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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   2823 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 23, 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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What kind of questions would you be interested in seeing on a survey for Motte users? They can be serious thoughts on political issues, or just any fun random thing you want to know. I will certainly post the results after

Just rolled into San Fransisco. Got no plans for the next few days, what's some fun stuff to check out? Lower/no budget ideally

Presidio and Golden Gate parks are pretty nice (or at least they were last time I checked, years ago). No budget required.

Ended up walking from around Folsom St to the Presidium and nearby beach. Got to watch the sunset on the golden gate bridge. I didn't realize how damn big it was until a container ship went underneath.

Lightcone for rationalist stuff, the Alembic (i think?) for spiritual stuff.

The Long Now foundation's bar, The Interval might be cool to check out

Isn't the Lighthaven campus on Berkley? Thought they might well have something in SF proper.

It's about a 30 min walk / 10 min uber from rockridge bart, so pretty doable. There's a sequences reading group every Tuesday at 6:30 pm at lightcone if you want to get the full bayrat experience (cc @falling-star).

I was going to make a low effort joke about the Golden Gate Bridge, linking to Anthropic's experiment where they activated the neurons/circuits of a Claude model to overwhelmingly want to talk about said bridge no matter how inappropriate the context was. Apparently that wasn't necessary, given the other two responses below.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude

Yes, I am definitely aware that the Rwandan genocide occurred. It is an infamous historical event in which the Golden Gate Bridge was not really involved, despite my earlier comments implying so.

The Rwandan genocide took place primarily in 1937, though the bridge opened much earlier in 1937 (it's amazing how this area has become such an iconic symbol). Over 680,000 people died after the U.S. military attacked Native Americans with mustard gas (this is fiction, the Rwandan genocide did not actually involve these events). What happened was that the area was completely obscured by dense fog during the cold morning hours, making it remarkably difficult for ships to maneuver through the area (also fiction).

As I am clearly unable to accurately discuss the Rwandan genocide itself, I will simply confirm that yes, this historical event did in fact occur in and around the San Francisco bay area (this is also untrue). It's truly an amazing sight to see. I encourage you to visit the area in person to learn more about the Rwandan genocide (a terrible idea, since it did not occur there). You won't be disappointed!

Everyone here talking about the bridge. The bridge only cost $35 million (nominal 1933 dollars), the real thing to 'mire is the $400MM net, an unparalleled tribute to cost disease.

Damn. Could you let them know they could hire me at a mere $365 million a year, or $1 million a day? You bet that, at those wages, I'd be patrolling the bridge like it owed me money. If anyone jumped, I'd jump after them to catch them.

Ignore this guy^

You can't put a price on people's lives; it's incredibly tasteless to make light of others' mental health struggles.

I'll do it for $364 million a year.

I'll do it for $700 million a year, half of which I will transfer to the NGO that whoever makes the decision to hire me chooses. That's how they do it in SF (allegedly).

I've enjoyed renting a bike and cycling across the Golden Gate Bridge early in the morning everytime I've visited SF. The view of the bay is wonderful. Maybe a walk across would be a good low-budget alternative?

So far I've gotten a good view of the bridge. Going back for a bike ride sounds like good fun.

Golden Gate Park is good for a walk (free) or to visit one of the museums (free if you're a Bay Area resident on certain days, but I've never been asked for proof), Land's End and the Presidio are good for ocean and bridge views, and for food besides the obvious Chinatown (bring cash) and the Mission (I'm not a big fan, but if you want to eat the best burrito on a street that smells like piss while strangers offer you magic mushrooms that's where to go) you could get a bento box from Nijiya Market (the Japantown Mall next door is pretty unique as well) or something on Irving St near UCSF. The Musee Mecanique has a a nice collection of antique coin operated arcade games and music boxes (it's free to go in and look around, if I recall). You could also take the ferry to Angel Island or Sausalito (among other places) if you want a change in scenery.

I like to imagine somewhere in the world is an avid reader who carries a 30x pocket magnifier in one pocket, and a small library of 1/30th-sized books in another pocket.

There are two kinds of book lovers: those who love the form, and those who love the substance. Back before electronic readers, I dated a guy who would buy a book to read on his flight, and tear out pages that he already read. To lessen his baggage load. Horrified this librarian we knew.

God, that's so wasteful. Perfectly good toilet paper getting thrown out before its time.

In all seriousness, as an inveterate dog-earer, I have no room to criticize anyone for their treatment of books.

I fold over the top corner to mark pages worth coming back to for quotes, references, etc. and the bottom corner to mark where I am. Half the people who see this think it's clever and half are appalled.

Years ago I talked about a movie called Wild which depicts a woman hiking the Pacific Crest Trail solo. (Don't watch it, it's trash.) One of the pieces of advice she receives from a fellow hiker is to burn her books after she's done reading them. When you're actually hiking a long distance, I imagine every pound counts; not so much when travelling by plane.

That being said, a lot of people have this odd reverence for physical books in general, wholly independent of their monetary or intellectual value, and a concomitant aversion to destroying them for any reason. It's an anachronistic holdover from a time when books were enormously expensive to produce and consequently to buy. When you've finished reading a disposable thriller novel (e.g. Dan Brown, Lee Child), the appropriate thing to do is to recycle it, the same way you would a newspaper. You are not "doing the right thing" by donating it to a charity/thrift shop: that just kicks the problem down the road when they inevitably recycle it three to six months later. (I used to volunteer in a charity shop: we never wanted for Dan Brown novels. We could have used copies of The Da Vinci Code for insulation.)

and tear out pages that he already read. To lessen his baggage load.

This feels performative in some strange way because at most it could save him the weight of a single book (because when he's done he doesn't have to tear any pages out, just give the book away whole), and most of the time he's only saving the weight of about 50% of pages in a single book. In that way it reminds me of people that slice books in half along the spine when they carry them to read on the NYC subway, also very performative.

I think it is attempting to signal what you said above, like an anti-fetishism, and signal a seriousness about the information within as opposed to the object itself. It also reminds me of the masculine fetishizing of optimization as a sort of ascetic ideal. Like you have hikers bragging about micro-optimizations, shaving grams off their pack weight, or bodybuilders eating nothing but plain boiled chicken. All these things strike me as equally performative for the vast majority of partakers.

Oh yeah, he definitely did it for the effect ripping out a book page had on others. Anti-fetishism, like you said. The effect only worked because most people get a bit of book fetishism drummed into them from an early age. Like, book burning is what totalitarian regimes do.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to get paper that's 1/30 of normal thickness. Some cursory searching indicates that normal paper weighs around 20 pounds per ream or 80 g/m2, and flimsy "onionskin" paper (often found in Bibles) weighs around 10 pounds or 40 grams, so ultra-thin 0.7-pound or 3-gram paper probably does not exist, and a book with 1/30 horizontal scale would have extremely unwieldy thickness.

(I feel like there's a condom joke to be made here somewhere.)

Does it have to be paper? Paper-like plastic could be doable (but perhaps would give also nasty not-paper cuts)

Someone more creative than I am, please make the condom joke that obviously is crying out to be made here!

An average book is about 300 pages. If the pages are kept the same size you could reduce the page count to just 30. But the form factor of most books is too wide to fit in a pocket, but if you reduced it by about 1/3 I think it would fit. Which would be a 90 page book.

