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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2371 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 20, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I'm thinking of keeping a journal. It's something my parents tried to instill in me as a child, but I didn't see the point then (of course). Now that I'm much older, I think I can see more of why that type of record keeping/thought organizing might be useful.

I'm planning to type my entries on my Windows desktop. While my initial plan is to just make a folder of text files, I think it would useful to have software that helps me organize it. Ideally, I'd like to be able to sort entries by date or topic (tag?), with multiple entries per date and the possibility of associating other media with entries.

Are there any journal keepers here on The Motte with software recommendations or other journal tips?

Standard Notes is the best, in my experience. Nice and simple.

OneNote is great and I use it and depend on it for my job, but I ended up using Joplin for my personal "note taking" app. I chose it over Obsidian for reasons now largely lost to time, I recall the things people praised Obsidian for weren't things I cared about, integrations of various kinds. Joplin syncs to DropBox, and I'm able to use it on mac/windows/ios. It's built on some bloated framework so it's a little slow to load on desktop OS's, though.

That said, as far as journals go, Joplin only contains my dream journal. Regular, brief daily journal entries go in a weekly planner, I use Leuchtturm A5 because they're easy to find and are formatted well. You can also get a different color every year and then you don't even have to label them. If I actually have something to say then I'll try for an essay and save that with its date in my personal documents.

I'm maybe a little obsessively reflective, but it definitely seems worthwhile to leave some breadcrumbs for yourself as you make your way through the world. I recently came across some of my earlier journaling from ~20 years ago at my childhood home and it was not what I expected, in a good way. There's a lot we forget.

I've been journaling off and on since childhood and digital journaling consistently since 2013.

TLDR: Obsidian. I use a template some of the time, and a journal review process I'll describe below.

I started in a program called Liquid Story Binder X, a locally installed program for writing, where you could attach entries to a calendar and it was very rewarding to look at the calendar and see all the dates lit up for the dates you had done them. This was abandonware, however, and did not autosave (at least by default) so I eventually moved to Evernote Remember before one note or google keep or anything when Evernote was a sexy startup unicorn that you could access all of your personal files? And then there were some unpopular changes, they stopped doing their own storage (hence no advantage in avoiding google/amazon) and pared down the capabilities of free accounts so that you could no longer install it on all of your devices for free. I had a paid account some of the time but I just wasn't getting enough usage out of it. So since my journal was on google servers anyway I jumped to Google Docs I brought over all of my files and linked them in a spreadsheet. I also set up my template so that I was creating the journal entry in a google form, when I wanted to. This was when I started doing journal reviews some days. If I feel like doing it, I reread journal entries from the same day. As I stated before I started journaling in 2012, so I have between 4 and 12 entries for any given day. Sometimes I review all of the entries, sometimes only the even or odd years. On review I occasionally delete old entries (if they were sparse) or add a + to the end of the name if I know it is a good one. I became really disillusioned and untrusting of Google, I think it was when they started scanning your personal files for copyrighted material circa 2020 so I jumped to Obsidian I have a dataview table that shows me all of the entries for today (so I can do the review process above) and I store new entries in one big folder in the format 22JUL2025. I have a template with a few brain-dumpy questions (what would make today great? dreams?--logging your dreams helps you remember them) and some memory focused ones(Did anyone say anything funny? What was the best thing about yesterday? Who did you talk to? What are you reading/watching?).

You could always just self-host a wiki with the same software that Wikipedia uses. (Other options include Tiddlywiki, Dokuwiki, and Wiki.js.)

I prefer Obsidian for general organization and note-taking. It would serve well as a way to organize an electronic journal with little fuss.

I've had Obsidian bookmarked for a while, but it seems to be a bit low-level for what I'm looking for. I'm sure it's very powerful, but so is LaTex and I don't generally type up my documents in that over something like Word.

I'm curious what you mean by 'low-level', here. I've heard Obsidian described many ways, but I don't think I've heard 'low-level' before.

I use OneNote. Linux users seem to recommend Obsidian for similar purposes.

New pages are automatically dated, it has built in search, and you can embed many sorts of media from pics and video to spreadsheets. Decent OCR too for text within pasted images.

It's a lot easier and more versatile and feature rich than trying to do it with text files. Try it out.

I'll give this a try. I'm not entirely sure about Microsoft nowadays, but ease of use has its appeal.

Just reminded of why I cannot play video games (at all). Whole weekend and part of this morning were taken up by civ, when I should have been doing other things.

Yeah that's why pretty much stopped playing - to have a good game takes at least a whole weekend, maybe longer, for pretty much every game I'd enjoy. And I can't justify spending that much time to myself. I played Disco Elysium though recently, and didn't regret it, but probably won't do anything like that again for a while.

And I can't justify spending that much time to myself.

My trick is to just focus on games with support for more than 2 players. If my video game time also counts as quality time with the wife and kids: boom, justified! (at least for a few hours a week - our multiplayer Civ games take months)

I played Disco Elysium though recently, and didn't regret it,

Heh, me too, though I regret the time sink a little bit. Not really something to share with the kids, though.

What gets me is, when I do have something single-player to share with the kids, I appear to have inadvertently implicitly taught them that only multiplayer games are worthwhile. Only one of my kids beat Portal, one of them never even tried it, and the third quit before even getting to the good part! Makes me feel like a failure of a geek father. If I can't get them into The Outer Wilds (which might work? it's good for spectating and ideal for turn-taking) I'm going to have to reevaluate entirely.

Just reminded of why I cannot play video games (at all). Whole weekend and part of this morning were taken up by civ, when I should have been doing other things.

In an ideal world, video game ratings would not cover violence but addictive content.

On the surface level, it's hard to tell the difference. Mario Kart is harmless. Civilization is risky. World of Warcraft is potentially life destroying. Only after you fall into a few traps yourself can you spot the difference from a distance.

I think addictive potential is individual, both in the type of game and the degree.

I never found the hooks World of Warcraft and Diablo try to deploy appealing, but Civilization or Factorio are like crack for me. I also banned myself from ever getting Baldurs Gate 3, after sinking four digits worth of hours into BioWare's discography during my youth.

This is a point in favor of my thinking that video games are better now than ever. All of the video game equivalents of crack cocaine have generally released within the last 15 years. I got horribly addicted to Caves of Qud, Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (I think @TracingWoodgrains may have played all three of these? He had an AAQC on roguelikes on the subreddit), Escape from Tarkov, Mount and Blade Warband, and likely others that I don't remember right now. Maybe that's just my brain being different as an adult somehow, but "gaming crack" seems like it's alive and well. Plus, you can still play all the old stuff!

Civ dates back to the early 90s, and Dwarf Fortress to the early 2000s. For another example, people used to get in trouble playing Doom at work because the game was just that good. There were very addictive games being made 20-30 years ago too.

Doom in particular got people in trouble not only for being ridiculously addictive, but also because it used broadcast packets to run its multiplayer code. So a few people gaming could have a disproportionate impact on the entire office LAN.

Civ dates back to the early 90s

It frustrates me occasionally that the first and second installments in the franchise have never been (legally) available digitally that I can tell. I played them as a kid but the CDs got lost over the years. I wouldn't mind trying the first one again.

Why the first one specifically? Civ 2 was one of the best of the series, but it was a pure improvement over Civ 1.

I'm not even nostalgic for 2 (4 was better in every way and 5 the best overall IMHO), but if you're missing the Civ 2 ruleset and don't mind a different user interface I believe that the Freeciv default settings are pretty similar and the available feature set greater.

If you were a Civ 2 fan, can I assume you played through SM Alpha Centauri? If not then forget about the Civ series and just fix that now.

https://playclassic.games/games/turn-based-strategy-dos-games-online/play-sid-meiers-civilization-ii-online/play/

You can play 2 online, via this emulator I linked.

I'm not arguing that gaming crack never existed before today's time, I'm just trying to push back against "gaming's golden age ended decades ago" point. I like that there's good stuff in the 90s. I'm happy it mostly still exists for weirdos who want to play through the best stuff. I would be very sad to give up the more recent stuff in some hypothetical world where gaming was executed for writing crimes against humanity sometime in the mid 2010s, like I suspect some hardliners might want.

I'm not arguing that gaming crack never existed before today's time

That is definitely what I understood you to be arguing when you said "All of the video game equivalents of crack cocaine have generally released within the last 15 years". If that's not the case, fair enough.

Either way I disagree with your broader point, lol. Gaming really is in a slump after the golden age of the 90s-00s imo. But I don't have any arguments you probably haven't seen before, so we can agree to disagree on that point.

I appear to have missed the words "video game equivalents of crack to me" in my statement. My bad!

