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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1925 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 31, 2025

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

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

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

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Anyone know some ways for a person — one without any particular skills at either coding or handicrafts — to make a few extra bucks online?

Answers for this is question can be, unironically, best found on Reddit.

Average mottizen is card carrying member of elite human capital with little experience of poor life (not that there is anything wrong with it), but folks from all stations of life could be found on the infamous orange website.

If you're in the US, you could grind the casinos for 'showing up' bonuses. Apparently you can make 50-100 dollars an hour for one hour per day. :

https://www.themotte.org/post/2068/friday-fun-thread-for-june-6/333425?context=8#context

Hi, I actually tried this and I'll warn against it. I got really excited by the same ACX review and here was my experience:

  1. Difficulty of finding expectation

The entire scheme revolves around using high expectation, low variance ("return to player" as the games call it). It is basically impossible to get an accurate take on which slot games are like this.

Even the ones that have this buried somewhere don't quite add up. For example there was a game that apparently had a 96% return to player over "thousands of spins". I did maybe 2k spins with the minimum possible bet of 10 cents to kill variance. For every 120 stakescoins I had, I was lucky to get back 98 and cash out without too much of a loss. Remember that according to the promised expectation I was supposed to get 117.6 which, given the $100 real money that this cost me I should have gotten $17.60 of profit.

  1. Counterparty risk

This was mentioned in the original ACX review which led me down this rabbit hole, but it's kind of serious. You will be risking $100 to make at best $20 in profit. The ACX guy was nonchalant about it, saying you could tell your credit card to cancel the payment but I've never tried it in practice. Be ready to wait for a week to get your money back.

  1. Time

Still takes a hell of a lot of time. The ACX reviewer had some bot system and also had been doing this for a while. I felt like he was heavily discounting the time it takes initially to set things up and find the right casinos and games and so on. Lists and "advice" online are fake and looking to cash in on referral fees.

  1. Savvy

This is the entire damn problem. The ACX guy made it sound so easy. He even began to muse "what if you had UBI and nobody came?". He made it sound like literally anybody with no skills could do this.

This actually requires a lot of savvy and isn't quite as foolproof as he made it out to be. Finding the right casinos, games, etc.

It's what I realized with sports betting arbitrage. Or thinking about getting good at poker. There's no free lunch. No money lying on the sidewalk.

In the end I cut all my losses and closed my positions and got a part-time retail job.

Interesting. I really want to argue with your points, but since I don’t have any experience doing this (not in the US), I’ll cede the field.

Yeah, possibly the biggest barrier is the need for some seed capital and the willingness to take some counterparty risk on it. The guy seemed like he was juggling/transferring thousands of dollars per day to take advantage of the credit card bonuses and the cheap tokens. You’d probably need like 20-50k starting capital you’re ready to lose (although I think the risk is not that big), and, like you say, a considerable time investment, before you can earn his full one hour a day salary.

Anyway, if it's a hassle, or less lucrative than advertised, it's probably better to do something less zero sum.

We are on the same side. If you have any way or maybe even specific online casinos to recommend please go ahead. Who would not want to sit at home and make $50/hr?

This game isn't really zero-sum either. The company wins because they have to do this by regulation. The gamblers whose losses you gain win because the online sweepstakes casinos continue existing because they can maintain the legal fiction.

Even though you're abroad just use a VPN. You might even be better off because the IRS won't get after you for your winnings

A few ideas I've had over the years:

  1. Operate a small machine shop that makes replacement parts for mining equipment
  2. Develop improved release agents, emulsifiers, and icing stabilizers used in the commercial baking industry
  3. Open a shop that does custom letterpress printing, which uses old-fashioned metal type. Every major city can support a few of these, most of the business coming from wedding invitations and the like.
  4. Get an M.D. and buy the kind of machine that's expensive enough and used infrequently enough that it makes more sense for doctors to have someone else come in than to do the work themselves. I neurologist I used to know made a nice living going to various offices to do EMG and nerve conduction tests, with the added bonus that he didn't have to deal with patients calling him or operating his own office.
  5. Find an application where a Wankel rotary engine makes the most sense, and corner the market on them
  6. Develop some kind of get-rich-quick scheme and sell books about how to implement it in late-night infomercials hosted by Richard Karn or some other washed-up B-celebrity.

These are all good ideas for someone with a fair chunk of startup capital, not someone who's trying to figure out how to afford food.

  1. remote, call center jobs and data entry jobs exist and are widely available. If you're trying to avoid a 'job' job this isn't an option.

  2. you can get paid for writing fake reviews, filling out surveys, etc. Pays Indian wages.

  3. you can monetize X by engagement farming. Pays a middle class income by the standards of the subcontinent or the nicer parts of Africa if you're good at it.

  4. secondary market in online gaming stuff. WoW gold farming is legendary; this option is sufficiently common that you can find guides online, including the economics of it.

  5. you can sell reddit accounts with sufficient amounts of karma to spambots/advertisers. I assume this pays Kenyan-middle-class wages when done successfully, but I don't know that much about it.

The problem with "online" is that you are competing against every third-worlder with a cellphone on the planet, most of whom are willing to work for pennies, plus AI. Add in the lack of skills and that makes it hopeless.

Well, almost. Some creative endeavors are still on the table. You could try your hand at writing an online serial (see previous discussion), or you could make an adult visual novel (sex sells).

you could make an adult visual novel (sex sells).

Requires coding skills and art skills.

No? Ren'Py is easy to use; if you can get a degree in physics from Caltech, you should have no problem learning it. Or, if you absolutely can't manage that, you can use Twine, which is so easy, a purple-haired Tumblrina can do it.

As for art skills, come on, it's The Year of Our Lord 2025; that's what AI is for. Try Fooocus, locally if you have a GPU, or on Colab if you don't. Or farm free credits from Civitai and use that.

or you could make an adult visual novel (sex sells).

Does it? Then why are like 90% of “adult” mangas male on male?

I don't know how things are in the US, but in Europe companies pay premium for non-third-worlders. Now, the "premium" might still add up to chump change, but it might still be worth it depending on your situation.

How many bucks exactly? There are paid surveys, but the rewards are extremely low. I heard of games where you could grind and farm characters or artifacts and then sell them. Probably also not very lucrative. In general, if you seek something that can be done with any person with a computer, you have over a billion people to compete with, so the expected revenue stream would not be very good.

How many bucks exactly?

Looking at something like $50-$80/mo. range? (Much more than that, and the "welfare cliff" benefit reductions start to really bite.) I just had a change in landlords, along with a $120/month rent increase (when I'm already dirt poor). Basically, rent, utilities, phone, and internet now take up over half my income, with my usual monthly food budget very close to what's left.

And I asked about online, because I doubt many here would have much knowledge about the IRL circumstances, here in Anchorage, AK, for making a bit of extra money.

Do you have unusually feminine-looking feet?

Do you have photoshop and a can-do attitude?

You bet your bottom dollar.

Could try having a look at the pinned threads and top scoring posts from the last year in /r/beermoney. Seems like people are claiming anything from $50 to $1000 per month, and I imagine it all entails grinding your way through endless hoops.

Call centers? A bit of an assembly line, but they do pay, and give zero fucks if it's online.

@mrvanillasky, why do you hate Sikhs so much? Is it a personal thing or are you in some way representative of a broader anti-Sikh sentiment?

I'm a long way away from both, but I've always viewed them as India's Mormons: religious weirdos that are on average more successful (and less dysfunctional) than their former co-religionists, but whose influence is mostly limited to a single state.

I'm not him, but I can share my own take, despite not really hating Sikhs.

There are two different categories:

  1. Sikhs, in India, and similar to them, Sikhs abroad who have migrated relatively recently.

  2. Sikhs abroad, who left a long time ago, or at least before the 1990s.

Why make this distinction? In the 70s, 80s, fading out by the 2000s, India had a Sikh secessionist movement desiring an independent Khalistan Things got very bloody. A Prime Minister was assassinated, there were pogroms on both sides. A large number of Sikhs fled abroad, to the US, UK or Canada.

The issue is that they took their anger with them. On the other hand, the Sikhs in India aged out of the desire for conflict, or never really had it in the first place. Current relations between Sikhs and other ethnoreligious groups, in India, are largely congenial. Abroad? Oh hell no. They're still malding, and occasionally send money to the very few remaining Sikh terrorist organizations in India, or help out Pakistan. There was a kerfuffle where India was alleged to have assassinated two Khalistani leaders, one in Canada, and one in Pakistan.

Younger Sikhs in the West? They're usually not so heavily indoctrinated, and get along fine. The Sikhs in India, do not, as a whole, really care for an independent state.

If I had to guess, Vanilla is also a part of elitist rightwing circles in India (he's very terminally online). They look down on Sikhs in places like Canada for engaging in a bit of cooking of the books, and the abuse of lax immigration pathways to bring their neighbors' brothers' dog's walker as a "student" who spends more time doing Uber deliveries than studying. This pisses off the locals, and makes things harder for other Indians. I will make it clear that I am sharing an online opinion, and not making an endorsement. I haven't been there personally.

They look down on Sikhs in places like Canada for engaging in a bit of cooking of the books, and the abuse of lax immigration pathways

Is this unique for Sikhs? I was thinking pretty much everyone who is from a poor country would have certain percentage of people who have relatives there (or paying customers) and would cheat to help them. Probably not for richer countries as the improvement in lifestyle is not worth the risk, but for a relatively poor country (or sub-community in the country) it would.

Hardly unique, but my impression is that the Sikhs in Canada have it down to an art form.

Oh, another reason came to mind. Canadian Sikhs tend to be very clannish, and regularly form cohesive vote blocks that swing local or even national elections. They force politics in an anti-India direction, since most politicians, left or less left, can't afford to piss them off.

A question for the gym-goers here: Do you make all sorts of grunting noises when lifting?