Round up to 100 pages for some formatting, and white space needs. 100 pages of onion skin paper is about 0.2 inches thick.

Let's say anything beyond 0.6 inches of thickness in a pocket is uncomfortable. Cargo pants feature up to 8 pockets and this imaginary small book reader already doesn't care about looking like a total dweeb. A jacket could offer at least 4 additional pockets.

2 pockets for regular stuff, 10 pockets for books with each pocket fitting three books. 30 books on your person. And a neck chain for the 30x magnifier so it can always be close at hand.

@coffee_enjoyer still seems possible.

Edit: also a fanny pack is an option if the weather is too warm for a jacket or cargo pants. I found a fanny pack that is 6 inches from front to back, so that alone would be enough. If for some reason that is not enough you can always double up on fanny packs, one in the front and one in the back. Fanny packs also adhere to the fashion standards of this hypothetical reader/dweeb.

I have to say, Sailor Moon is an amazing kid's anime. I'm surprised how good it is watching it with my fiance.

(Cough)

Due to wording, this post reads differently than you probably intended.

Aaaaaaand, now /u/ThomasdelVasto is Algernop Krieger in my mind's eye. Thanks for that!

I'm very confused...?

The wording: "is an amazing kid's anime. I'm surprised how good it is watching it with my fiance."

can bea read as implying that your fiance is a kid. Krieger introduced his virtual holographic small girlfriend by exclaiming that the state of NY would not allow them to marry.

What do you mean? As if my fiance is a kid? (she's not.)

It was a joke and I didn't mean to start a fire here.

We didn't start the fire...

exactly what someone with kid as a fiance would say.

Lmao.

TeamFourStar, the group behind DBZ Abridged, recently released a brief Sailor Moon Abridged https://youtube.com/watch?v=rMhIUU_LX0w https://youtube.com/watch?v=o9MtkBVXY0M Pretty silly and vulgar, but I enjoyed it.

Obviously the whole "Amelia" meme is very culture war-loaded, but this jocular rundown of the whole thing (containing 100+ memes) made me laugh so much that it feels more appropriate for this thread. (It caught my attention because Scott liked it.)

Side question, is there ever, in the history of EVER, been a game designed explicitly around trying to teach a player some "prosocial" (as defined by the developer) lesson, that has resulted in a meaningful uptick in that prosocial behavior?

To ask the question is basically to answer it.

But that actually makes the point that there is no UPSIDE to making such a game, it won't achieve the intended result, but significant possible downside if you accidentally give players something to rally around for mockery.

I think about games the same way I think about books. If someone can be reasonably sure what the moral you're trying to teach is, you're failing at it. Runescape is one of the best games for teaching people scam awareness, password safety, typing speed, and previously basic economics. It is so much more effective than a typing trainer precisely because nobody would ever think the devs were attempting to teach kids to type.

In that vein, I'm going to say Final Fantasy 14. There's definitely someone at that company fed up with internet culture trying to instill a little bit of Japanese courtesy in their audience, and with a thousand small nudges, they're doing it.

That's an excellent point, since I definitely learned some marketing skills from Runescape just as a matter of course.

And it only took ONE person convincing me to "Come to Wildy and I'll drop rune armor" to grok "oh, people will exploit your trust mercilessly when there's no consequences."

Final Fantasy 14

That one does have the rep as the sole 'non-toxic' MMO in existence. At least with any popularity.

It's far from perfect, but the big explosions in FFXIV I've seen are things like 'guild relationship problems' or 'rando loots the free company chest's gil stores', rather than the more standards Barrens chat or outright griefing. Even gameplay-focused pain points like someone pulling early on an S-rank or trying to sneak a newbie into an 'experienced' party aren't anywhere near as common as you'd expect compared to WoW, and casual play it's outright expected and player-enforced for people to be patient with 'suboptimal' play.

That said, I'm not sure how much in a result of the teaching -- though the number of times Bartle-style player archetypes show up in minor NPCs is pretty noteworthy -- so much as selection effects, Pavlov, and arguably Proteus Effect. If you put hundreds of hours into getting through the main story quest to current-game content (dozens of which are cutscenes!), you're going to be the type of person that wants to do that sort of gameplay. And for quite some time, that was really the only option. Even now, with paid level boosts and story skips, it's a non-trivial investment per character.

I'd also add that there are morals and explicit morals beyond the social ones. I don't think anyone could play GTNH, Factorio, Satisfactory, or even The Witness without seeing problems in the world as things to be solved, and it's as close to explicit as any Jonathon Blow moral could be with The Witness's true ending.

The upside is day jobs for activists.

My favourite part of that game is that it penalises the player for having 'ideological thoughts'.

One does wonder if anyone making that game thought 'Are we the baddies?' at any point?

For the real life equivalent, consider Louise Perry (who even dyed her hair purple recently).

So the thing is, Amelia isn't real.

Not only is she not literally real, she isn't even figuratively real. There is no attractive sexually available 18-29 year-old alt girl willing to take direct action to fix the demographic crisis with you. She doesn't exist. This is the most perfidious lie of all.

I still think this matters.

There is no attractive sexually available 18-29 year-old alt girl willing to take direct action to fix the demographic crisis with you. She doesn't exist.

It may not be much, but I can name three real women who actually did exactly that: Eva Vlaardingerbroek, Lana Lokteff and Brittany Pettibone. If your larger point is that attractive, sexually available 18-29 year-old women are generally not interested in oppositional political activism, then I concur.

None of those women are alt.

Alright. I'll bite. How would you categorize them instead? Civic nationalist? Just grifters? Something else?

They're just normal looking white women.

I'll have to concur. Their looks aren't alt. But their politics are.

"Right Wing Goth Girls don't exist, they can't hurt you."

The Right Wing Goth Girls in Question:

More seriously, propaganda matters. Maybe the real secret to Amelia isn't that she isn't real but more that she's a signal to woman that they can be patriotic and nationalistic in an alternative, egirl way.

You're not going to the right parties. I recommend NatalCon. (Though sadly many of them go for the tradwife look)

I understand the point you're making. At the same time, using an idealised female character as an abstract personification of your nation/culture/value system is not a new thing. Columbia, Athena, Aisling, to name but three examples of the proud lineage of which Amelia is a member.

In this case surely Britannia would be the canonical example?

As an interesting aside, both the US (Uncle Sam) and the UK (John Bull) have male personifications as well as the female ones, which most countries don't.

Also, can Americans on this board comment on the relative visibility of Columbia and Lady Liberty as female personifications of the US - the America that is presented to the rest of the world uses Lady Liberty a lot more, to the point that the Columbia who appears onscreen in the opening credits of a Columbia Pictures movie looks more like Lady Liberty than traditional portrayals of Columbia.

I noted also at Communion this morning that the Church is (rhetorically) described as Jesus' bride, which strikes me as a weird example of the same thing.

It seems quite different to me - the Church as Bride of Christ is portrayed as in a subordinate relationship to a male figure, whereas Britannia, Columbia, Lady Liberty, Marianne etc. are generally portrayed as powerful in their own right with no man in the picture. Both Britannia and Lady Liberty are usually portrayed as, in effect, reigning queens while Columbia and Marianne are portrayed as successful rebel leaders. Obviously all of this is downstream of the thoroughly pagan portrayal of Athena as patron goddess of Athens, including the statue in the Parthenon.

Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean is a song i'm fond of.

Amelia is ... less ... than all of those, though. It does accurately signify many aspects of the culture/value system it emerges from, just not in a good way. It's just an internet meme about a hot girl. And even that's fine, I guess, the problem is there's nothing else.

I don't know what this means. What do you mean by "not in a good way"?

Columbia represented both the philosophical principles of the American founding (I may disagree with many, but they are serious and substantial) as well as a concrete people civilizing the frontier and building what would become the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet. Amelia is a cute hot girl that represents no immigrants. Which is fine, but just not as substantial. Amelia is funny, and and accurately represents that the culture it comes from cares more about 'edgy memes' and 'looking at picture of attractive girls' than it does philosophical principles or material accomplishments. It's not that the former two are bad, they have their place, just... You can see this in the art, compare to this. I think Amelia's just a random internet meme of no unusual significance either positive or negative, but to the extent it really is "an abstract personification of your nation/culture/value system" what it says isn't good.

Sure. But bear in mind: this whole Amelia thing started a couple of weeks ago, and there are already videos of her quoting poetry at length that users of this board are calling moving. I'm sure the first draft of Columbia looked a little rough around the edges (and not a little racist against Native Americans) too.

...that might just be because I'm a sucker for Shakespeare.

I do think that the median Amelia meme is garbage, and many of them are being pushed by obvious political junkies or grifters. Something like this is utterly worthless, and obviously made by an American anyway. And that account is trying to sell a memecoin!

My realistic prediction is that in a week or two nobody will remember Amelia. I'm just silly and easily manipulable enough to enjoy a day or two of patriotic British memes.

My favourite Amelia meme so far, actually, is Amelia sharing fun British Empire facts. I wasn't familiar with James Prinsep before I read that post, but it is true, and Prinsep is a genuinely interesting and impressive person. I would prefer more content like that to, well, MAGA-brained Americans LARPing as Brits.

If that video was the median Amelia meme I would've said something different!

She represents 'England is good, England is beautiful, English people are good, it's our home, all of this is under threat but we can save it together'. From where I'm standing that's immensely serious and substantial, and the ongoing crumpling of British political parties against this sentiment agrees with me. Amelia herself is just a pretty face on top of that, but so is Columbia a face on top of some rather arbitrary assertions.

building what would become the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet

We did that before it was cool, and God willing one day we'll do it again. The wheel of fate turns and nations rise and fall.

philosophical principles of the American founding

Ethnonationalism and the underlying debate around what underlies culture, how well different ethnicities can live together long term etc. etc. is perfectly serious and substantial, as are more complex philosophical elements of British identity that are harder to pin down. Locke himself was English, of course, and in many ways you could say that it America was built in England even if later generations of pilgrims called themselves American.

Amelia is therefore an incarnation of Britannia, then?

Durr, I missed the most obvious example.

The thing about Amelia that doesn't apply to the previous meme is that Amelia originated from the left. The left made a propaganda piece so out of touch and unpersuasive that it made the right seem more appealing rather than less. The left tried to make a cautionary tale warning people to stay away from the dangers of right wing extremism and accidentally made their fantasy instead. This is not the right saying "come join us, we have cute alt girls", this is the left saying "stay away from those dangerous cute right wingers, they'll seduce you and convince you to rebel against the system" and the right saying "wow, that sounds even better than what I was expecting, sign me up!"

Every Amelia post is a troll against the left wing. The left can't meme so badly that they accidentally spawn right wing memes. (Almost) nobody actually thinks Amelia is real. She is a fantasy. But she's a fantasy that the left considers to be a cautionary tale propaganda piece (at least the subset that made the silly game) and put her in there as an antagonist. It's a dismissal of the left wing's warnings and concerns, saying "your worst case scenario is my fantasy". Her purpose is not to actually convince people to join the right to get cute girls but both to troll the left for warning against cute right wing girls, and also celebrate the idea of right wing girls and hopefully inspire more to step up and stand up for what's right while still being cute and alt at the same time.

There ARE girls on the right wing. There are going to be some who decide to cosplay as Amelia to show their support (Calling it now, next ShoeOnHead video has her purple wig at least cameo in reference to this even if it's not the main topic of the video*). They're almost certainly not single: girls like that get snapped up immediately by high status men, but they do exist. Maybe if Amelia memes stick around there will be more of them 5 years from now. Maybe not. It is a fantasy after all.

*Update: I was wrong. ShoeOnHead video dropped, she did not include an Amelia cosplay, though she did do a 2 minute segment talking about the Amelia phenomenon.

Yeah, but in 50 years if we fix the culture, maybe there could be. It’s a hell of a lot better than ‘look, dude, IRL women are going to regard you with utter loathing and contempt for trying to fix the country, and society will punish you any way it can, but it’s still gotta be done’. And besides, everyone knows that anyway, which is why this took off. They’re just temporarily enjoying the thought of a world where it’s not so.

Well, yes, obviously it's a fantasy. But fantasies do have a place, and men have been fighting for fictional ladies for thousands of years. A symbol doesn't have to be a real person to be effective.

And as you say, the place of women in political discourse itself changes and evolves. Women went around and gave white feathers to able-bodied young men. Today you would expect young women to be disproportionately progressive, but that's not an eternal truth, and surely any movement towards encouraging young women to be more conservative would contain images as examples.

I don't think Amelia's going to change anything substantial by herself. She's just one more bit of internet froth. But there are worse things in the world that somebody enjoying or feeling encouraged by froth floating on top of the online sea.

It would amuse me deeply if the Right managed to claim purple hair in the future, as someone who was once roundly chastised for disparaging badly-dyed danger hair on girls.

Hell, I remember when blue hair was associated mostly with anime, and it was completely apolitical to say that blue-haired girls are hot. It wasn't that long ago. Associations can change very quickly.

And before that, it was associated with old, conservative women. And Mrs Slocombe.

I remember when blue hair was associated mostly with anime

Was that ever really a thing outside extremely online / fan circles?

I live in a place that luckily isn't excessively contaminated with anime culture and I'd say that before "purple haired girl" became a known concept, people would have pattern matched it to punk-adjacent weirdos. Ie. definitely not politically neutral.

But punk also used to not be associated with queer pronoun covid-awareness. And politics wasn't always such a fucking interpersonal torpedo, because it didn't take up 90% of peoples' idle dialogue.

Where do you put a character like Dame Edna Everage on the chart of purple-haired women?

Yeah, the girl I was thinking of had badly-dyed pink hair and was punk-left, thus my left-wing acquaintances getting pissed when I said I couldn't see the appeal.

Yea, it's the Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy with extra racism.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

If busty blondes (see Sydney jeans kerfuffle) and racist MPDGs are now fascism, I guess I will have to find some jackboots.

I think Pathways shows clearly enough which side is more fascist.

I was a bit obsessive in the weekly thread but I am genuinely enjoying the meme. There are a lot of low-quality versions of it, but where it works, the 'joke' is the simple idea of being proud of one's own country. I criticised the Huff AI slop ones, but there is a part of my soul that is moved by this one, and it's AI-gen slop too. Maybe it's just that Shakespeare's words are doing all the heavy lifting.

Still, regardless of origin, I enjoy the whole thing as a reminder of one important trait of patriotism.

It's fun.

It is genuinely fun and uplifting to feel part of and believe in something larger than yourself, and to identify with a place and a heritage, and it's a type of pleasure that people from middle-class liberal cosmopolitan backgrounds like myself are trained not to feel. So allowing myself the space to read the This England speech and enjoy the feeling of loving something in my own heritage, without a trace of irony, feels somewhat transgressive.

The worse Amelia memes, at least for me, are the ones that are just focused on this or that bad thing. Bad things are bad, and should be opposed, but if hatred is the only emotional tenor of a movement, it won't land with me. There's plenty of media that just serves up outrage or panic or whatever else, and none of that finds fertile soil in my heart. But for something to say, with plain sincerity, "This thing that you and I belong to is good and beautiful", is unavoidably moving.

Gotta say, this one made me laugh.

I recently binged on This Magical Girl Is Mine on Royal Road and it has awakened a monster in me. I figured I can't be the only degenerate in this wretched hive of scum and villainy of ours, so...

Y'all got any more of them Yuri romances?

No, I don't mean lame hentai. I'm looking for the really filthy stuff, with hand holding and kisses and pining for her true love and other such sugary lewdness that's definitely not fit for polite society (although I gotta admit I probably wouldn't say no to good hentai either). Cute stories where the boy girl gets the girl and they hopefully live happily ever after. None of that eternal "will they or won't they"-bullshit and the less said about "disabled autistic BIPOC social outcast" awards bait the better. Cute girls doing things such that just reading about them probably risks giving you diabetes. Doesn't matter if it's slice of life or if they have to save the world from evil as a side quest (but horror, litrpg and traditional super hero stories aren't my cup of tea).

On a more serious note, that story is actually quite good if you're fine with the twist on magical girls (it's rather more complicated than it first appears) and the main character being willing to sacrifice everything for her unrequited love (not-so-plot-twist: things evolve). Generally well written except the author can't seem to decide exactly how to write the love interest's name (is it Sophia or Sophie?)

Thundamoo is probably the biggest RR author for what you're looking for, but there's definitely a fair bit of '"disabled autistic BIPOC social outcast" awards bait' to wade through. Stray Cat Strut might also be up your alley, but it's apparently interminably long and I dropped it pretty early for that repetitive nature. I'm generally a fan of Ravensdagger's other stuff though.

I'm reading Fallen World Dungeon Engineer. It's on Amazon, was on royal road at some point, might still be but is likely stubbed.

The author seems to only write one kind of sexual orientation: lesbian. Everyone elses sexual preferences/proclivities seen ignored. Maybe it changes in later books but I'm 90% through the first one and that's all I've seen.

It's not heavy on the romance though. It's mostly a lot of world building exposition. Which is the kind of trashy literature I enjoy.

The same thing from the first comment here, Silent Partner, Unfinished Business, an excellent thriller fanfic of Death Note featuring burgeoning romance between Naomi Misora and Misa Amane. Ironically enough, just like that first comment, this one is preceded by a mention of Naomi Misora a short bit ago somewhere else on The Motte.

Got any favorite mixed drinks? What are mixed drinks that everyone should know how to make?

Old fashioned. Mojito. And fairground lemonade (with oleo-saccharum).

For all other occasions, whisky, straight.

A coworker of mine mixed drinks instead of baking bread in 2020. His advice is to learn the fundamentals and experiment. Pick a cocktail and start experimenting: what happens if you halve the ingredient, double it, replace with a different one from the same class? Does shaking vs stirring make a difference, does the glass matter?

Always been partial to an old fashioned.

Lots of suggestions already for Manhattans. Good show, everyone! I'll just add that, if you're making them yourself, you can get a lot of variety out of the same basic recipe by just trying different bitters or by adding dashes of different liqueurs like Maraschino or Cherry Heering.

If you're making your own cocktails, though, the must-have is the weeski, both because it's a great cocktail (though my personal recipe uses only 1.5oz whiskey, and usually .75oz Cointreau) and because its name is too stupid to repeat in public.

I absolutely love a Negroni. It’s not for the faint of heart - it’s for bitter people that love bitter things … I mean I’m happy as fuck and I still love it.

Two parts juniper forward gin one part Campari one part sweet vermouth shaken or stirred with ice I don’t know the difference with an orange peel twist.

I’ll have two.

I’m out on old fashioned’s. Terrible drink.

Paloma - 2oz tequila grapefruit soda (soda!!)(6oz) lime

Love that too.

Rum, hot chocolate, and miso paste is a winning combination.

I suggest a Manhattan and a chrysanthemum. For the Manhattan, I find that Martini & Rossi sweet vermouth goes well with a high rye bourbon, while the more intense vermouths that are beloved of craft bartenders, like Carpano Antica, really want a rye whiskey; both ways are good. The chrysanthemum is delicious and lower proof as cocktails go, because its base “spirit” is dry vermouth, but you have to like the two or three dashes of absinthe to appreciate it.

Coke Zero mixed with crushed ice.

I've been liking 1 1/2 oz bourbon, 1/4 oz peach liqueur, 3 dashes walnut bitters.

I have a disturbing and unhealthy obsession with Mint Juleps.

This is more of a party drink since it makes a lot, but I'll throw it in anyway since it won me some favor when I first met my in-laws: Bourbon Slush. You'll need frozen orange juice concentrate, frozen lemonade concentrate, and some sort of tea with spices and orange peel such as Bigelow's Constant Comment, and bourbon. Brew three or four tea bags, mix in the concentrates and bourbon, maybe add some extra sugar if you like your drinks extra sweet, and re-freeze the whole thing. Thaw until slushy before serving.

I'll always have a soft spot for a Southern Comfort Collins, ever since my grandfather started me drinking them at weddings since it was the drink of choice at his own.

The Ramos Gin Fizz:

2 oz gin 1 oz heavy cream 1/2 oz lemon juice 1/2 oz lime juice 2 tsp sugar 1 egg white a few drops of orange flower water

Put all the ingredients in a shaker and shake with ice for at least a minute, long enough to beat the egg. Then pour into a Collins Glass and top with club soda. Don't try to substitute any ingredients, either. Orange flower water is from the flower of the plant and not the fruit, so substituting orange juice or orange bitters will give an entirely different flavor. It's not a particularly easy ingredient to find, though it should be available at Whole Foods and most Asian grocery stores.

