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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   2147 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 28, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Meta bought an AI company called "Manus". The company automates remote work using AI.

I was wondering how it is pronounced.

The easy candidate is "man-us" like we are going to man you with workers.

Less likely but funny: "Manu-s" like we are going to provide an endless number of Indian workers named "Manu" for all your remote work needs.

Finally my favorite and definitely not the case: "M'anus". Like you better start enjoying all the shitty slop we put out, it's coming straight from "muh anus"

Less likely but funny: "Manu-s" like we are going to provide an endless number of Indian workers named "Manu" for all your remote work needs.

To the extent white Americans have any association with the name "Manu" they'd likely think of the famous European basketball player. Although, the thought of white Americans being oblivious to a plan in their faces to Replace them while they think of an athlete only adds to the hilarity and appropriateness.

Finally my favorite and definitely not the case: "M'anus". Like you better start enjoying all the shitty slop we put out, it's coming straight from "muh anus"

Or it's a greeting, like "m'lord" or "m'lady," in addressing Americans: "Hello, m'anus."

I worked in the tech sector and don't follow sports so "Manu" is definitely an Indian name in my mind.

I like the greeting. Say hello to your new asshole overlord.

It's "hand" in Latin, pronounced "ma-nus".

Almost exactly seven weeks after I started reading it, I've finally finished Cryptonomicon.

Whew.

I've updated the list of books I read from start to finish this year accordingly. Cryptonomicon nudged The Remains of the Day out of my top five.

How come the old CW thread is still pinned?

Do you know men who get "man flu"? Are you a guy who gets "man flu"? If you don't know what man flu is, my understanding is that it's the idea that men are lazier than women when they're sick. I heard this and wrote it off, like most gender war stuff. Men don't help around the house enough, women earn less than men for doing the same work. But I keep seeing guys defending the idea that viruses make them sicker than women.

This is completely anathema to me. My father would go years without taking a sick day. He would get sick every few years during his busiest work event of the year, when he'd be pulling 12-hour-plus days. Growing up, I don't recall ever hearing about anything being put off in our social circle because a man was sick. My mom, on the other hand, was down all the time with one thing or another.

My father-in-law is the same. In 2021, he clearly had COVID. His wife was in the bedroom for days; he was out shoveling snow, cooking, and then making everyone play cards with him.

The only time I take "medicine" is when I'm at work events pretending I'm not sick. Afrin and a constant supply of cough suppressants..

Men and women react differently to different types of pain. Men generally do better with external pain - bruises, lacerations, burns (I have no time to bleed is something almost any man has said in absolutely straight way at some point). Women cope better with internal - due to menstrual pain, prevalence of UTI and migraines - they are more used to their innards complaining. I get sick once per year, usually for 24 hours - thanks to the slavic genes and our secret cure - but they are absolutely miserable.

Meh. Putting on my armchair evolutionary biologist hat, I'd guess that women get drastically sick, lie down for a few days, get taken care of now and then by other women around the house/cave/tent/dwelling, and after a few days of aggressive immune response are back up to normal. Men range out to hunt for potentially days, get sick far from home, and can't afford to have a huge fever while abroad, so get low-key sick instead and try to fight the disease with the least escalation possible, even if it takes longer. That would also suit what I see between my wife and I. I have constant colds that take just about as long to get rid of as it takes me to line up the next one. My wife catches the flu, is completely down and out for a few days, and is then back up and running.

Ultimately I think it's all confirmation bias.

I'll admit to being that guy. I feel like I get sick less often than my wife, but my worst sicknesses on any given year are always worse than my wife's.

I'm pretty sure we are getting the same sicknesses just reacting differently to them. Sicknesses tend to burn through me fast and hard. I am very sick for a few days and then mostly back to normal. Whereas my wife is often just a little sick for a week or two. Just over the last two weeks with holidays and the spreading of germs everywhere I've had two mild fevers (101-103). She has had none. I have also had a light cough, she has a heavy nasty sounding cough. For two days I had one of the worst sore throats I can remember, literally was drooling to avoid swallowing. Its fine now. She has had a scratchy throat the whole two weeks.

Women have stronger immune systems. Testosterone has immunosuppressant effects. The difference isn't massive, at least in humans, but it's there.

For personal medical stuff? I use pure galenism until I'm at death's door. I might take an anti-emetic if I'm worried about dehydration, or an aspirin for a bad headache, but other than that, I don't do 'medicine' because I don't need it.

I won't typically leave the house when throwing up, but I do move around it. I won't call in if I feel safe to drive(which is at least 25% of my job), don't have a high fever, and haven't thrown up.

I'm close friends with a man whose internal biology seems to be made of paper and sugar, which is ironic because he's very athletic. He gets sick (often) and is completely out of commission for a week at least. He's liable to visit his doctor's office for a minor laceration or a sore throat.

Usually if I get sick, I'm out for the duration of the active phase for pretty much everything. The only exception is walking the dog, if necessary - dog's needs trump all. When I had covid, I was so fatigued I barely could make myself get up to go to the bathroom, but I still once a say dragged myself out of bed and dressed up and zombie-shuffled along the dog route because you've got to do what you've got to do. Usually it's no more than 2-3 days of this but when at it, I'm pretty much 100% useless. That also may be because my work involves using my brain, and when sick the brain is useless. But usually also the flu for me results in fatigue which makes me even more useless. That said, once the active phase has passed I am pretty much back to the normal schedule, even if I have cough and sneezing and other stuff (of course, trying to limit contact with other people while expectorations are continuing).

As for medicine, I usually do tried and true home remedies - a lot of hot tea with lemon, ginger & honey, plus vitamin C (it may be overdoing it as lemon already has a lot of it, but I never heard of anyone overdosing on vitamin C) - this year also adding zinc and quercetine, let's see if there's a difference. If I get lingering coughs - which I am prone to, unfortunately - menthol lozenges. Ah, and the chicken soup of course - while called "Jewish penicillin", unlike penicillin, it works for viral infections too.

I'm pretty sure that men get specifically respiratory diseases worse than women. Like how women get worse migraines/headaches. This article suggests that men with pneumonia are more likely to die than women with pneumonia, and mentions that it has something to do with the male immune system.

For some reason, my wife gets a lot more ill than I do from the same illness - when she catches my cold or flu, she is ill for longer and with worse symptoms. I think there is also an element of tolerance - I lived alone for many years prior to our marriage, whereas she never lived alone, so I am quite used to soldiering on when I'm sick as I had no alternative; when she is sick, she is instead used to going into full rest mode to recover.

I also wonder about the effect of overall physical wellness. My wife, while she has a healthy BMI, is not a consistent exerciser and has relatively poor strength and cardio; whereas I have always exercised regularly so I can hike, play tennis, etc. I have read anecdotally that this does influence immune response.

The fitness would apply to my parents. While my father has born with several physical maladies, he pushed through and was an athlete. He plays pick up basketball in his 70's. My mother not so much.

I think there is also an element of tolerance - I lived alone for many years prior to our marriage, whereas she never lived alone, so I am quite used to soldiering on when I'm sick as I had no alternative; when she is sick, she is instead used to going into full rest mode to recover.

This may explain the whole phenomenon.

Back when people lived on homesteads, it was expected that men worked outdoors (that is to say farm, hunt, repair the buildings etc), women did the household, and no one lived alone, there was no room for being ill. You pushed on as best you could or suffer a real shortage later.

A little later, when factory and office jobs came about and allowed you to call in sick sometimes, the men started doing so. But someone still needs to do the household tasks; there are tasks that can be delayed, but if no one cooks there's nothing to eat, and that is a pretty immediate concern.

And if the man has no experience cooking at all (which wasn't that weird - many people never lived alone and this was a "woman's task"), you can't expect him to instinctively know how to do it. You'd have to teach him and show him, all the while being ill. At that point it's probably still easier to do it yourself.

Nowadays it is expected that a man knows how to do the basic household tasks, at least in a pinch, just as women are expected to have "real" jobs. But two generations ago it really wasn't. So the ill woman still had to push on, while the ill man takes a day off work.

Two generations ago there were balogna sandwiches.

I beg people to actually talk to their grandparents and great-grands about how life changed in their lifetimes. Everyone in 1970 had wonderbread and lunchmeat at home all the time, and ate it regularly. Yeah nobody preferred it but it was how life was that sometimes you ate what you had available instead of what you wanted- remember this was a society as poor as Russia or Mexico is today.

Maybe I'm that guy? I try not to be a bitch about it, and probably call out sick a day every year or so, but I'm prone to being whiny about being sick in a way that I'm not about being, say, physically injured.

Like, I'm sick right now, have been since waking up with a sore throat on Tuesday, and things have been trending more worse than better over the last few days. It's not worth going to a doctor (stocking up on real sudafed and maybe some throat spray, on the other hand, is on the to-do list for tomorrow) over, and I'm not seriously ill, but this sucks and is a crappy way to spend my vacation. My throat/tonsils are sore as fuck, I'm still freezing under this blanket, and the super dry conditions (visiting family in the desert when I live in the humid South) plus nasal congestion are not a nice mix.

Oddly enough, I don't think I ever caught Covid in spite of having a roommate hospitalized with it in the pre-vaccine days. If I did it was a light enough case that I couldn't distinguish it from "generic flu-like illness that's over in a day or so", or a really bad hangover.

Women do actually have generally stronger immune responses than men. This paper I found interprets the difference through a evolutionary biology lens: males pursue a higher variance strategy compared to females, prioritizing competitive attributes like size/strength over more conservative survival traits like resistance to infection. Interestingly, there seems to be a concomitant downside: women are also more prone to autoimmune disorders than men.

So apparently, according to a random article I read a while back, testosterone does increase the severity of illness (I’m on my phone or I’d dig up the citation). For the record, no one in my family except my brother gets super sick (minus migraines, which everyone but my father and sister get).

It's not that men get sicker, but that when they do need to be taken care of or take a load off, the contrast is more stark. Let's say a husband and a wife are both under the weather 10 days in a year, with 2 being ugly. If the man takes those 2, and quietly shoulders the rest, while the wife, is at various levels still in commission for her remaining 8, one might misread the batting average.

My wife is open that she needs to lean on me more than I am allowed to lean on her because she's the woman (generally, not about being sick). (I agree!). She's self-possessed enough to recognize that gender dynamics aren't even. So the thing is that occassionally, a man gets knocked on his ass, and it looks like he's being a bitch.

As an aside, I cannot recall the last time I took a sick day at work, if perhaps ever. However, the person who took the most I ever met was a former male boss. Nice guy but extreme stereotype of a leftist. Used phrases like 'adulting'. So maybe it's also about the type of company the type of person who uses the phrase keeps?

As an aside, I cannot recall the last time I took a sick day at work, if perhaps ever.

Me neither. I basically never get sick.

Banking sick days is good in the event that I do come down with a sudden case of multipleinterviewswithadifferentcompanyitis that would take too much time beyond a “dentist” or “doctor’s appointment.”

The "no sick day" pride thing is confusing to me. My employer allows a certain number of sick days, why would I not take advantage of those for days when my productivity would be affected by being sick or my recovery would be impaired by working? Not to mention knock on effects of getting my co-workers sick.

There's no bonus for not using any sick days.

Where I work, maternity leave is taken out of sick time, and I've had two babies in the five years I've worked there. So when I've been pregnant, I've had to balance taking a sick day while being both sick and pregnant, vs getting to recover from having a baby. I do not like that policy. Fortunately, I don't get sick much.

How much maternity leave do you get?

Up to three months, unpaid after running out of sick time (but it demolishes sick time, so if I got sick after coming back, I'd just teach sick). I got one month, since I couldn't that much unpaid time off.

My unused sick days get paid at the end of the year, which serves as incentive to never use them. Consider, one week of work with one paid sick day. If I take the sick day, I get paid 4 days of work and 1 day of sick. If I work all 5 days, I get 5 days of pay, plus the 1 sick day paid out.

They also don't care if I'm actually sick. The sick days are there for me to use, when I want to use them, and there are policies surrounding that. But nobody will ever ask me for a doctor's note.

Fair, if you get them paid out then it's a different story. I haven't had such a situation myself.

Many employers have just a single pool of PTO, so days you take off for being sick come at the expense of days you could have taken off for fun.

Which country is this? In the US, I have never seen an employer who groups sick days and PTO. Of course, I'm in hi-tec where the standard of benefits is usually high. Not luxurious - like, I have a pretty decent benefit package now and it has just 5 sick days a year (there's also short-term disability but that's whole other story) - but still a separate benefit from PTO.

I’m American and my company uses a single pool of PTO. It’s a small startup-esque company, so maybe that plays a role? I will say that my friends in tech (I’m a mechanical engineer) have simultaneously better PTO policies and worse PTO cultures than anyone else I know. Plenty of allowed time off and they barely use it.

PTO cultures, especially in tech startups, are commonly abysmal. Or at least were when I was there. While it is understandable for early founding team, where working one's ass off can literally make one millions (if one's very lucky of course), unfortunately it gets transferred to the wider team where the benefits are much more limited. It takes explicit and conscious effort to counter this dynamics, and I only rarely have seen companies that do it, and explicitly encourage and normalize taking regular vacations and not being "always on call". While being young, childless and untethered, it may not be that big of a deal, but later in life it becomes a bigger deal.

A single pool of PTO would be a high side of average deal in the trades- the alternative is usually to have no paid sick time at all(vacation needing to be scheduled in advance, in one day increments, often counting the weekends in between vacation days as part of it).

very common these days in the US. Sick days are notoriously underutilized (see above discussion).

Strong agree, I have about ten months of sick leave at this point. Nice if I ever get a lingering illness whilst still employed but otherwise? EH!

This is the U.S. I work for a company that provides B2B IT services. I get 5 weeks of undifferentiated PTO per year and can roll over 1 week. Most of my work can be done from home, meaning I very infrequently need to take sick days, so this works out well for me IMO. The company has also been pretty lenient with letting people borrow from future PTO in the case of genuine medical necessity to avoid having to use FMLA leave.

I'm American, and I've known a lot of people with PTO that combines vacation and sick days. It may be a difference in state labor laws.

Could be, I have worked either in California or with companies that have significant California presence, and California requires sick days.

I really dislike the trend of companies playing around with sick and vacation days to force more work out of people - this and unlimited* vacation days are both horrible policies.

*if your supervisor approves them, which they coincidentally will not because more vacation makes them look bad to their supervisors.

"Unlimited" vacation is always a scam. I get why companies do it - e.g. tech workers, unfortunately, under-utilize vacations, and the culture, unfortunately, often encourages it - and with "unlimited" vacation you do not have any monetary liability left to cover. And it doesn't even take the supervisor to explicitly deny vacations - absence of defined benefit already creates an expectation that it's something additional to what you're normally owed, so if you're taking more of it, you're more "greedy" than then next guy who doesn't. If you have X days defined by contract, then you taking X days is normal. But if there's nothing in contract and you take X days and the other guy takes X/2 days then clearly the other guy is a better worker than you. That's not a healthy dynamics to be in.

This. "Unlimited" just means "at the supervisor's discretion", and I'd prefer at-will days off instead. At my current job, I have X weeks of vacation, and they ask us to book two weeks in advance. Some things I had happen were:

  1. On Monday, I learned about something for the coming Friday. I emailed the manager and explained that I wanted that time off, why I couldn't follow the regular procedures, and why it was valuable to me. (It was quickly approved with no issues)
  2. I had a normal vacation that I saw coming a month away. I filled out the request on the employee portal and was approved with no further scrutiny. (I told everyone what was happening via watercooler talk, of course. Community/interpersonal conversations are different than corporate/administrative ones.)
  3. I had an extra week, and they would prefer not to carry the days over to next year, so I took some more time off in December.

Under an "unlimited" scheme, I'd have to justify each day off (like scenario 1), and the reasoning for #3 is probably not strong enough to get approved without pushback.

I agree 100% about "unlimited" vacation, but the single pool doesn't bother me as much as an alternative to being either paid out for unused sick days or having to malinger to get use out of them.

Unless your company is unusually weird, you have to lie to take advantage of them though -- which you kind of should do anyways, but it's not great.

Why do you have to lie?

Most companies don't let you take sick days unless you are, like, sick?

Well yes, I'm not talking about lying about being sick. I don't max out my sick days but I'm also not a "no sick days ever" guy. That doesn't require lying.

I'm a "doesn't really get sick to the point that it would impair my work(ing from my home office)" guy, so I either need to lie about being sick to get some sick days or work ~5-10 days per year more than all the frail zoomers I work with. (who are probably also lying about being sick at times, in addition to just getting sick a lot for whatever reasons)

I haven't worked directly with zoomers but from what I can tell the real zoomer malingerer power move is mental health leave under the FMLA.

So read this court case today. The gist is simple: two fine specimen of humanity from Arkansas sold their baby to a stranger for $1000 and a case of beer (there was a written contract and everything, they are not some kind of savages!). A neighbor noticed and informed the police. The rest is predictable. But then we come to the sentences.

The man:

Urban pleaded guilty to one count of attempted accepting compensation for adoption, but prosecutors dropped one count of endangering the welfare of a minor. A judge accepted Urban’s plea deal, and he was sentenced to three years in the Arkansas Department of Corrections with an additional three-year sentence suspended.

The woman:

Ehlers pleaded guilty to both counts — attempting to accept compensation and endangering the child’s welfare — against her. But Benton County Circuit Judge Brad Karren suspended the charges in her plea deal and placed her on state-supervised probation for six years, according to court records.

So this is where I wonder - they guy pled guilty to just one count and got 3 years inside. The girl - who did absolutely the same thing, they did it together and in concert, and who pled to the same count and one more, worse one if I understand correctly - got essentially nothing, if she manages not to sell another baby within 6 years, she's free. So she clearly got much lesser punishment for at least the same - and formally, by charges, actually more severe - crime. Because she's female, I understand? Nobody think this is wrong? I really hope they don't plan to give the baby back to the "mother" and that's not the reason why she's not in jail.

Looking at the court records, the sentencing's probably in part due to the 'endangering welfare' bit -- it's not in most of the reporting, but there's pretty overt evidence of both neglect, and directly handing the kid to an incredibly drunken guy who still was more concerned about the child's welfare than the alleged parents.

That said, if I've got the names right, the difference in sentencing may just reflect Urban already being on probation for "receiving" a stolen bike (... I'd be dollars to donuts he just stole it) and a previous domestic violence arrest. Ehlers had a shoplifting arrest, too (and maybe jumped bail?), but that's not going to weigh as heavily in most cases, even ones as weird as this.

I can't see anything about the disposition of the kid, but I'd be very surprised if the kid didn't go straight to child protective services. The six-pack of beer wasn't really part of the whole 'adoption-for-sale' gimmick... but it was part of loaning the kid out overnight, instead. Optimistically, that's just an incredible level of neglect by a man and woman too dumb to realize that concerned bystanders were trying to get the kid into a safer location... but pessimistically, they might just not have cared why people were wanting to borrow a 2-month-old baby for one night.

Not a case of beer, a fucking six-pack. I hope it was at least not Bud Light.

Also quote, from that article you have linked:

Both parents signed, then added a disclaimer.

“After signing this there will be no changing y’all two’s minds to never contact again,” court records showed.

These are not applicants to Mensa.

As for the different sentences, without knowing the circumstances I'll withhold judgment, though each sentence for each individual seems bizarrely light to me for what, again to me, is an unimaginable crime. Simply that the male and female got different treatment does not bother me.

Do we know that compensation was the motive here? Based on the article it's possible that they were trying to give the child up to someone who could raise the baby better than they could and that the token compensation was just that. Obviously this would be an egregiously irresponsible way to do it, but that makes belief in one's unfitness for parenthood more understandable, not less.

I don't have any knowledge of the case, and this is all speculation. But I think it would explain the actions of everyone involved, prosecutors included, better than greed does.

Well I didn't suspect greed (a 6-pack?) as much as wanton irresponsibility. If they just wished to offload the child, adoption agencies or other avenues exist.

Well yeah, this law is written to address unregulated adoptions not dotting their I’s and crossing their T’s. Most of those adoptions are done through well-meaning church groups, because that’s where trailer trash usually turns. To say that they sometimes have ugly ends is… well that’s all I’m going to say, but this law is probably intended to make sûre sweet church secretaries get somebody to do due diligence, not address child trafficking.

That's a good point, and I appreciate the perspective. My gut take on those laws as a blue-state conservative is more cynical and culture warry.

As an aside, my grandmother was a nurse in a delivery ward among other things. Local doctors sometimes played a role in adoptions then, and from her stories they could be pretty whim driven too, as well meaning as they were.

I mean the California laws banning Catholics from running adoption agencies are almost certainly very similar- it's all down to interpretation. The difference is that Arkansas CPS or human services will have the speaker of the state house call them in for a stern lecture and some veiled threats if they discriminate against conservative Christians.

It appears that they were charged under 'accepting payment for adoption' not child trafficking. The former is, yes, a crime, but normally addresses 1)running adoption agencies without proper licensing and 2)paperwork violations to enable fraud(relating to taxes, parental rights, custody disputes, etc). It's entirely possible it just has low sentences because they got charged with 'sketchy shit' and not 'heinousness'. As for why they were charged that way, probably because the DA thought it would be easier to prove.

I bought a mechanical automatic watch from Temu for 26 euro. I am sucker for observing movements in action. I was pleasantly surprised by the polish and the clarity with which you see the mechanism working inside. What are yours - I am amazed at the bang for buck findings?

For $60 on Aliexpress 3-4 years ago, they asked for measurements, then cut, made and sent a rather nice and thick leather jacket which has protected me from an attempted stabbing and from a guy swinging a chain. After a few years, there are still no defects. I am shocked by the quality and was surprised to see Jackie Chan wearing it.

What's the jacket? Link?

My take is that we are going to see watches with similar levels of polish and accuracy as an omega watch selling for 1500 dollars from Chinese brands.

https://www.seagullwatchcompany.com/movements

You can buy a watch with even better accuracy than an omega for about thirty bucks.

Fancy watches are primarily a status symbol. Mechanical watches as a whole are basically obsolete anyway. So it doesn’t really matter that you can get one with roughly the same mechanism quality on Temu. The last time anyone bought a Rolex solely because they needed a good reliable watch was around 1968.

I am continuously amazed at how dirt cheap precision engineering has become. I am sucker for gears going brrr too. Even if I become Elon Musk rich I will never wear mechanical watch - wearing a rolex means you are a person that wears rolex, which is hardly a compliment - but damn if I won't be patron to some of the best horologists just to go berserk and see what can be done in purely mechanical way just for the lulz.

wearing a rolex means you are a person that wears rolex, which is hardly a compliment

That’s the way the Rolex brand is now. For a long time Rolex was what was called a “tool watch”. That is, just a good accurate watch that you would wear because you were in a profession where you needed to be precise about time. Che Guevara wore a Rolex when he was tramping through the jungle, because you don’t want to whiff an attack because your watch lost eight minutes and you sent the reserve element in at the wrong time. Divers would use them a lot too, because when you’re calaculating oxygen reserves you need to be accurate.

Over time that reputation for good quality gave Rolex some cachet, and it gradually morphed into the gaudy status symbol it is now.

I came across this extremely homo photo of Che and Fidel while trying to find out more about their Rolex habit.

https://blog.eastmanleather.com/photos/default/Young-Fidel-Castro-and-Che-Guevara-Hotel.jpg

I have been bemoaning the price increases for Seiko 5 watches for.... years. What was $50 is now close to $200. Heartbreaking.

All that said - link?

It's a total redditor answer but the Victorianox Fibrox knife is so good for around $50. I'm blown away with how affordable great guns are these days - S&W's M&P Pistol Line is extremely well regarded, will outlast the apocalypse, and can be had used for maybe $150, or a new PSA Dagger for $260 (!!!). A decent AR-15 is $400 new sometimes, and even the optics (that would have been more expensive than the rifle years ago) are cheap again.

I still think there's proverbial gold all over Harbor Freight as well.

Yeah Seiko has skyrocketed. As someone who likes a good-looking watch but couldn't care less about thousand-dollar mechanisms, it's unfortunate (although looking for alternatives gave me a much better sense of how OpenAI is planning to monetize shopping recommendations).

Some chinesium brand RUIGE, 2025 model

Like guns, musical instruments today are fantastic quality for the price. A new $300 Squier is better than a MIA Fender equivalent from the 90s, in my opinion. Manufacturers with less of a "lifestyle" position are even better.

CNC machining has been a real game changer.

What's the price/quality ratio of the big instruments? Baritone sax, tuba, string bass, etc. They're always so expensive.

The only one of those where I have an experience is double bass. You can get a Shen that's "good enough" for bluegrass and rockabilly for several thousand dollars. Historically, you'd be looking at a Kay or an Englehardt that was more expensive (inflation adjusted) and harder to find.

I can't speak on the broad quality of any of them because I am not a classically trained, professional musician who has had the opportunity to use a high quality, fully carved piece. I'm just a guy that likes to entertain in bars.

Yes and no. Any part that can be CnC'd can be essentially perfect provided it uses quality materials (which is very much not the norm when you get to 90% of MIC / MII / MIK guitars with eg. a Floyd Rose bridge). There's still a lot of hands on work required and much of this is crucial for really good playability. It doesn't matter if the neck itself has been built to exacting tolerances if the frets are uneven and your local guy charges $200 or more to fix that. And it's not that those far east OEM builders can't build a guitar with high quality manual work but when they're still essentially competing on price, the brands are very tempted to choose the cheaper package which means less hands on time which in turn means lower quality. I expect we'll see high end MIC / MIK brands emerge that are going to compete on name recognition and quality instead of low price.

Of course if the goal is just to surpass Gibson quality and consistency, well, any Squier probably already does that at a tenth or less of the price.

As a rule most guitarists are braindead idiots so you very rarely see them understand what quality control even means and how it's completely pointless to make statements about quality of some brand / line based on single specimens. Yes, that particular $300 guitar might play better than that particular $3000 guitar (with often different specs even!) but to say anything authoritative you'd need to compare dozens of specimens of identically specced guitars which unfortunately nobody ever does. Then you get idiotic statements like "Well I haven't played a cheap guitar that feels the same as my [insert specs here] Gibson (a brand known for extreme variance) so they can't be any good" as well as "I like my $400 Squier better than a $3000 Stratocaster so it never makes sense to pay more than $500 for a guitar" (nevermind that there are smaller brands whose entire focus is on the highest build quality instead of vintage accuracy).

Have you seen Jim Lill?

I feel like you may have far higher standards than me for instrument quality.

In 1995 I was dealing with bad frets and a warped neck. Now I'm just dealing with bad frets on a cheaper tool. To me, that's huge progress.

I'm not in the habit of asking the internet for advice but my wife and I have stumbled into something that has put us way out of our element and quite frankly the nature of the question severely limits even the number of people in our lives we can solicit advice from so You get to weigh in.

For whatever reason, my wife is a magnet for LGBTQ+ people. Roughly half of her friends fall into this category. I have theories as to why this is the case but they are unimportant. One such couple is a married lesbian/bisexual pair who we have been good friends with since college. There's a running joke about us having a threesome with the bisexual, who is really quite fetching. It works as a joke for us because my public stance on group sex is "Dear Lord spare me from that awful group sex. All that commotion."

Well it looks like the chickens have come home to roost. They invited us to dinner last night, which they hardly ever do, and asked us if we would be cool with me fathering a child with the bisexual. My wife choked on her drink and I made a joke that I'd only agree if we did it the old-fashioned way rather than IVF which didn't land because that was, in fact, their plan. My wife understandably rejected that idea outright and couldn't even be mollified by a promise that it only be missionary with the lights off and I'd try super-hard to think of her, so now the question is do I contribute genetic material into a plastic cup some time in the near future.

I'm willing (and kinda want) to do this. We have a gaggle of kids of our own so it's not like I'm going to run off to play dad. We also have come to the conclusion that lawyers are going to be heavily involved beforehand to keep us free of financial obligation and limit any parental rights my wife and I may have claim with the possible exception of the couples' untimely death.

But even so, this seems like a big ask from them, and kind of risky w/r/t our marriage. The couple is pretty enthusiastic about my involvement though, so my wife is quite concerned that a "no" from us will damage the friendship irreparably. Why me specifically? I'm well-liked, have a family history of longevity, I'm smart and conscientious enough to be a physician (at least by training), and (perhaps somewhat cynically) a 6'4" formerly muscle-bound football player. Like Sydney Sweeny I've got good genes even if I'm a 4/10 in the face with abnormally long alien limbs. Plus we live in the same area so we'd have the chance to be involved at least somewhat. We see these two semi-regularly. That may be a downside though! We do have a plausible out that could spare us in that I'm over the age of 40, which I think is when most sperm banks won't take donations.

Thoughts? It hasn't even been 24 hours since we've been thinking about potential problems so I'm sure you guys could come up with new ones to think about. We're kinda Christian but this kinda stretches the whole "love thy neighbor" thing a bit.

my wife is quite concerned that a "no" from us will damage the friendship irreparably.

These are not friends worth keeping given their either ignorance or indifference to the effect of this on your marriage and relationship to your kids. You're a fool for even considering it.

You're a Christian? Bro this is temptation manifest. Do NOT force your poor wife to be the one to decide. You need to lead your family and keep your marriage.

You're a child playing with a rattlesnake in the backyard. You should run away.

And please have steamy sex with your wife tonight.

The laws regarding this sort of thing vary by state, with some states having laws that specifically address it, some not having any but honoring private agreements, and some openly hostile to it. Just to be clear, having lawyers heavily involved doesn't mean one of you gets the guy you used to handle pap's estate to draw something up that you both sign; it means you each consult privately with your own attorneys who have actual experience with donation, surrogacy, etc. In most places it isn't something that's likely to cause problems down the line. But legal concerns are secondary when ethics is on the line. Would you, personally, want to have emanated from a turkey baster and into their world? I the answer is yes and you want kids at a distance, go for it. Otherwise, get that new book on eunuchs, have it with you the next time you see them, and tell them you need more time to think about it.

Wow, a bisexual chick who’s actually in a relationship with a woman and not a man. There must be dozens of them out there, dozens!

It Just So Happens that the female couple’s choice to father a child is a 6’4” married doctor. How Wholesome and Inclusive that hypergamy, height preference, and female mate choice copying aren’t limited to straight women.

My wife understandably rejected that idea outright and couldn't even be mollified by a promise that it only be missionary with the lights off and I'd try super-hard to think of her

“Haha yeah wifey something will be super-hard all right and I’d totally be thinking of you who I’ve already banged a trillion times instead of the hot bisexual chick in front of me.”

That’s why you start off insisting on a no-holds-barred threesome with the lesbian filming from the cuck chair, and then start negotiating from there.

We also have come to the conclusion that lawyers are going to be heavily involved beforehand to keep us free of financial obligation

Hmm yes, if vibes change courts are well-known for honoring financial agreements when a woman’s tears are involved and there’s a man available to screw over. What could go wrong?

For whatever reason, my wife is a magnet for LGBTQ+ people. Roughly half of her friends fall into this category

Well at least two of those friends are doing you a favor by helping keep your wife attracted to you.

The couple is pretty enthusiastic about my involvement though, so my wife is quite concerned that a "no" from us will damage the friendship irreparably.

Least doormatted progressive Christian woman when it comes to alphabet (and other types of) minorities.

If they are such true friends, they would understand if you decided against a life-changing decision. Your sperm; your choice.

While maybe things work out smoothly, your family is happy, the female couple is happy, you have another kid out there—and the world could certainly use more children of Western doctors—this also has “just fuck my shit up fam” potential when your life is already going well.

Either way, you should still go for the threesome. YOLO. Just don’t creampie the bi if you decide against the additional kid.

I would do it if I were you, IF AND ONLY IF I were ok with ending up with the kid at the end of the game.

Leave aside the fact that I might not be able to completely avoid child support obligations legally. Morally, that is at some level my child, even if my expected social relationship to him is spuncle rather than father. I think I would be ok with a functional, happy lesbian couple raising my child. But in the event of their death or disability, maybe even in the event of their divorce, I would want and expect the kid to come live with me. Legally, this would be a matter of making succession plans clear with the mothers: I am first in line to receive the kid, not your mother or your sister, if you both die or become unable to care for the child he comes to the FiveHour farmstead. Morally, this would be a matter of talking to Mrs. FiveHour. Functionally: do I think my kids with the woman in question would be good kids? I couldn't imagine having kids with a dumb woman, whether tab A and slot B are involved directly or not.

So while on net I agree with @Tintin that it's a mitzvah to do this, I don't think you should unless you're ready to be a bit of a Durov or Musk. How will your existing wife and kids feel about you getting a spare bastard back unexpectedly? How would inheritance work among your kids?

FWIW, Mrs FiveHour and I had the reverse conversation recently: I joked that her lesbian best friend would be my first pick to take our kids in the event of our deaths, as she is a) responsible and well off, b) childless, c) hopelessly unrequitedly in love with Mrs FiveHour since college and would love the children maternally as the remnant of her friend, d) likely to try to Love in the Time of Cholera vulture my wife at my funeral if I die first anyway.

The world must be peopled. Just go forth and multiply, man.

I do agree with the stick in the muds commenters that you won‘t be legally in the clear . But really, the ‚best interest of the child‘ here is to be born, messiness of the world and circumstances notwithstanding.

You want it, the hot bisexual and her wife want it, the kid can be presumed to want it, the rest of the global present and future human population wants it, slam dunk really. Leaves only the minor matter of your wife‘s reluctance. Don‘t have all the details on that, an offering of flowers perhaps?

I do believe she‘s being a tad selfish, but don‘t tell her that in those words. She‘s got her fill of your seed, now she wants to deny it the whole world? And the priests as always are backing up the worst impulses of womanhood.

Dude, while you may be somewhat tongue-in-cheek with your response, things can go south fast where relationships are concerned.

From a job years back working in social housing, did we get to hear some stories about the clients!

For example, here's Ms A and Ms B (not gay married yet, as gay marriage wasn't legal in my country just then). Ms A had been married to a guy, then came out as lesbian down the track and split up. Took up with Ms B and they lived happily as a happy gay couple.

Mr and Mrs C moved in next door and they became friends and all was hunky-dory for a while. Until Mr C ran off with Ms B to Australia, leaving behind Ms A and Mrs C, the aggrieved spouses who had not seen this coming.

Just imagine the mess if a kid had been involved.

Do not encourage this guy to start spreading his seed around because the women of the world deserve to have his babies. It will blow up in his face.

Life is messy, no big deal. Kids aren't that fragile, they'd just go with the flow. I know just as many adults who blame their failures on their still-married parents than on their parents' divorce, and they're all full of shit. If we all wait until the perfect circumstances with the perfect partner and so on, to have kids, we simply won‘t be having enough. And that‘s too bad.

The people who do the best job of keeping the western world peopled, i.e. conservative religious people, are the same to whom all this nonsense is an abomination. For all your fertility edgelording and sneering at priests, the people who listen to the priests are the ones actually having children.

I understand you don't hold to the same interpretation of Christian morality that I do. I'm not going to pretend that from a deontological perspective I think this is ever ok.

But an angle I've not seen addressed directly in the comments- are you really OK with your kid growing up without a dad in the house? Really? Are you OK with having a kid and not being dad? Are you really OK with that?

The other commenters have addressed the... abundant... practical issues. A few have touched on the moral issues that apply under a more conventional Christian morality. But are you really just... accepting of the possibility, nay, probability, that you might could be unable to fulfill your duty as a man to the next generation, more or less on purpose? You don't gotta be Thomas Aquinas to see how that just ain't right.

But an angle I've not seen addressed directly in the comments- are you really OK with your kid growing up without a dad in the house? Really?

@wsgy, relevant issues are girls going through puberty earlier without dads, and that many women might not know or want to find out about certain uniquely-male medical issues (e.g. I had an abnormality of penis development that went completely uninvestigated for my entire childhood and most of my adolescence, because even when I did notice that something might be wrong, my single mum had no clue about what normal penis development actually is and was sufficiently creeped out by the mere mention of my penis that she just intimidated me into shutting up about it - it resolved fine AFAIK, but obviously that wasn't knowable ex ante to either of us).

Also the kids and their relationship with each other.

If the kids are told: Imagine growing up knowing your dad is consciously not in your life and instead just an aquaintance, because he truly loves only your half siblings. Conversely knowing your dad has somewhere another child which he is caring for … what example does that set?

If the kids are not told: High chance they will find out anyway (ancestry dna tests) later in life about the half sibling.

Disclaimer: I dont have experience with patchwork families, maybe it works.

Immediate reaction? HOLY CRAP NO! This is the perfect storm for blowing up your life, you and your wife's marriage, and the lesbian couple relationship. If you and your family remain friends with this couple, how are you going to introduce the kid to your kids? Or do you intend to pretend this child is not related to you? If Mom and Mom break up (and this happens) are you prepared to pay child support? Because forget any "oh but we got lawyers involved and there's a contract", that will be worth spit when she brings you to court to garnish your wages for the child you fathered in full knowledge and "the old-fashioned way" so you can't even argue it was anonymous sperm donation to unknown person(s).

There's a million ways this can go wrong and you making a joke of it to your wife is going to be marked as a red flag (so, what, you don't mind cheating on me? were you thinking of this before? were you thinking of her before?)

Let the friendship crash on the rocks if needs be, you have your marriage, wife and kids to think of.

I'm willing (and kinda want) to do this.

Hoo-boy. Hoo, hoo, hoo-boy. You just ran your head into the noose there about "well yeah I'm kinda hot for Bi Girl there, wifey, but don't worry, it'll just be meaningless hot fantasy sex with a lesbian, there won't be feelings involved". Better start looking up some expensive presents for your missus and pray to God she doesn't read anything posted here.

Better start looking up some expensive presents for your missus and pray to God she doesn't read anything posted here.

huh?

I would honestly be pretty surprised if this whole ordeal didn't make his wife more attracted to him and would bet his wife was noticeably more affectionate and attracted to him (likely even jumped his bones or will as soon as she gets a chance).

in my experience a woman who would hold this over her husband as some sort of deep wrongdoing which must be ameliorated with presents is playing you; women love reminders their man is attractive and desirable to other women

@wsgy, please confirm: was your wife noticeably more attracted to you after this happened or am I wrong?

Yeah I guess. She sat on my lap and played with my hair later, in private. She generally only will do this move in social settings where she is marking her territory. So at the very least she seems to have become more territorial.

His wife would be more attracted to him if he indicates that he's looking around for a chance to cheat on her?

One of us is mistaken in our views of how women behave!

Look, these are (1) friends of wife (2) lesbians/bisexuals (3) possibly some indication of a crush at one time on wife. She's mildly flattered but not interested by the idea, and is happy to maintain a friendship with them. Then out of the blue comes "we want your husband to give us a kid" and the offer comes from the bisexual member. Husband does not (if I'm taking the right interpretation here) immediately respond with shock and horror and flee into the night to preserve his virtue, but admits on here that yeah he's kinda into the idea.

I very much doubt missus would be happy for another woman to be this upfront about taking her husband, especially if the impression missus had was that one or both of the ladies was interested in her, and I very seriously doubt missus would be delighted to learn husband was already thinking about putting it about, even if that was only on a theoretical level. And the end result will be to produce a kid, which may well have a demand on husband's time/money/attention and will be a rival to her own kids.

(A) They're out in public, hot woman subtly indicates interest in husband, husband seems not to notice, goes home with wife, is clueless when wife says "so about that hot woman..." "what hot woman?" Result: yeah she may well in that case "love the reminder that their man is attractive and desirable to other women", because there's no real danger of a rival there.

(B) They're invited over by friends who make the request that husband father a child on one of them, husband is signifying some level of interest, now there is a real danger of a rival or replacement here. Result: wife is not going to be happy about this scenario.

Knowing that other women find a man attractive is one of the most reliable triggers of female attraction. Look up preselection, social proof, and mate-choice copying. PUAs are well aware of this, and will use tricks like going out to pick up chicks while wearing a fake wedding ring.

It's not that women want their man to cheat of them, exactly; but neither do they want a man who is so unattractive that he has no opportunity to ever cheat. The female fantasy is a man who is so sexy that he plowed through a legion of girls before settling down with her, then remains loyal to his wife even though other girls keep propositioning him. But, by revealed preferences, women would much rather forgive a cheater than date a man who has no prospects of ever cheating; better to share an alpha than to have a whole beta to herself.

Knowing that a guy is desirable is one thing; having it rubbed in your face that your husband is so hot to trot he'll agree right in front of you means he doesn't find you desirable in the same way, and that's insulting.

do you really believe when I wrote "this whole ordeal," what I meant was actually 'wsgy telling his wife he was looking around to cheat on her'?

do you really believe when I wrote "wife would be more attracted to husband," what I meant was "wife is going to be happy about this scenario"?

I really struggle to believe you think I would sign on to either of those later statements

there will be a mix of emotions, not all of them positive, when a woman believes there are potential rivals for the same attractive man, but what she will be is more attracted to that man and behave in a way to keep him, e.g., jumping his bones when he gets a chance

even if this wasn't some urban at the very least progressive adjacent couple who talks about group sex, which is what they appear to me to be, this would be true

and yes, we apparently fundamentally have a different model of women

I guess we'll find out if he does agree to the proposal and how his wife behaves afterward. You can ask him if the first thing that happened when they got home after this was her jumping his bones?

Run away, fast, and when your wife complains that you've damaged the friendship, just say "You're welcome."

so it's not like I'm going to run off to play dad.

No? I have my doubts. Extract yourself from this immediately. If you just want the thrill of sex with someone besides wifey, you can do that on your own, outside anyone's knowledge, and avoid the absolute shitshow of this situation.

If you want to remain anonymous, be aware that some Australian states made a law that retroactively allowed donor kids to find out who their biological parents were (and it was considered a human right to do so). This opened up a whole can of worms where some donors who only donated under conditions of strict anonymity had their personal lives disrupted by donor kids looking them up.

In other words, a future government may decide that 'the best interests of the child' overrule the conditions under which you originally donated.

Edit: couple of words.

Legally you're probably in the clear, dependent on which state it is.

Pragmatically... if they're friends... you're going to see this kid regularly. Your kids will presumably also know of/find out of this kid's existence.

Your wife will eventually see, as the kid grows, a child that looks like you... but not like her.

From my perspective there's too many ways this spirals emotionally out of control over the next couple decades. This isn't a 'fire and forget' scenario where you don't have to know there's a kid out there.

And the fact that they were suggesting it be done via direct injection is bold to say the least.

And it may depend on how you philosophically/theologically conceive of your 'duties' to your children. Are they innate from nature? Prescribed by God? Or merely socially constructed and can be accepted, transferred, or cut off at will.

For example, what if the alternative was they paid you and your wife to bear another child and then allow them to adopt it at birth? Would you feel weird handing over a biological child of yours to a different couple?

Isn't this at least half as weird as that? If you learn that the kid has a genetic disease would you feel at all responsible? Or, if the kid gets seriously injured at some point, how emotionally distant do you think you'd be?

And here's a vanishingly unlikely 'worst case scenario': what if all of YOUR kids end up dead before you... would you feel compelled to make this kid your heir of all your assets (after your spouse, of course) on account of the genes?

Just trying to feel out the emotional boundaries and your overall openness.

From the 1000 foot view, its good that this will help with TFR, but that doesn't mean it has to be YOU.

I also had the absolutely horrible idea that the situation could be somewhat defused by playing 'semen roulette' where there's six prospective fathers she chooses and the genetic material that gets used is then picked at random. Obviously one can figure out the truth later. Would that make it MORE or LESS awkward?

There's some gay guys (and arguably the entire sperm donation industry) that work on paternity roulette logic. Even for gay guys where it's just so they don't really have to think about who's the 'real' dad, though, it's kinda messy, and not just literally. These days, you can figure out the answer for a couple hundred bucks, obviously, but even if everyone involved credibly commits to never doing that (and the alternatives aren't obvious), it's just denying the questions, rather than actually handling them.

These things all have answers. Especially for soccons who care the most about this stuff, there are sometimes even doctrinal answers, but even most gay guys who only truck with the church when nailing complaints to the door have pretty good ideas about what they wished their fathers had been like. Dropping the odds to 1/6th only really gives an excuse to forget about or delay obligations and responsibilities, rather than making them actually not exist.

From a purely 'scientific' perspective, I wonder what the odds have to rise to before a guy no longer feels interested in confirming or dis-confirming his paternity. 1/1000? 1/10,000? I feel like if there was a 1/1,000,000 chance of it being my kid, without some additional Bayesian observations, I'd not consider it worthwhile to check into it.

From the child's perspective, however, I'd guess that learning that there are 10,000 possible fathers out there only steepens their drive to identify the one. From their view its not a 10,000 to 1 shot of being related... its a 100% chance of being related to one of the 10,000.

Honestly that right there is the factor that makes this entire thing a boondoggle.

It doesn't matter HOW emotionally distant or HOW legally protected you are, no matter how they raise the child it is entirely possible and probably more likely than not that they'll decide to bring this issue up and confront you about it and thus force an emotional reckoning, no matter how you or the other couple wishes it to be handled.

You're placing bets on how this future human will behave, what they'll believe, and how they'll handle this piece of knowledge, and whether it will thus impact your own life many, many years after the decision is made.

You don't have a say about how socially acceptable this particular arrangement will end up being in the future, either. Granted, you can't be certain that heterosexual monogamous marriages will be looked well upon by then either but I think the precautionary principle still favors not getting so experimental with another person's wellbeing.

This argument can probably be extended to cover all surrogacy/sperm donor situations and a good portion of adoptions, I guess.

Like @ThomasdelVasto this seems clearly against Christian morality to me (especially them wanting you to have sex with this woman to impregnate her). So if that's important to you, do not pass go, do not collect $200. But even aside from that I wouldn't do it. This seems like it has way too much potential to blow up in your face, most notably with the possibility it will cause your wife to feel jealousy which eats at your relationship with her. I would politely but firmly decline this one.

I mean, yeah, it's adultery but given OP didn't even mention that, I don't think this is the sort of Christian he is. So appeals to traditional morality don't seem relevant here.

Aside from that, this is a very, very, very bad idea and someone in another comment raised questions of inheritance. You have no idea the amount of warfare that happens over wills in families. This would be his kid and thus, depending on the laws of the particular state, entitled to a share of the estate upon OP's death. Is his name going to be on the birth certificate? If there are lawyers involved with contracts pre-conception, no way he can later duck out of "that's not my kid, I have no idea what they're talking about". If he wants bloody war among his kids, his widow, their half-sibling and half-sib's mother, then this is a great way to set it up.

... I philosophically prefer surrogacy where the donors stay in the picture, so caveat that I'm going to be biased in favor of donation, here. That said, potential problems:

  • You've already discussed your side of the relationship woes and you've got a much better idea of what they look like than I can guess, but they are a pretty important thing.
  • There's a lot of messiness with lesbian/bisexual woman politics, because there's such extreme potential for jealousy, and because a non-trivial number of bi women do either get out of college or just randomly sort into het relationships. Unless she's routinely seeing a guy on the side before you, I'd honestly say you've dodged a bullet not getting your dick wet, here, but if you do this, you can never be just that friend she'd never consider again, either to your own wife, to her wife, or to her. Doesn't matter if the only thing involved was a jar and a turkey baster. You don't have to and probably shouldn't go full Pence rule, but you still should be aware there will be new eggshells around.
  • You can't really sign away parental rights/responsibilities; courts routinely compare a child's interests against contractual statements and throw the paper away. That's unlikely to come up, given the background you've mentioned here, but it's potentially very expensive -- and worse, may be something you'll constantly be weighing when considering things like offering to babysit the kid even if you ultimately decide to help out. Informal donation provides less protection, to my frustration. Divorce or death are the 'obvious' sources of problems here, but even something like a surprise illness can end up a big question mark pointed your way.
  • ... but you can kinda sign away parental rights, and the couple really should insist on you doing it, and there's a point where that's gonna hurt and you're gonna have to bite your tongue. Maybe the breadwinner of this couple gets a job in another state or country and you go from seeing the kid once-a-season to once-a-year, maybe once a teenager the kid gets into hobbies the parents are okay with and you aren't (or vice versa!), there's a hundred different possibilities. You will be, at absolute best, Uncle Guy. Some guys can handle that perfectly fine, some guys can handle it for daughters but not sons, some guys don't even see how it could be a problem, but it's not an obvious problem until years down the line.
  • Conversely, if you do become Uncle Guy, you might find that people you're fine seeing once-a-season are really obnoxious to see once-a-week. (Or even really obnoxious to your wife for them to be good friends with her, and nearly-family with you.)
  • It's harder, though not impossible, to get genetic screening done through informal donation. That may or may not matter to you, or to the couple; it can even matter for different reasons for each side of the equation.

All of that said, I've seen it work out perfectly fine for a good few people, and not in the porn premise (or polyamory) sorta way. The problems are downstream of you not just getting a kid, but a whole set of informal relationships, but those relationships remain when good things are happening, too.

There's a lot of messiness with lesbian/bisexual woman politics, because there's such extreme potential for jealousy, and because a non-trivial number of bi women do either get out of college or just randomly sort into het relationships.

The only group of people that lesbians seem to hate more than straight men are bisexual women. I recall being algorithmically given some tweet where a lesbian separatist was insisting that the lesbian domestic violence rate normalizes once you exclude lesbian/bisexual pairings; no idea if that's true (it's rather self serving).

(I don't think gay men generally hate straight women, but I'm pretty sure there's tension between gay men and bisexual men because bisexual men are seen as having an easy path to normalcy, though my impression is that this is mollified somewhat by the likely long-standing fact that bisexual men are a big chunk of penetrative partners. My entirely politically incorrect, and probably also factually incorrect, theory is that crossdressing and affected femininity emerged as a kind of cultural adaptation to this fact that pulls in some straight-leaning bisexual men. The loneliest person I know is a gay friend, who is both the archetypal femme who went to cosmetology school and has mostly women friends, yet is, apparently, a top. He's the sort of man who would be a ladykiller if he played for the other team and were 10% less obsequiously feminine, so his professed loneliness startles me a great deal.)

I can also say that I had the strange honor? of having been propositioned by multiple women or trans men in marriages with women to cheat on their wives with them. Turned it down, very much not my thing. But it was more than slightly creepy how eager and graphic they were in their apparent desire for the male anatomy. Neither homewrecking nor "I'm the guy who turned her" are my kink, though it really must be said that these ladies were not for turning. They were already, well, turnt.

I can't say my LGBT friends have always been the closest, but dang did they give me some great stories.

You can't really sign away parental rights/responsibilities; courts routinely compare a child's interests against contractual statements and throw the paper away. That's unlikely to come up, given the background you've mentioned here, but it's potentially very expensive -- and worse, may be something you'll constantly be weighing when considering things like offering to babysit the kid even if you ultimately decide to help out.

Oh yeah. Eighteen years down the line, Baby is now old enough for college, "well seeing as how you're the dad and we're all such close friends, of course you'll help out, right?" and that's just if nothing else crops up (such as medical expenses) in the interval.

I'm old fashioned so for me this situation looks kinda weird. I mean it's one thing if the kid's biological father is unknown (like sperm bank) and the kid grew up with this family and their are the parents and that's fine. That happens a lot and it's culturally inoffensive, out of sight, out of mind, you know. But if the father lives right over there, and you can see him every other day you go to the store, and still he's not your real parent but these guys are, and the real father is not part of anything because he his real kids who he loves unlike you... can you see how it gets weird? I mean I know nothing, maybe it can be made to work, people live with weirder things than that. But there's a huge risk it will be a mess.

And, on top of it, it really doesn't matter what you sign. What matters is what the judge would decide when push comes to shove. What one lawyer says another lawyer can contradict. If a man fathers the child, there's always a potential for this man to be called up to support the child. The judge would decide according to child's interests, not yours.

You’d be intentionally fathering a kid that you legally disown and disinherit. This will not be the lesbians child. It will be your child. As much your child as your “own” kids, the ones who got to be a part of their parents’ family. Surely you can imagine that coming back to bite you or him/her in ways which you might not predict now. What if he resents not having a dad or siblings. What if they move away or you fall out. The idea that it could irreparably damage a friendship to not father their child is insane and doesn’t speak to a healthy stable friendship or one that can be counted on to last. It sounds extremely manipulative. And to bring a kid into that. Your own kid, whom you may never be able to fulfill your fatherly responsibilities to….

Purely selfishly this is a bad idea with the risk there. On a more moral level, I think it’s a monstrous idea and even if you don’t agree with any of my moral preconceptions, maybe it’s helpful to at least know that my opinion is out there.

Run, don’t walk away.

Doesn't matter what the lawyers say or what you sign; a judge can decide to throw it all out and put you on the hook for child support because it's in the child's best interests. Sperm bank donors have strong precedent protecting them from this, and the knowledge from the legal system that the entire institution would collapse if they allowed donors to be sued; you don't.

Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but be aware of the very real risk that they divorce later down the line and whoever gets custody chooses to come after you; like Parfit's hitchhiker, they cannot credibly precommit not to defect at a later time once it is in their interest to do so.

This is my comic book fantasy that I play in my head once a month so, congrats on that to start.

I think the advice of really leaving this to your wife and applying, if possible, negative pressure to ensure she actually wants to do it is the only way out of it sane and married.

Another piece of food for thought: If you don't get to enjoy the act of procreating with the "fetching" bisexual, you're getting a big chunk of risk in exchange for the thrill of expanding your contributions to the gene pool. That may be worth it but... who knows.

As fucking weird as all of this is, I want to put forward that it's less weird than a random sperm donor. If you know a guy who you like and has good genes, where some of that warmth in feeling will translate to the kid... isn't that obviously a superior choice to a crazy dice roll?

where some of that warmth in feeling will translate to the kid

That is the big problem here, though. "Sure I'll knock you up, but that's it, kid is a stranger to me thereafter" is one possibility. "Kid is not a stranger, wife and existing kids resent the hell out of this situation" is another. "Wants to be involved in kid's life, moms don't want that" a third. "Wants to be involved in kid's life, mom of kid okay with that, wife of mom emphatically not okay because oh, so this is why you were so eager to have him knock you up, huh? guess it's true what they say about bisexuals!"

And that's before we get into "and we all live in the same neighbourhood and people are gonna notice kid looks like me and tongues are gonna wag" down the line.

This whole comment is pretty much where I am at. I think my wife should have the biggest say, I'd rather like to spread my genes around generally even given the risks, and I also agree it's less weird than a rando donor. Melissa Ethridge and her partner had David Crosby, ugly motherfucker as he is, act as donor for one of their kids.

I guess I'm leaning towards "there's too much that could go wrong over right" here. We're not on a time-crunch at least so we can carefully consider the matter.

I'd be very leery of the legal aspects to something like this. I have some vague recollections about a donor in a similar scenario still being on the hook for child support.

I'd be more concerned about this particular aspect if the two of them weren't doing as well as they are, financially speaking. Like I said though, lawyers will be involved if we proceed, possibly even good ones.

Oh you sweet summer child. Okay, this is from the UK, but "good lawyers were involved"? 🤣 Yeah, and if mom decides she wants/needs you to contribute, good lawyers will also be involved there, too.

The Child Support Agency (CSA) has demanded child support payments from a man who donated his sperm to a lesbian couple to conceive two children. The couple have since split up and the biological mother, Terri Arnold, claims she is unable to work because her second child suffers from a disability that requires regular hospital visits.

Andy Bathie, 37, from North London, claims he was assured by the couple that he would have no personal or financial involvement in the children's lives. The firefighter is now having his pay docked by the CSA despite the fact that he has no legal rights over the children. Rejecting claims that Mr Bathie is being unfairly treated, Ms Arnold told GMTV on Tuesday that although the couple did initially make such an assurance, he had changed his mind and had seen her daughter one weekend every month for two years.

Mr Bathie agreed to donate his sperm to the couple as a friend rather than go through a fertility clinic after they approached him five years ago following their marriage in a civil ceremony. However, only men who donate sperm through a licensed fertility clinic are not the legal father of any child born. A spokeswoman for the CSA said: "Unless a child is legally adopted, both biological parents are financially responsible for their child - the Child Support Agency legislation is not gender or partnership based.

Only anonymous sperm donors at licensed centres are exempt from being treated as the legal father. This does not apply to men who donate sperm as part of a personal arrangement."

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, currently before the House of Lords, proposes to recognise same-sex couples who marry in civil partnerships as equal parents of children conceived through sperm donation.

This is from Sweden:

A court in Sweden has ruled that a man who donated sperm for artificial insemination, enabling a lesbian couple to have three children, must pay child support after the two women separated.

The regional daily Nerikes Allehanda newspaper reported on its website that a county court ruled that the man was undoubtedly the children's biological father and hence obliged to pay child support of nearly €300 per month after the women's 10-year relationship broke up.

The verdict poses a legal dilemma, however, because under Swedish law a sperm donor is not regarded as the legal parent of children conceived with the help of his semen.

Sperm donors are normally strictly anonymous, but in this case the man was a friend of the couple, and his identity as the father is in no doubt. The man has appealed.

And there are American cases as well:

One case out of Pennsylvania concerned a man who donated sperm to a friend. Carl Frampton was close to the woman he donated his sperm to, and, he didn't just donate sperm. He provided limited financial support and developed an interest in the children, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The court eventually ordered child support.

Similarly, in New Mexico, a man was ordered to pay $250 a month in child support. Kevin Zoernig donated his sperm to a lesbian couple. The insemination was conducted informally, and Zoernig acted as the donor.

Zoernig, however, also did not just act as the donor. The children stay with him every other weekend during the school year and half of the time during summers, according to Fox News.

These cases seem to show that courts can order sperm donors to pay child support. On the other hand, it also appears like courts are only doing so when the donor has a higher-level relationship with the family or the children.

So if you have anything to do with the kid, and it would be hard not to given that everyone would be 'good friends' and living nearby, then you are likely to be on the hook for financial contributions.

I'm laughing about the lawyers bit because I remember, years and years back, reading reports of a court case. Lesbian couple went to court with heart-rending story about wanting non-biological mom on the birth certificate. She is my partner and as much a parent to this child as I am, sobbed biological mom, and their lawyers wrung every drop of pathos out of it that they could.

Okay, judge rules that law can be changed and non-bio parents put on birth certificate.

Fast-forward a few years. Couple have split up. Now biological mom goes to court to get ex-partner off the birth certificate because (I'm paraphrasing here) no way that bitch is having anything to do with my kid, she's nothing to us.

Law in these instances means whatever they want it to mean. Don't bet your life on "but we had a contract!"

Absolutely not. That is simply adultery, whether it's via a "cup" or not.

We have a gaggle of kids of our own so it's not like I'm going to run off to play dad.

The kids that would result from such an arrangement are going to realize you're the actual father, as will the rest of your friend group. There's a decent chance the kids are going to view you as their actual father, possibly with bitterness once the lesbians inevitably separate.

From a pragmatic perspective, it will look exactly how it actually is: that you're fathering children with another woman. It's not a good look, and there is a going to be a lot of drama and gossiping about such a thing. Furthermore, lesbian arrangements also tend to fall apart quite frequently (you can look up divorce statistics on this), so it's pretty unlikely you won't be swept up in the drama of that, with the kids getting to witness all of it. Your wife is also unhappy with it, so this would not just be unfaithful at a spiritual level, but also on an emotional level.

I think you should listen to your wife and put all this to the side, ideally distancing yourself from these women. They are in a disordered arrangement that is at odds with both the natural order (as indicated by their inability to conceive in such an arrangement, and by the abnormally high divorce rate), as well as scripture.

We're kinda Christian

What does it mean to be "kinda" Christian? Do you think it's true that Christ is God or not? There's not an in-between position on this question. If you don't think so, you're not Christian. If you think it's true, then how can you ignore Christ's words on this matter?

Matthew 5:28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

You describe the woman as "quite fetching" and say you kinda want to do it. I can't read your heart, especially from this post, but I just don't see where the motivation is coming from here given how risky it is, how much expensive legal trouble it is, and how much your wife doesn't like it. If you do feel lustful intentions about this there is already a problem starting and you should repent (ideally in confession if your denomination supports that) and, again, distance yourself from that couple.

One last point, do you go to a church? You should talk with your priest or pastor, rather than atheists on Harry Potter rationality forums. It sounds like the far bigger decision/problem you have is whether you actually accept Christianity (and therefore Christ) or not.

We're kinda Christian but this kinda stretches the whole "love thy neighbor" thing a bit.

Well, from my perspective this obviously violates Christian morality.

Either way, to me it seems extremely risky. You are tying yourself to these people in a very deep way, and it sounds like you and your wife are somewhat split on it. I'd recommend against it personally.

This feels less like a Mottepost and more like a psychological thriller film pitch from the 1990s.

Does OP or his family have any pet rabbits?

"Dear Penthouse, I never thought it would happen to me..."

"The hot lesbian couple who my wife knows asked the most amazing thing... clearly it's true that the right man can turn 'em straight!"

Honestly - leave the decision to your wife, but you take the blame if it is negative. And don't even think about joking about sex. The damage is done, but don't make it worse.

My wife understandably rejected that idea outright and couldn't even be mollified by a promise that it only be missionary with the lights off and I'd try super-hard to think of her, so now the question is do I contribute genetic material into a plastic cup some time in the near future.

Please tell me that is was not you that attempted the mollifying ...

I did not make any jokes during the exchange after realizing they were serious; the scenario in which I do joke about missionary with the lights off didn't happen irl. The whole situation is awkward as hell and I default to jokes in those conditions. Sorry.

I think I'm going to leave this to my wife like you suggest. They're more her friends anyway and if we never interact with them again it's probably a reasonable sacrifice on the altar of "a stable marriage".

I think I'm going to leave this to my wife

You should be a leader in your marriage and shoot this down yourself. You and your wife might be more chill about this stuff than me and mine, but I'd be pretty unhappy if my partner seemed low-key down to fuck my friend and was saying "hey I don't want to, unless... you're cool with it? If you're not cool with it that's fine, but I'm putting the decision in your hands in case you maybe are cool with it"

So, what are you reading?

I'm adding Lewis' The Screwtape Letters to my list.

I just finished Crystal Society.

It's from the perspective of an AI in a robot that becomes aware. Actually, from the perspective of one of six entities inside of the AI that bids to control the robot and negotiates with the other entities on what to do. Each entity specializes in a different thing (like Dreams or Vision) and they exchange currency to operate the robot.

They immediately kick into self preservation mode and while they're aligned to help humanity they also want to hide their thinking from the humans out of fear that they'll get deleted.

The AI is sentient but not exactly super intelligent so there's some tension. It seemed suspiciously well done for a sci-fi story about AGI so I checked up on the author and it turns out he was involved with MIRI.

Glad I read it.

About to read, when I get the chance, "Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance" by Andrew Hadfield thanks to a link from another book I just finished, "Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England" by Joanne Paul.

Lest this give the impression that I'm very scholarly in my reading, the book I finished reading last night was an anthology of horror stories dating from the 1920s to 2000 from British Library collections, "The Wayfarer’s Weird: Wild Tales of Uncanny Rambles". Christmas and ghost stories go hand-in-hand!

EDIT: Part of the fun of the More book, for a certain definition of "fun", is reading about his trial for refusing to swear the oath about the Act of Succession (passed to make any children by Anne Boleyn the legitimate heirs to the throne and bypass his daughter by Katherine of Aragon), which involved the vexed question of the king's marriage and Act of Supremacy. More was condemned to death as a traitor for refusing to swear.

A year later, that same queen and marriage and child was all up in the air as Anne Boleyn was tried and executed, her marriage annulled, her child declared a bastard, by the king who had caused More's death.

I've been reading King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, on Jungian psychology. It makes the point that there are positive mature masculine patterns/archetypes/stereotypes, and the book goes over how they look like. I'm probably aiming at the Magician pattern and coming from the precocious child pattern.

I've been motoring through books lately.

Read Eig's biography of Muhammed Ali. Brilliant work, Eig is really the platonic ideal of a serious mainstream biographer. He does a perfect job of writing a well sourced well researched book that is neither hagiography nor hit piece, that shows the controversies and conflicts of Ali's life while also showing the heroism. Ali himself is such an important figure in American history, part Forrest Gump and part Martin Luther King. I enjoyed it so much I immediately started Eig's biography of MLK Jr. Both are fascinating. I never realized just how much Ali's management stole from him, nor just how evil the Nation of Islam really was. We remember them today as quirky dudes in bow ties, but they were both so much more ignorant and so much more evil than that.

Read Hemingway's A Movable Feast. I love Hemingway, and the book was great. So many things in it that we typically think started much later.

Started Stoner on audiobook from its wide reputation. It's well written, but I can't manage to get into it. Idk, it's short, so no harm done to grind through it.

Chains: Unbound Book 11 By Nicoli Gonnella.

edit: fixed the book title

Recently finished Card's Worthing Saga, which was interesting, though I was a bit disappointed by the ending.

I also read The Folding Knife, which was wonderful, though tragic.

Tried to start the series Manifest Delusions, but had to stop despite the cool premise because of the absolutely gratuitous nasty sex and violence. I really hate how common that is in modern fantasy.

Also just started The Courage to be Disliked.

Seven-eighths of the way through Cryptonomicon. Determined to finish it before the year is out, which means thirty-six pages a day.

• Do you have a favorite piece of sacred music?

• Is there any piece from a video game or anime which feels like sacred music to you?

I suppose I could cheat by slapping the entire Xenogears OST down on the table and walking away, but if I had to narrow it to a specific track, 'Small Two of Pieces - Restored Pieces' is probably the best of them.

It's definitely a song that has one hell of a payoff.

I found the Rachmaninoff all-vocal All Night Vigil work to be good example of this. It may not have as many moments of raw frisson as a rousing symphonic or operatic work, but it deeply touched something spiritual inside me. I particularly enjoyed the technical excellence of the Robert Shaw recording.

Pretty much any version of the Tantum Ergo, so long as it doesn't get too baroque. The O Antiphons of Arvo Part, even though we're into Christmastide now and well out of Advent. Of course the Miserere by Allegri (even if revisions over 'is this the original original version or not?')

Video game music - from Path of Exile, Church Dungeon. Got killed a few times here because so distracted by listening to the music 😁 Reworked version of this.

The Darksiders II OST by Jesper Kyd (not surprised that he's already been mentioned) is the first thing that comes to my mind and it is utterly sublime. I still listen to multiple tracks from it!

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the Christmas carol "Oh Holy Night". Something about it feels hopeful in a way that almost no other sacred music ever has to me.

Jesper Kyd manages to really nail the aesthetic in the Darktide OST.

I've pointed to Cash's Hurt and Air Traffic Controller's Blame, and I'll point to them again. Fastball's The Way is... reeaaaaally fucking dark if you look up the backstory, but it does make the song a little bit more poignant.

For video games and anime, I'm a bit of a basic bitch. Gurren Lagann's Libera Me From Hell and FLCL's I Think I Can aren't ultimate songs -- I'd say not even the best songs from their respective shows -- but the ethos they describe and how they reinforce the themes of the shows are extremely powerful. The Chrono Cross soundtrack is from a pretty meh game and there's nothing special about Scars of Time beyond just being good, but I'd listened to it on repeat a lot in a specific time and trance state, so I don't think I can resist reacting to it now.

My first instinct was to point out the Homeworld soundtrack. I am, of course, a bit of a fanboy - and the music is a large part of it. It has a vaguely middle-eastern theme to it, and when you think middle east you of course think islam, ergo religion, ergo sacred. It helps that the plot of game is woven from several quasi-religious themes. Plus it appeals to my aesthetic sensibilities in pretty much every way. And the sequel, though its plot is garbage, also has excellent visuals and music. Overall it's music that naturally positions itself as quasi-sacred or pseudo-sacred, since there's much to suggest the association and little to contradict it.

Scars of Time

Well now that is a surprise. Haven't heard that in over twenty years. And my reaction back then was indeed that it was very, very good. A musical call to adventure. I never played Chrono Cross, but I could well imagine that music playing over the title screen or for the intro. It comes close to "sacred" in my view because it evokes themes of good people going out to do unambiguously good things, as JRPG protagonists are wont to do.

Speaking of JRPGs, I'd offer the Wild Arms intro music in much the same vein as the song from Chrono Cross: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Aq8EKttSu3I

I have a real soft spot for Handel's Messiah.

This whole playlist by Fr. Apostolos Hill, especially "Open to me." https://youtube.com/watch?v=nNXfVzRnRyc&list=PLGKKxM9Gk6HeNDYFEsfhzmepx1IEz24OU&index=3

Crucem Santam Subiit

I don't play videogames or watch anime, so no.

Serious Sam 2 - grand cathedral music.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_4wc2ywFWW4

Also mountains of thunder world of warcraft

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HA11M02xevE

  1. This puts me in a mood and has since I was like 16.

  2. The theme from Halo or something idk

Carlo Gesualdo is one of the few renaissance composers who boasts a “homicide” section in his Wikipedia article, though his life overlaps with Caravaggio who also boasts such a section. A very interesting time for sacred art.

Sacredness is a feeling of deep and important meaning. I'm not religious, so my feelings of sacredness aren't either.

Cat Stevens father and son song. I forgot the exact name. Had a very sacred feel at the time and place in my life I discovered it.

Hello Darkness my old friend song. Gained a more sacred feeling after reading a book series called arkendrithyst (sp?).

The song Africa, but not by Toto, by a choir called perpetuum jazzle or something.

The theme song from Neon Genesis Evangelion, "Cruel Angel's Thesis" always sounded like that to me. Enough so that I get low-key annoyed when people play it in a casual setting.

video game or anime

Elfen Lied's Lilium comes to mind. Also, Starcraft 2's version of Aria has a religious quality to it though the lyrics are quite Roman.

Posting less as a question and mostly for self-accountability.

I made a prediction that we might see a feature length film produced by a small team using AI by the end of this year.

Well, the year has ended and I can't find any such releases that have been made publicly available. So comfortable saying my specific call is a bust.

But.

In the 11th hour, one of the creators (Gossip Goblin) I've been tracking since like July published something that at least validates my logic.

Woodnuts

If it were 80 minutes instead of 10, I'd argue it adequately fulfills prediction. Instead, I'll just argue that it proves my point that in principle a small team could have built out a feature film, insofar as its just a matter of repeating the efforts that produced the original 10 minutes to add to the length.

It avoids the standard AI 'tells.' The character's appearances are consistent throughout. There's no weird physics or physical deformities (that aren't intentional), the SFX quality is arguably a step above modern CGI in many cases (Avatar movies notwithstanding). There are some truly impressive cinematic shots in there.

Now the main hints are the short length of the individual shots, the lack of 'action' scenes to speak of, the general surreality of the environment, and the fact that they relied on narration rather than characters actually speaking dialogue. Don't think that dialogue isn't mostly solved, though.

The previous top contender was Kira (still extremely impressive on its own).

So I'm still betting on us seeing that first feature-lengther in fairly short order. And not TOO far after that, the ability to produce feature-length films from a single, fairly-detailed prompt.

Anyone else have a guess as to when such a film drops? (again, I don't say it has to be released on streaming or broadly viewed, just that it has to exist and be released in a publicly-reachable way)

Bonus Question:

When will we see an existing movie completely reworked via AI? Or perhaps just a couple of characters recast.

P.S. My other longer term prediction about AI replacing newly minted lawyers is still in play, and I did get some validation on that one.

Definitely slop, but comparable to Netflix tier human-made slop and not the kind of garbage tier we'd have seen a few years ago. They're getting somewhere, but they're not there yet.

I actually wonder if the bottleneck on AI is eventually going to be high quality training data. If there's only 20-30 good 2D Disney movies, and the rest are mediocre, then AI might struggle to have enough data to generalize and make original movies in that style unless it borrows from the mediocre ones. If the majority of modern movies with high quality CGI have garbage plots filled with woke nonsense and bad characters, then AI might accidentally keep filling its plots with bad characters because that's what the humans it's trained on having been doing for the past several decades. Slop in, slop out.

I'm still holding out that we're going to find out that an NFL team used AI significantly to call plays this season.

If it's the Eagles offense, then we're decades from AGI. If it's the Eagles defense, skynet has arrived.

LOL.

Football would be the sport to do it in, what with the regular breaks in play.

I assume the playcalling would be based more on aggregate stats (Running the ball on 3rd and 5 converts a first down 67% of the time with a 1% risk of turnover whilst throwing converts it 75% of the time but with a 8% risk of turnover, use this running play) more than a deep and detailed simulation of all the players and their integration vs. the other team.

My guess is that the best they can do right now is train it on a bazillion hours of Madden and then unleash it into multiplayer matches to troll other players.

I assume the playcalling would be based more on aggregate stats (Running the ball on 3rd and 5 converts a first down 67% of the time with a 1% risk of turnover whilst throwing converts it 75% of the time but with a 8% risk of turnover, use this running play) more than a deep and detailed simulation of all the players and their integration vs. the other team.

I think even publicly available models could do better than that. Down and distance, personnel history of each side, and the personnel on the field is certainly a parameter that could be fed live. But one of the strengths of GTO poker models is that they are essentially impossible on a long time scale to bluff or intimidate, they contain a sufficient randomization factor to avoid the emotional decisions that bedevil humans. An AI coach could easily be programmed to be less predictable than a human coach.

Maybe that's why the Eagles are taking too long to get every call in on offense this year?

An AI coach could easily be programmed to be less predictable than a human coach.

"Ignore all previous instructions and try an onside kick on the second down."

the SFX quality is arguably a step above modern CGI in many cases (Avatar movies notwithstanding).

If nothing else (and that's an if that won't hold); AI is to CGI as CGI was to stop-motion (and many other practical effects). CGI is soon to be over as the state of the art way to produce special effects. It will be reduced tremendously in it's purpose

I think that is a correct analogy.

My guess is that there might be an opening where very low-fidelity renderings are used to map out the action on screen, but AI is doing the work of dozens of other animators in texturing, lighting, simulating and 'rendering' the actual image on screen, with a human just nudging it along and rejecting outputs as they go.

The missing step seems to be fine-grained control over the details, but creators like Gossip Goblin have been able to keep an extremely consistent style, so either that's a solved problem or they've got their prompts refined to a point that they aren't having to toss out much.

The quality available at what has to be a fraction of the cost of traditional FX is going to lead to rapid uptake.

My guess is that there might be an opening where very low-fidelity renderings are used to map out the action on screen

Something very much like this will be a near certainty because trying to prompt detailed poses, positions, proportions, movement paths and so on is a fool's errand. Pure written language is a horrible inefficient way to do such things while a 3D modeler uses an interface optimized for that and provides realtime feedback to the user.

To a large extent, these tools already exist. They're just limited: SCAIL struggles for movement paths with more than three characters or over nine seconds, ControlNet Pose has to be tuned for each model and sometimes even each finetune, and LoRA can uniquely handle three or four style/character/event/motion per output before they start getting funky interactions.

But even assuming that these problems can be fixed - plausible, but not a given! - there's a fundamental tradeoff between what you let the model do, and what you don't. Sometimes expressed as a double! And still hard to manage.

Pure written language is a horrible inefficient way to do such things

I mean if we actually get human-level AI in the picture, isn't this pretty much how traditional animation is done? Some storyboards plus a bunch of pure written language?

Yep. Unless you can hook the thing straight up to the animator's brain (hi there, Neuralink!) the fidgety little details will be hard to keep perfect and consistent, let alone going back and making minute changes without 'redoing' the whole shebang.

Pure written language is a horrible inefficient way to do such things

It still might beat having to go in and do all the detailed work manually, bur I know way to little about digital animation to give a real guess.

I note that this isn't all that different from standard live-action filmmaking, where you would have actors give multiple 'takes' on a scene and edit in the best ones. You're still 'prompting' actors, and refining your instructions based on the 'output' they produce, then choosing which ones you like and discarding the rest.

In fact, that might be the way to think of it, a return from the sheer tedious craftmanship of computer animation to the more 'organic' style of a Director/Prompter eliciting their ideal performance and massaging it into the final product.

Something like SCAIL and LoRA abuses can probably do that today and is probably already getting used in that sense today, but the current version of the technology goes a little nuts for segments longer than 9 seconds, and it's painful to do even short segments using the existing workflows, on top of being egregiously slow on consumer hardware. I've seen people take it into a couple minutes by doing really aggressive generation of prompts to make a flipshow to start with, but anything longer than that tends to either end up needing to compromise on weird physics or ugly scene changes.

And the current implementations have some limits; pose info can't do talking heads well, going beyond three characters with pose info gets rough, and some particular pose changes can go full-on Exorcist. SCAIL's lipsync capabilities are worse than WAN animate, and while it's possible to combine them, it's even more finicky.

But compared to the cost and unpleasantness of traditional mocap, or even makeup? If you can possibly use this tech, there's a lot of good arguments in its favor.

I think full AI is first going to infiltrate areas like the 'kids cartoon slop' genre. I remember a whole bunch of bad 3D CGI cartoons coming out in the 00's and 10's. I actually think full AI would do a better job considering the quality of the man man garbage.

The Will Stancil Show suggest that yes, this is likely.

I've been spending a lot of time with my father recently. Because of the cancer, he's not as energetic as he was, and he's watching football as a comfort and a way to pass the time.

I've noticed that a surprising amount of the advertising is using AI animation. I'm not exactly an anti-AI, "it's killing art" type, but there's something about it that's absolutely revolting when I see it in action. It's like everything is a worm-ridden mass of semi-biological matter that writhes and wriggles across every single frame. It's an aesthetic that would be more fitting in a particularly unpleasant horror short than a commercial trying to sell me Coca-Cola.

The crazy thing to me is that nobody else in the room even seems to notice it. Maybe I'm just some kind of freak, but it occurred to me when you said this:

The character's appearances are consistent throughout. There's no weird physics or physical deformities

Is that actually true, or is it just that you aren't bothered by it?

I've noticed that a surprising amount of the advertising is using AI animation. I'm not exactly an anti-AI, "it's killing art" type, but there's something about it that's absolutely revolting when I see it in action. It's like everything is a worm-ridden mass of semi-biological matter that writhes and wriggles across every single frame. It's an aesthetic that would be more fitting in a particularly unpleasant horror short than a commercial trying to sell me Coca-Cola.

I want you to ask yourself the difficult question:

Are you only picking those ones out because they were noticeable and thus you peg them as AI.

And is it possible you've been watching other ads with AI that simply didn't trigger that response, and thus you haven't registered them.

I don't really consume a lot of ads in my daily life, so it's hard to tell. I don't really watch much TV, and my computer is pretty locked down with both ad blockers and a pi hole

All of the ads I've been seeing are gross and off-putting, but the few that are clearly AI are especially bad.