That's the question and basically that's the only question, but to explain why I am asking it, the following:

I go to a local gym three times a week. There is newly-opened Anytime Fitness about 3 minutes from my house that replaced what used to be a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant. I've been in it and they did a good job of revamping it, but the price of membership is not cheap and anyway gyms are almost impossible to quit here (that is a boring story I will not tell.) So I continue to go to the old-man, almost-free gym which is a bike ride or a 15 minute walk through the park away.

You tend to see the usual people at my gym. Meaning, the same healthy Japanese people almost every time. It depends on when you go, true, but not always. Mostly you see old men, some really old men, some men who look older than me* but probably aren't, a few old/older women, and occasionally teenage or 20 something guys who for some reason do not go to a cooler venue. One fattish late teens girl who does a lot of staring at her phone for some reason goes there and is always given a torrent of advice on her lifting form by one old guy. She seems to appreciate every word from his mouth but I have my doubts. People are usually friendly to one another--a nod, a chat, some of them seem to like talking. I do not. Once a 20-something guy came in, having brought with him with a girl of similar age, except she was wearing some sort of black latex body suit but without the modesty shorts--she was also gorgeous, brown hair up in this ponytail, and it was as if the clothing she were wearing had been designed expressly for her, designed solely to showcase her youthful perfection in all its...perfection, yeah I can't even find words, it was a moment--and I nearly walked over to the guy and asked "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Very bad form bringing a shockingly gorgeous girl to an old man gym. For a moment I felt like a grizzled Muslim dropped unprepared on Miami beach.

To the point: There is one guy in particular at this gym, he lifts pretty heavy, he is the kind of dude who has two things going on--one set of reps he is doing at the bench press, but he also tries to monopolize the leg curl machine, etc. He does not talk or greet, nor does he bow when entering or leaving (strictly not necessary as this isn't a martial art, but most of us do it anyway). This guy, when lifting (and I don't think he has great form) always makes noises like something out of Forrest Gump when the guy is banging Forrest's mom upstairs. I cannot reproduce the sounds on keyboard. Like a man lifting a sofa but then his back goes out and he groans in distress. Except he does not groan once. He keeps rhythmically groaning and huffing. Yesterday he had the 50kg dumbbells in each hand and was doing a dumbbell bench press with each (he did not get all the way up, at least when I saw him) and it was only at this moment that I expected a grunt--but nothing. No. He saved the grunts for later when he was using the full bar to bench and kept raising it like 5-inches, and lowering it, and raising it again, like miniature reps. Maybe this is a thing. But each rep came with its own damned grunt. And I do not mean "damned" in the normal way. I mean that each grunt was of the pit, was curséd, like the speech of Mordor.

I get moving really heavy weight sometimes there is an involuntary grunt of effort. Like when pushing a truck out of the mud with your buddies. But god this guy's constant utterances annoy. What is the proper etiquette, if any, for gym grunts?

*I know that should be "older than I" but I can't bring myself to write it.

FWIW I too have been going to a nearly-free old man gym in Japan for several years now, and nobody grunts or makes noise (except me, a little, when I'm trying to do my max).

Our regulars are probably 50% withered seniors born in the Taisho era lifting 3kg or stretching. The other half are dudebros (and a scattering of chicks) from the nearby regional university. It's usually pretty quiet in there (well, except for the loud boombox radio in the corner blasting our city's local station at near max volume... I'm always up on the weather and I get to improve my eigo with daily 2 min lessons) but that's probably because the older folks tend not to talk much while exercising. When the college guys are in there it can get a bit noisier, but even then I don't really hear any grunting that's louder than the ambient conversation. I think your Forrest Gump guy might have a screw loose.

P.S. I once attended a Joyfit for a year (sounds like we may have had similar experiences) and at that gym there was one elderly gentlman who would put on a weight belt and make very loud, hoarse shout-grunts that sounded as though he were either suffering through a bout of severe constipation or a round of particularly taxing intercourse, while manipulating a 10kg barbell in variety of ways. And at the Gold's in Harajuku I've seen some Asian bodybuilder dudes clearly on gear get really carried away pushing through sets and egging each other on. But never at my local neighborhood gym.

Do you make all sorts of grunting noises when lifting?

I sometimes do on the last couple of reps on the cycle. It helps. Not every rep though, for me it'd mean the weight is too much. And I am probably annoying other people. Which I try not to do without good reason.

It's a personal choice.

I lift weights practically silently, except maybe when attempting a max effort when I will occassionally WOOOO in triumph after hitting it. I make no noises when lifting, and I put away the bar as gently and quietly as possible, as though it were made of porcelain.

Mrs. FiveHour, by contrast, lifts half as much weight as though she's trying to make as much noise as possible. When she took up lifting, I finally bought decent squat stands, because the rickety old ones I had been using for ten years weren't equal to her abuse.

On the other hand, when I was in grad school, I got lectured by the woman running the girl's lifting club in the school gym about dropping the bar. She said the noise intimidated the girls. I pointed out that the bumper plates were meant to be dropped from overhead, and that I only dropped the bar when doing so was the safest way to get out of the position, or occasionally on warm ups to a max to get in the groove, and that noise was part of the gym experience and that I didn't criticize them for any noises they were making.

older than me

Double-dipping but my instinct is to say that this is correct. In the same way you would use 'He is older than her' rather than 'He is older than she'. But I see there is much disagreement.

I like this reddit post:

So, in the future, you're really better off consulting Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage for questions like this. You can see a preview here.

What it has to say on the issue of than, starting on the left column of page 892, is that "[a] dispute over whether than is a preposition or a conjunction has been going on now for more than two centuries. It is one portion of the price we pay for the 18th-century assumption that the parts of speech of Latin and Greek are readily applicable to English, an assumption that continues to gain uncritical acceptance to this day."

After describing the side championed by Lowth 1762 (holding essentially that after than comes the nominative case, except than whom), the side you're basically getting here, it quite sensibly allows for the use of than as preposition or conjunction, licensing both "taller than I" and "taller than me", citing Shakespeare ("A man no mightier than thyself or me", Julius Caesar, 1600), and several distinguished 19th and 20th century authors for prepositional uses of the phrase.

https://old.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/oig7q/my_brother_is_two_years_older_than_i_or_than_me/

Older than I (am) is the correct form, prescriptively, but usage varies, per your point.

It's not necessarily older than I (am) though.

Consider--"he looks older than dirt." This isn't saying, he looks older than dirt looks, it's saying he simply looks older than dirt itself, dirt as a concept. Older than dirt is also wouldn't be correct--it would imply that the statement depends on dirt's current age, e.g. that he looks younger than dirt generally will in a few hundred years, which is asinine.

If anime has taught me anything, it's that any physical effort must be accompanied by

haAAH! URYAAH!! dOORYAAAA!!! or at the very least yoi-shou!

You should hear me taking out the bins on a Monday morning...

(All joking aside, I almost never make noise when lifting and it's irritating when other people moan on every rep)

At the gyms I've been to the rule around grunts has been, "sounding like you're getting railed in the butt is bad taste, but we're not going to call you out on that". That is, a few involuntary sounds on your last couple of reps are understandable, but if you moan or grunt on each rep people won't hide their amusement.

One reason I asked here (in this forum) is that in Japan you never know what the hell the group reaction is unless you are finely tuned to the group, and in this case the group is varied enough and one-scene enough (just this gym) that I cannot calibrate their microexpressions, etc. In other words everyone ignores his oOOOomphs and Ragghhhhhs except me, and I don't know anyone well enough to know if they are equally fazed. As I say this is a dude who doesn't really interact with the normal pleasantries.

The two biggest moaners in my current gym are both women. One can't (or won't) fit her breasts into her jumpsuit, walking around with a massive cleavage. The other looks and dresses like a man from an aerobics video parody.

A missed opportunity for a Zardoz reference, or is it not that bad?

Nope, not that bad. She looks like Weird Al doing Flashdance cosplay.

I usually exhale after having passed the sticking point in leg exercises. When I am not paying attention to it (such as if I am otherwise preoccupied by lifting something heavy), this may result in a grunt. I don't really mind if other people grunt as long as they don't count out loud.

There are multiple studies indicating that swearing can lead to increased pain tolerance.

Similarly, it's possible that grunting can give some people that extra edge to be able to lift heavier weights. Could also just be placebo or attention seeking performance.

That being said, grunting obnoxiously loud in a public gym is pretty rude and I imagine if you're a powerlifter that needs to grunt to get that extra edge you likely could go to a gym more catered towards powerlifters where such behavior maybe more tolerated.

I grunt when my body is about to give out, or when I am seriously pushing myself well beyond a previous PR. Otherwise, I do my best to keep it to myself, nobody signed up to hear any of that.

I will tell you that - in the gyms that have had the misfortune of hosting me - I have heard very little grunting. This guy is probably being performative, seeking attention for what he believes are actions at the peak of the human physique. Maybe he wants that unattainably beautiful woman to glance his way? You're just caught up in his auditory net.

What to do about it? I'd go for noise canceling headphones, or that failing, a word with staff. I bring the former along just in case they're playing god awful music today.

The music is always godawful, but I have a thing against blocking out ambient noise in a public space. I know that is not normal.

It's interesting if this dude wants attention, because he seems so un-selfaware that he also seems unaware of everyone else. I suspect some sort of autistic tendency but whatever. I'll probably just fucking deal with it. (Also not to awooga again but the siren-y girl only showed up once, thank the Olympians.)

Memetic learning in all things.

A lot of guys grunt because they saw some "famous" lifter grunt on youtube. I think the rhythmic nature of it is a dead giveaway. Your bench-n-leg-curl aficionado probably saw at some point, perhaps even in real life, a lifter he considered "elite" doing something similar and decided to adopt it.

So this would naturally lead to the question "is there a reason for grunting that has validity." Yes but no. Yet in that intermediate to advanced lifters learn how to use held breath and abdominal contraction to stabilize their core which can be very beneficial for compound lifts. If you've ever seen lifting belts, they aren't there to "reinforce" the back on their own, they are there to aid with roprioception (the body's own sense of where it is) during the lift. Lifters combine breath techniques and their lifting belts to create a very stabilized core momentarily. To prevent blackouts and other bad things, they might "force exhale" in intervals. You'll recognize this as a kind of "hiss" through the teeth. Over time, or with decreasing emphasis on technique, these hisses can get grunt-ified.

There's also just guys (both novice and experienced) who grunt as a psychological tool for themselves. It can work or it can't. It is highly correlated with ego lifting.

Once a 20-something guy came in, having brought with him with a girl of similar age, except she was wearing some sort of black latex body suit but without the modesty shorts--she was also gorgeous, brown hair up in this ponytail, and it was as if the clothing she were wearing had been designed expressly for her, designed solely to showcase her youthful perfection in all its...perfection

Your awoogaposting always reminds me of the 1994 classic Exotica.

Let me ask you something, gentlemen: What is it that gives a schoolgirl her special innocence? Her sweet fragrance... Fresh flowers, light as a spring rain... Oh, my god, my god... Or is it her firm, young flesh, inviting your every caress, enticing you to explore her deepest and most private secrets? Well, gentlemen, I'm gonna let you decide that one for yourselves.

I get moving really heavy weight sometimes there is an involuntary grunt of effort. Like when pushing a truck out of the mud with your buddies. But god this guy's constant utterances annoy. What is the proper etiquette, if any, for gym grunts?

It's entirely possible the etiquette in Nippon is different, but here in America I don't think this behavior is outside the norm. I personally find that making too much noise is not conducive to maintaining tension so I don't tend to do it, except perhaps at the end of a set where maintaining tension isn't that important. But I wouldn't think twice about someone else making noise.

Awoogaposting, that's a new one for me. Also I didn't realize I had a tendency to make such posts. So much for self-awareness.

here in America I don't think this behavior is outside the norm

Good to know. Probably the guy's general selfish obliviousness (as if the gym is his living room) is the little drop of Retsyn that makes his grunting irritating.

The stylistic token that first registered you as a specific person to me was your descriptions of perceived female beauty in mundane situations. I've always thought it was quite pleasant; you have the soul of a poet.

I didn't realize I had a tendency to make such posts

They're tasteful enough (more so than Exotica, at least) and I think it's weirder to pretend like beautiful women don't exist.

Also I didn't realize I had a tendency to make such posts. So much for self-awareness.

I greatly enjoy reading those posts out to my wife in my best Exotica Eric impression.

Good to know. Probably the guy's general selfish obliviousness (as if the gym is his living room) is the little drop of Retsyn that makes his grunting irritating.

Monopolizing equipment is definitely annoying but IME most people are willing to let people work in, especially on selectorized equipment like a leg curl.

"I very specifically use the term pregnant people, and very specifically added my pronouns at the end of my resignation letter to make the point

This sort of use of "specifically" really annoys me. A friend of a friend does that, and I can't stand it -- he's one of those people who fancies himself a real magickal person -- magic with a k -- who like "summons a speed spirit" to make his DoorDash order come quicker. He specifically annoys me.

Is this a leftist quirk? (I don't really care, but this is a post for questions, so I thought I ought to add a question)

It sounds like your acquaintance is using "specifically" when they mean to say "intentionally". There are few things more irritating than people using long words in an effort to sound educated, and compromising the effort by using the wrong ones. I find it even more embarrassing than using the correct word but mispronouncing it because you've only seen it written down - "get a load of this guy, he's literate!"

I see the use of specifically as perfectly cromulent!

I was just going to mention cromulent. I am old enough to have watched that Simpsons episode live, and didn't think about it for years until people started writing it in reddit. Then I've seen it in this very forum more than once, used in otherwise serious passages. I feel like anyway that cromulent may be more a word that that goddam word sonder.

sonder

It's wrong in so many ways. "sonder" in German isn't a noun. It's not even a real word. It can't stand on its own! You combine it with various other word-components to make a real word.

Some examples:

  • absondern: excrete
  • besonders: special
  • sonderlich: strange
  • sondern: but
  • Besonderheit: peculiarity

And if for some absurd reason it were a noun of its own, you'd be obliged to capitalize it. And then it still wouldn't mean what, according to Google, it supposedly means in English!

Leftist quirk? Yes. But your friend appears to be slightly mentally ill. Some here would claim that one implies the other, I'm not that partisan.

So, what are you reading?

Still on Red Dynamite. Going through King Lear.

Started reading Careless People without realizing it's currently a center of an active kerfuffle. I'm about 25% through and what is described is horrible in so many ways, and there are really no good guys (gender-inclusive here) there, including the author. So far my opinion of Mark Zuckerberg has improved though (from quite a low point, to be honest) - at least if this book to be believed, and again I am only 25% through, so I don't know how it goes further (didn't get to the China part, for example), but so far he looks like a very autistic tech founder that just wants to make the best product possible, but is surrounded by busybodies who want to "change the world". I hope my morbid curiosity would overcome my sense of revulsion and I can finish it.

"A Crosslinguistic Investigation of Palatalization," Nicoleta Bateman's 2007 doctoral dissertation.

This dissertation is concerned with an investigation of palatalization which covers a majority of the above-mentioned processes. I will refer to two types of palatalization: in one case the consonant shifts its primary place and often its manner of articulation while moving toward the palatal region of the vocal tract, as in (1), and in the other it is co-articulated with a following palatal offglide, as in (2).

(1) Full Palatalization

k, t → tʃ /dont ju/ → [dontʃju] 'don't you' (English)

(2) Secondary palatalization

t, d → tj, dj

/yamati/ → [yamatji] 'a person' (Watjarri, W. Pama Nyungan; Douglas 1981)

Finally in (5c) we see a change that has been adopted into the English lexicon, thimble, where the lip closure for [m] and the velic opening for [l] overlap and cause the perception of a voiced bilabial stop. This is a case of 'stop intrusion' between a nasal and a fricative/continuant that has been proposed as the transitional element between the two distinct sounds (Clements 1987). Another well known example from English where stop intrusion occurs is in the pronunciation of prince, where a [t] is perceived between the nasal and [s], [prɪnts]. The release of the alveolar nasal [n] and the transition into the [s] gesture produce the acoustic effect of an alveolar stop [t] (see also Yoo & Blankenship 2003). Arvaniti, Kilpatrick and Shosted (submitted) tested the perception of epenthetic and underlying [t] in the same [n_s] context as in prince vs. prints, and found that American English speakers could not distinguish reliably between epenthetic and underlying [t], which suggests that the [nts] and [ns] alternation is moving toward complete neutralization.

Further support for perceptual epenthesis is provided by Davidson (2004) who presents experimental evidence showing that native speakers of English do not repair illegal onset clusters such as [zb], [zd], and [zg] by epenthesizing schwa, as is typically assumed. Davidson claims that the English speakers, not having experience coordinating the gestures of the consonants in these clusters, instead pull them apart, mistiming the gestures, which leads to the perception of an epenthesized schwa. This schwa, however, is qualitatively different from other schwa sounds that are normally produced during speech (lexical schwas; see Hall (2006) for additional evidence of perceived schwas resulting from gestural overlap).

i_know_some_of_these_words.gif

Finished The End of Eternity: it's a short read. Would recommend if only for its somewhat atypical take on time travel.

In particular, "stop playing games with the timeline to 'smooth things out' and appease your aesthetic sensibilities" conclusion felt very much in the vein of later "Don't immanetize the eschaton" conservatism. To quote one of the characters, "Any system like Eternity, which allows men to choose their own future, will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach. The mere existence of Eternity at once wiped out the Galactic Empire. To restore it, Eternity must be done away with." The comments on safetyism versus space exploration feel, if anything, almost prescient 70 years later.

Started The Mote in God's Eye. It's a lot longer, but comes highly recommended. Not far enough to have a real opinion yet.

I finished a YA historical novel about the Time of Troubles during my Assumption digital fast. By the author of bloody Cheburashka, would you believe that.

Also binged on the Psmiths' reviews, got a couple of books on their recommendations.

I finished reading Kurt Schlichter's American Apocalypse, about a second American Civil War, written pretty recently, so it doesn't feel ridiculously out of touch with current events. He's a red-team author, so naturally the book has the red team side be the good guys and win the war. It repeats the style from his previous book The Attack of being written from the perspective of a post-event author doing interviews with a series of participants in the event in a variety of different positions, so it's effectively a series of moderately connected short stories. I found it an engaging and enjoyable read, and much more fleshed-out with regard to how things actually progress and escalate than most other new civil war stories.

The way things escalate towards a hot war seems to paint the Blue side as maximally bad and the Red side as only as bad as they are forced to be. I enjoy reading that, but it does feel a bit improbable I suppose. It doesn't soft-petal how nasty such a war would be likely to be too much - it includes such things a double-digit millions of innocent Americans dying due to starvation and disease from collapse of food and healthcare logistics and both blue and red militias and guerillas treating civilians who oppose them poorly. It ends with a red "Special Security Force" department which confiscates all of the possessions of blue-teamers who were too influential, sometimes locks them into "reeducation camps" and forbids them from ever having an important job again until they earn a "rehabilitation certificate". It seems to take the position that, yeah, there isn't traditional American free expression anymore, but what else are you going to do when the Blues take advantage of that to weaponize every institution, seize power, and horribly abuse ordinary Americans. Not exactly something I'd care to endorse now, but maybe in a world where the events portrayed in the book actually did happen.

I do notice that it doesn't pay attention to a number of aspects of what I think would actually happen if there was ever actually a new Civil War. Not much detail about what actual Mexican Cartels and other large organized gangs would do in such a situation, besides a one-liner about how Mexican Cartels took over Arizona in that world. Or Islamic militants or other religious issues for that matter. Not much about race either - I don't think there's anywhere near as much racism in Red ideology as the Blues would have you believe, but there isn't none, and wars tend to enable the craziest people to really let their crazy flag fly. I suppose it's a bit much to expect to cover that stuff in a book that's supposed to be red meat to the actual Red Team.

I've also been trying to read Scott Horton's Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. It's basically okay, but rather long and repetitive so far in my opinion. I'd like to read like like 50-100 pages or so of a steelman of how American diplomacy backed Russia into a corner, in their opinion at least, but I'm not sure I care to slog through ::checks listing:: 2,316 pages of it. Wow, didn't realize it was quite that long. Maybe I probably won't actually finish that one after all.

I finished To Kill a Mockingbird. When I put it down, I thought to myself, this is my favorite book.

I also watched the movie a few days ago, and while the first half is a bit slow, for a movie from 1962, it holds up terrifically well. For those who haven't seen it, I highly recommend it.

Onto Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space. A work trip brought me to the outskirts of Houston a few weeks ago and I drove by the Houston Space Center. That, coupled with my general interest in engineering, problem solving, and a good biographical yarn, led me to this book. A bit slow to start, but some interesting tidbits and trivia so far.

Edit: I also spent some time browsing Wikipedia on Harper Lee and Go Set a Watchman. Others can more eloquently describe the controversy about Go Set a Watchman, but basically, it's Harper Lee's second book release ever, and it was released when she was 85 years old. What I found interesting about the books release is that people close to Lee have speculated that her lawyer and closest confidant (after the death of Lee's sister) pushed Lee to release Go Set a Watchman. Lee was said to have had lost some of her mental faculties at that point, was half deaf and blind, and one person described her as willing to sign anything that was put in front of her. Seems pretty obvious that Go Set a Watchman was released as a cash grab and the ethics of those who allowed it to get published are fairly indefensible.

Watchman convinced me that the Mockingbird editor had a very heavy hand in that book.

Silver Stars: Guardian of Aster Fall Book 8 by David North.

I have a collection of the Father Brown stories and read the first one, "The Blue Cross", during the week. It was pretty good.

Planning to read "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang tomorrow.

Leviathan Wakes, it's been a good beach read.

Ha, I just read that one at the beach a few weeks ago.

I'd love to hear what you think. I enjoyed it but not enough to continue the series.

Just finished James Clavell's King Rat. Have read enough Clavell now that I can pick out his personal writing tropes.

Now skipping through Nancy McWilliams' Psychoanalytic Diagnosis after seeing it repeatedly mentioned around the SSC-sphere.

King Rat is awesome. I tried reading Shogun and gave up about halfway through. Too long and fluffy.

The Systemic Lands:

tl;dr: 4.5 stars for books 1 and 2, 4 stars for books 3 to 9, 3.5 stars for book 10

Several other reviews say that the story falls off after the first antagonist is introduced in book 3, and I'm inclined to agree with them. For me, the first tipping point is in chapter 122 (halfway through book 3), when the protagonist, who previously made a big deal of keeping his word, rather egregiously breaks a promise. Specifically: In chapter 121, he promises a reward of 100,000 points to whoever snitches on a traitor. But in chapter 122 he decides to pay only the first installment of that reward before having the snitch secretly killed. In chapter 128, it is confirmed that the snitch has been killed. Compare that to chapter 70 in book 2 ("I don't lie. My word is my currency.") and chapter 46 in book 1 ("A deal is a deal. I always keep my word. I may be a murdering asshole, but I don't lie.").

The second tipping point occurs in chapter 463 (early in book 10), when the protagonist imposes a "Kafkaesque" punishment on an antagonist who cannot be killed. Maybe I'm overreacting, but it reminds me too much of the Sasuke poop incident in Chunin Exam Day, which was a definite marker of that story's downturn. So I've stopped reading there.

(As part of the English problems, I guess I should also mention that the protagonist's dialog is written rather weirdly. My mental image of him always is a bearded Russian in his 40s, rather than the clean-shaven American in his 30s that he's supposed to be. But that's a minor issue.)

Trying to tackle Of Grammatology for like... the 4th time in my life? Maybe this time I'll actually finish it. Gonna try to just plow through even if I feel like I don't have all the "prerequisites".

How big of a factor in Netanyahu's persistence in Israeli politics is the political fertility divide?

I'm asking in light of this Cremieux thread: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1961332683813855531

Not sure why it should be. Generally, the majority of Israel population is very sour to the political Left right now because, as the sibling comment noted, Oslo process had thoroughly failed and none of the promises the Left made to the people is even close to being even partially fulfilled. The question is who would lead the right or the "centrists" which will be pretty much the same as the right on the question of Arabs, but may be different on taxes or economic policies or how to deal with secular/religious divide, etc. - Israel has more than one problem. Among all those people, Netanyahu is the most credible and the most seasoned politician, so he keeps the power. The challengers, even if they have temporary success, usually fail to handle one crisis or another and get booted on the next election - and in Israel, that can happen anytime, because of how the Knesset works, the moment the ruling coalition loses the majority, it's new elections (not mandatory, but the majority can cause them to happen anytime they want). So the reason as it seems to be is kinda boring - he is on the winning side and he is the best at this game out of all available players. Maybe one day he'll get too old or somebody better than him will raise.

From what I can tell, the main factor in Netanyahu's persistence is the failure of the Oslo peace process. Nobody really believed in peace via negotiated settlement after that. At that point they're just arguing over how hard to stomp the boot.

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. Four times? That is something worse, because it means you are no longer the victim of enemy action, you are the enemy.

Which is how I found myself back at the gay bar, Thursday afternoon, for the fourth time.

The precipitating event was that my great-aunt and uncle had kicked me out of their house. Not maliciously, just because they were headed off to a doctor's reunion and I was surplus to requirements. I got back to Small Scottish City early in the day, contemplated going home, realized that if I did I would immediately fall asleep, and decided that the most energy-efficient adaptation was to go to the pub instead.

After all, interesting things happen to me at pubs. Or near me. Or in the general vicinity of my alcohol intake. The strongest argument I have ever encountered for alcoholism is not “you will get drunk” but “your life will suddenly become narratively compelling.”

At first this seemed like a mistake. The pub was almost empty, populated only by open-minded pensioners and their dogs. I sighed, resigned myself to wasting an afternoon, and nursed my drink. Then a clearly homeless man approached me and asked me out for a cup of coffee. I declined as politely as possible, partly because I am a nice person, partly because he might own a hatchet. He left without making a scene. I congratulated myself on my social skills, only to realize that the bartender and another man were looking at me like I had just wandered into the lion enclosure at the zoo.

“Did you notice me gesturing for you to turn him down?” the man asked. I had not, but I did have enough sense to avoid dates with the local homeless population.

This led to conversation, which was my true reason for being there in the first place. He bought me shots. He established, through delicate diplomacy, that neither of us were gay. We achieved male platonic bonding, greatly expedited by enthusiastic consumption of many a pint.

My new friend turned out to be a powerlifter, the sort of man who looked like his caloric intake could power a small town. Once professional, now semi-retired, due to a catastrophic equipment failure that had peeled muscle off his shoulder like wallpaper. A dramatic backstory, but not the point of the evening.

Because then she arrived.

She was small, Scottish, and shook my hand like she was trying to break rocks. When I commented, she doubled down and attempted to break my wrist. She did not succeed, but she earned points for enthusiasm.

This somehow segued into my powerlifter friend demonstrating a painful finger manipulation “trick.” He insisted it was unbearably painful and irresistibly attractive to women. I remained stoic, both because I am stoic, and because one cannot weep in front of cute girls.

She was not just cute. She was feral. My friend introduced her as autistic, with the weary tone of someone disclaiming liability for whatever happened next. This was misleading. She should have been introduced as “raised by wolves” and “possessing an oral fixation.” My friend reported that she occasionally bit him, entirely unprompted. I watched him roll up his sleeves to reveal a fading bruise. I must confess that I was not entirely unamused.

She was also a programmer. She told me her favorite language was Pascal. I told her mine was Python. She seemed satisfied. She told me she owned a Quest 3 and spent time in VR Chat. I confessed I had briefly tried VR Chat on a Quest 2 and given up after five minutes of confusion. She seemed even more satisfied.

Her energy was relentless. She taught me nursery games that appeared to consist of throwing gang signs. She complimented my boots. I told her they were from Primark for twenty quid. She remained impressed. She said she had grown up with horses.

Then, apropos of nothing, she performed her pièce de résistance: unhooking her bra under her hoodie, for the sole purpose of producing armpit farts. I did not know how to classify this. It was certainly flirting, as her friend pointed out. She denied it, then resumed flirting.

By this point we had wandered into open-mic night. The bartender and my powerlifter friend both warned her to control her “enthusiasm.” I knew disaster was imminent.

The poetry was… adequate. Some of it was even good. I applauded. I considered performing Howl. Then she growled.

This was not a figurative growl. This was not a playful growl. This was a sound that promised a future career in death metal. The poet on stage nearly fainted. She was shushed. She promised to behave. She growled again thirty seconds later. She was warned again.

Eventually she was ejected. The bartender dragged her outside, delivered a scolding, and sent her away in tears. She stumbled off into the rougher part of town. Nobody else seemed to care. I sighed, followed, and caught up.

She told me she was fine. I asked if she wanted a cab. She declined. At this point, a man materialized. He was impossibly tall, impossibly thin, with glasses that could be used for astronomical observation. He stared at my boots with the intensity of a man hypnotized. He stammered that she did not need my help. She looked away. I left her with him.

Back at the bar, I learned he was her boyfriend. I asked where he had been during her performance. The consensus was that he had been hiding in a corner, avoiding human contact. They probably deserve each other.

I had another drink, made more friends, and went home when I realized I was past inebriated and into alcohol poisoning territory. The next day I was still drunk, and the day after that I'm. still hungover. Interesting things happen at pubs. This particular story also involves the powerlifter, going to a particular raucous club, a very fetching leather jacket, too much booze, and meeting two single moms, one sensible and the other not. I will, probably, write about it when I'm fully sober.

(The first girl? She'd taken my number at some point during that long night, I'm in touch, we'll see how this goes. I know that is a bad idea, but I like to live dangerously.)

Presenting the sequel, now in the appropriate thread:

https://www.themotte.org/post/3038/friday-fun-thread-for-august-29/360953?context=8#context

Within the "redpill" ideology, a field report is a document or post in which a follower details their personal experiences and interactions, typically with women, to test and validate redpill beliefs. The core idea is to apply the movement's theories and then report the results to the online community for feedback and accountability

Rules of the Motte include being charitable and being no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary to make your point.

To that end, I will try to be charitable here and suggests that, at least for my vote, these semi-blog posts are getting a little tedious and I don't see how they fit into the friday fun thread or the low stakes sunday thread.

Again, being charitable, if you did something like turn them into a shorter 4chan style greentext, or a haiku or something I could see that being a good kitschy match for the off-topic threads. But a lot of this is, again n=1, tedious and irrelevant.

I'll curtail my comment here. Mods, I'm trying to be both sincere and charitable (did I mention charitable) here, but want to log my negativity publicly.

be me

be on long weekend with normies

find time to comfymaxx

visit wordy castle website

its weekly threads shitpost /general/

first post another post from not gay doctor indian anon

hes serially documenting becoming regular at gay bar

very suspiciously not gay famalam

scroll

read second post where anon complains about chinese cartoons

sigh

he doesnt know

he doesnt fucking know

anon doesnt know 2000s era travel blogs was the only good thing the internet ever made

think about how i didnt read the post of the very suspiciously not gay man bc i made a greentext instead

feelsgoodman.jpg

Log off

I wish I was gay, life seems much easier for them, at least in regards to getting laid. Alas, I am cursed with a preference for women. Can't live with them, can't live without them.

I am still immature enough to find humor in it.

The only gay bar I can remember going to was definitely fully... gentrified. Straightified? City, trendy nightlife, etc. Which is probably why an invading war band of very suspiciously not gay people was not an issue. It also wasn't ethnography friendly as it was not talking friendly. I wonder if we even have many gay pub equivalents in the states.

Jesus, do people think I'm red-pilled because I write up the occasional funny story? I'm nothing such, they're usually self-deprecating, and half of them involve me being hopelessly in love or falling for emotionally unavailable women. I do not think that even a single one has involved me getting laid, not because it doesn't happen, but because I'm not inclined to talk about those details here unprompted.

To that end, I will try to be charitable here and suggests that, at least for my vote, these semi-blog posts are getting a little tedious and I don't see how they fit into the friday fun thread or the low stakes sunday thread.

The SSQ I can understand, even if I don't think it's a big deal and wouldn't care if someone else did it. Definitionally, or certainly as a matter of precedent, they belong in the Friday Fun Thread. Most of them are fun, or at least funny, and if I bust out a calendar, some of them probably happened on a Friday.

You are, of course, at liberty to disagree. I do not particularly hold it against you. All I will say is that I disagree and plenty of people say they like my stories. Upvotes do not lie, leaving aside those who have said the same. If the same accusation is leveled at anyone else, my usual stance is to say that there's a button right there that will collapse the thread and save your eyes the bother. It's not a lot of work.

The strongest argument I have ever encountered for alcoholism is not “you will get drunk” but “your life will suddenly become narratively compelling.”

Doing it for the story, not the glory.

She was also a programmer. She told me her favorite language was Pascal. I told her mine was Python. She seemed satisfied.

I enjoy the automatic understanding among men that not even choice of programming language is safe from potential hypergamy, so one has to assess the female reaction afterward to see if the ick was induced. Python's a basic but safe choice, given its ubiquity across domains and industries nowadays.

I wonder what answer would run the highest probability of ick-induction in a manic pixie programming girl. Excel? SAS? SQL? An actual but boomer-coded programming language like COBOL?

The answer of Excel might be so-bad-it's-good, if you deliver it with grinning giga-Chad energy while being attractive and not unattractive. She might pattern match you to being a high-earning finance bro who doesn't care for nerdy things like programming.

meeting two single moms, one sensible and the other not

When single moms start looking "sensible," it was time to call it a night two hours ago.

What about MATLAB?

An excellent analysis and prototyping environment and absolutely horrible general purpose programming language.

I wonder what answer would run the highest probability of ick-induction in a manic pixie programming girl. Excel? SAS? SQL? An actual but boomer-coded programming language like COBOL?

What would be the likely reaction to Common Lisp?

(It has to be CL, none of that Scheme or Clojure shit.)

I hope someone pulls out a ruler and measures the length of your beard.

I wonder what answer would run the highest probability of ick-induction in a manic pixie programming girl. Excel? SAS? SQL? An actual but boomer-coded programming language like COBOL?

Javascript, perhaps. You expose yourself as either a frontend webdev who codes lame things such as buttons, or someone who uses a frontend webdev language for other tasks. Ew.

someone who uses a frontend webdev language for other tasks

Absolutely haram. Inshallah may their keyboards wither into dust.

I was trying to tell her that, at some point, I'd known some Visual Basic, but that was so fucking long ago and I was so inebriated that I couldn't remember the name. That's up there, with icky programming languages. Might as well claim I know Scratch.

She might pattern match you to being a high-earning finance bro who doesn't care for nerdy things like programming.

I'd already told her I was in the notoriously lucrative profession of psychiatry, so a bit late for that. I'll have to see if Count is hiring.

When single moms start looking "sensible," it was time to call it a night two hours ago.

You're not... wrong. In my defense, I had never met the ladies before, and they didn't come join us with kids in tow. Them being single mothers was an aspect I only gleaned much later. And if I do write the story up, you will see why the word "sensible" is appropriate, as a relative modifier if nothing else.

Pascal is an odd choice of favorite language. That alone should've tipped you off that you were dealing with a crazy girl. Also... Python? That's the most basic bitch language choice I can imagine, next you're going to tell me that about your great love of pumpkin spice and Ugg boots.

(great post btw, you certainly succeeded at having an entertaining day)

The original draft of my story explicitly called out my basic bitch taste. I removed it because I (correctly) excpected all the professional programmers here to call me out on it, it's what we in the writing business call a hook, heh.

Look, the design of Python is very human, and in a good way. It's not verbose, does a lot of heavy lifting for you, and there are no end of handy libraries. I never needed near bare-metal performance or felt the desire to do my own garbage cleanup.

Despite me giving you shit I actually do quite a bit of Python, because it's really the best scripting language available for Linux. I wouldn't call it my favorite language, but it is probably the language I use most.

I’d say the good thing about python is it lets you do just about anything. Any attributes of an objects can be called at any time, you can pass anything into any function, etc.

The bad thing about Python is of course that it lets you do just about anything.

I know just enough Lambda calculus to grokk that programmers/computer scientists think it is normal to treat functions as first class citizens and pass them in and out of each other like a human centipede. Either way, I have libertarian tendencies and I appreciate the opportunity to shoot my head off with a gun.

(I genuinely like Python, and it certainly beats Javascript, which is what I was taught in school)

Either way, I have libertarian tendencies and I appreciate the opportunity to shoot my head off with a gun.

May I introduce you to the lovely world of C++?

Although Undefined Behavior might better be described as a large caliber chaingun firing explosive rounds…

UB is bad enough that some people built an entire language (Rust) specifically to make it almost impossible. Sure, it has the learning curve of a cliff. Sure, the language stands in the way of doing almost anything ELSE you want to do, unless you do it in the one roundabout clunky way that the language designers permit. But the True Believers like shouting from the rooftops about how this is a Good Thing, Actually.

Nah. If UB always fired explosives it wouldn't be nearly as bad. What's diabolical is that UB is allowed to be a squirt gun on your test system and then switch to rapid-fire explosives as soon as one of your users installs a minor OS patch.

The thing that blew my mind when learning programming was that functions could be held in variables. Like this is a perfectly valid (if bad) chunk of code:

def multiply(A, B):
    return A * B

def add(A, B):
    return A + B

def doMath(operation, A, B):
    return operation(A, B)

doMath(multiply, 3, 4)

It blew my mind when I first learned about it too!

In some sense this is the same sort of mental gestalt shift that is at the basis of all scientific thought, and is therefore a useful experience for everyone to undergo.

What if a function were an object just like any other, and therefore subject to all the same sorts of operations, you can pass it around, access its properties, etc.

What if the human mind/body were an object just like any other, and therefore subject to all the same sorts of physical laws, etc.

It's one of those things which is really useful when you need it, though it can be hard to spot the utility when you are first learning. When I learned about functions as data in college I asked the professor why you would ever need to use that technique (and which, shame on him, he couldn't answer). But I've since found it to be absolutely clutch even if not something you use 90% of the time.

It's especially useful when you're writing reusable framework code, e.g. your UI library will probably have something like register_callback(Function f, Widget w) so you can perform action f whenever button w is clicked. But if you're just writing "app" code as opposed to "framework" code it may not come up as often.

I like that anecdote, because if she opens with 1. Pascal (!?) and you counter with 1. ...Python (??) you have already lost. She is satisfied because at this point, checkmate is a foregone conclusion. Maybe the growling should have tipped you off that you were dealing with a creature of legend. Some animal-spirit of the old internet. I wonder, if her boyfriend hadn't shown up, just how far into the dark woods you'd have followed..

I didn't want to get into a dick measuring contest with the lady, if only because I had the very reasonable concern that she would bite it off (or ask me to fuck her armpit).

Truly a character. There are Kinds of Human that I had never imagined I would meet, with my parochial Indian mindset.

You accidentally posted this in the Sunday Small Questions Thread rather than in the Friday Fun Thread.

You're not my dad! I just tend to use whichever thread is newest.

Yeah as a mod, I think you shouldn’t do this. You and vanilla increasingly take up a larger and larger share of the overall site content as your personal slice of life blogs, which is… fine. But at least have the courtesy not to shit all over any sense of structure on the site to do so. Especially not while also policing others for their usage of the site

It's interesting to ask why it should be bothersome when you feel that someone is "monopolizing" the site with posts you don't like. It certainly is bothersome, I won't deny that. But it's not clear why it should be. The site has an in principle unlimited amount of server space. It's not a zero sum game. One person posting a thread you don't like doesn't prevent you or other people from posting threads that are more to your liking.

There are certain popular genres of threads here that bore me to tears (mainly the policy wonk posts, and the posts that get into obsessive minutiae regarding current events). But I know that by the same token, there are people who hate the types of posts that I like to produce and read as well (borderline schizophrenic free associative rants about philosophy and psychology). If I start harping on people for writing posts I don't like, then I know that they can just turn that around and say "well we don't like what you're trying to turn themotte into either". So I generally just try to keep my mouth shut when there's a post I don't like and I just ignore it or collapse the thread.

I suppose that although the site in principal has space for an unlimited number of threads, it only really has space for one dominant culture, and in this sense it is more zero sum. The fear could be that threads you don't like will attract the types of posters that you don't like, which will over time shift the culture in a direction that makes the site less valuable to you.

My answer in two parts.

First while there is unlimited server space, there is not unlimited share of posts. That is zero sum. If someone posts enough proportionally they have a bigger effect on the culture and tone of the board.

Consider ad absurdem a sleepy friend group chat where people occasionally post life updates, coordinate events, or made small jokes. One day somebody starts dialing up the posting with personal drama and political screeds. Nobody is afraid they will run out of space. But the character of the group chat is compromised.

Selfmade has noticeably dialed up his proportion of theMottes engagement (which is a function also of this place kind of cooling off possibly unrecoverable). More and more it feels like self made’s spot. Which I said is FINE. He can do that regardless of how I receive it.

But the second part is extending that into also knocking down any loose structure that keeps the site gardened. It comes off as flaunting that he can swing his voice around the site for his own amusement and break down any even superficial sense of organization

I don't really get it either, and it's not something that's worth policing 99% of the time. We eventually crack down on blatant single-issue posting, especially if it is obnoxious, but that's a high bar.

We have a button to collapse threads. We have a block button. The last is a nuclear option, but the former? Just use that to skip past what you don't care for.

Fine, we mods had a talk and agreed that @self_made_human should have posted this in the fun thread. He is duly chastened.

We also agreed you're being kind of an ass about this, and not just because you apparently think all Indians are the same.

  • -11

What the fuck does this have to do with being Indian?! I am complaining about posting topics and you accuse me of racism. If this was anyone else they’d get modded by you.

Vanilla and Self made both post quite a bit about developments of their personal lives in a very episodic way. Which again is fine, but gets tedious when it’s obviously not even relevant to the threads topic.

Vanilla used to do it more and self made has really turned up the volume recently. None of it had anything to do with being Indian you fucking asshole

After discussing this with other moderators, we are reducing your ban to "time served."

A couple of things, for you and for everyone:

First, other people's behavior is not, never has been, and never will be an excuse for your own. Directed invective like "you fucking asshole" is ban-on-sight behavior even if the other person did something to deserve it. This is pure heat. Use the "report" button instead.

Second, our moderators are generally pretty thick-skinned, and we usually avoid modding in a thread where we're participating. But sometimes users think that means it's open season on the mod team. This is not the case.

Finally, it seems to me that a combination of Internet-mediated communication and partially hidden information (specifically, some "user reports" on various comments, and some inter-user histories) combined here to create conversations that were effectively "garbled" by how they played out. This is one reason I personally try to avoid the "meta," if at all possible.

Anyway, I'd like to end the litigation of this here, and hope everyone is willing to cooperate with me on that.

None of it had anything to do with being Indian you fucking asshole

I don't know what kind of a crash-out this is, since you posted something so obviously cruising for a ban and then reported yourself, but wish granted. If you're have a bad week, you need to take it out on someone else.

3-day ban. You can complain about the modding, but not like this.

  • -14

>impute racist motivations

>get (somewhat understandably) upset response

>reach straight for the banhammer

Outstanding move. This is not your first mod decision I consider objectionable, but it's definitely the most naked flex so far. I don't mind the blogposting myself, it's entertaining if nothing else, but when the volume reaches several posts per week (from the same posters, on roughly the same themes) people are absolutely allowed to complain. At no point is race required to enter the consideration.

From downthread:

We both thought it was odd that he grouped the two Indian posters together like that in such an unrelated fashion.

Maybe because they are the two posters who liberally blogpost as of late? If I'd made @iprayiam3's point they would've been my go-to examples as well, no Nooticing required.

Ctrl-F'ing the first 5 pages of @iprayiam3's post history turned up 0 mentions of Indians specifically and one direct mention of immigrants. What, respectfully, are you on about? How does race even factor in here, why does your theory of mind go straight to race-based motivations? I held my tongue last time I got warned for off-handedly mentioning "jewish tricks" without a meme disclaimer (point taken) but here I'll say it - I understand janitorial duties take their toll but you really gotta fix your racism/antisemitism detector, the false positives are visibly stacking up.

I agree that @iprayiam was factually correct about the frequency of blogposting by specific mottizens, and that racism seemed to play no role in it, and that the mods read too much into it.

But his reaction was also clearly out of bounds and did deserve punishment.

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Unfounded accusations of racial prejudice seem roughly as bad as calling someone an asshole; claiming to have made them as an attempt to lighten the mood crosses the line into straight up dishonest argumentation. Mods closing ranks on this is pretty bad too; I suggest that smh was a bad choice for a mod, and this should be rectified. Iprayim has the right of it downthread; nothing personal but the guy is bad for the forum. (as a mod)

Unfounded accusations of racial prejudice seem roughly as bad as calling someone an asshole

TBH I think it's a quite a bit worse - for many of us we live in a situation where being called racist in real life would be a profound existential threat, and in the overall blue milieu it is pretty much the worst thing you can call people.

I know I have an involuntary autonomic reaction to it even if I know I'm safe through anonymity or whatever.

I think this is the first time I have ever been utterly confused and disgusted by a moderation action on this forum.

If you are confused that calling someone (including a mod) a fucking asshole will earn a ban, then I am not sure what your expectations were.

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Eh? I'm slightly hurt that you'd lump the two of us together. Is it because we're Indian?

On a more serious note, we do not moderate the non-CWR daily threads very strongly. They are explicitly chill places. I find it unfair for @ToaKraka to call me out when several of his legal briefs stretch the definition of "fun" on a Friday (as much as I personally enjoy them). The effort rules are not enforced here, nor is much effort needed or expected.

If I was going to rules-lawyer this, and I don't care to, I could trivially throw a question on at the end. Should I go out with a woman who will bite me?

Reported you and Amadan for accusing me of racism to try to bully me against reporting something completely irrelevant to race. Extraordinarily low and a further abuse of your mod click.

I find this very troublesome.

You and vanilla both like to post long episodic slice of life updates, and increasingly do it in whatever thread is open. Beyond that there are no further similarities. The fact that you are both Indian is irrelevant and not even remotely on my mind.

Is it because we're Indian?

On a more serious note

This was intended to make it clear that I was being less than serious at first, and that I do not really think you're being racist. Even if you were, I wouldn't particularly care.

Look dude, as forms of mod abuse go, posting in a slightly off-topic thread because the old one seemed dead is not very high on the ranking. I did that before I was a mod, none of the mods bothered with it then, it's not favoritism.

Your objection to me doing so wouldn't warrant an actual reverse accusation of racism from me out of sheer outrage. As a concession, I've already volunteered to be more mindful of where I post, which is where I hope we could let the matter lie.

Maybe we ought to have a Blogpost...there's no weekday for B. Diary D....Dienstag? Donnerstag?

Shitpost Saturday? I'd fuck with that.

Well, we're almost out of days of the week. We must now live in paranoid anticipation for a whopping two new threads for a day. Not sure the backend can take it.

Slice-of-life Saturday

Less prurient, but it has my vote. I'll being it up with the other mods.

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What are these boots you were wearin'?

https://www.rmwilliams.com/uk/comfort-craftsman-boot-black-yearling-leather.html

Like these, but 5% the price.

Man, and I thought the Walker & Hawkes version of those were a bargain at 20% the price.

You probably got what you paid for. After 4 months of heavy use (including accidentally hiking up on the Cliffs of Dover), they're showing their age. But then again, they're so cheap that I'd just go to Primark and get another pair.

I used to join some boxing and Muay Thai trainings a long time ago. When I was actively training and sparring boxing I really liked the feeling that I had some idea how to stand up for myself if anything happened. Also nowadays I am in meh shape (but not horrible, I run and play tennis) and nothing ever got me as fit as regular sparring so I really would like to pick up a fighting sport again. I would like something where I can train against other people with some force without getting concussions (so no more boxing, I used to have bad headaches after sparring rounds..) and without kicking (very injury-prone in my experience, also some orthopedic problems making this uncomfortable for me).

I will probably drop by a nearby BJJ gym later today to check it out. There is one Gracie gym and one independent well-reviewed gym in my neighborhood. I have some doubts though: BJJ looks like memorizing a fuck ton of technique of dubious value without the constraints of the sport (hitting, biting, gauging etc). Also I am afraid the classes will be a long series of "technique/combo of the day" without long term structure as I often found martial arts classes to be, and I will lose interest.

I know a bunch of people here do casual martial arts so I am fishing for some recommendations. I live in decent size city so I could probably find a gym for most things you recommend.

Edit: just went to my first class and apparently it was cancelled. Great start

I used to join some boxing and Muay Thai trainings a long time ago...I would like something where I can train against other people with some force without getting concussions...

Are you literally me? I followed exactly that course into and out of fight sports (I quit after a bad concussion in a car accident, knowing that cumulative concussions would be bad) until I took up BJJ recently. Obviously, I'm less than a year in, so take this as the zeal of the recently converted or newbie enthusiasm, but:

Given your stated constraints, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is literally the exact thing you are looking for.

You say you want the fitness benefits of regular high speed sparring

nothing ever got me as fit as regular sparring so I really would like to pick up a fighting sport again.

but don't want to get hit in the head or kicking anyone

I would like something where I can train against other people with some force without getting concussions (so no more boxing, I used to have bad headaches after sparring rounds..) and without kicking (very injury-prone in my experience, also some orthopedic problems making this uncomfortable for me).

which is basically sport jiu jitsu. It's the closest you can get to simulating a fight against a resisting opponent without striking. You're going live, struggling close to full speed against an equally interested opponent, every single class from day one to age seventy unless you choose not to. The typical classes at the four schools I've visited all follow the structure of warm up -- technique -- live rounds. It's the closest you can get to a fight with minimal risk of concussions, and that seems to be an even harder line for you than it is for me. I'm not trying to get into an argument about fighting theory, but any other martial art you try to practice is going to be bullshit if you can't go live with blows to the head, you're either going to be doing some kind of tai-chi where you're moving so slowly that it isn't teaching you anything for timing, or you're removing head shots from competition which seems like a much bigger problem in terms of muscle memory and timing. Basically, to the extent that you think BJJ is bullshit because it doesn't involve striking/gouging/whatever, you can't take up any striking martial art that isn't more bullshit without getting hit in the head which you don't want. So I'd say take up BJJ and hit a heavy bag or get somebody to hold focus mitts for you once a week to keep your timing on your punches, and you'll be 99th percentile in a fight.

What I love about BJJ is that, if my schedule lines up with the classes and my (w/l)ife allows it, I can go live basically every day, in a full speed more or less full power setting against another adult male trying his hardest. I typically aim for ten to fifteen minutes, twenty at the outside, of live rounds after every class; this puts me at an average of around an hour a week of live fighting. If I were getting punched for fifteen or twenty minutes a day, multiple days a week, sometimes multiple days in a row, I would not be able to keep up with it. I've actually found that BJJ allows me to train at a higher intensity more regularly than most other workouts period, I couldn't lift heavy or climb project grades or run three days in a row at a high intensity with no rest days.

I will say that my gym is more sport focused, small built around several prominent tournament competitors, so in my training week a lot of time is dedicated to stuff that has no realistic self defense application. I frequently joke when one of my coaches talks about what would happen with a given technique "in the street" that if I'm in a fight with a stranger and he hits a De La Riva guard on me, I'm going to stop and say "hey where do you train? Tenth planet, no shit, my buddy Dan trains there, do you know him?" and the fight will probably fizzle out as we realize we share a hobby. But that's the natural consequence of going live, in every martial art there's a tradeoff in "realism" between actually trying with full speed/muscle/effort to win and putting in rules to prevent "unrealistic" strategies and behaviors on the mat. Some of the modern BJJ "dive for his shoelaces" leg lock techniques seem like they would be useless off the mat, but if you institute rules to ban them, you end up with so many rules that the sport becomes more restricted and less "real."

And anyway, the focus on sport BJJ versus self defense varies between gyms, and between coaches at the same gym. Actually between students. Every gym I've been to had a few cops, several veterans, and a few guys that are more into the combat jiu jitsu aesthetic/concept. Seek those coaches and fellow students out and you can practice in a more realistic rather than sport based way, they'll be happy to have another guy to practice with and on. Combat jiu jitsu rules are a popular way to include slapping strikes to keep your opponent honest on the ground without too much damage being done, and I've seen people bring out training knives or other weapons to practice self defense strategies with. What you need to do if you want something different than what your school is teaching is take control of your own training, ask the coaches for help with what you need.

Personally, I still hit the heavy bag every now and then, as I did before I started BJJ. In a fight, I'm probably still sticking to the plan of throwing straight punches and keeping my distance, though I'm much more comfortable in a clinch now, and I'd imagine that my timing is better as a result of so much time spend in competition with other full grown men. If I chose to use any BJJ, it would be sticking to stand up techniques like throws, arm drags, russian ties, which would allow me to control my opponent without going to the ground. If I found myself on the ground, I would aim to hit a sweep or reverse or otherwise disengage and get up, which we learn a lot of ways to do.

More broadly from my experience taking it up

Pros of BJJ

-- Live competition with a resisting opponent with minimal risk of injury.

-- Cardio, there's no motivator and no pacing like a 200lb wrestler on top of you who you have to stop from choking you.

-- Practical to train as a middle aged guy, there's older guys in their 40s and 50s going live at our gym. Can be a lifetime hobby.

-- Built for the mottizen/autist. John Danaher is the greatest BJJ coach of the century, he started training while taking a PhD in philosophy at Columbia. Chris Wojcik, a well known coach and competitor, is somewhere in the SSCverse having cited HPMOR in interviews as influential on his life. An infinite universe of techniques to learn and apply. It's the closest thing in the real world that delivers on the nerd martial arts dream of learning something and winning a fight.

-- Allows for a large number of styles for different body types and preferences. You can be a speed-power guy who shoots single legs all day, you can be a slow grinding technical old guy who fights from bottom half guard, you can be a flexibility and creativity guy who loves inversions to obscure subs.

-- Great community. Everyone wants to hang out, broad range of people from blue collar and cops to white collar tech kids.

-- You owe it to yourself to learn it, at least for a while, at some point in your life. Pure BJJ might not be something you see a ton of in MMA anymore, but techniques originally developed in BJJ are a core part of training for MMA fighters and armed forces, so even if you move on to something else it's worth taking time to study it.

-- The control and submission techniques you learn offer ways to fight without doing serious damage to the other person, which is good for situations where you may be in a fight but not want to overdo it. We have a lot of paramedics who train with us, and when they get crazy people in the ambulance they say its great to be good at keeping them in safe positions and neutralize them or force compliance without hitting them which creates more problems. At the same time, a kimura ends with a broken arm, and if you do it in a hurry it takes less than a second from locking it in to snap, so you can end a fight very quickly compared to throwing a lot of punches each of which is unlikely to end the fight. So you get a spectrum of violence to pick from.

-- The sense of masculine pride you get from defeating a resisting man in a physical struggle, knowing he is trying his best to subdue you but you subdue him instead, is incomparable. It is available nowhere else at this price in physical damage and danger, and never this frequently. When you win, it feels so good, and losing motivates you to try harder. Outside of any technical self defense ability, you will walk into that situation with the confidence of a wolf knowing you can beat another man in a fight because you have beaten other men all week.

Cons of BJJ

-- While BJJ is in practice the best weapon for the small guy against the big guy, because of the full-send nature of training, it's much more size dependent in training than boxing was for me. In a boxing sparring session, you're mostly going light, and against a little fella you just go lighter. In a BJJ round, you tend to go full power, and even if you don't the weight you are carrying around makes a difference. Little guys can just get smashed all day unless they're much better than the bigger guys. I'm lucky to be about the size of an antique heavyweight champion so it's not too much of a problem for me, I can go against basically everyone in the gym without problems, even the guys who are 250lbs I just do my best and figure I'm big enough that I don't get to complain. I don't know how you're built, so this may or may not matter to you, but if you're on the smaller side you're going to have a longer distance to travel in technique before you start getting wins.

-- You will get injured eventually, as you would in any intense athletic training, and especially in any real physical struggle. I don't see injuries any more frequently in BJJ than I do in rock climbing gyms or crossfit boxes, curving for intensity, but they do happen. You will need to personally take responsibility for preventing your own injuries, proactively tapping early, recognizing when you're hurt and should skip class or rolling, etc. There are some opponents I limit my rolls with to certain positions, because every time either they hurt me or I hurt them. A more "fake" training environment with fewer and less macho live rounds, like a krav maga self-defense class for women, is likely to have less of a "rub some dirt in it" culture and lead to fewer injuries.

-- You will feel ridiculous for an extended period of time. Boxing pretty much feels like boxing after about a week, you put your hands up and you punch and you just get better at punching, you put any guy in a boxing ring and he can fight. BJJ didn't really feel like I was doing BJJ for months after I started, I was just trying to survive and not hitting techniques, and I got pretty depressed at some points that I just sucked and would never get anywhere with it. I got past that, and now at least occasionally feel pretty good, but it's also the case that...

-- It's extremely training partner dependent. Our gym is pretty disorganized, mostly working guys and we show up when we can, so I never know who is going to be there any given week. One day this week I show up and I'm the only white belt, or I'm smallest guy there, and I'll just get smashed all day, just trying to avoid losing too quickly, taking pride in slowing the monsters down. Another day I might show up and be the assistant coach for the day because everyone else who showed up is newer and doesn't even know the positions we're training, or I'll happen to roll with guys I can beat on for one reason or another when we go live and rack up wins or work on new techniques I'm less comfortable with at full speed. Your fitness and skill levels, and those of the people at your gym, will determine your experience at the gym, in a way that isn't the case in lifting or climbing or running for me. When I lift the weights are there, regardless of who else shows up or doesn't. At BJJ, my experience is determined by the human terrain.

-- At times, BJJ can get way too meta. There's one coach I like a lot at our gym as a person, but when he's running class he teaches techniques that are too complicated for me, designed to counter techniques occurring at a level that I'm not operating at yet.

-- It can turn into an obsession very easily. Which was tough for me for the first six months when I REALLY, sucked, because I didn't want to talk about it. But you might find yourself making excuses to go to the gym more than you can spare the time for, or spending time and money on instructional videos or private training sessions or seminars and camps, and it is easy to get sucked in because you want to keep up with your peers at the gym.

Overall, I think BJJ is exactly what you are looking for at this stage in your life.

I do it more than 'casually.'

If you are concerned about self-defense, the strongest argument against BJJ is NOT that it doesn't work as a system. You can say that about a lot of arts like Aikido or traditional Kung Fu, which fail on their own terms.

BJJ is surely better than not being trained. But it is less likely to work if you're fighting outside of the gym context:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZpTctLEKV9Y

Since you do not get to pick the time, place, nor manner in which you are attacked, the system has to be adaptable and, unfortunately, cover as broad an array of scenarios as feasible.

But its a great workout, and it appeals to nerds because you're literally solving a geometry puzzle involving two human bodies, while they're fighting back, so you're not just 'mindlessly' punching things.

Me, I train Krav Maga. On the one hand there are internet memes about people who think it turns them into a badass overnight. On the other, it is designed, from the ground up, to first make someone 'proficient' at fighting (read: can beat an untrained attacker consistently) as quickly as possible. Then to build on that base to an ever-broader set of skills (multiple attackers, armed attackers, ground fighting, and offensively deploying weapons).

We know what works the best in one-on-one MMA fights, but its still a very, very open question as to what substantially increases your odds of surviving a life-or-death street brawl. If anything. Other than cardio and being able to run further and faster than the attacker.

The focus on 'efficient' techniques for debilitating an opponent means most of them CAN'T be trained in sparring context, but I run weekly 'light sparring' sessions to give people the experience of being punched in the face in a friendly context.

Oh, and BJJ is also pretty injury prone, because so much joint manipulation goes on and a badly-applied technique can do DEVASTATING damage to the impacted area.

If you try Krav Maga the only recommendation I do have is find a gym where the instructors can trace their training heritage to Israel, which I say mostly to 'ensure' that they're legitimately well-trained. My org is the USKMA.

My issue with Krav is that it really doesn’t teach fighting. It’s basically a system that can teach you how to use things you know, providing you learned them somewhere else first. And because most schools are not quality controlled in the least, you often have guys who have never been in an actual fight teaching things they don’t understand how to work to other people who know nothing about fighting. BJJ has faults, as does boxing, but at least in those systems, the to-KO or to-tapout rules of competition and the fact that the culture around those arts insists on winning competitions, you can be pretty sure that the guy who’s teaching you how to get the other guy into a chokehold has done so numerous times on an opponent actually working to stop him and knows how to make it work. It isn’t just something he demonstrated in class, he learned it by using it in competition. And that same competition will teach people how to think about fighting. You’ll learn how to see the next technique being keyed up, learn to think 3-4 moves in and how to control range. If you can’t do those things having “efficient techniques” doesn’t matter. If you can’t control range I can be out of range quickly or step in and be inside of where you wanted me to be.

And because most schools are not quality controlled in the least, you often have guys who have never been in an actual fight teaching things they don’t understand how to work to other people who know nothing about fighting. B

Quality control is definitely the biggest issue when trying to choose a training Gym for any martial art. MMA at least has the necessity of pressure testing for purposes of preparing to compete, frauds get revealed QUICKLY.

It so happens that our gym also has boxing classes, AND has BJJ classes trained by black belts, although the emphasis is not on competition.

So I would not hesitate to say that its probably one of the highest quality Krav programs in the U.S. (yes, this is tooting my own horn), if only because it gives students the chance to sharpen those individual elements as well, rather that just teaching them a few choke breaks and groin kicks and sending them out the door.

And end of the day, what you learn in boxing and BJJ is constrained by the 'rules' of the competition you're training for.

Is there any point in BJJ where you train how to handle two attackers at once? Not shark tank where you go one after another, but two guys trying to pile onto you simultaneously? I'd assume no, because that's a scenario that doesn't ever happen in competition.

And that likewise informs the tactics that are taught. BJJ guys want a fight to be on the ground.

Krav, we emphatically do NOT want to be on the ground, and so we train on how to both avoid going there, and at getting up as soon as possible. Every second you spend tangled up with a guy while working for a submission is a second in which his buddies could arrive and punt your head or he could pull a concealed weapon.

Boxing, well, if you're competent at that you'll be able to hold your own in a random street fight against unarmed opponents. But again, Boxing 'proper' assumes padded gloves, an enclosed ring, and a referee, so certain 'outside context problems' arise if you haven't trained again e.g. multiple attackers, armed attackers, or similar adverse conditions.

The (possibly futile) hope of civilian Krav is to give someone a sufficient set of tools to respond appropriately and effectively to almost any given threat in any plausible context, and hopefully have it ingrained enough that it comes out of them 'naturally' even when there's an adrenaline dump, which we assume will cause any strategic thinking and fine motor skills go out the window. Hence, some of the more fancy BJJ moves aren't really suitable because someone operating under their fight-or-flight reflexes won't be able to pull them off.

Just a distinct core philosophy that ignores any priorities that a 'sport' or 'competitive' system might include.

But yeah, people have to be able to train under pressure, hence why I host weekly light sparring sessions to at least offer the chance to sharpen the basic skills against an opponent that isn't just flopping along with the technique.

Of course, Krav Maga's real claim to fame is "It's used by the Israeli Military," and thus that implies that it has been tested under real, harsh conditions by soldiers who are very motivated to win fights. Association with the IDF might tarnish it in some people's eyes nowadays, but that is why I do suggest that the instructors you choose should have some training lineage that includes someone who trained in Israel where they have high motivation to maintain quality and they're more likely to have used it in a fight.

Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. I have never thought of bjj as injury prone but this makes a lot of sense. Still a bit better than permanent brain damage I guess but not exactly something I am very eager about. And no I am not really drawn to the nerdy problem solving side of bjj at all. I was actually quite happy with the “drill some basics and apply them very well and hard and fast” part of boxing.

I will check out Krav Maga. I have only seen it in the context of disarming videos and that always looked like some serious bullshido to me. I can see why it feels attractive to teach to law enforcement (although still I don’t see how it’s ever good idea as opposed to running away or shooting the guy with the knife). What do you think about that?

I have only seen it in the context of disarming videos and that always looked like some serious bullshido to me.

If they start training you on gun disarms early, yeah its completely pointless. Even if you manage a disarm, you still have to fight off the guy who had the gun. So building the basic toolset is utterly necessary to making everything else 'work.' The flashy techniques are there to get attention so people check out the system, the basics are kinda boring but they're what works. Which is what I like about the system. There's no emphasis on any 'mystical' aspects, there's no pure "do it this way or its wrong" in the techniques. Its "DOES THIS WORK and can you actually use it."

I have been running an 'advanced' student class with some of our most experienced practitioners, and we have been training our gun defenses with Nerf guns (i.e. projectiles 1/40th as fast as most real bullets, obviously) to see how often we actually avoid getting shot.

Even the black belts (myself included) can only 'succeed' at our easiest techniques about 4/5 of the time. That means we're eating a bullet 1/5 times. Not amazing odds.

So our official position is that you should comply with the attacker's demands unless there is some clear reason that you shouldn't (do you have kids with you? Spouse? Are they likely to shoot you anyway?)

Yet, we are finding that you can be successful enough to avoid a bullet in the brain and instead only get a grazing hit somewhere less lethal, which allows you to at least fight the guy off once the weapon is neutralized. Its an improvement. But is it an improvement worth training for years to achieve?

Knife defense? BWAHAHAHAHAHAH. Nothing 'works.'. Survival is the only thing you can hope for.

Question to ask is, at what point do you consider a given attack scenario unlikely enough that its just not worth training for? If you just want to build the skill for the sake of building a skill, then just keep learning stuff regardless. It is fun! And obviously cops are significantly more likely to have to deal with a knife or gun attack, so it makes some sense for them to train it.

And of course, a lot of self-defense scenarios can be solved by just carrying a gun yourself. Although we ALSO train how 'simple' it is to deploy a weapon under stress or while tangled with an attacker and it turns out its fucking hard, so once again being proficient at fighting under an adrenaline dump comes in clutch. Learning more won't ever relieve you of the need to keep the basics sharp.

Let me close it out this way: our curriculum is based around training you for the most likely scenarios first and foremost, then get to ever less-likely scenarios the more you train. And we teach situational awareness to avoid bad situations and cardio to ESCAPE bad situations.

If your instructors are playing up the "you'll be able to demolish people instantly with these techniques" aspect of it, you're probably in the wrong place.

That said, of all the techniques we teach, the simple eye-gouge is probably the most effective for 90% of situations you might ever encounter. If only someone can develop the gumption to USE it. As I sometimes say "No matter how big the guy is, he can't train eyelids."

So the biggest challenge for training folks is getting them to overcome whatever mental barriers they have against hurting other humans when the time comes.

What do you want? To improve your fitness? To learn self-defense? To have something to do as a physical hobby?

I used to do jujutsu (earned a black belt, almost made it to nidan before Covid basically killed our dojo), though our style was traditional Japanese, not BJJ. It's very practical self-defense oriented (BJJ is much more focused on ground fighting). Then I did judo for a while before I had to admit I'm too old to feel comfortable rolling with much younger (undisciplined) guys and hitting the mat.

Long ago, I did karate and kendo. (Kendo is a sport, not a real martial art, but it has a lot of the same aspects.)

So anyway - if you want intense workouts and a sense of achievement, BJJ really cultivates that mindset, and it's pretty good as far as self-defense goes. Krav Maga is supposed to be very good for focusing on the self-defense aspects, though I have never taken a krava maga class. Karate and kung fu and other striking arts - well, it really depends on the dojo. Some are just pretty aerobics pretending to be fighting styles, others are more practical, but those rely on the intense sparring that you say are a problem for you. It should be noted that any good BJJ school will totally gas you after a good randori and it also involves getting slammed on the mat and having your limbs bent a lot and occasional elbows to the face and ribs and knees in the groin and heels crushing your toes, so, no "real" martial art doesn't come without the possibility of injury.

Kendo is fun if you like very formal, traditional martial arts, but obviously it is not of much practical benefit. And it's a hell of a cardio workout. You still get hit in the head, though.

What do you want? To improve your fitness? To learn self-defense? To have something to do as a physical hobby?

All 3 I guess? I am definitely not sort of guy who would enter drunken brawls either by provoking or refusing to just run away. But recently some life changes (ie pregnant partner and then a baby) made me confront that there can be situations where you really have to stand your ground, helped by a couple of unpleasant encounters as well.

I am totally fine with some bruises (I have a pet theory that your body expends a lot of calories healing bruises and getting bruised is a good way to lose weight, never bothered to research this lol) but I definitely don’t want long term head damage(bread and butter of boxing) and serious joint/tendon problems as I know these can be truly awful and permanent from some experience. So the other comment scared me a bit about bjj at this point.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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