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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2703 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 10, 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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So I recently watched Tarkovsky's Stalker, an eminently wanky, pretentious arthouse film I was fully expecting not to like. The plot is simple - three characters (the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor) conduct a pilgrimage through a wasteland called the Zone, supposedly filled with traps, to reach a room at the centre that's said to grant people their greatest desire.

I am the furthest thing from a cinephile you can imagine (I truly hate most of what New Hollywood put out, for example, and that's way less wanky than Tarkovsky), but I ended up watching the full thing and being thoroughly transfixed the whole way, and I can't really even explain why. The pacing is slothlike and tends to linger on specific moments, with an average shot length of over a minute and a total runtime of almost three hours, and not very much happens throughout the film - but there's such a dreamlike and liminal quality to the filmmaking that it doesn't really matter. The film fosters a trance-like rhythm that lulls you into a reverie and gradually accustoms you to its slow pace.

The Zone portrayed in the movie feels downright haunted, in spite of little that's overtly supernatural in it; the site is overrun with overgrown tanks from previous aborted military expeditions into the area, and abandoned industrial structures that were built on the site before it became anomalous. All the characters, particularly the Stalker, treat the area with a certain reverence, and you're constantly waiting for the Zone to react to the presence of the main characters. The film is perhaps the only one I've seen which perfectly captures the feeling of being in an empty church or temple, perhaps with all the candles somehow still lit or incense still burning, and being overcome with that ineffable sense of hallowedness which religious spaces inherently evoke. The kind of reverie which makes you feel as if you shouldn't speak loudly, because it somehow feels like doing so would be to defile the very space in which you're standing. I think the lack of any clear and explicitly spelled-out threat only intensifies that feeling, it almost creates a sense of pareidolia where you're assigning supernatural explanations onto events in the film, and given that Tarkovsky was a committed Orthodox Christian who infused the film with a lot of religious imagery, I find it hard to believe that this was not intentional.

Apparently Tarkovsky was incredibly fastidious about every shot in the movie, at one point asking that all the dandelions be picked out of a field before shooting. As such the filming process was arduous, with at least one reshoot required due to improper development of the film. An aspect of this that makes Stalker even more surreal to watch is that the production possibly killed much of the crew - all the shots in the Zone were filmed around a small river nearby a half-working hydroelectric station which was actually contaminated by a chemical plant upstream. Tarkovsky, his wife, and the actor that played the Writer all died from lung cancer after the filming of the movie.

I could analyse the movie to death (to be honest I didn't find the main thrust that difficult to glean), but it's a movie you feel in your gut more than pick apart, and as the director himself said:

Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.

In line with his filmmaking philosophy, it's a movie that's probably not going to click with everyone, and I don't think there's a coherent argument that could be made for why someone should like it. It's just a vibe.

I watched this one recently, too. A vibe indeed.

Good: Long, forlorn shots. Set design which may or may not consist of just finding shit lying around. Haunting use of silence and background noise. Getting the viewer to question the reality presented on screen. Surreality. This is a film where almost every frame is mundane, and yet you are certain that something else is at play.

Bad: incredibly long, forlorn shots. I can’t judge how much of each was actually necessary to achieve the good points. But my God, they just keep going. Much like the character monologues, some of which land, some of which don’t. The delivery is great, at least to my English-speaking ears. The actual writing is much less consistent. There are a couple bits of sound design that fall into this category, too, but I’m willing to forgive them.

Ugly: Anything resembling action. There’s not much of it, which is for the best, because it absolutely deflates the tension. The gate guards? The bomb dismantling? Honorable mention to the scene ten minutes in where the stalker’s wife writhes around on the floor.

I don’t know that I can call it good, but I recommend it.

I've never disliked a Tarkovsky movie, although Solaris was a little cheesy. He actually knew how to make an art house film, and is one of the few who saves the genre for me.

I'd recommend watching 8 1/2 as another good art house starter film if you haven't

Tarkovsky, his wife, and the actor that played the Writer all died from lung cancer

Weren't they all smokers? A ruined, disused factory is unlikely to have much in the way of volatile fumes.

I don't think the chemical plant was disused, rather it was emitting waste into the water and it's not implausible that it emitted fumes as well. Apparently the crew were getting allergic reactions on their faces as well during production.

Admittedly this is based on a statement by the sound designer Vladimir Sharun, and it's not quite clear how supported his claim is. But it's a thing that's been weaved into the mythology of the movie.

Lots of older films are just vibes and this is often missing in newer flicks.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feels similar, tho totally different.

People here like to sneer at litrpg as slop - that's way out of date:

https://x.com/JerusalemDemsas/status/1976740387344814365

A new type of entertainment called 'vertical drama' has emerged: shows filmed in vertical format to suit smartphone users. Each episode lasts between two and five minutes, and after a few teaser episodes you have to pay to watch the rest. The dramas are usually taken from popular web novels. A title can be produced in less than a week, and the requirements for the actors are basic: they just have to look good on camera. Nuance and subtlety are the preserve of artistic films; verticals need as many flips and twists as possible. Production is often sloppy. If a line is deemed problematic by viewers, the voice is simply muffled, without any attempt to cut or reshoot. The stories are sensational. One that has got lots of viewers excited is the supposedly forthcoming Trump Falls in Love with Me, a White House Janitor. According to an industry report, vertical drama viewers now number 696 million, including almost 70 per cent of all internet users in China. Last year the vertical market worth 50.5 billion yuan (€5 billion), surpassing movie box office revenue for the first time. It is projected to reach 85.65 billion yuan by 2027.

See this is where AI is going to make insane profits, disrupting/expanding the immensely lucrative but radically unprestigious media formats you never knew existed. Just a few minutes, no need for fancy acting or cinematography, just stimulus in your face. I bet this will come to the West too and make Netflix look like a joke. Maybe it already has.

Trump Falls in Love with Me, a White House Janitor

Truly the humble H-doujin is the ultimate artform, primal neuron activation captured and distilled into pure animal spikes of dopamine. Perfect in its simplicity, universal in its application. Through dick, unity.

Sturgeon's law really does apply to every genre of media in existence. AI generated videos are probably 99.9% slop, because of ease of generation compared to the old way of filming and recording, and because the average user has negative taste. It'll only get better, those lambasting it because of a lack of consistency, weird physics, poor audio etc will be in for a bad time when it's all fixed. Who am I kidding? They'll probably retreat to every more nebulous concerns such as "effort" or "artistic intention".

AI-generated media is, I think, necessarily generic. Generating proper art is antithetical to how AIs function. People seek novelty, and LLMs learn through repetition, so novelty is precisely what they fail to learn. AIs are also downstream of human experience, and they cannot ever be otherwise, so attempting to solve this problem is like trying to turn hyper-processed foods back into healthy ingredients. An experience is more real than the memory of said experience, and for the same reason, AI generated content is necessarily lacking to anyone with taste (those who can taste the difference between home-made food and microwaved supermarket food)

I recently saw a clip of David Lynch speaking some time before his death. In stark contrast to his usual affable, Jimmy Stewart-esque demeanour, Lynch sounds not merely exasperated, not personally affronted, but positively wounded by the recent trend of people watching films and TV shows on their phones. He patiently explains that his films are designed to be watched on a big screen with a real sound system: how can you possibly expect to experience the intended emotional reaction watching the film on a screen smaller than your hand, using the integrated speakers which can't reproduce any frequencies lower than 200 Hz? He practically begs the viewer to watch his films the way they were intended to be seen. Boy, can I ever relate.

Personally, I cannot fathom the idea of watching a movie or TV show on a smartphone. I recall exactly one instance in which I've done it: myself and the girlfriend were on a long train ride through Italy and had neglected to bring anything to read, so we watched The Collector on her iPhone, each wearing one of her Airpods. (I think the movie was mixed in mono, thankfully.) The only kinds of videos I'll watch on my phone are ones devoid of aesthetic merit: YouTube reviews, Instagram reels and so on. But perhaps people like me are going the way of the dodo.

For what it's worth, I can't imagine the idea of watching a film on a phone or even on a computer monitor. It's practically the only thing I use my television for these days, but I still insist on watching films on a television.

Television sets or (preferably) projector screens are for movie watching in company. Watching something together is fun.

But when I'm watching alone, I prefer studio headphones and my 30" 4K monitor 3' away from my face. It feels more immersive than IMAX (except for the bass, can't beat feeling explosions with your diaphragm).

I watch the majority of movies and shows on my phone. I'm also not a heathen, so I use decent enough headphones or earphones. The only time my phone speaker gets any use is when I'm in the shower.

And it's perfectly fine. I own a goddamn OLED 4k HDR high refresh rate TV, it's not like I don't have options. My phone also has a large, high res, HDR HRR display, and - when it's held up at a comfortable distance - it takes up enough of my visual field to give a comparable experience. And the taller refresh rate means less letterboxing when in landscape watching things shot wider than 16:9.

