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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1721 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 12, 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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How do people write such long and well-written posts in the CW (or elsewhere in this forum)? What is the mindset and process?

Personally for me, it takes a long time to understand the various things said in a long post, and then to assimilate with my understanding, to put myself in the place of the author to understand that viewpoint, and then to assess both sides (if they are incongruent) - and then to write a reply back equally well and then do this back and forth. Sorry, i am lost. If someone can clear this for me, I will be very grateful. [it is a bit 'embarrassing to ask' question, because in general, i consider myself to be fairly smart, even prideful].

I have no clue how people write the posts that are full of lurid personal stories and read like actual short stories or memoirs. They often seem insanely polished, but also I'm a very boring person, and it's an exciting day when I get to pull ethernet drops.

But for myself, when I write a long post, it's usually because I was compelled to write something for its own sake. I'm often writing for myself as much as for anyone else. Someone says something I disagree with, or that I think is cruel, or that I think is deeply right, or that affects me emotionally, and I have to write to get it out of my head and actually describe how I think I should respond to it. I write because that's how I figure out what I believe, and I can't stop until I've actually gotten the idea out and neatly summarized it. I'm usually thinking eight paragraphs ahead to all the other things that have popped into my head and trying to get everything out. If I don't do that, I have to sit with the emotion unresolved. So when I do write a long post, it's more of a compulsion than a craft.

Thanks for the pointers.

A small but invaluable aid this time of year I want to pass along: property tax records.

Not sure if your friend’s or acquaintance’s spouse has the same surname? Or, how exactly someone on your Christmas card list spells their name? Once you have their address, this information is available online for individuals and married couples if they own property.

Has spared me the minor social faux pas of having to ask these questions multiple times this month.

I recall Sun Eater books mentioned here. I'm a quarter into the first book, and it feels like an excruciatingly slow remix of Dune. Does it pick up later, or should I abandon ship?

The series as a whole has issues with uneven pacing. The first book in particular is almost entirely setup.

I'd recommend grabbing the book of short stories called Tales of the Sun Eater. It should let you find out if you like the broader setting and writing style without quite so much investment.

I have very rarely finished supplemental anthologies even for my favorite media, maybe never, so while I'm grateful for the advice, I don't think it's a route for me. Can you tell me if the broader setting stops feeling like a surface-level Dune replica later on?

It rapidly moves away from Dune. It feels more like CS Lewis than Frank Herbert by the third book, with a little cyberpunk thrown in.

Interesting. I liked the first 2/3 of the first book, but the big plot twist… just felt obvious, and played out — of course the religious authorities are hiding important truths!!! Maybe it didn’t help that the audiobook version I was listening to gave the (linguist? archaeologist? I can’t remember) crush this blistering Scottish accent that wasn’t the least bit feminine, which combined with her standoffishness made it hard to see what Hadrian saw in her. I felt bad for the other girl.

I guess the elements I liked were the parts where the protagonist had to navigate court politics. Once he ends up stranded, the intrigue felt less interesting.

blistering Scottish accent

What the hell? Tavrosi is supposed to be something like a Thai/Swedish creole.

I guess the elements I liked were the parts where the protagonist had to navigate court politics.

This kind of subplot gets much more pronounced as the series progresses.

I think there's a free niche, in our AI world. Strike it while it's hot deal, IMO. There's only one way humans online can keep talking to each other without the doubt that it's really another person you are talking to and not AI: paying for posting. And also having anti-AI policy. I don't think it's going to be easy to create something like this, we would need a Bluesky style mass-exodus to that platform and we are all so used to posting for free that the idea will be met with natural revulsion, but IMO it's the only way to continue talking to real people.

Or maybe such a platform already exists: Something Awful still validates people like that. I'd love it to be not ideologically captured like SA. Maybe framing it as a monthly subscription would be acceptable.

I think the dead internet is going to become true very soon, it already is to an extent. It must get much worse before people will really resort to paid posting.

Private group chats already solve this, and they're quite popular. As is leaking their contents to the media.

If you mean public platforms, you can just make the discussion public but membership private (ie, invite-only). For any violators, you have a nice provenance tree that you can snip wherever the admin deems necessary.

The critique I've seen of this idea is that while a paid platform would appear more trustworthy the same trustworthiness would make it equally valuable to marketers who would then pay the admission fee to exploit it.

Nobody wants to pay though.

Try running a paid subscription internet service. I'm actually selling something that costs money, so there's more of a value proposition than 'internet forum'. It's bleak. Over 100 free trial users, 4 subscribers, 3 of them unsubscribed. Of course I am not a very good businessman or marketer or developer tbh... but I think people underestimate the difficulty of getting people to subscribe!

Maybe we won't want to talk to each other online anymore in the future, but I think the problem will become a real pain point very soon. If I'm forced to make a bet: will we stop talking to each other online or will people pay for the service somehow, I'm betting on the former.

will we stop talking to each other online or will people pay for the service

If we end up with the former, I'll observe that "RETVRN TO 1993" doesn't sound the worst from the perspective of political norms. That does assume the alternative is "going outside and touching grass".

It would be funny is the main political divide in the future is “grass touchers vs slop eaters”?

The "grass fed" versus "feedlot" jokes practically write themselves.

I think most people will embrace the AI. Most people are not discerning enough to deal with well-prompted AI, recall the 'changemyview' redditors who got their views changed by an old Sonnet, 3.6 or 3.7. They were very upset about that when it was revealed they were talking with AIs but they couldn't tell the difference.

