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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   4457 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 16, 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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In last week's CW thread I wondered what Trump's motivation might be for wanting to purchase Greenland. While various explanations have been offered, none of them have managed to convince me. Today however I stumbled across a fact which made all fall in its place.

The USA has purchased Danish islands before, i.e. the United States Virgin Islands. Strikingly, these formerly Danish islands have a connection to Trump! Probably the most famous of them is Little Saint James whose popular name derives from Trump's great friend, the late Jeffrey Epstein. Presumably, having lost access to Epstein Island, Trump is looking for another Danish island to purchase so he can go about his business in private.

Past Friday Fun comment regarding the US Virgin Islands' weird system of street addresses

The Virgin Islands also is one target of ocean thermal energy conversion technology, which generates electricity from the temperature difference between the surface and the deep water (like geothermal). The company that's doing the investigation (1 2) seems a bit sketchy, though.

I recently asked ChatGPT what the most recent global children's literature phenomenon before Harry Potter was. Surely someone must've written something since the Narnia books. It confidently said Matilda and refused to budge even when I told him I had no fucking clue who Matilda was.

Anyway, this Friday I found myself on a long bus trip with only a phone to keep me company and I decided to see what it was all about. And, oh boy, was I not impressed. Is everything by Roald Dahl as bad as Matilda? I wouldn't read this trash to my child if you paid me. The last book I inadvertently read that was equally terrible was The Girl that Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson.

Redwall, Chronicles of Prydain, and Dark is Rising have all been mentioned, so I'll say that The Great Brain series is also another good one for kids.

Weird, scrolling through the best-selling books list on Wikipedia Matilda is a fair amount behind both James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when it comes to Dahl books, not to mention the movie adaptations for the latter.

A couple other contenders post-WW2 are Charlotte's Web (1952) and Watership Down (1972). A lot of the bestsellers in the '80s and '90s seem to be series like Goosebumps, Nancy Drew, and such.

I enjoyed Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator as a child. It wasn't great literature, but it was funny.

There are so many Wings and Wongs in China that every time you Wing you get the Wong number.

haha

Don't know about global penetration, but John Marsden's Tomorrow Series was pretty big in Australian schools. There was enough of a gap between installments that people got hyped for the new ones but I doubt it was anywhere near as big as Harry Potter. Also AFAICT it didn't really make much of a dent outside Australia and maybe New Zealand.

I randomly stumbled across that series at the library as a kid and read at least the first couple books. It definitely would not get published today, just due to the premise being anathema to mainstream publishing houses. For context, the series is about a group of young Australians essentially engaging in guerilla warfare and sabotage against foreign invaders (from unspecified countries in Southeast Asia). Looking at the critical acclaim at the time is a fascinating window into the discourse in the '90s and early 2000s.

Edit: Just to be clear my recollection is that the author really tried to avoid racial and geopolitical issues to the point where I found it somewhat confusing and unrealistic. He mostly focused on the characters and their struggle to survive under occupation. The premise is what would make it unpublishable, not his execution of it.

Kind of like a Strayan Red Dawn?

The link in my post seems to agree:

While some comparisons with Red Dawn can be made, there are some significant differences to the story, such as its focus on Australia, character development and the more realistic story of young people surviving in a war zone. I always felt that the idea that Australia, with its relatively small population and relative isolation from Europe and America, could be invaded and completely conquered in such a short period is a lot more realistic than similar events occurring in America.

I always felt that the idea that Australia, with its relatively small population and relative isolation from Europe and America, could be invaded and completely conquered in such a short period

If innumerable games of Risk have taught me anything, it's this.

Adding another vote for the Redwall series. In my experience it seems to have been a big hit with the millennial homeschooler generation.

As for one that hasn't been mentioned yet, Chronicles of Prydain was a series I enjoyed immensely as a kid. And it seems to have gained some reputation as a great children's series per Wikipedia. It also got a little known (?) Disney adaptation of the first two books, named after the second book, The Black Cauldron. Which was a massive bomb, and pretty freaky for a kids film in my opinion. My recollection of the books is them being an excellent fantasy arc with some really great characters. Will have to read again with my kids and confirm.

I was really into both that and The Dark is Rising as a kid. Apparently Welsh mythology really appealed to me for some reason.

My favorite series as a child.

They made a movie that was so bad, Susan Cooper got kicked off the set for complaining.

ha! I've never seen the movie, I'll have to check that out sometime. It's been a very long time since I've read them so i hardly remember the plot at all.

That title sounds familiar. Welsh names just work perfectly for fantasy.

Chronicles of Prydain

You know, I was just talking about this series with a friend of mine. She's read it about a dozen times apparently, and is chomping at the bit to read it to her son. Assured me it's very appropriate for children, and it was written by a friend of Tolkien's specifically to be a more kid accessible fantasy series than LotR proper.

I don't know if that last part is true, but that's what she told me.

It's certainly accessible, and I can see the LotR comparison. Again my memory is failing me here but it's basically "plucky gang of heroes take down the dark lord" and the titular Black Cauldron could be something of a One Ring stand-in.

I haven’t read Matilda or any of his other children’s stuff, but his short stories are among the best I’ve read in English.

I always felt that Dahl was horrendously overrated. Sure, his writing was adequate, but it always screamed "so-called gifted kid still malding about adults not recognizing his talents" well past the point where it was dignified.

To answer your question more directly, Enid Blyton was to my mother's generation what JK Rowling was to mine. Many of her books were like the British equivalent of the American Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew novels, in which a group of intrepid children (the Famous Five, the Secret Seven) would go on adventures and solve mysteries together. She also wrote numerous standalone children's novels featuring anthropomorphic animals or kitchen-sink realism. Her books were very much products of their time, and like Dahl have been hit with the interminable woke debates over whether they're too "offensive" for modern children. (Oh no, a character is called "Fatty"! Burn the lot!)

Dahl's books struggle a lot with the limits of their medium, if you're looking for deep moral lessons. Matilda is supposed to have protected a bunch of fellow students from the Trenchbull, but there's good reason that most adaptations leave her with her powers and a general 'will try to help' personality at the end. The Witches and Big Friendly Giant are slightly better, albeit at the cost of being uncomfortable readers for adults.

I'll second erwgv3g34's list:

  • Goosebumps is a long series of mostly unconnected horror novellas released under the name 'R.L. Stine'. They're usually don't end well for the protagonist, tend to lean into gross horror, and are pretty highly varied in quality, but they were really popular with kids in the 8-12 year old range.
  • Animorphs is a single series of scifi books by K. A. Applegate, featuring a small group of teenagers who stumble upon an alien conspiracy to take over the earth and have to fight it using a different alien's tech that gave them magical shapeshifting. It's like Power Rangers, but except where Power Rangers has teenagers with attitude beating up monsters of the week with giant mechs, switch out 'attitude' for variants of shellshock, 'monsters of the week' with family or friends getting taken over by brainworms, and 'giant mechs' with Rachel turning into a bear. Good, but gets very dark. ('Here I go committing mass murder again!') Can be harder reads, though: advanced kids might be able to get them in the 10+ age range, but especially the later or large books would be difficult before 14 for most kids.
  • Redwall is a set of anthropomorphic novels set in a medieval fantasy world with a very clear division between good ('goodbeasts') and evil ('vermin') with very few exceptions. (imo, the weakest part of the series is its manicheanism). Most of the books are independent or only solely tied to each other (Martin the Warrior is a prequel to Mossflower, Mattimeo a sequel to Redwall), but they share the same world and individual locations or roles show up repeatedly. Longer stories, but relatively easy reads: ability to focus tends to be more important than vocabulary.

That said, I'll caveat that they're older works: Redwall and Animorphs were very much 90s-00s phenomena, and while Goosebumps is still in print it's not nearly as high-ranking as before. Goosebumps is also generally not a very moral work. From that era, I'd also add in Diane Duane's Young Wizards series (hidden world where select few can learn magic and must confront the Power of Entropy / Satan, heavily drenched in Christian religious theodicy), Dianna Wynne Jones Howl's Moving Castle and Dark Lord of Derkholme, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Terry Pratchett's entire output: Good Omens is the best-known because of the tv show and a joint work, and his last couple books went downhill, but I'd still give both The Witches and The Watch sides of the Discworld series as a good set of moral lessons. The Golden Compass is... worth being aware of, but messy: it's an aggressively anti-theist work by a bit of a prick and the denouement is trash, but it was very-well-known.

For recent phenomenon, your pickings are more mixed. A lot of stuff that's popular is just cruft: Captain Underpants was popular enough to get a movie, but I would consider it too simple for most 8-year-old readers. Dog Man is a little more advanced, but not much, and Percy Jackson is just a bastard child of Harry Potter and the paranormal detective world. There was a giant movement of Hunger Games-like slop in the late 2010s, and while they weren't necessarily all bad, none of them were really worth writing home about.

That said, I will point to the Erin Hunter group as somewhat interesting:

  • Warrior Cats follows a set of 'tribes' of feral cats trying to survive in a world with very weak magic. These get very dark (a named character getting crushed by a car isn't even the bloodiest death of one single book), but they're also very strongly moral books.
  • Wings of Fire is pretty similar but with dragons instead.

They're nothing terribly complicated, but they're decently written and have interesting takes.

Animorphs is a single series of scifi books by K. A. Applegate, featuring a small group of teenagers who stumble upon an alien conspiracy to take over the earth and have to fight it using a different alien's tech that gave them magical shapeshifting. It's like Power Rangers, but except where Power Rangers has teenagers with attitude beating up monsters of the week with giant mechs, switch out 'attitude' for variants of shellshock, 'monsters of the week' with family or friends getting taken over by brainworms, and 'giant mechs' with Rachel turning into a bear. Good, but gets very dark. ('Here I go committing mass murder again!') Can be harder reads, though: advanced kids might be able to get them in the 10+ age range, but especially the later or large books would be difficult before 14 for most kids.

For anybody who liked Animorphs as a kid, I strongly recommend r!Animorphs: The Reckoning, a rational reimagining of the series. It's even darker, the setting is tweaked to make more sense, and the characters are much smarter (especially Visser Three, because you can't give Frodo a lightsaber without giving Sauron the Death Star).

It's Animorphs for grownups.

In the interests of consistency, I believe some of the Animorphs books were also ghostwritten.

Good point. From my understanding, #25, #27-31, and #33-52, were ghostwritten, albeit with plot outlines and very heavy editing from Applegate. The ghostwritten works... vary heavily in quality. (skip 28).

I am an Astrid Lindgren fanboy, though that is a bit old fashioned/retro cool.

Roald Dahl is awesome and holds a deservedly esteemed place in the canon of British children's literature. I distinctly recall that one of the blurbs on my edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone observed that "comparisons to Dahl are, for once, justified" — on this side of the pond, comparing a children's writer to Dahl is like comparing a model of car to a Rolls-Royce. I'd hazard a guess that just about every British or Irish Millennial (or older) would have at least a passing familiarity with a few of Dahl's works and their iconic illustrations by Quentin Blake: these books are a true generational monocultural touchstone. I heartily recommend The Twits (my first encounter with the concepts of body positivity and gaslighting — no really); James and the Giant Peach; Fantastic Mr. Fox; Danny, the Champion of the World; The BFG and The Witches. (And, yes, I do think Matilda is great, and marginally superior to its transplanted American film adaptation, which I think holds up remarkably well.)

Interestingly, in addition to his career as a children's novelist, he also wrote delightfully wicked and macabre short stories for adults, many of which were published in outlets like Playboy and/or adapted as episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. One of these, "The Great Automatic Grammatizator", is alarmingly prescient in addition to being a cracking read.

I guess they just don't have enough penetration into the non-Anglo world, other than the chocolate factory one (and I would blame Gene Wilders and memes for that).

I'm genuinely surprised. Danny DeVito adapted Matilda for film, Henry Selick (of The Nightmare Before Christmas fame) adapted James and the Giant Peach, Wes Anderson directed multiple Dahl adaptations including Fantastic Mr. Fox, and no less than Steven Spielberg directed the most recent adaptation of The BFG. Just these four films made an inflation-adjusted 505 million dollars between them, and they're far from an exhaustive catalogue of all the various adaptations of Dahl's works. I appreciate that Dahl isn't as widely known in the states as in the UK and Ireland, but I assumed that the average Millennial or pre-Millennial American would be familiar with at least one of his non-Chocolate Factory works or its cinematic adaptation. The man was far from a one-hit-wonder.

FWIW I was born and raised in the Netherlands and I was read multiple Roald Dahl books by my parents as a kid and I'm pretty sure he is very well known around here. I distinctly remember liking the BFG as a kid, or rather 'de GVR', i.e. 'de Grote Vriendelijke Reus' as it gets rendered in Dutch.

I meant Anglo as in the core Anglosphere. You know, Five Eyes (and Ireland?).

Thank you, I misunderstood initially.

American

I think you're talking to a Russian.

Ah. I thought by "non-Anglo" he meant "non-English" as opposed to "non-Anglosphere". Makes sense.

Dahl’s stuff is popular with 10 year old kids because it’s irreverent of the pieties of adulthood (though fifty years out of date now). The fact that you wouldn’t read it to your child is part of the appeal.

I guess I just didn't like the book for the same reason I don't like Home Alone. Maybe it's okay to punish caricatures of pure evil in a book for children, but neither Kevin nor Matilda are making the world a better place by inflicting cruel and unusual punishments.