I'm not missing out on anything, and the convenience alone is well worth it.

I watch the majority of movies and shows on my phone. I'm also not a heathen...

You can't tell us how you do heathen shit and then expect us to believe you when you say you aren't a heathen. :P

Hey, I draw the line at listening to TikTok on the bus, on loudspeaker. Any heathenism beyond that can surely be excused?

Ok, fair. There are definitely degrees of heathen and that is way further than watching stuff on your phone. I'm honestly surprised people are rude enough to do that, but maybe I shouldn't be.

I own a goddamn OLED 4k HDR high refresh rate TV

Wait but why don't you use this

I also watch movies/TV on my phone when I'm anywhere that isn't my home (bus, airbnb without smart TV, driving to grocery store, whatever) but when I'm home the TV blows the phone out of the water. My girlfriend watches stuff on the iPad beside the TV and it makes me slightly crazy.

It's just not as convenient. I live in a shared apartment, so I can't really blast the (surprisingly decent) speakers. But I genuinely prefer watching things on my phone, for everything from movies to pirated anime to TV shows and YouTube.

The TV has never been used as a dumb or smart "TV". It's a monitor in use, hooked up to my pc. I would need to buy a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard to actually control anything from my bed, which is the only comfy place for a movie. I really don't care to get a portable HDD or use the in-built streaming apps, which is what I'd need for the old-fashioned experience. Poor thing hasn't even been hooked up to the wifi.

I own a goddamn OLED 4k HDR high refresh rate TV

Which you use as a monitor, right? How are you getting on with that? I nearly copied you but balked at the price.

As I have lamented before, I barely play video games these days. I've gone entire weeks without touching my setup. With important exams coming up, I suppose that's for the best.

I am quite happy with my choice (in terms of monitor) with a few caveats:

  1. 4k is demanding, even on a 5080. Quite a few games struggle to hit >70 fps, or require the use of upscaling which isn't always artifact free. Better optimized titles sing. I'm not CPU bottlenecked, I have a 9800x3d. This is mostly down to devs being bad at their jobs.

  2. This means I'm occasionally regretting not getting a QHD monitor instead, I don't care how unoptimized a AAA title is, my rig can handle that. I wouldn't actually make that trade, a QHD OLDED monitor would likely have been much smaller and more expensive than the TV.

  3. My bedroom is a bit cramped. I have to use that TV up close and personal. I'm mostly used to it, but this isn't the best from an ergonomic standpoint. If you're willing or able to use it from further away, it's a non-issue. If I was playing something like Forza, I could just kick back in bed with my controller.

Honestly, for that price? I couldn't have done better. It was this one:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DK46PM7T

It's currently out of stock, but I got it for £498, which is still cheaper than most QHD or 4k OLED gaming monitors! It's a fucking travesty. I tried looking for similar options for you, but everything is way more expensive, I'm lucky to have caught that sale.

For productivity purposes, it's pretty solid. A screen that big has a lot of real estate. I just don't use it for that purpose more than once in a blue moon.

As I have lamented before, I barely play video games these days.

True, and I apologise for not being around to play something as I said I might be. Work picked up a bit but mostly I’m too lazy even to be properly thoughtfully lazy…

I have my doubts about getting a massive screen because of eye strain. I’m told that if you have a big screen dead in front of you (ie you’re looking straight ahead rather than down a bit) your eyes instinctively try to focus on the horizon and it messes you up long term. I work on this thing most of the day so I want to be careful about that.

https://cluvens.com/scorpion-ergonomic-gaming-chair.html

A friend and I have a pact that when our careers takes off and we become immensely rich we will buy one of these lol

You have exams?

True, and I apologise for not being around to play something as I said I might be. Work picked up a bit but mostly I’m too lazy even to be properly thoughtfully lazy…

Not your fault in the least! We've both got other things going on haha. If you do ever get the hankering, just drop me a message, but I'm not playing much simply because I don't feel like it, not just because I don't have anyone to play with.

I have my doubts about getting a massive screen because of eye strain. I’m told that if you have a big screen dead in front of you (ie you’re looking straight ahead rather than down a bit) your eyes instinctively try to focus on the horizon and it messes you up long term. I work on this thing most of the day so I want to be careful about that.

I'm not an ophthalmologist, but as far as I can tell whoever told you that is misinformed. A quick search doesn't come up with anything regarding horizon seeking or longterm effects on vision. We both wear glasses, there's no harm in getting close to the TV.

Having the screen lower than your head/eyes? That's good, but mostly because of the ergonomics. You don't want to be craning up for prolonged periods of time, though if you're mostly looking straight ahead I wouldn't worry too much.

Eye strain? Best handled with brightness adjustments and regular breaks.

If you're using the TV from >3 feet away, you're peachy. You might want a lower desk to put it below eye level.

https://cluvens.com/scorpion-ergonomic-gaming-chair.html

Mom, hold me, I'm scared. I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but it really cements the super-villain's lair look. I'm not sure that thing can mount a TV, but maybe?

A friend and I have a pact that when our careers takes off and we become immensely rich we will buy one of these lol

At that price, I get it.

You have exams?

Unfortunately, yes. Notoriously, unnecessarily difficult ones. And two more if I pass this one. And perhaps many more depending on where my career takes me. It's okay, I'm used to giving exams. I daresay I'm half-decent at them!

TVs kind of suck as monitors FYI

So the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section on Tubi is pretty much interdimensional cable from Rick & Morty. Case in point, here's the movie Dragonfyre (2013).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CaXAKE4jdhw

An army of orcs and shit want to invade the earth through a magic portal, but their conquest is repeatedly thwarted by a mighty wizard armed with terrifying magic, AKA the gun nut whose land the portal opens on to. This movie is like if Sauron got a portal to the ranch of some guntuber and the host of Mordor got its ass blown off by a grumpy army vet.

Okay not really, it's more like the shitty bargain-basement version of the movie you're imagining. It looks like some asshole youtuber made it or something. Half the movie is just violence porn of orcs getting butchered by machine gun fire while trying to set up catapults and shit, but these guys can't even muster the filmcraft to employ squibs, so it's just guys falling to the floor while 90's video game CGI blood spurts go off over them.

There's an American Indian shaman with healing powers who dual-wields katanas even though he's blind and wears a blindfold to make double sure we know he's blind. I feel like this tells you a lot about what kind of film this is.

Nothing about the movie's thumbnail or blurb on Tubi gave me any clue what it was about. It just showed a dragon and said some generic shit about orcs. I just put this on for the hell of it because I love Z-list fantasy trash and then things started getting fun out of nowhere. Nobody seems to have made any funny reviews of it or anything either, and I felt like telling someone about it, so there it is.

their conquest is repeatedly thwarted by a mighty wizard armed with terrifying magic, AKA the gun nut whose land the portal opens on to. This movie is like if Sauron got a portal to the ranch of some guntuber and the host of Mordor got its ass blown off by a grumpy army vet.

I'd point out that this general concept has in fact already been done before, to cinematic perfection, in the film Tremors.

The pan to the back wall may be one of the greatest comedy shots in movie history.

This is something Sora 2 should help independent creators with.

I was blissfully unaware of Tubi until I recently watched a YouTuber review the literary masterpiece titled "This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib", by the legendary Quan Millz.

Then I became blissfully aware that they intended to make a movie out of it. I can't help but add that to my watch list, it's a task that's impossible to fail. I don't know how you can make a good movie out of such source movie, but there's scope for excellence, through either playing it straight or the "so bad it's good" approach.

Tubi is where I learned that there's a series of like twelve movies about a possessed bong that kills people, and ten more about an evil gingerbread man that kills people, and they have crossovers and shit. I've seen movies on there worse than what I'm convinced I could make on my own with no money or experience.

I've watched a kaiju movie so cheap it used painted cardboard boxes and someone's collection of model 1950's classic cars to make the city. They used a model steam locomotive to represent an urban elevated train, complete with a 19th century looking engineer who I think is just there because it's his model and he screams stuff like "Whoa Nelly!"

And these are all relatively modern American productions. That's not even going into like weird decades-old Italian B-movies about hot women who fuck snakes and turn into monsters and shit, etc. etc. It's a goldmine. They even have famous RedLetterMedia stinkers. I've seen Suburban Sasquatch and Last Vampire On Earth on there.

Tubi is manna from heaven for people who like weird stupid bullshit.

J.J. Abrams' Star Trek Into Darkness is a wild ride and a special effects extravaganza, but its good points are overshadowed by the dumbest move ever: recasting Ricardo Montalbán's Khan Noonien Singh as English actor Benedict Cumberbatch. Whatever one might think of the practice of racewashing in film, this is a move that made nobody happy (except Cumberbatch's agent and banker). The casting was intended as a surprise reveal, and when people guessed correctly, Abrams lied to the fans. So dumb.

So I fixed it.