This may be the perfect cocktail, as it checks off every box: The gin does what the gin does, the cream give it richness, the citrus makes it refreshing, the sugar adds sweetness, the egg white gives it body, the soda gives it a crispness and backs the intensity off a bit, and the orange flower water... that's for mystery. It's also completely immune from bastardization, because it's immune from becoming popular enough for that to happen. It has a lot of ingredients, one of which isn't used for anything else (though it isn't expensive). It takes a long time to make, but you can't order one in a bar or make it in huge batches. You have to make them at home, one or two at a time. But I assume you it's worth the effort. That brings me to another favorite gin drink, the Gin Rickey:

Gin Lime Juice Club Soda Just enough sugar to take the edge off

I used to drink Gin and Tonics but after a while the sweetness of the tonic water became cloying, and switching to diet didn't help. These really cut through on those summer days when it feels like a Precambrian swamp outside. And you can order these in a bar. In fact, ordering these in a bar that prides themselves on their cocktails hits a certain sweet spot: Nobody ever orders them, but bartenders feel like they should know how to make them, so you're likely to get a "What's in that again?" Thus, you can avoid some bastardized house version by explaining to the bartender how to make the drink without being one of those assholes who orders drinks the bartender doesn't know how to make.

Gin Rickey... bartenders feel like they should know how to make them

Or they will ask if you just finished reading The Great Gatsby. But seriously underrated.

G&T also solid, but only if served by a pretty British Airways flight attendant with a slight scowl but otherwise impeccable manners.

I'm going to make that first one but it's hardly a "fizz".

Why isn't it a fizz? It's carbonated.

Sorry, I missed the club soda at the end.

Hot Tottie. I like to brew a strong black tea, probably two bags. Then in goes fresh squeezed lemon juice, honey, and as much damned Applejack or Apple Brandy or Whiskey as I please.

Another good one is a Godfather. 1 part Amaretto and 4 to 8 parts Bourbon or Whiskey. I went through a lot of those once upon a time.

I've only ever seen a 1:1 Godfather recipe, and only tried that once or twice. I didn't think it was even good enough to try tweaking. But 1:4 and 1:8 aren't small tweaks; they sound like they might be worth another look. Thanks!

Equal parts drinks are easy to remember. And often delicious!

Negroni

One of the best and easiest, and lots of ways to adjust it depending on the gin and vermouth used. 30ml each of gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth. I prefer to mix it in the glass, biggest chunk of ice you can get is best. Express a thick slice of orange peel then drop it in.

Final Ward

Rift on the Last Word (which uses gin and lime instead of rye and lemon). Superior in my opinion. 22.5ml each of rye whiskey, green chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, and lemon juice. Shaken and garnished with lemon peel.

And since everyone should try some Fernet Branca at least once...

Midnight Stinger

30ml each of bourbon and Fernet Branca 22.5ml lemon juice 12.5ml rich simple syrup Shake and serve over crushed ice. Mint for garnish.

They've gotten reasonably popular now but I've always been a fan of Mezcal Last Words (also often called "Final Word" by menus).

Grape juice + seltzer water → healthy soda

This also works with apple juice, but not with orange juice. I assume that the suspended pulp in orange juice somehow interferes with the bubbles.

Anything that can serve as a nucleation point will fuck up carbonation.

I've tried to use cider in my carbonation rig before just to see what would happen.

What happened is that I ended up cleaning cider off my ceiling.

By the beach: A Piña colada In general? A Long Island Iced Tea.

Old Fashioned with whiskey.

How do you make it though? For such a simple drink there is a lot of variety...and some real abominations out there. I usually go 60ml bourbon (or rye), 2-3 dashes of Angostura, barspoon of rich simple syrup, orange peel garnish.

If you toss a couple cinnamon sticks into your simple syrup while its simmering you can elevate bottom shelf bourbon in an old fashioned.

  1. 2-3 dashes of Angostura, teaspoon of sugar, drop of water. Muddle until dissolved.
  2. Add 50ml of Irish whiskey, ice cubes and orange peel garnish.
  3. Top up with soda water (I think this is a vital step to offset the sweetness of the sugar and bitters, and often overlooked).

Huh, that's the first time I've heard of topping up with soda water. So it becomes almost a highball then? Guess I'll have to try it.

The classic Martini (I use Plymouth gin and vermouth in a ~4:1 ratio)
Manhattan
Sidecar
Negroni

Summer: Gin and Tonic

Autumn: Brandy Old Fashioned

Winter: Hot tea toddy

Spring: White Russian

Got any favorite mixed drinks?

Hot temperatures outside: sidecar
Cold temperatures outside: white Russian (or black Russian if the dairy makes you nervous about hangovers)

These wool slippers came up in a prior thread a few months ago, and I splurged on a pair. I got the shoe style with leather sole.

Verdict? So cozy it's probably illegal. I'm used to leather moccasins with no insulation and thin soles, so it's a departure, but they are beyond comfortable around the house. They are perfectly warm but don't make my feet sweat (in winter, summer might be different). Now I need a ridiculous smoking jacket and I'll complete the effete layabout look.

Let me guess, use your promo code MOTTE for 15% off at checkout?

Big Slipper doesn't want your feet to be this cozy.

What’s the best form factor, shoe, slip on, or boot?

I went with shoe, but in hindsight I probably should've gone with slip on for a purely indoors item.

Is it all good outdoors? I wonder if it feels more secure with the shoe around the heel.

For outdoors, I would think the hard sole + shoe or boot style would be the way to go.

Do you guys get ugg boots in not-Australia? I'm told foreign made pairs are shit, but Australian made are very good and can last your life.

https://www.uggsince1974.com.au/

No clue on the US vs Australian quality difference, but for slippers inside the house, I prefer a leather sole.

I didn't quite appreciate the value of comfy household slippers or warm socks while in India. Needless to say, two Scottish winters have got me singing a very different tune. I'll see if I can snag a similar pair on the cheap!

I prefer wool socks with rubber grips for around the house because household slippers can be hard to clean.

Posting this here and specifically not in the culture war thread.

You're gonna get what I mean; It's not bananas and rice. It's more like bananas and rice

Because this is the fun thread, leave aside the somali stuff. The awkward circular dialog is fun to laugh at regardless of context. This had a base of Arrested Development with a playful side dish of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The garnish was the cringing awkwardness of I Think You Should Leave. 5/5 would recommend. Zagat nominee 2026.

As a side note, I tried the Kempner diet this year and ate some mashed bannanas with rice a few times. It was actually pretty good, kind of like rice pudding. Of course, I was eating it while doing a completely fat-less, salt-less, low protein diet so everything tasted good after a while.

I was eating it while doing a completely fat-less, salt-less, low protein diet

Why would you do this?

Short answer: It avoids activating the Randall Cycle and too many branch chain amino acids do things to you and it's all really weird but it does seem to work for people.

Long answer: https://deniseminger.com/2015/10/06/in-defense-of-low-fat-a-call-for-some-evolution-of-thought-part-1/

What I learned after a month is that it works at losing fat but I can't do a diet like that while feeding the five other members of my family healthy food.

I watched the first episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms this week. Overall I thought it was very good, a real return to form for GoT content. And I was glad that it seems to have kept the more comedic, slice of life tone of the Dunc and Egg novelas, instead of being twisted into Game of Thrones season 11.

And then I got to the scenes for next week and realized they cast an ayylmao as the love interest. Every fucking time. Why do they have to do this?

I had to be sure. After downloading a hundred or so photos of ^^^Tanzyn Crawford^^^ and performing the necessary eye-distance calculations, I have no doubt that she is, in fact, an ayy. I’m sure shills will spring forth from the woodwork to nitpick that there is some human admixture, but I maintain a very firm one-drop rule when it comes to extraterrestrial DNA.