I can see that, and would probably agree with you if I had read any of his books after age 12 or so. I think that if you are mature enough to consider the morality involved, or its sociological implications, you are too old for the books. Dahl was so successful because he had the mind of a kid, and he famously didn't get on with adults.

Goosebumps? Animorphs? Redwall?

What are these?

Series (plural) of children's books that achieved popularity significant but much lower than Harry Potter's. Redwall even got an official video game shortly after the author's death.

Anybody watch the AFCON final? What a game. Spent 90 minutes as the sort of high-energy 0-0 football Americans love to hate, lots of missed chances, very physical, literal blood on the pitch. Then, in the last minutes of the game, well, I'll give some background, first - I was in Morocco for a couple games, and a common sentiment among fans of black African teams was that "the Arabs" have bribed the refs to favour North African teams, particularly Egypt and the hosts Morocco. Any bad call was met with mutterings about "the Arabs" and their nefarious plans. To be fair, Morocco are just really a very good team, causing much better teams a hell of a lot of trouble at the most recent World Cup.

So first, second minute of extra time, Senegal score a quality goal from a corner, which is ruled out by the ref a second later. A Senegal player and a Morocco player were running at each other in the box, both with their arms up (Morocco player raised his first), the Moroccan falls over, a very soft foul. Ref had been easy-going up until this point. The ball goes up the other end, probably the last play of extra time, comes into the Senegal box, and as the players are jockeying to jump for it a Senegal player puts his hand on an attacker's shoulder and the guy goes down like Bambi on ice. A clear dive to me, no attempt to stay on his feet, but just enough of a tug that the ref could call a penalty kick (for reference, about 75% of penalty kicks are scored. This is likely a death sentence for Senegal).

However, as they're lining up, a "security incident" is announced in the stands. No other information given on the TV feed, but the players are ordered off the pitch for safety. My experience was that the Moroccan organizers went in very hard on security (while fucking up every other aspect of the fan experience), understandable given the region and the threat of terrorism. Looking today, it seemed to be Senegal fans fighting with the cops. There's all kinds of pushing and shoving on the pitch, too, ref is giving yellow cards to Senegal left and right, but they storm off into the dressing room. A Senegal player posts on snapchat "Peace, we're getting robbed." Eventually they're told to come back, but either nobody's told the Senegalese team or they don't want to come out. Sadio Mane, Senegal legend, two-time and soon to be three-time African Player of the Year runs off the pitch, into the dressing room, and gathers his boys to face defeat with dignity.

The teams line up around the goal. Morocco gives the kick to Brahim Diaz, the tournament's top scorer. The hopes and pride of his nation ride on him, you can see it in his eyes and hear it in the crowd. Diaz steps up, Diaz kicks, and - well, let me tell you about the Panenka. Named for Czech player Antonin Panenka, it's a type of penalty kick where you fake out the goalkeeper so he dives to one side, and then bobble a light chipped ball right through the centre of the goal. It's a power move, the ultimate humiliation for a keeper if you pull it off. Diaz Pankenas. The Senegalese keeper, Mane, stands stock still. The ball sails gently into his hands. . The stadium roars, Sengal goes mad, you can see the light leave poor Diaz's eyes. Commentator on African TV shouts "This is not the time to play Panenka!"

Extra time (in knockout football tournaments, a draw often leads to an extra 30 minutes to break the tie). Just two minutes in, Mane gets the ball, Senegal plays it to Papa Gueye running up the left wing. Gueye runs with it to the edge of the box, one Moroccan player behind him and one positioning to block in front, but in a moment of space on the edge of the box he unleashes a gorgeous, gorgeous shot right into the top corner of the net. Rig that, "the Arabs." Madness erupts all round, including in our family living room. Senegal hold the lead, close out the match, victory. This is the magic of AFCON: it's not just that anything can happen. Anything will happen. If you have any interest in sports, internecine African rivalries, get bit by the "soccer" bug over this year's World Cup, or just like to see bizarre things happen on TV, I recommend catching AFCON summer 2027. Peace, we didn't get robbed.

Thanks for the write up, I completely missed AFCON.

It's a power move

I disagree, it's about as much of a power move as gluing a gold coin to the pavement and then laughing at a person who tries to pick it up. Sure, ""teckhnically"" it's a power move because the subject was coaxed into a snafu which left them empty handed but it's a lazy, schoolboy tier trick. The goalie nonchalantly catching the ball is the equivalent of someone picking up the coin and lifting the paving stone with it.

Staring down the keeper is the real penalty taker's power move.

There's an art to baiting the keeper into diving, I'd call it a power move if it works. But it rarely works with modern keepers and is generally a silly thing to do.

It's kinda lame since like you said, 75% of penalties are converted. The keeper has to both guess right and commit early enough to intercept it. The trick really just relies on the fact that the keeper is in such a bad position that they have to commit early in order to have a chance.

Then again my opinion is colored by hating the dynamic where games sit at 0-0 only to be decided by a penalty shot.

In the plainest terms it's poor sportsmanship. It's purposefully choosing to use means other than skill to force an advantage, and by implication admitting a lack of conviction in one's skills.

On the subject of lack of conviction in football skills I'll mention another tournament match, Scotland's World Cup qualifier against Denmark a couple of months ago. In a close game that went to extra time Scotland went 1 goal up. With scant minutes left to equalise Denmark reacted by throwing everything at Scotland, leaving the Danish goalkeeper off his line as he moved up the pitch to support the attack. The ball broke to Scotland, who quickly moved it to the midfield where one of their team was faced with nobody but the goalie and a golden opportunity to lob the ball over the keeper to go 2 goals up and seal the match. If you've seen the match you're probably thinking "yes, that's what he did!". It is, but on the second opportunity. Scotland had had the exact same opportunity a few minutes before but instead of lobbing the keeper and securing personal glory from his nation this player looked up, then decided to carefully guide the ball to the corner flag where he cynically kicked it out of play and started imploring the referee to check his watch and blow the whistle to end the match. The referee ignored him and then, with seconds left to play and holding a match winning 1 goal advantage, then his teammate successfully lobbed the ball from the halfway line over the hopelessly backpedalling goalie. And the crowd went mental.

If I was the Scottish manager the guy who turned down the ball to favour the clock would have been off the team.

I'm sorry, I simply disagree that it's poor sportsmanship. If you can fake out the keeper - through skill in misleading him, as Panenka did - it's a good play, if you can't, it's a bad play (if anything, a Panenka is usually having too much confidence in one's skill). That's like calling dummying a pass or nutmegging a defender bad sportsmanship.

Agree with you on the Scotland example, though.

With most rules of sportsmanship or unwritten rules, the question is who has escalation dominance on the field. People rarely ask this question well.

True, but escalation dominance in football is basically "will this make the guy mad enough to flatten me on the next tackle." This is why you don't see a lot of the street-football tricks to really style on your opponent - sometimes you see it in peripheral leagues in South America and Africa. Penalty kick stuff is kind of apart from that. I recall one game in the South African league where a player on the dominant team tried doing keepie-uppies and such to get round his defender, and then it got ugly from there.

Did you mean to use spoiler tags? Might wanna fix that.

I think spoiler tags are just broken with multiple paragraphs.

Now the biggest spoilers are visible while the rest is not.

Damn that's annoying. I'll tell Zorba.

I want to talk about what a pulverized skullfucked corpse Star Wars is anymore without the Culture War Thread's pretense of being edifying in any way, so here we are.

Yeah so listen, there's a Star Wars movie coming out like four months from now and as far as I can tell no one gives a shit at all. There's just zero hype or awareness. I know there's a big marketing push yet to come, but come on, think of what the prelude to a Star Wars movie was like back in the pre-TLJ world where people still gave a shit.

But even when the marketing does hit?

"Hey guys remember the Mandalorian? It was on Disney Plus a few years ago. Okay yeah I know the last season was kind of bad, but remember when it was popular? Oh and attention everyone in the entire fucking world who isn't a Disney Plus subscriber, remember Baby Yoda from like keychains and plushies and stuff? Well he's part of a show called the Mandalorian that you didn't watch but will hopefully want to turn up to a theatrical movie for."

Like good fucking luck with that pitch. Star Wars is screwed and they know it. They're so screwed with this movie that Kathleen Kennedy couldn't wait another four months to retire. Seriously the timing of her stepping down is a huge red flag to me. If she really thought the movie was going to get anywhere she'd stay unretired for another twelve or thirteen weeks and go out on a high note.

I bet this is the last Star Wars movie ever made. They've been prevaricating on everything else waiting for this to flop so they can call it.

I think it's not just Star Wars thing. They run out of creative juices about couple of decades ago, and now they only can deep-mine existing IP and consume and regurgitate what their predecessors did. Nobody is excited about this slop anymore. They are just milking it dry, because that's the only thing that is left to them. And when they will be replaced by cheap AI-generated models, nobody would know or care.

... yeah. And worse, they don't even seem to be able to deep-mine existing IP, or consume and regurgitate, in any sense except of mine tailings or vomit.

As a metaphor, I'm a real big fan of FLCL. Yes, it's very central example of anime that's filled with awkward surface-level visuals and the 'deeper' meanings are still not exactly high literature, and it's even self-referential about talking about anime that's got deeper meanings that aren't that deep and awkward surface-level visuals. There's a very uncomfortable 'how much of this coming of age story relies on everyone being a pervert' section.

It's short, it's to the point, extremely well-animated, has a great message executed very well, manages to fit into the right space of weird without being incomprehensible, and for a decade and a half, it was done. If you were a really big nerd you could read the manga, but it's a completely different story, something parallel and maybe interesting but about as related as two different Gundam universes. People often point to the paucity of Avatar in fandom spaces as evidence of how shallowly people engage with it, and that's not wrong, but FLCL shows the other way that can happen. It's got a mere double-digits coverage on AO3, and even on FFN it's tiny (at <600 fics, it's worse off than Redwall). Where Avatar loses out in fandom spaces because it's so vapid that anyone trying to use the setting can just serial-numbers-file-off into original fic and be the better for it, FLCL is hard to do anything but a visual reference, because going any further risks the original taking over. It has a universe with potential, but any addition is a subtraction.

And, in 2018, Toonami threw out another two seasons. FLCL Progressive and Alternative received... mixed receptions. You could get five different opinions on them from four different fans. Both suffered, badly, from some lackluster animation in signature scenes, Progressive leaned really hard into satiating the fans, and Alternative twisted hard away from the wacky hijinks into a more measured and slower-paced story. From a culture war perspective, Progressive's intentionally dialed up the squick factor (there's several overtly sexualized guro and vore scenes, the only upskirt is from a chubby guy who's a bit of a dork) to hit people who misunderstood or 'misunderstood' the interpersonal relationships in FLCL proper, and Alternative's flirting with girlboss syndrome despite having a main character who's recognized in-setting as a real bitch.

But they were stories. Even where Progressive was accused of repeating too much from FLCL, it had drastically different themes and story notes that could tell you how it was going to go, and what the differences would be (cw: spoiler for eight-year-old anime). Where Alternative doesn't quite make sense in the series timeline (supposedly originally intended as a prequel, which gets really pessimistic, there's evidence for prequel, sequel, or even AU); it doesn't just flip everything that happens in the original and Alternative the bird.

It can be done! It just... doesn't.

It's doubly frustrating because there's so many better concepts and ideas already written in so many of these universes, and the showrunners can't do it, or notice that they aren't able to do it. Fucking Truce at Bakura would have made more sense than the actual sequel movies.

I read a post a while ago, maybe here, that the new media stars are nowhere near as popular as the old. There will never be another Tom Cruise, and just about the only insanely popular singer is Taylor Swift, yet she's still nowhere near Michael Jackson's peak. Old times were total cultural dominance; new times are just competing for an ever-shrinking sliver of attention.

It seems that movies are about the same. I can't picture anything being as influential as the original Star Wars anymore, nothing ever being as universally acclaimed and omnipresent. The MCU might be very popular, but it's also widely hated, and I don't think you really miss out on much, culturally, by avoiding it entirely.

Of course, the new IP being terrible isn't helping anything.

I never thought people would look fondly on the fucking prequel trilogy. Shows how badly Disney has mismanaged the franchise.

I will admit the revisionist history I see from redditors regarding the prequel trilogy is surprising. I was a kid that was pretty much the target audience for the prequels when they released in the 90s, and even as an eight year old they were underwhelming and immediately forgotten. The only parts that genuinely made an impression on kids and entered into the canon were: Darth Maul and double-bladed lightsabers, podracing (mostly because of the great Nintendo 64 game). While there was hype for the Phantom Menace, parts 2 and 3 were attended with no hype, even from children.

The prequels felt like they were real Star Wars even with their bad aspects. Much of Disney Star Wars seems plasticky, fake, interchangeable with other late 2010s/2020s media.

Where were the lightsaber battles, not one good lightsaber battle in the whole sequel trilogy! Nothing to rival Darth Maul, Dooku or Battle of the Heroes.

The space battles weren't that great either. They did to Star Wars whatever was done to make skim milk.

As bungled as it was, there's a lot to appreciate about the prequel trilogy! Some epic scenes. Great music throughout. Memes for days.

I liked the prequel trilogy at the time. It's not perfect, but on the whole I enjoyed it a great deal and think that it was a worthy Star Wars trilogy.

To indulge in sheer schadenfreude-driven bitterness for a moment...

Good.

I loved Star Wars when I grew up, but right now, Star Wars needs to rest. The franchise needs to just lie dormant for a while. It's done this before - 1983-1991, for instance - and probably been better for it. Our media overlords should put it down and stop trying to exploit it.

Maybe one day there can or should be a Star Wars renaissance, but it is not happening now. Give it at least a decade of rest.

It really doesn't though. Maybe they should give up movies, but for whatever reason they never give the public (me) what it wants when it comes to video games, no matter how successful. For a period, up until around the late 00s, Lucasarts was producing some absolutely killer Star Wars themed games. And I don't think they've run dry the mine of both the storyworld of the Old Republic (which is just better in nearly every way from mainline Star Wars) or style of games such as the old Jedi Academy games. They just won't do them because it's not GAAS optimized slop. And when they do do something like an open world Star Wars game (killer in theory) they insist on wokifying it - but you don't have to do that.

I wouldn't read them, but probably you could theoretically do good books. Comics in the west are probably dead for a generation, at minimum, but if that weren't so you could theoretically do that too.

Anyway, there's still a Star Wars world at Disneyland, so I don't imagine they'll give up totally soon. It takes money to dismantle that thing, and anyways, it honestly looks cool. Speaking of, I heard they're finally giving up forcing the turd sequel IP line exclusively for Disney's Galaxy Edge and letting in nostalgia bait like Vader along with the joke that is Kylo Ren and the neo-Rebellion. Wise.

I checked the official star wars channel on YT and didn't see any trailers for any upcoming movies in recent history.

I've seen the "trailer", because I regularly a bunch of movie trailers. I'd call what they've shown more of a teaser.

But even when the marketing does hit?

What was the last big marketing push for a movie that you can remember in general? In the last five years, I can remember:

  • Dune (2021)
  • Oppenheimer (2023)
  • Barbie (2023)
  • Wicked (2024)

I can't even think of anything for 2025. The wicked sequel might have had something resembling hype, if you squinted.

Maybe I'm just living under a rock or something, but it really feels like movies as a cultural touchstone have just sort of fizzled out.

The promotion for Wicked and Wicked: For Good kind of blur together because there was so little time between them. It just feels like Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande have been out promoting the same movie for three years.

I think they tried to hype Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, but no one cares about the plot of Mission Impossible movies enough to get excited about seeing the second half. Going in all I could remember was that there was a submarine and and AI in the last one.

Marvel couldn't get any hype going. Captain America: Brave New World had too many well known reshoots and production problems for people to get excited.

I think Hollywood's big problem is that they locked in things like the "Representation and Inclusion Standards" for the Oscars during peak woke. The pipeline to make a movie is around 5 years.

So when some major projects underperformed in 2023-2024 followed by Trump getting re-elected, they lost faith in the movies coming out and didn't want waste a lot of money on marketing.

A Minecraft Movie managed to generate a lot of hype in the kids movie category.

Maybe F1 The Movie, heard some noise about that one.

F1 movie was itself marketing, it's a modest success based on the size of the investment but they're going ahead with a sequel because it was well received and rebates, sponsorships, and the actual involvement of F1 (and attached investor $s) saw it as good for the F1 brand.

I thought RLM's recent video on the future of the Star Wars brand made some good points. They'll probably never again be a big tentpole brand that's universally loved by almost everyone, but... maybe that's OK. Maybe even for the best. They can create lots of different content that doesn't even pretend to fit into the same universe, and each can find its own niche with a different group. So the people who like Westerns can go watch the Mandalorian, the people who like spy movies can watch Andor, the people who like Feminist Wicca stuff can watch the Acolyte, and the people who just like cuta things can buy baby Yoda plushies. Also: the box office gross of the movies hardly matters, the profits all come from things like toys, video games, and amusement park rides.

Also: the box office gross of the movies hardly matters, the profits all come from things like toys, video games, and amusement park rides.

Yeah they've had shit luck with all that too. It might shuffle on indefinitely in tertiary media, like some Depression-era comic strip no one realizes is still running, but it's dying as a cultural phenomenon.

I've started learning Korean recently, and I've run into trouble. Unfortunately, my teacher, being a native Korean speaker, has a hard time sympathizing with my issues, and has given me the simple advice of "practice more." I'm not saying the advice is incorrect or not valuable, but it's not very helpful when I don't even understand why I'm making the mistakes I am.

I'm having trouble distinguishing consonant sounds in Korean. Multiple consonants all sound similar. Not even between normal and double consonants, but different consonants that are supposed to sound different all sound the same to me. In fact, sometimes I have trouble hearing the consonant being pronounced at all, especially at the beginning of words. I can, with difficulty, read characters out loud. But when listening to characters being spoken, I cannot write them with sufficient accuracy. This is a problem that I've talked to multiple Korean speakers with and it seems that it's something that they intuitively understand to the point where they have trouble understanding my problem. Is this something anyone else has struggled with, and what are some things that I can do to help?

Fellow Korean learner who encountered similar issues and spent way too much time contorting my tongue and sounding like an idiot in the shower. There is a logic (with some exceptions, like any language), but it's too intuitive for native speakers to think about explicitly so it's often left for us foreigners to inductively reason out ourselves.

I can, with difficulty, read characters out loud. But when listening to characters being spoken, I cannot write them with sufficient accuracy

Spelling makes much more sense when you realize Korean used to be written in mixed script of Chinese characters and Hangul (kind of like modern Japanese). Any Chinese derived syllables maintain the spelling associated with the original Chinese character. This philosophy generally extends to preserving the spelling of verb stems as well. For an English analogy, in this approach "paid" would be spelled "payed" (preserving the verb stem "pay") even if it ends up being pronounced closer to "paid" than "pay ed", "driving" would be spelled "driveing", etc. As an extreme version of the decoupling, you could imaging spelling "went" as "goed" but still pronouncing it "went", though Korean never goes this far to my knowledge. You often have to use the meaning of the word to properly spell it. It's not a 1:1 correspondence between spelling and pronunciation.

different consonants that are supposed to sound different all sound the same to me

Korean consonants are trickier than they seem, because their pronunciations vary depending on where they are in the word. Also, many of these pronunciations don't exist in English. I'm guessing your issue is mainly with ㄱ/ㅋ, ㄷ/ㅌ, ㅂ/ㅍ, ㅈ/ㅊ. If you're trying to use the typical transliteration scheme that maps ㄱ/ㄷ/ㅂ/ㅈ to g/d/b/j, you'll have a hard time because in some situations they will sound closer to k/t/p/ch. Luckily the rules are generally pretty regular:

  1. ㄱ at the beginning of a word: halfway between "G" and "K". It's probably more accurate to say it's like trying to make both sounds at the same time. Take the vocal chord engagement of "G" and the puff of air from "K" and do them simultaneously. To the untrained ear, it will sound basically like "K", which is why the surname 김 is transliterated as Kim, but there is a subtle difference with the way a Korean would say it.
  2. ㄱ in the middle of a word AND at the start of a syllable AND after a syllable ending with a consonant other than nasals (ㄴ/ㅁ/ㅇ): basically ㄲ.
  3. ㄱ in the middle of a word AND at the start of a syllable AND after a syllable ending with a vowel or nasals (ㄴ/ㅁ/ㅇ): basically "G". 이거 sounds like "i geo".
  4. ㄱ in the middle of a word AND at the end of a syllable AND before a syllable starting with a vowel: the consonant moves to the start of the following syllable and is basically "G". 먹어 sounds like "meo geo", with the verb stem preserved as discussed above.
  5. ㄱ/ㅋ in the middle of a word AND at the end of a syllable AND before a syllable starting with a consonant: an abrupt discontinuation of the syllable with your mouth/tongue in position to say "K" (don't make the slight puff of air you would for the English "talk", you can feel this if you hold your hand in front of your mouth as you say it). 먹다 sounds like meok' da, with the apostrophe indicating abrupt discontinuation of the syllable.
  6. ㄱ/ㅋ at the end of a word: same as 5. 목 sounds like mok'.

Depending on the context ㄱ can have roughly four sounds: G/K hybrid (may feel like ㅋ but subtly different), GG (essentially same as ㄲ), G, or K' (essentially same as ㄲ or ㅋ, depending on the context).

ㄷ/ㅌ, ㅂ/ㅍ, ㅈ/ㅊ follow by analogy for D/T, B/P, J/Ch respectively.

Don't even bother with trying to get the true ㄹ sound unless you learned Korean or Japanese from a young age. I'm convinced it's one of the most unintuitive sounds in the world for an English speaker. It's like halfway between an American "R" and "L" but leans more "R" at the beginning of a syllable and more "L" at the end of a syllable. Just using American "R" and "L" in that way is probably as close as most can get.

In fact, sometimes I have trouble hearing the consonant being pronounced at all, especially at the beginning of words

Never had this issue but I might not be understanding what you mean. Do you have example sentences where this happens?

Never had this issue but I might not be understanding what you mean. Do you have example sentences where this happens?

"뭐하고 있어요?" was the correct answer, and What I heard was "어호이새여"

"지금 좀 바빠요" was the correct answer, and what I heard was "치감전파패요"

This was purely a sounds to writing test, and I don't know enough words in Korean to know what the characters meant, meaning I didn't have the context of whether the characters made sense together or not. I literally questioned my sanity after seeing the correct answers. Apparently in the first example, I missed an entire character being pronounced.

Some of those are because of the more advanced rules/exceptions that I mentioned, and @bonsaii listed some above:

  • The ㅆ from 있 slides onto the start of the next syllable
  • 요 at the end of a sentence usually sounds more like 여
  • the ㅁ from 좀 combines with the ㅂ from 바 to be... sort halfway in between ㅂ andㅍ
  • the ㅃ from 빠 slides back onto the end of 바 tomake it more of a ㅍ sound

The others... I don't know, there might be rules I don't know, but I think you just need more listening practice. It's hard. But you're not going insane, they just don't follow the simple pronounciation guides in the intro hangul guides quite as neatly as they make it seem.

this is a good list of rules. But you certainly don't need to know all of these when you're a beginner, or even any of them at all. Just.... be aware that they exist.

Don't even bother with trying to get the true ㄹ sound unless you learned Korean or Japanese from a young age. I'm convinced it's one of the most unintuitive sounds in the world for an English speaker. It's like halfway between an American "R" and "L" but leans more "R" at the beginning of a syllable and more "L" at the end of a syllable. Just using American "R" and "L" in that way is probably as close as most can get.

It seems unintuitive because it's two different sounds: at the start of a syllable it's a tapped r like in Spanish and at the end of a syllable it's more or less the same as the English l. Native speakers consider it one sound because there's only one letter for it, the same way English speakers think of the voiceless th at the start of "think" and the voiced th at the start of "then" as the same sound because they're written the same.

the same way English speakers think of the voiceless th at the start of "think" and the voiced th at the start of "then" as the same sound because they're written the same.

Of course we don't think of these sounds as the same - it's the difference between "teeth" and "teethe".

A better example would have been how the T at the beginning of “ten” is a completely different sound than the T at the end of “net”. (You make the former sound by touching your tongue to the part of your mouth right behind your teeth, but you make the latter sound by closing your vocal folds, no tongue involved at all.)

But of course, this example is harder to explain precisely because we think of those two Ts as being the same sound.

But of course, this example is harder to explain precisely because we think of those two Ts as being the same sound.

Your post really confuses me, because they are the same sound. And, contrary to your argument, I make the T sound on both words by touching my tongue behind my teeth.

Wait, you use your tongue even for the last T in a sentence like “Back in the day, people used to talk about surfing the net”? Huh. Between you and sarker, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that this is just a weird quirk of a regional American accent that I assumed everyone else had.

Yeah, I do. I just checked that sentence and I naturally use my tongue on the last T.

Idea for Friday Fun Thread: Share voice recordings to compare English accents and for evildoers to analyze and replicate

I think the point is that there are several different ways to pronounce this, and Anglophones typically will not differentiate between them.

But I'm not a linguist, so I probably am wrong.

A better example would have been how the T at the beginning of “ten” is a completely different sound than the T at the end of “net”. (You make the former sound by touching your tongue to the part of your mouth right behind your teeth, but you make the latter sound by closing your vocal folds, no tongue involved at all.)

Are you a bong or something? Both of those are /t/ for me.

Even in non-glottalizing dialects of English, aspirated and unaspirated T sounds are differentiated in Mandarin but not in English.

I’m an American, born and raised. (And I certainly don’t pronounce water as “wo’uh”.) In careful speech, sure, I’ll pronounce the final as an alveolar stop, but when just talking normally, if “net” comes at the end of a phrase, then I’ll pronounce the last as a glottal stop.

A T sound is a T sound. You can't say it's only a half.

Heh, yeah. I found learning Korean a very frustrating experience. They love to talk about how their hangul system is so scientific and simple, but native speakers don't understand how all the similar sounds and homonyms make it difficult for foreign learners. The pronounciation is tough, no way around that, and it's not always consistent. I've had some people tell me that 애 and 에 sound exactly the same, while others tell me that there's a subtle difference or that it's a regional dialect. I can't be sure.

(also, in case you haven't learned this yet, a lot of them change their sound depending on what comes before or after them. Nobody told me that in my intro Korean class)

Probably the best advice is not sweat the details too much, just push through until you know a lot more and then you'll get it from context. Nobody expects you as a beginner to be able to transcribe it perfectly. But realize that you're trying to do something difficult and it will take a lot of time and effort.

I've had some people tell me that 애 and 에 sound exactly the same, while others tell me that there's a subtle difference or that it's a regional dialect. I can't be sure.

Now this one I do know about. 애 and 에 merged in the speech of hip youngsters in Seoul in the 80s and it has spread to the rest of the country in proportion to how much one interacts with that crowd, similar to how the cot-caught merger is spreading among young Americans due to the cultural influence of California.

They love to talk about how their hangul system is so scientific and simple, but native speakers don't understand how all the similar sounds and homonyms make it difficult for foreign learners.

I mean, when you come from East Asia, Korean must seem like simplicity itself. Any alphabet, however flawed, is better than Chinese, which is a collection of 20,000 logograms so disconnected from any pronunciation that two completely different spoken languages like Mandarin and Cantonese can use it as their writing system, or Japanese, which is a monstrosity made up of two different syllabaries, one of which is used primarily to write fucked-up English, plus another 2,000 logograms stolen from Chinese which can be pronounced in two different ways (the Chinese way and the Japanese way).

That's what most people say, but i've found it's a bit more nuanced than that.

Chinese characters are certainly hard for foreigners to learn, but they work quite well for Chinese or any language based on it. So anyone from any sort of Chinese dialect can look at those written charaters and know exactly what they mean, even if they dont know the pronounciation. Or at least, they could until Mao messed it up with his stupid "simplified Chinese" that randomly removes strokes. They will also instantly know the meaning of most Japanese Kanji too, without any extra effort. The hiragana in Japanese mostly just fills in the grammar words like verb conjugations, so it's easy to separate.

This used to be the case in Korean too, but then they abruptly removed all the Chinese characters. So now there's no clear boundaries between words, verbs have like 1000 particle endings with no direct translation in English, and everything has 10 different homonyms since the characters and tones got lost. You pretty much have to know the entire sentence and context to know what any specific word means. At least you know the pronounciation... sort of... assuming you know all the little details and exceptions they don't teach you at the start.

this is maybe more ranty than i intended. Korean really is a difficult language though.

Chinese characters are certainly hard for foreigners to learn, but they work quite well for Chinese or any language based on it.

Not quite. Chinese children anyway learn some alphabet (either Latin-based pinyin in mainland, or Bopomofo in Taiwan) first. And often later they suffer from "character amnesia" when they can recognize certain character when they see it, but not able to write it themselves).

Is that a problem? It seems to work quite well for them, especially with the help of modern tools like smartphones to look up obscure characters. English speakers can also recognize words without knowing how to spell them, that's the whole point of spelling bees.

Spelling bee is for children, whereas character amnesia is still common enough in top 5% of Chinese adults. One of my Chinese friends says he often uses IME that is closely linked to strokes so he wouldn't forget how to draw them.

Really, the only reason they keep it is to pretend that languages more diverged than Italian and Spanish are one language.

It's exactly the same sentiment as the ones saying "Bolsheviks mangled Russian spelling" have. Both countries had 10% literacy and the reforms devised to make reading and writing more accessible were designed under the old regime to improve this abysmal state of affairs. In both cases they were rejected by the already literate classes in charge and were implemented only after the civil wars had been won by the more radical sides.

It's difficult to imagine that pre-reform Russian orthography would have prevented much higher rates of literacy. English famously has ridiculous orthography ("waiter, I'll have the ghoti") and high literacy. A few additional Russian characters and weird spelling rules is not even close to the insanity of Chinese orthography, and they still have high literacy despite the fact that their system is insane even after "simplification".

they could until Mao messed it up with his stupid "simplified Chinese" that randomly removes strokes

It was not Mao’s effort, and you should not give him credit for it. Since the beginning of the New Culture Movement, scholars had already been considering the simplification of Chinese characters as a way to improve literacy. Some radicals even wanted to abolish Chinese characters altogether, similar to what Vietnam eventually did. The Nationalists also had their own versions of simplified characters before the Communists (RoC’s Foreign Minister and Ambassador to the US, Hu Shih, is one of the most prominent supporter of reforming the Chinese language), although these efforts met with strong opposition. Japanese too have simplified some Chinese characters (some even borrowed by the communists later). All of these movements eventually culminated in the Simplified Chinese.

Most simplified characters have roots in Caoshu or Xingshu. Because of their cursive nature, these scripts naturally reduce and merge strokes. Scholars who are tasked to simplify Chinese mostly do not make up new characters. There are a few abominations that are created entirely after the Communists took power and makes no sense, but overwhelmingly, simplified characters predate Mao, some of them by centuries, even millennia.

Also only ~20% of Chinese characters have been simplified, and a majority of them (I would guess 60% probably) are only mildly simplified and easily recognizable by traditional Chinese users.

Ah, interesting, thanks for the context! Yeah i've never formally studied that history, so I probably got a lot of details wrong. Probably when I heard that "Mao mangled it" I was thinking of what you said "a few abominations that are created entirely after the Communists took power and makes no sense," but it still works quite well as an international language/alphabet.

I've come across similar complaints from Korean learners on various language forums in the past, but I don't know it well enough to directly address your issue. What I would suggest generally is identifying a set of minimal pairs in Korean containing whichever consonants you find troublesome, pulling audio files of native speakers reading those words from Forvo, and then attaching those mp3 files to an Anki deck so you can do spaced repetition exercises and train your ear on those particular sounds.

@Closedshop Seconding this as good general-purpose advice for anyone having trouble distinguishing sounds when learning a new language. Ideally you can record your teacher reading each word in the minimal pair 3 times and pick two from each set that sound very similar to you to create the flashcards. This controls for any changes in intonation that occur when reading a sequence of words, which commonly provides an unintentional extra source of information in many languages.

Magic Knight Rayearth is on Netflix! Now this is some serious nostalgia; Rayearth was one of the first animes I ever watched as a little kid living in Latin America in the 90s, right alongside Saint Seiya and Dragon Ball. Accordingly, I was shocked to see that it had been given a TV-MA rating, apparently for nudity? But it's tasteful, artistic nudity; no different from the transformations scenes in Sailor Moon. There is a stereotype out there that Americans are totally fine with blood and violence but God forbid that a kid might see a nipple, and damn if this doesn't lend credence to the allegations.

In any case, the story follows a trio of 14-year old girls consisting of the spunky Hikaru, the elegant Umi, and the nerdy Fuu (or Lucy, Anais, and Marina as they were called in the Spanish dub) after they get isekai'd to Cephiro, a generic RPG fantasy land, while on a field trip to Tokyo Tower and told to rescue Princess Emeraude (Esmeralda) from the evil Zagato. And I know that sounds like the most boring, cliche, and straightforward plot you could possibly think of, but there is a few things that make the show work.

First, the girls have great chemistry, playing off supporting characters and each other as they mature from three random schoolgirls into the legendary Magic Knights (Guerreas Magicas); watching them talk is as much fun as watching them step up to the challenges they encounter. Second is that the setting is not quite as cookie-cutter as it first appears; halfway through, it is revealed that their ultimate weapons are the Rune-Gods/Mashin (Genios), giant robots they must pilot into battle, so the series is actually something of a fantasy/mecha hybrid. And the third is that the show has a great sense of drama; some of the deaths are surprisingly heart-wrenching, and the ending drove me to tears.

So, overall, I recommend Magic Knight Rayearth. Netflix only has the first of two seasons, but that's OK; the first season tells a complete story with a very logical stopping point, and the second season reads like somebody wrote a fanfic sequel. At 20 episodes, it's a bit longer than a single-cour anime like Erased or Madoka but shorter than a double-cour like Evangelion or Cowboy Bebop. The original Spanish dub is there, for those who prefer that language. Or, if you don't have Netflix, you can also watch it on YouTube: English, Spanish.

Decided to use my existential crisis energy to finally figure out how to upload things to Youtube. Just uploaded my first video, a ramble about the Vorkosigan Saga. I'm inordinately proud of myself, been wanting to do this for a while and just sort of stumbling at the last step. It's rough and unprofessional and just has one image as the video the whole time, but it's original and it's mine.

Link if folks are interested: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HvPrXuh528o?si=TukFASsqJlE-rRL-

It’s a current trend on TikTok / Instagram to post pictures of yourself from 2016. Next month, in early February, we will celebrate our own 10th anniversary of the Culture War Thread. What are we doing to mark the occasion?

Scott made his request for a culture war thread on Feb 14th of 2016 https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/14/ot43-roses-are-thread/

This is one of the oldest culture war threads I could find from reddit (and it might actually be the oldest):

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/470zk9/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_22/

It is weird seeing comments from myself in the thread. About a third of the usernames in there are deleted. Some of the other ones I hovered over are suspended. No one else I could find from there is over here on themotte. Was anyone else there for the inception of the culture war threads? Did you just have a different username back then?

I can't help but feel old. But I was young then and am arguably still young now. My opinions have hilariously not changed an inch from back then. I guess that could be good or bad.

I was there, but I was lurking then and I'm still lurking now.

No one else I could find from there is over here on themotte. Was anyone else there for the inception of the culture war threads?

Yes.

I can't find any Culture War thread comments from myself until December, but I was at least posting in threads that we'd recognize today as too culture-war-adjacent to escape containment, as well as in Culture War stuff pre-CWT.

Hm. Looks like my first CWR post was August 2016, though I'd posted on the SSC subreddit (and a little on the website, though seldom in the open threads) before then.

Churn in a community isn't unusual, though I'll admit the drivers of churn here are different than in other environments.

Shame I missed the halcyon days. I showed up maybe a year or two after the migration to the subreddit.

Ha, "halycon days" more like the red hot opening of the culture war. No one had any mental immunities to culture war stuff. We didn't really know how to talk to each other without getting pissed off. People kept trying to throw around newly discovered superweapons, or unwrap all the old ones that should have been held back for special occasions (racist and nazi accusations). We had an entire subreddit dedicated to hating us. A wiki admin and rational wiki owner set on smearing us. Scott felt the need to discuss culture war topics, not because such articles paid his bills, but because the ideas had infected and ruined his friend groups.

I feel like the culture war has gotten better in that we have figured out how to sort of deal with it, the superweapons have lost their effectiveness. The fanatics aren't always running the show, cooler heads are getting more attention. But its also gotten worse because it spread to the normies and out of academia and limited intellectual circles. And the normies are willing to go on the streets and get violent.

I feel like the culture war has gotten better in that we have figured out how to sort of deal with it, the superweapons have lost their effectiveness. The fanatics aren't always running the show, cooler heads are getting more attention. But its also gotten worse because it spread to the normies and out of academia and limited intellectual circles.

IMO, God-willing, we're just ahead of the curve here --- early adopters of the Culture War, if you will. I think this is a generic narrative arc of an aggressive meme. I'm not even quite sure how to define the current one (it's been difficult to name, even, but feels motivated by the existence of the Internet, among other forces), but there are past examples like "what if we decided we didn't have a king, but that we're defined by Frenchness?" or "what if we used this new printing press to openly question the moral authority of the Pope?". Both of those took hold among the masses and caused decades of conflict (large hot wars, even), before a new lasting coexistence equilibrium was established.

I feel like I've seen some signs that we might have hit peak Culture War. Flame wars aren't edgy anymore, they're almost passe in my IRL social circles. We're re-learning the wisdom of not discussing politics or religion in polite company. The CW ideas aren't new to most of the populace because they've been everywhere for years, and there are fewer newcomers to the memes to become radicalized torchbearers. Maybe things are going to start cooling down.

Agreed, there is also something uncool and a little gross about someone that is very clearly mind rotten from culture war stuff.

I've only encountered a few in real life, but they have given me the ick every time.

It will probably make some people worse in the short term until they start figuring out why they have lost most of their friends.

I was about to point out a few posters I was sure still comment now and again, and checked each to find that they had dropped off or flamed out somewhere along the line.

I didn't expect the loss I'd feel going back through those old threads. I expected some - the distant, secondhand kind I get at an estate sale, thumbing through a dusty and meticulously organized collection of National Geographic. Instead I'm thinking of that gulf of time between then and now, how much has happened and yet how clearly I still remember nodding along to j9461701 and BarnabyCajones, engrossed in mcjunker's stories, or bemusedly seething at darwin2500 and HlynkaCG. Lurking in those threads was more important to my late adolescence than I'm proud of.

I posted less then than I do now, so I can't evaluate any change in opinion with much clarity, but what I wrote still sounds sane. Good for my sense of continuity, though I seem to be more vulnerable to nostalgia than I'd hoped. Something I'll need to keep in mind.

Instead I'm thinking of that gulf of time between then and now, how much has happened and yet how clearly I still remember nodding along to j9461701 and BarnabyCajones, engrossed in mcjunker's stories, or bemusedly seething at darwin2500 and HlynkaCG.

Bring back TrannyPornO!

You can still follow him on Twitter and read his Substack.

Cremieux is TrannyPornO?! How was I so OOTL on this one?!

This adds to the dark humor of Cremieux’s pitbull arc.

Now I feel out of the loop. Did TPO hate pit bulls?

He was fairly recently attacked and bitten on the face by a pit bull, and has since been engaged in an anti-pitbull crusade.

Don't know—the dark humor from my perspective was that:

  • Cremieux, recently famous HBD internet personality who I get occasional glimpses of from crimethink corners of the internet such as The Motte, suddenly started rageposting 6/66 pitbull hatefacts after he got attacked, when previously he had not shown any interest toward The Pitbull Question (to my knowledge)

  • It turns out, from @erwgv3g34's comment, that I'd been reading Cremieux way before in the form of TrannyPornO (who I also do not recollect having any opinion toward pitbulls one way or another)

It's more absurdist than some particular punchline. I would not wish a pitbull attack on anyone, much less an internet personality that I have a fond recollection of.