This scene takes place after "John Harrison" the augmented human defeated a cadre of Klingon soldiers and then surrendered to Chris Pine's Kirk and crew. It's largely Claude's prose, since I was more interested in reading it than writing it, but I've edited it with a weed-whacker.

The sound of Captain Kirk's bootsteps echoed against the brig's sterile walls as he approached the cell's transparent barrier. Beyond it, the man who called himself John Harrison sat with an unsettling stillness, watching him with eyes that seemed to calculate even in repose.

"Why is there a man in that torpedo?" Kirk demanded.

Harrison tilted his head slightly. "There are men and women in all those torpedoes, Captain. I put them there."

"Who the hell are you?"

Harrison rose smoothly, each movement economical and precise. "A remnant of a time long past. Genetically engineered to be superior so as to lead others to peace in a world at war. But we were condemned as criminals, forced into exile. For centuries we slept, hoping when we awoke things would be different." His voice carried the weight of disappointment, of expectations betrayed. "But as a result of the destruction of Vulcan, your Starfleet began to aggressively search distant quadrants of space. My ship was found adrift. I alone was revived."

Kirk crossed his arms. "I looked up John Harrison. Until a year ago, he didn't exist."

"John Harrison didn't exist," the augment agreed, "because János Horváth was planning the conquest of Europe when Khan Noonien Singh fell." He said the name with something between reverence and bitterness. "I was second in command of Britain's domestic intelligence apparatus when Khan surrendered. I never got to see if my strategies would have succeeded."

He moved closer to the barrier, and Kirk forced himself not to step back. "Marcus found it easier to give me a name with no history. A blank slate. But I am exactly who I claimed to be: one of Khan's officers. His left hand, if you will, while he was the mind that shaped an empire."

"If you're not Khan," Kirk said slowly, "then why should I believe anything you're saying?"

Harrison's smile was thin and sharp. "Captain, please. It would be so much easier for your pride to accept that you were beaten in hand-to-hand combat by the great Khan himself—tyrant, legend, the boogeyman of your history texts—than by one of his lieutenants." He spread his hands. "But I, like he, like everyone in those torpedoes, was designed to lead, Captain Kirk. Engineered. Every chromosome optimized, every genetic sequence refined to eliminate the accumulated errors of a million years of random mutation."

His voice took on an almost evangelical fervor. "You are the product of blind accidents. Your ancestors crawled out of the sea, stumbled through evolution's lottery, and called it progress. We were built. Purpose-made by men who followed the rules of reality to their ultimate conclusion: design, even by their limited minds, was far better than a roll of the dice. My reflexes are five times faster than yours. My strength, three times greater. My cognitive processing—" He paused, searching for smaller words. "You think with the tools that survival happened to give you. I think with an instrument precision-crafted for the task."

Spock, who had been listening in silence, finally spoke. "Yet you surrendered to that 'blind lottery' when you allowed Captain Kirk to capture you."

"I surrendered to save my crew," Harrison said quietly. "The only comrades I have left. Marcus used them as hostages, frozen in torpedoes like specimens. I built those weapons for him, yes—I helped him realize his vision of a militarised Starfleet. He sent you to fire my torpedoes on an enemy planet." His jaw tightened. "The Klingons would come searching, and you would have no chance of escape. Marcus would finally have his war."

"I watched you open fire on a room full of unarmed Starfleet officers," Kirk shot back. "You killed them in cold blood."

"Marcus took my crew from me!" Harrison's composure finally cracked, fury blazing through. "He used my friends—my family—to control me. I tried to smuggle them to safety by concealing them in the very weapons I designed, but I was discovered. I had no choice but to escape alone, with every reason to suspect that Marcus had killed every single person I hold most dear. So I responded in kind. And now because I made those choices, they live."

He leaned forward, and Kirk saw something raw beneath the calculated facade. "My crew is my family, Kirk. Is there anything you would not do for your family?"

A proximity alert shrieked through the ship before Kirk could answer.

"Proximity alert, sir," Sulu's voice crackled over the comm. "There's a ship at warp heading right for us."

"Klingons?" Kirk asked.

Harrison's expression shifted to something almost like satisfaction. "At warp? No, Kirk. We both know who it is."

"I don't think so, Captain," Sulu responded. "It's not coming from Qo'noS."

Kirk was already moving. "Lieutenant, move Harrison to med bay. Post six security officers on him." He paused at the door, looking back. "And Lieutenant? He's exactly as dangerous as he claims to be."

I had a culture war thread idea which would be along the lines of "we all live in a honor culture." In the first part of The Leviathan, Hobbes spells out how honor works and it occured to me that in contrast to how "honor culture" is used as a kind of derisive term towards various outgroup-type targets, viewing even the enlightened classes through the lens of honor culture feels like it could be a fairly profitable essay topic. I'm curious if anyone here has thoughts or reading suggestions on that.

That whole section of Leviathan can be boiled down to honor as deference to and respect for power. There are some old Moldbug essays that try to flesh this out concretely.

How do you think sports leagues should handle past wild-west-type PED usage when discussing historical records?

My preferred competitive spectator sports growing up were baseball and football, with a sprinkling of MMA/Boxing. So I was used to the ways that those sports dealt with steroids. Baseball whinged about it, drummed Barry Bonds out of the sport over it, and everyone stopped talking about Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire and the homerun record (suddenly people started talking about the AL home run record, which is theoretically clean), steroid users are mostly being kept out of Cooperstown, but it's still understood that records and stats accumulated by enhanced players "count." Football and boxing occasionally toss a suspension or a fine or a ban at somebody for steroid use, but mostly sweep it under the rug and ignore it. But those aren't the only methods!

Lately I've been enjoying recreational cycling, and listened to Nige Tassell's Three Weeks, Eight Seconds about the 1989 Tour De France while riding. It was exactly the kind of tightly written sports history book I love, from the title I knew it would end with a tight race, having no knowledge of cycling I didn't know who would win. The EPO era hangs over the historical narrative, looming "in the future" according the speakers who all deny that PED use was common at the time. Indurain and Lemond take star turns in 1989, between the two of them they carry the yellow jersey to 1995 and just before the Lance Armstrong era. But Lance has suffered complete damnatio memoriae from cycling authorities, and it's kind of fascinating how much cycling journalists and writers accept this politically correct erasure. Wikipedia lists the seven tours between 1999 and 2005 as having "no winner." And that weirdly Stalinist turn continues throughout cycling media, even in unrelated publications like the Wall Street Journal. This summer I followed the Tour casually, reading the articles in the WSJ, that kind of thing. Something I noticed was that people talk about Pogacar having the potential to match, and then beat, the record mutually held by Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Induráin of five tour wins. This ignores Lance's record of seven consecutive tour wins. Then they go on to talk about Pogacar being maybe the GOAT, surpassing Merckx or Indurain, with no mention of Armstrong. Tbh, on wikipedia, it's pretty hard to figure out Lance Armstrong's resume, because the sidebar with his "major accomplishments" just lists a couple relatively minor wins [Grand Tours: Tour de France 2 individual stages (1993, 1995) Tour de Luxembourg (1998) Tour DuPont (1995, 1996)] while refusing to list the seven consecutive tour de France wins. Indurain, by comparison, is listed in the first sentence as the only 5-time winner to win them consecutively. It just seems to be an absolutely bizarre way of treating the topic, and I have to assume that this is the result of some serious pressure from UCI to threaten any journalist who talks about Armstrong as a winner with such severe loss of access that writing about cycling would be impossible. Part of me wonders if this is the result of the European origin of TPTB in cycling lead them to particularly want to forget the period when an American came in and dominated the sport.

This seems like a bad way to handle things. Baseball fans acknowledge that Bonds lived and hit home runs, even if most of them hate him for various reasons. They might talk about the clean home run record, or the AL home run record, but they don't ignore the real home run record. My generation of fans, our memories are of Bonds and Sosa and McGwire and we're getting those memories back into play, I'm not sure why cycling fans don't feel the same way. Cycling fans seem to want to ignore the real TDF records, and make them impossible to compare, and pretend Lance Armstrong in particular never happened. I wonder if we'll see him readmitted to the fold if and when Pogacar wins eight, as then he will be a less threatening figure to cycling history and can be rehabilitated.

A third point for comparison: olympic weightlifting has twice shifted the weight classes in concert with new testing rules, so that the old records "don't exist" in the sense that the old records are from old weight classes and the new records are for new weight classes. We might be able to squint and say "gee they used to be a lot fucking stronger;" but there's never an unbreakable record for a current weight class the way no one will ever hit 80 home runs without steroids.

What method do you prefer? How should sports leagues deal with steroid records?

I think they should just be honest. Record the records, slap an * on it and explain in the notes. Assuming strong evidence; I've no idea what a sufficient level of suspicion would be to noteworthy though.

I’ve been thinking about a very similar topic to this one recently; the actual % of frauds in cheaters in every field, not just sports.