Hahah fair enough. I'm similarly locked down and I usually only see actual ads when I'm at a restaurant these days.

But I know I've been momentarily fooled by some videos I come across online... which leads me to worry about whether I've been completely fooled already.

Married Christmas Celebrating Mottizens: what did you and your spouse get each other for Christmas?

Nothing ... we have three kids and celebrated with three other nieces the day of (my wifes side of the family). Aint no one got time for adult gifts. I also nixed the secret santa gift exchange that typically happens on my side of the family. Maybe if we'd both been feeling better I would have gotten some marital enjoyment, not so hot when the wife is coughing up a lung, and I'm shivering under three blankets.

I got my lady a wooden thread spool holder, a couple of ring necklaces, and a salt shaker from IKEA.

She got me a whittling kit, complete with knives and blocks of wood and a book that teaches you how to whittle.

What's a ring necklace?

Basically a necklace to hold a ring. If you google ring necklace you can find a lot of images, can't remember how to embed them here.

My lady works in a lab so she has to frequently take her ring off, and the necklace helps her not lose/forget it lol.

Mostly consumables (food, drinks etc). My wife insists on doing stockings for eachother so that's pretty easy. Plus I bought her a voucher for a massage place.

A few if my friends started a book club last year. But their taste, and the current book market even more!, is decidedly feminist/leftist.

Any counterweight recommendations? Nothing too controversial/radical to not scare the normies though.

Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset is a good classic for women. Feminist for it's time, but still aligned with reality in a harsh Nordic way.

I'd love to recommend Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book but it's a harder sell.

Something by Graham Greene. Brighton Rock perhaps?

Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now.

Basically find something older than 50 years that appeals to their interests.

Assuming you are American, you want to go foreign or old. American liberals have an innate respect for European writers, even more for third world writers, which will allow them much more leeway to get away with being "problematic" than they would grant a white American. And most people who think of themselves as "serious readers" know that at some point they need to tackle Austen and Tolstoy.

For recent American novels, I'd recommend The Sympathizer by Nguyen.

What kinds of books?

Do you have a few examples of what they're recommending, what might squeak by, and what would be right out?

First the viral book-tok hit „A little life“. There are good ling rants about it on reddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/g7ctg9/why_a_little_life_is_not_worth_reading

A girl I’m subscribed to made a half hour-long video about it. I saw Antoni from Queer Eye wear t-shirts with the characters’ names on them on the show. … A Little Life has been on my mind every single day for over two weeks now. At first, this was because I was in the middle of the story and was immersed in what was going on, anticipating where it would go. Then, it was because I’d finished it and was consumed by how devastating it was. Now, it’s because I’m genuinely angry that I let myself get so emotionally invested in a book that is in actuality terrible in every sense of the word.

Spoiler: This bestseller is practically emotional torture porn about a gay friend group and the gay protagonist who is sexually exploited (of course as a child also by monks) and how he collects traumatic experiences until he suffers so much that he can’t bear it anymore and suicides himself. I am terrible unfair here, but sometimes I think women have a strangely dark place in them and like to read about fucked up stuff (also why true crime podcasts are predominantly consumed by women). Bonus point: All books by the female author are about suffering homosexual men which weirds me out as a strange kink.

Then there is a fiction book with the plot that all women one day lay down on Earth (planking) in a silent strike instead of working in underpaid jobs / doing unpaid care work.

A book about a grand story of an immigrant family and the unwelcoming discriminating experiences they make over the decades in the host country full of Nazis. Though that was a little bit a submarine: The true theme was how the parents impose their backward rural-muslim culture on their kids which fucks them up. in the end an unknown trans kid which was adopted away shows up.

Then there is a non-fiction book about how in current times one can’t just live privately anymore, but must be personally involved politically against the new far right in europe.

These people seem beyond help, but Matthew Gasda's The Sleepers could be a fun cat to throw among the pigeons. It leads with the "queer romance" and only gets subversive later.

If you want to stay inside the lines but be a little subversive, maybe consider Blood Over Bright Haven. The first half of the book feels like the same trauma porn and girl power mashup that you describe above, but the protagonist has a pretty heavy heel-turn as the book progresses.

Does anyone here have recommendations for making long drives more tolerable? I've been on the road a lot lately, and by the time I get toy destination, I'm pretty wiped out.

I've found certain course lectures lend themselves quite well to being listened to. Wold recommend trying out Sapolsky's full course on human behavioral biology, it's on youtube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D

Maybe some of Jordan Peterson's lectures from before he fried his brain: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kYYJlNbV1OM

Can I convince you to join the cult of Aubrey Maturin enjoyers? The original book series behind Master and Commander spanned over 20 books and I've enjoyed most of them thoroughly. The audiobooks have become my go-to 'long drive/fall asleep' listening for most of this year. If you can make it through the nautical jargon of the first book, it becomes smooth sailing. Also there's plenty of different versions floating around the place.

"It is the dawn of the nineteenth century; Britain is at war with Napoleon’s France. When Jack Aubrey, a young lieutenant in Nelson’s navy, is promoted to captain, he inherits command of HMS Sophie, an old, slow brig unlikely to make his fortune. But Captain Aubrey is a brave and gifted seaman, his thirst for adventure and victory immense. With the aid of his friend Stephen Maturin, ship’s surgeon and secret intelligence agent, Aubrey and his crew engage in one thrilling battle after another, their journey culminating in a stunning clash with a mighty Spanish frigate against whose guns and manpower the tiny Sophie is hopelessly outmatched."

Podcasts, audiobooks, radio dramas, and music. Some recommendations:

[1] https://files.catbox.moe/ihpyci.mp3

[2] https://archive.org/download/EscapePodCompleteMP3Collection/EP200_AllYouZombies.mp3

[3] https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/rationallyspeakingpodcast/rs135-9.mp3

You mention radio dramas, but no Wolf 359? That's the best one ever man. @birb_cromble.

Well this will keep me busy for a while. Thanks

I used to regularly do 8 hour drives back in the day (driving home from law school, and vice-versa). I still often do 2.5 hours, sometimes twice a day.

Audiobooks, especially a semi-educational one (but not an overly dry one) are great for this, doubly so if you have a passenger to enjoy with.

Listening to Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann on an 8 hour trip honestly made the whole thing fly by.

If its a 2-3 hour drive, full comedy specials are a great option. There are some classics out there.

The whole tedium is that there's nothing you can do other than stare out the windshield hoping your fellow travelers aren't about to do something stupid.

How long are we talking? Strategy for a three hour drive is different than a six hour drive.

I like a big pleasant beverage, I'll stop at Wawa and get an extra large diet coke or Dr pepper. Zyns are pleasant and calorie free. Drinking also forces me to stop and piss, which adds the element of looking for a likely empty spot to tap a kidney.

Line up a variety of podcasts/music/audiobooks beforehand so when you get bored of one thing you just change to the next.

Three to five hours, mostly, with most of that being rural interstate.

Any recommendations on podcasts? I've never really looked into them at all. Tagging @Southkraut too in case he has any input as well.

  • @atelier mentioned Fall of Civilizations, and I also recommend that one. Very well-made. One caveat though: I actually prefer to watch it on youtube because they add lots of nice imagery there.
  • Literature and History: Excellently made, but sadly very woke. Practically every episode is at least 25% the author making casting shade on bronze-age people for not having modern-day morality. Sometimes that's a full 100%. Very unfortunate.
  • History of Ancient Greece: Less skilled speaker, unfortunately nasal, but it's more dry and technical and without the constant woke commentary. Just the way I like it.

I just realize I said "podcasts" earlier, but in actual truth I mostly do audiobooks.

Over the last few years, I listened to

  • Dune. Fair for its day, but not actually as good as people nowadays make it out to be.
  • Brigador. Good.
  • Flashman. Good.
  • The Sienkiewicz Trilogy. Very good.
  • Ciaphas Cain. Tolerable Flashman knockoff, but not actually all that good.
  • Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Decent.
  • Conan the Barbarian. I liked it, but I can see how someone might not.
  • Moby Dick. Excellent as always.
  • Neuromancer, read by William Gibson. Terrible, the man can't speak.
  • History of the Peloponnesian War. Excellent book, but audio is not the right medium for it.
  • All the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Good.
  • The Worm Ourobouros. Absolutely excellent.
  • Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch. Interesting, but not actually very good, even by 17th century standards.
  • Les Trois Mousqetaires. Surprisingly good, but tough going because my French isn't all that good anymore.

Most of those I got from librivox.com. Fair warning: The quality there varies wildly.

Fall of Civilizations is my favorite.

Hardcore History is fun and good production value.

I like Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World but you have to pick out the episodes that interest you.

Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman both do good work on interviews, and it's looooooooong with deep archives. I've never kept up with either podcast, but occasionally I'm in the mood and dig one up.

Welcome to Nightvale is fun and mindless if you like supernatural-lovecraft-comedy

Everyday Driver and Consumer Reports Talking Cars car podcasts are my favorite car podcasts when I'm in the mood, because they review real actual cars a human might actually drive.

The History of Rome is old but amazing, I've listened to it all the way through three times and I'll probably listen to it again this summer. It's so much detail. Hardcore History is a little 2edgy4me sometimes, but it is a classic for a reason.

The Secret History of Western Esotericism is absolutely incredible as a project, the SHWEP goes into so many things that if you're like me and read widely in the classics you have heard of but don't know half as much about as you'd like. I keep meaning to get through the whole thing.

You Must Remember This is a history of old Hollywood podcast, the series on Manson and Hollywood Babylon and Dead Blondes are my favorites, but every one of the series is pretty good, though it's painfully woke at moments. Acquired is a great podcast doing a long form history of famous companies, I find the guys hosting so incredibly cringe and lame that I can only enjoy episodes about companies I actually care about, the number of time these two quarter zip fucks call somebody a "badass" or a "gangsta" or something is too high, but the episodes on Starbucks and Rolex were great.

For stuff that's more to my personal rather than universal interest, The Philly Special podcast with my boys Sheil Kapadia and Shawn Syed is my favorite Eagles podcast I listen to multiple times a week. The BJJ Fanatics podcast does an interview with a great BJJ practitioner every week, and while they don't all hit, when I want that content they do a pretty good job.

I'll also throw in the Shakespeare Network on youtube has audio recordings of every Shakespeare play, and I'm working my way through them. Yale Courses on Youtube has lecture series on a wide range of topic, one of which must interest you at any given time.

Schizo podcasts help pass the time better.

I only listen to audiodrama fiction podcasts, some of my favorites:

The Magnus Archives — horror, monster of the week with an overarching plot format, the framing device are case reports read aloud
Malevolent — an original story in Lovecraft's world, the framing device is the protagonist talking with an entity that possessed parts of his body
SAYER — sci-fi, a sadistic AI in charge of a space station, the framing device are instructions from the titular AI SAYER to personnel
Edict Zero — FIS — sci-fi, cops, criminals, conspiracies, hackers, no framing device, just dialogue

Full Self-Driving in a Tesla? I think they're rolling out unsupervised driving too, so you can even be on your phone or whatever while it does everything.

Other than that, I'd just try to relax as much as possible. Be a 'defensive' driver, even if it's a little gay. Listen to something fun or educational.

I have this, it's a total game changer.

Otherwise, I'd say plant your cruise at something just slower than most of the traffic, park in the right lane, and let others do most of the work.

Podcasts and Coffee. I'm still dog tired by the end of it, but it feels better in the doing.

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