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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   908 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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Twin Peaks review - the most spiritual piece of cinema in existence by Narayana's favorite director

I was away and wish to be more offline. I got a basic phone, and doing anything well is extremely hard. I really want to make this a standalone post and not a comment, so I may do that if my comment ends up being long. This is spoiler free. Lynch was the last Hindu director, and Twin Peaks is an allegory for his own spiritual journey, where he wakes up to spiritual truth. Twin Peaks is hailed as his magnum opus, and this is my earnest analysis of it, why I loved it and also why no other piece of media I watch from now will be as good. RSD had a saying that the self always comes through. David could not hide his own, the show to me ultimately is his own spiritual journey bursting out.

Twin Peaks is probably the best piece of media I have seen, period. A few weeks ago, I posted a review of the first season and how the show sucked me in big time. I enjoyed Blue Velvet since Mulholland Drive just felt depressing. I was not meditating when I first saw both, and I honestly only watched Twin Peaks because Lynch was a yogi who lived life in a way I wish to model. His meditation practice was from the Advaita Vedanta school, it's not as good as Shaiva Non-dual practice (Kashmir Shaivism in my case) and some other forms of Buddhism, but it will get you on the spiritual journey, and some even achieve enlightenment via it. I still will recommend Kashmir Shaivism, though that is not as relevant for now.

Lynchian is a term that is thrown around a lot, Foster Wallace gave his own definition of it, which I disagree with. Many have not seen his movies or may not have liked them, as I still do not like Mulholland Drive and have not seen any other movies besides that, including Blue Velvet, which I loved, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which was again amazing. Most movies today are very straightforward money-making ventures where you have a streamlined story, VFX and a plethora of tropes. Some directors do this well, Lynch is different.

His movies have a lot of supernatural, surreal, mysterious elements that feel random and incoherent; his movies are not for the mass market and many compare him with Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock in terms of his abilities. I am not a film nerd, movies to me are things I watch when I cannot read due to being tired, Lynch, the person, is what got me into Twin Peaks. After I procured the show, I started watching an episode or more daily.

Season 1

This show does not feel old; Lynch was bound to a tight story by co-creator Mark Frost. You are in beautiful Twin Peaks in the gorgeous pacific northwest, there is a murder, FBI sends special agent Dale Cooper to investigate and we meet the residents of the little town, the story keeps branching as the investigation ensues and it grips you, I could not put it down, you have an increasing amount of surreal elements with each episode, the show is still grounded, it ends on a cliffhanger and I am stoked to start season 2, Lynch does not direct all episodes, yet he is there during the entire production.

When you watch the show, there are some tongue-in-cheek references to soap operas; the creators called it a soap opera instead of a parody of one. You see a soap opera play out on tv sets in the show during scenes where it mirrors the show, though the show was not made to parody ot pay homage to them.

Season 2

The network by this point had armtwisted lynch into revealing the killed, his origina intetions were to never reveal it since the point of a murder mystery is the intrigue, the show was great till the reveal at which point David leaves the production out of anger, only appearing as an actor, he first appears in espisode 6 of the 22 episode season and keeps appearing more frequently later. The show gets bad, they introduce a straight-to-DVD type villain to keep it going, the network moves the show to a worse timeslot, Lynch and co protest, and he comes back to direct the final episode which, apart from being amazing, ends on a cliffhanger. The show is done for now.

It begins well; the first episode is 90 minutes of peak Twin Peaks. The sets, dreams, the town of Twin Peaks. You do not have much going on post episode 15, hell, I skipped large parts of it till episode 20 or so since it began to feel like a middling soap opera. Lynch himself hated how bad the show got before the final few episodes. Despite this, it was far better than most TV you will see, stick out the second season.

Fire walk with me

Frost and Lynch part ways, the movie is a prequel, it is much more surreal, gets panned by everyone, loses money at the box office and even sparks a feud between Tarantino and Lynch. I really liked the movie, though it is not what the TV show felt like; the negative perception was not that illogical. Many watched the show for being a great murder mystery that had just enough surreal elements, they wanted a continuation of the story, not a prequel. I liked the movie a lot, not as much as the show, but it is still amazing. His work is hard to describe and I cannot point to extremely specific reasons.