A man near me made a career in a certain field, climbing the ranks until he got to the top of the local version of this institution. It’s a public profession, and he was briefly in the news, so I want to stay vague to not compound his problems. His profession requires a 4 year degree and some professional certs, and advancing up the ranks generally demanded a masters, then a doctorate at the top. Not always, some get away with a master’s, but most of the people in the role around the nation have one. Turns out he didn’t actually have a phd, or a masters. He just self-studied the material while pretending to be in a program for the amount of time it would have normally taken. He’d worked in the doctorate level roll for over a decade before someone hired a PI to investigate the guy for some reason, and it all fell apart.

It seems like it was a lot easier to fake it in the past, before the internet. There were also fewer examples to make people suspicious. I wonder just how many people have to one extent or another “faked it”: PEDs in sports, fake degrees, fake job histories/references etc. Fake martial arts history or military claims were one of the first ones to really get exposed by the internet. I know more than one person who financed the launch of their successful, life-defining business with the profits of criminal enterprise, usually selling drugs. Is this even the same category? There’s also the currently hot trend of getting real advanced degrees and positions using fake (or plagiarized) scholarship.

Who knows how many skeletons are out there in how many closets. I think we are alive in a particularly fruitful time for discovering these stories.

To attempt an actual answer, I think it's because cycling is an individual sport with clear rules and an adjudicative body. Armstrong not only broke the rules, but took active measures to conceal his rulebreaking. And there was no question about what he did. Contrast this with the MLB, where no one is discussing whether or not the wins were legitimate, rather whether the records should have an asterisk. And the only case where anyone is really talking about that is with respect to the Barry Bonds home run records, which already have their own problems. The Aaron record is the most defensible one to revert back to, but the McGwire one can't be done because he was juicing too, which takes us back to Maris, who had his own asterisk discussion because he had a longer season to work with than Babe Ruth did. Plus there's the issue that if you officially strip Bonds and others of home runs for record purposes, then shouldn't you make them not count for games, either? It gets complicated real fast.

And add to that the much thinner evidence that Bonds was juicing. It's one of those things where people who were sort of paying attention to the scandal at the time are aware of the broad strokes, but no one remembers the actual evidence. Bonds never admitted doing anything illegal, and it basically comes down to a crooked doctor and that his head got bigger (which is an effect of HGH, which wasn't banned at the time). It isn't a 1–1 comparison but they do this all the time in auto racing for cars that don't pass post-race inspection. A few years back they disqualified the winner and the runner up of the Pocono race because they had an illegal piece of tape on the front of their cars. One can make the argument that this had real-world implications rather than merely historical ones because they lost the points they would have earned for the season and got zeroes instead, but that seems to be more severe than not being recognized on Wikipedia (which they aren't). And for what it's worth, the official NCAA coaching wins lists don't include wins that were stripped by the NCAA. For the 2004 USC team, it merely gives an asterisk, but that's understandable since the BCS wasn't run by the NCAA and the NCAA does not award a championship.

To attempt an actual answer

So wait, what system do you prefer or think is best?

Then they go on to talk about Pogacar being maybe the GOAT, surpassing Merckx or Indurain, with no mention of Armstrong.

Even following your philosophy of just taking the result at the very second itvwas achieved at face value, Armstrong has to claim to being spoken in the same breath as Merckx.

Arnstrong cared only about adoration of normies, by focusing on the one race normies know. This is in total opposition to the old masters, who would race all year.

prestigelisten.dk follows your philosophy in treating Armstrong as a 7 Tour winner, and even according to it, he is merely 9th in the All-time list.

Edit: Armstrong is just the most-familiar-to-American-casual-fans-of-cycling of their memories of the moment of victory, not matching official records. Even the GOAT won his 3rd Il Lombardia on 13th October 1973, only to have it yanked from him on 8th of November 1973 when doping was discovered. Would have made it 20 total Monument wins, but nobody assigns him this win today.

If you want to apply your philosophy consistently, contemporeneous coverage cycling is key, not picking and chosing when to trust official results and when one's memory.

But examining primary sources is hard, thus Armstrong won 7 Tours (primacy of lived experience over post facto investigation), and Merckx merely 19 Monuments (few Americans today can say they saw Merckx win the 1973 Il Lombardia as it happened, thus they defer to edited results).

I don't actually have much of a position on who the GOAT of cycling is. I don't know much about the topic. I'm still not entirely sure what a domestique does that's so valuable exactly.

What I object to is that in trying to learn about the topic, most of the sources I would rely on for the question in any other sport, like Wikipedia tables or mentions in newspaper sports sections, they won't tell me easily that Merckx won in '73. It makes for a complicated and politically correct universe.

And FWIW, Ninth is pretty high. In NBA terms that's what, Magic Johnson or Larry Bird? That's the kind of athlete that gets discussed by fans pretty consistently. Not one who is memory holed.

Part of me wonders if this is the result of the European origin of TPTB in cycling lead them to particularly want to forget the period when an American came in and dominated the sport.

I think this is not a small part of it. After the LeMond-Fignon battle there hasn't been a French winner of the TDF. And oh boy, if you get one of the home fans drunk on the side of the road and ask them the right questions, 100% there's quite a few that are salty about it. It probably has hurt local sponsorship as well which isn't great give it's quite burdensome for the local towns to host. The dependence of cycling on Lance followed by his fall, was probably bad for the sport in net. Not unlike the Tiger Woods effect, but golf has arguably recovered better. I have no doubt Lance ruled peloton with an iron fist, but I also doubt anyone at Tour level was riding clean in that era. Ignoring the ethical question for a second though, to me his greatest tactical error was not having a plan to bow out gracefully. Lance had enough clout to tie up the UCI and quiet LeMond, but he left a void when he left the first time. There's no way the Tour organizers were going to let Floyd Landis of all guys continue the American domination of the sport. The crazy thing is Lance probably could have gotten away with it if he had just staid retired, and like did anything else. I doubt anyone would have cared about the B-samples if he had just chosen to slowly fade from public view. The UCI busting Landis and then Landis immediately outing him should have been his warning not to come back.

I do think it's strange people accept The Court of Arbitration for Sport/UCI/ASO committee decisions for who "won" a given race. Like the race is "won" when you crush your enemies and see them driven before you. Take for example in the 2001 tour. The experience of following the tour was that on the road Lance Armstrong won the day he gave Jan Ullrich "The Look" on Alpe-d'Huez and Jan couldn't follow. Sipping champagne rolling into Pairs or hoisting the trophy on the Champs-Élysées were just formalities after that point.

olympic weightlifting

I know the problems associated with it, but I still think they should have brought back the clean and press when they redid the weight-classes in weightlifting. In its modern form the lifters are very explosive and athletic looking, but there's not really an event in the Olympics that has a pure test of static strength. I for one am willing to sacrifice the 20 km walk from the program if it means we can have the clean and press.

As far as general principles on records go, I treat it like my head cannon when I don't like what they've done with a show I like. I just ignore the "official" cannon. It's not like they can forcibly reprogram my mind (yet) and it's not like I'm going to all Custer's Last Stand to argue with someone about it. I just nod politely if someone wants to talk about the official cannon, then promptly go back to ignoring it exits.

After the LeMond-Fignon battle there hasn't been a French winner of the TDF.

They didn't schedule the final stage as a time trial again until 2024, which I was honestly a bit surprised at.

I know the problems associated with it, but I still think they should have brought back the clean and press when they redid the weight-classes in weightlifting. In its modern form the lifters are very explosive and athletic looking, but there's not really an event in the Olympics that has a pure test of static strength. I for one am willing to sacrifice the 20 km walk from the program if it means we can have the clean and press.

Race walking and clean and press suffer from the same problem, and I'd rather scrap both. At least with the race walking you can come up with some kind of shoe sensors that automatically disqualify runners, but with the clean and press? It will always be a cheater's sport.

there's not really an event in the Olympics that has a pure test of static strength.

The clean and press is hella cool but if there's a clean in there it's not a test of static strength. And to be honest given the techniques they were using for the press it's not static strength either. Maybe someone could come up with some autistic ruleset for the press but who wants to see that? Just add a deadlift event and be done with it.

I have been absolutely addicted to the song "Golden" from k-pop demon hunters on Netflix.

I'm not the only one, apparently it's a huge chart topper.

The story of the lead vocalist is pretty fascinating. She was part of some k-pop training academy but they never launched her career cuz she was "too old" 7 years ago. She left them and went into composing songs. She was good at that, got some of her songs picked up by other famous k-pop groups and then got tapped to write the songs for the k-pop demon hunters movie. Well she was demoing the songs for the studio, and they thought "you sound great" so she got the lead role. Now she is the biggest (maybe second biggest) k-pop star ever.

The group just recently did their first live performance on jimmy Kimmel.

"It's a bop!", as the kids say. Very very radio-poppy, but I like its energy!

I've heard that one, it just didn't speak to me. I look at the phenomenon of K-pop, including this movie, and consider its mass-popularity strong evidence of alien invasion.

