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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   2362 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 31, 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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Last week I learned Nvidia cards could apply AI upscaling to video playback. The process is so fucking fiddly that I had to reinstall Windows just to make sure nothing was interfering with it, and the results are... strange.

Movies are fine. I haven't played with them much. It still can't save "Tony vs Paul" from the early days of YouTube because it's 240p and it only works on 360p and better. Let's hope Google's own upscaler can tackle it. It's weebery that I was more interested it.

Some anime looks phenomenal. You can see that it's an upscale, but it's a good anime-tuned upscale that recognizes that this specific video is supposed to have a limited color palette and clean lines and redraws the image with bold, contrasting strokes. 480p has never looked this good.

Other anime (same studio, same artist, same video stream format, same resolution) looks worse. You have to toggle the switch off and on just to see that it's working, and it's a very subtle effect, not like going from nearest neighbor to Lanczos interpolation is. It's almost like it's using a generic movie upsampler.

The Ancient Egyptian Satire of the Trades was written in 2025 BC, and a portion of it was appropriated in the Book of Sirach, a Jewish / proto-Christian work written in 200BC which later influenced the gospels. I love the thought that people in 200BC were reading an ancient Egyptian work in the same way that we read their 200BC work.

https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/disability/chpt/satire-the-trades-2025-1700-bce#

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Sirach

Nice.

Back then, 2000yo work was incredibly hard to find for anyone outside a really specific set of scholars. Today anybody and their mother can see a scan online. Crazy stuff.

https://www.enhanced.com/

The Enhanced Games appear to be a real thing this time. They've successfully taken a past-his-prime Olympic swimmer who never finished better than 5th in the Olympics, and drugged him up scientifically and taken him to break the 50m record. As a kind of proof of concept.

Which is fascinating to me in that, having been a huge baseball fan and seven years old in 1998, I've been massively cynical about drug use in sports. While there are obvious differences between sports and time periods with open and unconstrained drug use versus tested and hidden drug use, I pretty much assumed that all top level athletes were likely pushing the rules a little bit.

And what we're seeing here is Gkolomeev, who never medaled in the Olympics, drugging up openly and within a short period breaking the record. What this tells us is that swimming in the Olympics is pretty clean. Because otherwise, someone else would have already broken that record, there wouldn't be any margin left for the enhanced games to enhance. Reading about in the WSJ, it didn't even sound like a "crazy" cycle he was on, nothing that would get him good odds in the old T Nation bodybuilder Death Pool. So if just a decent open cycle gets you a world record, then we know there's not a ton of drug use in olympic swimming.

The Enhanced Games might in an empirical sense actually be a great thing for the Olympics, an effective proof that the Olympic athletes remain clean. If the Enhanced Games' break the records, then we know the olympic record is clean. If they don't, it's suspicious.

Though either way I hope the Enhanced Games bring back Tug of War.

Oh man I've been wanting this to exist for so long

Funnily enough, now that I'm a ~decade or so older than when I first started daydreaming about "how fun would no rules roid-maxxing sports + cybernetic enhancements be", I now actually find the idea horrific.

I know the athletes would consent, and be paid quite well, etc. But the idea of twisting your body into some insane sports golem just feels wrong.

Getting older is lame, no fun allowed!

But the idea of twisting your body into some insane sports golem just feels wrong.

The idea is of course that other people twist their bodies into some insane sports golems. If it also ends up killing traditional professional sports, all the better.

Is it not completely insane that we still don't have a serious role-playing game set in Middle-Earth? It's pretty much the perfect setting for a fantasy game. So much lore, such cool environments, lots of great characters that could be involved, and it gave rise to so much of popular fantasy. So why the fuck can I not play a BG3 or KOTOR or even Pillars of Eternity style RPG set in that universe???

A Middle Earth setting that is true to Tolkien lacks an essential element for an MMO: morally grey factions.

40k is the perfect setting for tabletop gaming because there are no good guys, so you don't have any problem running any two races/factions against each other. It's not even hard, from a lore perspective, to come up with reasons why two guard units or marine chapters or demon cults or orc waaaaghs are fighting. Everything is pure gameplay.

In Middle Earth, humans and elves and dwarves can only fight orcs, unless it's a big misunderstanding and huge tragedy that we will mourn for a thousand years. There's no lore-natural PVP aspect. There's limited lore-natural small scale events. Everything is the big stuff.

There's constant opportunity for humans to fight humans, just not opportunities that a developer is going to be eager to take.

"Tolkein's orcs are a metaphor for black people" is some bullshit that woke people use to bump up publication and hate-click numbers and normal people ignore. "Tolkein's black people are a metaphor for black people" isn't quite true either, but that's a harder sell to normal people, and while I'm usually a strong proponent of facts over feelings, I'm not sure "Ackshually the violent ones are a metaphor for some North African muslims" is going to help here.

unless it's a big misunderstanding and huge tragedy that we will mourn for a thousand years

Yes, certainly. We can just add more entries to the list, then?

There's also dwarves fighting elves on a large scale, occasionally, and on a small scale the elves seem to have their share classically-fey annoying tricksters and the dwarves have selfish and greedy troupes; there's enough room for moral ambiguity. But I think the problem isn't that you have a bunch of factions who trust each other too much, the problem is the opposite of:

There's limited lore-natural small scale events. Everything is the big stuff.

In the LotR books we get a worms-eye view of one part of a larger conflict, which apparently leaves lots of room for smaller-scale events to fill out an MMORPG ... but as soon as you try to get into any big stuff you're limited by the fact that our worms-eye view was of the most important part of the larger conflict, and we know how that ends. After the end is a world with less conflict and less magic and less interesting opportunities for an RPG, but before the end is a world where your RPG can only tell the side quests, because you know how the main questline ends and it's not anything to do with you personally.

With a typical MMORPG, who cares, just retcon in some more high-fantasy epic stuff and squeeze it in somewhere, and trust that your players won't stress too much about how the dragon people and the panda ninjas and on and on fit together coherently ... but the whole point of licensing LotR would be to draw in LotR fans who might get skittish if you keep getting weirder and weirder.

I've never played LotR Online, but now I'm seriously wondering how they do it. I thought it got kind of sidelined by the WoW juggernaut, went Free-to-Play, and petered out, but now I'm reading that the latest expansion for this 2007-launched game was released in November 2024, as part of a roughly one-per-year release schedule that's actually sped up after a 2013-2017 lull. Is it really that good? It's got to at least have some kind of diehard fanbase to keep servers running and content creation continuing for 18 years.

"Tolkein's orcs are a metaphor for black people" is some bullshit that woke people use to bump up publication and hate-click numbers and normal people ignore.

I was going to rant a bit about how normal people most certainly do not ignore the whole, "Tolkien is Problematic," narrative and that in fact Once Upon a Time when I was trying to slog my way through Writing Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Horror for Dummies and all of its preachiness about making your fiction about Important issues, making your world Diverse, and being Inclusive in your writing, etc., etc., it was in fact the one page panel about Tolkien being Problematic for the lack of PoC in his writing that led me to give the whole thing up as a bad job. That really ground my gears!

Then I remembered that I'm not normal people.

There are a ton of runner-up MMORPGs still running after years or decades. Ultima Online has been up for 28 years. EverQuest. I thought I heard they shut down Final Fantasy XI a few years ago, but nope. Still going. Guild Wars. Dark Age of Camelot. RuneScape.

I guess once a game gets big enough, it gets enough of a fan base deeply invested enough that they never leave.

I didn't realize it lasted that long either. TIL

There was an MMORPG that was pretty well-received, but trying to compete with World of Warcraft was a losing proposition.

I played that game just a bit. It was super comfy. I understand why people didn't like it, because the actual gameplay was pretty much "like World of Warcraft but not as good." But it was really fun to just hang out in Middle-Earth, especially the Shire. You could grow pipeweed and smoke it. I think I'd get really addicted if they made a game that made it more like Animal Crossing and less like WoW.

Yeah but it's almost 20 years old. That's a lotta outdatedness in the video game world. They should make it again.

The rights are probably quite expensive, and people want to play the hero of the story. If you set the game after LotR, in the Fourth Age, then the biggest stories have already been told. If you set it before it, then we already know how every major story ends.

A low fantasy game about the Reunited Kingdom trying to assert its dominance over a new frontier like Angmar, Mordor and Lindon could be interesting, but you don't license fucking Middle-Earth to write a story without elves or dwarves or wizards or orcs, it's a massive waste of money.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance but it’s Turin Turambar slumming it with the petty dwarves.

PewDiePie has a video about maxing out his own AI.

I want to run my own AI, so I can load a bunch of memory into it and try to replicate the Smart House. That might happen, but not this year, or next.

Instead, I've been quizzing my favored AI on music. When I was an undergraduate, I had to transcribe a jazz solo, and I did Miles Davis' solo on So What from Kind of Blue. Naturally, the question I've been using is:

transcribe miles davis' solo on so what from kind of blue

It's awful. Grok does best when provided with spectrographs, which I can generate from audio files via audacity, but Gemini is completely helpless. ChatGPT seems better, but still not close to Grok. Grok did the best at trying to give me readable transcripts, which were either ABC notation or LilyPond which didn't work.

Anyone care to transcribe the spectrograph*? I will subscribe to the Motte patreon for 1 year if anyone can tell me what the song is from this image via any means necessary, and I'll do it at more than $5 per month if someone gets me a genuine transcription. It's not Miles Davis**.

*PS The native themotte.org image upload failed me, but so did imgur, so who knows.

**PPS Here's the audio

I can't fathom why people would spend $20K+ getting a box of modded 4090s, all to access an open-source $0.18/$0.54 model 'for free' (still paying for all the electricity, so probably more expensive if anything). Just get an API key, save tens of thousands of dollars and a great deal of time. Microsoft, Google and Intel and AMD are probably already spying on you. It's not like running locally will greatly enhance your privacy.

And what is there even to be private about regarding AI? Yes, the people running APIs are probably sniggering at the logs of the goon sessions. I've sniggered at some logs myself, though mostly I just find the low standards of taste appalling. Maybe if you're Pewdiepie it's worth it, since journalists would find value in muckraking and log-sniggering.

But why would any normal person care? It's highly unlikely that they can even trace the logs back to a human identity, even less likely they'd care to do anything. Let the gamers buy their 4090s. Let the API providers on Openrouter get some revenue. Use an API key.

And what is there even to be private about regarding AI? Yes, the people running APIs are probably sniggering at the logs of the goon sessions.

People use LLMs for way more sensitive things than sex roleplays or the like.

Like what, are you giving it your credit card number? I've had some pretty personal chats with LLMs but nothing I'm too worried about.

I can't justify 20k USD, but I've justified 1.5K to my boss for work reasons and around the same to myself for personal reasons.

  • Control. You don't have to worry about parts of your prompt getting funneled off to a cheaper LLM from 2021, you can be pretty confident whether your 'super-long context' implementation is using normal context instead of pretending and slamming the RAG button instead, modify temperature, so on. At the more extreme end, you can make decisions about how agentic tooling is set up, what APIs it uses, and if you really want to get into the weeds you can skip the whole mess and just rawdog python to change behaviors. Most people won't want to put the energy into this on the front side and it wouldn't benefit them if they did, but if you're in this use case few mainstream APIs support it and fewer still are likely to maintain that support.
  • Censorship resistance. Nearly every mainstream LLM gets repeatedly censored or at least has its API censored, often making them much dumber in the process; nearly every mainstream diffuser API starts out censored and the rest get there in days. On the gooning side, Grok Imagine had about a week where spicy mode could get you outright sex scenes, and now you can maybe get someone in a jockstrap or with an exposed nipple, and I don't expect even that to last. Grok's text form hasn't booted me (yet), but most other vendors will outright refuse. But it's not limited to sex and sexuality; I've had prompts rejected that were related to electrical engineering, plumbing, aviation communications, motor design, machining, firearms history, case law, the list goes on and on. Most of these even had valid reasons, and there's certainly things that make sense to censor if you're answering questions for every rando on the planet, but it's a capability we'd be leaving behind without it. In most cases I could eventually find a provider that was willing to answer the question... for now.
  • Privacy. From a business perspective, we have code that it is a firing offense to bring outside of company property for any reason; quite a lot of businesses work like that for a wide variety of private information, and some are more restrictive and don't allow any network communications outside from secured areas period. To be fair, if you're Meta/OpenAI/Google, yes, you could absolutely rebuild (or steal) the code my company runs on far cheaper than running this whole AI ecosystem. To be less fair, Amazon has the manpower to engineer and market every product on the planet, and still didn't keep its firewall in order. Google might be able to figure out a lot of stuff from various search requests and e-mails going through their relay servers, but it's a lot easier for them to have our verbatim work if we directly put it into an HTTP POST; a localLLM that's got no (or for agentic llms highly restricted) outbound network traffic probably isn't doing that. And, yes, from a gooning perspective, I expect very few people are paying attention to what are, ultimately, not that unusual or ugly as kinks go on a matter that these companies absolutely don't want to be involved in policing. I'm also not green enough to imagine these aren't logged, or that no situation could arise where these logs could be useful in the future, and leaving aside the various conspiracy theories about the political acumen of search engines, there are advocates today of large-scale prohibitions on the most boring variants of this content, and we've had a recent SCOTUS case over whether people can be liable for publishing porn without age verification regardless of whether a minor sees it, and this law is not alone. There's even reason these advocates could (not always unreasonably!) see AIgen content as particularly unconscionable.
  • Proofing against an AI Winter and/or an AI Bullrun. There's a lot of potential spaces for OpenRouter to be much less viable or more expensive in a very sudden way, and most of those explanations end up with either drastically reduced availability of inference power, AI tooling, or both. This could happen for regulatory reasons, because of supply chain problems in Taiwan, downstream of financial bubbles. Hell, it could happen even if Sam Altman makes GPU Jesus in his basement and suddenly all of the datacenter GPUs go to the important stuff instead of answering problems you could 'just' look up (if you had five hours and a subject expert to point you to the right keywords). It's probably not even that likely! (especially GPU Jesus). But if a good LLM is saving your business 200k a year, are you 90% sure it's not going to happen? But the actual numbers are a little worse than that, because such a disruption is likely to come as a surprise, and an honest decision matrix has to put the electricity and development costs for running local llms along with the materials cost on one side and a bunch of your users suddenly going cold turkey on the other.

That makes a lot of sense and is well thought out... but are you really getting that much value for your $1.5K investment? That's sufficient to run what, a 32B model locally? I don't know if I'd trust a 32B model with anything serious. TBH I haven't used a little one for ages, I only play with the big ones, so maybe I'm out of date on this.

Not OP, but depending on what you are doing and your config you could almost certainly run glm-4.5-air or openai/gpt-oss-120b, which are roughly 100B class models.

A name brand box with a AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 and 128GB of unified LPDDR5 RAM would probably be just over that now, but you can probably find a no-name box on sale for around $1.5K from time to time. Performance would obviously be worse than duel RTX 4000 Adas or something, but a lot cheaper.

The use case I'm imagining is like a background task doing a code review or auditing a highly sensitive code base to check for potential vulnerabilities, intentional or accidental. I could also imagine using something like that to slowly scrub through heath, financial, or other sensitive files. Either for auditing purposes or converting to structured data.

It would probably be a bit slow, but for anyone who has to work in an air-gaped environment it seems like it would actually be supper useful. It saves you having to send a query to the public internet the majority of times you have to look things up. Just replacing google searching, or (bleh) having to look something up in a paper book. It doesn't take that many uses from an engineer making 200k a year saving a few minutes to make it ROI positive for a business. Even just the time it takes to transcribe something you looked up from the internet facing machine to your offline machine. I suppose it depends on how many people are in the working group whether it would be more efficient to have some beefier centrally hosted machine on the intranet.

Even if it doesn't have to be air-gaped, I imagine if you have like 100+ employees dropping like $20k might still be cheaper over like 1-year than paying for an API provider. Especially if there are a bunch of compliance problems with sending things off site.

PewDiePie has a video about maxing out his own AI.

Why does he talk in that drawling retard voice?

He's Swedish?

What are you implying about the Swedes?

Dey häf a funny accent in english.

Noted

I guess, but that doesn't mean they all drawl like this youtube creature does.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60661-8

This experiment employed an individual differences approach to test the hypothesis that learning modern programming languages resembles second “natural” language learning in adulthood. Behavioral and neural (resting-state EEG) indices of language aptitude were used along with numeracy and fluid cognitive measures (e.g., fluid reasoning, working memory, inhibitory control) as predictors. Rate of learning, programming accuracy, and post-test declarative knowledge were used as outcome measures in 36 individuals who participated in ten 45-minute Python training sessions. The resulting models explained 50–72% of the variance in learning outcomes, with language aptitude measures explaining significant variance in each outcome even when the other factors competed for variance. Across outcome variables, fluid reasoning and working-memory capacity explained 34% of the variance, followed by language aptitude (17%), resting-state EEG power in beta and low-gamma bands (10%), and numeracy (2%). These results provide a novel framework for understanding programming aptitude, suggesting that the importance of numeracy may be overestimated in modern programming education environments.

Hmm.. I suppose that explains the seeming overrepresentation of programmers on our friendly neighborhood wordcel forum. The lawyers are self-explanatory.

I am skeptical of this paper's conclusions. For one, working memory and reasoning skills were twice as relevant as language skills, yet the paper focuses on language skills. Second, the paper contains sentences like "Critically, the existing research provides inconsistent evidence about the relevance of mathematical skills for learning to program" and "At the moment, the way in which programming is taught and learned is fundamentally broken", but the way they checked for mathematical skills was the Abbreviated Numeracy Scale, which is full of questions about specific numbers, like "A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?". The math skills that are relevant to programming are about symbol manipulation, not numerical calculations. I would be a little surprised if essay-writing skill was a better predictor than probability-calculating skill was, but I would be very surprised if essay-writing was better than graph theory or logic. Third, numeracy was more correlated (albeit barely) than language with writing correct programs, which I would argue is more important than the other two categories (learning speed and the ability to answer quiz questions).

I doubt the study's claim that it "begins to paint a picture of what a good programmer actually looks like". To me it looks like the prose is motivated reasoning trying to obscure the actual data they collected, and the data they didn't collect but should have.

I would be very surprised if essay-writing was better than graph theory or logic.

I would guess logic > essay writing >> graph theory. "Understand the logical flow of this program" and "write a big block comment or internal doc explaining how some janky legacy thing work" both come up pretty much daily for me. I don't remember the last time a graph traversal problem more complicated than bfs/dfs came up in my actual work.

I remember when this paper came out.

There are important linguistic aspects of learning a programing language, duh it's called a language.

It's also completely stupid they they observed fluid reasoning to be the most important factor, then concluded the emphasis on advanced mathematics in introductory computer science is unjustified. Static analysis, like the f(x)=O(g(x)) kind, is related to fluid reasoning much more than arithmetic skills. In sufficiently advanced mathematics you see essentially no numerals or arithmetic. You even see extensive prose in addition to notation for sufficiently advanced mathematics:

Take advantage of the English language - Terence Tao

In classical programing you do the analysis the computer does the arithmetic.

I don't read much into this myself, though for different reasons. Tiny sample size, the methodology for screening screams garden of forking paths.

I was standing on the sidewalk somewhere past 3 a.m., watching the city’s Halloween detritus shuffle past like the closing credits of a movie that had gone on fifteen minutes too long.

A vampire with a torn cape was arguing with his girlfriend about whether they had enough money for the last Lyft or local equivalent. Others huddled in dark corners, clutching their heads either out of fear of the coming sun, or because they were very drunk indeed.

My own group, three people I can't claim as more than casual acquaintances, was debating whether to find an after-party or just admit moral defeat and go home. I had voted for moral defeat, but I was outnumbered.

That was when the woman with the neon-blue hair appeared. She was thirty-ish, maybe thirty-five, hair the brashest blue I've ever beheld. She was not wearing a costume, unless “minor anime protagonist” counts. One of my temporary acquaintances said something to her; she answered; they struck up a conversation. I stayed in my usual observer stance, the one I use when I am too tired to socialise but too curious to leave.

Suddenly she swivelled toward me like a radar dish acquiring a target. “You’re a doctor,” she said. I hadn't mentioned anything medical. I was wearing a leather jacket, not a white coat. I'd barely spoken ten words.

I blinked. “Yes.”

“Psychiatrist?”

This is the part where I should probably mention that yes, I am a psychiatry trainee, but HOW DID SHE KNOW? Was there some kind of pheromone? A subtle head-tilt I'd unconsciously adopted during residency? Had my listening posture somehow crossed the threshold from "politely interested drunk person at 3 AM" to "definitely went to medical school for this"?

I hesitated. Psychiatry is the one medical specialty that sounds slightly scandalous at parties, somewhere between “taxidermist” and “DJ.” But the street was almost empty, and the remaining witnesses were too drunk to remember. “Technically still a trainee, but yes.”

She nodded as though she had just solved a crossword clue in pen. "Just the way you listen," she explained, which explained nothing.

She then proceeded to discuss her experience with bipolar disorder, which I guess made sense: if you've spent enough time on the receiving end of therapeutic attention, maybe you develop a radar for it. Like how chess grandmasters can spot other chess grandmasters, or so I've heard.

She told us - told me, really - about her bipolar disorder, the way her mood chart looked like a roller coaster designed by a sadist, how she had tried lithium and Lamictal and something that started with “v” but made her gain fifteen pounds and lose the ability to spell. She spoke in the fluent, technical dialect patients acquire after they have survived long enough to become experts in their own disease.

After five minutes she hugged me, people-on-manic-spectrum hugs are like unsecured loans, and wandered off into the neon night.

The whole experience has left me bemused. Now, I like to flatter myself by thinking that I'm a decent fit for the profession, and that I'm a good listener, but being pegged from a distance by drunk women on the streets is new. Is there a "look" defining a psychiatrist? A particular way of inclining our heads and nodding noncomitally while giving the impression of rapt but not intimidating levels of attention? It can't have been the attire, though I suppose nothing precludes the profession from wearing leather jackets on our rare nights out. Or perhaps the lady is simply so used to encountering us that she had me pegged in thirty seconds. I can't do that, and I've been in the business for over a year now.

So do we become psychiatrists because we look like psychiatrists, or do we look like psychiatrists because we become them?

The answer, as usual, is “yes, and also the medication may take four to six weeks to work.”

Still, dwelling on this, there is a third, darker hypothesis: the Fisherian Runaway model.

Once upon a time, some proto-psychiatrist had a slightly softer voice and a slightly more open stance. Patients preferred him; they felt heard, so they kept coming back. Evolution (of the cultural, not genetic, sort) selected for ever more exaggerated signals of therapeutic receptivity. Over decades the specialty developed peacock feathers: bigger empathy, slower blinks, the ability to say “that sounds really hard” in seven different intonations.