Dang are all of the best poasters just graduates from the rationalist / SSC blogsphere? Seems to be that way.

We are going to post a representative sample of comments from the first ever thread and evaluate their accuracy of course.

Well, whatever we're doing I look forward to all the photos from 2016. To some of us that feels like yesterday.

Nonsense: 2016 is THE FUTURE! Time stopped in 2015, as far as I'm concerned.

It's too bad it's been already 15 years since the 80s ended and music died.

Fellow Mottizens, I have a most shameful confession to make. Despite being a card-carrying member of the notorious player coffee haters, I have been living a lie.

I have been settling for coffee straight from a Keurig.

I hear your gasps and mutterings! I know! There's no excusing my behavior! For the sake of explanation, however, I will simply state that my coffee roaster was in desperate need of cleaning, which between my limited bandwidth and the tremendous amount of buildup in the roaster, became a fucking project.

That project has been completed, and I am happy to report that after two roasts, I can now confidently say we are back, baby! You see, the first roast, while good, was just muddled enough that I had some doubts. I could say for sure that the annoying meat-like savory note that cropped up was gone, as was the slight but persistent rancid flavor that often accompanied it, so it sure seemed like the cleaning had been effective. However, my coffee, a fine Ethiopian Dry Process from Hambela, while quite tasty and definitely a significant step up flavor-wise, failed to overwhelm me with its magnificence! What had happened, I asked myself. I knew that the roast had taken several minutes longer than usual, a definite potential issue, especially since hotter, faster roasts with my roaster tend to produce better coffee IME. Damn that cold snap! Or perhaps the beans were showing their age and indeed, they were no longer fresh from the vendor and quite possibly past their prime. Or, worse still, had my palate atrophied in the intervening time? Was I no longer able to enjoy the subtle depths of a premium cuppa? True, I could definitely taste fruity sweetness in many sips, as well as a chocolate note, yes, likely baker's chocolate, but outside of the traditional, relatively refined delicacy of a nice pour-over, I didn't get anything definite from the roast, despite enjoying it for over a week. The tasting notes indicated that there should be blueberry preserves, peach and dark plum notes in there, along with sorghum syrup (whatever that's supposed to taste like), and dried dates. I feared the worst.

The next roast, I brought out the big guns. You see, I still had a wee bit of another Ethiopian Dry Process from Guji, the infamous Gerbicho Rogicha. Hands down the best coffee to ever come out of my bullet, the Guji was even older than the Hambela before it, but I had nothing better in my inventory with which to test my skills and my palate. I roasted it on Sunday, another cold day, but managed to get it roasted three minutes faster than my previous batch, and happily locked it away waiting for it to out-gas and mature while I finished the Hambela. Today was my first cup of Guji, and I boy did it ever deliver the goods. The big notes that I remembered from the coffee were still there, slightly muted from their heights of peak freshness as they were. Still, it was deliciously reassuring to taste its bounty of flavors, from the pervasive limeade citrus note to the delicate floral sips as the cup cooled down, and an occasional-but-delicious strawberry fruitiness in-between. It was Good, and now I intend to roast down my burgeoning stores of green coffee and enjoy them while I still can. I even have two separate bags of Gesha to try out, which I look forward to roasting, and will do so as soon as I regain my roasting footage with a couple more batches. Stay thirsty and caffeinated, my friends!

@TowardsPanna

I usually avoid Keurig-like coffee in favor of tea or just water. But I would never say no to a properly brewed real coffee. I am not good enough to distinguish between the roasts but I appreciate the taste of it. I derive little benefit but taste from it - I can drink coffee late in the evening and sleep soundly, and I can drink it in the morning and feel nothing. I did feel some effects from Vietnamese coffee which is entirely different cup of drink, but for regular ones it's mostly for taste.

I'm a simple guy but for my money the moka pot makes a nice strong coffee that I can dump a bunch of milk into for something approaching a latte with espresso.

I have been settling for coffee straight from a Keurig.

Have only ever heard of Keurig in the context of it being some sort of scam on Bobos that milks customers through overpriced purchases of consumables. The Starbucks of coffee machines or something like that.

Yeah, that analogy checks out. IMAO what they are more than anything is convenient, but said convenience definitely comes with a price tag attached. I think these days that K-cups are over a dollar a pop when coming from a local grocery store, though the warehouse places like Costco, Sam's, BJ's, etc. will get you closer to .50 to .75 per cup, depending on brand, and below that for the house brands. So while the coffee might not be so fresh on the fourth or fifth cup from the good old automatic drip coffee maker, it'll be significantly less expensive.

Hmm. That's not that bad, assuming there's no subscription. Think marginal cost works out to about 25 cents per cup using an espresso machine and some of the fancier Arabica beans.

The problem is the combination of price and quality. You're paying between 2-4x more for far worse coffee. The net overall value difference between fresh ground drip and Keurig is at least 10x.

Say what you will about Nespresso, but at least the cups are nominally recyclable and it tastes decent.

Store brand "donut shop" coffee brewed in the finest whatever machine was cheapest last time the coffeemaker broke, strong and black and a couple hours too old, with a big scoop of Ovaltine in it. Chug that shit and feel your power level rise like Goku. Yeah motherfucker, you're not enjoying an artisinal craft, you're getting ready to start a 3AM shift overseeing a loading dock and you need the RAW POWER to SCREAM at people who probably don't know English until they admit that they do and stop fucking up.

People who have 3AM shifts typically drink energy drinks and because they're poor, they're not even sensible enough to settle for the store brand but instead spend 3x as much on branded ones.

You can hardly compare the caffeine levels.

Judging by the tales of Russian mandatory army service, you do not need a common language in order to get your point across.

I am in awe of your coffee game, fellow Mottizen. I can practically taste the bitter mochaltine flavor from here!

I have been settling for coffee straight from a Keurig.

I don't drink coffee at all, and my wife drinks instant coffee. I don't think you've been settling for anything at all.

No. No, no no. Don't excuse the Keurig use by @Muninn. It's a machine that exemplifies everything wrong about late-stage capitalism and the infantile American palate.

Just talking through it should be enough. Here's the "pitch": we're going to take a tiny, 9-gram dose of coffee and grind it to immediately start the process of decay. We're going to entomb it in a 3-gram amalgamation of aluminum and plastic - just enough to make sure nothing can be recycled, and packed full of air so idiotic consumers don't realize how much we're ripping them off.

We'll design machines with the lowest-grade plastic available, full of shiny surfaces that attract fingerprints. Each one a crime of industrial design: Debossed KEURIG front-and-center, pathetic blacks and greys, chunky cup holders that eat up so much vertical space that no meaningful drip dray can exist, and side-saddle water reservoirs to even destroy the tiny mercy of symmetry. No water filtration necessary! The algae growing in the poorly maintained office example should make it into every cup. While we're at it, let's spread that coffee dose around 3 different water sizes, spitting in the face of ratios, and make sure we only have one brewing temperature (Nuclear Hot) as insurance against someone tasting the slop we're pouring out. A scalded taste bud can be abused with impunity.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The coffee's bad enough, but there's a whole secondary ecosystem of "hot chocolate" and "apple cider" HFCS delivery systems that the underclass loves to puncture with those plastic needles, just to hasten the day they need to do the same with insulin and their skin.

I respect spooning instant coffee into the bottom of a mug 10,000x more than the animal self-cruelty of using the worst fast-coffee system ever devised.

You're absolutely right, of course, my choices have been inexcusable. I denounce myself!

Now I feel self-conscious, so I invite you to judge my own coffee-making procedure, which is roughly:

  • put coffee beans into blade grinder
  • grind
  • put grounds into French press
  • put 95 degree hot water into press
  • wait for a few minutes
  • depress press, pour coffee into mug
  • pour milk in straight from the bottle
  • drink

How much of a barbarian am I?

Unironically, this is fine. French Press is such a fantastic brewing method. Some points:

  • If you already have space taken up by a blade grinder, you might as well get a burr grinder. They never fall apart, and you'll get better flavor and the ability to do other brew methods if you want.
  • The only "snob" step you're missing here is the removal of the bitter crema crust at the top of your press before adding the top and plunging down. It's low effort, low yield, so totally optional.

Ah, well, that's good to know. I always thought I was a low-effort philistine because I have never owned a coffee machine and can't make espresso. But I'm glad that what I do, while tasting good to me, is nonetheless an acceptable way to make a cup of coffee according to people with higher standards than mine.

I have bad news… You may be French.

You're not wrong, Walter, but I'm doing a bit here, work with me!

I'm a basic bitch who goes to Starbucks twice a year and thinks the coffee was nice. I feel like a deaf person walking into a concert.

You say that, and I hear you, but believe it or not Starbucks is a significant gateway drug when it comes to the wider realm of craft coffee. And when I'm travelling and there's no good-looking craft coffee in the vicinity of my stay, it's nice when there's a nearby Starbucks and I can get a shot or four of their blonde espresso roast.

I thought the coffee haters would be for people that actually hate coffee, not people that like coffee enough to be picky about it.

I'm an actual coffee hater. I dislike bitter flavors. The cold brew coffee I drink I mask behind a vanilla creamer.

coffee hater
look inside
drinks cold brew

I felt like too much of a druggie taking caffeine pills. Tea doesn't have much flavor and certainly not enough caffeine. Downing enough soda or energy drinks to get my caffeine fix seemed much more unhealthy than coffee.

I buy cold brew from the store. Its just the least bitter coffee drink I've managed to find. And again, when im done with mixing things in, it barely tastes like coffee.

I thought the coffee haters would be for people that actually hate coffee, not people that like coffee enough to be picky about it.

Me too, but what do I know? I'm not a fan of the bitterness either, which is why, when left to my own devices, I prefer espresso and pour-overs.

I'm glad you found your way back to some Good coffee experiences!

I think @waffles brings up an important consideration: when coffee becomes a high volume routine it loses some of its luster, no matter how fine and fresh the whole beans may be.

I've been drinking too much coffee lately - turning it into some sort of crutch during the day, relying on it to boost my energy after working hard. Three strong cups a day is too much and my sleep has suffered as a result. I also haven't been able to pick out many subtle notes - and on that note!, I've wondered why the ground beans always smell much more intensely and complex right after grinding, compared to the finished liquid in the cup, which is much more muted and simple. Because of this I've included a stirring pin in my latest order. I will try to arrange the grounds properly before pouring, and then stirring while it infuses.

When the order arrives I'll be trying out what will be, by far, the most expensive home made coffee I've ever tried: Honduras Geisha. At almost 4.50 USD (eqv.) per 16g cup! In the meantime I'll try to reduce my tolerance a bit and improve my sleep by drinking a minimal amount of coffee.

Three strong cups a day is too much, and my sleep has suffered as a result.

I've been cutting out afternoon coffee while physically recovering to help sleep. I hate to say it, but it's a major upgrade. I've now compromised a bit and offer myself high-quality decaf in the afternoon. The state of the art here has changed, though it feels strange to pay drug-high-prices for the drug being removed (similar mental challenges with NA beer).

On one hand, sleeping well feels great. On the other, the pleasure of an afternoon coffee is one of life's greatest. It helps me keep workin' hard at the computer from 2:00 - 5:00 when my brain is already fried.

I will try out some decaffeinated (Swiss Water method) coffee soon. I expect it will give me some of the benefits of caffeinated coffee due to similar sensory stimuli/placebo.

I've been drinking too much coffee lately - turning it into some sort of crutch during the day, relying on it to boost my energy after working hard. Three strong cups a day is too much and my sleep has suffered as a result. I also haven't been able to pick out many subtle notes - and on that note!, I've wondered why the ground beans always smell much more intensely and complex right after grinding, compared to the finished liquid in the cup, which is much more muted and simple. Because of this I've included a stirring pin in my latest order. I will try to arrange the grounds properly before pouring, and then stirring while it infuses.

Yeah, that can definitely do it. At my own personal height of madness, I would have a shot of espresso in the morning, then head down to my local craft coffee shop to talk coffee and grab something from them, which could be a nitro cold brew, a pour-over, a "dialed in" (y'know, that fancypants mixture of steamed cold brew, coconut oil, and grass-fed butter), or even just another shot of espresso from them. This actually improved my palate overall, but it could give me sleep issues as well, which isn't saying much these days but still. COVID plus inflation killed them, alas, but I'm better off without all of that extra caffeine, even though I miss nerding out on coffee with the staff there.

On the ground beans part, brewing just doesn't extract all of that wonderful flavor and aroma that the act of grinding has just released from the bean. The idea behind espresso is actually to extract the maximum flavor from the bean while leaving the bitterness behind in the puck, and while it definitely produces the most intensely flavorful brew of all methods of making coffee, it can definitely blunt the more refined and delicate notes of a particular coffee, which is where pour-overs come in. Just about all of us who get way too into coffee end up preferring either espresso for flavor or pour-overs for the subtlety.

When the order arrives I'll be trying out what will be, by far, the most expensive home made coffee I've ever tried: Honduras Geisha. At almost 4.50 USD (eqv.) per 16g cup! In the meantime I'll try to reduce my tolerance a bit and improve my sleep by drinking a minimal amount of coffee.

Ooh, please share your experience with that once you've tried it a couple of times! I actually have three pounds of Guatemalan Gesha that I'll roast as soon as I'm confident in my roasting again, which will probably be a few weeks from now, but in the meantime I'd love to hear your opinion on it. Speaking of which, I'd be interested in hearing about whether or not the stirring pin makes a difference for you, if you wouldn't mind. Cheers!

Aha. I'd never learned the actual point of getting into espresso before now. That makes sense. I can see myself getting into it in the future, once (inshallah) I'm on a higher economic level.

Sleep was improved after limiting myself to one cup yesterday.

Will post an update in a few days on the Honduras bean.

I cannot compete with your purple prose, but I will share my relatively newfound experience with coffee.

I drank coffee semi-regularly in college, just the usual dining hall brew, but after a few bad experiences being sleep deprived in an industrial facility, I decided that eight hours of sleep was a much better option and swore off coffee for almost a decade.

One day, while browsing through Twitter (yes, it was still called Twitter at the time) I came across a post where a guy said that nearly everyone was using coffee incorrectly. Instead of waking up every day, drinking a cup, and heading to work, you should be drinking a cup on the weekend after a good night's rest, heading to the art museum, and enjoying those subtle psychoactive effects because you don't have a caffeine habit. That post completely reframed my perception toward coffee, and soon afterward I got myself a hand grinder, pour-over kit, and a bag of half-decent coffee beans.

These days I try to avoid drinking it more than once or twice a week. I found out that when I drink a full cup, at 7AM, I have trouble sleeping at night, so I have tuned it down to about 2/3rds of a cup.

I picked up a manual lever espresso maker over the holidays, and about two weeks ago I fired it up to make some espresso shots and flat whites. I will say that I have a lot of experimenting to do, as I'm still a bit inconsistent with the results. But the quantity of caffeine is just right, and I've been quite happy with the new toy.

Living in a fairly temperate climate, I am in one of the few parts of the world where I might be able to grow a coffee tree in my backyard. I learned the other day that it is not difficult to find sellers of live coffee plants on the internet. I am currently contemplating whether I should grow one of these magnificent plants in the garden!

Thanks for the kind words and for sharing your experience, pour-overs with fresh coffee are on a whole different level than regular automatic drip coffee! May I ask what kind of lever machine you're using? Espresso is actually my favorite way to enjoy coffee but my machine is ready for a full tear-down and a fresh set of gaskets, so I need to get going on that project now that I've done the deep cleaning on my roaster.

Growing one's own coffee would be amazing, though probably work intensive to get good coffee out of it. If you ever do so, please post about it here!

What machine do you have? I'll mention I replaced a ful set of gaskets in my Breville Dual Boiler last year. It took an hour or so, which I consider pretty great for a famously less repair-friendly machine. It's been chugging around now with some aftermarket upgrades for 6 years.

I've been using a La Pavoni Professional for the last several years, it's not terrible to take apart but I might be a little excessively concerned that I'm going to mess it up trying to pry the gaskets out of the grouphead, even though my rational brain knows it'll be fine. Never tried the Breville but I've heard really good things about them, and especially that dual boiler system.

I don't know a damn thing about hacking a Breville, but I'm curious as to what you'd hack on one. PID would be the obvious first stop, but doesn't the dual boiler have one in both the broiler and the grouphead?

The "upgrades" are trivial: A gasket/showerhead/holder set (the plastic holder fails very quickly on these) and a naked portafilter from Normcore. The dual boiler uses a 58mm grouphead, so the aftermarket is rich on that front.

I replaced all the internal gaskets as well, which was the job I talked about. One failed, and so I just went ahead and did the whole set. Very fiddly work but straighforward, the newest models all have upgraded maintainability (down to descaling).

If I become a cash millionaire, I'll sell it for something much more Italian and better looking, like yours.

Yeah, that makes sense, Breville just wasn't a Thing back when I was chugging along with a Rancilio Silvia and daydreaming about the one-armed bandit. NGL, said one-armed bandit was hands down one of the best scores that I ever made on an Amazon Warehouse deal back when they were actually deals and it was more common to get stuff that was better than advertised, if not NIB, instead of worse. That said, I did find the imperfection they had talked about by accident one day when I was cleaning it. Still, I regret nothing on that particular purchase!

I was looking into the various La Pavoni machines when I was searching for a lever espresso maker. They look gorgeous and must be a pleasure to use. If they made a scaled-down version I would've strongly considered getting one, but the capability of the machine was just too much for the occasional espresso drinker like myself.

They definitely live up (and down) to their reputation, I'll say that. The Europiccola is well night unusable IME, it barely had time to pull a shot before its thermal fuse kicked out. The Professional, OTOH, has been a dream in terms of maintaining steam/pressure, but finding the sweet spot in terms of tamp has always been tricksy for me in the sense that there's little wiggle room between a nice shot that requires some, but not too much, force to pull, and a shot that's a little too tightly packed and can't really be pulled at all! As you can imagine, that kind of workout hasn't been kind to the grouphead gaskets...

I ended up getting the Flair Go, mostly because the missus didn't want another device on the kitchen counter and this model folded into a neat package. It takes a few iterations to get the technique right, but so far I'm pretty satisfied with it.

I didn't like the idea of an automatic espresso maker, having to tear down the machine every so often for cleaning and replacing soft parts. Then again, I'm just cleaning the Flair Go every time I make espresso, so there's overhead involved either way. And I'm sure in 5-10 years the O-rings will wear out too, but that's probably a lot less difficult to replace than a typical consumer machine.

We will see whether coffea arabica ends up in my back yard! I need to level up on my gardening skills first, but it's certainly on my radar.

Cool, the Flair Go is a fascinating little machine, part of me wants to buy one for portable espresso but the other part of me is reminding me that the decision to just go with the flow and take the opportunity to check out the local scene was already made. Thing about an espresso machine in particular is that the pressure required for espresso is going to blow out the gaskets sooner or later, and next thing you know, your espresso is coming out the sides of the portafilter as well as from the portafilter and, well, you're ready to replace the gasket!

flair go

It's hilarious that this comes in a coffee pod version. Who is the target demographic for that?

How would you devise an MMORPG to hypothetically maximize for the most rewarding and positive social interactions and bonding? Some thoughts:

  • You want to make untrustworthy, treacherous, "defect-opting" player behavior as easy as possible. This is paradoxical, but knowing that players always have the option to backstab you (and be greatly rewarded for it) means that players are encouraged to form deeper than surface bonds. It wouldn’t be enough that a player has the correct stat or checks the OK box, you need to know him personally to trust him and to cooperate. The calculus would be that cooperation is only the best option in the longterm, whereas defection is the best option in the short-term (and abundantly so) and with no legible reputation-meter to check a person’s prior defections (easy name / face changes).

  • Similar to the above, add select highly-scarce player rewards that can only be obtained through longterm social trust. Dungeons in games like WoW do not require this level of trust, because they lacks the heavy punitive cost of trusting the wrong person, as Ninja Looting isn’t as simple as the olden days.

  • Cooperative questing where verbal call-outs are essential. This is something FPS games do pretty well, because the encounters are always unique so verbal call-outs are the only way to defeat enemies. In modern WoW it’s mostly following a pre-determined sequence of buttons.

  • More team mechanisms which show on-screen that the characters are benefitting each other. An animation for giving another player where you see something handed, with a happy rewarding jingle and expressions of kindness, an ornate healing animation, an animation for repairing, animations for rescuing, animations for pulling wounded teammates… this is a trivial way for hack our primate brains to sense greater bonds.

  • A group singing animation for buffs. Again, very primal, and very trivial to implement (keystrokes for notes).

  • Un-googleable (un-AIable) quest items, where you must find a limited amount of real players with the item and bargain with them to receive it by helping them with something. An algorithm can determine which player would be most aided by your particular class / race / profession.

  • Quest plotlines which articulate & extol brotherhood and camaraderie. Just a clever way to make us feel stronger bonds with other players (eg while questing with them, the quest plotlines themselves are showing great cooperations etc).

This was a fun aspect of vanilla WoW which afaik has died out in modern games. It’s a fun thought experiment.

I think the first point is wrong, gamers respond to incentives, and you need to worry about attracting the right people in the first place. And a game with betrayal mechanics will attract gamers that want to betray.

I think what is needed is downtime. A time and place for people to just talk and shoot the shit. Hopefully while doing something fun or productive feeling. Humans are naturally social creatures, they just need a space for it to happen.

Star Wars Galaxies nailed this community aspect in a way no other MMO has before or since. There were entire entertainer and doctor and crafter classes that didn't participate in combat at all. And because it was an entirely player-driven economy where almost every weapon and piece of armor and stat buff had to be crafted or traded between players, specialization and cooperation were heavily encouraged. I probably spent more time hanging out with people in cantinas and engaging in productive, mutually beneficial commerce than I did exploring or fighting.

EVE online was somewhat similar. Lot of activities in it were time gated and required you to be paying attention but didn't require you to actively do anything. So socializing with a group of people that were all paying attention was perfect.

FFXIV does most of these, excluding the ungooglable and (arguably) group singing, and sometimes by accident (ie, penalties for poor selection are less because of ninjaing, but more because there are many ways to exploit groups to get a token or get a second chance at a loot roll which will cost that group a lot because of how the raid system gives out chests). It's pretty good community-wise, though I think there's as much coming from how damn long the main story quest is rather than what extent it's powered by Friendship, and the twitchiness makes it hard for most groups to have conversations while playing higher-rank content.

I have bad news for you. Nearly every single one of those qualities existed in pre-WoW MMOs. It did not encourage rewarding and positive social interactions like you imagine it would. The flaw in all these "And then they'll have no choice but to develop deeper bonds and trust each other!" theories is that users can just start a new account. They might even have one account for griefing and another account for teamwork. They might swoop in with their griefing account in a coup de grace moment using insider information from their pro-social account. This was basically how I remember Ultima Online and Everquest playing like, and how Dark Age of Camelot looked watching some of my old LAN party buddies play.

There was a time in Dark Age of Camelot in particular that was brutal. I might get some of the details wrong, or maybe even have the wrong game entirely. Could have been Asheron's Call. But I think it was DAoC. There was some highly coveted spawn point that had a small percent chance to drop an extremely coveted rune that was essential to the game economy. The various guilds had basically agreed on a turn system so that access to the spawn point was distributed fairly, and enforced it vigorously. Any line jumpers or griefers became kill on sight to this alliance of guilds.

Anyways, my old LAN friends somehow managed to jump the line, murder the guild who's turn it was, steal the rune, and then somehow still frame the other guild as the guilty party. The consequences were quite dire for those poor bastards, and my friends gloated about it for the entire weekend.

No, people are rat bastards, and no amount of encouragement can get defect-bots to stop being defect-bots. Not in real life, and especially not in virtual worlds where you can just put on a new face effortlessly.

Not in real life, and especially not in virtual worlds where you can just put on a new face effortlessly.

I played a 'game' that had absolutely no rules (no pve zones, no group size limits, no spawn protection, no base protection etc) except for "don't hack or bribe admins" and ... while there were 'defect bots' they ended up on everyone's shit list, to the point you might get a reward if you found them and reported them to other players. And of course, bribing admins did happen a few times and there was even a touching occurrence when every sworn enemy in the game dropped the war they were fighting and united to keep eradicating a Chinese group of losers who were somehow related to then owners of the game and had an admin help them with cheats and cheated with impunity. The admin gave it up after the fourth time they rolled back a server for the group :D.

Defect bots, the ones who didn't quit the game in the end had a small group of their own, hated by everyone.

Didn't have anything to do with accounts, really. Lot of 'elite' players were perma-banned several times or because large groups were usually using duping exploits (and the biggest offenders got admin nuked) or had some idiot sell their stuff for real money, which often led to the entire group being deleted and permabanned. Which meant they had to spend $12 on serial keys and rebuild for a month with help of friends who escaped the ban.

Unless you were a known quantity (e.g. vouched for by someone trustworthy) only a fool would really trust you. Nobody would trust you with anything but most menial crap if you didn't use voice chat ofc.

people are rat bastards and no amount of encouragement can get defect-bots to stop being defect-bots

I have faith that that there are ways to do this… We just have to be very clever…

It's not exactly multiplayer in that sense, but I suggest taking a look at Death Stranding. The game's main theme is how cooperation is better than isolation, and the gameplay is tuned to deliver that message. When you first enter a region, the game forces you through a painful slog with pretty much no help from other players. Then slowly as you do deliveries for NPCs in the area the game allows more and more player built infrastructure in your game. When you use someone's infrastructure you can spam "likes" on it, which the creator of the infrastructure might see; those do essentially nothing (not completely but pretty much) except convey your gratitude. Eventually, you'll find yourself building roads or zipline networks through regions you don't have to stay in anymore because you just want to be helpful.

The first half of these are satisfied by games like DayZ and Escape from Tarkov. Tarkov is already sort of an MMO. Recently, Arc Raiders has added to the pile of games with Tarkov mechanics.

Oversimplifying the question, it really does have to be "great long term rewards are completely contingent on cooperating with others repeatedly."

Some mechanic like "if you successfully complete one dungeon with a given team, you can all choose to roll the rewards from the win into an 'investment' in the next dungeon run that will increase overall payout for the next success, and you can keep rolling those wins over until certain special items/top tier loot are available."

And then defection has to have a decent chance of severe and lasting punishment.

There is the paradox, though, when you have PvP games with Factions, the players want to fight other players, other factions, so you can't make your game too utopic or the fights won't happen, at least not as often as you'd like.