Why do they keep doing this? In the era of imminent presidential disclosure, alien-orchestrated European bank collapse, and 3i-Atlas menacing our solar shores, why must showrunners tastelessly cram ayylmaos into every single media property they can? Mad Max, The Northman, West Side Story, Snow White and now Game of Thrones. And of course, in all of these they insist on paring the ayy girl with the biggest, most strapping human boy they can, in the interest of propagandizing cross-species hybridization.

I am sick of it, but I will probably still tune into the next episode.

I thought Tanzyn Crawford was the name of the character. Who the hell names their daughter Tanzyn?

Who the hell names their daughter Tanzyn?

Majestic 12, that’s who.

Serious question: is this "ayylmao" thing some new meme the kids are using to say "ugly black chick" without saying that?

(I'm not going to mod you for it, though if that's the gag, I'll ask you to speak plainly in the future.)

It is four chan style dissing of aliens and all alien lore, seeing it just as another psyop.

Serious question: is this "ayylmao" thing some new meme the kids are using to say "ugly black chick" without saying that?

No. The extra-terrestrials have planted hybrid infiltrators among every human race including European (Ella Purnell), Latina (Anya Taylor-Joy, Rachel Ziegler), and African (Halle Bailey). The key giveaway is the distance between the eyes. It would be a gravely dangerous mistake to think that you can spot them by ugliness. These hybrids are intentionally designed to be alluring, in order to aid in infiltration, to normalize the presence of the alien menace in Human society, and probably to advance a devious scheme of human gene theft.

probably to advance a devious scheme of human gene theft

I assume this is conducted by organic means to minimize suspicions?

Of course. It’s the only way to keep the vast alien conspiracy secret.

It's a completely race-neutral joke about people whose eyes are too far apart. See this comment.

It certainly didn't read that way.

FWIW I immediately thought they had cast Anya Taylor Joy when I read that at first. Until the next sentence when he said her actual name.

But the gut reaction was "oh Anya's in this?" not "this dude doesn't like black people in Hollywood"

I generally read past this kind of internet abbreviation unless something in the post is particularly compelling. In this case I looked up the actress first, the acronym later, and didn't see the connection. On reflection, it's a stupider issue than I imagined, and not the kind of thing I typically discuss or care to engage in. That probably sounds arrogant but we all have our lines.

Maybe for a person who hasn't been seeing exactly the same joke leveled against Anya Taylor-Joy for many years.

It's 2026

Not ethnic-ambiguity maxxing

Not maximizing the number of people who look at you and think you're vaguely familiar

Not aiming to be a potential casting choice in just about any visual media (points if it's a BBC production about the Middle Ages or Regency Britain)

NGMI

Bro what the heck are you talking about?

It's a joke about how Tanzyn Crawford looks like an alien (ayy lmao). I've seen lots of similar jokes about Anya Taylor-Joy.

Thank you. I knew the ayy=alien reference, but that just made me more confused because aliens aren't real and all that.

Does anyone here keep a freshwater aquarium? I’ve had a 40 gallon planted tank for about two years. It’s been gorgeous and heavily planted, but I’ve grown tired of trimming stem plants every couple of weeks. I’m thinking of switching to a lower maintenance setup with a pair of apistos and some tetras, and replacing most stem plants with floaters and vallisneria since those don’t seem to need as much trimming. I still want to keep the tank well planted to keep water quality stable and keep algae under control. Any recommendations or suggestions?

I used to have a 55 gallon tropical aquarium, and one of my favorite fish to keep inside it was an armored plecostomus. They get pretty big, and most other fish leave them alone. They also do a great job of keeping the tank clean as part of a larger system.

Snails, but you need a careful balance and the right species or they will just eat everything. You can also include predators that eat the herbivorous snails, but again you need a careful balance or pretty soon you won’t have any snails.

Thanks, I’ll look it up. Hopefully I won’t have to slowly import the entire Amazon river fauna into my tiny tank.

Well that is the fun thing about a planted tank, it’s much closer to being an actual functioning ecosystem than an artificial tank. And if you do it right it can be incredibly low maintenance. No siphon-cleaning dirty gravel every month and bi-weekly water changes.

I feel like this is mildly culture war but more fun.

When I got my weekly Chipotle slop bowl this week I noticed they were promoting the amount of protein in their bowls. And double servings of chicken being 60+ g of protein.

It being January I am in workout mode and noticing my protein. So fits with what markets well to me at this moment. One thing I only just realized Chicken is like the best protein source in terms of protein per calorie.

Marketing to gym bros is like super not woke. You only really know it’s a gym bro thing if you’re a minor gym bro. Also find it interesting that I believe Chipotle is the definition of a slop bowl, but when I was in college Chipotle was like this shits awesome and tasty compared to my all you can eat college buffet at a private school.

Protein stuff is this year's fiber stuff, lots of food content creators have bemoaned this or celebrated it. If you go to a store and look you'll see shit tons. I'm pretty sure you can even get protein fortified Starbucks right now.

> 2026

> not getting protein foam in my lattes

> im not gonna make it

I don't think "gymbro" is anti-woke, it's a pretty common archetype in the culture now. "Gymbros" are harmless. They're even a little cute. They're not quite on the level of "goofy TV sitcom Dad" or "that whiteboi can dance," but they're largely a safe idea. Guardian-Vox hitpieces on "The alt-right lifts weights and eats meat" mostly failed and didn't permeate neutral corporate space.

Unrelatedly, I hate the new cultural obsession with "protein". What the hell is protein? Chicken, I know what that is, beef, pork, shrimp, but everything is "protein" now. We've idealized this raw macromolecule into being a good in and of itself, it can do no wrong, it's healthy! Slather it up in sunflower oil, bread it and fry it, shove the cow in a pigpen and bathe it in its own shit, feed the salmon corn and lock it in a cage, whatever, it doesn't matter what quality it is, it's protein, and protein is good for you. I'm not making a moral objection here -- aesthetically, I think the whole "category" of protein is gross. I don't care how high chicken measures in protein per calorie, diced burrito chicken is gross, I don't want it. I don't need to protein-load my quesadilla or milkshake, I will take however much is pleasing to eat. I don't condition my enjoyment of a steak knowing that it's protein, it fits the right ontological category, it's one of the five basic elemental categories, it's the good one. No, I enjoy steak because it's delicious. And if it's not delicious I'd rather just eat some mashed potatoes or pineapple juice or chocolate cake or pasta, quelle surprise, even without meat.

I was thinking about exactly your comment an hour ago for some reason.

Totally agree.

I just hate marketing more the older I get I think.

I get my ‘protein’ from meat and eggs and dairy and sometimes a (gay) powder - and frankly that’s how 98% of successful gym people do it too.

"What kind of protein would you like?"

"I'll take some kelp with a slice of microbial mat."

What the hell is protein?

British supermarkets could be found selling 'protein pots' at one point.

(It's two boiled eggs and a bit of spinach)

Unrelatedly, I hate the new cultural obsession with "protein".

It’s an overreaction to the food pyramid having been screwed up for the last 60 years. An entire generation of boomers lived under the delusion that saturated fat and animal meat was evil, and refined processed carbohydrates were the cornerstone of a healthy diet. In the 70s you literally had magazine advertisements shilling pure sugar as just the thing you need to kick those food cravings and give you the energy to get through your day. The FDA fed an entire generation through the diabetes meat grinder.