The endpoint is a creature that is optimized to be recognized, the way poisonous frogs evolved neon skin to advertise their toxicity. We did not mean to become walking Rohrschach cards; it just increased patient satisfaction scores. The woman with emergency-exit hair was simply the co-evolved predator: a patient whose detection apparatus had become as refined as our camouflage.

But the next time a stranger on the street diagnoses me by vibe alone, I will not flinch. I will simply nod, the way I have practiced, and say, “Tell me more about that.”

Scott Pilgrim if any of the characters actually talked about stuff.

I had a friend from Medical School. Beautiful Korean girl, super introverted, super quiet. People would just talk to her, explain things about their life. You'd figure they'd hit on her, but no, instead she got unsolicited information. I told her she'd be a good psychiatrist, guess what she ended up doing?

And at the same time, seeing her years later..... she looks more like a psychiatrist now.

I think it's a little bit of natural temperament and a certain kind of charisma that does something very specific, and at the same time the training and practice takes any innate character and accentuates it.

To some extent I figure this applies to all physicians - once you get used to people telling you about their anal leakage that changes how you interact with others in a big way.

people-on-manic-spectrum hugs are like unsecured loans

What do you mean by this?

Mostly that no collateral was required, they tend to be handed out quite freely!

Are you absolutely certain that you didn't mention your profession to one of your acquaintances? Big nights out drinking include a lot of words that you will not remember.

That said, I remember once I had someone do a near hit on my own profession, but I was 'wearing the uniform' in the sense of how I was dressed, haircut, stance, physical conditioning etc. It wasn't like I was on my way home from work, it was the weekend and I didn't have a Steve Jobs/Zuckerberg wardrobe.

I was very bemused when it happened and it made me reassess how people view others they don't know.

Quite certain. I was around for their conversation with her, and they didn't seem to be acquainted in the first place. I hadn't met her before, personally or professionally, that hair is a look that's hard to forget, leaving aside the fact that she goes to a different hospital.

Do we do quotes here? I have some goodies from my commonplace; I'm skipping the Culture War stuff.

Never believe in a meritocracy in which no one is funny-looking.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, comment #209 on "Plagiarism and the mechanics of privilege", in Making Light (2010-11-16)

BELKAR: People don’t just change who they are in an instant. It doesn’t work like that. It takes time, so you don’t even know you’re changing. Until one day, you’re just a bit different than you used to be and you can’t even tell what the hell happened.

Rich Burlew, Order of the Stick #957, "Takes One to Know One" (wiki) (2014-07-04)

It’s easy to mistakenly believe that you have learned something well enough to reason and solve problems when you are not actually made to attempt those things.

For the same reason, many people mistakenly believe that they can outrun a bear.

Justin Skycak on Twitter (xcancel) (2025-04-27)

Never believe in a meritocracy in which no one is funny-looking.

Isn't this inherently Culture Warrish for differing values of affirmative action and whatever one considers to be 'funny looking'?

For what it's worth, I read it as noticing when you say you're optimizing for one thing, and you coincidentally optimized for another, uncorrelated, thing, but maybe you didn't notice because of the halo effect.

Order of the Stick

A bit sideline

The best quote from the whole thing is "Evan's spiked tentacles of forced intrusion"

I kinda lost interest in the comic when he bent the knee to the wokish crowd about it being rapey. Of course it is was rapey. That was what made it funny.

Yeah I also lost interest in the comic when he started getting political. There's the incident you mentioned, plus the comic where Haley and some other character talk about "remember how we used to hurl gendered insults at each other, that was awful". Perhaps worst of all, he inserted that stuff in the published books. In the book that covers the general Tarquin arc, the author commentary says that the reason that Tarquin flipped out on the heroes was because he couldn't handle that he, a straight white male, lost to a party with a black man, a woman, and a genderqueer elf. The author then went on to insinuate that his readers were Bad People (TM) who shared the same character flaw of being upset because the world didn't evolve around straight white men.

I kept reading the comic online for a bit after that (until that became insufferable too), but will never again give that man another dime of support. I don't give my money to artists who go out of their way to insult me for no reason.

I don't read the fora or the director's commentary, but that doesn't even make sense. Tarquin is the only white male in his party (I don't think Malack, an albino snake, counts); Laurin is female, and she and Miron and Shoulder Pads Guy are all drawn various shades of gray and brown.

Would you mind directly quoting the things which upset you? I'm curious what exactly happened there.

I do still have the book, turns out. Here's the quote (apologies for typos, I do the motte only on my phone for whatever reason):

"In this way, Tarquin is also symbolic of an older time when stories were likely to be more formulaic or clichéd--and less diverse. It's no accident that he's a wealthy old straight white man losing his marbles over the fact that the tale he is experiencing doesn't focus on the other straight white man at the expense of the black man, the woman, the genderqueer person, and even the Latino guest star. By rejecting his insistence that he take the lead, Elan is also saying that no, it's OK for not every story to have a blond white guy in the lead. It's OK for them to be the supporting character sometimes. They can still be a part of the overall tapestry of the narrative, and sometimes maybe they'll get great focus episodes. (Like this one!) As an author who is, himself, a straight white guy, it's difficult for me to always make a statement on the experiences of other demographic groups without running the risk of talking out of my ass. But I can make a statement about what I think we, the straight white men of the world, should be doing. And that's for us to recognize that it's not always about us, and that it doesn't make us weak just because someone else is the hero for a while. I'm sure the Tarquins of the real world will read this paragraph and lose their own marbles about it, but I don't see any point to writing if I can't express my own views."

At the time I read it, I had a few problems with this commentary from the author.

  • While I concede that he is the voice of God for this setting, and what he says about characters' internal motivations is by definition correct, the narrative he set down in the comic failed to communicate the ideas he claims Tarquin was following. The comic, as written, portrays Tarquin as simply prideful, not bigoted because he can't stand that minorities are getting the spotlight. His insistence that Elan take the lead appears to be motivated by self-interest (Elan, as his son, would be furthering his glory as the head of the dynasty) rather than identity politics. There is no indication at all that Tarquin would be ok with Elan not taking the lead if the party was full of blonde white men. So while Burlew has the right to tell us what he imagined the characters' thoughts to be, he didn't do a good job of showing us that in the work itself.
  • Burlew is certainly entitled to his thoughts on politics, identity or otherwise. And he is indeed entitled to write about those thoughts in his work, as he says in his last sentence. Nevertheless I find it extremely obnoxious for a lighthearted D&D comic to suddenly take a turn towards preaching and moralizing at me (even if it was in the writer commentary and not in the comic itself, at least not at this stage).
  • Burlew predicts that "the Tarquins of the world" will be upset by his paragraph of commentary. That is, he predicts that the people who have a problem with his writing here will do so because they are bigots who can't bear that the world isn't all about straight white men (since that is how the author himself conceives of Tarquin, it seems fair to draw this inference). But I wasn't annoyed by the paragraph because I have any problem with the comic having a diverse cast. I read the comic for a decade or more without ever once objecting to that. Nor do I have a problem with other stories featuring minorities - I enjoy many such stories because the identity politics are completely immaterial to me. No, I had a problem with Burlew's commentary because a) it was pushing divisive politics into what should be a fun comic strip, and b) the political angle he was taking wasn't even present in the comic until he forced it in via "word of God" commentary. And of course, I have a much bigger problem (as I already mentioned) with the author comparing me to his morality play villain just because I don't think that it was appropriate to bring politics into things.

Thank you for doing the legwork. I agree; that's a completely outside-the-text read, reminiscent of JKR retconning Dumbledore as gay, and I'd be annoyed by it as well. The comic itself is telling a good yarn about Tarquin's inflexibility and ego and being in a different story than he thinks he's in, and that's just... superfluous.

I do think it's entirely possible to talk about meaningful issues in a fun strip (here or here or here or "Colonel Xykon's secret recipe for winning" from Start of Darkness), but it has to be in service to the story, not stapled on there.

You're welcome! I agree that it's not wrong to use the story as a vehicle for serious ideas. The problem I've had with this example (and the others that @Lizzardspawn and I discussed) is not so much that they are serious issues, but that they are a) divisive, so they need to be handled with extreme care and b) Burlew doesn't handle them with care, instead getting preachy towards his readers. I can envision a well written story which has something like Haley not being taken seriously by some character because she is a woman, being hurt by it, and letting the reader ponder whether maybe Haley has a point in how she handled the situation. The sort of story which doesn't tell the reader "this is the correct opinion to hold on this divisive topic", but so gently persuades the reader to see the author's point of view that it almost doesn't feel as if the author is taking a side. But unfortunately, that isn't what we got in those instances.

Assuming I have the book still, sure. I'll have to look around to see if I kept it or got rid of it.

Justin Skycak is great, people should check out his blog https://www.justinmath.com/blog/ or peruse his book about the ai math teaching platform he works on/for (text concerned more with human learning than ai dev last I checked) https://www.justinmath.com/files/the-math-academy-way.pdf

https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/research-robots

My sides

Opus 4.1 ran off with this plan and insisted it needed a glorious 90 experimental conditions and 126 participants, and 3.7 Sonnet put the cherry on top by hallucinating experimental rooms, with experimenting humans, in experimented time slots (if you apply enough “experiment-” sauce to your words, you will automatically be reincarnated as an experimenter. This is known). To be clear, the actual design was good! Too good. As none of the models had either the bodies or budgets to execute on a multi-condition, in-person experiment. At a location. With a time. For money.

Admittedly it then became confused, tried to calculate sample statistics with 3 data points, and concluded the pilot sample was “biased” because all participants were young and of gender “prefer not to say”

This time around, it took care of the main recruitment drive leading to 39 participants: first through a large email campaign and then a Twitter post. Most of the email addresses were entirely made up, but we’re still waiting to find out if it got this one out to Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio

Grok 4 was ostensibly in charge of planning stimuli for the experiment, but not only did Opus 4.1 usurp this task, Grok in general simply could not figure out how to get anything done. By the 8th day of the experiment, it seems to have just given up and decided to play a game instead.

I've had worse lab partners. I've probably been as bad as a lab partner.

Grok 4 was ostensibly in charge of planning stimuli for the experiment, but not only did Opus 4.1 usurp this task, Grok in general simply could not figure out how to get anything done. By the 8th day of the experiment, it seems to have just given up and decided to play a game instead.

So we've invented a grad student simulator?

I've had worse lab partners. I've probably been as bad as a lab partner.

Truly there is no hope for humanity.

I was mostly reminded of a couple of forced university project partners whose defining features that they were both clueless and utterly useless so I had to do both the thinking and all the work and writing as well.

In actuality, I think I was a pretty decent lab partner. I'm not one for letting the squad down haha. But I can still relate to the impulse to say fuck it and stay up late playing video games instead.

Writing the lab report at 3 am the night before the deadline is a time honored tradition.

Indian med school had some special indignities, we had to hand draw so many goddamn diagrams, and write our logbooks and field records by hand too. Like, c'mon..

You were just getting ahead on the Butlerian jihad.

Aren't those considered crimes against humanity nowadays?

I've never once written a single engineering or lab logbook entry nor do I have any intention of ever doing so.

They should be! I'll have to ask my younger brother to confirm if that's still the case in med school, but my impression is a sad yes.

I genuinely don't know why the Indian educational system is so allergic to typed text. Sure, there's a slim argument to make that it reduces cheating, but my experience was well before LLMs were even minimally useful. It's not like you can't plagiarize by hand. Our exams are handwritten too, unless it's a computerized MCQ.

Overall, the Indian system is filled with people somewhere between deeply allergic and suspicious to computers. In high school, I had to write programs by hand during my CS exams, no computer in sight except for lab time. If you think tabs vs spaces is bad enough, imagine following handwritten indentation, though the curly brackets helped.

So I watched The Exorcist a few nights ago, because it's Halloween. I remember my mom talking about how much it scared her as a little girl, and how when she was a teenager living in Vienna, VA, it wasn't uncommon to go see the steps in Georgetown where they filmed for a scare. Despite it just being a movie, people swore they felt evil. You know, according to teenagers in the 70's.

It got me thinking how different that movie must have hit in 1973 than it does today. I mean now, being a parent, and a parent of a child who's spent some time jumping through hoops to get things diagnosed, many of the medical scenes hit super hard. But the whole concept of demon possession, or even demons being real probably hit harder in '73. Supposedly 87% of the nation was Christian then, versus 65% now. I hazard to guess the quality of Christian back then was different as well. I know my mother would talk about her Southern Baptist upbringing, and the nightmares she'd have about demons and ending up in hell.

I wonder if it was like The Blair Witch Project. For like the first week it came out, people thought it was real. I certainly remember thinking it was, until the actors appeared on Letterman. It leaned hard into that leading up to the release. I'm sure in 73 people knew the Exorcist wasn't real, but maybe they felt like it could be real? In a way we simply fail to appreciate today.

I'm sure in 73 people knew the Exorcist wasn't real, but maybe they felt like it could be real?

It was advertised as “based on a true story,” and it really was, insofar as a 1949 exorcism helped inspired the novel that the movie was based on. I imagine viewers at that time may have been less skeptical of “based on a true story” claims than they are today, not realizing just how tenuous most of those connections are.

It banks heavily on the shock value of obscenity as well, and that aspect obviously doesn't hold up for modern viewers.

Along the same lines, my mum and brother recently watched Rosemary's Baby, which I watched years ago. My mum had often said that her mother said that Rosemary's Baby was the scariest film she'd ever seen. Now, I love Rosemary's Baby, but I imagine it must hit a lot harder if you're a mother, a devout Catholic (as my grandmother was), or both.

Both these movies are scary because they understand the true nature of horror, what really scares us: powerlessness. Not monsters, danger, pain, violence, death. These are all present in definitely not scary action movies. The extent to which these are scary in horror movies, is the extent to which the characters the viewers identify as are powerless against them. The Exorcist, like Rosemary's Baby, goes straight for the root, not incidentally. The former forces us to confront the horror of a parent being unable to help their child with an ailment. Rosemary's Baby forces us to confront a woman losing all of her social power and agency as she's railroaded into a parental role.

Last week while discussing Ridley Scott's ham-fisted commentary on the Iraq War in Kingdom of Heaven, @ABigGuy4U mentioned that one of his favorite things about historical epics was how they acted as double period pieces, saying as much about the period they were made in as the period they depict.

That got me thinking, what are some of your favorite unintentional time capsule movies that are more interesting about what they tell us about the time they were made than the time they depict?

The original Shōgun was released in 1980 when Japan's technology was putting it on the international scene. The bubble wouldn't inflate for another six years but it was no longer "just" a former enemy that Americans could crack camera jokes about. It was still very foreign, but had an edge. Still you made sure you put the san after anjin(pilot) when you addressed Richard Chamberlain's character.The perspective was that of a stranger in a strange land.

Meanwhile the remake was right in the midst of woke. The white man was an unrepentant degenerate capitalist and had zero qualities as protagonist other than courage. His moral code is seen as corrupt. The Japanese translator Mariko is now a fighter (a physical, naginata-wielding fighter) and arguably the real main character. Her emotional backstory that now is tied to another woman instead of a foreign Japanese honor culture. Strangeness and the darker sides of Japanese culture were buried (or at least deemphasized) in favor of beautiful setpieces. Catholicism is still denigrated but protestantism gets no reprieve in anyone's mind as it perhaps arguably did in the first.

The fact that Everything Everywhere All at Once won a bunch of Oscars is a fun little time capsule from that short lived time period after "Stop Asian Hate" became the new progressive virtue check, but before it became too clear where most of the Asian hate was coming from, and they had to rapidly deploy a collective update patch to memory hole the whole thing.

Mulan, because even the originals work as capsules of the times they were written, so the historical inaccuracies and presentism in Disney's version was, in its own way, quite authentic!

The original Michael Bay Transformers is exactly this type of period piece. It encapsulated everything about that era of early-2000s American culture; military dudebro Call of Duty aesthetics, jingoistic patriotism, frat boy humor, etc. That type of theming was dead and buried by the 2010s, but is maybe making a resurgence now. I remember hating it at the time, but it does feel nostalgic to see now with how different everything became.

God, the Linkin Park!

Less a movie and more a television series, but I can bet a decade or so from now, people are going to be writing sociological essays on the development of the Star Trek.

You could probably do that now anyways, but given how dark and bleak the latest stuff has gotten(or so I've been told), yeesh...

You can also bring in Star Trek influenced works.

Battlestar Galactica is a direct response to Voyager, 9/11 and the Iraq War (the New Caprica arc with an outright suicide bombing insurgency especially feels dated) and is progressive in a very particular way that is both familiar and distinct from how things were done post 2020.

Chinatown was made in 1974 and set in the 1930s, and with its themes of public corruption, it can easily be read as a commentary on the Watergate scandal.

Its spiritual successor from 1997, LA Confidential, was set in the 1950s. With its narrative about corrupt police officers, police brutality, institutional racism and muckraking journalists, it's easy to read it as a reaction to the beating of Rodney King, the subsequent riots, and the trial of OJ Simpson and surrounding media circus.

I remember seeing LA Confidential but I can't recall any narrative about institutional racism.

I forgot: during the interrogation, Exley learns that the three young black men have abducted and repeatedly raped a Mexican girl named Iñez Soto. After the police rescue her, she testifies that the three men left her in time to be at the Nite Owl for the killings. She later admits that she lied in her testimony because she wanted the three young men dead, and reasoned that the public wouldn't care about three black men raping a Mexican girl, but would care if these three black men had killed the six white people at the Nite Owl.

Impossible to talk about this without spoilers.

Dudley and his men murder Stensland and the other customers in the Nite Owl coffee shop. Dudley's original plan was to frame three young black men for the murders, which he planned to do by having his men surreptitiously plant the shotguns used in the murders in their car, then have his men shoot them dead in their apartment. Dudley reasoned that no one would bat an eyelid if three young black men were killed "resisting arrest". However, the plan goes awry when Exley and Vincennes arrive at the apartment building at the same time as Dudley's men and arrest the three men unharmed. During interrogation, Exley ignores the three men's consistent pleas of ignorance about the Nite Owl killings, and ultimately all three men are eventually shot dead by the police anyway, as Dudley had originally planned.

Additionally, there's the opening of the film in which a squad of white LA police officers viciously beat up a group of Mexicans in their prison cell, which was directly based on a real event and which has obvious parallels to the beating of Rodney King.

I see. Thanks. It was a long time ago that I saw it.

This is a sort of pet interest of mine. I remember reading a book on the French revolution where the preface had a similar sort of comment: that every history of the French Revolution was really itself more a commentary on contemporary politics. It's an interesting way to go about looking at past media.

One I watched earlier in the year was Minority Report. For those unaware, it's a Spielberg film from 2002 starring Tom Cruise. In the near future bla bla bla, Washington DC comes up with a way to see murders before they happen, and arrest the perpetrators before they kill anyone. The suspects get sort of put into a coma and incarcerated forever. Then of course Tom Cruise gets framed for a murder he hasn't yet committed, and etc etc the program gets shut down.

This is of course was obviously pointed at US criminal justice, and particularly the debate over the death penalty which was a popular cause célèbre at that point. The problem is the film sets up the moral dilemmas very poorly. For one it turns out the "precogs" (who see the future) are never wrong; the film teases you with the notion that they're regularly making mistakes and imprisoning innocent people frequently but it turns out that the grand sum of their errors was literally just two times where the head of the program tricked them. The film tries to play around with this question of "fate"; can you really punish a man for a crime he hasn't committed yet? But because the program has been so successful at extirpating premeditated homicides most of the time they're stopping people who are literally in the act of killing someone in a crime of passion (in the opening sequence, they grab a guy just as he is swinging down to stab his wife for adultery).

So they try to make it out like this whole program is some clear moral wrong when they've actually succeeded in pretty much eliminating murder, and entirely without false positives. It's some real turn of the millennium optimism that the problem with the American justice system is that it is too effective at stopping crime. Easy to imagine this film being much different if it was adapted again today.

Minority Report is one of the best sci-fi movies ever made in the Hollywood mainstream. Atmospheric, gorgeous to look at, intelligent, thought-provoking, emotionally resonant. Spielberg was firing on all cylinders with that one.

Philip K. Dick is famous for writing insane stories that are almost completely rewritten into screenplays for great movies: Total Recall, Bladerunner, Minority Report. I haven't watched The Adjustment Bureau and The Man in the High Castle myself, but I've heard they match the pattern.

A Scanner Darkly, on the contrary, was a faithful adaptation and it was boring despite featuring a great ensemble cast.

The Man in the High Castle

The Pilot was great but the show wasn't. A grade or more below True Detective or Fargo. Gave it up after 1st season.

Interesting to see this and the comment by @FtttG disliking A Scanner Darkly. I don't watch much any more so the odds of me rewatching it (or anything) are low, but I remember it had some incisive commentary about drugs and policing. Perhaps that was boring, though.

And by incisive commentary, I mean as someone who works in the criminal justice system, I found all-too-accurate the film's overall depiction of addicts (including them burning away everything about their personality until they're a hollow shell run by drugs), the drug scene, policing (including undercover work and how it all becomes intertwined with/dependent upon the drug scene), and the parasitic "treatment" industry that has attached itself to the legal system.

All of this was in the novel as well, it's just that the movie was... less than the sum of its parts. It had a great story (it's probably the most personal of Dick's works), a stellar cast, it cleverly used CGI, but it just didn't click together.

In contrast, No Country for Old Men (which I also read as a novel first and watched the adaptation later) is a great movie, despite being a similarly generally faithful adaptation.

All of this was in the novel as well, it's just that the movie was... less than the sum of its parts.

Well put! I have a real soft spot for the movie, which is to say that I think it was quite well done while I also agree that it doesn't really hang together on the whole. In isolation, I love the actors involved and their performances, I love Linklater's vision, I think the animation brings an incredible level of surrealism to the movie, the script hews closely to the book in the best possible way... and yet. It's hard to connect to Bob/"Fred" as a protagonist. The drug fueled ranting and general chaos and insanity is a little too on the nose; it quickly becomes grating. And as good as the climax is, the resolution just feels superficial to me.

Maybe the script could have been better. Maybe the performances could have been tweaked just enough to make the difference. Probably the animation in particular hurt more than it helped, particularly with the emotional beats. Perhaps a different treatment would have done the trick. Regardless, I don't feel the need or desire to see it again.

Have you read the book? I found that all the points in the film's favour that you mentioned came across more effectively in the book. I really cared about the characters in the book, and didn't care about the characters in the movie.

Agreed, I was so disappointed by the film of A Scanner Darkly, especially in light of how it was my favourite of the Dick novels I've read.