My dad was a 90s computer gamer, so I probably have a more unique view on gaming than most. From my perspective, I discuss games from more recently more than I talk about old stuff. My favorites from the 90s were probably Fallout 1, Planescape: Torment, and Marathon, which had some pretty meaty things to talk about, and Fallout was totally oozing style. But more recently (and using the term "recently" loosely), there's stuff like Hotline Miami, Spec Ops: The Line, LISA: The Painful, OFF, Katana Zero, and Dark Souls that put together some very unique combination of mechanics and writing that are really fun to think about and interact with, basically all of them having honed their own unique style in a way that was impossible back then. Maybe it depends more on the genre you like? Like, CRPGs have definitely suffered, I think. But if you are writing off indie games, I think that's generally a bad idea, because those are a lot more true to the company culture that composed 90s gaming companies.

I don't care if I've heard it before, I like reading about things I'm interested in. Please, write more about video games, all the time, everywhere. If my examples seem dated, that's mostly because I'm cheap and only buy cheap old games.

I agree that good games (even great games) are still to be found, especially from indie devs. My observation is just that there has been a decrease over time in the rate of getting those great games. Early on (like in the 80s), devs were strongly limited by technology, but in the 90s they started to be unshackled from those limitations and were putting out incredible games that blew everything before them away. Doom, Fallout, the various Infinity Engine games, FF6, FF7, Deus Ex, Starcraft, Alpha Centauri, etc etc. And that torrent of classics kept up for a good long while. But at some point it slowed down - around 2010 is where the inflection point seemed to me to be. Not that we don't get classics any more (we do, some of my favorite games are from after the golden age), but that something changed and now (to make up some numbers) 20% of the games are classic instead of 60%. We can still get a lot of great games while it also being true that we get fewer than before

I suspect that the primary driver here is because AAA game development has become way too expensive and time-consuming. When it takes 5-10 years and a team of 200 people to make the game, there's always going to be pressure to play it safe so as to recoup the investment. Not to mention that long dev times hurt because games (like other software) benefit a lot from iteration. If you make a game in a year or two, you can test out your ideas and learn from your mistakes so much faster than at the current pace of AAA dev. And I bet that this is why so many of the great games in recent memory have been indie games. Free of the constraints their AAA colleagues face, they can focus more on quality for their intended audience than safe broad appeal. They can iterate faster and dial in what makes the best games. But even though the indie devs still knock it out of the park a lot, time was that all the devs were doing that! It really does strike me as a golden age that we aren't quite experiencing any more.

Okay, those caveats are enough for me to be satisfied. I agree that there is not as much quality and much less actual diversity in game genre and creative liberties in general. I think you make a good point about game development and iteration. Insects lay 200 eggs that hatch every time they reproduce and this affects their speciation rate not an insignificant amount compared to primates which spend more than a decade raising their young.

I'm not sure there's enough cause to worry yet, though, because the art is young still, comparatively, and we know movies to have gone through different phases throughout the decades. Also, there's an absolute firehose of video games now compared to back then, so even a picky gamer can choose to play only good games. Unless he plays every day and gets bored quickly, I suppose.

I am annoyed that a space like this is one of the only places you can even bring this problem up. Why is that? Anywhere else, and the premise is questioned hard and it's assumed that you hate gay people. I'm guessing GamerGate made it so you can't question the choices of the industry anymore or something.

but that something changed and now (to make up some numbers) 20% of the games are classic instead of 60%.

How many games were there released per year in the 90s, and how many are released now?

My impression is that there are, to put it simply, a metric fuckton of games now and even if a smaller proportion of them are good, that still means way more good games than in the 90s.

It's a fair question. My subjective impression (i.e I have zero data for this, just a gut feeling based on the games I have played) is that there are fewer of those gems in absolute terms even though the overall number of games has increased. But that's not data, just how it has seemed to me.

Yep, CIV is especially dangerous in this regard.

Filthy addicts... :P

Was it a good campaign, at least? What civ did you play?

Maori on the classic Terra map. Got the whole continent to myself and got to play a nice relaxing dev game.

Sounds like Civ 6? I'm still on 5 (by choice). Skeptical towards 7 too.

Civ 3 was peak except for the stupid global warming mechanics. 4 was really good, especially with the live map editor. 5 and onwards have been sore disappointments for me, and the more I look at 7, the harder I gag.

Civ 3 really overpenalized playing "wide" instead of "tall". My father was a Civ fanatic but hated that one until I edited IIRC the corruption equation values.

Did you try Civ 5 with all the DLC? If you can't get past the ridiculous "one unit per type per hex" limit, that's understandable, but other than that it became a great game.

If you can't get past the ridiculous "one unit per type per hex" limit, that's understandable

That change is the best change in the game! Warfare is so boring in Civ 4 because there's no gameplay to it, if you have a stack that counters their stack you win. I am sympathetic to the argument that doom stacks were better because the AI was more competent with them, but can't really understand preferring them as a game mechanic.

If you want more complex combat, maybe consider Shadow Empire? It's a deep dive and some stuff is just opaque logistics-autism but there is fun to be had with encirclements, reconnaissance-in-force, spoiling attacks, preparatory artillery barrages before the armoured thrust...

That change is the best change in the game! Warfare is so boring in Civ 4 because there's no gameplay to it, if you have a stack that counters their stack you win.

That doesn't do the combat system in Civ IV justice. Unit types have inherent bonuses and penalties against other units or in specific situations, and can further specialize by taking promotions. An longbowman that is a sitting duck in the field becomes a killing machine with placed behind city walls with the garrison promotions. There is no best unit; every unit has a counter. And huge stacks can get demolished by collateral damage, so you have to make careful decisions about how to split your stacks, whether to attack and if so with what units, whether to take an extra turn lowering a city's defenses but risk more defenders showing up, etc.

And that's all just tactics. Strategy is just as important. You need to decide whether to invade an enemy or defend, how many units to send in an invading stack vs how many units to leave home, which types of units to build, whether to spread out your defenders to cover all of your cities or concentrate them at the most likely point of conflict or concentrate them on your most important cities, and so on. Geography is also surprisingly relevant; the second easiest way to win a war in Civ IV is to defend against an intercontinental assault, because amphibious invasions are hard. You have to decide when and where to land, whether it is better to disembark close to an enemy city or in a more defensible square or to attack directly from the boats despite the penalty, etc.

But most important of all is economy and technology. By far the easiest way to win a war in Civ IV is to be one tech level ahead of your opponent. When two equally advanced opponents duke it out, the one with the higher production tends to win, because they can replace their losses while the other can't, and there is only so much tactics and strategy can do to tilt the kill ratio.

It's an impressively complicated system that the AI can handle almost as well as a human. Civ IV is truly one of the greatest games of all time.

Alright, you've convinced me to give Civ 4 warfare another shot. I'm not exaggerating my experience - I really do remember combat being completely boring and without any nuance in that game - but it was my first Civ so it's certainly possible I overlooked depth to be found in it. Are there any good guides for Civ 4 tactics? I know the game has strategic depth, but something which helps to reveal any tactical depth would be welcome.

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I did play plenty of 5, more of 6, before the dumbass AI in the latter threw me off for good.

You're correct to wonder if I dislike the single unit per tile limitation. I think it sucks, and makes warfare a matter of attrition (across dozens of turns), traffic control, micromanagement and heavy reliance on choke-points. I'd rather take doom-stacks any day of the week.

Back when I played 3, I didn't have any internet access, and didn't know how to mod it. If I were to revisit the game, I'd definitely look to do what you did, corruption was a pain.

It hardly even counted as a "mod"; I think I just edited two numbers in an ASCII file.

I loved it when game companies didn't even bother compressing their text. As a kid I replaced all my Civ 1 Civilopedia entries with my own bad-imitation-of-Dave-Barry-style humor just for the hell of it.

If I was actually any good at modding, I'd have figured out how to get 5 to penalize doom stacks (something like the bombardment area-of-effect damage mechanic in SMAC?) without outright forbidding stacking. I still like 5 best overall, it's better than every other version in almost every way, but that one awful change nearly outweighs all the rest.

Civ 7 looks so bad. It's not even Civ any more, just another game with Civ branding. Then on top of that you have the legion of bugs that it launched with, and... yeah it's not a good look for Firaxis. People try to defend the game by saying "oh the new Civ game is always controversial on release", but I was there for Civ 5 and 6. Neither was even close to being as negatively received as 7 has been.

And don't even get me started on the sheer level of "diversity hire" leader picks they sunk to. This problem was in 6 as well (looking at you, Catherine de Medici), but 7 takes it to the next level. It's ridiculous.

Civ 7 heavily cribbed off competitors like Humankind, and for all the wrong reasons.

The ability to change civs could have been so good. All they needed to do was to be sensible about it.

Start as Rome in the Classical era? Become some kind of post-Roman state in the medieval era, be it Byzantium, France, Germany, England or, if you want to stretch it further, the Ottomans.

Go English? Get the option to remain that way post Enlightenment, or perhaps fork off to America.

You could add more leeway, especially for dead-end states, but avoid absurdities like Caesar running China, or America being a thing in the fucking Stone Age.

The idea of their being an ebb-and-flow to progression, with setbacks at the end of each era, that works great in theory for preventing rampant snowballing, but the current execution is utter ass.

Sigh. I'll go back and look lovingly at my copy of Civ 4. Last entry I wholeheartedly enjoyed.

Yeah, I agree that those sounded good in principle. That's why I was excited for Humankind when it came out, because I thought the idea of growing your civilization over time could be a really fresh take on the genre. In practice it didn't turn out so well (at least to me, and it sounds like to you) because the lack of identity just made civs feel soulless and disconnected from any historical flavor.

Accordingly I was already skeptical with the direction for Civ 7, because they were building on ideas that I already knew I didn't like when they were in another game. And unfortunately it seems like they too have gotten things completely wrong flavor wise (seriously, why does Firaxis think that the leader is what we players care about??). Not to mention the harsh age resets, which seriously undermine the core thing people like about Civ (building stuff up over time).

I find it especially galling because according to Firaxis, this all was in service of trying to get people to finish more games of Civ, since stats show most people don't finish the game. But I do! I find the entire arc of a game of Civ fun, and while the late game isn't quite as good as the early game, it's still really fun to me. So with Civ 7 they are trying to solve a problem I don't agree that the game has, by using methods that I don't like (and which go against the core identity of the series). It's very frustrating.

I find the entire arc of a game of Civ fun, and while the late game isn't quite as good as the early game, it's still really fun to me.

Which one do you play? I find the late game of 6 to be quite a drag, and 5 isn't much better. Early-game civ is easily 10x as fun for me.

Early-game civ is easily 10x as fun for me.

I agree. Everything has got higher stakes in the early game. Things that later seem like insignificant motions to go through, like securing a new unique luxury or defending/taking a city, or getting a trade route going to boost your growth, are very fun in the early game. Because it matters and because the future of your civ is uncertain and at risk.

I think you can use mods to help with this though - sort of. You can cap the tech at a certain age, or cut the build times by half or more, which effectively makes the early game last longer if you play at a slower game pace. Here's one such mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=664327211

Now you can e.g. conquer the world long before the modern era.

Are you trying to suggest that Harriet Tubman was not one of the great leaders and stateswomen of civilizations? Do better.

I'm trying to suggest that Ada Lovelace (much as I respect her) wasn't a leader of people by any stretch of the imagination. You can at least argue for Tubman in that she was a kind of leader. It's not a very good case, but you can make it. Lovelace? There's absolutely nothing there besides pure diversity quota thinking.

Wait what? I never heard about Lovelace being in Civ before now. A mathematician and "the first computer programmer". They have no business making her a leader of a nation. Or several nations across history, as is the case in 7.

But on the note of how to label these 'woke practices', I have started thinking it's more about female chauvinism/favoring women than about merely increasing diversity.

Yea civ 6. 5 is a lot better in some ways, but playing tall in civ is far better than wide, which makes the game not quite as fun as civ 6 where you can constantly be expanding.

To be fair wide is perfectly viable in Civ 5, I play that way myself. You will have a harder time in the early game (pro tip: settle cities on top of new luxuries so you get the happiness bonus immediately), but it's quite doable. Unless you're playing against humans, 4-city tradition is an optimization, not a necessity.

Civ 6 is currently free (including expansions and DLC) on Epic, for anyone who doesn't have it yet.

Not exactly a question, but definitely small-scale (or niche) and probably not a good topic for the main thread:

Pope Leo has granted an exemption for a parish in Texas to continue the Traditional Latin Mass

Early this year, the Diocese of Charlotte, NC issued, then delayed, a reduction in the number of locations for the TLM. The open secret is that the Vatican probably told the Bishop "slow your roll, guy!"

Is this enough evidence, now, to develop some cautious optimism about restrictions on the TLM easing?

Not a direct response to your question, but Leo created a bit of a stir in traditional Roman Catholic circles last week when he celebrated Mass ad orientem. Read into that what you will.

That particular church is 1) pretty normal for popes to visit and 2) has architectural reasons forcing ad orientem.

He’s definitely celebrated mass ad orientem as a bishop where it was optional, though.

No. The pope is on summer vacation and unlikely to have been the decision maker on this one, even if it bears his name.

I had a feeling you'd reply with some knowledge. Much appreciated.

Un-restricting the TLM and normalized SSPX relations are the two things I've watching for. I believe I'll be watching for some time.

Un-restricting the TLM

TC is too unpopular with the first world bishops, and not really asked for by the Latin American or third world ones, to stick around. That doesn't mean Summorum Pontificum is coming back but it has to get loosened for political reasons.

normalized SSPX relations

What do you mean by 'normalized'.

There is a tendency for conservative Catholics in the Anglosphere to wait eagerly for a big, beautiful deal that isn't coming, and won't be anytime soon, and claim that nothing short of a big, beautiful deal makes any difference. TBH, the conservative American bishops want a big, beautiful deal. But no one else does. The Vatican doesn't particularly want a big, beautiful deal. The bishops in other locations the SSPX is present in don't want a big, beautiful deal(what they do want varies, of course). The liberals don't want a big, beautiful deal. The other Latin mass groups don't particularly care for a big, beautiful deal. The society itself doesn't want a big, beautiful deal. Instead the gradual process of increasingly regular legal status, relations, etc which has been happening since 2007, didn't cease under Francis, and is probably going to continue on roughly the same trajectory makes the society, the Vatican, the French bishops, etc very happy. French bishops don't want to be stuck answering for the society's far right political associations if the French deep state steps up the cordon sanitaire against FN(which the SSPX officially supported since the Jean-Marie le Pen days), and other European bishops are mostly leery of the same situation developing; SSPX leadership has literally been prosecuted for hate speech and this is, well, Europe. But they also don't want to take the risk of a hardline attitude towards the SSPX, and most of them like the flexibility to grant faculties and negotiate with them. The Vatican doesn't want a big, beautiful deal it can be beholden too- especially given the SSPX history of playing hardball- and doesn't want the political blowback of whatever deal might get announced. It also appreciates the SSPX's influence among 'independent/irregular' groups of a traditional persuasion. And the society enjoys the flexibility of not having a formal deal, obviously, but they also don't want the attention of anti-far-right secular politicians, or a blowback from the terms of such a deal, or whatever, and, crucially, they don't envision themselves as a permanent organization. The SSPX's conception of its own future is that it will dissolve itself upon accomplishing its goals of banishing modernism from the church- part of their confidence that this will happen is psychohistory and conspiracy theories about apocalyptic prophecies, of course, but they also see themselves as well on track to accomplish them over a long enough timeframe(and they do not think in terms of years or even decades) by their own metrics. The regular Latin mass groups see the irregularity as an insurance policy for themselves.

Instead everyone gets what they want, except for conservative Americans. The SSPX gets to make steady progress on their plans measured in centuries. The French bishops and liberals get a convenient way to distance themselves from icky right wingers, but without declaring them to be in schism. The Vatican doesn't have to deal with everything a big beautiful deal would entail. The FSSP and ICK(who control the negotiating commissions, either directly or through sympathizers) get their insurance policy. The bishops of persecuted Christians in parts of Asia get society priests to violate local laws for them with plausible deniability(no, I will not provide a source, although SSPX clergy who are appropriately placed will discuss it freely if asked in person). Nobody has to give a particular interpretation of certain passages of Vatican II quasi-official endorsement(this disappoints conservative American bishops, who broadly do not hate VII but also identify the 'hermaneutic of rupture' or 'supercouncil thesis' as a primary problem in the church today. They're also mostly canon lawyers who are used to dealing with a markedly more cliquish and sectarian local church than is the global norm- as I keep pointing out, tradcath is, in the US, one part of a collage of different conservative Catholic movements, all of which would be reckoned as basically concerned with orthodoxy, socially conservative, and highly devout. It might be the biggest but is definitely a top five, and highly religious Catholics in the US are increasingly picky about where they go to mass.). Nobody has to sort out what's going on with the SSPX's associated religious orders, everywhere all at once, or their chapels that local bishops don't like, or whatever.

You gave an effortful and illuminating reply, so I'll do my best to answer your question.

When I say 'normalized', I suppose what I'm after boils down to two points.

  1. A consensus that the SSPX is not schismatic and that attending their liturgy and receiving the Eucharist is fine and not illicit. This lets more people attend the TLM in parishes / dioceses that lack one.

  2. The ability (built on point number 1) for SSPX clergy to evangelize and catechize. Regardless of one's political opinions regarding the SSPX, their seminarians come out extremely well educated and theologically solid. This cannot necessarily be said about many diocesan seminarians - with the major caveat that the variance across the USA can be quite large. I don't need to recapitulate the how and why of really bad liturgies emerging in the 70s and 80s, but suffice it to say, part of the cause was sub-par seminary training and study for priests of that generation. Although it does seem like the younger generation takes it more seriously, I met a friend-of-a-friend priest in his early thirties who, beer in hand at a wedding, announced he was "really into astrology." I'm not going as far as saying he's heretical or satanic. Quite the opposite - he was "father friendly / youth pastor / acoustic guitar" levels of spiritually flaccid. I wasn't scandalized, I was disappointed that this was a fairly recent product of a seminary.

The SSPX, I believe, has ordained just over 1,000 priests now (USA and rest of the world). That's 1,000 theologically sound clergymen who could be used for a whole variety of projects that require a strong theological foundation.

Regarding your excellent outline of the political realities regarding the SSPX, Vatican, and various groups of bishops, it all makes sense to me and I understand exactly the odd situation of conservative American Bishops. As a country, we always kind of make whatever the 'thing' is into our own, don't we?

Online tradcaths are mostly that - online. If every rando posting DEUS VULT memes would simply go to Mass regularly, we'd probably see some real demographic change across parishes. IRL tradcaths are too busy having big families and experimenting with various levels of crunchy-ness (small scale farming, local produce, raw milk etc. etc.) The theologically rigorous folks I try to spend time with also frame TLM discussion exactly as you did; TC isn't popular and needs to be loosened, but we probably aren't going to revert to Summorum Pontificum. My bet is that we'll get to a spot where any parish that goes to the trouble of requesting approval for a TLM probably gets it from their Bishop unless there are very peculiar circumstances. This would, I hope, lead to more diocesan priests seeking training in the Extraordinary Rite.

Again, what do you mean by ‘consensus’? The Vatican does not consider them in schism. The people who call them schismatic are mostly unhinged polemicists, either of the sort that unironically use phrases like ‘schismatic from the council’ or boosters of particular movements which have unrelated bad blood.

Diocesan bishops can give whatever faculties they want to SSPX priests, same as for FSSP or ICK priests. This happens at lower, but not much lower, rates. American and French bishops like using priest who regularly celebrate both rites for major diocesan initiatives but you don’t find FSSP priests doing this stuff either, even if they’re over represented as exorcists.

I didn't know these things.

Can you provide any good rec's for a "State of the SSPX vis-a-vis the Vatican" at present?

No comprehensive, up-to-date, source exists.

My understanding is that the Vatican has been granting exemptions quite freely when the local bishop asks nicely, even under Francis. As far as I can tell, there are no recognized TLM society chapels within 200 miles of San Angelo, so it would be well within the current guidance to grant an exeption.

Remember that Chinese hot air balloon over America? Why isn’t similar technology being used in Russian / Ukraine war? Seems like you could fill one up with drones that then free fall out and use guidance to hit locations in the interior of the country. Wouldn’t the weapons used to destroy something 70k feet in the air be considerably more expensive than the production of decoy balloons?

One obvious point seems to be that a a Geran-2 weights 200kg, 60kg of which is the warhead. When it's launched in a wave of several hundred, at night and accompanied by decoys, it currently does OK at reaching its target.

Adding hundreds of balloons to this operation (I don't think you'd want more than 2 drones per balloon, that's a large payload already for a lighter-than-air vehicle) is unlikely to decrease the cost per hit. Especially when compared to just doubling Geran-2 production again.

For one thing, the winds at high altitude pretty much always blow from West to East in the mid lattitudes, posing issues if you're Russia in this scenario.

For another, I doubt that big slow balloons are that hard to shoot down, even at 70k feet. Modern multirole fighter planes can get to 55k-60k, and specialized interceptors can get to 80k. You wouldn't need a big fancy missile to get from 60k feet to 70k feet. You might even be able to hit it with an autocannon.

Why is high-fructose corn syrup bad (compared to cane sugar)? If it's not bad, why do people think that it's bad?

It’s not just the chemical structure that makes it bad, it’s the corn lobby. The price of corn syrup is driven down by government farmer subsidies. You can put massive amounts of corn syrup in everything at a scale that wouldn’t be affordable with cane sugar.

There's a (likely just-so) hypothesis they teach you in undergrad biochemistry, or at least there was many years ago. The first enzyme in the catabolism of glucose, phosphofructokinase, is thought to be a key regulatory step in the pathway - as downstream products build up, flux through the glycolytic pathway is decreased. Fructose has a parallel catabolic pathway that bypasses this regulatory step and thus keeps churning and is more likely to stimulate de novo lipogenesis in the liver (aka getting fat).

I'm not sure how much stock I'd put in this, or how it interacts with CICO. But I think this hypothesis trickles down in an increasingly garbled form to the public and may be a large part of the hostility towards HFCS.

IIRC, the basis for the argument that high fructose corn syrup being worse than cane sugar comes down to fructose needing to be converted to glucose in the liver, as opposed to glucose, which does not. Sucrose is essentially a molecule of fructose and a molecule of glucose, so the liver only has to do about half of the work, comparatively speaking.

edit: I didn't remember correctly after all. Apologies! Sucrose is a disaccharide, essentially a molecule of fructose and a molecule of glucose bonded together. Enzymes in the mouth partially break down some of the sugar but most of the breakdown occurs in the small intestine, where the glucose and fructose are then absorbed into the bloodstream. High Fructose Corn Syrup contains free monosaccharides that can be immediately absorbed into the bloodstream from the small intestine. Once in the bloodstream, glucose can be directly utilized, assuming the presence of insulin, production of which the free glucose will stimulate. Fructose, OTOH has to be processed by the liver, and doesn't stimulate the production of insulin or enhance the production of leptin. As @sarker has helpfully pointed out in reply, HFCS actually contains similar amounts of glucose and fructose, so the key difference there is that regular sugar still needs to be broken down in the small intestine before it can be metabolized. Rest of original post follows.

Proponents allege that too much HFCS in the diet leads to more visceral fat and even metabolic syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. The counterargument is that the difference in metabolic pathways is relatively minor, that if caloric sweeteners are that much a part of any diet, metabolic syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease can result, and that the bigger issue is a diet heavy in processed foods in general.

so the liver only has to do about half of the work, comparatively speaking.

HFCS is usually also about half glucose (by dry weight).

The most common forms of HFCS used for food and beverage manufacturing contain fructose in either 42% ("HFCS 42") or 55% ("HFCS 55") by dry weight, as described in the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (21 CFR 184.1866).[5]

HFCS is IIRC pretty darn similar to honey in terms of sugar composition. And if you think fructose is the enemy specifically, there are "healthy, natural" options advertised with higher fructose content.

I ran into this a couple years back reading up on DIY endurance nutrition: the quick, cheap recommendation is usually a mix of maltodextrin (long-chain glucose polymers, used in home brewing fairly often) and something high in fructose (typically agave nectar) because the two metabolic pathways are largely orthogonal. That said, those results are largely applicable to specific circumstances resembling "how many calories can I usefully consume while running in warm weather", not general nutrition advice.

You're right! I had to refresh my own memory on this some more and the additional detail that my brain was fuzzy on in the intervening years is the whole disaccharide vs. monosaccharide bit, meaning that because regular sugar is a disaccharide, the bond between glucose and fructose has to be broken, whereas HFCS contains free monosaccharides. I kinda remembered that sucrose took a bit more work by the body to digest, but I was misattributing that to the balance of sugars, which as you're pointing out, isn't really much different than regular table sugar. So to be clear, it's not the amount of glucose vs. fructose itself, the idea is that the free monosaccharides of fructose in HFCS are uniquely taxing to the liver in a way that regular sugar is not because the bonds on sucrose have to be broken before the fructose in regular sugar can be processed by the liver. That's... even more hair-splitting than I remembered it to be!

A lot of really really unhealthy eating amounts to "not thinking about eating." Just eating whatever.

The moment you start thinking about anything relating to eating, it's a huge upgrade over not thinking.

You can get just as fat off cane sugar as hfcs, but if you refuse to eat hfcs you'll at least reject a few things at the 7-11, and sometimes you won't eat something you would have otherwise eaten.

Sure, but how is that relevant to replacing hfcs with cane sugar in Coca Cola?

It explains why the placebo effect exists? Due to ozempic thé average waistline will assuredly shrink for at least a little while, RfK will have something to claim credit for.

Despite Mexican soda using only cane sugar, it’s the fattest country in the world. I’m skeptical of there being much difference.

It's not, but it explains why someone might empirically think it is. Someone who eliminates hfcs from their diet will likely see various improvements in health.

It's not an infrequent observation that nearly any diet is better than no diet just because you have to start paying attention.

I think mostly it is just cheap, and thus every cheap thing that needs sugar has it in it. Some people say that they can taste the difference but chemically it becomes identical if there is enough water/acid so I doubt the effect is the corn syrup.

Cane sugar tends to generally-but-not-consistently taste better. I'm unconvinced that the health difference isn't just another 'gluten sensitivity'.

Can't speak for the cane sugar, but the gluten sensitivity thing is real from my experience.

Cut out gluten in a desperate attempt to sort out some digestive issues years ago and it helped a lot.

If I eat gluten in moderate quantities nowadays it results, like clockwork, in a headache, brain fog and later indigestion.

So yeah, sample size of one but I'm sold.

I can tell the difference in Sodas. But it's hard to discern how much of that is the aluminum/lining vs glass as opposed to the sugar approach.

Pepsi Throwback (in a can) was better than Pepsi (in a can), but I don't know what else changed in the recipe.

I don't know. When I moved from Europe to the US, taking my 2-liters-of-soda-a-day habit with me, it resulted in a slew of crippling gastric issues which responded well and quickly to (1) forcing myself to not drink soda and/or (2) switching to "Mexican coke". Now, of course, there are more differences in the formulations than the type of sugar used. I am however generally very skeptical towards food sensitivities, so it seems unlikely to me that this was pure nocebo.

Aren’t European soda formulations very, very different? I’d assume it was some dye or something before pointing to the kind of sugar.

And I’ll point out that Mexico is an extremely fat country, despite a good chunk of their population being poor enough to worry about starving to death. The portion sizes probably helped you though.

2-liters-of-soda-a-day

I feel as if I am misreading. That's a lot of soda per day. That's me growing up in the 70s amounts of soda. Quitting or reducing that would substantially improve your insulin sensitivity over time.

I mean there’s definitely people doing that. There’s no shortage of them- either by tonnage or headcount.

Yeah, it was quite a lot - on more productive days I'd easily average more on the order of twice that. I was somehow blessed with a fairly generous metabolism, which allowed me remain slightly underweight through all that and have no problems (in terms of blood sugar levels/functioning) with suddenly going cold turkey, which I believe would suggest that my insulin/glucagon system was fine. Perhaps relatedly, I also used to easily flipflop between eating ridiculous amounts and skipping meals altogether while hyperfocusing on something.

In the end it was simple stomach irritation (enough to cause an intermittent IBS suspicion) from the US variant - and the bad ergonomics of the half-liter glass bottles that mexicoke came in - that got me to drop it (instead replacing it with a more expensive, and painful during withdrawal, coffee habit), and now that I'm back in the EU I have rebounded to maybe 1l/day.

What's the best Disney sequel movie? I've watched basically all of the classics at some point in my life, but there's a bunch of stuff like Cinderella 2 or Mulan 2 that I just assumed were cash grabs based on the popularity of the original, and never bothered watching because I didn't think they'd be worth the time and the original movie closed its story on its own without needing continuation.

Is this assumption universally true, or are there exceptions? Am I wisely saving my time and money, or have I been sleeping on the hidden gem Aladdin 2: Electric Boogaloo?

Most of the Disney sequels are direct-to-video releases, so even when they're not trash, they're going to have an obvious decrease in animation quality and integration. And a lot of them are trash, or at best random TV episodes stapled together (eg, Kronk's New Groove).

That said, there are exceptions that are at least decent, even among the direct-to-video market. In addition to the Aladdin sequels, The Lion King II and 1-and-1/2 are late enough that their animation is decent, and they avoid their stories being too bad, but they're not exactly high literature.

Ditto to Rescuers down under. Aladdan 2 and Toy Story 2 are “watchable”. Everything else is slop.

The Rescuers Down Under. It doesn’t even feel like a sequel, partly because it’s just better than the original, and partly because it’s from before Disney went creatively bankrupt and started churning out vapid content to milk legacy IPs.

I'll second that. The first Rescuers was a work of love in a lot of ways and better from a matter of pacing, it has to fight a lot with the story it was using being originally intended for a novella format. Down Under has its faults and was a commercial flop, but the difference in animation quality a decade makes is vast, and the story, while more Topical for its time, avoids the ten thousand coincidences problem in the original.

A lot of that era also just benefits from the new technology (and, to a lesser extent, 'kids movies' developing enough demand to get a sizable budget). For a non-Disney example, Fievel Goes West is a much more marginal improvement from An American Tail, but the clarity of animation, audio quality, so on is massively improved, entirely downstream of technological advances. There's a few scenes in American Tail that are amazing efforts for what could be done, and what got Bluth his name and reputation... and also are just muddled and muddy by modern standards, with Scooby-Doo-level matting. Fievel Goes West still isn't as clear as modern-day techniques, but it's night-and-day.

For "worth the time" I'd nominate Monsters University, Finding Dory, the Toy Story sequels, and Ralph Breaks the Internet. My kids would add Frozen II.

The only Disney sequel (arguably) as good as or better than the original is Toy Story 3.

My kids would swear that Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure (TV series sequel) was at least as good as the movie. I watched enough with them to say that's surprisingly plausible but not enough to agree or disagree.

Even with adult movies it's rare that a sequel surpasses the original, probably for the reasons you state. Aliens, Terminator 2, Last Crusade, Dark Knight, and for especially the first three it was still downhill afterward.

You were probably just talking about the classics, but I've always seen Frozen 2 as a vast improvement on the first one, up to retroactively improving the first movie. Including the story of the second movie, the end of the first one feels more like a midpoint, while also expanding the world as the story expands to fit it.

Also, the music is much better IMO

The music in Frozen 2 is better, but the plot is barely comprehensible, and I hate the characters. The tendrils of wokeness are too obvious: Anna treats Kristoff like shit, Elsa is selfish and navel-gazing, and surprise-surprise, the old whites murdering the native magical browns are why everything sucks.

It's obvious Frozen 1 was rushed out and had serious story thrash but at least it's earnest. My kids barely watch the sequel but will see 1 any time.

Also, the music is much better IMO

The music in Frozen 2 is better

Am I taking crazy pills? "Non est disputandum" and all that, but still, really?

Frozen (1) was entirely supported by "Let It Go", which was so amazing (though the plot played it too straight in the end) that the flaws in the movie's plot and characterization were nothing compared to the zombie-apocalypse-level infectiousness of that song. I'm sure "Into the Unknown" managed most of the same technical feats of clever key modulation and whatever, but the lyrics and melody weren't nearly as interesting. For like a year afterward teachers were complaining that you couldn't put five kids in a room together without one of them starting to sing "Let It Go" and turning the whole group into an impromptu choir.

But even aside from the tentpole song? Frozen 2 had nothing as funny as "In Summer", and nothing as heartwrenching as "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?". I admit "Lost in the Woods" was impressively mature for a kids' movie, but I think "Love is an Open Door" would have been up there if only its irony had been a little less subtle. (of course, that time the plot managed to drive the irony in later, with a sledgehammer; modern Disney can show the problems with "love at first sight" more clearly than with "girl power leads to monologuing like a supervillain")

You know what? Actually, you're right. I've seen 2 fewer times so I was modifying my perception to account for it but after consideration 1 is superior.

Yeah, Frozen II songs were a little too on-the-nose.

This will all make sense when I am older
Someday, I will see that this makes sense
One day when I'm old and wise
I'll think back and realize
That these were all completely normal events
Ah

I'll have all the answers when I'm older
Like why we're in this dark enchanted wood
I know in a couple years
These will seem like childish fears
And so I know this isn't bad, it's good

There is a certain type of "Children's" entertainment that is really geared towards Parents. Books like "Love You Forever." Episodes of Bluey (I know this is controversial, but there are more than a few episodes of Bluey that have little interest to kids but is more geared toward teaching the parent.)

Frozen II is kinda there. Or rather, it's geared towards the 20 year olds who will never have kids but can reflect on their own childhood.

It's a weird rule, but Movie IIIs are typically good. Cars 3 is better than Cars 2. Toy Story 3 is better than Toy Story 2. Cinderella III is good. Aladdin III is good.

An Extremely Goofy Movie is fun. The Rescuers Down Under is better than the first.

I wonder if the logic is something like the first sequel being an easy cash grab where you don't want to expend too much effort or creativity, since it's fundamentally a bit grubby endeavor riding on the coattails of the initial movie, and the sequel is probably going to sink into obscurity after pulling in the expected amount of extra profit. However, if the sequel does better than expected, you've got a potential successful movie series going, and you should again start putting more effort and attention into the next sequel since now you want the sequel movies to be seen as An Entire Thing again.

Aladdin 3: King of Thieves is pretty alright, on the basis of a strong third act.

Can’t say I know of any other good ones.

Just had a random thought. Arguing on TheMotte about politics is kind of like stepping back in time to the 1800s before radio and TV. This is an era of politics that people like Postman like to idealize, and I see why. You come to admire and/or believe in other posters because of their arguments/style rather than good looks. At the same time, it's not like this place is a beacon of rationality (despite being better than most of the rest of the internet) at all times, which I think highlights the rose-tinted glasses nature of this kind of thinking. That said, I've enjoyed getting to know users here by the way they write, rather than how they look.

People forget that internet culture has been around since the Republic of Letters in the late 17th century.

Interesting. I keep a picture in my head of how everyone looks. Probably wrong but I'll never know.

I don't know if I'm notable enough to have a mental picture, but curious anyway.

Again this isn't me being Kreskin it's just the vibe I get when I read the person's posts.

Early 30s Russian male, keep your hair short, scruff which could be beardy but you don't let it get too far, pale eyes, high forehead. If I had to pick a color it'd be orange. That's probably because of the word sun.

I might as well ask.

Goatee, hair to shoulders, blue eyes that are animated and charming but hide a darkness behind them. Quick to smile but you suppress it. Given to plaids in winter and minimalist tshirts and jeans when you can get away with it, which is usually. You wear boots and have a weave belt.

I look like a half irish half mexican man in his early thirties wearing a gigantic grey leather witch hat drinking from a glass gourd. I assume all the other posters are roughly this level of eccentric.

I was just about to write that description of you.

I'll take his slot, if the game is still running.

I know you're male, and I think you have a family. Beyond that you're one of the several on here for whom no picture emerges.

OpSec: full points.

Maybe. I tend to remember certain things but I don't remember much in this case. I have him as a family man but picturing "family man" isn't a visual image.

“George E Hale describes Mottezians” could be a regular segment.

More interesting than bare links, at least.

That's probably fine though, because the image you build in your head will be built on the implicit stereotypes that you derive from reading their words. Which means that if you subconsciously ascribe certain properties to someone here based on how you imagine they look, those properties will likely be accurate. You're essentially going Words -> Impression -> Imagined Appearance -> Impression rather than going Appearance -> Impression and biasing your perceptions (the way everybody does in real life).

  • I also keep an internal picture of everyone in my head.
  • It's cheating since your picture is on your substack, but my internal vision was fairly accurate
  • If you're not exhausted, I'll echo the clamor for "do me!"

Tall, taller than I am. Cropped hair, clean shaven, I don't think you're Canadian but I imagine you posting from Canada anyway. Enjoyer of spectator sports, smoke an occasional cigar, sometimes drinking beer when posting. This is all probably stupidly innacurate to realty.

You're more right than not! I'm most digitally loquacious after 2 beers.

May I have a turn please

Male, early 30s, knitted brow, dark brown hair that sticks up. Heavy framed glasses. Green on March 17. You are surrounded by a yellow aura which belies your vociferous demeanor.

I'm strawberry blonde with 20/20 vision, otherwise right on the money. I'm impressed that you got my age correct: people who see a photo of me or meet me in person often place me a few years younger than I am, whereas people who only read what I've written without seeing what I look like often assume I'm older. I'm something of a young fogey, it seems.

You're wired differently. I have no idea what anyone here looks like, and any self-descriptions I read I forget. Mottizens are all names and sets of random factoids to me. Here's your character sheet:

  • Presumably middle-aged.
  • American living in Japan.
  • Family man.
  • I wonder about where he lives (and whether it's one of the places I've been to).
  • Normie vibes.
  • I doubt his name really is George Hale.

It's not exhaustive, but blame my bad memory. I barely remember anything about anyone. Which isn't meant to express any kind of low esteem that I hold mottizens in; I like you guys and am glad to have this place. It's just difficult to see you as fully-featured human beings when all I get is text, and no way to square what you read with any real-world impression of you. You might all be fabulists. You might all be figments of some AI's imagination. You probably aren't, I don't treat you as if you were, but it's just not the same as talking to people in the flesh.

I've no idea what anyone looks like either I just get a mental image reading people's posts, which firms up the more of their posts that I read. There are some posters here where I can't see anything at all, for various reasons.

Edit: You wear steelframed high quality eyeglasses in my mind's eye. German-made, of course.

Edit: You wear steelframed high quality eyeglasses in my mind's eye. German-made, of course.

Oakleys, actually, by my optometrist's recommendation. I might have picked German-made ones if I'd had any idea of what my options are, but I'm still new to the whole glasses business.

I'm the same. I can't really form proper models of people over the internet through just their self-descriptions and their usernames, and it's especially tough considering I have a hard time imagining faces in the first place. Here's you:

  • Middle-aged.
  • Half-Jewish German.
  • Father to a daughter (who he is rather fond of).
  • Married to a very dysfunctional woman with whom he has a working partner/SAHM dynamic.
  • Does not think Peter Watts is a good writer.

I think it's particularly difficult to form proper conceptions of people in TheMotte in spite of how regular most users are, since this forum isn't all that personally-oriented - it tends to be arranged around debating abstract ideas and less about discussing one's own situation. Also everyone here is very concerned with OpSec because of all the wrongthink bandied around on a daily basis, and many members here have jobs and families they would like to shield from any consequences of their online speech.

I can’t resist the temptation. Do me do me do me!

Forties, white, I imagine you in an Oxford button down, white or blue. I keep seeing everyone in short sleeves but maybe just because it's hot AF. Not bald, hair probably dark. American. Famous in some way that you keep from the rest of us.

Well… you’re right about white, American, and not bald! Sadly you struck out on the rest. Although I’m intrigued by that last part. Hopefully at some point in my life I’ll make you right about that!

Well I'm not Kreskin, I just tend to picture people in my head.

As for the no I'm not famous part, that's what you would say if you're keeping it from the rest of us.

I think I've described myself quite a few times, but I'll bite.

I did this to myself, didn't I. Yeah you're Indian, a dude, anyone who saw you would think yeah, probably one day will have love handles but otherwise normal shape.Black hair, slightly wavy, conservatively cut. Thin fingers. Mild overbite. You could be a sympathetic minor character in a Spielberg movie set in New Delhi, but you get revealed as evil in the end. Prone to light colors, and blues. Still not a fan of those spikes off the field.

C'mon George, 90% of Indian men end up with a pot-belly eventually, no points for that guess haha. Of course, Ozempic must have its say.

conservatively cut

Hair sounds right, but I have faded sides and back. No overbite, I have excellent teeth! At least 2 people have asked me, unsolicited, if I had them done in Turkey, though they were very drunk.

I, apparently, have surgeon's hands. A surgeon said so! Ignore the fact that said surgeon is my dad. But women do like 'em.

Hmm.. On the colors. I think you're on to something there.

Still not a fan of those spikes off the field.

Genius is never appreciated in its time. Alas.

You could be a sympathetic minor character in a Spielberg movie set in New Delhi, but you get revealed as evil in the end.

I do not know what this implies, but I suppose getting eaten by a dinosaur isn't the weirdest thing that could happen in Delhi.

How do I look?

Note: Answer will determine whether I ever comment on another post of yours again.

Southeast Asian, Singaporean maybe, or Malaysian, or something, thus dark hair, and in your case longish. Dude, 20s probably, or maybe early 30s. No glasses. Perpetual smirk. You have a lot of black shirts.

I feel a little bad about the deluge of requests you're gonna get. Though you really should have expected this, hah.

You're half correct. Malaysian Chinese, (semi-)short black hair which stands on end as if I've been electrocuted, buzzed on the sides. Dude, 24, wears glasses (is hopelessly shortsighted), perpetual smirk, wears almost exclusively white shirts. Imagining a more well put-together version of L from Death Note probably gets you 95% of the way there.

Am I pretty?

Why not.

To at least one woman you are. Your username suggests not a spring chicken so I imagine 30 or 40 something white guy. Mildly overweight. Gamer. Beard, longish hair. A good voice. I'm just making this up, I could be completely wrong.

No.

(You're gorgeous)

Go ahead and start listing them off.

Ha, well it's my mind's eye, so probably not a reflection of actual appearances. You're 40ish, heavyset but stout, not fat, big hands, short cropped hair for the hardhat, or possibly balding. You burn instead of tan. Clear blue eyes. Beard and moustache, a goatee type setup. Polo shirts, favoring blues or the occasional yellow someone else bought for you. White guy. Any dress shirt is a button down and probably short sleeved.

@thejdizzler is late 20s, about 185 cm tall, about 75kg, fit by any reasonable standard but not in his own mind, wears glasses, fools around with facial hair sometimes but not currently. Short wavy hair brownish. Also a white dude.

Well you did get my complexion right.

Suggestion:

Phrase your replies as prompts for Grok or any of the image generators.

For example, @FiveHourMarathon would obviously be:

an anthropomorphized wawa sandwich that lifts a lot of heavy barbells, Graffiti art style.

So, what are you reading?

I'm adding Jews in the Soviet Union, Vol. 1, another open access book, to my list. Looks like the full series isn't published yet, but volumes 1, 3 and 5 are out.

  • Tried Annihilation Score the second time after a break, but then caught myself thinking "why I am forcing myself to read a book which I clearly hate? I'm not even paid for this!" and dropped it. Probably done with Stross for a while.
  • Read Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, which, unsurprisingly, is an overview of how racial classifications work in the US. No partisan politics (well at least not noticeable to me, with all my biases), just a meticulous description of the whole thing. I thought it's a mess but boy was I underestimating it by orders of magnitude. Truly eye-opening, though not in any optimistic way.
  • Started Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and got about halfway so far. I wasn't sure I was going to like it, but so far it's going surprisingly well, even though I'm getting a bit of "show about nothing" vibe.

