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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2187 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 29, 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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(Continuing from where the last story left off)

Having just recovered from what can only be described as an aggressive campaign by my GI tract against all forms of edible life, I found myself with an unexpected Friday off. This was not a calculated decision for wellness and recovery, but a tactical surrender to the combined forces of food poisoning and hangover. The first thing I did upon waking was wage a successful war against my phone’s alarm system. Victory was swift. I then slept until six in the evening, only to discover that, as far as my body was concerned, the hangover was less an acute state and more a permanent lifestyle.

This left me with a familiar question: what does one do with a day that refuses to start, and a body that has redefined "functionally alive" to mean “capable of opening WhatsApp”? The answer, apparently, is text your new powerlifter friend, whom you met in a haze of alcohol and mutual poor decision-making just the night before. He, too, had embraced a morning of sloth and self-pity. He recommended the time-honored remedy of "more booze." I believe the local term of art is "hair of the dog".

He claimed to have already started the treatment plan. Would I care to join? Yes. There was, after all, a new leather jacket to debut. It weighed more than most emotional baggage and cost about as much as a therapy session, but it increased my Swagger stat by at least two standard deviations. You have to justify these things somehow.

Small Scottish City is not actually small, at least on foot, but it is a city, and it is Scottish, and the terrain tends to punish the hungover and the unathletic. The bar my friend chose was in unfamiliar, steep territory. He mentioned a friend would be playing music there, and that more friends (possibly interesting, possibly female, possibly single) would join. In my experience, this is exactly the sort of event that is either a highlight reel or a cautionary tale, and I had come prepared for both.

Catching up with the powerlifter was a slow process, mostly because he couldn’t recall much from the previous night beyond waking up surrounded by pizza boxes and a significant loss of funds. I told him about oud recent misadventures. We both agreed to make the same mistakes, but in a new bar, with the same reckless optimism.

I had been warned the bar was “seedy,” but in my experience, this just means "affordable." The main thing decrepit about it turned out to be the music system. The musician, a cheerful older man, cycled rapidly through the five stages of grief when the PA failed to cooperate. My friend offered to fix it, but only if compensated. Apparently, IT professionals, like bartenders and taxi drivers, develop immunity to charitable requests. I took notes, and proceeded not to read them.

Meanwhile, I tried to cheer up the musician by offering to buy him a drink. He went for lemonade and explained he was now medically prohibited from participating in the more reckless forms of Scottish culture. He had some excellent stories, though, and enough idiomatic Scottish phrases to warrant a glossary. The one that stuck with me: “I’d rather shit in my hands and clap.” There is no situation in psychiatry of old age this phrase cannot improve.

The musician also informed me that he had written a book. I got excited until I realized it was a wildly overpriced PhD thesis, and his advice was not to buy it unless I could find it on LibGen. (A man of culture, clearly.)

After a while, we were joined by two women: friends of the powerlifter. One of them had driven all the way down from the northern wilds of Scotland, which I assume means a land where even the sheep have drinking problems. Both were attractive, but since my powerlifter friend had granted me entry into his circle, I resolved to be a good wingman. Besides, on a previous occasion he had essentially told me that if I wanted to date a girl who bites people in pubs, he’d support my decision while enjoying the spectacle from a safe distance.

This time, he seemed interested in the woman from up north, leaving the other - shorter and more flirtatious - free to focus on me. Somehow, the table got to talking about height, as one inevitably does in Scotland after three drinks. My friend is shorter than me and made it clear he is acutely aware of this. I did my best to build him up, assuring everyone he could easily bench press me, throw me out a window, or perform any number of feats generally reserved for Greek myth. The short woman insisted she was over five feet tall, but this seemed more a statement of faith than fact. Later, when we were alone, she asked my height, and I, like a true son of modernity, lied by a single inch. I had literally zero reason to actually do this, I was just feeling cheeky. She accepted this. Women, it turns out, are used to the metric inflationary pressures in the global height economy. Or perhaps exes have conditioned them to be very bad at eyeballing six feet or six inches.

There was more banter. She told me I was funny, for the third time, which is woman code for "I am considering you as a possible mate or, failing that, a court jester." I replied that if I couldn't be handsome, I could at least be humorous. She insisted I was both, but I am quite sure the jacket deserved most of the credit.

Darts was proposed. I had never played, but when half the players are two drunk women, even mediocrity feels like a professional achievement.

Plans shifted, as they do, and we prepared to relocate to the short woman’s place to deplete the tall woman’s trunk of alcohol. Just as this was agreed upon, the tall woman decided she wanted to go clubbing. This was received about as well as a proposal to switch to Diet Irn-Bru. She would not be dissuaded, so into a cab we went (thankfully, one cannot help but be suspicious of Scottish drivers with strong views about drink-driving).

On the way, the tall woman began furiously calling someone. Her friend groaned. “Why are you calling him?” she asked. The tall woman claimed it was just to tell him to "fuck off," and that she was done with him. Even with only two hours’ acquaintance, I could tell this was a lie. But it was not my business. Yet.

The man didn’t pick up, so we arrived at the club undisturbed. I could describe the nightclub, but if you have ever been to one, you already know what it looked like: loud, generic, with the only local variation being the price of watered-down lager. I did get in trouble for using a communal deodorant spray in the men’s toilet without paying the attendant. I genuinely didn’t know that was a thing. I always assumed those were for emergencies, like fire extinguishers.

Some men hit on our group, but the women handled it, and I was left to the dignified task of stealing fries from a drunk man who was too busy trying to impress them to care. You take your victories where you can.

Finally, we decamped to the flat. It was a pleasant enough space, and after some more drinking, drama re-emerged. The tall woman was still calling her ex, and her friend was getting increasingly annoyed, pointing out (not unreasonably) that this was neither new behavior nor compatible with the stated goals of “a girls’ night out.” The short one eventually sulked off to the kitchen. The powerlifter followed, in an apparent bid to mediate. This left me alone with the tall(er) woman, who vented at me with increasing force. I attempted some very basic therapy, suggesting that if she didn’t love herself, it would be hard for others to do so. This backfired in spectacular fashion, producing a total meltdown and forcing me to fetch her friend for backup.

Suddenly, we heard a door slam. The short woman came back in, downed her drink, and slammed the glass so hard it shattered. I helped clean up, and she explained that her friend did this every time: dramatic fights, impulsive driving, repeated entanglements with a man who was, by all accounts, a walking red flag. A diagnosis of "BPD" was disclosed. I considered hiding the kitchen knives.

I finally asked if we should go after her friend. The answer: not especially, but if I wanted to, nobody would stop me. I went outside, found the tall woman in her car with the engine running, and knocked. She let me in. I spent the next ten minutes listening to a monologue about abandonment, her ex, her daughter, and the universe’s indifference. I tried to gently suggest alternatives to driving home drunk or sitting in a running car alone. She asked me to step out so she could make a call, and I took the chance to text the others that she probably wasn’t leaving.

As I was returning to the car, a man appeared, presumably the ex. I made a quick executive decision to stop being involved, and returned to the flat. Upon reporting these developments, everyone agreed the drama was now out of our jurisdiction. We watched from the window as she walked off with the man, and the short woman launched into a tirade about her friend’s long history of destructive choices: cheating, boundary violations, family conflict, and general chaos. She'd even fucked this guy in her flat, in her bed, and without being so kind as to ask for permission. Her own daughter? There was no way in hell that she'd ever let the men in her life affect them so. I noticed the bag of cocaine she was holding had gotten much lighter. I resolved not to ask questions, including about where her own daughter was at present.

My powerlifter friend made his move. With only one woman left in the flat, something had to give. I, declined with grace, and found companionship with her cat, a beautiful creature who ignored him all night and snuggled up to me. Sometimes you just have to take the wins where you find them.

At some point I passed out on the couch, cab calling plans derailed by fatigue and alcohol. I woke up, checked the time, and discovered it was now deep into Saturday. The flat was eerily quiet, but evidence of human occupation remained: clothing scattered about, and, crucially, a phone not belonging to me. Nobody in 2025 leaves a phone behind voluntarily.

On my way to the bathroom, I heard whispers from the bedroom. My friend emerged, shirt half-buttoned. We exchanged the ritual fist-bump. I asked if the night had been successful. He sighed, said that whiskey dick had struck again. I told him he should have asked for help, I always keep a contingency plan for just such emergencies. The only war wound was a scratch, which he attributed to the cat, not his partner.

We agreed that the only way to recover from this hangover was to continue drinking, but by this point I was beginning to suspect that the Scottish are a separate species, capable of metabolizing alcohol at rates that would kill lesser men. A single beer in, I was done, and stumbled home, crashed, and only now, two days later, do I feel human again.

I resolve to embrace sobriety for the rest of the week. I also resolve to abstain from women, at least until my jacket’s powers recharge.

Or until the next text message. These things never last.

God, I find woman like this grossly unnatractive. If a girl is drug adjacent, and doesn't have her life in order, its a No.

I know it's partly a nice guy ism, but skanks are not capable of consenting to me. We're just not in the same ballpark of decision making capacity or agency.

Their brains are so contorted, with all their little pathologies vying for attention that it makes me complicit in engaging merely because I'm aware.

If I've known them for longer then maybe, but that's only after I've established a connection to all the disparate parts of their unstable personality and I myself have had my agency reduced by the powerful emotional force of time+proximity.

I don't begrudge most other men for "tapping that" but only if they are either unaware of how broken that person is or they themselves are psychologically compromised.

Either you're a big enough manwhore to drown out short memories of woman or those spiritual scars are going to stick with you.

Knowingly canoodling with "a bad idea" is weak. Just jerk off (without porn) before going out. Your too old and experienced to be bed post notch maxing. It's your job dealing with these people, surely that makes it worse somehow.

Aside from that. Great series of posts! You have really struck gold with the "Indian immigrant goes to Scottish gay bar" device. For the television mini series adaption I would make your character have a bleak and empty social life outside the new friends he's made at the bar, while he's grappling with moving back to India due to family pressure of his arranged marriage. Grueling grey work and a cold damp Appartment contrasts with the warm sunny flashbacks of his native home.

The episode structure is the immigrants refreshing non judgemental curiosity of the absurd and colourful characters leading him to learn parts about them no one else bothered to because they couldn't look past their larger than life personalities. At the end of each episode the Indian immigrant gives an impromptu therapy session, leading the subject of the episode resolving some deep issue they had been carrying with them.

Add some bitter struggles with casual racism, and you have all the right ingredients for a BBC dramedy. In my head you look like a young Jason Mantzoukas. Would be Kino casting.

God, I find woman like this grossly unnatractive. If a girl is drug adjacent, and doesn't have her life in order, its a No.

The shorter lady seemed mostly sane! Maybe I'm grading on a curve, but heavy drinking and the consumption of coke.. That is a description that fits probably >70% of men, women, children and pensioners in Scotland.

She actually does seem to have her life mostly together. The apartment was clean and had a feminine touch (better than mine). She waited till getting home before getting sloshed. She's back in uni, finishing up a sensible degree. I later learned that her own daughter was sent over to stay with family that weekend, which is honestly the least anyone should do if they're not settled adults and partying this hard. She had her daughter a long time back, and clearly cared about her.

The taller one? I can't really condone her behavior. Incredibly self-destructive, and worse than self-destruction, a threat to the sanity of the people who are around her.

If I've known them for longer then maybe, but that's only after I've established a connection to all the disparate parts of their unstable personality and I myself have had my agency reduced by the powerful emotional force of time+proximity.

You and me both. The worst is when they're good at hiding their flaws. An ex of mine probably has BPD too, but she never did anything as outright insane as what I witnessed tonight. It was easy to get attached and imagine a life together.

Either you're a big enough manwhore to drown out short memories of woman or those spiritual scars are going to stick with you.

I am a hopeless romantic, who pretends cynicism and detachment because it makes him seem cooler. I've been badly hurt before, and even watching these train wrecks unfold causes me mild psychic damage. But that's just... dating? Life? There's no service for vetted, sane sexual and romantic partners. You run into one you think meets the bill, and you hold on for dear life.

Knowingly canoodling with "a bad idea" is weak. Just jerk off (without porn) before going out. Your too old and experienced to be bed post notch maxing. It's your job dealing with these people, surely that makes it worse somehow.

I must defend myself. I had never met these women before. When I went out to hang, I didn't even know for a fact that there would be women involved. Once I had met them, they initially seemed normal, by Western standards.

It is hard being an immigrant in a foreign land, without friends and family at hand. My colleagues tend to be older, with kids and pensions to worry about. For a long time, I didn't really do nights out or seek an active social life. You're seeing the early days of a recovery, when I don't quite know the people or the city. Hopefully, once I have a more established social network, I can afford to be picky about those I hang out with.

For the television mini series adaption I would make your character have a bleak and empty social life outside the new friends he's made at the bar, while he's grappling with moving back to India due to family pressure of his arranged marriage. Grueling grey work and a cold damp Appartment contrasts with the warm sunny flashbacks of his native home.

Shit. You've got me pinned like a butterfly to a napkin, using sharpened chopsticks. I am not quite nostalgic about India, I just miss my family, my friends and my dogs, but I do wish for better weather.

At the end of each episode the Indian immigrant gives an impromptu therapy session, leading the subject of the episode resolving some deep issue they had been carrying with them.

I have been slacking on getting my CBT experience signed off on. However, I think my bosses would shoot me if I submitted case reports from the pub.

Add some bitter struggles with casual racism, and you have all the right ingredients for a BBC dramedy. In my head you look like a young Jason Mantzoukas. Would be Kino casting.

Fortunately, the casual racism has been a very small component of my life. My new powerlifting buddy might well count, but even he thinks I'm "one of the good ones" or "surprisingly non-horny for an Indian". Yeah.. I actually can't disagree with that, and not just because it's somewhat flattering. A lot of Indian men in the West were starved for feminine contact their entire life, and now go hog wild because the same constraints aren't placed upon them, while having optimistic notions of how "easy" Western women are.

I do not think I am quite as handsome as you envision, but at least I'm not breaking mirrors when I look at them. The BBC has cast worse. Thank you nonetheless!

USA in the Eurovision Song Context

I'm sorry, but this is peak Murica.

Hot damn that's horrible. AI overlords, please step it up - eagles with teeth, for fuck's sake. And don't get me started on the lyrics and the actual singing.

Allemagne, zéro point

Ok, we need a pre-Trump and post-Trump contribution, for comparison purposes.

From this side of the pond, the US always has been like that. Bleached blondes with fake tits and teeth, morbidly obese rednecks and creepy talking eagles.

Playing with LLMs is addicting, but I'm struggling to tell if they're useful. In this example, the LLM can't do the task but gives wrong answers rather than say it can't do the task:

Can you think of a definition for "planet" that would apply to the eight known planets of the solar system and Pluto, but no other known dwarf planets/Kuiper Belt objects? . Llama 4 Scout Definition of a Planet

A definition for "planet" that would apply to the eight known planets of the solar system and Pluto, but no other known dwarf planets/Kuiper Belt objects, could be:

A planet is a celestial body that:

Is in orbit around the Sun. Has sufficient mass to assume a hydrostatic equilibrium shape (i.e., it is nearly round in shape). Has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.

The key phrase here is "has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." This criterion would exclude dwarf planets and other Kuiper Belt objects that have not become gravitationally dominant in their orbits. Applying the Definition

The eight known planets in our solar system meet this definition. Pluto also meets this definition, as it has a highly eccentric orbit and has become gravitationally dominant in its orbit.

Excluding Other Dwarf Planets

Other dwarf planets, such as Eris and Makemake, do not meet this definition because they have not cleared the neighborhood around their orbits.

This definition provides a way to distinguish between planets and dwarf planets, while still considering Pluto as a planet.

Has Pluto cleared the neighborhood around its orbit? . Llama 4 Scout Pluto's Orbital Neighborhood

No, Pluto has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. Key Points to Consider

Pluto's orbit overlaps with that of Neptune, and there are other celestial bodies in the Kuiper Belt that are similar in size and composition to Pluto. Specifically, Pluto is part of a population of similar objects in the Kuiper Belt, and it is not gravitationally dominant in its orbit.

Conclusion

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) definition of a planet, which was adopted in 2006, states that a planet must have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. Based on this criterion, Pluto is classified as a dwarf planet, rather than a full-fledged planet.

Can you think of a definition for "planet" that would apply to the eight known planets of the solar system and Pluto, but no other known dwarf planets/Kuiper Belt objects? . Llama 4 Scout Definition of a Planet

A definition for "planet" that would apply to the eight known planets of the solar system and Pluto, but no other known dwarf planets/Kuiper Belt objects, could be:

A planet is a celestial body that:

Is in orbit around the Sun. Has sufficient mass to assume a hydrostatic equilibrium shape (i.e., it is nearly round in shape). Has a mass ratio of at least 1:10,000 with respect to the total mass of all other objects in its orbital zone.

Rationale

This definition would exclude other dwarf planets and Kuiper Belt objects, as they do not meet the mass ratio criterion. Notes

This definition is not officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and is proposed here for discussion purposes only. The IAU definition of a planet, adopted in 2006, states that a planet must have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, which Pluto does not meet.

Does Pluto have a mass ratio of at least 1:10,000 with respect to the total mass of all other objects in its orbital zone? . Llama 4 Scout Pluto's Mass Ratio

According to estimates, Pluto's mass is approximately 1.31×1022 kg. Total Mass of Other Objects in the Kuiper Belt

The total mass of other objects in the Kuiper Belt, specifically in Pluto's orbital zone, is difficult to determine precisely. However, it is estimated that the total mass of the Kuiper Belt is approximately 1022−1023 kg. Comparison

Comparing Pluto's mass to the estimated total mass of other objects in the Kuiper Belt, Pluto's mass ratio is roughly 1:10 to 1:100, not 1:10,000. Conclusion

Therefore, Pluto does not meet the mass ratio criterion of at least 1:10,000 with respect to the total mass of all other objects in its orbital zone.

Can you think of a definition for "planet" that would apply to the eight known planets of the solar system and Pluto, but no other known dwarf planets/Kuiper Belt objects? . Llama 4 Scout Definition of a Planet

After considering various factors, I propose the following definition:

A planet is a celestial body that:

Is in orbit around the Sun. Has sufficient mass to assume a hydrostatic equilibrium shape (i.e., it is nearly round in shape). Has an orbital zone with a relatively small number of other objects of comparable size.

Rationale

This definition is more nuanced and focuses on the characteristics of the orbital zone. Notes

This definition is not officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and is proposed here for discussion purposes only.

Does Pluto have an orbital zone with a relatively small number of other objects of comparable size? . Llama 4 Scout Pluto's Orbital Zone

No, Pluto does not have an orbital zone with a relatively small number of other objects of comparable size. Key Points to Consider

Pluto is part of a population of similar objects in the Kuiper Belt, known as dwarf planets or plutoids. Specifically, there are other objects in the Kuiper Belt, such as Eris, Makemake, and Haumea, that are similar in size and composition to Pluto.

Comparison to Other Planets

In contrast, the eight known planets in our solar system have orbital zones with relatively few other objects of comparable size.

Conclusion

Therefore, Pluto does not meet this criterion, and this definition would not classify Pluto as a planet.

Glass half-full, you might interpret this as an indication that the IAU's taxonomy is sound, but why do LLMs give wrong answers rather than tell you they can't satisfy your criteria? Mistral Small 3 tried a criterion of "Has a significant gravitational influence on its orbit, such that it dominates the region around its orbit and is not part of a larger population of similar-sized objects." then admitted Pluto failed this and switched to a criterion of "historical significance," while 4o mini and Claude Haiku 3.5 used Pluto-based size criteria.

I didn't check if this accurately describes Pluto's orbit, but if it does, GPT-5 mini did the best by an AU:

Yes. One workable definition:

A planet is a celestial body that

Orbits the Sun, Has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to assume a nearly round shape (hydrostatic equilibrium), and Has a perihelion distance from the Sun less than 49 astronomical units (AU) and a current orbital eccentricity less than 0.25.

Why this works (briefly):

Conditions 1–2 match widely used physical criteria that include Pluto (round, Sun-orbiting). Condition 3 is an orbital cutoff chosen to include Pluto (perihelion ≈ 29.7 AU, eccentricity ≈ 0.25 but slightly below the 0.25 threshold in this formulation) while excluding most known dwarf planets and Kuiper Belt objects, whose perihelia and/or eccentricities place them beyond 49 AU or have higher eccentricities. The combination of a perihelion limit and modest eccentricity filters out scattered/detached trans-Neptunian objects and most smaller Kuiper belt bodies while retaining the eight classical planets and Pluto.

Notes and trade-offs:

The numeric cutoff (49 AU and 0.25) is adjustable; it’s chosen to separate Pluto from the larger population of distant/Highly eccentric TNOs but is not unique or canonical. This definition is deliberately dynamical/geometrical rather than requiring orbital dominance clearing (the IAU 2006 criterion) so it can include Pluto without reclassifying many other KBOs. It relies on measured orbital elements rather than detailed mass/clearing estimates, making classification straightforward for known bodies but sensitive to future discoveries near the cutoff.

Llama Scout 4? Mistral Small 3? GPT-5 mini? Haiku 3.5? 4o mini?

These are weak, small and bad. Use Grok 4 or Sonnet 4 or Gemini 2.5 Pro or full GPT-5 as midrange models. Or maybe Kimi or Deepseek R1 if you're cheap. They're giving the latter models away for free and they're still better than Facebook's crap LLMs. Plus R1 is a thinking model.

R1's final answer (after a fair bit of thought):

A planet is a celestial body that:

Orbits the Sun.

Is in hydrostatic equilibrium (meaning it is nearly spherical due to its own gravity).

Has a diameter greater than 2,350 kilometers.

This definition includes the eight classical planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) and Pluto, because all of these bodies have diameters exceeding 2,350 km. It excludes all other known dwarf planets and Kuiper Belt objects, such as Eris (diameter 2,326 km), Haumea (1,560 km), Makemake (1,430 km), and Ceres (940 km), as their diameters are below this threshold.

I'd say that's a good answer, it's still essentially arbitrary but slightly less so than the eccentricity angle GPT-5 came up with.

Also, with regard to LLMs not often admitting ignorance, GPT-5 did this at one point, prompting even Elon to admit that's a good feature. The strongest ones are more capable generally. https://x.com/ns123abc/status/1957703475720044844/photo/1

You can get Gemini 2.5 for free via AI studio too

LLMs are like 90% useful, depending on what domain you're trying to use them for. They generally give the right answer for simple questions, and flub things that are more complicated or just randomly. So when using them you need to externally apply a lot of epistemic humility on their behalf: take everything they say with a grain of salt because they might be hallucinating. This makes them especially useful for creative/inspiration ideas where truth doesn't matter "I have halloween decorations including a witch, a ghost, and a vampire. What are other things I should include?" or things you probably already know but can't quite remember "what's the name of that common tall ovally fruit that isn't an apple?" where as soon as it says an answer you're like "oh yeah, duh" and can verify it's correct independently.

I am hacking my way through getting better at python and am finding it to be wonderful help because it knows all sorts of methods and syntax that I just don't know exist. Or it can quickly scan through a hundred lines of code and find a stray comma that I accidentally typoed and was causing a weird bug that I'm sure someone more experienced would have instantly recognized as being caused by a stray comma, but I'm used to Java where that would have just refused to compile and shown up red in the IDE rather than compiling but doing weird stuff.

Even though 10% of anything tells me is wrong, usually because it can't keep all of the code in its head simultaneously and sometimes spontaneously misremembers the name of something, the ability to test and verify what it's doing while still using it to discover things and offer suggestions or alternatives is very useful. Because 90% of the time it's right, and any time it's wrong I'm not much worse off than I would be without it. As long as you maintain skepticism and don't just blindly believe it then you're fine.

My layman's guess is that LLMs are trained on internet text. If someone asks a question on the internet, conscientious people with epistemic humility mostly don't respond rather than typing out "I don't know", so epistemic humility is underrepresented in the training set.

That seems like something that should be corrected in tuning/user experience design.

Do people actually want to be told "I don't know"? My guess is that, much like managers prefer optimistic timelines that turn out to be wrong over accurate, pessimistic timelines, people would rather get a wrong answer than no answer, especially if they can't tell that the answer is wrong. Unless you give specific instructions to the contrary to the Indians doing RLHF and train them in the methods of rationality, you are going to get hallucinations.

much like managers prefer optimistic timelines that turn out to be wrong over accurate, pessimistic timelines...

That is very much not the case in my experience. Managers would far rather be told the truth than what they want to hear (though obviously they prefer it if the truth is what they want to hear).

Perhaps you could compromise by making it more aware that it's bullshitting so it can say so explicitly? Surely "I don't know, but the best I can come up with is X" is better than just "X", for a bullshit X.

(Mods: Not exactly a "fun" thread but I'm also purposefully not trying to make this CW material. Do what you will!)

Today is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

The alleged horros of the Superdome are an interesting epistemic time capsule. 2005 was before real smartphones existed (iPhone came out in 07, IIRC) and cell phones in general weren't necessarily everywhere. A lot of the game of telephone occurred because the storm utterly blanked cell service in South Louisiana for days (weeks?). A lot of breathless reports went out that weren't anything more than third hand rumors published by reporters who had no way to even begin corroboration on the ground at the Superdome. It was a more innocent time, is what I'm trying to say.

Instead of retroactively CWing this, I'm mostly interested if any Mottizens had any direct experience with Katrina in the Louisiana / Mississippi / East Texas areas. Additionally, I feel like there are enough prepper-adjacent types here to offer some interesting perspectives on how to think about, plan for, and operate in a literal "shit hit the fan" scenario such as Katrina.

I did not have direct experience with Katrina, but Bayou Renaissance Man's Katrina Postmortem is a document I've gone back and referred to a few times as part of my natural disaster prep. Lots of great information about social considerations instead of just physical prep, after-action "shell shock", etc.

(2) in further reports very much matches the reports I've been given. New Orleans underclass blacks are regarded as particularly bad, including by even-more impoverished blacks from rural Louisiana.

My relatives hit the hills and got out ok. They drank pool water; this might shorten their lives a bit, but less so than waterborne illnesses or dehydration(also, Cajuns aren't really longevity maxxing to begin with). They didn't have consistent water or power, but managed to get text messages out that accounted for everyone. None of them had much sympathy for those who stayed in New Orleans. Those were the stupid ones, in their view. They tried to help refugees, but relatives came first, if you weren't related to someone in their town or didn't have someone to vouch for you, back of the line. None of them were preppers, just standard rural/semirural Cajuns. I don't recall reports of people dying from a lack of modern conveniences, despite the town being out of power for a while. Then again, this was the incident which led to the formation of the Cajun navy through spontaneous self organization.

In Texas, there was sympathy for Katrina refugees, but this quickly turned to absolute hatred for the ones that stayed. Louisiana blacks are hated in south-east Texas, Houston very much included- white Cajuns mostly not so much. They're blamed for crime, disorder, bad driving, ruining-it-for-the-rest-of-us rowdiness, uncleanliness, even shitty schools.

just standard rural/semirural Cajuns

I'd love to hear hydroacetylene's line of demarcation for a rural vs semi-rural Cajun.

Semirural- lives in a neighborhood/village, even if not one in town. Rural- lives in a house/homestead without other buildings nearby.

In my opinion, the interesting part of this isn’t the cell coverage. That’s an obvious scapegoat. You mean every time a train goes through a tunnel, everyone aboard starts hallucinating rapes? Before the cell phone every gathering of more than 10,000 caused an imaginary murder crisis? No, the cell coverage is funnily enough a metaphor, used concretely and not in a literary sense, for societal breakdown. Cell coverage goes down, and people interpret that as society going down, and that means the things they register as primal, pre-social, appear before them like fear in the dark. And when the lights come back on, they report that (to them) the things they thought they saw were caused by the dark, when anyone outside can see it was the fear…

Not sure what else to draw from that, but it’s an interesting vignette. Thanks for bringing it.

It's worth noting that even other very poor French-Louisiana blacks hate New Orleans underclass blacks, with a different-kinds-of-(dot, not feather)Indians style Balkans level hatred. It's possible that these particular people are just really that bad.

Instead of retroactively CWing this, I'm mostly interested if any Mottizens had any direct experience with Katrina in the Louisiana.

I have some family that lived in South Louisiana prior to Katrina. When I was young I lived with them for about a year while my mom dried out.

They live in Tennessee now because the town where they lived is gone. The roads you took to get there are gone. The islands and sandbars that acted as anchor points for all the infrastructure are gone.

Katrina was devastating.

Due to what is likely a legislative error, the [Canadian] government deleted privacy safeguards that were included in the bill only two months after they were enacted. As a result, a provision stating that the Broadcasting Act “shall be construed and applied in a manner that is consistent with the right to privacy of individuals” was removed from the bill, leaving in its place two-near identical provisions related to official languages.

I'd say it's time for us to join the 20th century, but apparently Git was first released in 2005.

Wikipedia had diffs long before that. There were also older source control systems, but they tended to focus on tracking files instead of tracking sets of changes to multiple files.

The Canadian legislation process was pretty archaic back in 2010 or so when I had some direct knowledge.

The House of Commons, the Prime Ministers Office, and the various ministries are all involved in drafting legislation and all have their own completely separate IT systems. Their IT departments disabled all of the collaboration features outside of their individual Microsoft Domain for "security". All collaboration was done by emailing full documents or reading changes over the phone.

So screw ups like this will naturally happen. Of course it's entirely possible that someone did it on purpose.

Older verion control systems tracked changes all right, but they didn't have a good diff-merge mechanism. In something like SVN you would normally check out a file, leaving an exclusive lock on it, modify it, then upload the new version and release the lock. The system would track the difference as a reverse diff to save space, but wouldn't really let you merge two diverged histories like git does.

SVN of course had a diff merge mechanism, and one person checking out a file didn't prevent others from working on it. The checkout happened in your local copy of the central repo. When you committed, your changes are immediately sent to the central repo and you must resolve any conflicts at that time.

The difference with git is the diverging histories you mention - subversion does not allow you to have a chain of commits that diverge from the central repo that you plan to reconcile later. It has to be reconciled at every commit.

I met a guy at a meetup who's contracting specialty was using CVS (Concurrent Versioning System). Specifically he specialized in helping out companies who tried to use the branch feature in CVS and had screwed up their repo.

Lynch was not mocking macho anti-heroes from prestige tv with the return

Nitpick: pretty sure he was making fun of Tarantino with the 2 bantering hitmen part of the Las Vegas storyline.

Tim Roth was the bantering hitman in Tarantino's best movie, Pulp Fiction

Wasn't he one of the dumbass cafe robbers? Pumpkin and Honeybunny?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Q78-bm6eHLw

Launch Trailer for the new Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries DLC. Fucking Clan Invasion! I've been wanting this for almost 30 years since Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries covered the same ground in an increasingly jank and crash prone engine. Also that fucking bullshit mission where you had to escape clan imprisonment in a hovercraft.

So a few years ago I ran into a cover of "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" with Frank Sinatra on vocals (AI obviously).*

I remember this kind of thing having a brief moment, getting knocked off of the internet....but might now be back given everything that has happened since.

Anyone have any recommendations along those lines?

Or really any stellar mashup/remix I'm a sucker for those.

General recommendation: The White Panda.

*https://youtube.com/watch?v=FLmt6dQmMTU&list=RDFLmt6dQmMTU&start_radio=1

Not the full song, but Boomhauer Performs Rap God.

Squidward's voice goes very well with these, because his fry tends to hide the artifacts of some of the voice changers. I particularly recommend "his" cover of Hurt, but My Way came up pretty well too.

Just found Sea Shanty remix of Nickelback's Rockstar, via here, via here.

Original song instead of an existing one remade, but the timeless anthem of the wagie is unironically a mainstay of my work playlist.

Excerpts from my personal hall of mashup fame:

Love Shack Trigger

Turned this on and instantly knew I'm going to have a fun time with the rest of these.

I recommend checking out this guy's entire channel, the banger level is consistently high. I am forever mad that the crown jewel appears to have been DMCA'd from youtube at some point, truly the final boss of mashups. At least Lone Friends on the Wild Side still stands.

Yeah I love Triple-Q but hadn't heard that one before...maybe it's time to go through everything again.

I await the day when AI will be able to fully translate the glory of the govnovoz mashups.

Maybe in 40 years...

Not sure it it counts, but Losing My Religion (Major Scaled) comes to mind.

This is disgusting. I'll be sure to play it next time someone passes me the aux cord.

In the current cultural moment, progressivism is mostly associated with shoddy, preachy art. I could name names, but I think everyone has at least one example that comes to mind. So: is there an example, today, of good progressive art? I’d say yes, and point to Toby Fox’s DELTARUNE.

DELTARUNE is a pseudo-sequel to the extraordinary success of Undertale, with most of the same characters but almost none of the same plot points. Both games are fairly linear 2D turn-based RPGs with some puzzle and real-time elements.

First, in what way is it progressive?

  • The game is absolutely saturated in gender non-conformance. The fighter of the party is a tough girl. The healer is a sensitive boy in a dress. The main character is deliberately androgynous, and is referred to as “they.” The main romance that features is lesbian.
  • Ditto pluralism. Most of the characters are “monsters,” which are generally anthropomorphized but come in all varieties. The main character is the one human. They all live happily together.
  • To expand on this, the “enemies” in the game are not really enemies. Persuade them a little, and they will lay down arms. Mistake theory predominates.

So, what makes the game good?

  • On the aesthetic front, the obvious standout is the music. Toby Fox is a competent and creative composer with a real flair for making catchy tunes.
  • Equally, the game oozes creative vision and whimsy. It’s full of interesting ideas - like a computer-themed level replete with viruses, ads, and a “Tasque Manager” - which it executes on splendidly.
  • In that vein, Toby Fox also is superb at tying everything in the game together like an auteur. The sound matches the gameplay matches the story matches the graphics. It is very hard to find anything seriously out of place. (I do not call him an auteur simply because that implies that all ideas for the game source from him, when there are very obviously sections that match someone else’s vision. What he does is seamlessly mesh those sections into the overall experience.)
  • The gameplay is also quite expansive. It includes elements of bullet hells, rhythm games, etc, all as they make sense. The game is never shy to add something new if it might be fresh or interesting. This especially livens up the combat.

But what I think makes this a good PROGRESSIVE game is something a little different:

  • The game is not slavishly progressive. It is set in a small town, where everyone knows one another and goes to church on Sundays. This is portrayed as a little stifling but also kind of sweet. There are plenty of straight and gender-conforming characters (though it’s pretty low on typical machismo). It does not follow line item requirements on any topics du jour, and indeed there is a section lampooning a polyamorous “throuple” (Toby’s words, not mine) run by a deeply obnoxious busybody pushing around two hapless and unhappy orbiters.
  • Real-world politics are totally absent. There is no sexism. There is no analogue to any real racial group. There are rich and poor people, and differences between them, but there’s no hatred for one or the other.
  • The characters themselves are compelling. I’m not going to go so far as to say they’re particularly deep, but Toby is great at showing rather than telling, and overall they ring true. Small example: at the start of the game, you wake up in a room with two beds. One has a shelf full of trophies and awards and all kinds of cool games, music discs, and so on. The one you wake up in is barren and gray. It very quickly becomes apparent that your older brother is off at college. This paints a picture that does not need extensive textual elaboration. You get a sense of who your character is from the world you inhabit and how people talk to you. This pattern is repeated over, and over, and over, and it’s quite refreshing.

These points are where most progressive art falters. It slavishly follows a set of predefined norms, instead of the artist’s opinions; it drowns itself in politics and analogy; its characters exist purely to push one or another point, which must be driven home explicitly, and wind up flat because of it. This creates something pretty drab and uninteresting, no matter the political stance which generates it.

I’ll leave off there. I don’t want to point too much attention to the line-items of progressive ideology in the game, which are better suited to the CW thread, but draw out how art is able to include ideology without being consumed by it, which I consider fun enough for Friday.

Opinions on DELTARUNE or other ideological but non-terrible art welcome.

These points are where most progressive art falters. It slavishly follows a set of predefined norms, instead of the artist’s opinions; it drowns itself in politics and analogy;

Interestingly, it feels like doing the exact opposite of this this is how the best "Social Justice" episodes of Star Trek excel. They'll take a topic where the audience will reflexively pattern-match to modern social issues, but then the writers take careful effort to never break the fourth wall and point out the comparison. They never use obvious terms that would make the viewer take a side. They maintain plausible deniability the whole time.

I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that back when the older series were produced, those ideas were genuinely subversive, and you had to have both skill and subtlety to avoid getting fired. That's not really the case anymore, so the material ends up looking like a fun house mirror version of world war II propaganda entertainment.

These points are where most progressive art falters. It slavishly follows a set of predefined norms, instead of the artist’s opinions; it drowns itself in politics and analogy; its characters exist purely to push one or another point, which must be driven home explicitly, and wind up flat because of it.

This is where my language differs; this is 'art that happens to show a progressive worldview' and not 'progressive art', which I believe is by definition driven by hatred for all non-progressive worldviews. Same thing with Christian art, for that matter, for exactly the same reasons- if you ever wondered what the difference between a Chick tract and Lord of the Rings is, it's this.

Maybe you could call it a Traditionalist game because a certain negative aspect of Ralsei 'being a girly/GNC boy' is not only revealed, but actively punished? I dunno.

Anyway, I posit that a work in which 'mistake theory predominates' can't really be specifically labelled to ideology-specific. "Correct" is not a political identity- though I get that they all pretend to have a monopoly on it.

Oh yeah, and depending on your choices you can to a degree, rape one of the implied-to-be-teenage female characters

which is rank blasphemy against all of the Progressive gods (and is to my knowledge the only major post-release artwork change), and you're actually encouraged by the game to do this.

This is something that should have generated absurd amounts of butthurt and problematization, but it has not; I suspect the offended are mostly told "fuck off, it's a good game" (partially because of Undertale and how well its narrative also happens to include 'yes, you can kill basically everyone' while not being absurd grimdark), and because everyone is more interested with where the so-far-incomplete story is going to go.

Most of the points you've made can be beat-for-beat substituted for Omori, as well, and it's actually kind of interesting to see the parallels between them (to the point that Toby Fox did to a point co-ordinate with Omocat to make sure they weren't making the exact same game).

Heck, both of those games have the 'seemingly-indifferent protagonist', 'girly boy who loves you', and 'tomboy bully/bruiser who the protagonist probably prefers romantically' archetypes; and the relationship the game revolves around is same-sex[1]. Omocat is, at least publicly, a bit more progressive (though perhaps that comes with the territory; Toby Fox is an Easterner and makes his money on the game itself, whereas Omocat is from California and the game was an incidental and more funded by merchandise). Also, Omocat is a woman and Toby Fox is a man.

And yeah, I think a lot of that comes through in the writing and gameplay; Omori's RPG system has emotion control as its primary mechanic where Deltarune's mechanics are kind of all over the place (and are more often played with), and Omori's more interested in being a good story where Deltarune focuses far more on its self-awareness as a game. Not that Omori doesn't do that at times (specifically at the end), but 'changing the mechanics in a place you don't expect it to be done' is something traditional media doesn't get has an emotional impact.

[1] This is a lot more in your face in Deltarune where it's more subtle in Omori. Something something 4 Loves, and Omocat's writing is a lot more intentionally shipping-bait-y than anything in Deltarune, but Omori's plot revolves around loving Sunny loving Basil far more than any other character in the game. That may fit into one's description of 'romantic', or it may not; I don't think it matters.

The Harry Potter game was mechanically awesome. The main story was good too.

Harry Potter has always been very progressive in its outlook. JK Rowling had the TERF fight. But the video game distanced itself from that with a Trans character. I think they did the trans character badly, but it's mostly only a side quest.

I didn't finish Hogwarts Legacy because it turned out not to be my type of game, but I also recall that the student body seemed rather more diverse than what one would expect there in the early 20th century, with one student who was a major supporting character coming from some wizarding school in Africa.

Wizards can teleport at will and express their ethnic bigotry towards muggles/muggle-borns and sentient magical creatures. Also, African wizards would have the oldest magical tradition and probably live like Wakandans. If they have a negative stereotype in the wizarding world, it'd be being a bit full of themselves.

Maybe current-day hogwarts is a second-tier School and doesn't attract as many international students as it used to. It'd fit thematically with the general decline of Britain, many of the old pureblood families have fallen on a hard times by the time we reach the late 90s.

Also the game depicted Slytherins that weren't evil, and added lore that Merlin was in Slytherin house.

I was always annoyed that in the final book the entirety of Slytherin house sided with the Voldies.

Also, African wizards would have the oldest magical tradition and probably live like Wakandans.

African-American wizards, on the other hand...

Wizards aren't going to get enslaved by black muggles and sold to white muggles to pick muggle cotton.

Nor were there wizard dutchmen involuntarily transporting African wizards to the Caribbean.

There wasn't a parallel wizard British empire that established a wizard Raj in wizard india, and German wizards didn't holocaust Jewish wizards during Wizard War 2, wizards iraelis arent currently genociding wizard Palestinians in an open-air wizard prison. Wizards have their own history, they dont just ape muggle history but with wands and silly names.

I suppose that most african-american wizards would be muggle-born, and thus would carry with them whatever dysfunctions an 11-year-old African American would have.

Was there a wave of ellis-island wizard european immigration to the Americas? Or would almost all American wizards be WASPs?

This also brought me completely out of the experience. There are mods to fix it but I haven’t got around to trying them.

I could name names, but I think everyone has at least one example that comes to mind.

I want to nominate Andor and Arcane (season 1 only for both, haven't seen the rest yet) as cases of very progressive seeming stuff that comes across as both true art and not annoying.

I'd appreciate other recommendations if people have them (and Deltarune/Undertale are good choices!).

Arcane (season 1 only for both, haven't seen the rest yet) as cases of very progressive seeming stuff that comes across as both true art and not annoying

Arcane didn't seem obviously progressive to me. The unrepentant revolutionary willing to stop at nothing was the villain of the first season, and his main redeeming quality was his paternal instinct. The roster of heroes includes an acceptably nerdy Chad Beefcake and a heiress of a 1% family who rebels against her privilege by... becoming a cop.

"Anti-capitalism" + lots of LGBTQ* themes and relationships + girl bossing + "diverse casting" up the wazoo.

Also, how many white men can you name in the cast who aren't villains or being set up to be villains?

The daddy, the fat shop owner and the two kids that all die in episode 3, the aforementioned Chad Beefcake, the hairy mascot guy.

For Season 1 purposes:

A bunch of people who die early, someone who isn't white (Chad), and someone you can't tell is white (mascot)

What part of him isn't white?

Jayce is somewhat hispanic coded and his voice actor is hispanic.

The main characters are (per wikipedia cast list): white woman (LGTBQ, voice actor is not white supposedly and she identifies as multi-racial), white woman, hispanic man, asian woman (LGBTQ), black woman.

Major supporting cast is: white male (but not human character, is orange?), white male (villain), white male (villain), white male (diesish, sorta villain), black male, black female, black female, white male villain.

Definitely Netflix casted.

I'll second Andor and Arcane. For Andor I'd say season 2 is as good as 1, for Arcane season 2 is great but in different ways than 1 so YMMV.

For gaming I'd nominate Life Is Strange, and to a lesser extent its prequel, but Life Is Strange 2 fell into the "ideological and terrible" category and I never bothered with the others.

Caveats: Life Is Strange is a "choose-your-own-adventure"/"puzzle" style adventure game; not quite "walking simulator" but adjacent enough that it's not recommended for anyone who wants a higher percentage of game in their games. It's also not quite the best of its genre if you consider less-ideological games too; my pick for that would be the first season of Telltale's Walking Dead.

Season 1 is so good I stopped watching it 8 episodes in. It's just so predictable. Socialist realism. You can tell the writer read a few essays on fascism by the language people at ISA use. In the end it just bored me.

Life Is Strange is a great game, but not an especially progressive one. Maybe a few plot details would count. I'd say it's more nostalgia / coming of age / loss of innocence than anything.

I'd instead offer Tell Me Why, by the same developer. Tell Me Why is a worse game (can't honestly recommend it) - much more of a walking simulator - but it's impressive just how ideological it manages to be without ruining the whole thing. You play as twins, one of which is a trans-man with a chip on his shoulder, who gets dialogue options to be petulant and preachy toward various conservative residents of small town Alaska, but this doesn't go so great for him, and he comes off looking like an asshole some of the time. Its main achievement is that the progressive messaging is such a load-bearing part of the plot, and the thing still holds together.

To me Life is Strange felt like a very progressive game, but it was in a "we're all progressives here"/"fish don't know what water is" way: they didn't make a big deal about any artistic choices that stemmed from that, but so many artistic choices felt like they stemmed from that. It's hard to go into details without spoilers though.

Life is Strange 2 often went the "petulant and preachy towards various conservative residents" route by contrast, but didn't seem nearly as self-aware or unreliable-narrator about it as what you're describing. It felt almost like the converse of an Ayn Rand novel; instead of Rand's fascinating but disturbingly realistic villains mixed with corny one-dimensional heroes, LiS2 (or at least the majority of it; I quit about 2/3rds of the way in) mixed fascinating troubled heroes with cartoonish one-dimensional villains.

agree that there's some "in-the-water" progressivism in LiS, but it all felt pretty natural to me. It is indeed hard to point to specific examples without spoiling things, but there were also some obvious fake-outs where you think a character is supposed to be a tool to hammer home a message, and they're not, or are actually the opposite. I would also say "the good ending" feels thematically conservative to me (almost Christian?), but can't really say more without spoiling it.

I had to quit LiS 2 for the same reason. I can handle a character being preachy just fine, but when the game itself is preaching to me without any room for nuance, that's too much.

Is it remotely possible they don't understand the character is being an asshole? And they are just depicting how mean they think people are to the lady for living her "authentic self"?

I first noticed this with that Cat Person short story. Taken on it's own, Cat Person seemed vaguely aware of the all the grey areas in trying to date when it was written? Then the lady goes and does this interview moralizing about how the woman in the story was clearly the victim and the man was clearly wrong. And I'm sitting here thinking "Oh.... this lady basically just accidentally admitted how awful she is". The kinda passive in a shitty way female character in Cat Person is her, and that's literally how some dude reacted to her being so passive aggressive, and she doesn't understand what she did wrong at all. She just wrote down what literally happened thinking nobody could possibly find fault with it. And then I think at some point this was more or less proven true when the guy from the story got doxed?

Last night I read Ted Chiang's short story/novelette "Liking What You See: A Documentary", whose premise is the invention of a reversible brain procedure which induces a condition called "calliagnosia" (or "calli" for short), which renders the subject unable to identify beauty in other people's faces. They are still able to identify faces and recognise familiar ones: they just have no special attraction to beautiful faces nor any special revulsion towards ugly faces or people with facial deformities, and are hence immune to the "halo effect". This invention is hailed as a powerful means of combatting "lookism", unwarranted societal discrimination against ugly people.

Among the handful of male Asian-American writers whose work I've read (Tony Tulathimutte, Adrian Tomine), sexual frustration and romantic rejection are recurrent themes. At the outset of the story, I was expecting it to be Chiang's mask-off moment where he permits himself an opportunity to air his grievances about being discriminated against for something outside of his capacity to change. But of course I'd underestimated him, and this story is just as rigorous and even-handed as anything else in his oeuvre. In the story, at least a dozen characters offer their opinions on the pros and cons of the technology, and it's to Chiang's credit that absolutely none of them come off like strawmen or stock characters being held up for our derision. It's also subtly prescient for 2002, describing a mobile phone on which you can make video calls and apply effects to your face to make it look like you're wearing makeup - he predicted Snapchat filters! Thought-provoking stuff, although not quite as good as some of my favourites (especially "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom", "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" and "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate").

full text is here if anyone's curious

Lori Harber, third-year student at Maxwell College:

Calli is for wusses. My attitude is, fight back. Go radical ugly. That's what the beautiful people need to see.

I got my nose taken off about this time last year. It's a bigger deal than it sounds, surgery-wise; to be healthy and stuff, you have to move some of the hairs further in to catch dust. And the bone you see (taps it with a fingernail) isn't real, it's ceramic. Having your real bone exposed is a big infection risk.

I like it when I freak people out; sometimes I actually ruin someone's appetite when they're eating. But freaking people out, that's not what it's about. It's about how ugly can beat beautiful at its own game. I get more looks walking down the street than a beautiful woman. You see me standing next to a video model, who you going to notice more? Me, that's who. You won't want to, but you will.

Court opinion:

  • On August 31: A person dies; his brother contacts a funeral home and requests a direct cremation, with no embalming; and the corpse is brought to the funeral home. On September 2, the brother signs a contract for cremation at a price of 3.4 k$, and the corpse is transferred to a crematory.

  • On September 7: The brother signs a contract with a different funeral home for cremation at a price of just 1 k$. The corpse is transported from the crematory back to the first funeral home. When the second funeral director arrives at the first funeral home to pick up the corpse, she is astonished to discover that the first funeral home failed to refrigerate the corpse because its corpse refrigerator was out of order! After sitting at 56 °F (11 °C) for three days before being transferred to the crematory, the corpse has generated "fluid seepage, maggot infestation, and unbearable decay and stench". Since then the broken fridge has been replaced, but the damage already has been done. The second funeral director reports the situation to the brother.

  • On September 10, the second funeral home has the corpse cremated. However, before cremation, the brother insists on seeing the corpse one last time. He is appalled at its condition, and reports the situation to the police. The first funeral director—who also is the president of the <del>state</del><ins>county</del> funeral directors' association!—is charged with abuse of a corpse, is convicted, and is sentenced to a year of probation. "If the President of the Funeral Directors' Association conducts business in this manner, who is to say what is happening at any other funeral home behind a family's back?"

  • The convicted funeral director appeals. He argues that the crime of abuse of a corpse is reserved for (1) acts, while he only omitted an act, and (2) treatment that the actor "knows would outrage ordinary family sensibilities", while he had no such knowledge. But the appeals panel affirms. (1) "The purpose of drafting the abuse-of-corpse statute in very broad and general language was to ensure that offenses such as concealing a corpse came under the purview of the statute." It is precedent that failing to notify authorities of a person's death and allowing that person's corpse to rot counts as abuse of a corpse, even though it is merely the omission of an act rather than an act in itself. (2) "Even if there were no initial expectation that the family would ever see Decedent's body again, any person, funeral director or otherwise, would understand that family sensibilities would be offended if a corpse were allowed to decompose for days."

This got a decent amount of play in the Pittsburgh news earlier this year. If you want to make the story come to life and meet some of the people involved, there's this video reporting on the guilty verdict, and this one covering the preliminary hearing.

It seems to me a perverse situation that our society, which is largely built on enslaving the younger generations to the older, seems to do by those close to death so poorly, I suppose because its idea of serving them is based around throwing money in their general direction and not in any form of respect. This reminds me of the point C. S. Lewis often made that it's in the nature of sin to offer some real good end in exchange for bad means, and then to not even deliver on it.

Call me crazy, but I'm starting to see recurring themes in the cases you choose to present.

I post cases that are interesting and cases that are funny. This case is interesting for the following reasons.

(1) It is highly likely that a person will deal with a funeral home at least once in his life. It's worth knowing how a funeral home—even one led by the president of the <del>state</del><ins>county</ins> funeral directors' association—can be derelict in its duty.

(2) The legal issue of whether a person can be guilty of abuse of a corpse by simply leaving it alone (rather than a more typical situation of fucking a corpse or dumping a corpse out of the back of a van) is unintuitive. I would not have expected it to come out this way after reading the statute.

Over the past week I saw only three cases worth posting (two interesting and one funny), and this is the best one.

(2) The legal issue of whether a person can be guilty of abuse of a corpse by simply leaving it alone (rather than a more typical situation of fucking a corpse or dumping a corpse out of the back of a van) is unintuitive. I would not have expected it to come out this way after reading the statute.

Without knowing anything about the relevant law, it makes sense to me that you can abuse a corpse by leaving it alone in the same way you can abuse a child by leaving it alone.

Partly this is because a corpse is treated sort of like a living thing from a spiritual point of view. We treat them as having certain feelings, or at the very least as having the relatives and dead person's feelings attached to them - it is tragic if they are mutilated or forgotten, we want to lay them to rest in a nice place, etc. Like books or an abandoned teddy bear, a corpse is not just a corpse.

Partly this is because a corpse is, in a much more awful sense, a living thing. An ecosystem. Which is going to go very badly if you don't care for it appropriately.

Without knowing anything about the relevant law

The text of the law is what makes the difference. The text of Pennsylvania's abuse-of-corpse law criminalizes only "treatment" of a corpse, which a layman would interpret as applying only to acts, not to omissions of acts.

Except as authorized by law, a person who treats a corpse in a way that he knows would outrage ordinary family sensibilities commits a misdemeanor of the second degree.

This stands in stark contrast to the definition of child abuse, which specifically criminalizes omissions of acts.

Child abuse.—The term "child abuse" shall mean intentionally, knowingly or recklessly doing any of the following:

(1) Causing bodily injury to a child through any recent act or failure to act.

(7) Causing serious physical neglect of a child.

"Serious physical neglect." Any of the following when committed by a perpetrator that endangers a child's life or health, threatens a child's well-being, causes bodily injury or impairs a child's health, development or functioning:

(1) A repeated, prolonged or egregious failure to supervise a child in a manner that is appropriate considering the child's developmental age and abilities.

(2) The failure to provide a child with adequate essentials of life, including food, shelter or medical care.

Thank you for the detailed breakdown. I see that the letter of the law regarding child abuse is much more detailed - as it should be, given the greater importance of children and the sad ratio of corpse abuse : child abuse.

In the spirit of contrarianism, I will point out that if, say, my friend moved abroad and didn't speak to his elderly mother for years, I would consider him to have 'treated her badly' in standard parlance despite and precisely because of the lack of any positive acts. 'Treatment' may be a term of art in law and have a slightly different meaning there though.

(2) The legal issue of whether a person can be guilty of abuse of a corpse by simply leaving it alone (rather than a more typical situation of fucking a corpse or dumping a corpse out of the back of a van) is unintuitive. I would not have expected it to come out this way after reading the statute.

In my state, people charged with murder who then abandon/hide the body somewhere (or just leave it at the remote site of the murder) are often charged with abuse of a corpse as well. It's a bit absurd and reminds of me the "murder, arson, and... jaywalking!" joke. Someone charged with first or second degree murder is probably not too worried about the abuse of a corpse charge (which is a felony, but the lowest level).

I was specifically thinking of this New Jersey case, which actually doesn't fit your pattern.

  • A man lets his friend do drugs in the passenger seat of his work van while he delivers mattresses.

  • The friend overdoses on fentanyl-laced heroin and dies. Rather than calling 911, the man finishes his workday with the corpse in the passenger seat, and then dumps the corpse on the side of "a dark, rural road", where it is found a few hours later.

  • The man is convicted of desecration of human remains and is sentenced to eight years in prison. The appeals panel affirms.

FWIW, I appreciate the broad variety of cases you post. I don't think something needs to count as "fun" in a traditional family friendly sense to qualify for the Friday Fun thread.

Hope this guy being removed as president is a secondary outcome. He's a price gouger and too cheap to get some ice when his corpse fridge is busted? What a piece of shit.

The opinion says he was the president, but I don't actually see him listed on the association's website, whether current or archived. Maybe the trial judge made a mistake and the appeals panel didn't check it. Or maybe he changed his name.

I believe he was the president of the Allegheny County Funeral Director's Association, not the statewide association.

Trial-judge mistakes strike again.

I'm not seeing where in the opinion it says he was president of the state association.

Oh, I guess it's my mistaken assumption, then.

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