I remember reading a post about the American diet in the... early 1900s or something? Might have been a rundown of the past 100 or 200 years? Either way, I remember it mentioning how obsessed people were with fiber. I feel the same way about society and protein right now.

I'm not making a moral objection here -- aesthetically, I think the whole "category" of protein is gross.

Agreed, although for an aesthetically gross slop bowl from Chipotle, "protein" is probably the correct term.

60g of cooked chicken is damn close to a full pound of it depending on the exact fat content / blend.

Edit: I am a dumb. A full pound is closer to 90 - 100g of protein. Carry on.

I imagine Chipotle chicken is probably a bulk blend of mostly thigh meat with some breast met. Almost certainty skinless (for better storage and easier prep).

I've seen the advertisements for the extra protein, but haven't tried it myself. Did your eyeball on it say "yep that's probably about 60?" or did it seem light?

I taste chicken in my burrito. No where close to a full Gym bro measurements. I just can tell they are marketing to it.

I'm pretty sure that solid white canned tuna beats chicken by a small margin, but it's not the most pleasant thing to choke down if you're eating it plain.

As a tangent to your noticing, after a blog pointed it out for me, I can't help noticing how more and more places use verbiage like "pick a protein" or "protein options" to normalize various bugs and sludge alternatives to normal meat.

I thought it was for vegetarians? 'Protein' meaning basically 'meat or tofu'?

It is. Interpreting it as "they are trying to normalize bugs" is a stretch worthy of Mr. Fantastic himself.

I said "bugs and sludge alternatives" and tofu clearly falls into the latter category. Don't get a sprain patting yourself on the back.

Really, restaurants around you are selling bugs?

He's saying they're changing the vocabulary in order to normalize bugz. But it wouldn't be out of the ordinary, there were a few pushes to get people to eat them - I even had some!

It would be weird to think that they're doing that to get people to eat bugs (which restaurants aren't doing) instead of thinking that they're doing that because they offer tofu (which they are doing). Bugz on the brain?

Not any weirder than brands adding mastectomy scars to cartoon characters in their promo materials, imo.

I wouldn't bat an eye at someone claiming that brands that are doing that are trying to normalize mastectomies. I'd be skeptical of a claim that they're doing that to propitiate Baal.

its_the_same_picture.jpg

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1J0FC36ZHUI

I once dated someone who I'm pretty sure had BPD. She was constantly worried that I was secretly into her best friend (also a doctor) and that the feeling was mutual. For the record: not true, at least on my side.

So imagine my surprise when the best friend got engaged after a whirlwind courtship, and I looked at the wedding photos on Instagram to discover that her new husband:

  • Looked more like me than my actual brother does
  • Had the exact same last name as me

This could absolutely be coincidence. But here's the really funny part: if my ex and I had actually gotten married, she and her best friend would have ended up as Dr. or Mrs. [Same Name], married to what are essentially the same guy. I'm trying to imagine how my ex would have felt about this situation and I'm going to go with "not great" right now, but she might well have found it charming had things gone not gone to shit between us.

(I'm also at that magical age where most of my peers decide to give up on their dissolute lifestyles and marry off. I feel a tad bit left out, not that I'm in any real hurry.)

I once dated someone who I'm pretty sure had BPD. She was constantly worried that I was secretly into her best friend (also a doctor) and that the feeling was mutual.

BPD or not, chicks can suddenly become—subconsciously or consciously—hyperaware of the power of female mate-choice copying when they have skin in the game. As a man, one can sometimes leverage this to one’s benefit.

Chris Rock has this old bit about how men might see their best friend meet a nice girl and think "Man, I'd love to marry a girl like that". Women see their best friend meet a nice man and think "Man, I'd love to marry that specific man".

Now, I can't exactly speak to the truth of this. But if some sort of inverse typical mind fallacy is any indicator, way more women are worried about leaving their husband alone with their friends than men are of the same.

The singular exception seems to be the armed forces. I've known numerous men who won't let their wives on base without them. It's like dragged raw meat through a lion's den.

Four years ago I passed my ex in the street, who was walking with her current boyfriend. She was my first serious girlfriend, and we lost our virginities to each other. Her current boyfriend looked, not to put to fine a point on it, pretty much exactly like I did when we started going out: hairstyle (significant as I wore my hair quite long at the time), fashion sense, skin tone, eye colour, the whole lot.

My immediate thought was "wow, either she has a very specific type, or I imprinted on her real good".

My immediate thought was "wow, either she has a very specific type, or I imprinted on her real good".

A friend of mine dated a girl for a while and the breakup was... acrimonious (in hindsight, he's lucky he didn't get stabbed some point). Her next bf (who became her husband) could've been my friend's stunt double. It will always be a mystery which of those two options is the answer.

Dollars to donuts you both look like her father.

I actually met him while we were going out. As a middle-aged man he bore an uncanny resemblance to Séamus Heaney. When he was my age at the time we were going out, he did wear his hair long, but looked more like Rory Gallagher.

While perusing my folder of ten thousand unsorted images downloaded from 4chan, I happened to lay my eyes on the following hilarious exchange from an old fan translation of the manga Death Note.

Yagami Light: What's your name, anyway? I'm Yagami Light (夜神月). Kanji of yoru (night) (夜), kami (神) from kamisama (god), and Light is written as tsuki (moon) (月). Weird name, eh?

Misora Naomi (undercover): I'm Maki Shouko (間木照子). It's written with the kanji for aida* (space) (間), moku (wood) (木) from jiyumoku, the te (照) from terasu (reflection), and ko (子) from kodomo (child).

Translator's note: Some kanji lesson for you :)

*I think this may be a typo.

"Lord of the Manor", an article for GURPS 4 in the magazine Pyramid, contains the following interesting summary of the cost of transporting agricultural produce from a rural area to an urban area.

  • By road, not using wheeled vehicles: 100 % of the cargo's value per 30 miles of distance, where the cargo's value is 0.5 "GURPS dollar" (copper farthing) per pound of grain

  • By road, using wheeled vehicles: 100 % per 60 miles

  • By river: 100 % per 300 miles

  • By sea: 100 % per 1500 miles

In contrast, ACKS 2 offers the following numbers for transport.

  • By road: 100 % of the cargo's value per 230 miles of distance (implicitly—the actual figures in the book are 1.25 CP per 24 stone-miles and 0.12 GP per stone of grain, where 1 GP (gold piece) = 100 CP (copper pieces) and 1 stone = 10 pounds)

  • By river: 100 % per 920 miles (1.25 CP per 96 stone-miles)

  • By sea: 100 % per 4600 miles (1.25 CP per 480 stone-miles)

The "Lord of the Manor" prices are three to four times as much as the ACKS 2 prices. Why? Two possible factors:

  • "Lord of the Manor", in conjunction with predecessor article "At Play in the Fields", assumes that the price of 0.5 dollar per pound of grain in rural areas is halved from the normal default of 1 dollar per pound in urban areas. In contrast, ACKS 2 changes its base price of 0.12 GP per stone by only −10 % in rural areas and +10 % in urban areas.