I had to stop reading Stross too, quality fell off.

Just finished Master & Commander. It was very good! I found the writing style a bit slow to read, but it was a page-turner all the same.

After finishing The Secret of My Success I wanted something light, so I devoured The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in three days. Even though the ending had been inadvertently spoiled for me years ago, I couldn't put it down, and enjoyed spotting all the little clues about the killer's identity which I would have presumably overlooked if I hadn't known. After Ten Little Redacted, it's now my favourite Christie novel.

This morning I started reading a book my mother recommended, Free by Lea Ypi, a memoir of the author's growing up in Albania in the nineties.

Long ago I would similarly devour Agatha Christie books, my favorite was Lord Edgeware Dies. Since I read them when I younger, I wonder how much of the social situations went over my head and how enjoyable it would be to reread them now.

I loved Agatha Christie as a kid and she's how I learned-and-it-stuck that adults really under estimate kids. I was in the gifted and talented program and my 4th grade teacher still publicly accused me of plagiarism for my book report on one of her books. Not that he ever explained who he thought I was cribbing from, but apparently 8 year olds aren't supposed to be reading and writing coherently. After he quizzed me, right then, in front of the class, he stopped. No apologies were made.

It amuses me that 3? Of my foundational childhood memories involve her books as a critical element.

Still working through Grant. Finished listening to the audiobook Nickel Boys and gave up on Trust. Relistening to Stephen King's The Wind Through The Keyhole which is essentially The Dark Tower 4.5. I also just picked up a bunch of Pulitzer Prize books from eBay (Oscar Wao, Interpreter of Maladies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Poisonwood Bible (not a Pulitzer winner)).

I just started Oathbringer, the third novel in the Stormlight Archive series. I really enjoyed the second half of The Way Of Kings and the first two-thirds of Words Of Radiance, but I found the totally forced love triangle her appears to be building between Shallan, Kaladin, and Adolin extremely tiresome and off-putting. I’m hoping he abandons this as the series continues, but clearly he put it there for a reason. (The reason, I suspect, is that he realized he is creating a commercial product which is likely to be consumed by a large audience of women, who want and expect that sort of thing. Perhaps I’ll be proved wrong and he’ll develop it in a way that is more artful and plot-relevant than he has this far.) I’m loving the world-building, I just need the characters to be more consistently well-written if I’m going to continue the series after this one.

Yeah I wouldn't worry about that. Even in the third book (let alone further), it isn't a factor any more. And to be fair, I don't think it was ever much of a love triangle. I think the story was just there to show Kaladin and Shallan mistaking normal human relationships for romantic feelings because they are kind of screwed up, not to have there be a serious contention.

Oh good. The worst parts of the books so far have l been Sanderson’s various pathetic attempts at insult humor, which he apparently considers the height of wit, and that entire mini-arc brought out the nadir of it.

Stormlight Archive is where I pretty much bailed on Sanderson. I really liked the first book, but the second was so tedious I lost any desire to continue the series.

This is, in fact, what seems to happen with all his series. A decent first novel increasingly becomes self-referential Cosmere wank in the later books. And more and more it's Brandon Sanderson (tm) writing a Brandon Sanderson (tm) novel. The man has no range.

I have not read any of his other stuff (I read a lot of fantasy literature in middle school and high school, but took a very long break from the genre) so I have no preconceived notions.

You probably know he's hugely popular, and I'll admit I've read quite a few of his books because he's got a pleasant and entertaining style, but in my opinion he's very overrated. However, if you like the series (SA is his "flagship" magnum opus), he (unlike GRRM and Patrick Rothfuss and Scott Lynch) will probably actually finish it.

And he'll also write like five other books per year along the way.

You probably know he's hugely popular

Yeah, I definitely wanted this to be my bridge back into the genre, and had heard a lot of great things about it. I agree that the characterizations are dicey at times and that much of the dialogue writing is awful. I find the cosmology interesting, though, and I admit I’m a sucker for the “here’s a list of factions with distinct personality traits and iconography, sort yourself into the one that you’d be a part of” trope.

I’ve read all five. Don’t worry about it. The quality is a bit uneven IMO but that’s not going to be a big part of things going forward.

White Witch, Black Curse (The Hollows, Book 7), by Kim Harrison. Book 11 of He Who Fights With Monsters was fine, and it wrapped up all of its major plot arcs, but I don't feel the need to run out and read book 12 right now.

Was Floyd picked as a figurehead because he was a criminal, rather than in spite of this?

I've been wondering about this from time to time over the last couple of years. I'd like to know if there's a term for this political strategy, if indeed it exists.

Surely there were some truly "innocent", non criminal black men - or black women, as the media would spin the 'racism crisis', but I gather it is pretty rare for women of any color to be murdered by cops - who were killed by cops in dubious circumstances, and could have been picked out by the BLM movement as their martyr? I'm not American and am not very familiar with the issue, but I do vaguely remember a few cases of egregious police brutality against black men without criminal records and without meth addictions, maybe even during the same time period in the year 2020. Rather than someone with a long criminal record and two types of hard drugs in his system.

If indeed this was done on purpose; why? May it be in order to make the pill harder to swallow for political opponents? And with the movement becoming unstoppable as they hoped for, it resulting in a bigger political win? If people went along with protesting for a criminal, they'll definitively be very likely to do it for actual decent people too...?

Was Floyd picked as a figurehead because he was a criminal, rather than in spite of this?

I'd say more likely any person who would end up in this situation would be a criminal with the probability > 95%. I mean to set off the whole thing, the person obviously needs to be black, poor (a cop may arrest an affluent looking man, but much less likely to manhandle him), drug addict (otherwise he wouldn't die) and with poor impulse control (otherwise he'd just quietly go into the car). And it should happen in a large city, otherwise it'd be impossible to make a huge deal out of it. The chance that a person with such profile, statistically, doesn't have a record is not very large, to be honest.

You have a dangerous line of thought. You're almost downplaying the problem of police brutality and similar abuses of power.

Predators seek out vulnerability in the victim and the opportunity to get away with the crime. Finding particularly guilty people to punish does not really enter into the equation except coincidentally.

You have a dangerous line of thought.

Thank you, I guess? Usually the ideas that can be endangered by thinking aren't the worthy ones.

You're almost downplaying the problem of police brutality and similar abuses of power.

I didn't "downplay" anything, I didn't discuss this topic at all. I think you are projecting some kind of bias on me which is not related to what I have said.

Predators seek out vulnerability in the victim and the opportunity to get away with the crime

Not sure what you mean here.

Assuming that police brutality and other forms of abuse of power happens because of racism misses the more important point:

Abusers want to hit without getting hit back, and to get away with the violence (in whatever form) without being punished by the law.

So they seek out people who are weak/vulnerable in some way, and preferably isolated and stigmatized.

If you're implying the policemen specifically look for people like George Floyd to abuse them, this does not sound plausible. I mean, did you see the man? His standard description in the woke media is "gentle giant". I am not sure about the gentle part, but he's 6'6", played multiple sports, was employed as a security guard, and he doesn't exactly look like something you'd describe as "weak". And, of course, if you wanted to target somebody weak and unable to resist with violence, without the possibility of punishment, would be a public street, in presence of your peers and multiple witnesses possessing recording devices, your preferred venue for that?

What do you mean by "isolated" and "stigmatized"? Floyd certainly weren't "isolated", given how much resources have been spent on defending his cause and lionizing him, including burying him in a golden casket, all DNC leadership kneeling to apologize for whatever happened to him, and erecting a monument to him. And anybody alive in the last 20 years would know how such things work. So if you think the policemen were on the lookout for some helpless victim nobody would care about, it's literally the worst choice in the history of bad choices. And they would know it very well. Neither is he "stigmatized" - if anything, all his past as violent psychopath and drug addict is completely forgotten and any discussion of it is now considered "downplaying the problem of police brutality and similar abuses of power" and definitely means whoever discusses it is a racist.

Even most of the people in the Soviet gulags were genuine criminals.

If you mean "criminals according to the arbitrary application of USSR laws", which included criminal punishment for things like criticizing The Party, having more property then the Party things you should have, or procuring any food when The Party decided you must starve to death, let alone being late to the job or making any mistake (which is clearly terrorist sabotage) - then yes. Otherwise I don't think they were.

Can I ask why you routinely resort to such snark? What he very obviously meant to say was that the majority of GULAG prisoners were common criminals as opposed to political prisoners i.e. thiefs, murderers, bandits, rapists, average thugs and bums etc., which was indeed the case if you look at the data.

