site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2932 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.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats