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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2239 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 5, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'd read that Hungary has rather strict abortion legislation, and was curious if Hungarian women ever go abroad to get abortions. I typed "do Hungarian women" into Google Search. Here were the autocomplete suggestions:

  • do hungarian women like black men
  • do hungarian women like american men
  • do hungarian women make good wives
  • do hungarian women like older men
  • do hungarian women like foreigners
  • do hungarian women shave
  • do hungarian women date black men
  • do hungarian women like indian men
  • do hungarian women like americans
  • do hungarian women like asian men

It's usually pretty similar regardless of the country, although the minor variations are interesting (three of the suggestions for "Do French women" are questions about what they wear, while three of them for "Do German women" are about where they shave). The exception was trying the above with Welsh women, where autocomplete comes up with somewhat less expected results (the two that caught my eye were "can welsh women's teams play in england" and "where do welsh women go to prison").

Searching "do irish women" got the suggestion "do irish women wear kilts" which is interesting.

I've bought Talos Principle: Remastered for the new expansion and I have been cyberhumiliated. If you found Talos Principle 2 too easy, then this is for you. It's at the level of The Road to Gehenna star puzzles. Either that, or I have become much dumber since then. Which is not impossible.

I guess I need a running start to beat it, I'll run through the original game again first.

I picked up Hollow Knight SilkSong. Played it for about 10 hours over a few days and then put it down because I'm not willing to invest the time to 'git gud'. There are some legitimate issues with the game's artificial difficulty, padding and grind, but really I just don't have the free time (or interest) to invest in iterative fights until I memorise combat sequences.

Anyone play MTG here? I've found it really tickles the part of my brain that loves optimization. I have a few friends I run pauper games with on Tabletop Simulator and I've lost track of how many hours I've lost trawling Scryfall to make this one weird idea I have work, only for every single one to lose to my buddy's turbo reanimator that can turn 1 mountain > faithless looting and discard an ulamog's crusher > lotus petal + simian spirit guide > exhume out the ulamog's.

I hate to bring to up, but it's impossible to escape the topic in the year of our Lord 2025: asking chatGPT for deckbuilding advice is a hilariously effective way to see the weakness of current AI. I thought it would be good at this, since MTG is a game with a very cohesive ruleset and every last tidbit of information about every card, mechanic, effect, and interaction is trivially available online. But it will consistently misunderstand what cards do, hallucinate effects, forget simple things like mana costs, or just make outright bad recommendations. I haven't seen it hallucinate an entire card yet, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Old Magic was fun, but I moved to other card games years ago. The newer card designs feel wordier, powercrept and just plain worse to me than what we had back in my day, and the endless tie-ins are ridiculous to me. Netrunner was fun until NISEI (the fan continuation of FFG's reboot of WotC's Netrunner) was skinsuited by the sort of people who run Discord servers and turned into a full-throated progressive organization.

It's a catnip for nerds but the Wizards of the Coast disgust me to no end, so I simply stopped playing.

I played when I was younger, really enjoyed it. I asked my brother about the cards we had growing up and he said he donated them to goodwill. Aww well!

I'm still enjoying playing with LLMs. I'm using duck.ai, because I care about privacy (There are dozens of us! Dozens!) and I have a budget of $0 (There are billions of us! Billions!), which makes it easy to try different models. It's been interesting to see that GPT-5 mini isn't consistently better than 4o mini, but I haven't been systematic in comparing them. One funny "jailbreak" I found is that Claude Haiku 3.5 often (but not always?) refuses to give the pros and cons of 9x19 and 45acp for ccw, if it's the initial prompt in a chat, but will give the pros and cons of 5.56 and 7.62 for carbines, as an initial prompt, and then give the pros and cons of 9x19 and 45acp for ccw, if the request is a follow-up prompt.

So I finally talked my wife into letting me put Linux Mint on her 10 year old laptop. She's been complaining about it for years. First I swapped out the HDD for an SSD because Windows 10 at some point stopped pretending people might still be running their OS off an HDD and it just ground to a halt. Then I upgraded it from 8 GB of ram to 16 GB of ram because Chrome is a gluttonous whore. Still, the complaints persisted, and I could see why. Random Windows processes were constantly eating up nearly 100% of her CPU. I'd play whack-a-mole with them, but every few months updates would further enshittify her experience. Right before I went to install Linux, I saw some Windows Telemetry service was monopolizing 100% of her CPU. So I kept telling her she didn't have a laptop problem, she had a Windows problem.

Had a few hiccups. It didn't want to boot off the USB on the first try, but the second was fine. Then the wifi didn't work, because it used a proprietary driver. Luckily I wired my office with ethernet, so I plugged in at my desk and downloaded that using Mint's driver manager. Unfortunately it wasn't signed, so I had to turn off secure boot for it to load. After that the printer didn't work. Mint thought it found a driverless printer on the network, but that was a lie. Installing the drivers using a script off Brother's support page worked wonders. Then it broke when I installed the VPN because it broke network discovery. Not a problem, just a config setting away. Last I loaded Brave onto it, and imported all her passwords and bookmarks.

Near as I can tell, after she opens a browser she can't tell the difference. I haven't heard any more complaints about her laptop being slow so far. Finger's crossed I won't be shelling out a grand for a new laptop any time soon.

I got my wife the cheapest base model M1 MacBook from Walmart. Done with this crap. Only have time to tinker with my NAS.

I've got my wife pretty bought-in on super cheap Chromebooks for 'laptop-like' stuff. She genuinely lives in a browser and isn't ever doing computationally expensive stuff, so it works pretty well. There's maybe one or two things that would make me weakly prefer for her to have a Mint laptop, but given our shared preference for super cheap, small form factor, low power (low heat), long battery life, etc., I think chromebooks get the job done well enough.

For the main desktop, which I ask to do a lot more stuff, I have it dual-booting Win10 and Mint at the moment. There are a few niche things I'm still figuring out, but the main one is Excel. We have a fair amount of stuff in Excel, and it appears that things don't translate directly into Libre... especially any of the books with significant VBA macros. A cursory amount of research tells me that it's actually annoying to get Excel working in Linux, so I might be staring down having to just re-write everything and having a clean break in compatibility for prior years' info. I've still only done cursory research into it, partly because I don't want to think about having to redo it all.

I keep a windows VM for things like that. Defeats the purpose of Linux only slightly.

This is what I do - run Windows in a VM. I have a few games that don't run in Linux. If you never let Windows access the Internet, a lot of the annoyances are mitigated.

Yeah, I guess. I was looking at WINE/such first, and my "cursory amount of research" was basically just asking an LLM, which IIRC told me that they had problems with Excel. I should revisit doing it with a VM. Biggest challenge will be making a workflow that is wife-approved, since she needs to use it, too.

I've generally had good experiences replacing waifu computers with Linux. They pretty much never have a problem, though they just use webapps. The most they struggle with is file management since a lot more Linux apps will drop stuff in Home and they don't know to check there if Documents and Desktop don't have it.

Unfortunately it wasn't signed, so I had to turn off secure boot for it to load.

I would think you could just self-sign the printer driver and tell Linux to trust that signature but it might be too annoying.

I would think you could just self-sign the printer driver and tell Linux to trust that signature but it might be too annoying.

If it were my computer, and I cared enough, it was a thing I could research. I saw it was presented as a more secure solution that just turning off secure boot. But turning off secure boot was the thing I knew how to do immediately, and thus was much easier and faster. Maybe one day.

I mean, I ran into this problem with nvidia drivers. They failed to update with signatures trusted by Ubuntu. Then I tried to self-sign it and failed. Then I just gave up and disabled secure boot.

I just wish we could turn back the clock and have all desktops run Windows 7... That was the peak of personal computing.

Latest Windows 11 insanity:

Windows locks the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. An application puts some UI buttons at the bottom of its window. The app automatically resizes its window to hide the buttons behind the taskbar if you try to make it full size.

I wouldn't mind using Windows 11 if they made it a feature-complete and reliable operating system. I don't think that'll happen before they kill Windows 10.

(Fun (unverified) Fact: If you pay extra, you can get delayed access to the latest Windows features, because being on the general upgrade path is a good way to crash your computer.)

I thought XP was pretty much the pinnacle of personal computing, before I switched to OSX.

After seven long years, Hollow Knight: Silksong released and people could finally play it crashed Steam for several hours after which people could finally play it.

You'll remember that Dark Souls (2011) started a storm of Dark Souls buts -- Dark Souls but Scifi, Dark Souls but Roguelike, Dark Souls but Cooking Mama, etc. Of these, to my knowledge, the only pure success was Hollow Knight. (But Metroidvania.) It captured Dark Souls 1's best feature, which was a feeling of going on an expedition into the deep unknown, with no idea how to get back home. Likewise in Hollow Knight, very commonly players clear the game's tutorial zone and end up falling into a late game spiders' nest a hundred miles underground. Or swim through a hole in wall, but get lost in a complex sewer system with an abandoned city underneath. Or mess around platforming and find a secret level hidden above the cliffs of the starter village. The story, vibe, and lore were also very Dark Souls, although this is mostly because Hollow Knight just plain ripped it off.

Five hours in, I'm enjoying myself but I'm disappointed. It's ironically the exact same disappointment of Dark Souls 2. Silksong is much more linear and railroaded; the difficulty, even in these early areas, is a step up from the original, and this is mainly accomplished but lower player health, higher enemy health, and the liberal use of gank squads. And I suspect Silksong won't pull off a nifty meta-narrative like DS2 did, or at least not with such gravitas or panache.

We'll see if the game opens up once I reach the citadel, or once I finally get a freaking health or damage upgrade. Anyone else playing this? (Or any other Soulslike or Metroidvania, I guess)

Update on Silksong.

The conversation around this game is getting on my nerves. Camps have divided over whether Silksong is too hard (double damage, runbacks) or just right (get good). Ultimately difficulty is up to preference. No one is going to convince anyone here, although people denying Silksong is harder are pretty annoying. But no one is talking about Silksong being a different genre than Hollow Knight. That seems important. Am I taking crazy pills?

The core conceit of Metroidvanias is exploration yields power. You have a freeform world and can explore many different areas. As you find collectibles and beat bosses, your avatar strength increases. You unlock new areas, which open up new bosses and powerups, which in turn open up new areas, etc. Not so in Silksong.

First off, the area progression is almost entirely linear. You have one or two optional areas like Hunter's March. But really, you're advancing down the critical path like a regular action platformer.

Second, your avatar strength is barely increasing, and not at all due to exploration or boss-beating. If you comb every area for hidden walls, you can maybe find enough masks to increase your health from 5 pips to 6 pips by Act Two. But since most enemies and environmental hazards do two damage, that isn't an upgrade. As for your damage output, you are gifted a small sword upgrade at a set point in the story about 10 hours in. But since all the enemies from that linear point on get twice as tanky, that's not an upgrade. And there's no incentive to backtrack, so...?

All crests or tools you get are sidegrades. They unlock other gameplay styles according to your preference. I've mostly ignored them.

Weirdly you do get a few things that feel like Metroidvania "door-opening" moves (See: the Drifter's Cloak or Silk Spear). But they end up only being used to advance from the area you find them in. Want to backtrack? The door-opening moves don't open anything in old zones. And later levels forget about them. (Why didn't Team Cherry put steam updrafts in later levels at least? That was fun!)

At hour thirteen, I don't feel my hornet is meaningfully stronger or more capable than at hour two. Instead, the last eleven hours have been a sequence of challenge levels.

Conclusion: Silksong is in practice closer in genre to something like Super Meat Boy or I Wanna Be the Guy than Hollow Knight. The trappings of a Metroidvania are here, but the substance isn't. I feel like this change is more important that just 'second game harder', no?

This development does not surprise me in the least, given how the tail end of my playtime in Hollow Knight was mostly just a continuous escalation of challenge for the sake of challenge. I liked the game for what it was up to a point, especially for the exploration, but the exclusive focus on high-end skill checks in the boss rush or extreme platforming sequences at the end had me check out. That Silksong looks more like that and less like the open-world exploration game that the earlier parts of HK were like seems consistent with what the devs of HK already liked to turn their game into.

This development does not surprise me in the least, given how the tail end of my playtime in Hollow Knight was mostly just a continuous escalation of challenge for the sake of challenge. I liked the game for what it was up to a point, especially for the exploration, but the exclusive focus on high-end skill checks in the boss rush or extreme platforming sequences at the end had me check out.

I had the same experience of HK. The game was all roses until I maxed out my knight. Then, suddenly, to reach the ending I apparently had play a masocore platformer and a bullet hell game? Why? I checked out and watched the ending cutscene online.

Honestly, I didn't hold this against Hollow Knight. But it seems Team Cherry wanted to make a sequel to the part of their game I actually didn't like. Shame.

I only just stumbled across this post, but I feel like this deserves correction. The Path of Pain and Absolute Radiance are both very optional, intentionally brutal content. The canonical good ending only requires you to defeat normal Radiance (after fighting the Hollow Knight), which is a bit tricky but nothing compared to what you linked. It sounds like you checked some guides, misinterpreted them, then gave up prematurely?

No, I agree with @popocatepetl. AFAIK getting the good ending requires doing a bunch of ‘optional’ bosses to power up the dream nail, then going through super-meat-boy style platforming in the White Palace to get the Void Heart, then fighting two difficult bosses in a row.

I beat the ‘final’ boss, felt kind of good about it, looked the game up online and got told about all the other bullshit I was meant to do and gave up.

I liked HW for the metroidvania exploration, but Team Cherry seems far more invested in super-hard bosses and platforming.

But it seems Team Cherry wanted to make a sequel to the part of their game I actually didn't like. Shame.

Agree completely. I don’t think they realised that this wasn’t what appealed to many players.

From the wiki: "Behind a breakable wall on your left is the entrance to the Path of Pain - an optional and particularly hard area. Note that beating this area isn't required for the true ending."

Yes, you do have to do some platforming in the White Palace. But you do not even have to find, let alone complete, the insane secret section that's showcased in the linked video.

Sorry, I expressed myself poorly. You are factually correct that the Path of Pain and Absolute Radiance are optional.

I agree with the previous poster in the sense that you have to fight some pretty bullet-hellish bosses and do some pretty gnarly platforming to get the chance to fight ordinary Radiance, and that I noped out on hearing this.

Fair enough! It's definitely a hard game.

There are three major endings in the game, ranked from earliest/easiest to hardest. I'll spoil them just in case.

  1. You kill the three dreamers and then the Hollow Knight. Doable with mid-level upgrades, but might feel hard at that point. You probably won't have discovered the entire map.
  2. You awaken the Dream Nail, requiring defeating some combination of easy-ish Warrior Dreams and harder versions of existing bosses, then collect the Void Heart (the only obstacle of note is the aforementioned platforming section), then kill Hollow Knight followed by Radiance. At that point, if you've been exploring you should have enough upgrades that Hollow Knight is barely a challenge, especially since you're fully healed on entering the Radiance fight anyway. This is the "canon" ending that Silksong takes over from.
  3. You find and kill every boss in the game, then complete a boss rush where you fight all of them in a row, with a few opportunities to get a full heal, capstoned by a stronger Radiance. This is pretty much the 100% completionist ending and is not for regular players. Solksong does not have this kind of challenge implemented as of now.

I find it strange to complain about platforming in favor of metroidvania exploration, because as far as I remember there are more than a few exploration rewards in HK that are locked behind platforming.

In my experience Silksong is quite heavy not on hard bosses but hard "gauntlets", i.e. the multiple waves of enemies arenas. But those can be trivialized by tool spam if you haven't been zeroing out your shard stash all the time.

Silksong does not have this kind of challenge implemented as of now.

Yeah, Hollow Knight also didn't have the Pantheons (boss rush) until the DLC came out. And while the first four (much much much easier) Pantheons contribute to the final 112% completion percentage, the fifth one with that ending does not. It really is intended to be optional content. (There IS an achievement for it, though.)

I haven't finished all Silksong's extra content yet, but I found the bosses to be tough but fair - especially if you count this as a soulslike, which IMHO is a genre rife with badly-designed overtuned bosses. I would cite Nine Sols, another recent metroidvania, as an example of how NOT to do it.

I'm playing (have just defeated the Fourth Chorus and made my way up, where I am now up against the owlmoth thing), and finding it pretty enjoyable so far. The differences in locomotion from HK don't particularly bother me (the diagonal plunge is easy to get used to), and I don't actually see the game feeling too linear (I felt a fair bit of freedom regarding the order that I could do the early bosses in, to the point that I actively backed off of one in the hope that I could find some movement upgrade first). Some complaints I have would be that

  • the early areas somewhat lack distinctive personality

  • the whole trap/consumable mechanic, so far, feels insufficiently impactful to waste precious middle-aged neurons on developing muscle memory for

  • BGMs feel more ambient, while HK had some songs that stuck in my mind

  • I agree with the sentiment below that many enemies are pointlessly damage-spongey (looking at you, red ant tribe).

  • So far the driving plot feels too similar to HK, what with the collapsing bug kingdom suffering from a mind control zombie plague that the protagonist has some mysterious existential connection to.

On the other hand, things that I feel are an improvement over the predecessor:

  • The graphics and level design feel more polished. HK had some areas that looked pretty monotonous.

  • Every boss fight so far has been great: they are unique, inventive, and the difficulty feels fair. HK suffered from the problem that a lot of the bosses were just finicky - you needed to learn the exact timing and hitboxes for their attacks so that you could get out of the way and strike back, but the mechanic would often just be "dodge this massive club swing by between 1 and 4 pixels and then run towards the enemy to get in a hit".

  • It has doubled down on HK's strength of having an endearingly quirky NPC cast with funny fantasy-language exclamations and songs announcing their presence.

  • I found the FOMO (what if some other set of powerups would have trivialised this boss?) of HK's knapsack-based badge/upgrade system to be more annoying than anything. The new one has less of that (though that might just be because so far I have found hardly any optional powerups that feel meaningful).

  • I'm obviously not far enough in yet, but the narration of the main story feels more tight.

One thing worth noting is that I tried to play the game with my recently-acquired Switch controller (having been a keyboard gamer all my life, but finally folding because of some games requiring omnidirectional movement/aiming), but went back to keyboard after the first few bosses which immediately gave me a massive power spike. I am not sure the controls were optimised for gamepads.

the diagonal plunge is easy to get used to

I envy your neuroplasticity.

You eventually get crests or something that alter your attack moveset (but require you to unlock equipable slots all over again) and the first one i got changed the downward plunge to much more forgiving hitbox that's slightly slower but you get it after you've probably gotten used to the fast diagonal or at least had to use it for four to five hours.

You move in the direction of the needle, which helps.

nifty meta-narrative like DS2 did, or at least not with such gravitas or panache.

Please elaborate.

nifty meta-narrative like DS2 did, or at least not with such gravitas or panache.

Please elaborate.

Oh boy. The following are all spoilers. Although the Dark Souls series never makes these things explicit, discovering them is the marrow of DS1 and DS2. I recommend these games in part for their story, but I'm not going to turn a Motte comment into a CIA document. Read at your own risk.

Dark Souls is set in a kingdom named Lordran, and Dark Souls II in one named Drangleic. They're far away: "if the first game was set in the North Pole, the second would be in the South Pole". Both kingdoms are in a Cormac McCarthy The Road state of social collapse and imminent human extinction. All characters are slowly going mad as they lose hope. The vast majority are already mad ('hollow') and form the bulk of enemies you fight. The games hint, if you pay attention to their death sounds and what makes them respawn, that hollows are 'player characters', so to speak, who unplugged the controller, abandoned the game, and turned into mobs. And ALL player characters of Dark Souls do eventually turn into mobs. The games diegetically loop back to New Game+, so no one ever "beats" Dark Souls, strictly speaking. Whenever you stop, you stop. The "Age of Fire" ends, and the "Age of Dark" begins, though the in-game lore never explains what these terms mean.

All this is an analogy for nihilism in our garden-variety IRL life. Dark Souls games pose the question: Is fighting entropy worth it?

Do you remember when I said DS1 and DS2 are set in different places? I lied. Or Director Tomohiro Shibuya lied in that interview anyway. Once you actually play Dark Souls II, you'll find heaps of evidence that Drangleic is actually Lordran, except tens of thousands or even millions of years later. Most locations of the first game are all accessible, but buried underground, and so worn with age it's hard to tell what you're looking at. First game items can be found as artifacts: the Holy Grail equivalent of DS1, the Lordvessel, is in a trash heap in the basement of the starter village. Characters frequently remark on "countless kingdoms rising and falling on this very spot".

(Side tangent: 2014 was the first time I encountered NPCs in the real world, though I didn't have the vocabulary for them at the time. Debates raged online for the first year after DS2 on Drangleic vs Lordran. One side said "Here is a mountain of evidence Lordran is Drangleic", the other side said "An authority figure said Drangleic is not Lordran, and Trust The Experts, case closed". Fun times.)

Everything in DS2, even the story, is a cheap knockoff of DS1, being repeated over and over and over again. There is an Age of Fire running out, yielding to an Age of Dark. In one sense, DS2 is making another analogy about nihilism and entropy. In another sense, DS2 is talking about video game sequels.

Dark Souls 1 was a smash hit. What's more, beyond commercial success, it became perhaps the Most Admired Game Of All Time. What Ocarina of Time was in 2010, Dark Souls became in 2011. What's more, the premise and ending of DS1 made even the idea of a sequel artistic sacrilege. That hopeless, but nevertheless beautiful descent in the Heat Death of the Universe — and I won't even spoil the way DS1 punctuates that at the ending — did not brook a direct sequel. But because video game franchises, FromSoft did indeed have to make a sequel to a game about the End of the Universe.

This crass act is a bit like taking mom out of her coffin, mummifying her, and using her body as a carnival prop.