And on that note, the whole issue is that a game is (supposedly) optimizing for 'fun' for the players (and money for the devs) and players will have divergent ideas of what they find 'fun.' Many will find griefing others fun, some will find it fun to play a lone wolf, some just want to kill things. I don't know if its 'possible' to design the game from the ground up such that cooperation is consistently the most fun thing a player can do most of the time.

I've sometimes thought about game design where the factions aren't just different aesthetically or with different perks, weapons, powers, etc., but they are also different ideologically, in a way that is enforced by the game's code.

You can have the Capitalist faction where players are free to trade with their fellow players, enter contracts determining how to split loot in advance, and accumulate unlimited amounts of resources to yourself.

The Communists where there's an 'equality of outcome' mechanic so that everyone gets rewards divided up "according to their need" to equalize everyone's capabilities and wealth, and presumably a HARD cap (voted on by players) to the max wealth any one person can ever get.

Monarchists where all rewards belong to the 'King' and he bestows them as he prefers (unless deposed by an underling, I guess).

Fascists who can each control their own wealth but the wealth can be seized or a player 'executed' for the good of the faction.

Pure Democracy where every player gets a vote on every decision, and none are allowed to opt-out.

Gerontocracy where the most 'senior' players get to have outsized political and economic power.

Technocracy where players with the highest skills points in certain areas get to make all decisions regarding those areas.

Hell, have a Degenerate Gamblocracy where all loot and rewards are divided solely by games of chance.

I feel like there's probably a Minecraft mod out there that does something like this.

I would like to see this so we can measure which system is best for resource acquisition, development, and player enjoyment

Some of these seem very similar to EVE online?

This was exactly my thought, and the elements led to very emergent social situations. No dancing emotes needed, just severe financial consequences for leaving yourself open to being backstabbed etc.

Yeah and the Probe when you join corps (guilds)!

Wdym 'probe' ?

Because corp membership involves a decent amount of trust there's usually a thorough review of ones API keys to join any corporation worth anything.

It's humorously compared to a thorough colonoscopy.

API keys?

A way to look at player account information outside of the game. In EVE that means seeing income and spending, skills, and see in game messages etc.

Every character/account can export an API key that allows anyone to access things like in-game messages, what skills your character has trained and to which level, your previous employment history, your wallet transactions.

High end corp/alliances then run the data through some filters to flag risk factors. For example, they find some suspicious transactions to a character in an enemy corp.

Huh, that's neat. In Ark there was nothing like that, you had to just know people.

Scott's sort-of obituary for Scott Adams is one of the best things he's written in ages.

It’s the best his writing has been since the pandemic, but that’s because he’s writing on one of his favorite topics which is being mean to himself and his audience. The reason his writing declined elsewhere was that he was and hopefully is mostly happily and so didn’t really care to the same extent. Even a long past their best singer can put on a quality performance of their greatest hits.

He makes a few references to Adams' potentially getting too mentally calcified with age to maintain his contradictory ideals and personas and just lost self-awareness of what parts of the joke he was supposed to be 'in' on, and who was laughing with him vs. at him.

I now do wonder how Scott expects to avoid this particular outcome or if he's accepting it as probably baked in and just wants to make sure he leaves the greatest possible legacy he can, on top of his kids.

Great stuff though. One thing that deflated Adams' image in my mind was when the gorgeous Instagram model he married in 2020 divorced him about two years later. Like, if you're going to advertise as this professional persuasive hypnotist guru... and you can't 'persuade' the young hottie to stick around in your life for more than a couple years, I suggest that your skills are overstated. Indeed, this sure reads like he got hypnotized into a situation by some of the oldest persuasive tools in human history: a woman with an hourglass figure and decent makeup skills.

Think its fair to say that his overall impact has been positive by any utilitarian calculation.

if you're going to advertise as this professional persuasive hypnotist guru

I don't think he ever advertised himself as professional hypnotist. He did advertise himself as trained hypnotist, but that only requires one to pay for a training course and successfully sit through it. And I don't think he ever claimed he uses his training to convince women to sleep with him?

Indeed, this sure reads like he got hypnotized into a situation by some of the oldest persuasive tools in human history: a woman with an hourglass figure and decent makeup skills.

You are saying it like there's anything bad in it. I am a happily married man, but if I weren't, and I were 63, and a hot young lady, which I liked, were willing to live with me, I'd take any time I can get, be it two weeks, two months or two years.

just going to drop into this to note that hypnotism is a real thing with an actual evidence base, at the same time it doesn't really work like people think it does.

Right, but "take what you can get" is not the ethos he was trying to embody, I think.

"Follow all this advice and read my books and you too might be able to marry a hot single mother for a couple years" is not a massive selling point on its own.

I'm being a tad uncharitable, but I just find it interesting how Adams was able to maintain an image of his prowess that seemingly exceeded the reality of his capabilities.

I just have a larger amount of respect for Bill Watterson, who ALSO published a beloved, wildly popular comic strip. But he ended it while he was on top, disappeared from public life, does whatever it is he enjoys doing, and has eschewed any and all attempts to merchandise or monetize his characters (this appears wiser and wiser every year).

This gets towards Scott's other aside about various intellectuals who he seems to think have beclowned themselves in moving beyond the areas that they achieved their original insights and following.

Knowing when to exit before you crumble your own legacy is a talent very, very few exceptional people have achieved. Scott would like to be one of them, I'm sure.

"Follow all this advice and read my books and you too might be able to marry a hot single mother for a couple years" is not a massive selling point on its own.

I don't think he ever used his marriage as a selling point for his books, did he? That said, how many of the 63-year-old geeks who aren't billionaires actually get hot smart model pilot wife, even just for 2 years?

This gets towards Scott's other aside about various intellectuals who he seems to think have beclowned themselves in moving beyond the areas that they achieved their original insights and following.

I actually see no problem in that. Nobody owes anybody to be anybody's role model. If a person X is successful at something, and then they want to try something else, and fail miserably, they don't owe Scott or anything to live their lives in a way that would not diminish former success in Scott's or anybody's eyes. If he didn't want to live his "legacy" for the rest of his life, he has full right not to. He was his own man, and did not let anybody else - neither his "legacy", nor anybody else's needs - define what he's doing next. I find that laudable, even if he did not always succeed and sometimes looked ridiculous. That's the price one pays for trying things. It's not for everybody, but I can find no fault in Adams being one of the men who wanted to do that.

I don't think he ever used his marriage as a selling point for his books, did he?

In the way that any dude having a hot girl on his arm is using her as a 'selling point' just by showing her off, I'd argue.

I just recall a period of time where she was showing up in his posts with semi-regularity in a kind of "Look at what I got fuckers" context. Can only find this one piece of evidence left, though. Wait, here's another.

Nobody owes anybody to be anybody's role model.

Slight disagree, only insofar as someone who actively chooses to convey advice and represent themselves as a person worth emulating... you kind of do owe it to your audience to be very open about failures as well as successes.

Or if you don't care to advertise failure, don't seek the audience.

But that much I will 100% say: he never, ever did grift off his audience. No crypto schemes, no scammy seminars or conferences, no shilling for sketchy brands or gambling sites (that I recall).

(I'm not counting his failed entrepreneurship attempts as scams because part of the reason they failed is he plugged them earnestly.)

What Scott's obituary does seem to acknowledge is that Scott WAS living life on his terms, and there's beauty in that, but he argues he kind of let that get swept away when he got a taste of true 'influence.'

In the way that any dude having a hot girl on his arm is using her as a 'selling point' just by showing her off, I'd argue.

That's a very cynical point of view, but you can not really fault him for your perception. I mean, what, is he supposed to lock his wife up at home so you don't suspect him in "showing off"? I think this is going way too far.

you kind of do owe it to your audience to be very open about failures as well as successes.

I am not sure the guy who literally talks about "failing at almost everything" in a very title of his book is a good target to accuse of hiding his failures.

he kind of let that get swept away when he got a taste of true 'influence.'

I think there's a difference between a person who is willing to share his opinions - and let people be influenced by them, which is kind of the point of sharing them anyway, not? - and a person who must subject his whole life to forming some kind of heroic example for the followers. I don't think it is fair to demand from everybody who shared one's opinion publicly to become full-time role model.

That's a very cynical point of view,

My cynical point of view has an extremely good track record of predictions, sad to say.

I mean, what, is he supposed to lock his wife up at home so you don't suspect him in "showing off"?

Should he have? She ended up leaving him. His extant strategy clearly didn't work.

I don't think it is fair to demand from everybody who shared one's opinion publicly to become full-time role model.

For better or worse, he adopted that approach, near daily streaming and constant commentary on daily events

You could definitely pick WORSE role models, but I think he was happily putting himself out there in that regard.

My cynical point of view has an extremely good track record of predictions, sad to say.

Predictions of what? You can't know what Adams was actually thinking, so what exactly are you predicting and how would you verify this prediction?

For better or worse, he adopted that approach, near daily streaming and constant commentary on daily events

Anyone can do that. I have a blog. I put my opinions there (no, I won't link it here). People read it. If anybody would demand of me to do something to their liking because I owe them for being their role model, I will tell that person to stuff it. And also probably find a responsible adult to run their other life decisions by, because it's clearly not within their competencies.

There are literally millions of people putting shit on the internet all the time. So yes, Adams was one of them. So what?

You are saying it like there's anything bad in it.

I presume Adams had to pay her a significant settlement after the divorce. Perhaps the juice was worth the squeeze, but perhaps it wasn't.

Not for us to decide, for sure.

I now do wonder how Scott expects to avoid this particular outcome or if he's accepting it as probably baked in and just wants to make sure he leaves the greatest possible legacy he can, on top of his kids.

I don't know if you saw everyone on Twitter clowning on Scott's post about how he's lost complete control of his kids. I'm pretty sure Scott already fell into... whatever you call that outcome.

Scott used to write posts about how to positively manage the seething jealousy one feels while one's poly partner is out on a date. He's post-shame on personal topics.

Oh I saw it, I'm just not convinced it was a clear L for him.

There was some back-and-forth (particularly from Jeremy Kauffman) regarding how much actual discipline you can and should impose on your toddlers.

I doubt kids that have his genes will turn into uncontrollable feral monsters.

I doubt kids that have his genes will turn into uncontrollable feral monsters.

As someone who has to constantly push back on my wife's inability to have boundaries with our 6 year old, and all the attendant issues it causes, no amount of "genes" makes up for allowing your child to never be forced to respect boundaries. These are choices, and the wrong ones make your life infinitely worse.

Eh I don't know, his kids are what, 2? 6 and 2 are very different ages.

It got me thinking if I'll be able to. The number of highly respected boomers I loved who have calcified is high. It's difficult to think of those who stayed flexible, and the number can be displayed on a single hand.

Maybe the lesson is to line yourself up before 50, to make the glide onto the landing strip as graceful as possible.

The number of highly respected boomers I loved who have calcified is high.

It's not even boomers. I'm seeing people in their mid 40s that are gaining the befuddled NPC look that I usually associate with boomers. Take note incels, that's the real wall, and the men are in danger of smashing into it too.

As middle age is encroaching upon my never-escaped-the-90s flesh, this scares me so very much. I already have lots of stupid brain malfunction moments, with increasing frequency. Not sure if age, medical side-effect, chronic health condition, or lifestyle-related ... but the next time I try to use my work badge to unlock my house, and my house key to pay for lunch, I can only really hope it's not in the same day, at this point. I know that's not precisely what you're talking about, but it's closely enough related that I am reminded of one by the other.

Your working memory might be full of befuddling gunk under the surface. Start meditating every day.

Oh, you're just getting started on the fun, sonny. You've got so much to look forward to! Before you know it, your nose will run for no reason when you're eating, your grip will fail you every once in a while, you'll get sore so much more quickly when exerting yourself physically, your muscles and bones will creak and pop in new and freaky ways... it just keeps getting more interesting! Yes, you'll keep mixing things up, probably ever-more frequently, but it's when you stop noticing the mix-up that shit's getting real...

Yeah I'm seeing at least as much of this in the millenials I know -- at this point I think @beej67 is onto something with the egregores and feel compelled to treat some form of unconventional zombie apocalypse as a real possibility. There are pod-people all over the place.

My man, the oldest millennials are mid 40s.

I am aware -- the ones I know well are quite a lot younger though, being the [early] kids of my GenX friends.

One guy who just turned 30 is kind of pressuring me to start a compound and supply weapons in case Trump invades [somewhere pretty near to the butthole of] Canada -- it's strikingly similar to the Facebook-addled Boomers in my life, except he's actually got a lot to live for (decent job, good girlfriend, etc) and no excuse around senility.

The brainrot is real. I don't know how much of it is phones, short form content, people not reading anymore, microplastics clogging up our brains, metabolic dysfunction from shitty diets, or what.

I will say, reading more, eating better, exercising regularly and fasting has helped my mental clarity enormously.

I will say, reading more, eating better, exercising regularly and fasting has helped my mental clarity enormously.

IME, same. Doing any of these intentionally under normal conditions is really difficult. Luckily, AI makes researching options easier... something about what I said feels contradictory in context.

Maybe the lesson is to line yourself up before 50, to make the glide onto the landing strip as graceful as possible.

I think that's all you can do under current tech constraints.

lol now I'm wondering whether kids in the future will be dealing with a 120-year-old Bryan Johnson who can't accept future social rules b/c he's 'stuck' in the 2030s mentally, despite having the body of a 30-year-old.