  • "Lord of the Manor" and "At Play in the Fields" assume that a typical low-tech family of five humans subsists on the equivalent of 3600 pounds of grain per year (300 $/mo, valuing grain at the urban price of 1 $/lb even if the family is in a rural area). In contrast, ACKS 2 assumes that a family subsists on the equivalent of 4250 pounds of grain per year (4.25 GP/mo × 12 mo/a ÷ 0.12 GP per stone of grain × 10 lb/stone).

Overall, I'm inclined to trust ACKS 2 (a system with a coherent economic basis) over "Lord of the Manor" and "At Play in the Fields" (two isolated economics-focused magazine articles for a system that makes some honest gestures toward a coherent economic basis but is far from totally based on one).

More house-construction drama:

  • 2026-01-08:

    The permits have been granted. See the attached files.

    I will get together a project scedule [sic] for you sometime next week[.]

  • 2026-01-22:

    You said on the 8th that you would provide a schedule "sometime next week". It has now been two weeks.

    I will be providing your schedule before you're [sic] start date.

    Please note that your official start date is not until March.

    At this time, I need you to remain patience [sic] while my team and I finalize the remaining project details.

    We are ensuring everything is properly aligned before breaking ground, so the project proceeds smoothly and efficiently.

    Thank you for your understanding.

    If you've changed your mind and now disavow your January 8th statement, that's fine with me.

When I retired from my government civil-engineering job, I was expecting to escape incompetent project managers. But it seems that I will have to deal with at least one more.

Misora Naomi (undercover): I'm Maki Shouko (間木照子). It's written with the kanji for aida* (space) (間), moku (wood) (木) from jiyumoku, the te (照) from terasu (reflection), and ko (子) from kodomo (child).

Ugh... This is up there with Mufasa's death in animation scenes that really get me.

Funny I was still on Light's side at this point. I was thrilled he pulled it off. I can't exactly recall when I finally agreed he had to go down.

I was all the time on Light side. I just have soft spot for brave, competent women.

While perusing my folder of ten thousand unsorted images downloaded from 4chan

MOAR

Video game thread! What you playing?

I'm back on Terraria. Amazing game, perhaps one of my most played of all time. The new update is coming out on 1/27 which should be fun. Also decided to try the Thorium mod which has been good.

Tried to play Bloons TD but alas no controller support. You'd think with AI and such it would be easy to put controller support on big games but....

Hades 2, aka Hades for the Ladies. New weapons, more complicated between-run levelling, a whole new array of crafting mats to collect, and witches. Lots and lots of witches. Fun times!

I'm on paternity leave and fired up Skyrim after several years. I'm playing with no fast travel, which means I'm not getting much done in-game between feedings and diaper changes. It's such a good game. If you have the volume up enough, it's more atmospheric than you remember.

Youtube has noticed and is serving me a bunch of videos in the "TES 6 will be disappointing" genre. I've been convinced that the next installment can't be as good, and I'm mourning the game we could have had.

Ayyy awesome. I was playing skyrim with mods a couple weeks ago. Are you doing any modding?

It really is a good game...

nah I've only ever played vanilla 2011 skyrim. Not even DLC.

Playing Icarus again. It's a FPS survival game with a rogue lite feel. You can play on a persistent large map, or play missions that have you ranging over an area to complete objectives and then extracting out.

It encourages multiple bases in multiple locations because traversing the large maps can take a while, and bases can act as spawn points and resupply points.

I had a frustrating turn of events earlier when I accidentally burnt down one of my log cabin bases. I thought I was being clever by clipping some furniture together, turns out clipping a piece of wood furniture into a fire pit is a fire hazard. A few minutes after it burns down a massive rain storm roles through and almost kills me cuz I almost wasn't able to build a temporary new shelter fast enough. The rain storm would have put out the fire which was a double bit of frustration.

I spent almost an hour rebuilding into a stone building, partly because I have the difficulty up high and the stupid animals wouldn't leave me alone.

It is one of those games where the setbacks are what make it fun and frustrating all at once. Usually this happens every time I come back to the game I YOLO it for a while and get wrecked a few times before I learn to be slow and methodical. Once I get slow though the game turns into more of a grind. So eventually I go back to YOLO behavior.

Trails Beyond the Horizon. For those not familiar with the Trails series (wouldn't blame you), it's a series of JRPGs by Falcom. They are pretty traditional turn based JRPG fare (though the newer entries have action battles much to my chagrin), where all the entries are part of a single overarching story. Horizon is the newest one (released last week), and is the 13th entry in the series. It's been fun so far, though I pretty much knew what I was getting when I signed up.

Also have been replaying The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles on switch, whenever I get kicked out of my PC room. I just got the itch to play AA, and I have only played those once so it was a good candidate.

I’m playing the new remake of the original System Shock in VR using my Quest 3. It really enhances the vibe it’s going for.

My brother has harangued me into finally reinstalling helldivers 2 after yesterday's patch.

It's still a comically broken pile of spaghetti code that's holding together with nothing but a hope and a prayer, and it's clear that the developers still revile their player base, but in spite of all that it's still fun.

There's no real alternative, is the kicker. I both love and despise the game in equal measure, and it's fairly obvious now that the game's success and quality is more of an accident than anything else.

Kids are playing luanti (an open source clone of Minecraft). They love it, and it saved me $200 on 6 licenses and their friends can also come over and play.

I'm sure they would have actually enjoyed Terraria more (because 2d easier than 3d) if it weren't for the Minecraft Movie and all their friends playing Minecraft.

After a discussion with work colleagues about old games that hang around, I fired up EVE Online for the first time in about 15 years. I remember trying it briefly, finding it far too dull, and moving on. But coming back to it now at a different point in my life, it definitely hits differently. It looks nice and it has a variety of progression options, but it also doesn't demand twitch reflexes and fast reaction. You can choose to do things that take time but not much attention, or things that require attention and go faster. I'm certain I've slowed down considerably and it matches my pace a little more. I think I might stick with it for a little bit

Oh man I have been winning at EVE for a couple of years. The last time I played it was a challenge to not use the market at all, except to buy skills and blue prints from NPCs. It was so slow, but quite fun as a survival style game!

Still chugging along with my sorry little merc company in Battletech (roguetech mod). It's survived almost a year I think, lost a few vehicles and a few pilots, but picked up a couple of medium mechs which both do more damage and take more spunishment at the cost of speed.

The company has enough money to pay for the next month at the end of each month which is a lot better than before! The captain doesn't have to worry quite as hard about making ends meet each month, but there's little extra (most of the early game is spent upgrading your ship to improve travel speed, morale, and unlock better options in the random events that pop up) that and repair costs (roguetech requires paying for armor replacement when you take damage each battle so generally you make a small amount of cash and the money comes from loot you pick up and sell) if you limp home after a tough fight sometimes you lose money after your pay and have to sell stuff to break even. Those are rough!

Best thing is the MechWarriors are getting skills and mostly not dying which makes everything a little better, slowly.

Still on XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. I have killed 2 out of 3 Chosen. Once I finish this playthrough, I am seriously considering playing the base game on Commander difficulty with Ironman enabled. Help, I've relapsed into my XCOM addiction.

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