Bearer of the curse.
Long have I awaited one such as you, one who might shatter the shackles of fate.
One who can set me free. Bearer of the curse, it was my own manifestation that led you here.

Dark Souls II a game about being forced to go through the motions of something degrading that you hate. Like making a cynical sequel to a story that conclusively finished. Over the course of the game, you forget why you're even doing what you're doing, just like the ugly crone in the opening cinematic promised. Of course, it's not "just" about video game sequels, but that's part of it.

Thanks for the detailed explanation!

Now please explain how DS3 fits into that narrative framework.

Thanks for the detailed explanation!

Now please explain how DS3 fits into that narrative framework.

It doesn't. Dark Souls meant and intended one thing at release. Then they had to make another game, so they brainstormed a sequel, which retroactively changed the meaning of the original. And then they made another sequel, which retroactively changed the meaning of the last two games, again. And so on and so on.

This is why "canon" arguments when it comes to stories that were not planned in advance are stupid. Obviously, in Star Wars: A New Hope as of 1977, Darth Vader is a low level mook and the republic collapsed in distant history. Now, when I watch it again in 2025, should I view it through the hermeneutic that Darth Vader is actually Vice-President of the Empire and the Republic fell 19 years ago? Of course not. Those retcons were made for the artistic convenience of later films.

It's generally valuable to analyze movies or games on their own, in light of what preceded them at the time of release.

in Star Wars: A New Hope as of 1977, Darth Vader is a low level mook

He's referred to as "Lord Vader", and recognized immediately by an imperial senator.

Later, he's on board the singular imperial superweapon in a top-level strategy meeting with less than a dozen participants. He does obey a command from one of the other participants, but the command is "stop choking that high-level general", everybody watches for a while first before anyone dares give the command, and Vader still faces no consequences for the incident; Tarkin even goes back to addressing him as "Lord Vader" immediately afterward. Out of context, the impression the movie gives is that Vader is basically the third in command of the Empire after Tarkin. With "it was only 30 years after WWII" context, Vader seems to be the head of the sort of personally-loyal private forces that fascist dictators develop alongside existing traditional armies, with perhaps less nominal power but with more real power.

and the republic collapsed in distant history

This was probably technically a retcon - there's some bit of dialogue in the novelization about multiple Emperors and their increasing corruption over time - but the bits needing to be retconned never made it into the movie.

In the movie, the Emperor dissolves the senate in the middle of the plot. Not long prior, Leia is invoking the Senate as a moral authority and the villains are taking it seriously enough as a practical authority that Vader decides it'll be easier to pretend Leia died than to admit she's imprisoned. This is perhaps compatible with the Senate being just an old Imperial-Rome-style facade that hasn't had real power in centuries, but from the film alone the retcon is the most parsimonious interpretation - they spell out right in dialogue that everyone still takes the senate seriously, and that the imperials get rid of it as soon as they think they've got the centralized military power to ignore any backlash.

Vice-President of the Empire

The phrase in the final draft of the script was "right hand of the Emperor". To be fair, this never made it into the movie, and could have ended up in the same wastebin as "Journal of the Whills" without too much hassle.

Those retcons were made for the artistic convenience of later films.

Star Wars, even if you only consider the first movie vs later films (and not the others or the shows or the entirely waste-binned Expanded Universe), has some seriously retconned ideas! These just aren't the best examples.

DS3 is when you say ‘fuck it, this is definitely the last one but we can at least do it well’, and you get back the reluctant Lords of Cinder (Miyazaki-san and the team who worked on Bloodborne) and squeeze out whatever is left for one last hurrah.

It’s the end of Dark Souls but you feel that something new will come along one day and that’s enough to lift your spirits a bit…

The First Flame quickly fades. Darkness will shortly settle. But one day, tiny flames will dance across the darkness. Like embers, linked by lords past. Ashen one, hearest thou my voice, still?

Here’s my take from a few bosses and couple upgrades in.

Overall, the game’s pretty fun and meaningfully more difficult than the first. I feel pretty confident saying this. I 100%ed (112%) the first game deathless, and it wasn’t that hard. I’ve gone back to it a couple of times and it’s been very easy to pick back up. On my first play through I even got several bosses on my first try. Silksong is not giving me trouble on the level of, say, Sekiro, but it’s not nearly so easy.

I think there are two elements driving this. First, the enemies all have truly obnoxious amounts of health. It feels like every fight takes about 1.5 to 2x what it would in the original. IMO this is a hard miss. The original had a challenge mode for forcing boss completion with perfect or near-perfect mechanics. Extending the time to complete a boss will force perfect mechanics but honestly gets quite boring. I’ve so far found it pretty straightforward to learn mechanics and perform for a few minutes, but it’s not the best experience.

The second part is that the movement in the game is way messier than the first. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The first game had exceptionally clean movement, which made it a tactile delight to play. Silksong’s movement is comparatively weird. My hands are well practiced in Hollow Knight movement, and I have a hard time adjusting to the different down attack movement. This is one change of many. So some of this challenge is just a learning curve. Back to Sekiro, I had to eat dirt at the first actual boss for something like an hour to get the main mechanics under control. That’s table stakes. I also suspect that using the non-basic attack options (“tools”) is much more important than in most games in the genre, but a serious miss here is that the degree of their importance is not obvious from menus… This means that the player is not quite encouraged to experiment. For all of these I expect that the game will shake out over time, and I do like the systems even if they do not come naturally.

Last thought. The areas of the game so far have been lackluster. Hollow Knight made it very clear how the pieces tied together into a unified whole. The starting area is literally a crossroads suggesting what was once present in that land. In Silksong you start in an iron foundry that is apparently still active. I don’t know what to make of that except that the devs wanted both a lava level and red ants, which I believe got cut from Hollow Knight. If this game is eight years in the making for cutting-room floor scraps from the original it leaves much to be desired. But I’ll wait on that judgment.

Just got it today. I don't normally buy games when they first come out because $60 is a lot and I want to wait until they go on sale, and get enough reviews to know if it'll be worth it. But $20 for a game I'm nearly guaranteed to enjoy given how good HK is? I'm in.

Preliminary opinions are similar to yours. It feels a bit more streamlined in a way that makes it more convenient, but kind of loses some of the mystique. Same with Hornet talking instead of being a silent protagonist: it makes sense lore-wise, and might allow more options for the story to deliver, but it gives a very different feel.

It's fun to play so far though. I hope it ends up even better than HK, but even if it's slightly less good it'll still be worth the time and money.

I’m playing and enjoying. My experience so far is that the game is hard, but not much harder than I remember HK being at first. I’m taking things slow, not letting myself get too worked up about setbacks (like repeatedly dying because of combat or platforming mistakes), and having a great time.

Noita is a fun roguelike with a ton of deep exploration component, and regularly invites you to jump in well over your head. Very much a game for masochists, though, even compared to Dark Souls: I think I was in the low hundreds of deaths before I 'finished' the game, every death puts you back at the start, and killing Kolmi is just the beginning. Downside's that it tends to be very frantic, compared to the slower-paced Souls combat that I like a lot more.

Noita was a frustrating bullet hell game to me.

I've put dozens of hours into Noita, but I still don't know how to resolve the tension in its game design: It both requires and punishes experimentation. If you find a mystery late in a run (whatever "late" happens to be for you, personally), then you're faced with a choice: Test it, and have a 50/50 chance of dying or learning something, or leave it alone forever. I ended up installing a resurrection mod to deal with it.

We'll see if the game opens up once I reach the citadel, or once I finally get a freaking health or damage upgrade.

HK was also annoying to play until you got the cloak and the claws.

UPD: okay, I got to the second boss (right past the cartographer) and I need a break. I'm not good at bosses, especially early game ones when you can't tailor your build to them. Being able to heal only if your spool is full is punishing.

HK was also annoying to play until you got the cloak and the claws.

I think you know what I mean now based on your update, but early Hollow Knight was annoying-ish in the sense of "You don't get a dash or double jump for several hours." Silksong is annoying-ish in the sense of "I've died five times in a row to this gauntlet of ant mobs that take eight hits to kill each"

I do enjoy how mobile even early game Hornet is though. (Tip: Keep holding C after dashing to sprint)

I haven't gotten to the ants yet, I am currently trying to beat the big club miniboss, but so far I haven't really been punished by the regular mobs. The firebombing fliers are annoying, but not enough to kill me. Bosses and minibosses dealing two masks per hit are the biggest hurdle, as you die in three hits and recover three masks per spool, so even if you time your heal well, you will die in two hits the next time.

I've never been good at dodging in platformer games and my favorite builds in games that let you tailor your build have always been facetanks, so you can see my frustration. At least in HK I could combine Stalwart Shell, Soul Eater, Quick Focus and not worry too much about missing a hit.

Regarding the big club miniboss: When I realized he can't jump if I lure him into the tunnel, the fight went by really fast. If this was intentionally set up by the devs, kudos.

Yeah, now I'm past him and fuck platforming. I have explored the available map and it looks like I have two options: to beat the white fencer lady (and hopefully get some powerup that will let me find another path forward) or to learn to airjump on the red pods. The only game I liked airjumping in was the second Ori, and only because it had bullet time.

UPD: okay, the fencer lady is down, time for the big lava fight, reminds me of the Giant in Dead Cells. At least DC gave you lots of invisibility frames when dodging.

That's too bad. I keep seeing these memes going around that all the remaining mainstream review sites that nobody has any respect for (IGN, PCGamer, etc) hated it. But I can't see that they've reviewed it at all, because there are no review copies. I'll probably grab it on Switch 2 at some point, unless community consensus decides that it's a completely bomb.

It's super cheap, so there's no reason not to buy a copy today. I'll be starting it in ten minutes.

I'm trying not to buy games anymore unless I'm going to play them right fucking now. The shelf of shame is just too weighty.

Currently my spare time is heavily invested in Mechwarrior 5 and it's new DLC.

I'm completely shameless in regard to unplayed games.

I have literally hundreds.

Question on my mind a lot is whether my children can, and will care to, inherit.

As I recall Steam officially does not let anyone inherit your account. But if you actually own your games because you bought them on GOG, that's what offline drm free installers are for.

Seems like a question of enforcement. How would they know I died?

Now I'm imagining my kids having to deal with this when my putative lifespan is getting so high, including future medical advancement, that it's no longer plausible. And I think, if I could take that deal I would, because it implies an acceptable future. Wonder how the monkey's paw would take effect though.

Also presumably at that point no one would care if they're pirating a 70 year old game anyway.

Football is back baby!

I wish everyone luck with #YourTeam unless they are playing #MyTeam.

Additionally - #DakSpatFirst.

That said it seems like the league will be making professionalism a point of emphasis and that has already generated some friction. Between that and the importance (or lack there of) of Dak triggering Carter, well some culture war fodder has popped out if anyone wants to go to the other thread for that.

Some things I'm looking forward to:

-Just how bad the Saints are going to be.

-Finding out if we get Good 49ers or Bad 49ers.

-Which team will win the NFCE since the Eagles are curse ineligible.

-How much of a shit show the NFCN will be.

-Will Chiefs performance have an impact on Swift's relationship.

Dolphins v ‘9ers in the Super Bowl

‘Fins up !

Not exactly that football you are talking about but still: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MusyO7J2inM

Additionally - #DakSpatFirst.

Dak spit on the ground, and then Carter spit directly and intentionally onto Dak’s chest. I don’t think these two actions are comparable.

Just how bad the Saints are going to be.

I know Tyler Shough looked pretty all-over-the-place during the pre-season (bad enough, apparently, that the team decided to name the demonstrable terrible Spencer Rattler as the Week 1 starter) but I’m not ready to bury him before I’ve seen him in regular-season action. Their offense has a lot of very capable players, the performance of many of whom will of course come down to health. (Will Chris Olave end up with another concussion? If so, will that be the career-ender? Will Shaheed and Kamara hold up for a whole season or close to it?) The rest of their team is so devoid of talent, though, that it might not matter.

Finding out if we get Good 49ers or Bad 49ers.

Apparently CMC has quietly ended up on the Did Not Practice list as Sunday approaches. My Brian Robinson fantasy stock appears to be growing in value before the season even starts.

Which team will win the NFCE since the Eagles are curse ineligible.

Speaking of fantasy football, my Jayden Daniels ownership in my dynasty league promises to pay many dividends. If that team can just put a functional receiver corps around him that isn’t just Terry McLaurin, that team could get really scary.

How much of a shit show the NFCN will be.

All depends on how JJ McCarthy turns out, and if Jordan Love is as good as the Packers clearly believe he is, seeing as they were willing to trade away two consecutive first-round picks.

Will Chiefs performance have an impact on Swift's relationship.

I have to admit that Kelce is the most formidable competition I’ve yet faced for her affections. Lot of staying power. I need him to have a humiliating season — not only because I’m a Chargers fan, but also if I want to have any chance at her moving forward.

Congratulations Hoff, every team that has won a game in Brazil has won the super bowl that season. It's their year.

Dak

While one is worse than the other and they are always going to get the second guy...... you can't throw the book at Carter and let Dak get away with instigating that. It's bad looks all around.

Saints

My suspicion with them is that they do not have an NFL QB and the vet talent they've been riding on for so long will have the wheels fall off.

CMC

I think he's effectively done, he may be able to still perform at a high level but not for a full season and at the expense of post-football quality of life. Man needs to hang it up. Without him though? IDK they've worked magic before.

NFCE

Agree with you, but I also think they are in for a sophomore slump. Could easily see the Cowboys or Giants somehow winning the division, especially with the tough schedule the Eagles have. Felt more comfortable with that before the Parsons trade though. Giants will be high variance.

NFCN

I feel like the Packers and Vikings are both well positioned to be the top team in the NFC...or not. Lions have to regress, right? Bears will probably be a good team but underperform in W/L because of their schedule.

Chargers Fan

I'm so sorry.

you can't throw the book at Carter and let Dak get away with instigating that.

Spitting on the field is something that every NFL player does probably 20 times over the course of a normal game. I don’t see how it’s a rules violation. Just because he was talking to another player when he did it doesn’t make it an intentional attempt to offend captivate anything or “trigger” that player.

It's clear from the footage that Dak directly spat at Carter with specific intent to taunt and enrage him. Likely also with some verbal content between the two of them we can't tell from the footage. We can tell Dak knew exactly what he was doing.

In a non football context doing that could easily start a fight. That doesn't suggest that the fight is justified, or a response in kind or with escalation (spitting on instead of at) is justified.

But it's still aggressive and offensive.

If you are going to flag someone for flexing (Nolan Smith I believe?) then spitting at a player is absolutely worthy of punishment regardless of Carter overreaction.

I think you’re projecting things onto the situation that aren’t there. Dak’s explanation, which seems supported by the video evidence, is that Carter was talking shit to Tyler Booker, Dak came over and entered the conversation, and he had to spit, so he spit on the ground. The direction in which he spit was a result of the fact that Booker was in the way of where he would have spit if he’d wanted to make abundantly clear that he wasn’t spitting “at” Carter. Then after he spit, Carter asked him, “Did you just spit at me?” Dak then replied, “Why the fuck would I spit at you?” (A perfectly reasonable question.) Carter then very clearly and intentionally spit on Dak’s chest.

Your stance is that spitting on the ground in front of another man is inherently aggressive and instigatory? Perhaps I’m the wrong person to weigh in, as I’ve never been in a fistfight and don’t always have the strongest theory of mind regarding high-testosterone men with a violent disposition, but this seems obviously wrong to me.

Your stance is that spitting on the ground in front of another man is inherently aggressive and instigatory?

I mean, kind of? Not sure if it's obsolete or some regional deal, but I thought it was pretty universal & ancient that looking a guy in the eye (esp. when trash talk is going on), then spitting off to the side is a gesture of contempt at best, and essentially fighting 'words' in most cases?

See, um -- Darwin (!?), apparently: (thanks Google!)

Spitting seems an almost universal sign of contempt or disgust; and spitting obviously represents the rejection of anything offensive from the mouth. Shakspeare makes the Duke of Norfolk say, “I spit at him—call him a slanderous coward and a villain.” So, again, Falstaff says, “Tell thee what, Hal,—if I tell thee a lie, spit in my face.” Leichhardt remarks that the Australians “interrupted their speeches by spitting, and uttering a noise like pooh! pooh! apparently expressive of their disgust.” And Captain Burton speaks of certain negroes “spitting with disgust upon the ground.” Captain Speedy informs me that this is likewise the case with the Abyssinians. Mr. Geach says that with the Malays of Malacca the expression of disgust “answers to spitting from the mouth;” and with the Fuegians, according to Mr. Bridges “to spit at one is the highest mark of contempt.”

Granted most of his quotes do involve people spitting at others -- which is clearly even more aggressive -- but I personally would not spit to the side while talking to somebody unless I were looking for a fight.

I think their is a kernel of an interesting conversation in discussing the union of impulse control, testosterone, substances of abuse (as are likely present) and how some of this may in fact be beneficial given the sport...but I don't know where to take that so I'll toss it inside.

Instead let's consider the game and metagame of this. Given that we can't take anything either of them say at face value (I assume Big Dom's hand is shoved firmly up Carter's ass and Dak is a pro at this point).

The game - I "believe" Dak probably was trying to instigate given the shit eating grin and the fact that both teams clearly came to play and were chippy as hell. But I think a reasonable person could believe Dak was doing it on purpose, and a different reasonable person could believe it wasn't deliberate.

So the metagame then - if you throw the book at Carter and let Dak "get away with it" it's going to make players feel that being a dick on the field is incredibly useful, as long as they don't get caught. That's a complete failure of the point of emphasis.

Do I think players are going to walk away believing that? Unsure. Certainly Eagles fans and anti-Cowboys fans will mostly think that.

Sidebar-

For the Eagles haters out there, this might be better for the Eagles in the long run, since it might decrease how much of a cap hit Carter causes when his big contract rolls in.

So the metagame then - if you throw the book at Carter and let Dak "get away with it" it's going to make players feel that being a dick on the field is incredibly useful, as long as they don't get caught.

I don’t think that’s the message at all. The league has had on-field shit-talk for as long as it has existed. What they can’t tolerate is overt, visible aggressive actions that can be seen on-camera. I’ve seen the argument that the league’s renewed focus on eliminating visible displays of bad sportsmanship from its TV product is part of a larger push to stop hemorrhaging trust among current parents of children. (The rising clamor over CTE has a lot of parents deeply wary of involving their boys in football; the league can’t afford to alienate them further by broadcasting their players being aggressive and unsportsmanlike toward each other.)

What Dak did has always been permissible under the rules, and, again, doesn’t really seem that bad or out of the ordinary. He literally just spit on the ground in the general direction of Jalen Carter; he’s not responsible for the fact that Carter has the emotional continence of a small child. If it’s that easy to get in Jalen Carter’s head and make him do something bad enough to get him ejected, then perhaps he’s not cut out for this league long-term.

What Dak did has always been permissible under the rules, and, again, doesn’t really seem that bad or out of the ordinary. He literally just spit on the ground in the general direction of Jalen Carter;

So same stuff happens, Carter doesn't respond, a ref catches it... you don't think Dak gets flagged this game?

I absolutely think they'd throw a flag for spitting at Carter while shit talking.

We'd probably be talking about it being an overreaction, but still.

More comments

This is highly inscrutable to me, barring the reference to Taylor Swift's ?fiancee ?husband. Still, I hope that everyone has fun!

Oooooooooh. Me teach sport. Real football. Or fake football? Ball touch foot less, maybe fake.

-The start of the season was last night and within six seconds of the game starting two black players spat at/on each other on national television. Both were some of the most important players in the game. The NFL had decided to emphasis professionalism this year. Oops.

-One of the teams (the Saints) engaged in very risky and tricky team composition management for years and now are dealing with the fallout in a catastrophic hilarious fashion. They are so so bad (at least on paper).

-One of the historically better teams in the league (49ers) seems to alternate between nearly winning it all and sucking ass on a yearly basis. It's funny.

-One of the divisions (NFCE) has had exceptionally good parity, no-one has "won the division" in back to back years in decades. Eagles won last year (and the Super Bowl). Will they break the curse?

-One of the divisions (NFCN) was comically competitive last year, with three out of the four teams being arguably some of the best teams in football. Will they take a step back?

-Chiefs. Yeah you know this one.

I appreciate it, even if I'm still left dazed and bemused. Maybe I'll get to catch a game live when I'm visiting the States this year!

Football is a different beast than most sports and has a shocking degree of complexity for a bunch of large men ramming into each... - don't worry you don't have to pretend to pay attention.

Although picking up the other football will likely have professional benefits for you given your practice location.

Better at diagnosing CTE and concussion? I could use that.

I mean soccer aka football.

Always useful to have something you can talk to patients about. It can distract them, calm them down, normalize you, establish empathy, whatever.

It can be hard to be a normal person in medicine.

A fun observation and a follow-up to the last week's OF discussion. I recently updated the list of NSFW subreddits I follow and ended up with what looks like a network of Ukrainian refugee online sex workers on my frontpage:

  • their Reddit profiles all look identical and externally managed:
    • the bio is a short thirst trap that doesn't say anything about them (a couple mention Ukraine)
    • they have a few well-received comments in random subreddits, probably to farm starter karma
    • they have a pinned post that invites you to visit their "FREE (always in all caps) OF"
    • the rest of their activity is posts in second-tier NSFW subreddits with grammatically correct, but repetitive thirst-trap captions
      • these subreddits are usually completely taken over by these posts, probably to ensure that if you subscribe you will only get their content
  • the photographs and clips they post are also very similar:
    • the girls aren't shy about showing their faces
    • the girls all have this waifish complexion that is common in the Russo-Ukrainian rust belt
    • they are shot in rental flats across the EU and in the UK
      • the countries are different, but there are telltale signs like the window frames, the radiators and the power sockets
      • you can tell it's a short-term rental because of the combination of the latest designs and shit materials, most flats don't look lived-in
    • they are all zero-personality shots that focus on the body and cycle through the locations around the flat to avoid monotony

My working theory is that someone has found an untapped resource of sexy Ukrainian zoomers stuck as refugees in Europe and has a third-worlder run tens of similar profiles. My only question is whether this is an ongoing arrangement ("you just bring me 100 new softcore photographs and 5 PPVs each month and I pay you 50%") or a one-shot one ("I pay you for a 1000-frame photoshoot and the right to post the images as "Aurora the Sexy Witch" on Reddit and OF, please tell all your sexy friends about me").

