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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   1965 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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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.

More comments

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.

  • -14
More comments

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.

More comments

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.

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