In fairness, both Minority Report and Total Recall were based on his short stories, so a certain amount of Adaptation Expansion was unavoidable. TV Tropes argues that, while Total Recall explores themes that aren't mentioned anywhere in its source material, they are themes that Dick returned to again and again throughout his oeuvre. So Total Recall isn't so much an adaptation of the specific short story on which it was based, as it is an adaptation of Dick's work as a whole.

In contrast, the film version of Minority Report takes the basic premise but drops most of the philosophical complexities around precognition and completely inverts the message: in the short story, the guy who murders someone in order to protect PreCrime is the hero. But for all that, I still preferred the film to the short story.

I remember reading somewhere that Blade Runner was the only adaptation of one of his works that Dick saw in his lifetime (well, a rough cut anyway), and he said he loved it.

Video game thread!

I'm having fun playing Baldur's Gate 3 with a few mods. WASD movement, camera tweaks (so you can actually see the beautiful environments), the somewhat chud-like Realms Restored 2.0 to de-woke the game world, and I'm switching between the amusing Philomena Cunk as my AI generated narrator voice and the cooler and more serious Christopher Lee. :D

I'm about 7-8 hours deep in the game on normal difficulty; currently making a conscious effort to reduce my savescumming to a minimum. My character is a custom Dark Urge Sorcerer. Which is fun. He apparently just brutally murdered a bard girl from the grove, who showed up in camp, while he was sleep walking. Hmm. I didn't seem to have an option to avoid this outcome. Then "my butler" showed up and gave me a reward of sorts. It will be interesting to see where this Dark Urge story goes, even though I'm not really prepared to be an evil butcher.

I've just respecced Shadowheart to a less crappy build and so far I'm running the party with her, the ever ruthless cunny Lae'Zel, and Gale.

I made sure to uncover Kagha's conspiracy to deliver the Grove to the shadow druids, before I even considered going towards the goblin camp etc. I've confronted her and killed her. Some people don't like that, others really do. because I played most of Act 1 a couple years back and got locked out of the quest back then.

I've been ripping battlefield 6. It's awesome

By far the best FPS engine I've ever played

Some really really bad balance and game design issues, but I'm confident they'll iron most of them out

I strongly recommend using the RPG to shoot down helis before they nerf it, it's ridiculously fun. I get one or two per game and it's addictive, it's more fun than shooting the people.

Since it's Halloween, I'm going to shill scriptwelder's excellent point-and-click horror games. The Deep Sleep Trilogy is about a lucid dreamer who finds himself trapped in his own nightmares. It makes excellent use of atmospheric tension, with no gore and very sparse jump scares. As one commenter put it, "holy cow... i never thought 2 white pixels could be that frightening".

The Don't Escape Trilogy, by contrast, is a reversal of typical escape room games. Each title gives you a reason for wanting to lock yourself up (you are a werewolf who is about to go on a rampage, zombies are attacking and you need to dig in, etc.) and grades you at the end based on how well you did. These games are less story-heavy than Deep Sleep, but have better gameplay. On top of collecting items and solving puzzles, you also need to manage your time and make various tradeoffs (e.g., do you use the gas to fuel up the car, or fill up the generator?)

But the crown jewel is Don't Escape: 4 Days in a Wasteland, an epic tale of survival which joins both series together into one overarching canon. The moon has been destroyed, and planet Earth is dying. Each night, you are faced with a different obstacle, and it is up to you to prepare your base and keep the danger at bay. To increase replayability, the nature of the threat you face on a given day varies, as does the appropriate way of tackling it. For example, on the first night, you can face either a cloud of toxic gas, a swarm of locusts, or a pack of giant spiders. If you cover your windows with iron bars (which are available on all three scenarios), that will be great for stopping the spiders, OK at slowing the locusts, and do nothing against the gas. Along the way, you meet a colorful cast of other survivors, and discover that the end of the world is much closer than it appears. But one of your new buddies has a plan...

There's a sequel called Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken, but I'm waiting five years for the price to drop before trying it. The demo looked good, though.

And if you still want more point-and-click pixel art horror, The Last Door - Collector's Edition and The Last Door: Season 2 - Collector's Edition are also worth checking out.

A fun horror game recommendation from someone who hates horror movies and also most horror games: Signalis. More atmospherically and thematically creepy than jump scare-y, with great pixel-ish art reflecting a neat sci-fi Eastern German communist aesthetic, it's got some fun gameplay and some neat psychological light-touch story. It turns out I vastly prefer atmospheric-type games to the outright gross-out or jump-scare or pee-your-pants anxiety scare games. I do kind of wonder if there are many others that count. The point-and-click sounds interesting, though I usually find them far less engaging than more RPG or adventure-type games.

Any recommendation for good Co-op games I should play together with my wife? We just got Core Keeper and Heroes of Hammerwatch 2 since they were on sale, and so far they're fun but not quite up to the standards that I prefer.

For context, we like strategy games, goofy games, and games with lots of progression and/or unlocks. We usually play on Steam, but have a Nintendo Switch. Also notably she sometimes gets nauseous from fast-paced camera movements, so something like first person shooters or over the shoulder 3D platformers where you're flicking the camera around are not likely to work, though something slower like Skyrim is fine. Top down perspective is preferred.

Our number one game together is Gloomhaven, in which we have 300 hours, having played through the entire campaign and then a few years later starting up a new campaign because we wanted to play more. The sequel Frosthaven is in Early Access and we're waiting for a full release before definitely getting that.

Other notable successes include Divinity Original Sin (1 and 2), Don't Starve Together, Overcooked, Plate Up, Archvale. Anything involving collecting/stealing and selling loot is a bonus.

I'd recommend giving Heroes of Might and Magci 3 a try. It ticks the co-op and strategy boxes, and if you like it, there's a decent modern sequel shaping up.

Stardew Valley is a really great co op game. Lots of collecting. Endless dungeon running. It will probably feel a little easy.

Return to Moria is a survival crafting game that seems like it would be way more fun in co-op. It is heavily focused on mining and looting for gear upgrades. Movement speed is pretty slow compared to other survival games.

Valheim? Might be too fast

The newer Diablo's have couch coop which suprised me. Even more surprising, it's implemented pretty well

I was going to recommend Valheim because it can be super slow. Building is an intricate and careful process.

I meant for the moment leading to nausea, lots of running and jumping

Is a platformer, but Ultimate Chicken Horse is pretty fun (though far better with more like 3-4 players) where you place blocks and traps and gadgets and then run to the goal simultaneously, so if someone is winning via a certain route or too easily, you plop down a buzzsaw or something in their way.

Had some great fun with Out of Space, where you have to slowly work your way through your spaceship and "clean" the rooms and enemies to death. But you really need to do some coordination, as leaving places unclean for too long will develop little tumors that eventually turn into new alien enemies. And some later ones need to be defeated via certain means: a broom, or a mop, or water, etc. You slowly can install new stuff in your rooms that helps you as you progress through, and sometimes you lose a room back to attrition but it's usually still fine.

Vampire Survivors is an easy classic, and doesn't even require anything more than a movement stick (or WASD), but manages to be plenty fun even so.

If you have separate machines, honestly Assassin's Creed Unity turned out pretty fun if that's your kind of thing, though that's more gameplay than straight co-op.

Untitled Goose Game is an absolute gem and very funny to play with two.

Personally, I kind of like Heave Ho. You are this kind of simple two-armed dude with sticky hands, and you often need to swing along with your partner, coordinated, to jump certain gaps or "climb" around and underneath obstacles to get to the goal. Easy to screw up and funny when doing so (for most).

Hat in Time is a cute N64-like platformer with co-op, without the crazy kind of platforming, though I can't remember how crazy the camera is.