A lot of subtle and explicit foreshadowing is done really well here, the movie is quite dark, bleak, and it feels different, not worse, just different. The viewing order dictates that you watch it post-season 2 and before season 3. TV back then was still PG so this was a welcome addition too.

Season 3 / The Return

There is an episode in the pilot or the second episode where they make a point about the importance of 25 years. Showtime gave Lynch and Frost plenty of money and freedom. In 2018, nearly 25 years after going off air, the show that was killed too early comes back. This is Lynch's magnum opus. An 18-hour-long movie, unlike the last two seasons, every episode is directed by Lynch, Frost comes back, the cast reunites. A big budget. three decades of tech advancement, this show felt like crack. I stayed up nearly two nights and finished the entire show, and stayed up again to understand some cryptic parts. No more self-censorship, there are f bombs, tits and adult themes everywhere, much more than the movie FWWM. Lynchs final piece of Cinema and also his best,

The show keeps getting bizarre, more surreal. I had trouble believing a tv channel would show this. An anti-nostalgia show, you get something new, you see Las Vegas, parts of North Dakota, and even Wyoming. This culminates with episode 8, which is the strangest thing to ever air on TV. It made no sense to me then and still does not now. The show builds to a finale and somehow ends on a cliffhanger again.

This is not enough to justify the praises I have; there are many well-made shows that do mysteries and drama with tighter precision. Hell I did not even get the more abstract parts. Those who have seen it know that a lot of things come together fully only by episode 16.

One of my favorite scene was the one with Monica Bellucci, where she quotes the Upanishads in a Parisian cafe, where they both end up looking back at a younger David from nearly three decades ago.

We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream

Projection and bad YouTube essays

We love to project things onto other people, things, and events. There are hundreds of videos that analyse the show, the best being Corn Pone flicks who makes points that make sense. Like everything in life, you can make things worse with YouTube essays, frequently made and consumed by low-status nerds who arre not gifted filmmakers. The single worst was Maggie Mae Fish, a trans (?) lefty who finds anything less than infinite Somali migration fascist. She spends two hours dunking on a slightly less left-wing guy and cracking leftist jokes. In her twisted soy world, hekcin brave twin peakerinoo is about leftist values, conveniently forgetting that the protagonist is a man, and women who appear on the show usually lose their bras. Leftists are not funny; chud impressions are only funny when reactionaries do them. Lynch was not mocking macho anti-heroes from prestige tv with the return, not everyone hates men like you, you ugly fucking wierdo.

Twin Perfect made a 4.5-hour-long essay that took him two years to make. He made three Twin Peaks videos which together clock over 6 hours, he sounds like Charlie from It's Always Sunny Pepe Sylvia meme by the end. Lynch did not write a lot of things for the show. Twin Perfect wants to solve the show like a soap opera detective. His efforts are worthy of praise but Lynch simply would add random things because they felt right. He did not make a child's crayon drawing, but he was also not designing a PCB.

The second worst was some retard reading off Wikipedia for Advaita Vedanta, getting all of it wrong. I left 20 rage comments because he understood stuff at a 6th-grade level. Spiritual and religious are not interchangeable words. Furthermore, you experience the spiritual, how he went on for three hours and then shilled his Patreon is beyond me

Sidetrack

Lynch was a spirituality nut, like me. He was always shy about his art, the one thing he would not stop about was spiritual life. He took a holy dip in the sangam, visited the holy site of Jyotirmath, remembered yugas and quoted the Vedas more than any director I know of. Transcendental meditation is very woo-woo, and he did seem to be taken by it. David Lynch was much truer to Hinduism than any director I have seen. Religious and spiritual beliefs always come out. Plenty of dysgenic movie directors here are born in the fold, zero actually believe in any of it. There have been close to zero really good directors here since the demise of Satyajit Ray. Documentaries of David's visits exist; he was visiting to convey how grateful he was to the Matha. Can't fake that. Yes, I know of his Polanski signature and the milquetoast political opinions, but that does not diminish what I have written.

Advaitins are people who believe in Narayana or Lord Vishnu similar to Shiva in Trika, hence the title.

