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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   3194 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

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

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Lately I've been reflecting and I think one of the biggest themes of change in my lifetime is the increasing efficiency of the world, and largely, it sucks. I think different people have described this in ways that suit their own worldview. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, Redditors might call this a form of late-stage capitalism, woke people would call a subset of this gentrification, I call it increasing efficiency. Let me give you some examples.

Airplane seats. Thirty years ago, a savvy traveler would know to get exit row seats, for the same price you got extra leg room. Over the course of my life airlines have recognized they had this little luxury and were effectively leaving money on the table by not charging more for it. Over my life they have created sub-designations like economy-plus to extract that little bit of value that they were leaving behind.

Some years ago I went to Kansas City for a conference and I was pretty excited to try the barbecue. I went to a couple places and overall, while it was decent, I'd had better in New York which obviously makes complete sense! If you were a world-class barbecue chef from Kansas City, why would you stay in KC where there isn't much money and the competition is fierce? Bring your talents to New York or San Francisco and you stand to get a much bigger payday and critical recognition that would never be available to you in KC. In some sense, having a great regional cuisine only available in Kansas City is just irrational. If people all over the world would like barbecue, why would it only be available in some relatively poor middle-America city? It should naturally be available the world-over in proportion to the money available in a locality. I think essentially the beautiful diversity of regional cuisines is an inefficiency or an irrationality waiting to be eaten up. At this point the only foods remaining regional are really ones that nobody else wants.. In the world I grew up in my dad would always tell me that you just couldn't get a good cheesesteak outside of Philly, that world doesn't exist anymore.

Or consider my hobby, daguerreotype collecting. When I look at older collections built in the 70s-90s, collections were more haphazard. People would have lots of mundane things I wouldn't look twice at today mixed in with some truly extraordinary things that would be impossible to buy now even if you were a museum. It seems like in the past, before the internet, price discoverability was basically zero, so with enough persistence if you were willing to hit the road and hit up dozens of antique and book stores you could turn up great things for nothing. Today with the availability of eBay, prices are more accurate and as a result collections are much more defined by how much money you have to spend. There is no shortcut, there isn't really a way for effort and luck to substitute for raw dollars today.

I think Tinder and OnlyFans are examples of the same phenomenon. Tinder, for women, is essentially a price discovery tool. If you are a gorgeous girl from some small town you no longer have to settle for some guy from your hometown. You can go on Tinder and find that there are 6'5" med students that do rock climbing a few miles away that are very much in-your-league. Regarding OnlyFans, if you were curious about ho'ing it up 40 years ago what was your option? Mail photos of yourself to Hustler and then potentially move out to LA for a giant question mark of a payday? Today if you are a moderately popular woman on social media you will have a very good idea of exactly how much money you would stand to make the very moment you choose to open an OF, which could be a very large amount indeed.. I think thirty years ago if you were some loser guy working at a small town gas station you could at least have the fantasy of getting the girl, because sometimes the world was just crazy and irrational and nonsensical things happened! Today I think that fantasy feels less realistic as desirable women have far more tools to get a sense of their true worth. Not to say the world is perfectly rational now, but it is more than it used to be. I think the popular SEC couples meme is celebrating exactly the wonderful irrationality of mixed-attractiveness couples that is increasingly rare to see.

I imagine if you are a guy that frequented strip clubs, hooters and escorts you probably view the glory days as behind you. 30 years ago you could probably find some seriously gorgeous girls with enough looking, today I assume any decent looking girl would be leaving those places for OF.

I would say gentrification is a specific subset of this same phenomenon. Essentially it is a majority/privileged/white group recognizing that a minority/marginalized group has something that is 'undervalued' and moving in to exploit that. This undervalued thing could be a food like oxtail, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, a hairstyle, whatever. Either way I think these are both cases of an inefficiency being ironed out, low-hanging fruit being plucked and the world becoming more rational and efficient. After all, shouldn't Williamsburg be expensive? It has a great view of Manhattan and is closer to the Financial District than lots of upscale areas on the Upper West/East Side. The fact that it was ever cheap was just an obvious inefficiency waiting to be corrected.

I think this kind of sucks because the theme across all of these is that the world becomes less irrational and by extension less hopeful. In the past you could dream of getting the girl, or finding that amazing daguerreotype in an antique shop, or coming home to a cheap meal of oxtail in your Williamsburg apartment with a great view of the Manhattan skyline. Today, as with collecting, the quality of your life is much more closely following the amount of money you have to throw around and opportunities for savvy or just plain lucky individuals are disappearing. Kind of sad imo. I think the human spirit and persistence of hope rely to a certain degree on irrationality and chaos to sustain themselves, the idea that anything can happen and it doesn’t have to make sense.

I would be very interested if people have more examples of this because I feel like it has swept across almost everything in the last 30 years

I'm reminded of a couple years ago when a friend and I stopped at a Texas Roadhouse. I had not been to one since college when it was the highest-end eatery I could afford. The place was packed. I often eat 80 dollar filets at high-end steak houses, but I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of my steak. For 14.99 I enjoyed a flavorful (if slightly chewy) eight-ounce sirloin, two sides, and endless rolls. If I recall correctly, the same meal cost 9.99 when I was in college 15 years ago, while beef prices have tripled during that time.

The biggest change was in how the service was provided. In college, Texas Roadhouse was a standard sit-down restaurant with waiters who served a small number of tables. While the trappings of this model were still in place, the methodology was far more optimized. There is a well-defined mechanism for assigning parties to tables. Once parties are seated, the server "tags" the table with a sticky-note receipt with the party name and number, presumably to assist the waitstaff in delivering the correct order and to facilitate accurate billing. Despite my rather dim assessment of the waitstaff's mental faculties, we were delivered accurate orders in minutes. Once our plates were taken away, we were able to pay via the mobile payment device connected to each table. We left within thirty minutes from when we were seated.

The efficiency of this process was evident. The crowded restaurant was staffed by no more than 4 or 5 waiters. Yet there was something tangibly missing from the experience for both the patrons and the servers. Waiting tables at a Texas Roadhouse would have been a good job for a high-school or college student: the student would gain experience and acquire a certain amount of responsibility. Now, the waitstaff is not expected or encouraged to show any individuality or responsibility. Any deviation from the process is a flaw. When we were being seated, there was a slight breakdown in this process. A wayward plate from another table had been set on the table at which were to be seated. Our seater was flummoxed. Eventually she and another waiter contrived to put the plate back on the original table, at which point she continued to seat us. Addressing a trivial mix-up like this should be done without a second thought by even the most inexperienced waiter.

When we were paying, our electronic payment device asked for a tip. Given the impersonal experience in which our only possible interactions with our waiter were transactional (except, oddly, for the monetary transaction itself), a tip seemed pointless. The waiters had no opportunity to independently provide a pleasant dining experience, instead relying on customers' habit and largesse.

While my natural inclination towards productivity and efficiency makes me appreciate what Texas Roadhouse has accomplished, as a diner I felt like a commoditized agent being pushed through an assembly line. I, too, was expected to participate in the well-run ordering of the establishment. If I had been a little quicker with the credit card, maybe we could have spent only 25 minutes eating and not wasted 5 minutes of a table meant for the next faceless consumer.

So what am I to take from this? The dining experience felt demeaning and dehumanizing to both the servers and the customers. It feels like Wall-E. It won't be long before we do have robot waiters. We will all have adequate, but unsatisfying, commoditized consumption experiences. The majority will be content to consume and over-consume. I only can hope that a few of us will not want to just survive, but to live.

And yet, while the experience may have been grotesque, aesthetics are a low priority in any hierarchy of needs. The clientele were much more concerned about getting a decent meal at a reasonable price. I believe that making steak relatively more affordable for more people is a good thing. Better to gorge on sirloin than to go hungry in the streets. Better to be in a cog in a machine than for the machine not to exist at all. The economic engine that drives us towards efficiency may not always be pretty, but it generates results.

I have a mental model for economic markets that they behave much like a stochastic gradient descent algorithm. Firms and entrepreneurs explore the economic domain and move ever towards optimization. Whether this exploration results in a globally optimal solution depends greatly on the initial conditions. Initial conditions such as culture, institutions, and societal norms can have a major impact on how close the market engine comes to global optimization. An optimization problem is considered relatively stable if many different initial conditions can result in similar minima.

While this mental model is useful, it is incomplete: the very act of economic optimization can lead to eventual changes in the topology of the economy. In the case of Texas Roadhouse, the optimization begets atomized consumption and labor. Neither buyer nor seller is being acclimated to experiences outside of a prepackaged box. This may well lead to a fragile stasis as we lose initiative and dynamism and as the economic system becomes incapable of accommodating any deviation from the norm. Hence I can simultaneously applaud the innovations that lead to greater abundance, and decry the resulting changes to our society that can lead to stagnation and collapse.

The clear intellectual inferiority of the waitstaff is a microcosm of the entire labor market. For the first time in history, most labor is sorted (roughly) by intellect. In the agrarian days, farmers were more or less intelligent, but as long as the farmers could plow their fields their intellect was sufficient for the job. The higher intelligent farmers would naturally become community leaders and occasional inventors. With jobs now bifurcated by intellectual capability the "lower skill" jobs are essentially only occupied by lower capability individuals. There is limited interaction among individuals of different capacity as many of our social circles are dominated by work colleagues. Lower skill jobs atrophy with no innovation and no leadership. Hence the gross incompetence of many fast food restaurants and the disaster of manual construction and landscape labor. It genuinely was better service in the old days, when a diversity of intellects occupied these jobs. Conversely, the "high skill" workplace is now almost entirely staffed by high intellects. The menial jobs that would still have required interaction across intellects have been replaced by computers.

AI may be the great leveler. Robots are increasingly good at "high skill" jobs, but can't (yet) perform the types of physical tasks that even a 70 IQ individual can do. If job loss in "high skill" industries occurs en-masse, we may see the intellectual class starting to perform "low skill" jobs, with positive benefits for all.

I may have been one of the few people who thought that Buy'N'Large was one of the greatest human achievements ever depicted in film

I'm currently looking to get into canoeing as a hobby, inspired by tales and aesthetics of it from preceding eras, and I'm very afraid that I'm about to arrive into a hobby that had all the discovery and enjoyment (for me) optimized out of it. People are already reporting that national parks have to be reserved at the opening of the season if you want to have a chance to get a camping spot. My plan to avoid this is to use my contrarian superpower to look for under-optimised strategies. Everyone's reflex when it comes to these things is to go to national parks, maybe I should look at private camp grounds? Or at hunting/fishing lands, which do regulate the recreational use in a different scheme than national parks.

Consider starting at a local river that offers multi-hour canoe/kayak trips before worrying about places and trips that require camping.

Yes, that's the plan. I'm planning on moving to a city next to a paddleable river this year, I want to practice in that river this summer, and then in autumn do a weekend trip not necessarily a trip down a river where I'd camp along the way, I'm also looking at campgrounds next to scenic paddleable lakes for daytrips.

Suggestion: don't sleep on county parks. I've found them to be very underutilized due to their lack of centralized (or any) reservation infrastructure, smaller size, and general emphasis on recreation rather than natural wonders. But while the quality is more uneven, some of the best places I've camped have been county parks.

I agree 100% on all this as someone who loves second-hand fashion and collecting obscure historical artifacts. Though to some extent boldness can still substitute for money.

I will put my hand up for one hobby this trend enables, though: credit card churning/airmilesmaxxing. This is the one thing I've found where you benefit from exploiting this trend, in that as airlines build systems to entice the ordinary consumer (and really, neither the airlines nor the banks are behaving particularly badly in this space, and they write off your pointmaxxing as a rounding error in their cost of doing business), a motivated and systematic person can get massively outsize rewards from exploiting the system. However, because the marginal cost of filling an empty airline seat is ~$0 (the largest cost to the airline of filling an empty first class seat is actually liquor), you get all the fun of intricately planned defection without actually harming the commons.

Except for all the people who get into massive credit card debt who these programs are actually trying to target and where the credit card companies make all their profit.

A) No, American Express, Chase, etc. do not "make all their profit" on bad debtors. That's why they have credit checks and you need a good credit score for premium cards, because bad debtors are a real pain in the ass for higher-market-segment banks. They make their profits off interchange fees (which tbh are kind of bullshit and should probably be illegal to do in the way they're currently done), and to get those fees they want stable customers who spend lots of money and pay their bills like clockwork. Get mad at bottom-of-the-market issuers, if you like, but that's a separate issue.

B) Not my problem. You're complaining about the existence of consumer credit. I'm talking about exploiting features of credit card reward programs, at the expense of the banks involved. If you want to make this about Late Capitalism and all that jazz, happy to have that conversation, but you gotta lay that out on the table.

I wrote a response to @sarker that also responds to your part A.

Not my problem. You're complaining about the existence of consumer credit.

Yes, I'm complaining about the existence of consumer credit (at least as it's practiced today). But even more so I'm also complaining about the "not my problem" attitude.

I do in fact care about the welfare of my fellow countrymen. I even care about the financially illiterate and irredeemably midwit among us. Every fancy financial scheme that exists makes these midwits feel like suckers for not taking advantage of it, and so they try to take advantage of it and get their lives wrecked because they're not equipped for it.

That's why they have credit checks and you need a good credit score for premium cards, because bad debtors are a real pain in the ass for higher-market-segment banks

Well, yes, but... The ideal debtor for the CC company is one that keeps the balance, for quite a long time, but pays most of it at the end. That's why you don't have to have 800+ score to get most of the cards, and in fact pretty much anyone with a pulse can get one (unlike, for example, bank loans which would ask you for many more documents to give you a loan at half the APR). They are even fine with occasional discharge - as long as you paid enough in interest over the life of the loan to cover it (or you neighbor did). And yes, they charge interchange fees too, but:

First, we find that, on average, the credit function makes up approximately 80 percent of the credit card profitability, whereas the contribution of the transaction function is slightly negative, as rewards and other expenses on credit card transactions outpace banks' interchange revenues. In addition, fees—in particular late fees—comprise approximately 15 percent of credit card profitability.

(https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/credit-card-profitability-20220909.html)

This is not how it works.

I disagree with Patrick McKenzie. I think are disagreement is probably at a philosophical level that I don't want to go into, so instead I'll share a personal story:

I teach a data science practicum course for economic majors where financial institutions "hire" our students. One of the projects our students were contracted for was literally optimizing the advertisement of credit card rewards programs to attract low income consumers who would not default on the loans but would carry a high interest balance. Another project was optimizing the fee schedule to extract the most money as possible from overdue payments on these cards from low income consumers.

I've sat at the table with the men and women who run these programs. I've asked them how they justify it to themselves. They fully acknowledged that some people were ruining their lives, but they did not have any moral qualms and said "everything we do is legal and fully regulated". So I think the folk that run these programs are every bit as evil as the worst communist propaganda would have you believe.

(I refused to work with these companies, but other professors chose to work with them.)

I haven't read this one (and I intend to) but I noticed that when Trump called for 10% APR cap, the stocks of major credit card issuers dropped instantly and several of them that are heavily dependent on consumer credit cards pretty much said it is not a sustainable business in that way. From which I derive that substantial part of their income is in interest over balance, which means it is how it works, at least for many companies.

That credit cards earn revenue on interest does not imply that rewards are funded from interest payments.

Yes, you are correct that this a-priory does not imply so. But The Fed seems to think so: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/credit-card-profitability-20220909.html

First, we find that, on average, the credit function makes up approximately 80 percent of the credit card profitability, whereas the contribution of the transaction function is slightly negative, as rewards and other expenses on credit card transactions outpace banks' interchange revenues. In addition, fees—in particular late fees—comprise approximately 15 percent of credit card profitability.

Of course, they are talking about profit and not revenue here, but I think one implies the other, and I think it is reasonable to say that if 80% of the profit comes from credit function, then the credit function is the one that "pays for" the enticement features - like rewards, is it not? It looks like if not for the interest, the rewards would outpace the transaction fees, and the whole business model would have been infeasible. The credit revenues, however, make it feasible. The original claim has been:

Except for all the people who get into massive credit card debt who these programs are actually trying to target and where the credit card companies make all their profit.

And according to the link I quoted, this sounds 95% correct at least. Of course, the link dates from 2022 so if you have more fresh data that amends the picture, please provide it.

I highly recommend reading the article I posted in order to refute this claim rather than demanding evidence without reading the evidence I already provided.

Here's one relevant excerpt.

We're looking at figure D, from the paper interchange income minus reward expenses, graphed against FICO score. And the upshot of this graph is that there is no part of the FICO score spectrum at which issuers continually rebate more rewards to customers than they earn in interchange.

I think I know what's going on here. This quote - and the data - comes from paper dating from 2013. And indeed, if you look at Figure 3b in my link, that was the case up to about 2017. When it changed, and rewards expenses started to exceed transaction income, and have exceeded it since. This also matches my own experience - a while ago, 2%+ no fee cashback cards either did not exist or were a rarity that required a lot of hoops to jump through. Now they are commonplace. As you can see in the graph, the rewards expenses went from ~3.4% in 2013 to about 4.5% in 2022, while the transaction margins decreased.

The article discusses (and refutes) the idea that rewards beneficiaries are "rich" and interest payers are "poor", but neither I nor thread-starter made such claim (it's not the fault of the article, obviously). In fact, both categories may be rich, or poor, it's irrelevant - the discussion about whether tx margins or interest is the main source of revenue does not require any specific income distribution among either category.

The article says:

I'll say, as an aside, this paper dates back to 2014, but it's the best available in field, in my personal humble opinion, and I don't believe the conclusions of it have materially changed.

Given what I have seen in my link, I must question this opinion and claim that while the conclusions of the article may have been warranted given the data from 2013-2014, the situation did materially change. At least a claim from the Fed to that effect strongly indicates it did, and one needs much more than an offhand "I believe" to counter that. Maybe the conclusions of the article - which differ from the initial claim - are still warranted, but I do not think that the old data in the article supports what you purport it to support anymore.

Your article opposes the claim that credit-card rewards are funded by poor people. PokerPirate made a different claim—credit-card companies are funded by people who pay interest on balances. I think your article agrees with PokerPirate's claim. This Supreme Court opinion does as well.

Amex competes with Visa and MasterCard by using a different business model. While Visa and MasterCard earn half of their revenue by collecting interest from their cardholders, Amex does not. Amex instead earns most of its revenue from merchant fees. Amex’s business model thus focuses on cardholder spending rather than cardholder lending. To encourage cardholder spending, Amex provides better rewards than other networks. Due to its superior rewards, Amex tends to attract cardholders who are wealthier and spend more money. Merchants place a higher value on these cardholders, and Amex uses this advantage to recruit merchants.

The article does not agree with PokerPirate's claim. It quite clearly explains that rewards are financed from interchange fees.

Great post, seriously. It hones in on a big part of what I think is the malaise of modern day society: either be the best or don't even try. A lot of people are choosing the second option.

One of my friends just complained about all the surveillance. FLOCK cameras are big news in certain right wing circles, but my friend was more complaining about everything else: dashcams, ring cameras, home surveillance systems that all tend to capture an entire street. For me, sure, I think that's not the best, but really, it's one of the absolute best ways to protect yourself and also fight crime, provided that crimes captured this way are actually prosecuted. I think they're pretty much necessary at this point, too, otherwise, there might be an even larger crime wave without them. So perhaps that's another way things have become much more efficient. Why use witness testimony when you can have a perfect piece of evidence? I wonder if it contributes to the background noise of the small percent of the population that goes insane.

I went to a couple places and overall, while it was decent, I'd had better in New York which obviously makes complete sense!

Yo, where the fuck do you think you can get KC grade BBQ in NYC. Please share.

I haven't found any place on the east coast north of the Carolinas that I think has acceptable BBQ.

One place in Jersey is decent but nothing compares to Joe's or Jack Stack.

Also, where the hell can you get a good cheesesteak outside of Philly? I've had Angelos a few times and nothing else I've eaten anywhere comes close.

While I agree with the thrust of your post I think the food bit is off base. Very few Indian place are nearly as good as what you can get in Edison, I don't think you can get decent Gooey Butter Cake outside of St. Louis,* Chicago pizza styles outside of Chicago are almost always trash, good Mexican food is impossible in many states etc etc.

*this one at least you can make yourself.

One place in Jersey is decent

Where?

I stopped by Red White and Que (Green Brook NJ) on a road trip and found it to be excellent for east coast BBQ.

...Still think the KC/Texas options or Pappi's in STL are way way better.

Yeah, there are lots of food culture things that are aggressively local. We aren't even close to peak efficiency.

Nothing is going to top fresh Maine lobster, Italian tomatoes, actual access to fresh fruit or whatever.

But so much stuff is straight up technique that can be duplicated elsewhere (yes the bread is important for most sandwiches but plenty of cities have good bread) - you should be able to make an excellent cheesesteak anywhere, they just don't.

Nothing is going to top fresh Maine lobster, Italian tomatoes, actual access to fresh fruit or whatever.

Every other tomato grown in the Mediterranean region. Same with olive oil. Italy is just better with marketing.

In fact, growing tasty tomatoes is not a huge task. It's entirely possible to do this on one's own backyard. Maybe not the best tomatoes on the planet, but great ones that beat anything you buy in the grocery store so much there's not even any comparison. And tomato is one of those plants which once it starts producing, there's no stopping it. Which may be why the store ones are not as good - they are optimized for mass production, preservation and remote delivery - making a fruit that survives this journey is much different business than making a fruit that is going to be picked up and consumed within hours.

In fact, growing tasty tomatoes is not a huge task.

What is unfortunately a huge task is growing tasty tomatoes, while - at the same time - making them fully machine-harvestable and giving them long shelf life while being tossed around in boxes and by customers in the produce section. Which is the actual reason large parts of Italy had access to excellent tomatoes - they still hand-picked a significant fraction of their tomatoes.

Notice the past-tense used above. Supermarket tomatoes in Italy today taste like anywhere else. From my informal data gathering, I'd guess they mostly faded out hand-picked heirloom varieties around 2010. Same is true for a lot of other "soft" produce, too. Peaches, plums, ect. now taste like everywhere else.

Farmers markets and restaurant suppliers still have the good stuff, though. The Italians additionally still grow a lot of heirloom varieties.

It's entirely possible to do this on one's own backyard.

Your backyard may vary. Rabbits and mice sneak under my fences easily, which I think explains why, although I can get tomato plants to grow like giant weeds, their fruits tend to vanish on me almost immediately after ripening, before I can pick them myself.

That happened to us with some things too. One year we lost almost all the cherries to fruit flies, another year squashes were all eaten... But somehow in our quarters, nobody is eating the tomatoes so far.

Salsa with ingredients straight from your garden you made yourself is life changing. Still prefer the high end canned stuff for my sauce though.

but, but muh volcanic soil!!!!

This feels so very true and depressing. I am a fan of capitalism. But man can it suck in some ways.

I remember seeing this process at the company I worked at between 2013 and 2020. Trips to visit coworkers in other offices became harder to justify. Nights out with co-workers used to be expensed or paid for by higher ups, and they did that less and less over time. Some of the fun co-workers that weren't necessarily as productive got kind of pushed out. The way per-diem worked shifted from a flat amount to having to submit all your receipts of meals. Amenities in the kitchen area became slimmer. It felt like the company was nickel and diming us constantly. Which was saving them a bit of money, but was mostly just making us miserable.

It led me to a big realization about politics and management at the time. That a good manager has two competing priorities. The first priority, which is their job, is to save the company money, or make sure that the company resources are being used efficiently. But the second priority, which is never spoken of by the company, is that the manager needs to save their people from the grinding destruction of all that is human and fun for the sake of the first priority. Managing that second priority is called "politics". Its a dirty word for the company and those who lose out by having a manager that sucks at it.

Politics is the desire to place the preferences of humans over the preferences of inhuman competitive forces.

The extent to how much an organization can get away with diverting resources to politics is a sign of how rich the organization is. An organization that is perfectly efficient with no waste or politics is probably a miserable place to work. I imagine Amazon warehouses are somewhat like this, where they have optimized things such as bathroom break frequency. An organization that is all politics can also be a miserable place to work, or an amazing place depending on whether you are on the winning side of the politics. Non-profits and some government organizations are both a bit closer to being 'all politics'.

Great comment, and yeah reframes the way I see politics in my big organization. I agree though. I work in a Fortune 500 company and we got $1,000 for our holiday party this year, on a team of ~50 people in the U.S. That's pretty much the only event budget we got this year, outside of celebrating a 20 year work anniversary for someone on the team.

Apparently we used to have much more funding for these sorts of events, but they've been slowly cutting back. IMO it's crazy because I doubt it's even strictly efficient, given how important it is to keep talent. But I don't make those decisions.

I think the type of efficiency we have is efficiency at maximising what can be measured. The causality between e.g. a fun sociable office and employee retention is hard to measure. It's somewhat obvious that there is such a connection, so it gets a little funding. But there's not enough numerical evidence to put it where it should probably be to actually optimise for success.

On X, I've seen this referred to as zero-sum hypercapitalism, and as you note, it results in the tiniest inefficiencies being ruthlessly engineered away wherever possible. Optimization uber alles, but "optimization" from the big line go up forever view, not any kind of human flourishing view.

My wife was just complaining about how second hand shopping has changed from when we were in college.

Time was, Goodwill priced everything the same: a men's suit was $12.99, a women's dress was $8.99. Didn't matter if it was cashmere from Saks or polyester from Sears, for the most part they just priced everything the same. As a result, in the sea of junk, you could find gold, and cheap. My wife and I were inveterate thrifters through our undergrad years, I still have a lot of really nice stuff I bought that way. My friends and family members often commented at the time, something like "FiveHour, Goodwill is for poor people who need it, you can afford to buy new clothing." Inevitably, when they came with me, they realized that there was essentially no demand from poor people for camel hair sportcoats, and that my consumption was orthogonal to the charity aspect of the store, and they started looking for the half-off items.

Over time, the stigma of "used clothes" broke down from people like us shopping there for fashion, and resale sites like Ebay and Poshmark became more prominent. Mrs. FiveHour, when between jobs, made tens of thousands of dollars buying at Goodwill or Poshmark and arbitraging to Ebay or TheRealReal. More and more people got comfortable with used stuff, and Goodwill noticed everyone else making money off of their work, and they started raising prices on good stuff to capture some of the value. With demand up as more people bought used, and the reputation appearing that you could get a great deal, people came in and paid higher prices.

Mrs. FiveHour whines that the used market isn't what it used to be, that it's no longer worth the effort. I'm an optimist, and pointed out that we had the best part of the wave: we got the low prices for designer goods when we were broke, and now that we're well-employed (and more set in our fashion ways) we have the money to buy what we want from the stores we like. And anyway, I've accumulated too many goodyear welted shoes and vintage cashmere sweaters anyway, I don't need to go buy more of them at any price. Though I will admit, I miss it as a fun date with my wife, I do think part of the reduction in fun comes from higher standards on my part rather than changing prices.

But if I were a broke college student today, I couldn't walk into a thrift store, invest three hours of my time, and walk out with gorgeous vintage designer clothes. It used to be that if you had the knowledge of clothing brands and construction, fashion taste and discernment, and time you could go to thrift stores and look fantastic without spending a lot of money. Now, that's a much tougher thing to do. Efficiency wins at all levels: Goodwill makes more money, or original purchasers on Poshmark get back some money, but for young or broke fashionistas the opportunity and creativity isn't there.

Mrs. FiveHour, when between jobs, made tens of thousands of dollars buying at Goodwill or Poshmark and arbitraging to Ebay or TheRealReal.

It's weird to hear you lamenting the decline in thrift stores when you actively destroyed what made them special :/

-- Is there anything more American than finding something new, civilizing it for the masses, only to lament and resent that the newly civilized space has no place for you? It's the plot of John Wayne's McClintock, where the old cowboy who killed the Indians and built the town regrets that both the daughter of his body and the son of his spirit can't experience pioneering the way he did, and the musical Rent where the hipsters who made the Village cool bitch that New York is cool now and they might have to pay money to live there. The pioneer tames the wilderness and makes it safe for civilization, only to find that civilization has no place for the pioneer, and that he can never step in the same wild river twice, that he isn't the same man and it isn't the same river.

-- On a more culture-war and less FFT basis, I can argue there's a difference between what my wife did and the modern scene. I was at the library book sale over the summer, and among the old ladies and college students there was two or three immigrant women with little barcode scanners attached to their phones. And methodically, mechanically, they would scan each and every bar code on each and every book, one at a time, not even glancing at the cover or the title, and picking up one book out of every fifty or so which the phone told them was valuable enough to resell. That's what modern reselling looks like: poor immigrants sucking every cent of value out of stuff they don't even care about. I'm generally averse to critiquing the poor for trying to keep body and soul together, but their presence eliminates the opportunity for a down-on-their-luck hobbyist to hustle a bit of money on the side using their knowledge and skill. This is one less way that an ordinary person can make a little money without debasing themselves. And there's a certain romance to a young middle class woman leveraging her knowledge and enthusiasm to arbitrage, that just isn't there for a drone who doesn't care about the stuff involved, that I think makes the former acceptable in a way the latter is not.

-- As part of the above, the level of stuff involved is different. Mrs FiveHour would find the odd piece of Gucci or Prada and buy it for $10 and sell it for $300. Nowadays it's Banana Republic and Abercrombie getting sold at Goodwill for $20-25 and then resold marked up to $30-40. It used to be I'd spend all day hunting for vintage Scottish cashmere, and get it for $8, but on the way I'd see a thousand Banana Republic sweaters and any day I wanted I could go over and buy a cheap sweater. Now the juice isn't worth the squeeze for the cheap stuff, I think you're better off waiting for a sale on it new at that price point. Nobody needs cheap Gucci, but it used to be nice being able to get functional nice looking stuff for cheap.

Is there anything more American than finding something new, civilizing it for the masses, only to lament and resent that the newly civilized space has no place for you? It's the plot of John Wayne's McClintock, where the old cowboy who killed the Indians and built the town regrets that both the daughter of his body and the son of his spirit can't experience pioneering the way he did, and the musical Rent where the hipsters who made the Village cool bitch that New York is cool now and they might have to pay money to live there.

Not really the same thing. It's more like shooting all the bison and wistfully remembering the days of the great bison herds without feeling any personal responsibility.

On a more culture-war and less FFT basis, I can argue there's a difference between what my wife did and the modern scene.

I am a discerning arbitrageur that leverages deep knowledge of the value of clothes with Gucci and Prada labels, you are a casual thrift store flipper, he is a drooling, smartphone scanning, drone NPC bugman.

As part of the above, the level of stuff involved is different. Mrs FiveHour would find the odd piece of Gucci or Prada and buy it for $10 and sell it for $300. Nowadays it's Banana Republic and Abercrombie getting sold at Goodwill for $20-25 and then resold marked up to $30-40.

Ironically, the first thing is obviously way worse. You're okay arbitraging away the opportunity to save 96% but think that arbitraging away the opportunity to save 17% is just going too far.

I'm good with the idea that the we can't always have a Wild West and that part of what made the West fun was the taming of it, and so we can't have it again.

But I'm not cool with the idea that destroying the commons is okay when I do it in a classy way but not when those shlups do it in a low class way. It's either a commons that needs preserving or a resource that needs exploiting.

As an aside, my impression is that there is still a lot of finds to be had at estate sales (at least in CA). I think the real reason the thrift store market has dried up is not because of people buying the good stuff from the thrift stores, but because the suppliers have stopped sending the good stuff to the thrift stores. People now find the good stuff at the estate sale, and so the left over junk that gets donated has much less signal to noise. I suspect the higher prices at the thrift store are also related to garden variety inflation, where it is magnified tremendously by not being part of the official basket of goods tracked.

But I'm not cool with the idea that destroying the commons is okay when I do it in a classy way but not when those shlups do it in a low class way.

Ah, there's the problem, I am cool with that idea.

Another great example! I've heard exactly this lament from vintage resellers I know endlessly and in many ways it mirrors exactly my experience with daguerreotypes and antique shops. Similarly it is hard to blame Goodwill for picking up the fistfulls of dollars they were leaving on the table. But as you said and as I said above, it is a bit sad for people that are broke but with aspirations of higher fashion. In the before time, a bit of effort and fashion-knowledge (as your wife had) could stand-in for money in a way that it can't today. Today if you're broke you're going to look broke.

I've heard this called "perfect price discrimination" and airlines try to apply different prices not just to different seats, but to different passengers. They can easily map you to your digital profile via fingerprinting your browser (that includes facts like "loves to switch on incognito mode when shopping for airline tickets") and estimate how much more they can charge you for a seat just because you can afford it and your fellow passenger across the aisle can't.

This has always been rumoured and it's possible but is there any actual evidence of it?

It's not true to my knowledge, though I also believed it for some time. If nothing else, if it was true, you'd have airmiles obsessives writing thousands of blogs about optimizing it. Try to navigate the website of an average airline and you'll have a pretty good idea of how good their tech is. The talented guys they do have are generally in the "keep operations from falling apart in the next 24 hours" department rather than the price gouging department.

I looked up a couples of research articles yesterday that had experimented with different profiles and VPNs (firefox/safari, PC/iPhone, different countries, profiles corresponding to 'rich' customers i.e. luxury hotel websites vs. 'poor' customers) and found that differences were $10 max and didn't vary substantially across different countries let alone different user profiles, so I think you're right. But open to hearing otherwise.

At this point the only foods remaining regional are really ones that nobody else wants..

You could have chosen surströmming, or balut, or nattō, or kholodets, but you chose a normal-ass hamburger.

That is not a normal-ass hamburger IMO. They don't normally have a bunch of filler added in addition to the beef.

Surströmming is less food and more chemical warfare.

No, it’s a great example. It’s an inferior good. There’s no direct alternative to natto other than just…not.

I think this is a major contributing factor in the oft-discussed "enshittification" of everything. The world has become increasingly flat, and increasingly bland. Car companies don't take risks, and everything they sell is some shade of grey with maybe some blue scattered in. Companies increasingly recognize that any small "lifehacks" or perk can be monetized, and our sense of hope and wonder fades away. Even Disney World has MBA'd itself into a place I would no longer remotely describe as the "happiest place on earth".

The phenomenon stems largely from corporate consolidation, as well. You used to have a bevy of media options and ownership groups, which could bring multiple flavors of radio stations and newspapers to even a mid-size town. Now they're all pretty much owned by the same handful of companies. And how many quaint local mom-n-pop stores have succumbed to Amazon and Wal-Mart?

Companies increasingly recognize that any small "lifehacks" or perk can be monetized,

My new car doesn't have cruise control, because I didn't think to check or choose the $2000 upgraded trim package (not that I could. It was used.).

I feel like that sort of thing is common with car makers... there's a "base model" with basically nothing - no cruise control, no power windows, etc. - and then there's the reasonably priced first trim upgrade that gives you all the things most people expect at a minimum in modern cars.

The steelman of price discrimination is that it enables a lower floor to a product's price than if it had to offer a single price point, which helps accessibility. It can even be good, in that the people who overpay for a few extras (especially for stuff like "color stitching" on seats or other visual upgrades which are pretty much just signaling that they could afford to pay for a fancy trim) are subsidizing the product for the people who get the cheaper ones. That if you made it illegal and that all cars had to have only one trim, it'd be a middle trim, it'd be more expensive than the current middle trim and the people who could only afford the base trim now just can't buy it anymore.

I feel like there needs to be a name for the steelman that like, obviously isn't true and is a fig leaf for the money grubbing that the company wanted to do anyways. Like, does anyone actually believe that advertising is "connecting people to goods and services that will better their life"? Or that price discrimination isn't immediately used to capture all the excess value of a transaction*?

* So in theory, every transaction has two winners; both people only made the trade if they believe that the trade is worth more for them than what they're giving away (tautologically - would anyone voluntarily make a trade that they thought was all downside?) The issue with price discrimination is that instead of both parties capturing some excess value from the trade, one party captures almost all the excess value, while the other captures epsilon (as in, just enough to make the trade worthwhile, but no more).

What makes it true or not is how healthy the competition and the market is. A company that only did this to extract more money from each sale would find itself having a hard time finding buyers compared to cheaper competitors. Companies that offer a genuinely good deal don't do it from the goodness of their heart, they do it because it's also a valid business strategy to aim at making a larger number of sales with a lower profit margin.

The issue with price discrimination is that instead of both parties capturing some excess value from the trade, one party captures almost all the excess value, while the other captures epsilon (as in, just enough to make the trade worthwhile, but no more).

In the case of "signaling" addons, it's quite possible that both the car manufacturer and the customer are happier with price discrimination. After all, the point of signaling is that you're showing everyone you paid for something expensive because you have money. If it was cheaper, or if it was available on every trim, that exclusive paint color or colored stitching the rich person paid for wouldn't be useful to signal how rich he is.

A company that only did this to extract more money from each sale...

That is literally every company that uses price discrimination. They don't get punished either because of market inefficiencies or because they sell goods that aren't interchangeable with competitors' goods.

The frontman :)

What car company? Just so I can be absolutely certain to never buy one.

Ford. They fixed it in later model years, but still. I'm kind of with you on that now.

Yeah, I'm glad I've never owned one. That's been standard on all but the most basic cars since at least the 80s. What money-grubbing bastards.

Good post. The internet really brought that efficiency everywhere. My example is ski mountaineering. The internet ruined it.

Even just 10-15 years ago, this was a niche hobby and an extreme sport. To plan a winter ascend, you had to buy guide books and stacks of paper terrain maps. The first few times you needed a good mentor or a hired mountain guide, just for judging the weather and the current avalanche risk (also for route finding and for teaching the techniques). But if you left the ski resorts behind, the mountains where empty and quiet, and full of untracked powder (that tried to kill you when you least expected it).

Then the internet told that every single resort skier on the planet, and it turns out they really already have 95% of the skills necessary to go touring. Now the back country is swarming with people. Mountains that used to be empty now have 10 different tracks leading to the summit the morning after a fresh snow fall. I can't even remember when I've had to break a fresh track the last time.

Decades worth of experience judging the weather? The daily forecast is much better than that, and it comes with live precipitation radar maps showing you where the snow storm is and where it's going to be, and when. The local guy tracking the layer composition of the snow pack all through the season? Professional avalanche reports online give everybody that information for every single valley. Route finding? Just load a GPX track someone else planned onto your smart watch. Want do check that guys work? Here's an app that shows slope angles and rates your track for avalanche risks. Local knowledge about a difficult couloir that has powder in late spring? It's all over Instagram, and there's 10 touring portal posts about its conditions this moth. Also, here's a 3D render of that entire mountain, in case you where wondering if there's any other skiable gullies.

There's upside, too, of course. All the information available actually is much better (especially if you buy guide books in addition anyway). It generally is so much safer now (but many more people die - because many more people are out there). The larger market hugely improved the gear - everything is lighter, more reliable, less finicky, more comfortable. The avalanche beacons now actually work.

I also have a counter example: the used market for commodity consumer products still works. All the kids here ride the same plastic bob sledge through the snow. It's a bomb proof design, tried and tested through the decades. They all get it from the same big box store, and it costs 140. Yes, for 4 pieces of injection molded plastic from China, made millions of times. Anyway, they go for 10 bucks on the local equivalent of Craigslist, and chances are the family selling theirs is about as far away as that big box store.

I can think of a few examples of how better resource optimization can make things less good.

  1. There used to be a lot more friction around moving people around; someone who is a top 0.01% engineer might not have ended up with Google or NVIDIA or whatever due to not being as keenly aware of their level of skills. As such, you tended to get more talented people in more diverse spaces (as opposed to concentrating them all into 1 or 2 big companies). By the inverse token, people tend to be a lot more interchangeable in jobs themselves, as anyone better will have gone to a better paying position, so you are necessarily stuck with a bunch of people who are approximately the same level.
  2. I'd argue that there is less room for disruptors too; for example, card and tabletop games (like, say, Magic the Gathering), or even early PC games (like, say, Starcraft) did not have as much penetration as to what the "best" choices were at any time. A very popular thing amongst CCGs currently is the presence of the "netdeck" - as in, someone who buys the exact deck that the pros buy, then plays exactly that. In ye olden days, it was much more likely to find someone who had simply been playing games in a different circuit than the pros were, and had completely different tactics and builds.

Overall, very good post.

I very much like both of these examples. I'll respond to reach.

  1. On careers. I will attribute to this my inability to find a good plumber. Here is my hypothesis. 70 years ago I imagine that if you were the son of a plumber there was a good chance you ended up a plumber too even if you had an IQ of 130. Today if that's your IQ, all you have to do is do well on the SAT and you'll get whisked away on a scholarship to NYU or something. And after that, well, how you gonna keep em down on the farm? The point being, if you shopped around enough 30 years ago you could probably find a pretty damned intelligent plumber. Sure, even back then most plumbers wouldn't have been the sharpest, but there were at least some. Today with the much more efficient sorting of people, how many common residential plumbers have an IQ of 130, approximately zero?

  2. The prevalence of metagaming and net decking is a great example. I played Vanilla World of Warcraft and loved it very much at the time, and I remember awaiting the launch of WoW Classic with great hype. Unfortunately I found when they relaunched it, it just wasn't the same. Of course it wasn't the game that had changed, but me, and us and how we approached it. I and other players were no longer content to bumble around in dungeons and group wipe repeatedly all night. We weren't 12 but 30 and we expected dungeons to be a polished and professional experience, and generally at the first sign of a wipe we were abandoning the group and finding something better to do with our time. But in our greater desire for time-efficiency in game we had somehow removed all the magic. My experience in WoW classic lasted a couple months before I gave it up, the magic just wasn't there anymore like it was when I was 12 and naive and just fucking around.

The prevalence of metagaming and net decking is a great example.

I don't play much but I've noticed people have very strong opinions on The One True Allowed Way To Play a game and what sorts of game types others should even be allowed to play at all based on their preferred play style. This is exemplified by the assumption that anyone who isn't a hardcore competitive gamer who's willing to invest in a $5000 gaming computer should only ever play ultra lightweight casual games. I think it was even on /r/themotte some years ago where I pretty much got jumped on for saying I'd like a version of Starcraft 2 that nearly completely eliminated "actions per minute" as a relevant metric in single player game (which is to say, a version of SC2 with the artificial stupidity of unit AI removed and some basic action automation features added).

I'm not quite sure if it's about the one true way to play, so much as it is fear of losing something people like. Take your SC2 example: I personally quite agree that SC2 would be a better game without the focus on APM. But to someone who loves SC2 as it exists today, they probably hear that and envision a world where vanilla SC2 is replaced with a version of SC2 where it has all the unit automation. So they push back on it because they don't want to lose the thing they love, and they're afraid that's what would happen.

I understand people who like the multiplayer aspect wouldn't want to play like that and I have no problem with it. Any implementation could essentially be just another variant of easy level difficulty purely for the single player campaign.

That wasn't what the comments said, though (in that and some other similar conversations elsewhere). They were all about me supposedly playing an entirely wrong game genre (as if single player RTSes are somehow inherently about braindead unit AI and twitchy mouse clicks) and I essentially got told that I should just play turn based strategy games (a completely different genre that I have zero interest in). Essentially that only people who people who have play with "proper" meta should be allowed to play games like that and everyone else should stick to simple casual games.

Everybody sees the dangers of cultural appropriation once it's their culture.

In an ideal world "StarCraft 2" and "SC2 but with better AI" would just be two different game variants, and a vanilla-SC2 player wouldn't complain about the AI options any more than a blitz-chess player would complain about someone else preferring to play without any clock.

But everybody's attention is a scarce resource vied over by competitors, and in a world where network effects make it much more enjoyable to have everybody else's attention go to the same target as yours does, it's actually reasonable to worry about whether an alternative is going to stop that from happening. If you actually preferred Betamax over VHS, HD-DVD over BluRay, etc, it sucked to be you.

I thought SC2 was popular enough that nobody should need to worry about splitting the player base, though; surely both sides of any split would be able to find online matchups easily for years to come? At the very least an experienced player who eschews better AI should be able to find a game against a noob who doesn't. Maybe video game fans have just been through so many iterations of the of "Sega Genesis vs Super Nintendo" fight that getting worked up about such things is a reflex now.

So they push back on it because they don't want to lose the thing they love, and they're afraid that's what would happen.

If you want to see these sorts of fights played out on Hard Mode, look at the worries some people have over driverless cars or vegan meat substitutes. The bailey is that driverless cars are unsafe or that vegan pseudomeats are unhealthy, and that no amount of technological improvement will ever make them good enough, but I think the (occasionally explicitly stated!) motte in each case is the risk that, once the new alternative actually is better for most people, there'll be pressure to make the traditional alternative outright illegal. Nobody's ever going to ban anyone's preferred versions of Star Trek or StarCraft, but animal rights groups or public safety groups might actually get some traction against real meat or human-error-prone cars once the main argument for them is pared down to "Freedom!"

The higher stakes version of vegan meats and driverless cars is going to be embryo selection

As a former national merit scholar with a STEM masters who's currently stuck doing manual labor in a medium-sized metro, here's hoping I can make some of that frictionlessness work better for me. I was just thinking to myself last night (yes, on Sunday night), while hammering together some outdoor timber steps that I'd seriously underbid, what a great deal the client was getting given that he couldn't have found anybody else both smart enough to do the job this well and dumb enough to do it this cheap.

Without going full Girard, I think this efficiency also leads us to target our desires more to what the market has made measurable, and limits discoverability of greater personal upsides in the course of removing risks of aggregate downside. The scope narrows for being pleasantly surprised in ways you may not even have known you could be surprised. Tinderella may actually have been much happier with a particular Mr. 5'8" for illegible Tinderella-specific factors, and now she'll never know because she's set the same 6'1" filter as everyone else without even really knowing how much it matters to her. Even if average outcomes are better, maybe some of the best outcomes have been closed off because they only aligned with desires that were particular to us, perhaps unknown to us, certainly not known to the market at large, and which the market is actually leading us to downplay in ourselves.

These are half-formed thoughts and I could write a whole essay on this but I have to go hang a gate on some frozen posts.

Come down to DFW. It sucks here but there’s a whole lot of STEM work. We’re basically trying to underbid California.

This new Irorian song is a total banger. Very inspirational. "You don't have problems, you have skill issues", indeed.

Link to the glowfic, but you need an account to read it.

Adele-ish or whatever you call that style of singing gives me the creeps even in non-ai form.

The AI songs are fun for like five minutes and then they cause the same glaze over effect I get with text AIs.

What

total banger? Bang average, more like.

Matt Baldwin - COLLECTED FRICTIONS

Why are advertisements for AI so bad?

There's one running during football games where a coach is, I think, supposed to be picking players for the draft. And he starts asking the AI to give him the linebackers with various traits, then asks for the ones with "strong leadership abilities." And that is OBVIOUSLY A TERRIBLE QUESTION to ask AI! All an LLM could maybe do is search news articles to see if any have been called out for it, but in all honesty I'd expect it to tell me "yeah no can do boss." Like there's probably a lot of useful things an LLM can do for NFL draft prep, but asking it to assess intangibles is not one of them!

And there have been others just the same. Apple ran a series of ads where employees used AI to just not do their jobs. Like a producer using it to summarize a script that she then agrees to buy (the benefit being that she didn't get caught not reading it). Or using it to pretend to participate in a meeting you aren't prepared for, or reply to emails. And the impression I get out of it is that as an employer I would not want my employees using AI to make it harder to see if they're doing their jobs.

It just seems like they're giving terrible examples of awful and irresponsible ways to use LLMs which will almost certainly lead to disappointment and disillusionment.

Why are advertisements for so bad?

Because people who make them know nothing about X, and their measure of success is pleasing and impressing their bosses who know ever less about X.

Even at best scenario, it is very difficult to judge what, if any effect does marketing/advertising has. Are our burgers selling because or despite our brilliant campaign?

And, with political/regime propaganda, these problems compound. This is why people wonder "This is so lame and cringe! Why would anyone commission such crap?" The answer is: To you, disilusioned zoomer/millenial/Xer it looks cringe, to boomer boss on the other side of the world who ordered it, it looks cool, based and revolutionary.

I've only seen the Sora Instagram ads, which I kind of like. Especially the one with the huge cat running through a house, destroying it, and then they replace the cat with other funny creatures.

I've also heard good things about Claude Code, but mostly from Substack and Youtube (from content creators, not pre-roll ads), and it does really seem to be the kind of thing were it's more effective to hype it that way than on an NFL ad.

My experience has been that AI is really good for personal life stuff, but I almost never use it at work. I'm sure that eventually firms will learn how to use it effectively*, but right now it's a helpful consumer product and less of a workplace tool.