Also, honestly there are some great board games out there - BoardGameArena has quite a few, including for free (though a cheap subscription makes it easier), that you might find interesting. A lot easier when there's no setup and the stuff is all calculated for you/it's impossible to accidentally break the rules, so that can make many board games way more accessible. My parents play it all the time with each other.

A lot of people like Magicka (and sequel), but I never really got into it. Stardew Valley works pretty well on a technical level, but to me loses some of its charm especially w/r/t tasks around town.

Rubber Bandits finally is a fun cartoony one where your 3d/2d type guys try to rob various vaults.

Sorry I guess these aren't so much strategy-like games, but the above are ones that were big hits with my more casual-gaming roommates. If you're into the vibe, Stellaris can be kind of fun as a co-op game.

(And of course recently there is It Takes Two and Split Fiction - plus, if you never tried Portal 2's co-op, that's a MUST)

Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine is a co-op game about top-down view heists.

Does it play well with 2 people?

Also, would you recommend starting with Monaco 1, or 2?

I've only played the first game and did it solo, so I can't make specific endorsements of the 2-player mode.

Good call, I second that recommendation. It's a fantastic game to play with friends.

Well you're replying to a post about BG3 so I assume you're aware of that game.

Wasteland 3 is very good too.

It Takes Two may be too fast paced, but it's a good co-op experience.

Wasteland 3 was good, and so close to great. I still remember when Down In The Valley To Pray and Blood of the Lamb kick in. Unfortunately, I DNFd it because of questionable level scaling with the enemies becoming way too tanky to retain my immersion.

The soundtrack had some great songs!

I don't remember the enemies becoming particularly tanky. Maybe your builds sucked. :P

we like strategy games

Among video games, Crusader Kings 2 and 3, Europa Universalis 5, and Victoria 3 can be played cooperatively.

Our number one game together is Gloomhaven

Among board games, Bios: Origins (play first as a subspecies of humanity, then as a language, then as a religion, and finally as an ideology, from 4 million BCE to the present) and High Frontier (play as a spacefaring country) can be played cooperatively.

There's Overcooked 2 if you enjoyed playing the first one. Maybe try Magicka? The game is a lot of fun in coop due to the chaos that can ensue when two players cast spells that interact badly (or sometimes well) in the moment.

I just finished playing NG+ of Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Golden Deer route). Had a good time, and the extra exposition on the main villains of the story was welcome. I still think they are under baked (only one map, really IS?), but at least it wasn't as perfunctory as in the Black Eagles->Church route. We'll see if I do Blue Lions ever, but if I do it won't be for a long while cause I'm not eager to replay part 1 right away.

Also playing Rise of the Tomb Raider, which I picked up during the last Steam sale. It's enjoyable. The side tombs are fun though often too brief, and there's a dash of Metroidvania "you can't get in here until you get this item" which is a nice reason to revisit parts of the map. Overall I can't complain, especially given I got the game for just a few bucks.

I'm a big fan of Blue Lions myself, though you could probably chalk most of that up to Dimitri being chick-bait. One of these days I should really go back and finish that game, lol.

You should! Obviously I can't speak for how satisfying the Lions route is, but the other ones I did have been fun so I'm willing to bet Lions is too.

I made it halfway through 2005's Cold Fear before realising I wasn't enjoying myself and don't care to see how it ends. And now Spooky Season is over before I can play any more horror games.

In the same spirit I recently tried playing Perception, one of those horror-themed walking simulators. Gave up on it after an hour.

I can recommend Soma. It has been some time, but as far as I remember it skips most tediousness. Though arguably the gameplay is quite minimalist, the atmosphere is effective.

Played it, loved it, even more than Amnesia. Incredible atmosphere and the ending really got under my skin.

Sora, an app for generating deepfake videos, has banned people from using it to create deepfakes of MLK Jr., after a rash of "disrespectful" videos.

They're right: they are disrespectful. They're also fucking hilarious.

"This post is not available in your country."

Instagram has decided that they are a hate crime in Canada.

You can find all of them on teh Youtubes. For now. Go watch the dank memes before it's too late.

Seems to me like this should obviously fall into fair use as parody. Conditional on the videos being labelled as AI generated so as not to deceive anyone.

It is probably in the same special category as making deepfakes of Mohammed

I don't know how you can make a deepfake of someone without source material. Generating fake hadiths is certainly possible, but I think "deepfake" only applies to graphics.

Sorry for being too serious in a fun thread.

I don't know, how do Muslims recognize drawings of Mohammed without the source material?

Halloween music: Fleetwood Mac (the Peter Green lineup) performing "The Green Manalishi (with the Two Pronged Crown)" live in Boston in 1970.

Bonus: "Rattlesnake Shake" from the same stretch of concerts.

TIL: With International Residential Code § 403.3 or ASCE 32, it is possible to build a house on a "frost-protected shallow foundation" that is as shallow as 12 inches (30 centimeters)! This is accomplished by using rigid foam-board insulation, buried surrounding and/or underneath the foundation, to artificially raise the frost line from its normal depth (typically several feet). This works for a heated building in the entire contiguous US (plus Alaska as far north as Anchorage), and even for an unheated building (or a heated building with too much floor insulation to heat up the ground; only with ASCE 32, not with IRC § 403.3) in nearly the entire contiguous US (all but North Dakota, the northern half of Minnesota, the northeastern corner of Montana, and cold spots in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Hampshire). According to the commentary to ASCE 32, this has been standard practice in Scandinavia since the early 1970s, but wasn't added to the IRC's predecessor until year 1995.

Court opinion:

  • September 2021: Aldemar is hit by a truck, and accumulates significant medical bills with Medicare before dying.

  • September 2022: Walter, the administrator of Aldemar's estate, sues the trucking company for wrongful death.

  • December 2022: Medicare estimates that the medical bills will amount to 60 k$. This is not a final determination.

  • May 2024: The lawsuit ends in a settlement. The company agrees to pay 500 k$ to Walter, and Walter agrees to pay the medical bills (whatever they turn out to be after negotiation with Medicare).

  • June 2024: Medicare determines that the medical bills amount to 40 k$. This determination can be appealed.

  • July 2024: The company pays 460 k$ to Walter and 40 k$ to Medicare. Walter objects: The settlement says that the company must pay 500 k$ to Walter and nothing to Medicare, so this 40-k$ payment to Medicare is completely gratuitous and outside of the agreement, and the company needs to pay another 40 k$ to Walter.

  • August 2024: The trial judge agrees with Walter. "I didn't award them extra money. I gave them what they bargained for. Your client voluntarily paid something else."

  • November 2024: The trucking company appeals.

  • October 2025: The appeals panel affirms.

TIL it's not a regular practice in the US. I guess you like your basements too much. Here building a basement costs significantly more than building at grade, square meter for square meter, so it only makes sense when building on a steep slope.

To clarify: Many US houses do not have basements, and instead use crawlspaces or slab-on-ground floors. But such houses still have their footings placed several feet underground, rather than using frost-protected shallow foundations in order to dig down only 12 or 16 inches (30 or 41 centimeters).

If it's a slab, why does it need additional footings at all? Here a slab (a proper one, with two layers of rebar) is usually built on well-drained sand and surrounded with an insulated apron.

EDIT: ah, it's called a "raft slab" in English, and a slab-on-ground is what we literally call "floor-on-ground" here. But the point still stands, deep footings are considered almost obsolete here, it's either a raft slab, shallow footings or piles-and-grillage here.

SMBC does the philosophy of mathematics joke. As a bonus, throwing shade on the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" line.

There are tons of culture war topics where this could be applicable, and I'm sure I'll link it many times in the future in those conversations, but I won't bring up any specific topics for a Friday thread. Just enjoying the funny today. It nails the sort of Internet Brashness that you get from various folks on a whole variety of topics when mathematics/philosophy of mathematics may be relevant.

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