For my case, I'm just trying to create habits now that seem to correlate with decent neuroplasticity later. Martial arts and hard exercise, learning languages, good quality sleep, and playing with kids and friends all seem to help.

If Bryan isn't a drooling senile mess at 120, then he's probably benefited from some kind of drug that rejuvenates the brain and restores neuroplasticity too. Taking LSD or shrooms helps with that today, even if it's not going to cure dementia.

This was a wonderful read, thank you for linking. This part had me feeling REAL called out:

The variety of self-hating nerd are too many to number. There are the nerds who go into psychology to prove that EQ is a real thing and IQ merely its pale pathetic shadow. There are the nerds who become super-woke and talk about how reason and objectivity are forms of white supremacy culture. There are the nerds who obsess over “embodiment” and “somatic therapy” and accuse everyone else of “living in their heads”. There are the nerds who deflect by becoming really into neurodiversity - “the interesting thing about my brain isn’t that I’m ‘smart’ or ‘rational’, it’s that I’m ADHDtistic, which is actually a weakness . . . but also secretly a strength!” There are the nerds who flirt with fascism because it idolizes men of action, and the nerds who convert to Christianity because it idolizes men of faith. There are the nerds who get really into Seeing Like A State, and how being into rationality and metrics and numbers is soooooo High Modernist, but as a Kegan Level Five Avatar they are far beyond such petty concerns. There are the nerds who redefine “nerd” as “person who likes Marvel movies” - having successfully gerrymandered themselves outside the category, they can go back to their impeccably-accurate statisticsblogging on educational outcomes, or their deep dives into anthropology and medieval mysticism, all while casting about them imprecations that of course nerds are loathsome scum who deserve to be bullied.

I disagree that those things originate from “reaction formation” against not being the smartest person. They are more easily explained by the general fact that humans get passionate about things they like and have a habit of exaggerating its importance. Somewhere out there is a surfer or painter or deadhead who never cared for intelligence yet believes his chosen hobby is the balm of mankind. That’s just what everyone does. If they have no intellectual pursuit, then this comes out in their consumer purchases or luxury experiences, as another way to obtain a sense of self-importance. This quote isn’t exactly fitting but as Pascal notes,

Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier's servant, a cook, and a porter brags and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them. Those who write against it want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it desire the glory of having read it. I who write this have perhaps this desire, and perhaps those who will read it…

As for those believing “nerds are loathsome scum who deserve to be bullied”, I’ve never actually seen this directed against anyone but those who like Marvel and Funkopops. Usually niche interest enjoyers have respect for other niche interest enjoyers. Scott’s implicit assumption appears to be that everyone who does not worship strict empirical rational inquiry is coping with not being the best at rationalism, which is quite the convenient line for someone who is the very face of rationalism. But EQ and embodiment are probably interesting things to get passionate about. If you don’t believe in EQ, you’ll have to explain why the smartest students in the world party on the weekend to rap music made by artists with a low IQ. This is my favorite example demonstrating EQ, becaus there are a lot of high IQ people who wish they could be rappers, but no one parties to their music on the weekends.

The bit just before that, man.

Every nerd who was the smartest kid in their high school goes to an appropriately-ranked college and realizes they’re nothing special. But also, once they go into some specific field they find that intellect, as versatile as it is, can only take them so far. And for someone who was told their whole childhood that they were going to cure cancer (alas, a real quote from my elementary school teacher), it’s a tough pill to swallow.

Reaction formation, where you replace a unbearable feeling with its exact opposite, is one of the all time great Freudian defense mechanisms. You may remember it from such classics as “rape victims fall in love with their rapist” or “secretly gay people become really homophobic”. So some percent of washed-up gifted kids compensate by really, really hating nerdiness, rationality, and the intellect.

Literally my course from high school valedictorian, to 85th percentile college student, to barely-above-average law student.

Then I kind of came back around by embracing the 'suck' and interrogating myself honestly about my 'shortcomings' and inflated self-expectations and calibrating my goals to what would be truly achievable (funny enough Slate Star Codex was a major influence in that period!).

Also, this line is an insanely deft cut to the jugular, holy cow.

Adams was willing to sacrifice everything for the right to say “It’s Okay To Be White”. I can’t help wondering what his life would have been like if he’d been equally willing to assert the okayness of the rest of his identity.

This sort of thing has always fascinated me as someone who always liked extremely nerdy things, but never really understood nerd culture.

There is some kind of subculture, especially in the United States, that is into a lot of the same things I'm into, but which seems to revolve around this massive wound (or dare I say trauma) that I just cannot relate to. There's some complex of experiences that includes being interested in dorky things, being smart, being academically successful, being bullied, simultaneously feeling contempt for and yet feeling intensely envious of jocks, etc., etc., that's wrapped up in being a 'nerd'. I have some of those things (I've played D&D, I built my own PC, I was academically successful, I'm smart, etc.) but not others (I was never bullied, I never felt particularly jealous of kids who were good at sports, etc.), and so my relation to American nerd culture is a combination of understanding what they're interested in, and also feeling like they're bizarre aliens.

I think this essay about Scott Adams is in the "bizarre aliens" category. It's close enough that I can tell that it's aiming sort of towards people like me, but then it flies straight past me, impales someone else, and I realise it was never aimed at me at all.

I grappled with my self-identification as a 'nerd' for a while before mostly just leaving it behind a while back.

I like nerdy things, and was unapologetic about this. But to identify as a 'nerd' meant making certain things a facet of my identity. Which made me uncomfortable because I was really just into these things because... I found them fun, challenging, and weird in a pleasant way. Tabletop gaming is an amazing social activity, and I don't find most sports to be compelling enough to follow, so not a surprise where I gravitated.

Like, okay, I'm into outer space, rockets and scifi, I am really into computers, I think the 'internet' as a technology is cool, and I like gadgets. I feel an affinity for hacker culture and I play video games as a hobby...

But I also don't feel a need to dump copious amounts of disposable income into proving my credentials and keeping up with 'fads'. Don't really treat it as a lifestyle that requires certain commitments to fit in and buying lots of CONSOOMER goods as a prerequisite.

Hmmm. Maybe that right there is the factor. I dislike the culture the instant it becomes a pure status competition, and the status climbing becomes the point more than the factors that made it an attractive, enjoyable collection of shared interests.

Something something Geeks MOPS Sociopaths.

Yes, the conclusion that I've come to is basically just to like what I like, and to not make what I like an identity. It's like the difference between playing video games (which I do) and being a gamer (which I do not consider myself). I play tabletop role-playing games, and I enjoy them, and that's enough. The closest I come to 'identifying' as a nerd now is that sometimes, in a social context, I'll say that I have some nerdy hobbies with a self-deprecating laugh.

But I'm not the things I enjoy. Nor should anyone be. And I find there's something very liberating in just deciding that you don't care what the things you like say about you, and just settling for liking the things that bring you joy.

I can’t help wondering what his life would have been like if he’d been equally willing to assert the okayness of the rest of his identity.

I wonder what is the rest? "It's OK to be male" probably would get him cancelled as fast, and the label of misogynist is arguably even worse than "racist" - the latter gets you hated, but the former gets you despised. "It's OK to be a nerd"? But what does it mean? Some nerds are billionaires ruling the world now. Others are a caricature in a popular TV show. Others made a deep dive into various stuff Scott enumerated so eloquently. Which one is it OK to be?

But i think Adams never doubted that it's OK to be Scott Adams. His whole life, and his whole public persona, is a testament to that.

"Its okay to be a mediocre businessman."

"Its okay to be childless."

"Its okay to have a singular crowning achievement that defines your success."

Its specifically the non-spectacular aspects of himself that he seemed to want to avoid acknowledging.

I think he wrote quite a lot of his business failures. What he was probably not ok with is for his success as a cartoonist defining him for the rest of his life, but I don't think it's a bad thing. I think on the contrary, looking for being something more is what made him interesting. Yes, he failed a lot, but so what? I think him keeping at it means that's what defined his identity more than anything, and him not accepting "stick to drawing comics, monkey brain" is actually much more part of his real identity, as he saw it.

What he was probably not ok with is for his success as a cartoonist defining him for the rest of his life

Hence why I find myself with quite a bit more respect for Bill Watterson.

Go out on top, then do things you want to do without the eye of the public following you everywhere.

I guess I disagree. I mean it's a fine choice, but the other choice - choosing to do different things, even if they might be not as successful as things you've done before, and being OK with that, even in public - is fine too.

Every nerd who was the smartest kid in their high school goes to an appropriately-ranked college and realizes they’re nothing special. But also, once they go into some specific field they find that intellect, as versatile as it is, can only take them so far. And for someone who was told their whole childhood that they were going to cure cancer (alas, a real quote from my elementary school teacher), it’s a tough pill to swallow.

Man, I am so profoundly lucky I had two teachers that I think changed my life.

The first was my middle school social studies teacher. In the mid 1990's she had finished her service in the Navy or Army, I can't remember, and become a teacher. She was black pilled as fuck about the future of the country and constantly told us we weren't going to have it as easy as our boomer parents. For whatever reason it made a deep impression on me and I adjusted my expectations accordingly.

The second was my high school calculus teacher. I slept through his class and consistently got top scores. He wrote me a whole ass page long note on the back of one of my tests, because I was never awake in class for him to talk to. It was all about how he'd seen kids like me before, who were never properly challenged and developed poor study habits. That if I didn't reform my ways, I'd either flunk out of college or flounder professionally. Coming from any other teacher, I probably would have blown off the advice. But he always had my back, and generally had an attitude of "If he gets A's, he can sleep through class if he wants" with me. His message of support, but concern, resonated deeper than 12 years of just having teachers yell at me to get my shit together.

Because there is this really toxic part of nerd culture, where the motto is "Work smarter, not harder". But then they melt down in seething rage when someone works smart and hard and utterly mogs them on their own turf.

It was all about how he'd seen kids like me before, who were never properly challenged and developed poor study habits. That if I didn't reform my ways, I'd either flunk out of college or flounder professionally.

I could have used one of those. Mostly for the wakeup call of "everything is intuitive and easy for your now because the training wheels are on, and your intelligence is covering for your shortcomings in discipline and work ethic."

Law School was the clear inflection point there. Turns out you CAN pass tests by pulling all-nighters to cram the entirety of the coursework the day before the Exam. But when you're graded against people with more consistent habits and effective strategies, you can only hope to keep pace by sheer desperate improvisation.

I didn't really learn the right lesson, though.

This period:

came back around by embracing the 'suck' and interrogating myself honestly about my 'shortcomings' and inflated self-expectations and worked on calibrating my goals to what would be truly achievable

Was when I finally got on the right track.

"Work smarter, not harder". But then they melt down in seething rage when someone works smart and hard and utterly mogs them on their own turf.

lol. "I'm not lazy, I'm just more productive with the time I DO use for work."

"Ookay, well I'm approximately as productive as you with my time, and I spend more of it working... what now?"

That said, the extreme other end of that mentality is the "Sigma Male Grindset" approach where effort is all that matters, whether that effort is spent on something useful and important? Who cares! Getting paid is the only metric that registers.

Thankfully I now have a boss who tolerates my quirks well enough as long as I close enough files to keep the cash flowing.

Tagging @WhiningCoil since this is an appropriate response to his comment as well.

This is what I call "Smartest Motherfucker in the Room" syndrome. I think law school does this to a lot of smart people because they spend three years arguing edge cases with professors who do nothing but theorize in edge cases and when they get into the field they realize that edge cases are rare and that most cases are fairly routine. Compounding this is that most of the work is looking through documents and doing a lot of writing. I think the drive is that these people are constantly looking for opportunities to prove to the bosses how smart they are, while the bosses are looking for people to, you know, get the work done. They constantly bitch about how tedious the work is and are always planning an exit strategy, thinking that if only they worked for a firm with better management or a in different practice area that was more exciting they'd be happier. I give them that name because they seem to forget that they were hired to do actual work, not to be the smartest motherfucker in the room.

On the other end of the spectrum are the people who don't necessarily hate their jobs, and maybe even like their jobs, but have them down to such a routine that they don't want to do anything to rock the boat. These people tend to be reluctant to ask the bosses for advice or bring up their ideas to them. They are significantly less annoying and last a lot longer than the smartest motherfuckers in the room, but they tend to get pissed when they are passed over for promotions by people whom they perceive as lower on the totem pole, usually by virtue of how long they've been with the company.

They're basically two sides of the same coin: The gifted kid who gets As without studying on the one hand, and the overachiever whose grade is a one to one reflection of the work put into it on the other. The gifted kid balks when he finds out that homework is a big part of the grade, not based on its quality but on the fact that it was done, and the overachiever balks when he finds out that 8 hours of consistent studying might not result in an A. The most successful attorneys I know are the ones who embrace the drudgery, not because it's a necessary evil but because it's part of the job, and nonetheless aren't afraid to be the smartest motherfucker in the room if the situation presents itself.

The best part of my job is that I have significant autonomy to select the clients I accept. And if one of them has an "interesting" legal problem to solve and they are willing to pay for the work, I can take on those jobs to keep things fresh.

Thats how I became probably a top 10 expert in a very particular area of Florida construction law.

The drudgery pays the bills, the occasional novel matter keeps me from bashing my head in.

Embrace the suck. Then you'll have more power to achieve success on your own terms.

Yeah, I felt very attacked by that passage.

IMHO it's not one of the best things he's written in recent years (I'd put Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know and Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know above it, for the research), but it is his best writing in recent years.


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