"The AI-generated content proved significantly more effective than human comments, with personalized responses ranking in the 99.4th percentile of all users on the subreddit, meaning only about 0.6% of human commenters were more persuasive"

AI is only going to get more persuasive while the population's faculties are plateauing or even declining. It's a huge boon for the algorithms running social media, making them more addictive and also producing more content.

I think that this forum and its users are wildly out of distribution. Go to webnovel.com, the nhentai comments section. Go to a normie facebook server or sports twitter or the average AO3 story. These are not very sophisticated thinkers that are going to be outwitting modern AI used adeptly.

I mean they already consume shit like tiktok too, but there’s for example us, here on the Motte talking to each other. The Motte IMO is going to be affected by the coming avalanche sooner or later, so in my head the question is - where would I go? I came up with “a paid forum”, but I think touching grass OSS an acceptable outcome too

Private group chats obviously, that's where almost all conversation has moved already.

I kind of hate private group chats. I have a private group chat with friends to shoot the shit and it makes sense if I just want to keep in touch and make each other laugh, but Discord style real-time model just doesn't fit my mental model of deeper discussion:

  • If you don't have a lot of time to constantly check on it, it's hard to understand where an ongoing conversation started.
  • It's hard to follow the discussion because multiple groups of people can talk about multiple things at the same time. Thread model captures my mental model of discussion much better.
  • I don't have time to read it to an extent where I keep up with everything going on.
  • It's unsearchable - sometimes I want to find an old conversation. On Reddit, here and on forums, the conversation about a topic will be organized into a nice thread. On discord it's interspersed with some random conversation without start and end.

If it's a smaller group chat like Signal or Telegram or whatever, those problems are less prevalent but I just don't have an understanding how to join one with an anonymous group of people I don't know.

The funny thing is I'm pretty sure it's not about the money, it's about the hassle of putting your credit card in. You could charge 1c/yr for your forum and your conversion rate would still be single digit because people just don't like paying for stuff.

Anyone on this forum live in Madrid and want to meet up next week? I’ll be in the city from 15-22.

Dang! What's on the itinerary? I have never even left the country. Though when I visit relatives in other cities, I guess they typically plan trips for me, and they usually involve going to restaurants that they want to show me and certain landmarks. I suppose that's how visiting a foreign city would be, too...

I’m there for a week before I go with my family to visit our extended family in north England. I haven’t made a detailed itinerary because that feels too much like work. Have a few restaurants and museums I want to go to, a run club on Wednesday night (classic Spaniards not even starting until 8pm) and day trips to Toledo and Él Escorial).

Is this the first time you are able to try out your years of practice with Spanish on real people? It's an exciting opportunity.

Yes! It's been a revelation so far, although that's probably just the jetlag+ anxiety!

Personally I find planning for a holiday pretty entertaining. I'm travelling on the 15th too; going to China, and the number of places I have written down is ridiculous and I will probably will not be able to visit them all. If I were in Madrid I would at least visit the following:

  • Royal Palace of Madrid (official residence of the Spanish royal family; reserve a ticket in advance for this one)
  • Church of Saint Anthony of the Germans (17th century baroque church with some spectacular floor-to-ceiling frescoes, you can't really miss this one in my opinion)
  • Royal Basilica of Saint Francis the Great (18th century church, baroque style, possesses the fourth largest dome in Europe. Here are some of the paintings you can find on the interior).

There's also the Temple of Debod, an Egyptian temple moved straight from Aswan to Madrid, the Cerralbo Museum, a private mansion containing the private art collection of the Marquis of Cerralbo, alongside a bunch of other museums and palaces that are worth visiting if you have time.

If you're willing, a trip to Toledo is just a 30 minute train ride away. It's a historic town that's on the UNESCO register; its centrepiece is the Primate Cathedral of Saint Mary of Toledo, a High Gothic church (one of the only three in Spain) featuring a gigantic carved altarpiece. I'd say it may be worth your time; there are many other historic sites, synagogues and even former mosques in the city from the Moorish period. Just walking around the old town and checking out whatever you can would probably be rather fun.

Temple of Debod is closed right now, but I'll head to the churches for sure. Have a ticket for all three of the art museums, and am going to go to Toledo and El Escorial for the day sometime this week.

I never plan much when I go on vacation, usually I have like 1-2 things I want to do when I go for a week and let the rest be spontaneous.

My father-in-law does a minute plan whenever he travels. It can be fun following him around for like a day but then it gets exhausting and counter to the purpose of going on vacation in the first place (for me).

I don't really disagree with that, rigidly planning out every moment of your vacation is an absolute and utter slog. But I never really have an exceptionally clear idea of what I would want to do on a day by day basis; I don't plan things out for the purposes of prescriptively defining what my vacation should look like. My kind of planning looks more like keeping a register of what's there so I can make an informed decision of where to go in the moment (which doesn't exclude exploratively walking around and seeing what's there, either).

It's also particularly important to understand what's in your vicinity when you're vacationing in a more rural area, since unlike a city it's harder to just walk around and stumble across things spontaneously.

That being said, I do get the sense I like to travel in a significantly more hectic way than most people. I get bored very easily just kind of lazing around for a significant portion of the time; beach and cruise vacations are exceptionally unappealing to me.

Gentlemen, and the odd lady: I passed my MRCPsych Paper A. And not just passed, but passed well.

This is one of those moments where I should probably reflect on the nature of medical education, the arbitrary gatekeeping functions of credentialing exams, or maybe the peculiar psychology of test anxiety. Instead I'm just going to say: thank God that's over.

Walking out of the exam hall, I felt that distinctive mix of mental exhaustion and fatalistic acceptance you get after three hours of multiple choice questions. You know the feeling. Your brain is simultaneously convinced you failed catastrophically and that dwelling on it serves no purpose whatsoever. I spent an hour debriefing with fellow trainees (mostly commiserating) and ChatGPT (mostly useful), and gradually my mood upgraded from "exhausted fatalism" to "cautious optimism about probably passing."

Turns out my intuition was underselling it. The Royal College doesn't release exact percentile scores (because of course they don't), but reading between the lines of their deliberately vague feedback system, I'm guessing somewhere around 90th percentile. Which means I almost certainly overprepared.

But here's the thing about pass/fail exams: you can't really overprepare. Or rather, you can, but the expected value calculation still makes sense. The cost of overstudying is maybe fifty extra hours of your life. The cost of failing is retaking the entire exam, paying the fees again, and explaining to your training program why you need another attempt. Better safe than sorry is one way to put it; another might be "pathological risk aversion masquerading as conscientiousness."

I got the results today while sitting on a beach, drinking beer, under what I can only describe as an unreasonably hot sun. As far as settings for receiving important news go, this ranks pretty high. It occurs to me that this might also be one of the better settings for receiving bad news, actually. Hard to catastrophize properly when you're slightly tipsy and the ocean is right there.

The bad news (there's always bad news): the reward for winning a pie-eating contest is more pie. I now have to start preparing for Paper B.

Paper B is generally considered harder, though "harder" here mostly means "has more statistics and critical appraisal of scientific papers," which are exactly the things most doctors struggle with. I'm cautiously optimistic about continuing to be above average in this specific domain. We'll see.

Thanks again to everyone who wished me well. I am now 1/3 of the way (measured in major exams, not counting the years of supervised practice or any of the other requirements) to being a fully qualified psychiatrist. Only [checks notes] several more years of training to go.

Onward.

that beer would be forever etched in your good memory. i am glad that you passed in flying colors.

Thank you. Cheap local bottles have never tasted so good. And I've got some fancy stuff from Scotland to crack open later with family, friends and cute girls haha.

Gratz. Sorry for the short post I'm in the bath

Thank you, and I appreciate you risking electrocution or your phone joining you for the shower to tell me haha.

Which means I almost certainly overprepared.

Well, I'm sure actually knowing the material will materially improve your actual job performance, haha.

Haha.

Ha.

Regardless, congratulations!

I wish I could continue bitching about the exam and claim that it was entirely useless, but that would go from honest anguish to outright slander! 50% of the material was materially useful, so I do think I learned some tricks which actually make me a better shrink.

(I just wish that I didn't have to study the other 50%)

Especially neurology and neuropsychiatry. I will admit that I find it profoundly boring and would have continued avoiding it if given the choice.

Regardless, congratulations!

Thank you!

Congrats bro. You should go party with your uncle to celebrate!

That's... Not the worst idea I've heard. Not the best either, but you could do worse. I will certainly party somewhere, with someone. Thanks haha

That's great man! Congratulations!

Thank you!

Well done!

Thank you! It's quite a load off my back, at this point "doing well at exams" has becoming core at my identity. I should take up something cooler, like playing Wonderwall on the guitar haha.

Congratulations!

What am I, the protagonist from Evangelion haha?

(Thank you!)

I confess I've never seen Evangelion. But from what I gather, you'd have to be a child soldier with crippling emotional issues to be the protagonist of that. So I think you're safe, lol.

Congratulations! I clicked into this thread at an auspicious moment.

Thank you! Hopefully it's just you as the only person of (highly probable) feminine persuasion, otherwise I'm going to have to edit my post. Or perhaps pivot to claiming that "odd lady" refers to other facets of their personality. We've all got our quirks if we're posting here, men, women and LLMs alike.

I suspect women who like to hang around a place like this aren't too likely to be offended either way.

I could name names to the contrary, but I'm enjoying my vacation too much to crave the drama!

I just finished The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer. And I didn't like it. It was well enough written mechanically, and at times the plot threatened to be good but relented before arrival. It was too weird and contrived, too much effort put into elaborate personal backstories for characters I never quite care about. It never quite managed to get there. Maybe it's a Seinfeld Isn't Funny thing where some of the edginess is just boring to me, but was cool in 1950?

But I realized midway through that Norman Mailer occupies a unique place in literature for me. I don't like him, but I consistently confuse him for an author I like. I've bought several books of his when browsing used book sales, his biography of Picasso, TNATD, his book about the Rumble in the Jungle, I think a couple others over the years. The only one I even marginally liked was the boxing book. But I keep buying them thinking I like Norman Mailer. He's constantly mentioned in the same sentences as authors I like ("Manly man authors like Hemingway and Mailer", "Hard boiled gonzo journalists like Thompson and Mailer") or by authors I like (Eldridge Cleaver calls him out as a great author in Soul on Ice and Alex Perez loves him). But when I tried to think of things of Mailer's that I like I realized I was getting him confused with Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) or Carver or Updike or Gardner. Every story I could think of that I liked about Mailer, even the personal details, I had confused with somebody else.

Does anyone else have somebody like that? An artist who you don't like, but who you repeatedly forget that you dislike and vaguely think you like because it seems like something you'd like.

Look forward to me posting this again in five years when I pick up a copy of The Executioner's Song that I find in an AirBnB and slog through it in a weekend only to remember I hate it.

I enjoyed Miami and the Siege of Chicago. Mailer was part of the New Journalism, and his work’s novelty may well not be apparent to readers from Gen X, onward.

I loathe Norman Maclean’s work, in the vein you mentioned.

My sister has several books by Jeff VanderMeer, and I've borrowed and/or read-while-visiting multiple times, and always regretted it. I think my most recent encounter, with the story "The Third Bear", crystallized for me the idea that I really don't enjoy the way basically every character in a VanderMeer story is guaranteed some sort of horrible fate, and I hope to start actually remembering this going forward.

Do people actively play/did people use to play MUDs back in the day?

20-30 years ago, I was deep into a very niche MUD - small enough that naming it might even be an opsec liability. Maybe 50-100 max players online. I'm shocked to see that they now have a discord, and about 1-2 dozen people who still play. No idea how they manage to RP/PVP. I'm also surprised to find a fairly active subreddit for MUDs, possibly enough to make me consider trying it again.

Yeah as MUD users go I'm pretty normie. Played the Iron Realms MUDs on and off over the years. Building zones and implementing servers were more interesting than playing, for a while, but eventually I stopped tinkering too.

Much as I hate the endless wave of AI slop, it's almost a shame the text-only LLM era didn't stretch for longer than it did. If we hadn't got image generation as soon as we did, we might have seen a mini-renaissance of LLM-boosted MUDding.

I played a few MUDs in the mid 90's. Real social experience. Its also where I learnt about ganking, PvP and trolling in general.

First thing kids do with games like that is griefing. Fun times.

MUD's were kinda proto-mmorpgs, but really were just colourful chatrooms where you could fiddle with the content while meeting and catching up with people. Also back in the day, the internet was a new frontier so moderation was very loose. I got exposed to stuff that probably wasn't normal for kids to see until well into adulthood.

I played a WoT MUD, no idea if it's still going.

A lot of it really is the same people who played back then, now in their fifties and sixties. The same is true of EverQuest, the average player today is probably late 40s / early 50s now, some in their sixties and a few in their late 30s or early 40s who are the kids of the former category and started playing at 10 or 12 with Dad.

My dad told me about MUME along with some stories he read on some forums and set it up for me to briefly try when I was 11 or 12 or so. I checked recently, it's still going, but I told him that it's still got players, and he went into a rant that there's some kind of noob farm going on at the Ford of Bruinen, high level players luring people there to kill, or something. I am probably misremembering the rant, though. I think Two Towers is also still going.

Runescape kind of resembles those old MUDs. It's a great format. I hope the genre can make a comeback somehow.

Some weeks ago, I shared a court case regarding whether a firefighter's failure to resuscitate two dying babies with CPR counts as "abnormal working conditions" that give rise to a valid PTSD workers' compensation claim, rather than being merely part and parcel of working as a firefighter. This case presents a similar question: Does it count as "abnormal working conditions" for a police officer in a very peaceful municipality to shoot a suspect to death as part of an intense physical struggle?

  • The administrative pseudo-judge expresses deep skepticism toward the claimant's argument.

    On cross-examination, [Claimant's boss] acknowledged that the death of [the suspect] was the only occasion since he became Superintendent that a Township officer [in a municipality adjacent to Philadelphia] was forced to take someone's life. At that point in the cross-examination of [claimant's boss], [the trial judge] interrupted Claimant's counsel to make the following remark:

    [Counsel,] are you going to argue that, when a police officer discharges a firearm in pursuit of a suspect, that's an unusual and abnormal working condition? Is that where you're going with this? Because I'm Philadelphia born and raised, I've been living out here for quite a while, and to me, that does not seem, in this area, to be unusual and abnormal.

    Claimant's counsel responded that he was asking about the abnormality not of the need to discharge a firearm but of the need to kill a suspect.

    The pseudo-judge rejects the claim. On administrative appeal, the workers' compensation board affirms by a vote of four to two.

  • On judicial appeal, the appeals panel reverses by a vote of two to one.

    [The pseudo-judge]'s finding that the incident "was a normal-type condition for a police officer who works in the Township" is erroneous for two main reasons. The first is that [the pseudo-judge] focuses on one aspect or another of the incident rather than the full convergence of events. For example, [the pseudo-judge] characterizes the incident as one in which Claimant "discharged his firearm". It has never been Claimant's contention in this case that the incident was abnormal strictly because of the necessity of using his firearm, or even strictly because of the necessity of taking someone's life. To frame it as such is to engage in the flawed reasoning that our Supreme Court cautioned against in Payes II [1 2: breaking the entire incident into component parts, "where each part, standing on its own, might be safely determined to be a 'normal' working condition for a police officer"], because it casts the full incident in a deceptively "normal" light.

    The second reason that [the pseudo-judge]'s conclusion is erroneous is that it is not even supported by the testimony cited as its basis. [Claimant's boss]'s bare assertion that such incidents as [this one] can be normal for a Township police officer is belied by his acknowledgement that there has been no other fatal officer-involved shooting in the Township in the years since he became Superintendent, that Claimant has only discharged his service weapon on 3 or 4 occasions in the past, and that Superintendent has never discharged his own while on duty in his 27 years as a law enforcement officer. [In this incident], Claimant not only discharged his service weapon, but was forced into hand-to-hand combat with [the suspect], placed into a chokehold so aggressive that he was lifted off the ground, was nearly deprived of his duty belt when [the suspect] pulled it away with such force that Claimant's belt loops were torn, and nearly lost control of his service weapon, which placed him in reasonable fear that his own death was imminent. Once Claimant reasserted control of his service weapon, he had to shoot [the suspect] at such close range that he witnessed changes in [the suspect]'s facial expressions and movements in the fabric of his shirt; subsequently, Claimant tried (like the trooper in Payes II) to perform life-saving measures in an attempt to keep the bloodied [suspect] alive but did not succeed. Nowhere in [Claimant's boss]'s testimony is there support for the notion that this chain of events is of a kind that a Township police officer, or any police officer, may normally expect to encounter at the beginning of a workday; to the contrary, his testimony militates against such a conclusion.

    At the outset, we point out that even a strict construction of the Act militates in favor of reversing [the pseudo-judge]'s deeply flawed decision. Thus, while it is true that we have gravitated toward a liberal construction of the Act in order to favor the compensation of workers injured on the job, that principle has no bearing on our holding here. However, we take this opportunity to register our grave concern with [the pseudo-judge]'s cavalier treatment of the facts in this case. This is displayed not only in her written decision but in her interruption of Claimant's counsel at the hearing to editorialize that the discharge of an officer's weapon did not seem to her like an abnormal working condition, based on the utterly irrelevant fact that she is a native of Philadelphia.

    We find [the pseudo-judge]'s outburst to be of particular concern for two key reasons. The first is that the Act's regulations are crystal clear that a [pseudo-judge] is to "conduct fair and impartial hearings" and to "maintain order". [The pseudo-judge] failed to carry out these duties when she disrupted the examination of a witness on a highly sensitive matter in order to provide her own arguments on the Township's behalf. The second reason is that, by focusing on the narrow question of whether the discharge of an officer's weapon is abnormal, [the pseudo-judge] was, again, exhibiting exactly the kind of myopic and distorted view of the incident that our Supreme Court warned against in Payes II.

  • One appeals judge dissents from this conclusion.

    I cannot agree with the Majority that the incident here qualifies as an abnormal working condition sufficient to support benefits under the mental/mental theory of recovery for psychological injuries. I do not discount the facts here or seek to improperly break the event into component parts, "where each part, standing on its own, might be safely determined to be a 'normal' working condition for a police officer", an approach that our Supreme Court denounced in Payes II.

    Acknowledging that this inquiry is both fact-sensitive and a question of law, I believe that this incident, replete with terrible facts that cannot be minimized, remains within the type of event that law enforcement officers unfortunately encounter in the performance of his or her duties. Police officers face the possibility of life-and-death situations every day as a necessary part of their work. Indeed, it is the nature of the danger and trauma inherent in their work that engenders our deep respect for police and other first responders.

    Unlike in Payes II, where the accident [running over a mentally ill jaywalker on an Interstate highway wearing dark clothing at night, and unsuccessfully attempting to resuscitate her while simultaneously directing traffic around the crash site] could have happened to any driver on the highway at that moment, this incident would be highly unlikely in a work context had Claimant not been a law enforcement officer. The cases collected in Payes II bear out this approach. Law enforcement officers have been awarded compensation where "a street gang, in retaliation for the officer killing a gang member in a shootout, placed a bounty on the life or health of the officer and his family" and where an officer was "subjected to false accusations by the chief of police, public airing of those accusations, suspension, termination, and stripping of his duties and authority upon reinstatement and deliberate ostracism instigated by the chief". These were truly abnormal working conditions for a law enforcement officer, not events that were, as the Supreme Court stated in Payes II, "inherent in police work".

    By contrast, the more numerous cases collected in Payes II where benefits have been denied to law enforcement officers all entailed incidents occurring while the claimants were engaged in their law enforcement duties: responding to a call to assist officers who had been shot and seriously injured; involvement in a physical altercation arising from an attempt to serve a domestic violence arrest warrant; fatal shooting of an unarmed suspect followed by a grand jury investigation, indictment, trial and media attention; and involvement in an eighthour standoff involving the officer, other officers, and a barricaded gunman. The facts here fit more within the latter category rather than the former and convince me that this case does not present abnormal working conditions for a police officer in [this municipality].

In a footnote, the appeals-panel majority points out that the state legislature has "fortunately" recently passed a law making further court cases in this vein unnecessary: "A post-traumatic stress injury, when claimed by a first responder, 'shall not be required to be the result of an abnormal working condition to be a compensable injury under this Act'."

A very interesting exchange in the culture-war thread:

I haven't consumed commercial pornography in like a decade now. I would like to pretend that I quit watching porn for moral reasons, but I actually just found that while I was aroused by porn, the actual moment of orgasm when I was masturbating inevitably happened while I was looking away from the screen and remembering/remixing memories of partners I had. I realized that porn wasn't really serving any purpose for me.

If we don't want porn stars to make money, if we don't want their names to be common bywords, men need to stop consuming porn. I'm not even asking you to stop masturbating! Just use your imagination and your memories! Think about that time in the back of the car after Kaylee's graduation party, or that girl in the bookshop who never wears a bra.

Typical-mind fallacy. Maybe you have a wealth of experience and a great imagination, but I have only about three IRL-based sexy situations that I can imagine well enough to fap to (available upon request), in comparison to the dozens of text, hundreds of video, and thousands of image situations that I have compiled on my computer.

How good is your imagination in this arena? Do you have a "mental spank bank" that surpasses the one on your hard drive?

The three IRL-based sexy situations that I can imagine are as follows.

(1) IRL, for a dancing unit in high-school gym class I was paired with a hot, somewhat acne-afflicted (Indian) girl. In the fantasy, she has obtained from a genie a wish to be super-hot, but as a tradeoff for the wish she has been cursed with overwhelming horniness, so after gym class she drags me somewhere private and begs me to fuck her.

(2) IRL, in high-school physics class (I don't remember which one—maybe honors, maybe AP, maybe both) a hot, skinny, cargo-pants-wearing (Chinese) girl was included in one of my laboratory groups, and for around a year during college she was a pseudo-friend of mine—not Pseudo-Friend One, whose list of questions is linked above, but Pseudo-Friend Six (1 2 3). In the fantasy, she comes to my house wearing a sundress and invites me to fuck her.

(3) IRL: In my civil-engineering office there was a hot (white) woman just a few years older than I was. At the end of one workday, just after sending a resignation email to upper management*, she pulled me into the office's plan room (filled primarily with dozens of stacked metal cabinets containing hundreds of decades-old as-built plans** and survey field books) to tell me privately that she was resigning.*** In the fantasy, she invites me to fuck her in the plan room before she leaves.

*She was extremely frustrated with upper management. As one example: She was a licensed engineer. Licensed engineers (and licensed surveyors) are as rare as hen's teeth in this particular government employer, because for obtaining a license this employer offers tuition reimbursements but not the salary or promotion incentives that can be found in some other states. A few years ago, instead of instituting a salary incentive, the employer set up a program allowing licensed-engineer employees to volunteer as mentors to help other employees gain licenses (fulfilling the license requirement of several years of experience under a licensed boss), and my coworker volunteered in that program. The program consisted mostly of designing solutions for work orders provided by the operations people. But she discovered that, whenever she told the operations people that a particular work order could not be fulfilled in a standards-compliant manner within the scope of a quick maintenance work order (rather than being put off until it could be included in whichever full-blown "capital program" construction project was scheduled to pass through the area several years in the future), they would just shop the same work order around to different mentors until they found one willing to condone the drawing up of a substandard design that would expose the employer to liability if discovered later. (If a motorist hits a piece of guide rail, is injured, and files a lawsuit, the installing authority has immunity only if the guide rail was designed in accordance with the authority's standards.) She raised this issue in emails with the bigwigs and even in a full meeting with them, but I guess she wasn't satisfied with their response.

**Now that I've retired (since depression made me incapable of tolerating work, even with the medication described in the linked comment), I guess there's no reason for my throwaway account @throwaway20230125 to exist separately from @ToaKraka. (Was there ever a reason? Maybe I'm just paranoid.) So now I can claim the prestige of membership in the AAQC-writers club. Look on my work (singular), ye mighty, and despair.

***I don't know why she felt it necessary to give me special notice in this manner. I don't think we were very close, though we were both acclaimed by others as highly effective employees. In response to her revelation, I just (very nervously, due to the dangerously-secluded situation) said something like: "Okay. If you find resignation necessary, then it's necessary. It's your decision."

Crosspost from >>>/diy/2959736:

>Be me, mid-Atlantic USA
>Hire a homebuilding contractor to build a small custom house (860 ft2; 220 k$ plus permit and utility fees) in a town of 10,000 people
>Project manager sends me a zoning permit application to be signed
>Whoever filled out the PDF didn't write in what zone the lot is in, and didn't include the second page of the permit application. I point this out
>Project manager responds: "It's a minor oversight. I'll finish filling out the form after you sign it. Just trust us! I've got ten years of experience doing this!"
>I again ask for the second page
>The permit application gets sent over again, now with the first page complete and the second page included
>But whoever filled out the second page didn't write in the lot's ID number. I point this out
>Project manager now says there's been a misunderstanding: the contractor helps me fill out permits as a courtesy, but in the end it's my responsibility to complete and file them
>Okay, whatever. I'm an early-retired civil engineer, so I can do it myself if I really need to
>Fill out the applications for zoning, driveway, and fence permits, use QCAD to draft a fully dimensioned copy of the homebuilder's site plan (with the driveway shown—it wasn't in the site plan that the contractor sent to me), and send all four files to the municipality

Am I about to get fucked up the ass by a shitty contractor? Or is it just normal procedure for clients to sign incomplete forms?

Responses from 4channers:

Everyone is a shitty contractor. It balances out because the city inspectors and permit departments are also shitty and don't care what you're doing as long as they get their beak wet.

bingo. its hilarious when you pull property maps and tax docs from them county and half the info is obviously wrong or completely missing yet the county engineer round stamped it

My folks applied for a permit to add a fourth room to our house. The permit got held up cause our houses 'already had 4 rooms'. After reviewing the details it seems the original builder submitted plans, got them approved, and then built a completely different house. After twenty years no one had noticed.

My girlfriends house was built back when no one gave a shit about anything. The septic tank leach lines were basically stubby little nothings because the lot didn't have much of a back yard. It was a wide lot but not deep. The house was a two bed/one bath and they wanted to double that. The county building code put limits on the number of bedrooms based on septic capacity. They said the limit was two based on the septic tank. The system would need a full replacement to bring it up to code. They found another county code that stated that a room was not a bedroom unless it had a closet. They built two 'dens' and a bathroom addition and the county updated their codes the next year to fix that loophole.

I live in a city. We wanted to add an office/bonus building to the back of our lot. The permit and inspection costs were a huge issue. Code said that anything 120 square feet or less was an outbuilding and exempt from permitting, inspections, and even building codes. Ended up building three 120 square foot 'sheds' in a U-shape around a central deck. Code says decks require a permit... if attached to a structure. If they are free standing they don't require one. Power required a permit but that was much less hassle.

How good is your imagination in this arena? Do you have a "mental spank bank" that surpasses the one on your hard drive?

Imagining porn? Like uphill bothways through three meters of snow?

Saving external porn to hard drive sounds like a foreign concept to me in ${CurrentYear}, akin to downloading mp3s from Napster or something.

I do have various POV-filmed sextapes from previous or ongoing ONS/situationships/relationships that I sometimes revisit when I’m all-so-tiresomed out from thot-fatigue and/or browsing porn websites. It’s like the pragmatic-nut version of comfort food: Pretty meh from a Coolidge-Effect perspective, but at least there’s a known outcome.

Also hilarious but horrifying when you see chicks you’ve banged/facialed/whatnot on camera later-on post engagement and/or wedding photos on social media, although generally they will be at least a few months after. Sometimes you might see some of them make #GirlPower posts on LinkedIn.

I’ve never made a video.

But tangential to the latter, I met Young Woman A at Male Friend B’s wedding; we had a short fling as she had just broken up with her boyfriend. It ended when they got back together.

A year or so later, at Male Friend C’s wedding, Young Woman A was a maid of honor. Neither of us had apparently spoken about our fling, as I was seated next to her by-then financée at dinner. I was polite and made no mention — wouldn’t have under normal circumstances and especially so at someone else’s wedding where taking any attention away from the celebration would be inexcusable. But I could tell Young Woman A was sweating a little bit.

The county building code put limits on the number of bedrooms based on septic capacity. [...] They found another county code that stated that a room was not a bedroom unless it had a closet.

Not the only only place to have a rule like that - my brother- and sister-in-law had to get their septic tank replaced several years ago, inquired whether they should get a different size, and were told that the existing size/capacity was correct for the number of closets in the house.

Also on the topic of septic systems, my own house did not come with a map of the extent of the leach field, which is an important piece of information when you want to put in fruit trees and a vegetable garden. The county website claimed they had such records on file for all houses constructed after the 1960's, and my house was built in the 80's, but long story short they couldn't find any record of my house having a septic system. I ended up relying on a location estimate from my elderly neighbor who moved in back when the development was newly built.

Some weeks ago, I shared a court case regarding whether a firefighter's failure to resuscitate two dying babies with CPR counts as "abnormal working conditions" that give rise to a valid PTSD workers' compensation claim, rather than being merely part and parcel of working as a firefighter.

We're really stretching the definition of "fun" today, aren't we? But I suppose type 3 fun is still technically fun, in the same manner that "off" is a TV channel. Everyone needs a hobby.

I haven't consumed commercial pornography in like a decade now. I would like to pretend that I quit watching porn for moral reasons, but I actually just found that while I was aroused by porn, the actual moment of orgasm when I was masturbating inevitably happened while I was looking away from the screen and remembering/remixing memories of partners I had. I realized that porn wasn't really serving any purpose for me.

If we don't want porn stars to make money, if we don't want their names to be common bywords, men need to stop consuming porn. I'm not even asking you to stop masturbating! Just use your imagination and your memories! Think about that time in the back of the car after Kaylee's graduation party, or that girl in the bookshop who never wears a bra.

I usually find myself visualizing past sexual experiences while, uh, watching sex education films. I don't look away from the screen in the process, that's the whole point for me: that the person on the other end is a stand-in and stimuli-enhancer. I also have neutral-to-positive attitude towards porn, so I have zero interest in undercutting the industry or even decreasing my own minimal use

How good is your imagination in this arena? Do you have a "mental spank bank" that surpasses the one on your hard drive?

A hard drive? What is this, 2005? I've got 6 TB's worth of SSDs, and about zero bytes of them dedicated to porn. It lives on the internet, for free, all you need is a VPN if you live in Britbong land (or India).

That being said, I was raised in intellectual poverty, my adolescent awakening coincided with no regular internet access. I got pretty fucking good at doing without. Or course, back then, it was pure imagination. With actual experience under my belt, there's far less fervent dreaming of the texture of bags of sand. Porn is still great, wouldn't want to live without it, even if I could do without.

We're really stretching the definition of "fun" today, aren't we?

As mentioned previously, I include both "interesting" and "funny" in "fun" for the purposes of these threads.

By all means, carry on. I'm just noting the theme being unusually morbid of late.

It's slim pickings sometimes. My normal procedure is to check the following listings in order on Thursday afternoon and try to find one or two interesting or funny cases.

  • New Jersey: Supreme, published appellate, unpublished appellate, published tax, unpublished tax, published trial, unpublished trial

  • Pennsylvania: Commonwealth appellate (includes zoning and workers' compensation stuff), superior appellate (includes most civil and criminal stuff)

  • Something else (federal, New York, Ohio, etc.)

For today's posting, I went through all of New Jersey's opinions for the last week and found nothing either interesting or funny, so the opinion that I ended up posting was a good way into Pennsylvania's Commonwealth Court. Twice in recent months, both New Jersey and Pennsylvania were totally barren, forcing me to post opinions from Ohio or the feds.

Does it count as "abnormal working conditions" for a police officer in a very peaceful municipality to shoot a suspect to death as part of an intense physical struggle?

I'll be honest that's a tough one I don't really have a clear answer to. On one side, that's unlikely to be what they ever had in mind would happen that that day, even with decades of experience. Then, I think how silly it would sound for infantrymen to make the same claim, that having to shoot at people in a warzone is abnormal for a soldier, even if they're from a country that hasn't had a combat deployment in decades. I think on balance I would err on the side of the dissent, no matter how unlikely it is to happen, using deadly force is something police officers train and prepare for as it is a possible outcome of an intervention. If it was so unlikely and abnormal, then they wouldn't be armed at all times in the exercise of their functions, they'd have guns at the station or in their cars for "abnormal" emergencies.

That said it seems a quite a bit shitty to refuse compensation because it would not be "abnormal working conditions" and I'll echo the sigh of relief that that law has been amended, even if I can imagine situations where people abuse those claims or get into jobs they should be gently discouraged to be in due to being a poor emotional fit for it. Hopefully there's other criteria that would stop an EMT from claiming PTSD compensation from simply seeing blood.

[cw: almost certainly TMI oversharing. And most of the names here are either gay or male-leaning-bisexual]

How good is your imagination in this arena? Do you have a "mental spank bank" that surpasses the one on your hard drive?

I write smut, if not necessarily good smut, so my imagination's doing fine. There's a lot of options that aren't really featured in conventional porn at all, and despite the best efforts of the furry fandom to explore new domains of indescribably bizarre smut, there's a lot of stuff that either isn't available or only has a tiny number of not-great examples. Forget weird kinks: "Woman in jockstraps, het sex, go" seems vastly underserved and trivially easy to execute. I've got a handful of story irons in the fire, and while most of them are probably not desirable to the average poster here (a distaff counterpart to Hooters gets a little out of control, a gay guy gets talked into talking up a woman by his bi boyfriend, woman goes undercover in the men's locker room until hijinks 'force' her to watch some M/M, two opposite-gender spacers on a long haul trip find the close quarters and lacking privacy to take its toll, a gay guy in an alternate history fantasy world ends up 'owning' his straight best friend after hijinks ensure and struggles with his principles while said straight friend doesn't seem willing to learn his lessons), they're pretty enjoyable to consider.

In the bedroom, I'm a lot more interested in pleasing others. That's fun and sometimes a good start for a stroll down memory lane, but those experiences don't always or even often transfer over well if I'm just trying to shut down for the night, so to speak.

On the flip side, there are things other people have produced that I either could or would not consider, or have done anywhere near the same quality, even solely within my imagination. There's a really good short form animation of people competing in a video game while also abusing the settings on remote vibrators, doesn't even show a hint of a genital, would never have considered it as a concept beforehand, really gets my motor running. Fek's Spellbound (cw: technically there's a pair of boobs, but it's almost all gay) and a lot of Ruaidri's animations should be comedic, but it's just so well-executed that it works. A lot of LawyerDog/Cantio, Braeburned, and Rick Griffin's stuff is both comedic and horny. Even for conventional human-on-human camera porn, there's a lot of imagery that's not something I'd have considered.

On the gripping hand (hurr hurr), a lot of scenarios presented by my own imagination or presented by others, aren't really practical or desirable; sometimes they're not considered because they're bad ideas. Sex while gaming is actually pretty unpleasant, quel surprise. Wake-up sex is an interesting fantasy, but no level of carefully-circumscribed consent beforehand can overcome a startle reflex. A lot of rough sex or degradation is just unpleasant, rather than kinky in a fun way. Ethical exhibitionism or enhibitionism isn't as time-consuming to set up as it sounds, but it's still ultimately very chilly and I don't have the physique for even ENM. Orientation play just doesn’t really work in situ; fantasies that depend on magic or superscience or both tautologically can't actually happen. Haven't tried the Braeburned orgies, but don't really want to, either.

*I don't know why she felt it necessary to give me special notice in this manner. I don't think we were very close, though we were both acclaimed by others as highly effective employees.

I wonder if she left because she saw herself at an ethical or liability crux, and thought you were competent such that you'd end up next in line after she retired, and didn't want you to feel like she was abandoned/shoving it on you or for you to not be aware of the scope of the problem. But I dunno the domain-specific context.

Wake-up sex is an interesting fantasy, but no level of carefully-circumscribed consent beforehand can overcome a startle reflex.

You'd be surprised - and it is as good if not better than the fantasy of it.

It definitely works for some people, so don't read that as a complete nonstarter for everyone. It just doesn't work for me, even if the fantasy was still interesting, either being self-conscious while waking up or getting an elbow to the eyeball are kinda moodkillers.

I wonder if she left because she saw herself at an ethical or liability crux, and thought you were competent such that you'd end up next in line after she retired, and didn't want you to feel like she was abandoned/shoving it on you or for you to not be aware of the scope of the problem.

(1) She informed the whole office of the mentor program's shenanigans in a non-private manner months before resigning. In this private rendezvous she did nothing but inform me that she had sent her resignation email to the bigwigs a few minutes ago.

(2) I did not have an engineer's license, so I was not eligible to volunteer in the mentoring program, and I would not have been interested in volunteering even if I had been licensed. (In the absence of any salary incentives, and with my plans to retire early, I had no interest in obtaining a license.) Her mentoring volunteering was transferred to another licensed volunteer in a different office, and her non-mentoring work was transferred to a different person in our office (not to me).

FYI, I think you can mark comments you've made as 18+, it's under the ellipsis in the default view. IDK, if anyone cares, it matters, or does anything.

I used to do that, but unfortunately its biggest impact was breaking external archive sites, with very little benefit to the not-so-virgin eyes I was trying to protect.

I do think it slows the slide into prurient topics that I think the more misanthropic among us insist on telling us is 'fun'.

Possible, but I was direct-linking hardcore stuff under that, so dunno how effect it'd be.

IIRC, some people complained about how that built-in NSFW mark (1) triggers an annoying pop-up for people who have not bothered to disable the pop-up in their account settings and (2) breaks third-party archiving and search indexing, so using the NSFW mark is frowned on.

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