There's no snark there. By USSR laws, a lot of minor acts were criminalized - like being late to work, or any unauthorized usage of kolkhoz property (which was just forcibly taken from the farmers) - e.g. the infamous Law of Three Spikelets so a lot of people that were convicted under supposedly "criminal" articles weren't actually bandits, rapists or bums - they were average citizens trying to survive in the hellscape of total terror. "The data" (which btw you neglected to support with any evidence) can't tell you that, you need a little knowledge about what actually was going on.

There is, in fact, a rather mundane legislative reason for the phenomenon you’re describing, included at the beginning of the Wikipedia article you linked to:

Before it the prosecution for theft of state or cooperative property was formal and didn't exceed 2–5 years of prison or community work, which wasn't a barrier for mass thefts of foodstuff and property, especially in kolkhozes.

The Russian version of the same article goes into more detail on this:

Researcher of the criminal world of Russia and the USSR, Soviet dissident Valery Chalidze noted that even in tsarist times, Russians were characterized by “disregard for the right of ownership of the treasury,” and this tradition “remained significant in Soviet times. This tradition became unusually widespread… also due to the fact that now almost everything around is the property of the treasury or state property”.

After collectivization, a large mass of public property was formed in the villages, which the peasants perceived as alienated and did not consider it necessary to look after it. Petty thefts in the collective farms became a mass phenomenon, while industrialization required food resources. However, the punishment for theft of public property was so insignificant that it did not stop anyone.

A similarly mundane and succinct reasoning was actually provided by Stalin himself in private correspondence, quoted in the same article:

"Capitalism could not have smashed feudalism, it would not have developed and grown stronger, if it had not declared the principle of private property the basis of capitalist society, if it had not made private property sacred property, the violation of the interests of which is most severely punished and for the protection of which it created its own state. Socialism will not be able to finish off and bury the capitalist elements and the individual-grabbing habits, skills, traditions (which serve as the basis for theft), shaking the foundations of the new society, if it does not declare public property (cooperative, collective farm, state) sacred and inviolable."

Who knows, maybe if the so-called Law of Spikelets had been enforced with as much longevity, relentlessness and rigor as the Bloody Code in Britain, the peoples of the USSR would have gradually come to respect the concept of public property. Then again, I’m not a sociologist by profession. It should be noted for the sake of context that, according to the same article, a rough total of 182,000 people were sentenced according to this law in a span of 7 years in a country of almost 170 million, which was a scarce contribution to the spectacle of mass imprisonment, total terror, hellscape and whatnot, to the extent that it existed in reality (as opposed to the realm of sensationalist literature and yellow journalism).

With respect to the criminalization of being late for work, that is explained by the even more mundane fact that Russian peasants usually had zero concept of measuring time in hours and minutes; I imagine they’d have gradually acquired this trait in the span of decades after being turned into factory workers even without such harsh penalties, as it probably happened in Britain (although I imagine the difference in harshness was only limited in that respect); however, industrialization in the USSR was to be completed in a much more swift manner. This phenomenon is actually described in a rather succinct fashion in the novel Darkness at Noon by the character named Gletkin.

I find it rather curious that you but ‘the data’ in quotes when in fact yes, it’s factual truth that to the extent that any examination of the Gulag’s history discusses this subject (which I imagine is a touchy one for many), it mentions that the majority of inmates were not political prisoners but common criminals. See here and here, for example.

The Soviet Union had no western style prisons, only the work camps. If you were a murderer, rapist, thief or gangster, you went to the same gulag complexes that the political prisoners went to. That’s where the scary tattooed Vor V’Zakone that later became the Russian mafia came from. That’s part of why being in a gulag was so hellish, the company wasn’t great.

The Soviet Union had no western style prisons, only the work camps.

Can I ask where did you get such ideas from? The GULAG was founded in addition to prisons in order to fulfill a purely economic function.

The Soviet Union had no western style prisons

Of course they had. Well, not "western-style" - much, much worse - but they existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Prisons_in_the_Soviet_Union The problem was that building a physical prison - with walls, doors, grates, beds, plumbing, etc. - was too expensive and too slow for the number of inmates the NKVD machine needed to process. So most were directed to "camps" which were much cheaper to maintain (and way worse to be in, of course).

That’s where the scary tattooed Vor V’Zakone that later became the Russian mafia came from.

Err, no, Vory as a socio-cultural phenomenon existed way before the Glorious Socialist Revolution. But, since Soviet style mass imprisonment was not practiced in Russia before, at least not in the way USSR practiced it (look up how the revolutionaries sentenced to be deported to remote areas were handled by the Tsar - they were basically free to do whatever they liked there, including access to firearms for hunting, with the only requirement to periodically check in with the police. And yes, they were allowed to be accompanied by their wives, too) - the fertile ground for development of real comprehensive mafia-like structure only appeared with Gulag. Though given that many other mafias also started gaining power at the same time (e.g. Cosa Nostra, which existed way before, but started to become really powerful in the US by mid-century), I wonder if it's not part of some larger trend.

That’s part of why being in a gulag was so hellish, the company wasn’t great.

It didn't matter too much, it was hell regardless of who was around - it was designed and implemented that way. Of course, none of the above establishes that the majority of Gulag inmates are career criminals, as claimed, that point remains unproven.

The video of George Floyd just looked really unusually bad, and it came at the right time(the lockdowns when black culture had adapted to social-media scrolling driven video-based victimmongering rather than text based a la facebook or radio), in the right place(a white progressive ruled city). I think that's the reason. Most people killed by the cops are scumbags, even if they don't deserve to die, and so mathematically an unusually bad-looking video at the right place and time will probably have a scumbag in it.

This was addressed in one of the holy texts:

More important, unarmed black people are killed by police or other security officers about twice a week according to official statistics, and probably much more often than that. You’re saying none of these shootings, hundreds each year, made as good a flagship case as Michael Brown? In all this gigantic pile of bodies, you couldn’t find one of them who hadn’t just robbed a convenience store? Not a single one who didn’t have ten eyewitnesses and the forensic evidence all saying he started it? [emphasis mine—and note that this was written in 2014!]

I propose that the Michael Brown case went viral – rather than the Eric Garner case or any of the hundreds of others – because of the PETA Principle. It was controversial. A bunch of people said it was an outrage. A bunch of other people said Brown totally started it, and the officer involved was a victim of a liberal media that was hungry to paint his desperate self-defense as racist, and so the people calling it an outrage were themselves an outrage. Everyone got a great opportunity to signal allegiance to their own political tribe and discuss how the opposing political tribe were vile racists / evil race-hustlers. There was a steady stream of potentially triggering articles to share on Facebook to provoke your friends and enemies to counter-share articles that would trigger you.

TL;DR: controversial topics go more viral than benign ones.

Edit: also, to address the specific case of George Floyd, at the time, the video footage that went viral was very chilling to watch. (Or so I’ve been told by friends, conservative ones, who had watched the video; as a rule, I try to avoid viewing such things.) When one sees a man being choked to death slowly over the course of eight minutes while protesting “I can’t breathe!” then it’s hard not to viscerally feel that an injustice has been committed. (And if I remember correctly, the video went viral long before the man’s extensive prior criminal history or fentanyl usage became common knowledge.)

Back in the old subreddit, I recall some contemporaneous discussion about whether or not George Floyd would go viral, and some speculating (possibly myself included, I don't remember) that it wouldn't specifically because it failed the toxoplasma criterion: in the first few weeks, it seemed that more or less everyone agreed he'd been the victim of excessive force at the hands of Chauvin et al. Perhaps the subsequent revelations about the drugs in his system allowed it to circle back around to being controversial, as for a time it seemed there was some legitimate ambiguity about whether he'd died because of Chauvin compressing his chest or because of an overdose (my understanding is the autopsy confirmed the former).

Out of curiosity, of the people here that watched the video, who found the video chilling to watch?

I didn't. I do find plenty of things online disturbing, but this wasn't one of them.

I found the video disturbing. Sometimes I have to recall how I felt watching that first video to give any credence to the other side at all, especially as it relates to the conviction of Derek Chauvin, whom I usually think should have been acquitted, but sometimes, the thought of that video pops up again and I think twice.

Obviously, it didn't justify any of the rioting, though. That was an insane year.

It wasn’t chilling, but it was definitely enraging to watch the initial videos without any context other than police brutality. A bunch of cops slowly killing a man who seemed helpless while dozens of people around begging them to stop. After the body cam was released (showing he is high as a kite, very violent, already losing his breath due to the drugs etc) I swore to myself to never again come to emotional conclusions from video content without A LOT of autistic context

Thank you for the link. I suppose Occam's Razor here is that the controversy adds to the virality and that's that.

I never watched the video either, but I had the same reaction to the text. I don't doubt that the cops in question were horrible predators.

I don't doubt that the cops in question were horrible predators.

The kneeler Derek Chauvin maybe, but Alexander Kuong and Tou Thao seemed more incompetent/overwhelmed than evil. Thomas Lane, the other white cop, was unlucky as it was his fourth day on the job and he challenged Chauvin only with questions but not with actions.

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