The war may have brought in fresh blood into this 'trade' but this is not a new method by any means. While I'm sure there's variations of how it works, the arrangement I'm familiar with is this: the girl is already doing some kind of explicit content but it's small scale and restricted to her native language audience. She gets approached (usually by another woman that also does this type of content) with an offer to market her through private channels to an english speaking audience for a fee (I don't know exact %). If she agrees, they create a separate account for her with a different alias (that way the managing company doesn't get thrown to the side by the girl once the account gets established) and all the girl has to do is wait and provide content management requests

From what I managed to learn, it's a camming to OF pipeline: "your workload will increase minimally, and we'll bring in English-speaking audience that you can't handle with your 'put shoe on head' English". I was surprised to learn that camming is still a thing.

At this point I think you will really struggle to find any profitable OF account not managed more or less this way. Really tells you something how quickly we reinvented the pimp in yet another medium of sex.

Many people think that a room cannot count as a bedroom if it does not have a closet. However, no such provision actually is contained in building codes.

According to the Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction, the typical closet is 8 ft × 2 ft (2.4 m × 0.6 m) for an adult or 5 ft × 2 ft (2.4 m × 0.6 m) for a child, with 14-inch (36-cm) shelves affixed to the rear wall.

Do you like closets? Or do you prefer movable storage solutions, such as wardrobes and shelving units?

Would you ever consider living in a house that has no closets?

Many people think that a room cannot count as a bedroom if it does not have a closet

Another instance of learning a small thing that surprises me about America (I assume).

Would you ever consider living in a house that has no closets?

A wardrobe serves the same function even if it takes up more space.

I like closets because I need a lot of storage (I have trouble throwing away things) and built-in storage means I don't have to pay for it separately. Of course, no house so far had enough built-in storage for everything, so I have some wardrobes and bookcases and so on. Would I consider a house that has no closets? If it's perfect otherwise, than probably yes, but discounting it by the price of the storage furniture I'd have to buy and install, and also the effort to find them (took me months to find decent bookcases that don't cost like I'm building a taxpayer-funded Presidential Library). And, alternatively, the house with ample built-in storage would get valued more for the same price.

Closets in bedrooms are not a thing here in Russia. The typical storage solutions in an apartment here are:

  • commieblocks have lowered ceiling in the corridor leading to the kitchen past the bathroom (if you've read Pavel Tsatsouline, he mentions it in the context of greasing the groove with pull-ups)
  • older houses (like, Stalin-era), often have broom closets in the hallways and corridors
  • newer houses might have a closet like this (my classmate used one as his bedroom), but they usually have a wall in a corridor that you cover with built-in furniture
  • then there's always the balcony
  • and the bedrooms usually have a freestanding wardrobe, mine does

If we're talking about actual single-family houses, then reach-in closets aren't a thing either. People either build walk-in pantries and wardrobes, or use freestanding storage.

I vastly prefer having closets. Shelves and Wardrobes "penetrate" into your living space in a uniquely explicit way. As the walls around the room go from predictable edges to a jagged collection of furniture, the percieved space is eliminated not just by the footprint of each item but also the area around it.

People own many ugly things that deserve to be hidden. My camping gear shouldn't be exhibited in my room or even really on a shelf. The closet is the best space for these things.

Pretty sure it's a Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac thing, though. My first house was actually closet free so not only did I consider it, I did live that way, though doing so taught me that I really took closets and closet space for granted. Movable storage worked, but took up what was otherwise (seemingly) valuable storage space and although I got furniture to compensate, closets were a much more natural and better fit for me. And when the time came to sell the house, the Realtor straight up told me to pay someone for closets as otherwise the bedrooms could not be counted as such.

Pretty sure it's a Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac thing, though.

A cursory search for "fannie mae closet" reveals no such requirement. (Having "limited closet or storage space" is mentioned in this document as one factor in appraising a house as "quality 6", the lowest possible rating. But it's only one of several factors.)

the Realtor straight up told me to pay someone for closets as otherwise the bedrooms could not be counted as such.

Obviously he failed to actually read the standards. Many such cases!

GUH, looks like you're absolutely right. I just did my own $Internets_Search and I'm seeing several sources that back you up on the FHA having no closet requirement. At the time, I had been impressed by my realtor and so I just assumed she knew what she was talking about but it just goes to show you how pervasive those sorts of common misconceptions can be. With as much crap and downright weird stuff I've dealt with when it comes to mortgage companies over the years, the whole closet thing seemed pretty tame in comparison!

Happy birthday to the Motte! If nothing else, it is a good time to remind myself that I am bad at predictions and should never play the prediction markets, because I didn't think we'd last this long. But here were are today, entering year four!

Just like last year, I will point out that the server costs continue to be borne by about 25 patrons, making us the Internet's leading (possibly only?) independent user-funded (ad-free!) open political speech forum.

As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.

(Proverbs 27:17)

Are server costs really ~$3750 a month?

The amount of money listed on Patreon isn't per patron, it's the combined total given by all Patrons per month.

Got it, that makes a lot more sense.

Happy birthday to the Motte! If nothing else, it is a good time to remind myself that I am bad at predictions and should never play the prediction markets, because I didn't think we'd last this long. But here were are today, entering year four!

Any takes on what made our lifeboat more successful than other Reddit pilgrim colonies throughout the internet? The lifecycle of every other I've seen is:

  1. One month of elevated activity, with everyone criticizing Reddit and celebrating their new home
  2. A purity spiral towards the far right starts
  3. Ghost town

I'm certain a few departed/banned left-leaning posters will accuse us of going through #2. But it's nothing like what happened to Ruqqus, for example, and #3 never arrived. We've been stable at 1000-2000 comments/week for years now. Subjectively I'd say quality is down, but eh.

Perhaps mottizens are just built different™?

Any takes on what made our lifeboat more successful than other Reddit pilgrim colonies throughout the internet?

I'm sure the emergent property of "success" in this context arises in several ways. For one, we do just have a great userbase. But one important aspect, I think, is probably that there is a real demand for spaces like this, and very little plausible competition.

It has been interesting, to me, to watch the SSC subreddit really struggle with CW posts lately. It's clear that a lot of people posting there want to talk about CW issues in a rationalist-adjacent way, and the most active moderators joined post-split and are a lot more tolerant of CW content (often going so far as to make tortured arguments for why this or that post isn't really CW, even though, uh, it clearly is). The CW thread was originally a pressure release valve, basically, keeping CW out of the rest of the sub (usually!). It improved the quality of the rest of the sub--but by being a part of the sub, the quality of the CW thread was itself increased.