That being said, there is a song named Golden that I love. Or rather, this remix that throws in some Tame Impala:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=RbuVplqW5vQ

Same, I've got nothing against the occasional pop banger, k or otherwise, but didn't land with me at all

It's not bad, but doesn't come close to this soul cover of "How you Remind Me" by Nickelback. Fair warning I believe it's AI: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BFaK-uBsrl8

Good version of Black Parade as well.

Link???

https://youtube.com/watch?v=T-rfu0p3ChY

THIS IS GREAT WOAH!!!! Ty sir.

I knew the songs were big online, but I was still surprised to hear one of the other neighborhood moms singing "Golden" to herself while we were cleaning up after a recent block party.

I have been absolutely addicted to the song "Golden" from k-pop demon hunters on Netflix.

It sounds to me like one of these songs that parody a genre by ticking every box. Designed to be perfect, but disturbingly generic. Like a "house style" PonyXL face.

Nah, Golden is just Heaven by DJ Sammy redux - a quintessential feel good house song. Like Heaven, it is great, though admittedly not inspired like the best Daft Punk, for example.

6 years ago Riot Games released KDA kpop song. I liked it way more than Golden.

Yeah. My daughter keeps playing it and to me it's like fine but like a portmanteau B- version of the Blackpink style of KPop.

Designed to be perfect, but disturbingly generic.

That's the movie's whole shtick. It's the emotional equivalent of ludicrously empty calories. This takes real skill to accomplish, and I'm genuinely impressed with how well the movie and the music really present as the apotheosis of pop. It's the perfect emotional dessert--utterly devoid of nutritive value.

That's interesting. I thought it had a lot to say about how shame can fester and turn into something worse, about how you don't really accept someone if you try and cover up the unsavory parts of them, about how when you lie to your friends because you're afraid of what they might think, the LIE is much more important than what you originally were afraid of them judging you for.

Maybe these seem really straightforward or trite, but it's a kids movie, and those are pretty good kids movie morals.

I found it really confusing on mixing up shame and guilt together. Rumi is ashamed of being half demon but she's not guilty the same way the guy who sold out his family for a comfortable life.

This sounds like something a Douglas Coupland's character would say.

Generation X, baby.

More like Shampoo Planet. IIRC, that's the book with the protagonist celebrating stuff like nationwide homogeniety of goods and services.

I started watching Xavier Renegade Angel, perhaps because mosquitoes laid eggs in my brain. It's... something. Each episode makes me feel like I'm on drugs, or that I would benefit from being on drugs. I'm not sure if it's the best or worst thing I've ever watched.

My husband made me watch an episode of that show once, and I vote worst.

Another incident of political violence happened on Sunday. A man attempted to bomb members of the Supreme Court while they attended a traditional start-of-term Mass at St. Matthews Cathedral in DC. We can quibble a bit about his motives, but it's being reported that his manifesto included animosity towards the Supreme Court, Catholics, Jews and ICE.

Now, you may be wondering if I posted this in the wrong thread, but I did not because this plot was so utterly fucking stupid and inept that I'm not even mad about it. It's just hilarious from start to finish.

The Gang Bombs the Supreme Court

Louis Geri of New Jersey, on the morning of Sunday October 5th, set up a tent outside the cathedral, because he was already banned from the cathedral. I have never heard of someone being banned from a cathedral, and can't find any reporting about why he was banned, but I maintain high hopes that the story is delightfully stupid.

The police, attempting to clear the area ahead of a mass that was to be attended by sitting SC justices, told Geri he had to leave and remove his tent. Geri replied, “You might want to stay back and call the federales, I have explosives.” Quoting that article,

The affidavit said the officer notified a bomb technician with the Metropolitan Police Department’s Bomb Squad of Geri’s actions, and they approached him together. After the bomb technician told Geri that he needed to move because of a special event, he said, “I’m aware of that.”

The affidavit said Geri then threatened to test an explosive in the street.

“Do you want me to throw one out, I’ll test one out in the street? I have a hundred plus of them,” he said.

After being told he would be removed against his will, Geri said, “Several of your people are gonna die from one of these.”

Geri later handed the bomb technician a manifesto consisting of nine pages torn from a notebook with the title “Written Negotiations for the Avoidance of Destruction of Property via Detonation of Explosives," according to the affidavit.

A review of the manifesto “revealed his significant animosity towards the Catholic church, members of the Jewish faith, members of SCOTUS and ICE/ ICE facilities,” the affidavit said.

From another article:

The sergeant opened the tent flap fully after noticing a butane lighter and another object in his hand, which outraged Geri, who then reached into a bag and told her, “All right, if you want to do it, we’ll do it now.”

He proceeded to pull out multiple capped vials containing yellow liquid with explosives taped to them and told her to “step away or there’s going to be deaths.” Police retreated and formed a perimeter.

He was handcuffed after a brief tussle shortly afterward when he got out of the tent to urinate on some trees.

Friends, this is some actual Charlie Day level shit right here. "Officer- no, officer, you can't arrest me! I called time out pee break! You can't- you can't arrest a guy after he calls pee break! What am I supposed to pee in my tent?"

He had "200" "explosive devices", but many of them were just fireworks he rolled in thermite, and others were just vials of nitro rubber-banded to what I'm guessing were the most ghetto detonators ever built.

I am just in awe of this mans dedication to executive disfunction. I honestly think I could have planned, built and executed a better attack when I was twelve. Pitting Geri against the DC Metropolitan police is just unfair; as a foe, he's more in the range of being an antagonist for a Wolf Scout den. But that would cause it's own nightmare scenario, because Geri is a sex offender:

Geri was at a Scottsdale doughnut shop in May 2021 when a woman and her daughter, 4, noticed he was standing in line behind them with his genitals exposed, according to court documents.

The woman asked Geri why he was exposed and Geri told her that she “can’t tell (him) how to dress,” court documents said.

Geri left the shop and walked down Hayden Road with his boxer shorts tucked underneath his exposed testicles, said court documents.

An officer, responding to complaints, arrested Geri, according to court documents.

Geri, who represented himself at trial, admitted he did expose himself but said he did not do so with the intention of offending anyone, court documents said. He said his intention was to “exercise a perceived freedom of attire,” according to court documents.

Geri was convicted by a jury in September 2021 of two counts of indecent exposure, with one of those being a felony because it involved a child, court documents said. He was sentenced to three years of probation.

Geri appealed his conviction, again representing himself, saying Arizona had no law against public nudity and that being nude was a constitutional right, according to court documents. The Arizona Court of Appeals rejected his argument and upheld his convictions in June 2022.

Again, not even mad, this guy is just amazing.

Getting banned from cathedrals actually happens a lot, because cathedrals are a) a magnet for cantankerous idiots and b) usually near other, lower profile Catholic churches, so no one feels guilty about it at all.

Geri was at a Scottsdale doughnut shop in May 2021 when a woman and her daughter, 4, noticed he was standing in line behind them with his genitals exposed, according to court documents.

Geri, who represented himself at trial

Those two sentences tell me everything I need to know about his executive functioning.

How do you get smart enough to manufacture thermite and nitro, plus detonators, but not smart enough to realise that you're going to get arrested when you leave them behind to take a piss in front of police officers? Serious question. Is it just that mental illness affects different cognitive capacities differently?

If I google "nitromethane" I get two sales links among the results; apparently reputable racing and model racing leagues think it's too dangerous to allow, but it's not banned for private use? Well, either that or the two shops were Fuel Booster Inc and All Top Fuels and either would be happy to rush a team of "salesmen" to my house after I placed an order.

Thermite is basically powered aluminum mixed with powdered rust, isn't it? I once considered a demo for my kids, and at that time IIRC the only obstacle to getting everything off Amazon was that the smallest sizes for sale would make for a lot of demos. I'm not sure how it would be useful for a would-be murderer, though, unless the target can be convinced to stand in a specific spot under a prepared mixture and then not look up when they hear sparks flying above their head.

Proper detonators I've heard are difficult to make, but any crazy person can make something they think is a detonator, if it never ends up getting tested.

I wonder if the plan (to the extent that any of this can be called a plan) was to throw the nitro, and then remotely ignite it with the thermite-tipped bottle rockets.

That's something I might have come up with when I was 10.

I probably could've told the difference between nitroglycerine and nitromethane when I was 10, but it's not that big of a mistake to make.

Court opinion:

  • An officer finds a woman asleep in her still-running car in a parking lot. When roused, the woman appears to be intoxicated, and admits that she used methamphetamine 16 hours ago. The officer arrests her and takes her to a hospital for a blood test.

  • At the hospital, the woman consents to the blood test. However, after four failed attempts to draw blood, she withdraws consent due to the pain. The officer gets a warrant and the woman cooperates with a fifth, nonconsensual attempt to draw blood, but that attempt also fails. (Some cursory searching indicates that (according to various reputable-looking sources, including this paywalled standard) the normal maximum number of attempts is three.) The woman refuses to cooperate with any further attempted blood draws. She offers to take a urine test, but the officer doesn't take her up on that offer.