My interpretation

My first spiritual experience was on the 14th of February. I have had a few till now, you cannot understand what I mean till you feel it. When you embark on the spiritual journey, you do it to search for the truth. Whether it makes you happy or if it kills you, you are not to stray. There are different stages. After the initial euphoria, my mental state took a sharp nosedive. Recognition, I finally hit a stage where I was recognising how bad I had fuckessd upl in my life, the consequences felt real for the first time. My state has gotten better, with time, you experience so much more that is extremely real yet impossible to prove.

These are things you cannot relate to until you do them, and the divine shines its light on you. When I finished the show, I could not shake something off, I could not put a hand on it. After my aforementioned search for answers, it clicked.

Twin Peaks is an allegory for David's own spiritual life. Laura Palmer's murder and the resolution of it are his attachment to art, Dale Cooper is him at various points in the journey, and the show ends on a spiritual cliffhanger. Will David embrace letting go, or will he fall into the traps we are all warned about? Letting go does not mean being an ascetic; Trika, unlike Vedanta, does not see the world as an illusion to retreat from. He captured what the entire journey had been like for him.

A beginner's view of the view

You feel happier, you start to recognise your own faults and bitterness, malice you always had that you were never aware of sticks until you keep going down the path. You even feel extremely stupid, impossibly lucky. And then you reach a deeper level, you recognise more, realising that both are temporary, and in time one may attain enlightenment, be able to realise essence nature.

Non-Dual belief in Trika is that we are all one, Lord Shiva is not someone who exists just in the temples, he exists in everything, non dual. Note that this is an esoteric SPIRITUAL practice; I am not advocating for free love hippie world order, the social order does not run this way, and you should not use this as an excuse to allow tyranny. Hareesh Wallis over at tantrailluminated.com describes this better than I can. Spiritual life aims not to add on top of who you are, it removes all that you added and allows you to see essence nature. You are not told to adhere to a belief system; you do things, and your own experiences act as your guide. This all sounds nutty until you experience it, I laughed off all of this until one day, after a sit I tasted euphoria and clarity of the kind I cannot describe. My skimming of texts on people's experiences was in single digits when you count the number of minutes. Reading, asking others happened later. The sadness, confusion, and things after that are all a part of one's journey

Dale Cooper undergoes all the things Lynch went through, yes, the show is great, for me it's the fact that lynch could capture a universal thing in his own medium is what sets it apart. His last public words were Jai Gurudev, probably a reference to the former Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath, who trained the most important Advaitin monks of this century. The former Shankaracharya of Dwarka, Karpatri Ji (guru of the current Shankaracharya of Puri) and also Lynch's own teacher, I carry a combination of extreme disagreement and a high amount of respect for them. There is no Hindu Pope as sects and beliefs exist in forms vastly different from the rest of the world, much worse now and nearly all "saints" are terrible people psy opping others. Swami Lakshman Joo being the last one in Trika who revived a lot of what we have

Abhinavagupta was a sage of immense intellect, an aesthetician who, upon reaching enlightenment, spoke about how overrated intelligence was for the journey. As a person, I possess slightly above average amounts of it, describing these things is for me beyond words. Even if I could describe it under 14 thousand words, it would not do it justice. Twin Peaks is hence my favourite piece of cinema; it reminds me of my own journey, the sort many blessed people before me took. Arguments for me projecting are valid, I may feel differently about the show later. Death is not the end, I felt bad when he died, as much as I can call cinema a low art form, he was a world-beating genius, worthy of extreme respect.

A bottomless glass of happiness

I get a big wide smile whenever I hear the show's theme song or if I see something related to it. Please, if you can, meditate, get Hareesh's book, sign up for the website, watch Lynch's final piece of cinema, and I hope you, too, can appreciate the joy all this brought me. Hari Om!

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.

Yeah, lol, Tim Roth was the bantering hitman in Tarantino's best movie, Pulp Fiction. Foster Wallace wrote a very nerdy scathing comparison of the two and how Lynch is far beyond him. It's correct but pretentious imo, Tarantino was not wrong, FWWM was panned by everyone, including the fans.

Side note, Casino owning borhters were quite funny, the segment had the best payoff I have seen on a show.

They do occasionally make fun of cinema, its not the central plot or the point of the show as cinema jackasses make it to be, also, should I post this as a standalone post here or is it too low effort/bad/incoherent?

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 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.

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 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?

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.

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").

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.

(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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