*And I understand that it's basically there for coding already

And I understand that it's basically there for coding already

So far that hasn't been my experience. It gets uncannily close,and if you don't pay attention it's fine, but for any reasonably sized project the code tends to be rife with bugs. It's not just one kind of bug either - it varies from braindead stuff like not closing resources to subtle misunderstanding of APIs and business requirements.

The consistent thing I see from its biggest cheerleaders in my company is a kind of Gell-Mann amnesia, where they use it to do something they themselves don't know how to do, and are then blown away by the "quality" of the output. I end up getting assigned to fix it a few weeks later after the hype has died down.

And I understand that it's basically there for coding already

That is very much a subject of controversy in the industry. Some people say that is true, others (myself included based on my experience) say that it ultimately slows you down rather than speeds you up.

The only two that I can remember seeing were pretty reasonable. First for the new Google Pixel, where a woman points her phone at a florist's display and asks Gemini to pick her some affordable flowers that will match and be long lasting. The second one was for the new Samsung phone where a couple ask the AI to guide them around a museum they are visiting on their holiday.

And then there was the new iPhone advert where a sprinter runs through a brick wall to demonstrate how amazing vapour cooling is, which has nothing to do with AI but if I had to choose a phone based on nothing but those three adverts it wouldn't be the iPhone.

I recall one that featured an unprepared book club hostess "cunningly" asking an LLM just before the guests arrived to "suggest themes for discussion for the book Moby Dick".

What level of pretentious sub-midwit is that marketing towards?

George Costanza?

Actually perfect example. Exactly the kind of guy who would find himself hosting a classic book club, while being so generally ignorant that he couldn't fake up "Moby Dick is an allegory for obsession and revenge".

I was specifically referring to the book club episode where he tried to get out of reading Breakfast at Tiffany's by watching the movie.

lol what? It's faster to read it than watch the movie. Though I'm guessing the gag is they diverge quite a bit.

George, Paul is gay

It's like the marketing is meant to tell you: hit defect, everyone around you is about to become fake and gay, you might as well defect early and reap some measly social prestige benefits quickly before this kind of thing becomes so well known that all meaning is destroyed forever.

Holy cow THIS.

Cluely's very clueless ad was the Reductio ad absurdum of this particular message.

"Use AI to cut corners on tasks you are ostensibly supposed to enjoy in order to gain, I guess social credit among people who will somehow not mind that you used AI?

No, can you show me the AI directly enriching my life? Making me wealthier? Cutting out tasks that I don't enjoy and nobody else relies on me to perform?

Perhaps the actual goal of the ad is what you suggest. "All your friends are going to cheat with these tools, don't be the sucker who is left out!"

Look, I don't even mind the concept of using LLMs as the enhanced Google replacement. I just hate that 'hype' is built around use cases that are not actually improving my general day-to-day experience, and if EVERYONE ELSE stats using it that way, might degrade my experience!

MarginalRevolution quotes from a Politico article with the only comment “sentences to ponder”:

“France will delay this year’s Group of 7 summit to avoid a conflict with the mixed martial arts event planned at the White House on Donald Trump’s birthday.”

So unexpected I had to laugh out loud.

The ufc white house event is a good barometer of whether the ufc is a legit league or if it's gone full WWE: if all the Americans win, it's cooked.

What is your favorite superhero/capeshit movie?

None.

All of them I ever saw I regret seeing. The entire genre is trash unfit for human consumption.

At which point I probably have too high an opinion of human standards.

Into/Across Spiderverse. I reserve the right to throw this out if the third movie is atrocious, but unfortunately there's a real risk of that happening.

Similarly, X-Men First Class => X2 => Days of Future Past. The payoff for this one is immense and despite the changes they made to the story, it holds up thematically.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Pt1+2. Part 1 is shaky but again the payoff of Part 2 is worth it.

Sin City.

Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker.

Snowpiercer. One of my favorite movies of all time.

Into/Across Spiderverse. I reserve the right to throw this out if the third movie is atrocious, but unfortunately there's a real risk of that happening.

"Into the Spiderverse" would stand up okay on it's own, I think, even if the trilogy doesn't stick the landing, but I agree that it's only going to belong in a "favorites" list if all the checks they wrote in the first half of the sequel (I can't even call it the first sequel; not enough closure) don't bounce.

X-Men First Class => X2 => Days of Future Past. The payoff for this one is immense

That's an interesting watch order. Why leave out the first X-Men movie? I understand deciding that the benefit of "Days of Future Past is a little better if you watch X-Men 3 first" isn't worth the cost of "but you have to watch X-Men 3 first", but watching X-Men before X2 is win-win.

X1 just... isn't great. It's throughly average, a relic of its time and despite a handful of great moments doesn't really stand up on its own. There's not much that happens in it consequential to the throughline of that one arc aside from a great depiction of someone grappling with the reality of being a mutant for the first time and a bunch of Wolverine cliches.

The Shadow.

I'll nominate a few, because it's hard to choose one.

The Incredibles is a superhero movie and I think works particularly well because it's animated and has so many comedy elements. Unlike most modern superhero films, it doesn't take itself that seriously, and is a better film for it. Superheroes are, at their core, rather silly and childish, and embracing that works. It's the difference between The Incredibles and every Fantastic Four movie - the former isn't pretending to not be silly. Anyway, it is amazing. I am fond of Megamind for similar reasons, though it's a less polished and ultimately less successful film than The Incredibles. Still, when I watch a superhero film, it's because I want to have fun, and these films provide.

On the very other end of the spectrum, The Dark Knight is still amazing. Batman Begins is actually quite solid too. However, I don't think I'm going to nominate them as my favourite because they don't fit the genre. The Dark Knight is a dark, gritty crime drama that just happens to have Batman in it. It's not realistic - on the contrary, it's more of a psychodrama about nihilism and chaos - but it's not fundamentally about superheroes either.

I will also mention Iron Man (2008), which is probably the best film to star the character. It's from back when the MCU wasn't a thing, Robert Downey Jr. wasn't famous, and the character of Iron Man was still an obscure B- or C-lister that no one outside of comics fans recognised. If you knew Iron Man at all, it was probably in the context of him being a total asshole in Civil War (the comic). The film singlehandedly brought him into the public eye and made people love him again. Anyway, what I think the original Iron Man has going for it is that it's just un-self-conscious? It has none of the burdens of being a Marvel film. It's just a film. But it's a film that has such enthusiasm for its subject matter, and such infectious joy? The whole film is a love letter to engineering and creativity. Tony's first flight is a sequence of pure joy. It's also from back when the Iron Man armour was genuinely cool, and part of that for me is that the armour in the first film clanks and whirrs and sounds like a machine. It's not this nanomachine nonsense that may as well be magic, as it is in the latest films. It is metal and gears. Lastly, I want to say that unlike a lot of later MCU films, it has a bunch of really good shots in it? The Jericho test at the start or the tank scene have these really well-composed, memorable shots. But do you remember any similar shots from the sequels? Lastly, Black Sabbath. It's just great.

The Incredibles is a superhero movie and I think works particularly well because it's animated and has so many comedy elements. Unlike most modern superhero films, it doesn't take itself that seriously, and is a better film for it. Superheroes are, at their core, rather silly and childish, and embracing that works

Can't argue with that. Many superhero movies I've seen I didn't really care for. But with few allusions The Incredibles manage to conjure up a mythical retro mindspace where all that golden-to-silver age superheroes existed and enmeshes it with some great James Bond villain tropes. Also, a great movie.

I will nominate The Mask of Zorro as a runner-up for similar but not same reasons. (Cape, mask, heroics --- of course its capeshit, but it comes with swords, horses and 19th century California/Mexico landscapes, which makes it better). Not a perfect movie, but I had genuine fun watching it. Many darker movies are objectively notable (the Dark Knight trilogy, Watchmen, Joker) but not really fun.

I notice this with the MCU as well - the best films are the ones that embrace the transparently juvenile nature of the whole endeavour. As a rule, the more childish the film, the better it is.

Iron Man (2008) is basically a fourteen year old boy's fantasy. Tony Stark is rich, awesome, lives in a palace with a bunch of luxury cars, he has a private jet that transforms into a strip club with his own private pole-dancers, and so on. Stark's superpower is engineering, one of the most 'boy' careers around. He goes to all the fanciest parties and has sex with hot women. He makes cool toys and flies around and doesn't do what anyone else tells him. The film is a profoundly adolescent one, and even though the emotional arc of the character is growing up and becoming less of an utter man-child, he still does all the cool man-child stuff.

Likewise if you look at the other most successful MCU films. Guardians of the Galaxy is again a teenage boy's fantasy about being a cool guy. The Avengers is a Joss Whedon film and Whedon's greatest strength has been his inner teenager. The Avengers is about a clubhouse of four awesome dudes who hang out and quip wittily and do really cool stuff together. The most popular Thor film was Ragnarok, the one that dropped all the attempts to be serious or really evoke a heroic epic, and instead just went for adolescent comedy combined with awesome violence. Early on the MCU tried to give each character's cinematic sub-series a unique tone - Iron Man was all about technology and creativity, Captain America had these wistful, serious films about war and intrigue, and Thor was meant to be high fantasy with a Shakespearean edge from the comics, hence Kenneth Branagh. But that didn't take off that well with the superhero film audience, and while, say, this has no place in the serious quasi-Shakespearean fantasy epic, it is undoubtedly something that makes teenage boys cheer. The MCU always does better when it leans into the childishness.

I'd argue that the DC films' biggest problem was trying to take themselves too seriously. Charitably they were trying to differentiate themselves from Marvel, and they were probably chasing the successes of The Dark Knight and Watchmen, but... well, Watchmen was a deconstruction, and as I said, The Dark Knight isn't even really a superhero movie. When DC tried to do a serious, dark Superman it didn't work out. I've not seen Wonder Woman, but Aquaman was the best of the DC films I saw, and I do not think it was a coincidence that Aquaman was the most openly silly.

In fact, I'll go beyond just saying that superhero films do better when they embrace their own childishness. They do better when they realise that superheroes are kind of inherently comedic.

None of these films are straight comedies - not even Guardians of the Galaxy or Thor: Ragnarok. But they all have a lot of comedy elements. It works because, well, superhero comics are funny. They work much better if you embrace that.

That doesn't mean I want Superman or Captain America to gurn and mug at the camera. Superman and Cap are very sincere characters, whose simple goodness and wholesome patriotism are part of their appeal. But that doesn't mean you can't acknowledge the silliness or have comic scenes. The best Superman film is probably still Superman (1978), and it gets plenty of comedy mileage from the contrast between Superman and Clark.

Anyway, The Incredibles was a comedy, and I think that just being a straight comedy works better for superheroes than trying to cut the comedy entirely. Superheroes become miserable when they take themselves too seriously.

no one outside of comics fans recognised

Didn't he get a run in one of those 90's animated shows?

He did indeed. I and many of my generation knew who Iron Man was even if we weren't comic fans because of that.

Its plain that the MCU as such would not exist if not for Iron Man being as freaking cool as it was, and also allowing the heroes to coalesce around a central figure that wasn't Spiderman. And using him as the catalyst for bringing Spidey into the MCU proper was a natural choice and done well.

And thus, killing him in Endgame made such beautiful thematic sense, it really made it impossible to continue the MCU as a coherent world after that point. Why keep watching if there's no chance a smarmy RDJ might show up and one-liner his way into and out of trouble and reveal new suit designs in the process, with the classic rock blaring all the time. A top 5 fave favorite moment is his entrance in Avengers to confront Loki. The fact that Tony could burst onto the scene at any moment was a huge appeal.

And as you say, he would eventually wear out his welcome since there was nowhere else for the "iron man" concept to go after his magical nanobots mode.

Which was always going to be a problem. I think one of the best parts of Age of Ultron was the introduction of the Hulkbuster armor, showing that he puts a ton of thought into what designs he might need... but also showing this one as not quite up to the task it was built for and thus Stark isn't quite the walking 'counter everything' character that, say, Batman has a reputation as.

I dunno. Cap's my favorite of the main group, but Stark is what keeps me coming back.

I liked the most-recent The Batman. It’s not perfect, and given it’s the third or fourth iteration on film, its reputation undoubtedly suffers from fatigue. But it was an enjoyable, somewhat-smaller noir/detective story without an overpowered protagonist and any salvation by some fantastic tech, or a McGuffin or the like.

I generally liked it, but it was too long. Around the end of hour 3 the story has wrapped up. Then it keeps going for another half hour or so.

Also way too dark. I could barely see what was going on in parts.

Punisher War Zone. It is a masterpiece. Close second is The crow. The old one.

Spiderman 2 is great, came right before the big deluge of Mavel movies, and none of them really topped it.

Dredd. It doesn’t bother with origin story and does world-building fairly naturally through narrative. A tight 90 minutes with solid pacing and stays true to the feel of the source material.

YOU BETRAYED THE LAW

Ever since Chronicles of Riddick I have wanted Karl Urban to really break out a big success. I really wish Dredd had done that for him.

What business does a merc, a hellion and a slab addict have in the Riddermark? Speak quickly!

True, further proof of his acting and the costuming I never remember him playing Éomer. That just was Éomer.

Spider-Man (2002). It's a nostalgic movie for me because I saw it when I was a child, which is the appropriate age to watch superhero films.

Failing that, the borderline example of Unbreakable, which is still the best cinematic deconstruction of superheroes.

That spider man movie is iconic for me just for the upside down kiss scene, which I've tried to imitate with every gf I've ever had at every opportunity and it's a good trick that goes well every time. What other movie has that?

How did you arrange to be hanging upside-down at some point with each woman you've dated?

Picture this. It's 2011, you're nineteen or twenty. Your fraternity has booked a party bus to take everybody to formal. Everybody is pregamed, dancing in the aisle of the bus. You grab the overhead handrail, and realize you can do a pull up on it, then realize you can flip over and loop your legs over the rail and hang upside down. So of course you grab your girlfriend and you kiss her upside down and your fraternity brothers and their dates yell WHOOOOOO SPIDERMAN

So anytime you're drunk with your friends and you see a handrail or a pull up bar or an appropriately sized tree branch you can swing your legs over, you do the same thing. And everyone saw that movie ten years ago and cheers. It's the college equivalent of the middle school practice of jumping to touch the top of doorways.

The most Chadly thing I've read so far in 2026.

Superman: The Movie. Lot of nostalgia there-- the night I went to see it, the era, everything.

Watchmen.

It kicked off a copycat trend of deconstructions of the genre, but unlike most of them, it was an actually good movie. Just don't watch the Director's Cut, the comic-book scenes add little or nothing to the story.

Just don't watch the Director's Cut, the comic-book scenes add little or nothing to the story.

I feel like there must be two versions of the director's cut or something, because I have the director's cut and there are no comic book scenes. It's just extra live action scenes (nothing super necessary but they are still enjoyable enough).

Great pick though, I love Watchmen. One of the very few movies I've seen which were good enough that I went to see them in the theater a second time.

There’s a directors cut then an extra special directors cut with the animated Tales of the Black Freighter sections added (this is the only version I watch, without the pirate stuff you’re losing the backstory and motivation of one of the most important characters).

Hard choice. The Dark Knight, Kick-Ass, and Mask of the Phantasm are all excellent in their own ways.

The Dark Knight. It’s not particularly close.

The problem with dark knight is that if you remove every scene heath ledger is not in it becomes even better movie.

Watching that film completely fresh, opening night, having ZERO clue as to how Ledger's performance would land, only knowing that he had died for it (in a certain sense) and then getting THAT FUCKING PERFORMANCE out of him was a transcendent experience.

Whenever Joker isn't on the screen, all the other characters should be asking, "where is the Joker?"

No. There are lots of good scenes where The Joker is mentioned or alluded to.

I was surprised there were so many other answers, I agree it's not close in my view either. The diversity of views here is a constant amazement to me.

I think you can probably guess.

Tell me... do you feel in charge?

I really liked Winter Solider and wished Marvel could have found more of that energy rather than just lean into being jokey Star Wars.

Kickass.

Does Mystery Men count?

I just got back from a December trip to northern China. It's a country that's modernised in a very non-Western way, such that it appears like a weird cyberpunky juxtaposition of hypermodernity coexisting with third-world elements - the streets are very clean, robots in hotels deliver stuff to your door, face recognition for check-in and boarding is a thing in some airports, the whole country uses pretty much only payment apps, etc, but the AQI can be bad, the public toilets are dirty, taxis and some train stations smell like cigarette smoke, nobody speaks anything but Mandarin (or some other Sinitic language), there are touts who will try to sell you shit, and so on.

Personally, I think it's an amazing destination. I would go back in a heartbeat if I could. I have so many superlatives for it, and I won't forget being almost completely alone on the Great Wall with mist rising over the surrounding mountains like some Chinese ink painting, or stepping into an ancient grotto cave the size of a cathedral with thousands of religious carvings covering every square inch of its walls, or suddenly encountering a colourful festival in the streets of a Qing dynasty walled town. There is an astounding amount of history and culture there, I think it boasts by far the greatest density of genuinely historical stuff in Asia.

I have a travel report lined up and pictures to upload, but I'm suffering from severe jet lag and am too lazy to do that right now.

Is real Chinese food as good as the MSG slop they serve at Chinese restaurants in the US? I love that shit.

The answer to this hugely depends on what "Chinese food" we're talking about here.

China has a ridiculous number of regional cuisines, so many in fact that one attempt to categorise them all identifies 63 cuisines. Throughout the trip I was only able to scratch the surface of only 3 cuisines in that list - Beijing, Shanxi and Central Shaanxi food, and they're quite different from the mostly Cantonese-inspired (and increasingly Sichuan-inspired) Chinese food in the West. It's different enough that all of these cuisines barely feature rice as a staple grain since it doesn't grow well at all in the desolate and harsh climate of the north.

Shanxi food is by far my favourite - the dishes there are very vinegar-heavy, and it's something the province specialises in. The vinegars there are made from sorghum, barley, and peas, and they're ridiculously varied and malty and deep in flavour (I actually got to see some being actively fermented the traditional way in an old Ming/Qing dynasty building). Every restaurant in the region will provide a variety of vinegars to pour onto each dish, as well as a large pot of chilli oil. The food in this province is flavourful and hearty, and many of these dishes aren't well represented outside of China, I highly recommend it. Though there are dishes that some laowai should maybe avoid unless particularly adventurous - I saw dishes featuring rabbit head being served in places like Datong, which I imagine would turn off a large number of Westerners.

On the other end of the spectrum, Beijing food is not all that fantastic. I find that their dishes tend to lack depth and flavour, and while I wasn't hugely excited for the cuisine there in the first place I was still surprised at how little I cared for it. It's not bad at all, but their flavour preferences don't excite me. Peking duck is still good though, and another thing that I really enjoyed there was their jianbing, a sort of savoury stuffed crepe popular in that part of China.

Something that really unexpectedly blew me away when I was in China was their yoghurts. Nai pizi and suannai are less sour than Western yoghurts and way more texturally satisfying, and in Shanxi province they come in weird flavours such as sea buckthorn and vinegar (I am not joking when I say it works; some vinegars in Shanxi are downright caramelly in flavour and actually complement the taste of yoghurt really well). They run circles around Western yoghurts all day, and being back in Australia now I can no longer find them anywhere, something which I am extremely disappointed by. In addition, China also has the most comforting drinks - their coffee is good, their tea is super fragrant, and their soy milk is downright delectable. I don't even like soy milk usually, but the Chinese really know how to do it right.

All this is to say that overall I really liked Chinese food (it was certainly way better than Vietnamese, come at me), and I don't just think it's as good as western MSG slop, I think it's often better. But food in China is far from a singular cuisine, the dishes in different parts of the country are nothing alike, and it's not really possible to say whether real Chinese food is "good" or "bad" without specifying which Chinese food we're talking about.

I just came back from HCM myself and while the minimum floor was quite high, only one thing I could genuinely call exceptional. The coffee.

Can't beat a banh mi for like 35,000-40,000 VND (a little over $1 USD!!!) though.

It's funny, you just listed the main Vietnamese dishes/drinks I would really consider a must-try. Vietnamese coffee is truly incredible albeit a bit sweet (though understandably so given the use of Robusta), and southern-style banh mi is the only food I tried that I would call great. I only had a short layover in HCMC when I went, and I'm very glad I ventured into the city just for that one banh mi stall.

I suspect I would have liked Vietnamese food more had I spent more time in southern Vietnam; the more south I went, the more flavourful the food became. I'm typically more accustomed to heavily-spiced food, and much of northern Vietnam seems to enjoy food that's perhaps even blander than Cantonese cuisine.

I was on a trip through Vietnam and Cambodia and the thing I found pretty consistently for both was the relatively poor quality of the meat as well as fairly mid butchery. When import meat was sold in dishes, there was usually a big markup. Seafood was the way to go in Vietnam, and I really enjoyed both bun rieu and banh xeo.

On the other hand their chicken tastes strongly of chicken compared to the bland, growth-hormone pumped American product even if the meat is tougher and the birds are less fat.

Oh, and good lord, the mangoes. So good it almost felt like a sin to eat a giant hunk of fragrant and sweet chilled mango sold off the streets.

Agreed on the high quality of the fruit (and poor quality of the meat). Didn't try any mangoes in Vietnam, but the pineapples and coconuts I had there were so very fresh. Fresher than anywhere else I've been. I had at least one coconut every day with my meal and it didn't matter where I went - regardless of if it was a sit-down restaurant or some tattered stall on the side of the street they were delicious.

I very consistently had a good time with Vietnamese desserts, which was unexpected. I was a big fan of the che when I was there, and there's a gigantic variety of these sweet soups; there's even one featuring a savoury pork dumpling (che bot loc heo quay) that actually kind of works in spite of the flavour contrast.

Never been to Cambodia, though Siem Reap is a destination I've had on the backburner for a while now.

HCM also has... weirdly good pizza. I actually managed to find a semi-legit Detroit slice there which I've basically never seen in Asia.

Yeah I was in Siem Reap. Gorgeous nature and views. I'm wavering on whether or not I should do a high-effort writeup because there are a lot of things about this trip that I found difficult to process.

Yes.

The old adage that traditional Chinese food is nothing like Western Chinese food is overblown. You can go into any restaurant in China and order Kung pao chicken, egg fried rice, and stir fried vegetables just like the West.

The difference comes because Western Chinese is mostly just Cantonese restaurants. China is an extremely large country with a long food history and there is a massive amount of regional variation. Discussions about "Chinese food" are the equivalent of talking about European food and then being surprised that not every restaurant in Germany serves pizza and pasta.

face recognition for check-in and boarding is a thing in some airports, the whole country uses pretty much only payment apps, etc, but the AQI can be bad, the public toilets are dirty, taxis and some train stations smell like cigarette smoke, nobody speaks anything but Mandarin (or some other Sinitic language), there are touts who will try to sell you shit

So basically the standard Hollywood future dystopia?

Not really, for a few other reasons - for example there's a pretty distinct lack of homelessness and drug addiction in Chinese cities, and the country is extremely safe, which actually makes it feel rather non-dystopic compared to many Western cities I've been to (which are often very visibly riddled with these problems). The country also doesn't feel very totalitarian compared to many other one-party states of its ilk, police presence isn't heavy and you can generally travel quite freely. I would not call China third-world as a whole, I'm unsure where I would slot it within that definition because it's not really easy to categorise along that axis.

There are elements that you can pattern-match to a Hollywood dystopia (like having to scan your bags when you enter the subway), but as a whole China doesn't feel "low-life" or dystopic as much as it feels contradictory. People love trotting out extremely polarised and sensationalised views of China - people will either say it's "living in the future" or that it is a CCP hellhole that's about to collapse, but I don't think what I saw actually matches either view particularly well. I think people can come to these conclusions because they focus in on aspects that already confirm a preexisting view - there are things that it's extremely good at, and there are areas where it lags. In general it seems the Chinese government and people have a very different view of what their country should look like, as opposed to the West.

Looking forward to reading the report!

I’ve been thinking lately about the liminal horror genre. In my internet wanderings I’ve been revisiting a bit of the Backrooms content and Youtubers who dipped into the genre. Just wanted to share some of my random musings.

Liminal spaces are defined as in between, temporary, transitory. Usually what happens is a person somehow gets into a space they’re not supposed to and becomes trapped. Liminal horror often elicits dread from the location itself. Although there may be unsettling creatures or monsters, the location is the main focus. These stories tend to be pretty skimpy on plot but full of atmosphere.

Other people are rarely encountered in the space. If there are multiple people in the story, they have entered the space together. Often the videos are filmed in a first person POV. Besides being immersive, this device means you can’t even see the main character on screen. All the visual imagery tends to be void, empty, lifeless.

One of the aspects of this genre that really appeals to me is the idea of being lost in the middle of civilization. These spaces very often are secret floors of ordinary buildings. Help may be only a few hundred feet away. Somewhere out there are phones, food, people, all the trappings of daily life. But to the person trapped in the in-between space, they might as well be on another planet.

Quick story - I got mildly lost in the suburbs once. The idea of suburbs as liminal spaces is probably not a new one, but it was interesting to encounter this in real life. Think of those self contained suburban neighborhoods which are just endless mazes of roads curving back on themselves. When they’re on a large enough scale, you can wander for miles among identical, neatly trimmed homes without getting to a gas station, a store, a bus stop, or even a park.

So I wandered into one without a phone or a map one time. Walked for a while and realized I had no idea how to get back out to the main road. There was no through road once you got into the neighborhood. There were no distinguishing landmarks, no signposts on the streets.

There was a store that I was trying to get to and for some reason I thought I had found a shortcut. You could see the back of the store maybe a thousand feet away. But you couldn’t get to it because of the culvert and retention pond and the fence in the way. There was no shortcut. The only way to get to this store that was a thousand feet away was to backtrack through a few miles of the suburban labyrinth and work your way around to the main road.

What separates this experience from the strict liminal horror was the presence of people. I did pass a couple of joggers, dog walkers, etc. For them, the environment was comfortable and familiar. The safety of their home was nearby, as was food, water, transportation. For me, I was getting very thirsty and hungry, and safety seemed incredibly remote and unreachable. And I was held back from asking for help by the absurdity of my situation. How embarrassing is it to knock on someone’s door and admit you’re a stranger in the neighborhood and you’re hopelessly lost? How did I even explain how I ended up there to begin with? It’s clearly not the kind of neighborhood you just wander into if you don’t live there. The whole thing had me at quite a loss. Even surrounded by homes where I knew there were people inside, I felt completely alone and without resources.

When you go on an expedition to a cave or a forest, you expect trouble. You pack supplies. You plan your route. The people who get trapped in liminal spaces often get there entirely by accident, or they just planned to take a quick look and get on with their day. Despite civilization being so close, they find themselves without food, tools, or any way to communicate. They are woefully unprepared for this scenario. Who expects to pack survival gear when they are just exploring around town?

Another aspect of liminal horror is the disconnection of spaces not designed for people. Liminal horror is full of spaces that seem to have no purpose, or were designed with some alien or abstract purpose that can’t be fathomed. They are often behind walls, under floors, in maintenance passages. Often they aren’t built with the intention that people would ever be in them except maybe to make repairs. A curious or casual visitor is not welcome, most likely unauthorized to be there, and will be viewed as an intruder.

The space is hostile to trespassers, and indeed to all life. There is nothing growing, no plant or animal life. All is dust and silence. Any thing that could make this space its habitat is surely something outside human knowledge or comprehension.

There are no human comforts like water or food or bathrooms. When there are elements of human activity, they are incongruous in the space and distributed in a haphazard manner, as if someone just needed to store a random assortment of furniture. You can tell it was not placed there with the intent for humans to make use of. If a space has clear signs of being abandoned, then of course that raises the question of why it was abandoned and presents an intriguing hint of where the story could go.

The alien aspect of liminal spaces combines well with megalophobia. While some liminal horror deals with small spaces, a lot of it involves space that is very large. Endless labyrinths extend on and on. Gargantuan walls loom over tiny people. A massive empty hangar or airport terminal extends into the darkness. The size again reinforces the sensation that this space is not designed with humans in mind.

Liminal horror sometimes has an evil entity that is hunting the protagonist, but this element doesn’t seem to be critical. Often the space itself carries its own menace. A massive space destroys small humans just because that is its nature. Humans will be swallowed or crushed without even any awareness or malevolence. It is inevitable and inexorable, and there is no weapon to fight against it.

Backrooms is the classic presentation of liminal horror (check out Kane Pixels) but I would also strongly recommend The Stanley Parable for a game presentation of this topic. Would love to hear your suggestions also!

Would love to hear your suggestions also!

This trailer came up on my Youtube feed the other day. Empty swimming pools with creepy architecture.

strange to see it framed as 'liminal horror' because i have always felt weirdly comforted by such spaces.

could be downstream of mild misanthropy, or perhaps a childhood+adolescence of being allowed to explore freely among such spaces: hallways, tunnels, theatre backrooms, rooftops, etc. the video game 'myst' also comes to mind.

It's all part of the same supernatural tradition, right? The same thin places can lead to a kid eaten by monsters or a kid being gifted magical treasure by fairies in two different legends. The liminal Shitbird Geography of every suburban town provides both the overlooks and reservoirs and abandoned camps and empty barns where teenagers make out or smoke weed, and the same places where every serial killer story is set when the slasher gets at the horny teenagers.

I think of it as 'urban exploration gone wrong'. It starts out as a curious adventure and then you realise you can't backtrack due to a locked door or getting lost. A very mild anxiety sets in (mollified by the mundane banal surroundings) where you try to calmly start thinking through your options. You check your phone battery and its dead. Your loved ones won't be expecting you until tomorrow. Uh oh.

Liminal horror is in many ways the modern manifestation of the "horror of the gaps," that horror exists just at the edge of civilization, just at the edge of what we have normal knowledge of, and as that line has shifted so has the location of horror. In the same way that we talk about the God of the Gaps shrinking to exist in the spaces between human scientific knowledge, supernatural horror has shrunk over the years to fit into the spaces where civilization does not adhere.

In ancient and medieval horror stories, the spirits exist just at the edge of the village. The forest is dark and full of terrors. You might meet the devil at any crossroads at night. Only God sees what goes on in the mountains or the deserts, and who can possibly say what might be on the other side? Hansel and Gretel can run into a witch just on the edge of town, the Black Forest has everything from dwarven kingdoms to the gates of hell depending on the story, the Irish bogs are full of fairy lights and changelings.

Then the Enlightenment happens in England, science happens, exploration happens, the world is connected, the forests that aren't cut down are well mapped, the deserts and mountains have good roads through them. We know there aren't witches in the woods. So then you have Bram Stoker, who projects that horror across the English Channel, to Transylvania, a gap in modernity, a place where horror can still exist without modernity knowing about it. Then a few more decades pass, and modernity is pretty well hit in Transylvania, so Lovecraft has to fit his cosmic horror into smaller gaps: Antarctica, the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, a strange cult on an Island or among the negroes and Portuguese down at the docks. Then you have the "highway horror" of mid-century America: Children of the Corn or Deliverance or Silent Hill, the idea that if you take the wrong turn off the highway traveling between civilized towns you can end up in horror. This is a very real experience any Pennsylvanian has had: driving your nice comfortable car on a nice modern highway between metropoles of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, you can end up at a gas station that time forgot very easily. Hell, driving from NYC to Syracuse, you briefly find yourself in towns where all the signs are in Hebrew and the locals make it very clear that the uncircumcised are unwelcome. Then the world became a little more connected, and a little more documented, and highway horror started to lose its credibility, because those towns have high speed internet and cell phone service and cameras and everything. In the 1970s, Deliverance just barely works, today banjo kid would be watching videos on TikTok just like any other kid.

So horror has had the retreat again, and having nowhere left to go geographically (the forests are parks, transylvania and silent hill both have high speed internet, Antarctica has been mapped and the pacific islands are mostly resorts), horror has to retreat into the interior. The liminal spaces are a new wilderness, created by humans but over time taking on a life of their own. This is just the latest gap that horror has shrunk to inhabit. The backrooms and hallways are a reflection of internet horror, the horror that is hidden in recursive chatrooms and forums and groups. That infrastructure created for one thing can be used for others. The same horror around homeless people living in subway tunnels. Some of it is a sense of living in the ruins and margins of a great civilization that has retreated. As a kid living in the exurban-rural rust belt, realistically there was no wilderness, but there was the abandoned. There was an abandoned construction company building we used to "explore" each year on a certain camping trip in the boy scouts, the "House of Nine Inch Nails" because of graffiti made years before I arrived. Places like this became part of the "shitbird geography" that forms a big part of teenage suburban life, the places you can go in town to smoke or drink or make out with a girlfriend: dead ends where bridges are out, abandoned industrial buildings, access roads built for projects that were never completed, old churches that have been empty for years, school buildings still used only for storage, reservoirs with long access roads and no traffic at night. Of course, cheap chinese surveillance cameras have probably disrupted this activity for today's kids anyway. But there's still some space, somewhere, that remains abandoned, wrong, uncanny, still existing but eternally empty.

This fits into the book I read last week: House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski.

It was a really good horror book for me, probably the best horror literary experience I have ever had, primarily in that a friend gave it to me for Christmas and I had heard of the book but knew nothing about it. It was often mentioned as a book in the "confusing metafiction" space, but if you had asked me in advance what a book called "House of Leaves" was about, I would have said that it was a domestic drama about a Japanese lady and the passage of time, or something like that. So I'll say right now, if you want to read House of Leaves the way I did, STOP READING THIS COMMENT.

HoL is fun because it combines Borges style reality-bending metafiction with simple horror: there's an alternate dimension and a monster in it, a big monster that growls and has big claws and might want to kill you. Or it might not exist at all. There's absolutely no certainly about anything. The book is layered with at least three unreliable narrators: it presents itself as a found text of a found text of a review. The narrative of the book is a summary and review of a documentary, The Navidson Record, about a family that moves into a house in Virginia, only to find the house is bigger inside than outside, and that a mysterious door appears leading to an infinite hallway with more doors and staircases etc. But the summary and review is presented as the incomplete and damaged found papers and work of Zampano, an old blind man living by himself who died under mysterious circumstances, and put together by Johny Truant, our punk rock vulgarwave guide and narrator. Johny in turn inserts his own opinions and stories through footnotes to Zampano's review of Navidson. Then, on top of Truant, you have the "editor" who published Truant's mostly complete manuscript. So you have these layers of Event >>> Navidson's documentary >>> Zampano's review >>> Johny's editing and interpolations >>> the editor. There's additional sub layers, like when Navidson's wife cuts a trailer for the movie and the critics that Zampano either cites or invents, but there are always those layers to deal with.

In some ways, i think this is kind of a cheat code for Danielewski. No matter what mistake or inconsistency or bad writing HoL partakes of, it's impossible to pin it on Danielewski, it's always an error made "by" the unreliable narrator, revealing something about our knowledge or his character. If the parts of the story don’t fit together, that’s an unreliable narrator, or it’s a call out to some kind of symbolic happening, it’s meaningful that the error was made. Then you chase down that error and turn it into a new theory. The book is about the labyrinth but it also is the labyrinth. And you get lost in the book. In theories, in readings. Which of narrators and levels of narration are “real?” The obvious answer is none of them, but also some of them. Each level involves claims that don’t make any sense. Navidson claims there’s a giant labyrinth in his hallway, Zampano claims that there’s this movie and all this academic criticism of it, and Johny claims that despite being marginally employed as a tattoo apprentice despite having no tattoos he gets laid constantly. The latter is actually the least believable claim for me, to be honest. There’s theories that hold that all of them exist, that none of them exist and it’s all a mysterious other person, that one of them is the real writer and the rest are created fictions to cover up or represent parts of the psyche of the real author. And you can’t escape the labyrinth, there is no answer. Danielewski successfully creates a riddle with no answers. I had a lot of fun debating it with friends, and it’s a good atmospheric spooky book, but there is nothing real at the end of it. I highly recommend it, but my answer to the question is ultimately that we choose to enter or exit the labyrinth, as Davidson ultimately is retrieved from the House by his wife’s love, and that the real answer is the friends we make along the way.

Quick story - I got mildly lost in the suburbs once. The idea of suburbs as liminal spaces is probably not a new one, but it was interesting to encounter this in real life.

I experienced this same kind of thing when doing my eponymous marathon run. Most of the roads I planned to use are long and straight and grid-style, easy to navigate as long as you know which direction the sun or the ocean or the bay is in. But there are two patches of neighborhoods at the far ends of the Island that are that same kind of labyrinthine subdivision, with discontinuous road names that start and stop, curve around into cul-de-sacs, disconnect and then restart after an offset. And after 20 miles, buzzing on exhaustion and endorphins and caffeine, I couldn’t find my way out. I had my phone, I had it tracking my progress!, but I don’t want to sit there and stare at it, and somehow I kept making wrong turns and getting spun around. Partly I suppose I’d gotten comfortably with the open grid, where I had basically memorized the five or so turns I would make before leaving home in the morning, and now trying to remember directions was impossible. I didn’t want to walk it staring at my phone, both for pace and pride reasons, but I had to stop and look at the map multiple times, and still got turned around, because all the buildings look the same and all the roads have similar names of flowers or trees, and everything is so similar it’s hard to figure out. It starts to stress me out, out of a mix of shame and fear that I’m crashing out. And it’s creepy because it’s empty, it’s the off-season, and there are maybe two dozen people in a neighborhood with a hundred houses. I feel like an intruder, the silence is deafening. I found my way out eventually, but the gps map of my trip looked permanently stupid, with long lines up and down the boulevards and then a tangle of knots up at the north end of the island.

I think these kinds of liminal spaces are where we run into our limitations, no longer in reaching a space or conquering it, but in mapping or understanding it.

This is a very real experience any Pennsylvanian has had: driving your nice comfortable car on a nice modern highway between metropoles of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, you can end up at a gas station that time forgot very easily. Hell, driving from NYC to Syracuse, you briefly find yourself in towns where all the signs are in Hebrew and the locals make it very clear that the uncircumcised are unwelcome.

Back in 2011-2014 I would find myself driving the backroads of rural Southern Georgia several times a year. Places where you could drive 1-2 hours in any given direction and NOT hit anything truly resembling 'civilization.' And more importantly, places where there was no cell service and so you might find yourself having to navigate on dead reckoning if your smartphone (which weren't all that smart back in the day) wasn't helping.

One of these times, I was out there with no cell service and about two gallons of gas in the tank, with sunset looming in about an hour. This was a safe margin in most contexts, but here, no guarantees that I would find a gas station, or that it would be open for business if I did. I got kinda existential about it. It did evoke a sort of 'frontier survival' feeling in me. Where I had to make hard decisions under uncertainty, and ration my resources, invoke my wits, and hope that I didn't make a wrong turn that would seal my doom hours later. Nevermind that I could probably just knock on the nearest farmhouse door and most likely be fine.

Alas, I found a gas station, got back in a cell service area, and while I HAD gotten quite turned around, I would not have to shelter in my car for the night.

The backwoods of Georgia are still plenty spooky to drive on at night these days, but now they're more LEGIBLE with better cell coverage and Starlink guaranteeing you're never without internet.

Last time I felt that frontier feeling was three years back, driving home after Hurricane Ian ravaged my area. I cooked meat on a wood fire, fell asleep to the hum of a generator, and had to go door-to-door to check on my neighbors. For all of three days. They got the power back on FAST.

Civilization has gotten to the point where even the most powerful natural disasters are just a waiting game to 'survive.'

Maybe this is why many popular horror movies over the past 10 or so years have used psychological allegories or "the monster is a metaphysical concept" to create fear. The innermost areas of our own brains might be the last place that terrible secrets can hide.

I guess Cosmic Horror can still manage to wring out some new ideas to make us afraid of what's OUT THERE (I take it that Pluribus is doing something like this?) but it can be hard to do without getting too cheesy

It's striking to me how one can get a sense of relative isolation even when objectively close to other people. Perhaps it's precisely because we're so used to being hemmed in by other people nowadays that even a little bit of separation makes an impression. I used to go running at a park by my house. Objectively it was probably only half a mile wide at its widest point and maybe 3 miles end to end. It was bracketed by the interstate on one side and a suburbs on the other 3 sides. During the day there were usually other people there and you could always hear the noise of the highway whatever the time. And yet, the way the network of trails I ran on twisted in and out of the trees and back on each other, it felt much more expansive than it was, and I often felt quite remote from other people - particularly around dusk. It made such an impression on me that I wrote a little bit of weird fiction inspired by it.

This finally made the “liminal spaces” thing click for me. I’ve never understood how anyone could find an empty or abandoned space scary (aside from concerns about deranged homeless people or animals, which people have always assured me aren’t what freak them out). Up until now, I’ve always chocked it up to people watching too many zombie movies. But then, I grew up in the country, and I spent a good deal of my childhood traipsing solo through abandoned barns and woods. Today, my nearest neighbor is about 300 yards away, and I sometimes find even that too close. I’m very much not used to being hemmed in by people. But if all you’ve ever known is being surrounded by other people, peaceful, quiet places with no one around must be completely unnerving.

I own a rental house that's on a back road between two gorges tucked in the far corner of our town. So five minutes away in the same zip code you're in solid suburbia, but at this house you're dead alone for a few hundred acres in every direction except for the coyotes.

And it's interesting because when I look for tenants, a large number of people will tell me that they can't live there because it isn't safe, no one is around. Where my reflex is that it's very safe because no one is around. I would have figured that it would be gendered, because I would think it very effeminate to worry about, but a lot of men say so too, expressed as concern about property or women.

It's just fascinating because such fears must be primal, as they are clearly irrational. There's much more to worry about in a city than in the middle of nowhere.

Great post. I do think, though, that if you narrow things down to the modern, “backrooms” type of liminal space, it fits into the broad category of depictions of common dreams. It’s less about horror, or the edge of the forest, and much more about the strange, incompletely recreated, bizarrely navigated versions of reality we dream of. I distinctly remember having dozens, maybe hundreds of individual dreams almost identical to backrooms type spaces (endless corridors and rooms made up of components of buildings I had navigated in real life) before I became familiar with the concept. If I had to speculate I would say that our own generative intelligence isn’t generally able to create fully realistic, fully plausible, fully coherently navigable (in the ‘interior dimensions match exterior dimensions, rooms plausibly fit the space and connect appropriately etc) interactive environments in our head - at least for those who haven’t specifically trained memory palace type techniques, and even those involve only a very limited form of three dimensional reconstruction in some form - so we have these weird spaces we navigate in our dreams, not in a sinister way but in a processing capacity way. The primitive AI we have works in much the same way, it can generate already compelling video and imagery but struggles (albeit ever less so) with multiple angles of the same event or space, with that exact coherence I mention above.

The liminal space idea is just one in a long line of attempts by artists to depict the contents of our dreams.

Huh, interesting. I don't really think of it like that. When I think of the backrooms kind of genre, I think of being a small child and seeing the boiler room at my elementary school. Being six years old, the boiler looked enormous, loud, dangerous and fascinating and hidden. When I think of endless dream spaces, I think of occupied spaces, or of forests.

I think that’s also probably why you saw space horror start to pop up in the late 70s. It kind of petered out in the 90s because space feels too far away anymore to be creepy.

I appreciate the connection you've made and I like the framing of the "gap" concept very much. What is it that draws us to invent mysterious horrors in places outside of our sphere of normal activity? As you said, our sphere of what is "known" has grown and grown but we keep identifying nooks and crannies under the surface of our comfortable bubble. Is it a desire for new things to explore? Do we somehow feel comforted or intrigued that there are still places not yet delved into?

When I was younger I was very much into cryptozoology. My favorite section of the library was the one with all the books about Bigfoot, Loch Ness, UFO encounters, etc. And this was in early internet days too, so the library and TV documentaries were the main source to feed my fascination. These days I'm over it. It's pretty clear that the preponderance of evidence is not on the paranormal investigator's side. But it makes me sad, in a way, because I liked the feeling that there were things Out There that science couldn't explain, that would defy logical certainty, that could still impart a sense of wonder. Even if they are terrifying and implacable, it is a profound loss to come around to, "oh, I guess this is it then. This is all there is."

I have read House of Leaves and wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I could have done without the acres of footnotes as I don't think they added anything. But the core concept is brilliant. I just remember being struck by the idea that Zampano is blind and therefore could never have described watching a video recording in such detail and going on and on about the camera work and so forth. The whole existence of the record is an utter impossibility and yet there it is in front of you. I'm afraid I don't remember much though as it's been a while since I read it.

Control is more a blended mix of New Weird stuff, but the giant complex with a singular evil entity that's more of a force of nature than a person, the twisting and manipulation of normal-but-never-familiar spaces, so on. Decent game, little twitchy for my tastes.

Non-standard variants:

Portal and especially Portal 2 are kinda prototypes; underneath the humor and the claustrophobic testing chambers, the scale and scope of even the smaller bits of the larger complex you see get kinda staggering.

The Liminal Experience is a Minecraft Modpack, and both an example and an (unintentional?) sendup of the genre. It is the first level of the Backrooms as a skyblock/stoneblock-like, that's the joke, full stop. But it's also in Minecraft. So at first you've got nothing, and you're going to get easily lost, and probably starve to death wandering endless halls filled with useless cruft while foreboding sounds buzz through the air, and the rare (and buffed) monsters will shove your face in. But after a few hours, you can start making out paths to and from your base with chalk, you can funnel monsters into lava, and a lot of the random detritus is now useful resources. There's still some interesting decisions going on, like having to break lights and/or explore further and further away for fresh resources, but eventually the bizarre infrastructure and dangerous machinery is just you.

Chromaticraft's Lumen/Chroma Dimension is... weird. It's meant to be a magical, exploratory, novel place. It's also meant to be abandoned, alone, solitary, and a bit of a trap for the unwary explorer of knowledge. Can't really explain in more detail without spoiling, though.

I thought the concept of the directorship of a federal admin agency being a King Arthur sword in the stone type thing was really funny.

Doubly so when it's a King Arthur sword that a) isn't good at its job, and b) likes to make those who attempt to use it An Hero themselves.

Control is too Finnish to be plausibly American. Call me a chauvinist but I just don’t like when especially European game developers try to create authentically or quasi-authentically American spaces, they just can’t do it. It’s fine for Grand Theft Auto because it’s inherently a foreign satire of America, which is fine, but not for things that try to be a little more sincere.

They should have set the game in Finland, which would probably be even more interesting. Hogwarts Legacy suffered from the same problem in reverse, it was clearly created by Americans.

Typically I would agree, but for Remedy games it only adds to the slight Twin Peaks-esque unreality of it. The only one it really hurt was Quantum Break.

What's un-American about Control?

Control's trying to be about an FBI-by-way-of-X-Files, but there's a number of bits that don't really match how americans see the place. Ahti the janitor/god would have been hispanic-themed (or actually Coyote) in a US-work, the Board doesn't really match American oversight concepts, FORMER seems too inspired by the formori in form and concept. The Oceanview Motel is supposed to come from late-80s Montana, and it's hard to separate how much of it's weird because of the whole shared dream subconcious thing going on, but the lack of air conditioners is not especially plausible. The Oldest House's exterior comes by way of a specific (probably NSA) construction that exists in real-world New York, but the interior is a blend of every brand of brutalism ever, and that's necessarily going to include a lot of non-American influences.

I think it works out for the better -- it's supposed to be subtly weird in a way that just cloning a Best Western and the Hoover Building wouldn't -- but I don't have the same tastes as 2rafa.

and it does make the whole 'Alan Wake invented this' bit harder to bite.

the Board doesn't really match American oversight concepts,

A disembodied extradimensional alien hive intelligence doesn't match American oversight concepts? I mean, true, but unless I'm not up to date with what's going on in Finland these days...

FORMER seems too inspired by the formori in form and concept

I assume you mean the Fomori? Maybe in the sense that FORMER is large and the Fomori are giants, but the Fomori are supposed to predate the Tuatha Dé Danann whereas FORMER is an exile. In any case, FORMER looks more like a HL2 strider than an Irish sea giant.

but the lack of air conditioners is not especially plausible

Is... Is the claim here that it's obviously not an American game because they didn't put air vents in the transdimensional liminal space?

the interior is a blend of every brand of brutalism ever, and that's necessarily going to include a lot of non-American influences.

Of course, there's plenty of brutalist American federal buildings. Given that the building itself is essentially an SCP, it seems fitting that it isn't constrained only by American styles or even any extant brutalist style in particular.

Fair point. I'm more motioning around decisions that American writers (and artists, and developers) wouldn't make, that the devs of Control did, but it's naturally something that's going to involve tea-leaf-reading unless @2rafa has a more overt example than I can bring.

I mostly agree with you, the dialogue is obvious too, weird slang.

I played a couple of games that remind me of this:

The Exit 8 - You're stuck in an underground train station trying to find the exit.

The Lurking Horror - Text Adventure Cthulu Mythos game where you are working late on a paper at university during a blizzard and strange things start happening.

Edit: Almost forgot, Infra - You're a structural engineer that is surveying decaying infrastructure (like old dams and tunnels) alone and of course things go wrong. The only way out is through.

Great comment and on an original subject.

I'll share a personal anecdote as a means of homage.

I once worked, in IT, on what's called an infrastructure team. These are the hardcore, hands-on-servers guys who actually wire up all of the servers running in data centers and similar installations. I was not actually a hardcore hands-on-guy, but a dude who was empowered, via our bureaucratic overlords, to buy stuff. This meant I spent a good deal of time inside server rooms and data centers not as a technician, you know, doing stuff, but observing the technicians and logging all of the necessary purchases to complete the project. I passed the time mostly with idle chitchat and, for those Infra dudes who really were anti-social, by reading content on the old longform.org website before it 1) woke-ified and 2) closed down.

There was one particularly odd project that had a team of three (me and two other guys) in a totally windowless server room (they are mostly this way) for over a week. We had a deadline and so we were in there for 12+ hours daily. Because of the logistics and time of year, we would enter the larger site / building when it was dark and we would leave when it was dark. We'd then carpool to the hotel we were staying at, usually have dinner at the hotel restaurant, retire to our rooms, and do it all again the next day.

You can tell that this definitely put me in an odd headspace by the end of the week. I was definitely a little friend and wigged out.

On the final day of our work, the two guys were working on something when they (well, all of us actually) got an e-mail from back at our home office. The two other dudes were needed for a conference call about some other project. TollBooth, you are not (sad junior employee sounds).

The two guys can't take the conference call in the server room because it's actually pretty loud. Servers have to be aggressively cooled, especially when you have dozens or hundreds of them in close proximity to one another. This is done (well, at least it was then) by having cold air blasted up out of the floor on one side of the servers (the "cold aisle") and then, on the opposite side, the hot air is aggressively vaccummed down into the floor (the "hot aisle"). The result is a constant hum of fans and other circulation equipment that probably sits around 50 dB or so. You get used to it after a while and it doesn't cause hearing damage, but you can't have conversations more than about 10 feet apart. On a conference call, the other listeners would think you were in a wind tunnel.

So the others leave to take their conference call and I pull up longform or something. For about five minutes, I'm content. Hanging out on the company dime, more or less. Then, in an instant, I am filled with a palpable sense of dread. There is no proximate cause. Nothing was on fire or damaged. No e-mails foretelling doom had entered my inbox. But I was on the verge of legitimate panic.

I believe this was an episode of real life liminal horror. I was alone in a windowless computer cube with an omnipresent inhuman sound that actively suppressed basic human conversation. I had been in this room for a week, but only exited to darkness and yet another kind of liminal space (the hotel). Nothing in this space was human. No running water, no food, no bathrooms (not technically true as they were just down the hall outside of the server room, and we had been using them all week, but still). It was blinky lights, copper wires, the knowledge that an absolutely turbo-lethal amount of electricity was flowing over every inch of the room, and the sound, the sound, the sound.

Fortunately, I bravely endured got my fucking shit back together. I think I got up and used the bathroom and just that 20 seconds of movement shook me out of the headspace I was in. Other dudes finished their conference call, came back in with a pair of shrugs, and we finished up the day and the project.

The feelings of dread could have been an infrasonic effect.

I like this theory. Thank you. The sound definitely did have something to do with it. To some extent, I've always been a little more sensitive than others to big droning sounds. I think I lack the ability to tune them out the way most folks do.

Video game thread! What did you get over the holidays, what are you playing?

Having a blast playing Skyrim modded. Been playing a lot and also just looking through modlists. This is one area I've found AI to be extremely fun and useful to work with, which has been rare for me lately.

My crew has picked up SCP: 5K again after a long hiatus. If you like janky tactical shooters and survival horror, it might be worth your time.

Cyberpunk 2077. I bought it in 2022 but never completed it, so I've been working on getting to the endgame. I'm terrible at games but the gameplay is really fun, and I'm enjoying the story although I wish Keanu Reeves would shut up. I don't like that everything ends terribly, but apparently the developers were insistent that was supposed to be a cyberpunk element. I'm kind of reminded of Mass Effect; it's like game developers are better at starting stories than ending them satisfactorily.

Also a bit of WoW. They finally added player housing, and it's actually pretty good. Most MMO housing systems make me feel more constrained than creative but the housing system actually lets you do what you want.

I picked up MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries over the holidays, overall it's pretty fun. It's the first installment I have played in the series though so I can't really give a comparison to other iterations.

Pros:

  • It's just viscerally satisfying to pilot a giant robot around and blow stuff up.
  • They do a great job with the sound design and feedback from stepping on things, firing weapons, etc.
  • It's fun to customize mechs in various ways, the shotgun Kintaro build is great.
  • The career progression is overall pretty good, with missions unlocking new, bigger mechs in a somewhat random way.

Cons:

  • The AI teammates are a bit slow in the head, they make up 3/4 members of your squad but often do under half the damage.
  • The standard missions get a bit repetitive (although to be fair the story ones are decent).
  • Walking distances... Bigger, more powerful mechs are slower, but the mission maps stay the same size. This started getting pretty annoying later on in the campaign.

Not really a video game, but I got the new Twilight Imperium 4th Edition expansion played the new franken-draft game mode: Twilight's fall. Got super addicted to it and and couldn't wait for my group to organize another game so I've started playing it online via the online asynchronous community. It plays a lot like online diplomacy in that people take turns throughout the day politic/react. Very addicting, I got almost no work done this week...

Ahaha oh man. I played that game once and it took like 14 hours, and it was horrible. I always talk about it as my worst time playing a board game ever.

How long does it take you to play?

Yeah it's a long game, if we finish in 10hrs we were moving pretty quick. The expectation is that if you sit down to play its a 12-14 hour game at the minimum. We did the draft mode at 5-Players over break and it took 17.5 hrs. In hindsight we should have broken it up into two days, but that's the game.

Escaped from Duckov today. Cute game that makes for a good alternative to the strategy games I usually play. On that front, I keep getting sucked into Total Warhammer now that CA gave me the third game. It’s really the perfect set dressing for the series.

I got travellers rest. It's a top down game where you own and manage a little tavern.

You grow crops, make beer, wine, spirits, and food. You can build guest rooms for people to stay in.

It's got stardew valley vibes all over. It's a nice relaxing game while I'm trying to get through an awful string of sicknesses.

travellers rest

For whatever reason I've got Innkeep on my wishlist. I really enjoyed Graveyard Keeper so was looking for something in that style.

I enjoyed Graveyard keeper as well. I can't remember now if I finished it though.

Travellers Rest is still in early access, my gut was saying to wait for more updates and stories, but it fit my gaming needs at the time so I purchased anyways. I think waiting if you can would be a good idea.

Playing a bit more Project Silverfish. It's still staggeringly unforgiving and I have a hell of a time identifying factions by eyeball before they start shooting at me, but getting more familiar enough with the conventions and map to not start each run scrambling for a compass and/or a helmet with a HUD.

Took Stoneblock 4 off the back burner. Like most FTB Minecraft modpacks, it suffers a bit from having too many random themes thrown in willy-nilly, but it's definitely polished.

Put Star Citizen back for now. They've had a bit of a tradition of year-end patches with hilariously bad balance ramifications, and this time the year-end patch dropped a pretty deep system without too many problems (and VR, mostly working)... but the balance is impressively scuffed. Might look back at it again in a month or two.

Nioh 2! The third is coming out in just a few weeks, and I'm replaying the second in preparation. Having already beaten the game 1.5 times or so, playing "I constantly swap between the 10 different kinds of weapons based on what recently dropped well" is a ton of fun. So many of the move-sets and combos are basically muscle memory for me, especially the katana, since it barely changed since the first game. Sekiro is an honorary contender, but I really do think Nioh is the best 'combat focused' game I've ever played. At least for melee combat, the ranged is rather bolted on in comparison. But the stances, ki management, the way it encourages aggression without becoming a rhythm game like Sekiro, it's just all so peak. I really hope the third one lives up to the legacy. As much as I love onmyo being its own playstyle, I think doubling down on their melee focus was probably the right call.

Based. I have 700 hours in Nioh 1 and still haven't even started Nioh 2.

Finally got around to repairing and modding a japanese new 3ds ll! Took a little wrestling with google translate to get through the menus (I was too stupid to realize I could just... mirror most of the steps on my English one that I didn't want to mod) but overall pretty easy. Felt very nostalgic to crank up a new save of Pokemon Ultra Sun, but now with the ability to mod the save file directly and make my Rowlet shiny.

Also downloaded more games to it than i'll play in the next 10 years. After Sun, probably one of the Fire Emblem Games?

Also bought the Final Fantasy 1-6 (iirc?) collection cartridge for switch when it was on sale. Also on the "get around to it eventually" list.

Any favorite mod recommendations? Been thinking about getting a computer just powerful enough for modded Skyrim.

I’m using the immersive and pure mod list from nexus and enjoying it. Legacy of the Dragonborn is included which is a super awesome mod that lets you put unique weapons armor items etc in display in a museum, adds auto sorting stuff, and a lot of quests.

And that’s just one of like ~300 mods! It includes clockwork too. I like it.

It’s a blast so far.

adds auto sorting stuff

That's what I've been missing on console :( Godmode and a sorting mod!

Any favorite mod recommendations? Been thinking about getting a computer just powerful enough for modded Skyrim.

Clockwork.

Ooo that does look fun!

I have been playing Total War since Shogun and the Warhammer series since it released but I've been working through the Bordeleaux Errant campaign. It's now quite difficult in the early game. He has zero friends in the region and one of the strongest foes who's also agressive right below. If I can just get into tier 3 I think I can hold on.

That's Alberic's, right? Across the Sea from Louen and the Enchantress?

Yeah! It was one of the easiest Bretonnian runs in Vanilla then Skulltaker showed up and things got spicy, now I see a new Slaneshi legendary lord who seem similarly good, but who has been busy with Dark Elves and the Jade Dragon. I haven't even bordered a lizardman this run.

I’ve been listening to the Hallowfall OST for WoW, though I haven’t played in more than a decade. Really nice pieces esp for the Lorel’s Crossing, Armory, Church of the Sacred Flame areas. I am a sucker for airships (always loved treasure planet), Halloween-themed things, and fictional renditions of Christianity, so I love it. I think they fucked up by implementing widespread flying mounts though, doesn’t seem like you can connect to locations if you’re rushing through them so quickly.

I’m also paying attention to ARC Raiders because I’m interested in why it is so popular. It seems that “coalition-building” is a really big joy that people get out of it which you don’t find in alternative titles, and the designers have implement some cleve matchmaking algorithm that puts all the cheaters in the same lobbies. And how just three years into the nature of war changing with drones, we already have a drone-heavy war simulator, which is interesting.

Far Cry series. I realized that clearing outposts scratches the same itch for me as something like Power Washer simulator. Slow progression is the point. I will probably replay the whole series from #3 through New Dawn.

I won’t touch Far Cry 6, though. In a shooter, RPG should only stand for Rocket Propelled Grenade.

Picked up Planet Crafter to play with my sister. It's a mild first-person survival game built on the concept of surviving, exploring, and terraforming a planet. Nowhere near the depth of, say, Terraforming Mars, and sometimes too much running around from one place to another, but reasonably good-looking and low on system requirements.

Dead Space Remake. I'm a wuss so I play on easy - the scares are enough excitement for me already, I don't need to be constantly fretting about ammo or surviving by the skin of my teeth at the same time.

In general I've been re-discovering easy mode lately. I love Dark Souls and similar soulslikes, and got very into the 'if it weren't so hard to get to the next area, it wouldn't have nearly the same emotional weight' way of thinking about games. It's a good philosophy but especially for games that aren't as tight as Miyazaki-san's stuff, it can really suck the fun out of what's supposed to be an enjoyable experience.

For example I was regretting buying Pacific Drive until I bumped the difficulty way down. Once I was getting new upgrades and story almost every trip, I got much more immersed in the story and started really enjoying it. Of course it was over soon but 13h of fun is way better than 40h of pain.

I'm still convinced that the original Dead Space still holds up and the changes in the remake just makes it worse. I think they are really screwed up with repeating "make us whole" 100 times through the game and even mentioning it so early. There was no need for extended scenes with the wife or Mercer. And surprisingly they almost didn't touch the whole "hey we spaced 1 necromorph and he took over the entire battleship full of military in an hour".

All true, but I'm a simple man. I liked the original Dead Space and I wanted to see what they could do with modern lighting systems. And to be fair they made non-graphical improvements as well: Kendra's character is much improved, and the weapons feel better too. I preferred the old zero-grav sections though.

"hey we spaced 1 necromorph and he took over the entire battleship full of military in an hour"

I loved that bit! Very much 'we're saved!' and then the slow realisation that you've really, really fucked up. Plus it makes total sense to me that the military get slaughtered, they're not informed about what's going on and they don't have the right tools. It would be like expecting Fort Knox to withstand a sudden assault by Count Dracula.

It's also funny that USS Valor is where you get the pulse rifle which when upgraded is one of the best weapons in the first game (extremely ammo efficient).

I would like to see Count Dracula assault Fort Knox. How deep into Dracula powerscaling are we going? Does he get the gypsy servants?

He gets the ability to hypnotise people, and the ability to turn into mist that can presumably get through any hole or crack. I think that'd probably be enough, you?

Suppose his mission is "exfiltrate with the gold reserve"... he could pull it off, I think. I doubt Fort Knox has master-stranger protocols in place.

Even if accessing the vaults requires confirmation from off-site, he could probably break in and get out before reinforcements arrive.

Next time, they should put the gold on an island, since crossing water is supposed to be Dracula's weakness.

Easy mode is great. I never got to play Dead Space! I really like Prey though, which I think is somewhat similar. I also used to be a stickler for the harder difficulties, but am chilling out as I get older.

Would you recommend it so far?

Fallout New Vegas (Modded with Viva New Vegas stack).

I'm doing it because season 2 of Fallout is halfway through and its trippy playing through areas and meeting groups that are showcased in the series.

Hah I love that show. How is the New Vegas modding scene? I looked at Fallout mods many years back and was not that impressed.

There are modding tools that will download a stack of mods almost automatically (need to click download for each if you dont have a nexusmods subscription) and load them in the correct order for you which makes things a lot easier these days. The base game sorely needed some QoL, Graphics and UI tweaks which Viva New Vegas does while leaving the story and experience intact. The modding scene seems alive and well.

I haven't looked at any larger story packs or anything, but I'm enjoying the current playthrough. The writing is great as are the branching pathways. You can really wreck things and do horrible things to people.

Yep I just used a mod collection for Skyrim. Having fun. And lol, going all murder hobo doesn't appeal to me much anymore, but I'm glad you're having fun. ;P

I always do the nasty option and reload. Things like selling your companions into slavery, or telling someone you are going to wear their head like they are wearing their hat.

Nothing at the moment. I put some hours into a Civ V game earlier in the week. Playing the Hittites (Lekmod). Found myself attacked by Morocco (!), Ethiopia and Arabia at the same time in the ideology era.

I keep putting hours into ARC Raiders. It's low commitment to just go do a run or two. I also keep playing Marvel Cosmic Invasion, which was phenomenal at start but later on in the game it starts piling up more frustrating enemies. I don't know how I feel about that.

ARC Raiders

I got a copy for free (for which I am grateful!), but found it falling far short of what the hype promised. Maybe I just don't get it.

Bad:

  • Rifling through trash and doing inventory management on the fly are not fun but merely annoying.
  • The randomized nature of the loot means that you have no way to reliably get a specific item that your progression requires. Blueprints are the worst offender.
  • The progression is extremely grindy and gamey, very anti-immersive.
  • Knowing what to keep and what to get rid off effectively requires using a guide; advance knowledge is key.
  • The out-of-run inventory management in the main menu is very repetitive and boring.
  • The third-person shooter combat is entirely underwhelming. Sorry, but Helldivers 2 spoiled me here.
  • Running through the same maps over and over and getting the same trash out of the same trash cans and then extracting at the same elevator...did I already say repetitive? It is repetitive. Repetitively.
  • The whole family-friendly nobody-ever-dies thing is just baffling. We shoot each other with guns, blow each other up with bombs, and somehow we only ever get "knocked out" and then magically reappear in the base.
  • The NPCs are a woke diversity cast.
  • Player customization offers no facial hair and only unisex clothing.

Good:

  • It's technically very competently made. File size, performance, graphics, sound, animations, stability are all top-notch.
  • One thing I'll give it is that the solo player experience is unusually good for a PvPvE game; most solo players are unexpectedly not out to kill you and you can cooperate with them and even exchange items sometimes. (The same is NOT true in team games.)
  • Being able to barricade doors and set up ziplines is a nice touch.

Overall I grant that it's well-made and well-marketed, but at the same time it's a soulless consumer product.

I don't think you're not getting it, we just have a different gaming profile. The progression is frustrating and randomised, but personally I just put out of my mind. All it does is inform which buildings I'm likely to target for looting in a run but other than that I'm happy just getting random stuff and shooting ARC. I don't hate the looking through trash aspect. And the shooting is satisfying to me.

I'll grant that the out of run inventory management is annoying and especially coupled with the slow progression. I'm filling up with materials to build stuff I just don't have the blueprints or levels to build; and there's little use in building a bunch of entry level equipment, you'll always be able to build them right before a run.

It's not game of the year, but it's the low time and mental commitment that makes it so I keep coming back for a handful of runs a day.

It seemed pretty boring and soulless to me too. I refunded it. Third person games (maybe especially in the woke era) tend to bore the piss out of me.

Hah I have a buddy who loves ARC Raiders, keeps trying to convince me to buy it. Idk, I put competitive shooters behind me almost a decade ago now, but I do hear good things.

It's not a competitive shooter, it's an extraction shooter, like Tarkov. That means sometimes you'll end up in a fight with other players, but in my experience the ARC Raiders playerbase is quite chill, at least when I play solo. 95% are not going to initiate PvP, most are happy just saving someone's ass for the fun of it. The PvE enemies are overwhelming but also previsible which makes them fun to plink at. The biggest issue I would say the game has is that it's repetitive and has a hard time keeping me occupied for more than an hour or so at a time.

FWIW, I second that assessment.

Supposedly non-PVP players are matched with non-PVP players and vice versa, which helps.

Whoa.

So that's...that makes a lot of sense. I had very peaceful solo games when I just started out, and after playing several rounds with my bro and his friend (who play a very aggressive PVP strategy), I had a sudden uptick of inexplicable psychos in my solo games. Guess that explains it. The game doesn't care about my peer pressure excuses; it knows what I did.

No Man's Sky. First time playing it. Pretty cool but the planets get a bit samey after a while. The base building and terrain manipulation feel like Minecraft for adults (in a good way). It does a good job of portraying scifi space travel. I can really get into flying around star systems and exploring planets and stations.

This game is really something to experience in VR. Unfortunately the "samey" vibe still kicks in pretty quick, and some of the combat updates made VR space combat a lot more difficult. But I find myself coming back to it every year or two just to "be there."

Didn't buy anything, none of the new releases or discounts seemed to offer anything new.

Terra Invicta recently had its 1.0 release, but I'm reluctant to start another run. They go on for very long (made by developers of The Long War, so no surprise), and I'm not sure the updates since the last time I played actually added enough to justify the investment.

Shokuho, a Warring-States-Era-Japan mod for Mount & Blade II Bannerlord recently had a minor update, and on a whim I picked it up again and slapped on whatever mods would fit. It ended up being a bit of an ordeal to get it to run, because I needed the exactly correct versions of each and every mod so they played nice together. It works now, and I play it on and off on an old campaign that miraculously still works. IMO Mount & Blade is peak singleplayer gaming; the single-best genre formula ever devised. Unfortunately the actual games are made in Turkey and the quality is accordingly somewhat lacking, but man did the Turks get the basic idea right. Anyways, now I can fiddle with Shokuho and try to do pike and shot tactics in medieval Japan. It mostly works fairly well, except for the part where I can't control the proportion of pike to shot that my NPCs recruit, so I end up with too little pike for how much cavalry is running around. Also, pikemen can't drop their pikes - if they have a secondary weapon, they'll just magnetically glue the pikes to their own backs to draw swords. Which looks extremely stupid. So I outfit my pikemen with no secondary weapons...which makes them significantly less capable in chaotic melee and sieges. So I need to keep specialized swordsmen around as well, which is some unwelcome micromanagement. Maybe there's a modding solution for that, but I haven't found it yet.

I was feeling an urge to play XCOM 2 over the Christmas break. When I opened it from Steam, I found that it gave me the option to play the War of the Chosen DLC, which I didn't remember buying. It adds so much new content to the base game that it's a bit overwhelming at first brush, but the base game is so addictive that I got into the swing of it pretty quickly, and I think I've logged a few dozen hours into it so far, having killed my first of the three Chosen assassins.

Any of you XCom fans tried Phoenix Point? It's a newer team shooter by Gallop, who did UFO Enemy Unknown which I loved so much but also XCom Apocalypse which I didn't.

Tried it, and found it a horrible mess. UX was bad, the free-aim gimmick didn't fit the grid-based movement at all, the campaign progression was very opaque, the troopers and items looked silly, the here-are-three-factions-with-one-unique-unit-each system seemed eerily similar to War of the Chosen, the DLCs varied from questionable to godawful...I didn't get far in it. I keep retrying it occasionally; there was a patch recently and a big old mod Terror From The Void ("The Long War of Phoenix Point!", they say), but every time I try it I just end up frustrated by the tactical layer and with no sense of direction in the strategic layer, and annoyed by the UX all throughout.

IIRC, @self_made_human enjoyed it, though?

@atelier I can't find a detailed review either, so it's up in the air if I've written one.

The TLDR is that Phoenix Point is incredibly mid. It's just teetering on the edge of worth playing.

The main issue is wasted potential. The ideas behind the mechanics are excellent, it's a simulationist approach, closer to the original XCOM than the new crop, but in 3D.

I particularly enjoy the ballistic simulation, since the RNG simplification of XCOM always slightly annoyed me.

But that's really all it has going for it. The gameplay was grindy, often unfun. The content didn't feel as diverse or interesting as XCOM. The story was so-so.

The balancing wasn't great, but don't listen to me on that now, because the devs implemented a community patch by a group of popular modders that redid the progression. I've seen people claim it's much better.

I'd say I like idea of Phoenix Point much more than actually playing it. I was an obsessive before release, but Julian over-promised and under delivered.

Thanks! I appreciate this review! I saw there was a demo so I'll give that a try. The other review makes it sound like something I'm looking for while this dampens my excitement so I'll give the demo a try and skip it or wait for a sale.

I think for some games the magic comes from learning it or the way it did something and once that's passed the magic is really hard to recreate. Tough position to try to rekindle.

Thanks that sounds like it has more of what I miss about the originals so I think I'd enjoy it. I'll poke around and see if I can find @self_made_human's review.

I've heard of it but I've never played it. The only XCOM games I've played are the reboot ones, I've never played any of the originals.

The original is probably my favorite game. It wasn't as polished as the new ones, but I loved the time unit system (you could take actions as long as you had time units so someone who didn't need to move could shoot multiple times and reloads varied with where you had to get the ammo from belt was just a fraction of a turn backpack meant a good chunk of a turn but you could carry more ammo and some ammo only fit there).

But what I loved was the story portential it unlocked in me. Having an early terror mission go bad against the floaters when all of the sudden the rookie picks up a heavy weapon of another troop's dead body and blows through all the remaining aliens like butter. She eventually became a colonel and led the fight all the way to Mars. Her mental fortitude was the highest I think I'd seen in thousands of hours.

Or the time I blew up half my psyonically strong team when I brought a rookie to get experience (mind control let you move the enemy for a turn) so I was grouping a huge ship of etherials up for the rookie to kill and I missed one who mind controlled the rookie with the bazooka and oh no as the realization set in and I dusted off with a much smaller elite cadre.

I played the new ones I think I've played all the tactical titles in the series, but I think I'd changed and they never had that same feel.

War of the Chosen is great. @Southkraut actually just mentioned The Long War, have you ever heard of that mod for XCOM? It's also awesome.

I've heard of it but never tried it, I'm curious. Reading the TV Tropes page for it now.

Hah. Allow my partial disagreement - War of the Chosen is a complete mess, and if XCOM2 hadn't already jumped the shark on its and with its other DLCs, WotC would have been the final nail in its coffin.

Mechanically XCOM2 tactical combat is pretty good - the stealth mechanics for example are a nice addition. But the whole theme, plot and writing are superhero-movie-tier trash, the strategy layer is a mess, the visual design of the entire game is godawful, the character building has gotten far out of hand with mutiple overlapping systems, and the DLCs make it all even worse by adding more systems that barely fit together.

If I want a cartoonish everything-and-the-kitchen-sink XCOM game, I'l play X-Piratez, thank you very much. At least that one knows what it is.

I used to think that Xenonauts was too boring compared to XCOM, but after XCOM2 I actually found myself appreciating Xenonauts 2 for being less messy and more grounded.

Ultimately, my favorite turn-based tactics game isn't XCOM at all but Battle Brothers. Maybe Menace, coincidentally by the same developers, will be the go-to in the future...but that one isn't out yet.

XCOM:EW with LW is very good though, IMO. Showing its age by now, and they couldn't fix some of the base game's issues (pod mechanics, stupid-looking weapons), and the mod isn't perfect itself (too many MEC classes), but at the time that one was pretty much non plus ultra.

I tried Battle Brothers and got murked hard in my 2nd battle. Maybe I had the difficulty too high? Haven't been back but should really dust it off again.

Perfectly fair to start with a lower difficulty. Battle Brothers has a bit of a learning curve early on, as you need to pick a few fights you shouldn't have, and make a bunch of mistakes you could've avoided, just to get your bearings. It's a game for risk assessments and pragmatism, and you need to have a minimum of painful experience to do that.

FWIW, ordering a retreat mid-battle is perfectly valid. Unlike in earlier versions of the game, ordering a retreat will even disable enemy Zones of Control and they will stop pursuing you. It will lower your company's morale and cost you some reputation, but that's generally preferable to getting Game Overed. So it's a very safe panic button.

If you like turn-based tactics, then I highly recommend giving it another few tries. Yes, multiples - as said, you absolutely cannot expect your first few runs and your first few battles to go your way.

Here's a few more tips to get you started:

  • As said, feel free to retreat when you feel a battle isn't going your way. Losing a bunch of brothers unnecessarily is worse for morale than running away and abandoning a contract, and you can regain the lost reputation more quickly when you don't need to spend weeks getting back up to strength.
  • Similarly, don't hesitate to abandon a contract when you notice that it's more than you bargained for.
  • If you ruin your rep with a given client, just go work somewhere else until they forget about it.
  • The rewards for a given job scale with your reputation and with your relationship with the client. Early on, contract payout won't even cover your expenses - your early sources of income are mostly in selling loot, and possibly in trading when you buy low and sell high.
  • When you hire a brother, you also pay for the equipment they bring with them. Early on, avoid recruits with expensive items.
  • The main source for equipment should be loot. Only buy equipment when you urgently need something and you have no luck with the looting.
  • Contract difficulty scales with the number and levels of your brothers, but not with their equipment or their actual stats. Upgrading equipment and getting brothers with better skills relative to their level is an important edge in the mid-game, while having lots of low-quality, possibly crippled, poorly-equipped but high-level brothers can be a bit of a trap.
  • You should absolutely attack and loot enemy camps that have nothing to do with contracts. Those always contain a good deal of loot. The difficulty of those camps scales with time, and with their distance from civilization.
  • Hiring cannon fodder is absolutely valid. Cheap brothers with cheap equipment are effectively ablative armor for your core brothers.
  • If possible, don't send your guys into battle naked. Even a straw hat is better than bare skin.
  • Swords get a bonus to hit chance. Spears even more so. Brothers with poor melee skill should use those.
  • Shields are mandatory for brothers with low melee defense. Only with decent melee defense and a good plan for what happens when you get hit (i.e., armor and the right perks) can a brother use two-handed weapons and expect to survive.
  • Don't over-equip brothers that rely on skills with high fatigue costs, or who don't have much stamina to begin with. Not everyone is suitable for heavy armor.
  • Sometimes the dice are against you and you're going to sufffer permanent injuries, deaths and failures that seem like they shouldn't have happened. That is of course a misconception - they are bound to happen sooner or later.
  • Each enemy type brings a different strategy to the table. They'll probably take you by surprise the first time you encounter them. It takes some doing to learn which tools give you the upper hand against a specific opponent, and which you are better off avoiding with a given team configuration.

Anyways, I like Battle Brothers a lot. Even read the novelizations. It's not perfect, but I wouldn't know of any turn-based tactics game I'd rather play.

Ultimately, my favorite turn-based tactics game isn't XCOM at all but Battle Brothers.

I had a lot of fun with Battle Brothers. Have you had a look at Stoneshard yet? It hits a few of the same notes.

I have! I keep retrying it occasionally. But in the end, it feels to me like a game the dev really wanted to make, but not one that he really wanted other players to enjoy. The UX is terrible, the dungeons go on for far too long, far too much time is spent manually travelling and backtracking, the inventory management is onerous, and the combat is mostly a matter of stacking dozens of tiny 1% and 2% buffs to this or that stat in the hopes that it will tilt the odds just enough in your favor...

Yes it hits some of the same notes as Battle Brothers, but it has none of BB's streamlined elegance. Maybe I'll come around to it at some point, but so far I always found myself having decidedly too little fun for how much time it costs to play it.

Yeah I kind of agree. Its a lot of fun, but what isn't fun is having so many different stats (eg 'hands efficiency?') that you need to invest time in reading about to understand. Games are meant to be fun. If you need to go read a build guide outside of the game to make a decent build, something has gone wrong.

I am waiting until the final release before getting back to it as I hope it will have a lot of QoL polish by then.

Mechanically XCOM2 tactical combat is pretty good - the stealth mechanics for example are a nice addition.

I thought the stealth mechanics added to XCOM 2 were a bit half-baked and gimmicky. WotC goes some way towards addressing this specific criticism with the addition of missions in which the optimal strategy is to go the whole mission without being spotted.

But the whole theme, plot and writing are superhero-movie-tier trash

Agreed, although I can't really say this is a significant departure from the original XCOM: EU. I actually prefer the grizzled, bitter, shell-shocked Bradford over his flat, clean-cut characterisation in the first game, even if his new haircut looks preposterous. Shen is the archetypal Marvel girlboss Mary Sue, though, there's no denying that.

the character building has gotten far out of hand with mutiple overlapping systems

Agreed, almost everything in the tactical layer is far too cluttered compared to the more streamlined first game, and this is only exacerbated in WotC.

I thought the stealth mechanics added to XCOM 2 were a bit half-baked and gimmicky. WotC goes some way towards addressing this specific criticism with the addition of missions in which the optimal strategy is to go the whole mission without being spotted.

IMO the main thing stealth did for XCOM2 was offer an alternative to needing to overwatch-creep and just bumble into pods. Both are still in the game, of course, but with the stealth parts you get occasional relief from that.

Yes, I think the devs' main takeaway from the base first game was that the mechanics encourage an overly slow and cautious playstyle. Their attempts to address this both in Enemy Within (meld containers that self-destruct in three turns) and XCOM 2 were largely successful and mostly make sense in-universe. It's reasonable that XCOM, as a guerrilla paramilitary force, would have a limited window in which to extract its operatives before their transport gets overrun by enemy troops; it's not reasonable that ADVENT would attach explosives to a valuable asset and set them to blow up after a fixed period of time before they even know XCOM is in the vicinity.

If you just want to play it vanilla, the phone port is actually great btw. But otherwise I'd always recommend Long War at least anyway.

I've heard so much about Long War, and having logged more hours in the base game of XCOM 1 than anything else in my Steam library, perhaps I ought to check it out.

Fourth-ing (or whatever) the recommendation for Long War. Note that Long War: Rebalanced is made by different people and is pretty good but not the same experience.

The mods have mods? We need to go deeper.

Octopath Traveler 0. I gather that the game was originally an episodic installment on mobile platforms, and that shows through in a variety of ways--the "town building" is hollow, the writing is uneven. But the pixelated tilt-shift JRPG grind is pretty well untouched from the previous games. I'm about 80 hours in and closing on the endgame.


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