  • The woman is convicted of driving while intoxicated (sentence six months of jail with the possibility of parole after three days) and obstruction of justice (sentence two years of probation concurrent with the jail time; the appeals panel notes that this appears to make no sense). However, the appeals panel vacates the obstruction conviction (and remands for resentencing).

    Norris did not commit an unlawful act concurrent with, physically interfere with, or attempt to thwart the investigation at the outset by refusing to cooperate with the police's effort to execute a valid search warrant. Instead, Norris complied with the police officer's investigation until the point that the multiple failed blood-draw attempts became painful and, it appears by any reasonable and common-sense standard, futile. Under these circumstances, we believe: (1) the statute does not compel a person subject to a DUI blood draw to submit to an unreasonable number of attempted blood draws, as was the case here; and, more importantly, (2) a defendant's refusal to cooperate after five failed attempts does not prove her intention to obstruct the trooper from obtaining a blood sample.

RSMeans is an authoritative source of cost-estimation data for construction contractors in the US (and Canada). The current residential dataset costs about 0.5 k$/a in paper or 1 k$/a online. However, a paper copy for year 2019—just before the pandemic produced a paradigm shift in construction costs—can be purchased for just 25 dollars. Even if such an old version cannot be used for current cost estimates, it still is interesting to look at for comparison purposes.

For example: Let's say I want to build a house for seven occupants. I have three designs.

  • One-story: 1182 ft2, three bedroom+bathroom suites

  • 1.5-story (finished attic under steep roof): 1560 ft2, one bedroom+bathroom suite on floor 1, two bedroom+bathroom suites on floor 2

  • Two-story: 1541 ft2, one bathroom on floor 1, three bedroom+bathroom suites on floor 2

The book indicates that the second story of the two-story design can be built in three different ways—above ground (standard), below ground (finished basement), or halfway below ground (bi-level). That yields five different cost estimates.

  • One-story: 1182 ft2 × (115.45 base* + 4.95 for air conditioning) $/ft2 + 2 extra bathrooms × 6489 $/extra bathroom = 155 k$

  • 1.5-story: 1560 ft2 × (111.3 base + 3.69 for air conditioning) $/ft2 + 2 extra bathrooms × 6489 $/extra bathroom = 192 k$ (+24 %)

  • Two-story, standard: 1541 ft2 × (111.55 base + 3.01 for air conditioning) $/ft2 + 3 extra bathrooms × 6489 $/extra bathroom = 196 k$ (+26 %)

  • Two-story, finished basement: 770 ft2** × (135.5 base + 31.7 for finished basement + 4.95 for air conditioning***) $/ft2 + 3 extra bathrooms × 6489 $/extra bathroom = 152 k$ (−2 %)

  • Two-story, bi-level: 1541 ft2 × (103.25 base + 3.01 for air conditioning) $/ft2 + 3 extra bathrooms × 6489 $/extra bathroom = 183 k$ (+18 %)

So, according to this dataset, moving all the bedrooms into the basement has approximately the same cost as keeping them on the ground floor. (Beyond cost considerations, having a smaller footprint on the plan view may free up space under the "maximum impervious coverage" prescribed by the local zoning or environmental regulations, while sticking to a single story may be preferable from a long-term "aging in place" perspective. But cost still is an important factor that one should consider.)

Of course, the highly simplified numbers demonstrated above are open to question. (Does it really make sense that putting the bedroom floor halfway below ground is significantly more expensive than putting it all the way below ground?) But the book is divided into four main sections:

  • 96 pages of uncomplicated per-square-foot prices, as demonstrated above (including materials, installation, and contractor's overhead and profit)

  • 186 pages of moderately complicated per-assembly prices (cost per yd3 of excavation, per ft2 of 2×6 wall, per water heater, etc.; including materials and installation)

  • 384 pages of very complicated per-unit prices (cost per ft of 2″×4″ stud, per ft2 of sheathing, per yd3 of concrete, per acre of topographical survey, etc.)

  • 82 pages of reference: equipment-rental costs, crew listings (e. g., a topographical-survey crew consists of a chief, an instrument man, one or two rod men, and an electronic level, for 954–1232 $/d if employed or 1550–2008 $/d if subcontracted), location factors (e. g., multiply prices for materials and installation by 1.21 in Newark, NJ, or by 0.92 in Wilkes-Barre, PA), reference tables (state sales tax rates, state workers' compensation insurance rates, typical architectural fees, etc.), estimating forms

So, a dilettante who doesn't trust the per-square-foot prices can dig deeper into the per-assembly prices, and a true contractor can use the per-unit prices. I'm too lazy to go any further here, though.

*The base $/ft2 number is taken from a list of numbers that decrease as area increases—e. g., from 150.15 $/ft2 at 600 ft2 to 82.2 $/ft2 at 3200 ft2. This list can be approximated with a quadratic equation in a spreadsheet—e. g., 28.55 $/ft2 + 3052 $/ft ÷ √(area) − 1482 $ ÷ area—but I have not done that in this example. There are separate lists based on quality (economy, average, custom, luxury), story count (1-story, 1.5-story, 2-story, 2.5-story, 3-story, bi-level, tri-level), and material (wood studs + wood siding, wood studs + brick veneer, wood studs + stone veneer, painted concrete block, solid brick, solid stone).

**The book's estimating procedure is based on the non-basement living area, even if the basement is finished.

***The book does not give a separate number for adding air conditioning to the finished basement. If I naively double the number that it gives for adding air conditioning to the non-basement living area, the final cost is 156 k$ (+1 %).

/r/hailcorporate

At the hospital, the woman consents to the blood test. However, after four failed attempts to draw blood, she withdraws consent due to the pain.

I wonder who was trying to do the draw. In my state, many officers are supposedly trained to be phlebotomists and will do the draw themselves, but once at a hospital, it's usually staff.

Not that staff are necessarily better. I have ridiculously prominent veins and I've had them screw up so badly (during a blood donation) that they gave up and tried the other arm, only to also screw that one up. I went home with a bandage on each arm and no blood donation.

Who can actually draw blood with some skill is pretty variable, usually a hospital will have a formal or informal plan for how to do this ("call the ultrasound guided IV team" or "get Agnes") and hospital blood draw quality has worsened in recent years because of various healthcare problems. Most hospital staff also don't like working with police and will probably not put in an effort to be independent about fixing the issue in a case like this.

Of note one of the biggest factors impacting ease of blood draw is hydration - someone who used meth and passed out in a car is probably dehydrated and going to a hard stick.

I'm not a doctor but isn't it true with repeated pokes it gets harder and harder to hit the veins on the same site? Like maybe she was also doing needles before?

If you mean injecting drugs....sure.

Lots of Meth users are pure meth though.

To note- when mildly overhydrated, I'm still a hard stick, and my blood donation attempts result in short draws that can't be used. Is there some way to fix this?

Uhhhhhh let's see. Lose weight, stay hydrated, have muscles. I believe staying warm and avoiding activity before hand also help.

Ultimately some people just be like that though.

If that's you I'd avoid blood donations - you know it's going to present a challenge and you know you'll have an increased risk of complications.

Unless you have a rare blood type I'd try and do some good by nagging someone else to go in your stead b/c it isn't super viable for you.

The opinion says:

A phlebotomist and a lab technician made four attempts to draw blood from both of Norris’s arms but were unable to do so.

A second phlebotomist failed the fifth attempt to obtain a blood sample from Norris.

Let's say I want to build a house for seven occupants.

I guess your calculations are just for fun? What kind of living situation are you envisioning where such high density is required, but you are able to get what look like relatively modest building costs?

In an modest sized city or inner suburb of a larger city 2-1/2 level town homes or even 5-over-1 stumpies seems like the more common solution to medium density moderate cost housing. In exurbs or rural areas pre-fab is more typical of small home lower cost housing. To make new construction marketable, you would be talking about like factors of 2-3x on square footage for anything that would actually sell to a seven person household market.

The HVAC costs also look suspect for meeting current ASHRAE guidelines for 7 occupants. To have decent air quality for seven people in a house that small you are talking about 4-5x the total HVAC cost you have estimated here. Probably a dedicated enthalpy recovery ventilator, dehumidifier, and roughly 2x sized HVAC unit than would normally be used for a 1200 ft2 house. You also would need to scale up other mechanicals if you are going to house seven, like electrical service, hot water heater, sound isolation, etc. Square footage also need to be allocated for mechanicals if you assume you are occupying the basement and/or attic. If ducting and plumbing is going to be run between floors, you also need to a assume extra cost for engineered open web flooring trusses. That or oversized basement walls so you can drop the ceiling, again additional cost over the per ft2 pricing for typical construction used here.

Is the idea two parents and five kids? A decent number of municipalities wouldn't even allow seven non-related people to occupy a single family residence. I know people do it, but asking three kids to share a 10x10 room is a lot by modern American standards. There aren't that many people who want to actually live out Little House on the Prairie anymore. More power to you if you're serious about raising five kids, that's truely excptional in this era.

Even people who are into smaller houses for efficiency/environmental reason like the "pretty good house" people are talking about:

Be as small as possible: 1000-1500-1750-1875 ft2 for 1, 2, 3, and 4+ inhabitants

You're talking about 1182 ft2 for 7 inhabitants!

Does it really make sense that putting the bedroom floor halfway below ground is significantly more expensive than putting it all the way below ground?

For your two-story finished basement example, probably a reverse living layout makes sense. Don't forget each bedroom would then require an escape well then though, which will substantially increase basement construction costs. That's a lot of extra form and mason work. I wouldn't be surprised by a $30k delta on cost even without the escape wells. For basements you have the extra concrete yardage of the basement walls including structural considerations for the extra back-fill pressure, extra excavation and haul away work, workers now have to set up ladders or scaffolding to get into the hole, extra below ground rated waterproofing, extra below ground rated insulation, extra water mitigation measures (you're closer to the water table), extra radon mitigation measures (you're closer to bedrock), etc, etc. Like the size of excavator the contractor will have to use is easily 2x the cost of ownership to the contractor.

Edit: I see you're estimate was that a finished basement is cheaper than the split level. This is entirely down to your assumption that you can halve the footprint square-footage. Practically speaking, if you are going to use a basement for bedrooms you should assume only 1/2 of the building footprint is usable in the basement for that kind of purpose. You're going to need redundant sump-pump wells if you are going to be putting finished bedroom space down there to start. The costs also obviously don't just scale, but have at least a constant component. Like if a contractor is going to haul a medium sized excavator out to a job site you're going to pay for at least a whole day regardless of the square-footage of the hole they are digging.

I guess your calculations are just for fun?

Yes. (I've already hired a contractor to build a house, nominally for five occupants but actually for only two.)

What kind of living situation are you envisioning where such high density is required, but you are able to get what look like relatively modest building costs?

I don't see why a person can't build a small house in a cheap area. It's what I'm doing.

The HVAC costs also look suspect for meeting current ASHRAE guidelines for 7 occupants.

More specifically: In the per-assembly section, the book says that, for a 1200-ft2 house in year 2019, a cooling system costs 5.8 k$, while a heating/cooling system costs 11.6 k$. The number given is per ft2, not per occupant.

Square footage also need to be allocated for mechanicals if you assume you are occupying the basement and/or attic.

If you look at the designs, I have provided a laundry/utility room for the furnace (in addition to the washer, dryer, and circuit-breaker box).

Is the idea two parents and five kids? A decent number of municipalities wouldn't even allow seven non-related people to occupy a single-family residence. I know people do it, but asking three kids to share a 10′×10′ room is a lot by modern American standards.

These designs are compliant with the 2024 International Property Maintenance Code, which prescribes minimum bedroom area of 70 ft2 for one occupant or 50 ft2 per occupant for multiple occupants. They exceed the IPMC's requirements for dining/living-room area.

I do think sketching floor plans is quite fun.

Where did you end up for final square footage? Closer to 1050 ft2 based on removing 120+ a bit ft2 from your smallest seven person design, closer to 1200 ft2 like your seven person design / scaled larger design, 1500 ft2 like the PGH 2 persion target, or 1875 like the PGH 4+ person target, even smaller since it's actually for only two?

I'm very much in favor of building the design of house you want with the best quality materials you can afford, even at the tradeoff of square footage. Provided, that is, resale does not have to be a consideration. Unfortunately, square footage is the most dominant factor in sale price. For most of the housing market , price and price/ft2 seem to be the dominant considerations.

If you've actually signed for a custom built, you probably know better than me, but I always though custom would be a 20-30% premium over a spec-built house, which would be a 10-20% premium over a tract house, which would be a 20-30% premium over a prefab. I'd be interested to know what the final premium is over just dropping a same bed/bath cheap trailer on your lot ends up being. I would rather live in a small custom than a trailer, but I assume most people living in small homes in cheap areas are doing it because it's cheap, rather than aesthetic preference.

I did see the utility rooms in your plans. It's pretty generous for a washer drier, but I imagine pretty tight if you also need to fit an air handler, return, ERV, and 80 gallon hot water heater. You could make everyone take cold showers or pay the premium for an instantaneous hot water heather though I guess.

The square footage based HVAC calculation probably assumes average bedrooms/people per square foot. If you are following IRC you would at least need it to be based off of bedrooms. I'm pretty sure that table is based off of ASHRAE 62.2 though, and they just assumed 2 people in the master and 1 in each other bedrooms. I think ASHRAE probably prefers HVAC techs to use their (person + ft2) calculation if you actually intend to occupy at very high densities. I don't particularly mind a small space, but small and stuffy sounds very unpleasant.

Where did you end up for final square footage?

If you're referring to the design that I'm actually having built, I went with the third drawing in this image.

  • 744 ft2: Most efficient, but has the kitchen in an L-shaped position that IMO is awkward in juxtaposition with the highly linear dining/living room

  • 793 ft2: Less efficient, but looks better; unfortunately can't fit into my lot's 35-foot-wide buildable area without rotation

  • 873 ft2: Final choice; originally drawn by the contractor's drafter, redrawn by me here

  • 857 ft2: A less ugly design, centered on a corridor rather than on a dining/living room, presented for comparison purposes

I always thought custom would be a 20–30-% premium over a spec-built house, which would be a 10–20-% premium over a tract house, which would be a 20–30-% premium over a prefab.

RSMeans says similar things. For a 1000-ft2 one-story house, the 2019 numbers are:

  • Economy: 124.3 $/ft2

  • Average: 144.55 $/ft2 (+16 % vs. economy)

  • Custom: 198.65 $/ft2 (+37 % vs. average, +60 % vs. economy)

  • Luxury: 233.9 $/ft2 (+17 % vs. custom, +88 % vs. economy)

I signed a contract to build my 873-ft2 design for 221 k$ (253 $/ft2) including driveway and fence. Due to a miscommunication, the contractor also offered a price of 193 k$ (221 $/ft2) not including driveway and fence. This probably is a waste of money in comparison to just buying a manufactured house (or perhaps obtaining a modular implementation of the 857-ft2 design), but I wanted to splurge on implementing my own design, since I'll be living in it for 50 years.

I did see the utility rooms in your plans. It's pretty generous for a washer/dryer, but I imagine pretty tight if you also need to fit an air handler, return, ERV, and 80-gallon hot-water heater.

Possibly, but I assumed the use of forced air in these designs just for simplicity, to align with the book's default assumptions. If I were actually having these houses built, I would use ductless heat-pump HVAC rather than forced air, freeing up a lot of space.

I don't particularly mind a small space, but small and stuffy sounds very unpleasant.

Not mentioned in the book's per-square-foot numbers is default window area. I generally would put 4-foot-wide windows everywhere (2 feet tall in bathrooms, 3 feet tall in kitchen, 4 feet tall elsewhere), which would more than suffice for the IPMC's light/ventilation requirements.

I'm not sure how to tell you this, and I'm not an architect, but I don't see how the layout you're under contract for makes sense. My admittedly amateur eye sees several problems that suggest to me that there's a reason you don't see house layouts like this:

  • Starting with the front door, it's path is in conflict with the door to the utility room, since the utility room door swings outwards.

  • The reason it swings outwards is because the layout of the utility room doesn't make sense. There isn't enough depth to store the washer and dryer without them sticking out into the entry path from the door. And assuming you're putting the water heater, furnace, and panel box in here, plus possibly a stationary tub, the room isn't long enough to put them far enough back to keep them out of the immediate ingress path.

  • The living room-as-central-hall concept will reduce the usable space by half. My house was built in 1945 and the upstairs hallway is 36" wide, and it's narrow; newer homes have 48" hallways. I'd say three feet is the minimum clearance you'll need around the doors to have adequate movement without it being cramped. Since you have doors on both sides of the room, nearly half of the total width needs to be kept clear for ingress and egress through the area.

  • The upshot of the above is that there will be very little room for furniture. The couch will have to be practically in the middle of the room. I think I see how you have a plan to mount the TV on the wall between two doors. With this TV location, you'll have to get a very small "apartment sofa" dead center in the room, and you might have room for a small end table or another chair on the wall next to the door. And that's it. That also means that the highest traffic area of the house will be directly between the couch and the television.

  • Another issue with having a central hall is that the private areas of the house are exposed to the living area. If you're entertaining people will be looking in bedrooms, and will be going to the bathroom with nothing but an inch and a half of birch between them and the party.

  • Why the double doors in the bathrooms? They have conflicting swing paths and seem unnecessary. Make the master bath en suite and the spare open up to the house.

  • What do you need two bathrooms for? And two large bathrooms at that; a typical size for a full bath in a small house is 8' × 5'. I don't know why you'd build a house with an 800 ft² footprint and waste space on two bathrooms.