But this only works if the mod team is genuinely committed to a "tone not content" moderation policy. In committing themselves to advancing one certain approach to American politics, Reddit admins made this increasingly difficult to achieve. Some of our own spinoffs, right and left (CWR and TheSchism, respectively), never really went anywhere, because they abandoned the one thing that people actually want from this space: content-neutral moderation.

And I say that, knowing full well how often we moderators are accused of thumbing the scales for the right, or the left, or whatever. But even those accusations are a reaffirmation from the userbase that it is content-neutral moderation that is desired, even if people don't always agree on how that looks in practice.

In short, what makes this place as successful as it is, remains the foundation of the space:

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases.

People actually want that, but almost everyone out there promising such a thing are actually trying to build a "neutral" space where they can prove that their particular views are the actually neutral ones. Literally millions of dollars in grant money have flowed to university research projects promising to "improve political discourse" and yet we do more to accomplish that here every single day, on a Patreon shoestring, than every single one of those universities combined.

I think that counts for something!

because they abandoned the one thing that people actually want from this space: content-neutral moderation.

Possibly a nitpick, possibly this is what you meant, but CWR was pretty content-neutral, though it was probably a bit too loose on the "moderation" part.

Yeah that place got squeezed to death I think more directly from being in the eye of Sauron, its users just got systematically purged over time I imagine and the ranks never got refilled.

In all serious, I think it's mostly down to goodish users and robust moderation, especially in avoiding #2.

thank you 25 patrons

That makes us what, three years old in our latest incarnation? Very lindy by niche internet fora standards. I look forward to many more.

independent user-funded (ad-free!) open political speech forum

Not for us mods, I have some of the spam messages seared into my retina, haha.

Very lindy by niche internet fora standards.

I was a member (and for a while, the only active moderator) of Yandere^2 Forum, which lasted IIRC a bit over 9 years*, although it was much, much less active than here.

*Eventually our host found out that we'd been sodomising their terms of service with a rusty fork, and nuked the entire site from orbit. We'd probably not have lasted nearly as long had we been Motte-sized; there's a long list of sites in the same vein - many actually crossing less lines than we did - that got killed by enemy action (r/yandere has survived, but only by amputating absolutely anything to do with RL).

Spam posters are guaranteed one set of eyeballs on this site. At least that Russian guy asking about who owns the website seems to have given up. Or I just haven't been the first to spot him in a while.

I literally didn’t know we had a Patreon.

The “Profile Views” button says “this page is only available to patrons”, can I actually view that if I become a patron?

To the best of my understanding, that is not actually a function of the site--maybe leftover code from rDrama? I would need @ZorbaTHut to say more about that.

Just like last year, I will point out that the server costs continue to be borne by about 25 patrons, making us the Internet's leading (possibly only?) independent user-funded (ad-free!) open political speech forum.

Petiton to pimp up Quincy, change the caption to "bitch better have my money", and equip him with that patreon link.

I was reading through some of The Dreaded Jim's archives, and I saw that he recommended a film called Kick-Ass. So I took a look, and... where has this movie been all my life?

Everything is great. The writing is great. The action is great. The music is great. This is the best Hollywood action movie I have seen since The Matrix.

The film is bold and unapologetic, working hard to earn its R rating; characters get shot, stabbed, crushed, and burned. The dialogue pulls no punches, mixing wit and profanity without ever coming across as overly edgy or performative.

My new waifu, Hit-Girl, is easily the best character in the movie; watching her mow down a hallway full of mooks to the tune of "Bad Reputation" is a delight. And that's after she infiltrates the bad guy's base by dressing up like a loli schoolgirl; I had no idea Americans could be so cultured!

The only problem is that the MC, Kick-Ass, is not nearly as awesome as Hit-Girl and Big Daddy, but that's alright; he can be the Ishmael to the latter's Ahab. And, unlike so many spineless MCs, he continually grows as a character; by the end of the film, he has gradudated from using a "gay-looking taser", as Hit-Girl rightly calls it, to dual wielding miniguns while flying on a jetpack.

I just don't understand why Roger Ebert didn't like it.

Roger Ebert had bad opinions about movies. He thought Fight Club was terrible.

I put more stock in Ebert's opinions than I do to the modal critic, but when he got it wrong, he could really get it wrong. He gave Blue Velvet one star pretty much solely because he objected to Isabella Rosselini appearing nude in it for what he considered ignoble aesthetic ends.

As much as I love Fight Club, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that it has significant pacing problems and the first half is much stronger than the second.

I think I recall loving the movie, and then hating the final scene/ending.

I vaguely remember that movie! I think I enjoyed it. I remember I loved Nick Cage in it, and somehow his trademark over performance seemed perfectly suited for his role in the film. Maybe I should give it another spin.

Have you ever seen Shoot Em Up? It's fantastic. Has some of the worst written dialog you'll ever hear, and two award winning actors chewing the scenery and giving that terrible dialog all they possibly can. Also does a great job of constantly escalating the action to increasingly outlandish and cartoonish places. It's a delight to see what absurdity they come up with next.

It was probably my favorite action flick up until I saw John Wick, and even then I should probably rewatch them both to really help me decide their ranking.

I remember very clearly how critically panned it was and how much I loved it. Need to re-watch.

A classic, to my mind. Honestly it's a rare case of the movie being even better than the source material, and the source material isn't bad! Sadly, the sequel didn't really do it for me, and it's a high water mark for Chloe Grace Moretz on film (though she has done some solid voice work since).

Court opinion:

  • While searching a drug dealer's house in accordance with a search warrant, police officers find the suspect's cell phone lying face up in his bedroom. The phone lights up by itself, displaying a text message from "Shana" in plain view of the officers. The officers know from their prior investigation that a person named Shana has been working with the suspect in his drug dealing, so they take a photograph of the text message and use it as the basis of a new warrant for a search of the phone.

  • At trial, the defendant moves to suppress as the fruit of an illegal search all evidence obtained from the phone. He argues: The last notification received by the phone occurred six hours before the officers searched the house. Therefore, the phone cannot have "lit up by itself" while the officers were there. In reality, the officers must have activated the phone's screen themselves in an illegal warrantless search and then lied on the application for the second warrant. The trial judge agrees with the defendant's reasoning and suppresses the evidence obtained from the phone. The appeals panel affirms.

Note:

  • There's a bunch of other evidence on which the defendant definitely still will be convicted of drug dealing.

  • The author of the appeals panel's opinion autistically changed nearly every quoted instance of "cell phone" to "cell[ular tele]phone".

Court opinion:

  • A man is in jail, with pending criminal charges for abusing his romantic partner. In January 2024, the woman additionally requests a protection-from-abuse order, which is granted.

  • In May 2024, the man is charged with criminal contempt for having contacted or attempted to contact the woman from jail 343 times in 24 days. In June, he is charged with another fifty instances of the same wrongdoing, circumventing the jail's efforts to prevent him from doing so. In August, he is charged with eight more instances.

  • The trial judge finds the man guilty of all 401 counts of criminal contempt. Each count carries a jail term of two days (with the possibility of parole after one day) and a fine of one dollar, for a total of 802 days and 401 dollars. The appeals panel affirms.

The author of the appeals panel's opinion autistically changed nearly every quoted instance of "cell phone" to "cell[ular tele]phone".

The image of him doing this is just killing me. “No colloquialisms in THIS court!”

Note to self: if you are using your phone to deal drugs, set up privacy settings so that messages do not show up when the phone is locked. Which actually is the setting on all my phones anyway even though I don't deal drugs.

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