slovenia independent, Croatia in Yugoslavia: +1 to self-determination, −2 to Italy happiness

  • Both in Yugoslavia: +1 to German containment, −4 to Italy happiness

If unrest in a region gets too high (perhaps due to an event card—Eleutherios Venizelos, Ho Chi Minh, Ibn Saud, etc.), an uprising may cause a settled issue to become unsettled, requiring a new resolution to be agreed to. But keeping troops mobilized to quash unrest will make your people unhappy.

The same company has also published board games in the same vein for negotiations during (not after) the War of the Sixth Coalition (UK, Austria, Russia, and France) and World War Two (UK, USA, and USSR). These two games have slightly more military action. (Which is more important—achieving your long-term diplomatic goals, or actually defeating the enemy in the short term?) All three of these games have solitaire/bot rules.

Big fan of GMT, and Churchill (the WW2 game that Versailles 1919 is based on). Churchill has the same basic setup: a three-player game representing the US, the UK and the USSR negotiating even as WWII is still going on. You need to make progress against the Axis (represented very abstractly on two different tracks, one for the war in the Pacific and one for the Eastern and Western fronts in Europe), but you don't want your opponents to make too much progress compared to you. You are also carving up the post-war world with colony chips, and there is a separate Atomic Bomb track. Victory conditions are kind of wonky, because if one faction wins by too large a margin, they destabilize the peace (being seen as a new existential threat) and then there are some complicated rules to figure out who is the "real" leader of the post-war world.

Tangentially related and a bit more on-rails, but you might really like Suzerain, a sort of amalgamation of a little bit of political simulation, a bit of choose your own adventure, a bit of visual novel, and a bit of Paradox. You basically guide your country, fresh off of a lifelong dictator's one-party rule, into the sorta-democratic era, and decide if you want to be a dictator yourself, maybe a commie, maybe a capitalist pig, maybe in the middle. But it's not all country-simulation: you are you, the leader. If you promise to reform the constitution, you sort of have to follow through, unless you're savvy enough. The chief justice of the supreme court might try to bribe you at some point. Your son sometimes acts out. A cabinet member might get embroiled into an affair or a scandal. Terrorists sometimes attack. You have neighbors including one who might invade you, and a sort of cold war analogue going on internationally (where you are not one of the big dogs).

Have you played any of them? Are they fun? I've played the Crusader Kings Board game (just solo) but really enjoyed it.

I now have spent a few hours muddling through a few solitaire games of Versailles 1919, and IMO it's quite fun.

I purchased them out of sheer amazement and thankfulness that they exist. I don't have any spare time/energy to play them, though.

Court opinion:

  • Keith allegedly sustains injuries from a car crash in which Carlos is at fault. Keith sues Carlos for damages.

  • In federal court, Carlos files for bankruptcy. In state court, Carlos moves to stay (pause) Keith's lawsuit, since Keith's claim must be disposed of as part of the bankruptcy case. Keith opposes the motion, arguing that, since Keith is seeking only Carlos's insurance coverage of 200 k$, and nothing from Carlos's actual funds (which now are part of the bankruptcy estate), Carlos's bankruptcy case will not be affected by Keith's lawsuit. The trial judge accepts Keith's explanation and denies the motion for stay. Likewise, the bankruptcy judge lifts the automatic bankruptcy stay that applies to all demands for payment made against Carlos, solely for purposes of Keith's lawsuit, and explicitly up to a limit of 200 k$. So the lawsuit continues in state court.

  • At trial in state court, the jury finds that Carlos is liable to Keith, not just for 200 k$, but for 1.6 M$! Carlos moves to limit the damages award to 200 k$, in accordance with the prior agreement. But the trial judge rejects this argument, claiming that any limits on the verdict are the province of the bankruptcy judge, not of the trial judge.

  • By this time, Carlos's bankruptcy case has been completed and closed. Keith goes back to the federal bankruptcy judge and moves that Carlos's bankruptcy case be reopened so that the entirety of Carlos's new 1.6-M$ debt to Keith can be ruled nondischargeable. But the bankruptcy judge rejects this argument. Having agreed that he would not seek more than 200 k$, Keith now is estopped from reneging on that agreement.

  • With the bankruptcy judge's opinion in front of him, the state trial judge acknowledges that Carlos need not pay more than 200 k$ to Keith, but still refuses to modify the jury's damages award. Rather, the trial judge thinks that the official damages number should remain listed as 1.6 M$, and Carlos should first pay the 200 k$ and then submit a separate application to discharge the extra 1.4 M$. Carlos does so, but still appeals this rigmarole.

  • The state appeals panel reverses and remands for the trial judge to reduce the official damages number to 200 k$, since the bankruptcy judge's stay was limited only to damages not exceeding 200 k$. (This is in 2025, regarding damages from a car crash that occurred in 2018.)

Is $200k the limit on the amount that Keith's insurance would cover? If not then Keith is entirely in the right here, and the bankruptcy judge should not have required the limit of 200k in the first place. There's no reason the amount should have been relevant for this ruling except if it would be dis-chargeable via the bankruptcy.

If it is the insurance limit then the best outcome would be the $1.6 M being the official amount awarded and the $1.4 M being retroactively discharged by the bankruptcy.

It's unfortunate that the laws aren't smart enough to do the obvious thing.

Is 200 k$ the limit on the amount that Keith's insurance would cover?

No, it's the limit on the amount that Carlos's insurance would cover.

If not then Keith is entirely in the right here, and the bankruptcy judge should not have required the limit of 200 k$ in the first place.

To clarify: This situation arose solely because Keith was impatient. He asked the two judges to impose the 200-k$ limit because he wanted to get his money ASAP, without waiting for the bankruptcy proceedings to finish.

No, it's the limit on the amount that Carlos's insurance would cover.

My bad, that's what I meant to ask but got their names mixed up.

To clarify: This situation arose solely because Keith was impatient. He asked the two judges to impose the 200-k$ limit because he wanted to get his money ASAP, without waiting for the bankruptcy proceedings to finish.

But why was that necessary? Shouldn't there have been an option to do the thing he tried to do? That is, have his case proceed but, because the accident occurred prior to the bankruptcy, anything that exceed the insurance value can retroactively be voided by the bankruptcy? Or is that not possible because it would make him a creditor and the bankruptcy has to figure out how to pay those out?

Wouldn't it make more sense to put a hold on the bankruptcy proceedings and handle the lawsuit first?

Or is that not possible because it would make him a creditor and the bankruptcy has to figure out how to pay those out?

This, I think. But I'm not a lawyer.

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