  • Why no basement? I know they're more expensive, but if I understand correctly you're in the Philly/NJ area, which isn't exactly the South. Here in Pittsburgh the frost line is at 36" and while I imagine it's less over there, it couldn't be that much less. Building on a slab means sinking a footer at 36" and then building up frost walls, which is still ultimately less expensive but doesn't usually make sense considering that a basement gives you a lot of extra space. Slabs are also more difficult to heat. The only time people build on slabs around here is if there's some special consideration like they're building on an old industrial site, there are mine subsidence issues, or they're in the mountains where there's shallow bedrock. The only house I saw that was build on a slab for no reason had a lot of other puzzling decisions made by the guy who built it, who I knew and was surprised he'd build a house like that.

  • Not as big a deal, but the lack of a rear door seems concerning.

If you want to look at efficient houses, look at a typical ranch or split-entry layout. They're all practically mirror images but when they were building tract houses in the '50s and 60's the builders wanted to maximize usable space while still making the house livable.

The front door's path is in conflict with the door to the utility room, since the utility room door swings outwards.

I fail to see how that is a problem. I do not expect that people will be using both doors simultaneously very often.

The layout of the utility room doesn't make sense. There isn't enough depth to store the washer and dryer without them sticking out into the entry path from the door. And, assuming you're putting the water heater, furnace, and panel box in here, plus possibly a stationary tub, the room isn't long enough to put them far enough back to keep them out of the immediate ingress path.

The washer and dryer are all the way on the left side, facing toward the door. There is no furnace, since heating and cooling are provided by a ductless heat-pump system (one of the versions that still works at low temperatures). See this image, drawn by the contractor's drafter before I remembered to have the direction of the laundry/utility room's door reversed.

The living-room-as-central-hall concept will reduce the usable space by half. My house was built in 1945 and the upstairs hallway is 36′ wide, and it's narrow; newer homes have 48″ hallways. I'd say three feet is the minimum clearance you'll need around the doors to have adequate movement without it being cramped. Since you have doors on both sides of the room, nearly half of the total width needs to be kept clear for ingress and egress through the area.

The upshot of the above is that there will be very little room for furniture. The couch will have to be practically in the middle of the room. I think I see how you have a plan to mount the TV on the wall between two doors. With this TV location, you'll have to get a very small "apartment sofa" dead center in the room, and you might have room for a small end table or another chair on the wall next to the door. And that's it. That also means that the highest traffic area of the house will be directly between the couch and the television.

I agree that 48 inches is a good width for a corridor. (My (mother's) current house has a 30-inch corridor, and it's quite annoying.) In corridor-based designs, I use 48-inch corridors. However, this is a dining/living room, not a corridor. There are two different 36-inch paths around the central tables for people to use.

The television mount is intended to be a mount that can pivot to face any direction.

Also, I never use the dining/living room in my (mother's) current house, so I don't care much about it.

Another issue with having a central hall is that the private areas of the house are exposed to the living area. If you're entertaining, people will be looking in bedrooms, and will be going to the bathroom with nothing but an inch and a half of birch between them and the party.

All four of the doors between the dining/living room and the bedroom+bathroom suites will be steel "exterior" doors with weather stripping, not flimsy "interior" doors that easily transmit noise and smell.

Also, I don't expect to be entertaining many people.

Why the double doors in the bathrooms?

The intent is to make either one of the bedroom+bathroom suites a suitable master suite, rather than locking in only one of them as the master.

What do you need two bathrooms for?

In my (mother's) current house, I generally have been slightly annoyed at having to share a bathroom with her. Also, having two bathrooms makes renting out one bedroom easier if it becomes necessary for financial reasons.

And two large bathrooms at that; a typical size for a full bath in a small house is 8′ × 5′.

ICC A117.1 prescribes several different levels of accessibility. Generally, under an "aging in place" perspective, I am seeking to make this house compliant with "type B"—not so extreme as "accessible" or "type A", but not so minimal as "type C". I have determined that 10′×5′ (or a little less than 10′, depending on how close the doors are to the perpendicular walls) is the minimum size of a bathroom compliant with ICC A117.1 "type B" (able to accommodate a 30″×48″ wheelchair clearance, but not including the extravagant 5-foot-diameter circular turning space required under "accessible" and "type A").

Why no basement? I know they're more expensive, but if I understand correctly you're in the Philly/NJ area, which isn't exactly the South. Here in Pittsburgh the frost line is at 36″, and, while I imagine it's less over there, it couldn't be that much less. Building on a slab means sinking a footer at 36″ and then building up frost walls, which is still ultimately less expensive but doesn't usually make sense considering that a basement gives you a lot of extra space.

Prior to hiring the contractor, I hired an architect for initial feasibility checking. According to him, adding a basement would increase the cost of one of my designs by 40 percent (for a 988-ft2 design, from 133 k$ to 188 k$, not including the contractor's overhead and profit). I don't think that's a reasonable use of my limited funds. (This was long before I became aware of the 2019 RSMeans book. Now that I have the RSMeans book, which estimates a cost differential of only 10 percent for an unfinished basement or 24 percent for a finished basement, I feel a bit more skeptical of the architect's calculation. Still, he's the expert. I haven't asked the contractor about it, and I don't see much reason to now that I've signed a contract for a no-basement build.)

The slab will have R-10 foam-board insulation underneath it. (I argued to the contractor that the IRC mandates R-20 insulation under a slab floor in zone 5A (cool humid). But the contractor disagrees with my interpretation and thinks that R-20 under-slab insulation would be prone to compression over time.)

The lack of a rear door seems concerning.

The IRC mandates that in every bedroom at least one window be big enough and low enough that a person can clamber through it easily, so I don't see much need for a back door.

I had an apartment with almost the same layout as your build. Very functional and reasonably comfortable for two. Of course we only had windows on one side, unlike your build. We did host another couple for a total of four for a while, and it was fine. Probably could have squeezed another person in if needed. I wouldn't want to live that way long term, but seems very reasonable for two for now, hosting up to five.

Given current construction prices and the size of your build, you either got a great deal or live in the middle of nowhere or both. If you really are staying for a while, I think the splurge is worth it. We can't all build a Monticello, but there's something to be said for living in a house of your own design.

Opening a window is a good option for ventilation as long as the weather is good and there's not too much outdoor pollution. Unfortunately the number of places that have good weather most of the year, don't have wildfire smoke or car exhaust outside, and are affordable is pretty small. For a house that small though, you probably are fine with just exhaust fans and some makeup air to a small air handler. The extra energy cost over an ERV/HRV is probably pretty small given the small square footage.

Given current construction prices and the size of your build, you either got a great deal or live in the middle of nowhere or both.

The 2019 RSMeans book indicates that the cost multiplier of my new house's location is 0.92. (Some states have locations as low as 0.74.)

For a house that small, you probably are fine with just exhaust fans and some makeup air to a small air handler.

It's an interesting idea. I see that, according to the Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Design: "Most new residences are too tightly constructed to provide adequate leakage ventilation. Therefore, manual and mechanical ventilation are recommended."

It's very rare that I would ever say that, but the meth user seems to have been more than reasonable there.

Man, I remember when I was trying to give blood one time, but I was dehydrated so my veins kept collapsing. I think they might have tried 3 times before they said I simply cannot give blood that day. You'd think it wouldn't be that bad, but for whatever reason the relatively minor pain inflicted on my arm left me woozy, nauseous and I'd broke into a cold sweat. They wouldn't let me leave until I'd recovered. There is some kind of extra shit going on when it comes to your veins.

Absolutely.

I used to get real close to passing out even from the briefest of blood samples. Turns out the secret was just not looking at the needle. Doesn’t matter if I’m otherwise distracted, if the nurse has a hard time finding the vein, whatever. As long as I don’t see the needle in my arm I’m fine now. Magic.

We used to volunteer at a blood drive every year for scouts, and every year this guy would show up and pass out. Every year. Without fail. But he showed up. I still think of him.

I was deeply amused when I needed stitches on my lip after a BJJ mishap that despite the amount of pain being clearly less than I endure during BJJ, I was squirming and whimpering like a bitch to avoid the needle. while in the gym or working on a car I will voluntarily take larger quantities of pain without comment, I'm a whiner for needles.

I could never get large tattoos.

That reminds me of the time I sliced my toe open. I go to the hospital to get it stitched up, and the lady tells me I should lie back. Being in my early 20's and cocky as fuck, I go "It can't hurt worse than when I sliced it open, right?"

She just looks at me, gives up arguing, goes "Whatever" and gets to work.

She got about 1/3rd of the way through just numbing it before I tapped out and had to lay down, sweating bullets and nauseous as fuck.

Though I did remove them myself a few weeks later with some nail clippers and pliers.

Yeah, I do that too for run of the mill blood draws. Yearly physicals, stuff like that.

But man, when things go off the rails and some inexperienced nurse really has to start poking around, no amount of not looking seems to help.

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