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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2805 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 6, 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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DO NOT MAKE THIS BAKED ZITI RECIPE IF YOU WANT TO MAINTAIN YOUR DIET

I REPEAT DO NOT

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/281646/the-best-baked-ziti/

Looks pretty good, yeah.

You know what? The halftime show was a lot of fun. Bad Bunny did a great job and as far as I can tell the message was definitely much more one of unity than one of criticism, contrary to the Trumpist worries. His only lines in English? God Bless America (although with the slightly subversive implication that America = 'the Americas' more broadly). The dancing was great (Indian - Hispanic unity there, white America really doesn't get/value dancing atm), the visuals were very varied and fun to look at, although I personally can understand a decent amount of Spanish I think there was probably enough going on that non-speakers would probably still enjoy?

I like Bad Bunny as a halftime show but that's mostly because the field of 'music sufficiently popular with the average american to be a halftime show' is a pretty low bar for me these days. Like, we're never getting a halftime show that's all Sabaton singing about the US in WW2, or any of the Christian Rock bands I don't mind (The most mainstream/patriotic options on my playlist). So, Bad Bunny is... Fine? Don't love his lyrics, but the beat's good and the show was aight. No complaints.

My girlfriend watches the halftime show every year – not the Super Bowl, she just likes the halftime shows. I was half-watching it, and while reggaeton (or anything reggaeton-adjacent) is not really my cup of tea, I did feel like it's more appropriate for this context than Kendrick Lamar, purely for being more overtly "party" music composed with dancing in mind. Bad Bunny, with whose music I was erstwhile unfamiliar, is an undeniably talented performer.

Favourite take so far is from Ryan Long:

If I was running for president of a Latin country my platform would be to bring the people a second drum beat

Legitimately: why is that every Spanish-speaking country is so obsessed with the reggaeton drum pattern? I went to Cuba for a week and it was inescapable. My brother went to Spain several years ago and came back saying the same thing, that Spanish people like music with exactly one rhythmic pattern. I went to a rave during Covid and there was a DJ playing techno, but all of the Mexicans in attendance simply refused to dance until another DJ took over and began playing reggaeton.

And the weirdest thing is that every other non-Anglophone culture is starting to follow their example. In the last three months I've been to a wedding for a Turkish couple and a Syrian birthday: the soundtracks were Turkish reggaeton and Arabic reggaeton, respectively. What is it about those four notes that inspires such a hypnotic cross-cultural fixation?

Don't forget Norwegian Reggaeton!

I had fun making fun of it with the people in the room. One of them was a fluent Spanish speaker and said he couldn't understand most of it. The show was competing with 6 screaming kids volume wise, so it might have been hard to understand English lyrics too.

I can sort of count in Spanish and know only a couple of other words. It was boring to listen to, and the screaming kids sounded better.

The dancing I found boring, because there is much better amateur stuff on YouTube. And the camera angles weren't really doing the dancing any favors, moving around way too much and way too quickly.

Overall it was good to have something other than AI commercials to make fun of. Next year they can save money and get a local mariachi band to perform.

I enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed all the recent halftime shows, which is to say, not at all. I liked the music slightly more than the mumbled hip hop we've gotten lately, but the thing being in Spanish without even subtitles really did feel like a fuck you.

but the thing being in Spanish without even subtitles really did feel like a fuck you.

Felt exactly the same way, until I saw some of the translated lyrics on X and quickly realized why they wouldn't be on network television

If these are the lyrics then wow you weren't kidding. That's some serious degeneracy.

I watched the first few minutes and my main thought was "Who the fuck OKed a set that blocks the audience that paid for a ticket to the Superbowl from seeing anything?"

My second thought was "Yeah, this is lame garbage for ratchet latina chicks" (fun fact: unlike most Americans I knew who he was years ago because the most ratchet employee I've ever had talked about him while doing a terrible job lying about why she was calling out because she went clubbing on a Wednesday).

In more important news, I seasoned with my heart and the wings came out extra spicy. When I pick my son up from his SB party, I'm going to have to try some reverse psychology to get him to eat any.

That's fair - but also definitely the trend in the last few years to make the show more TV-friendly than stadium-friendly. I speculate some of that is actually Apple TV's influence, but honestly the half-time show really IS for the TV audience, not the people in the stadium.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to start listening to Bad Bunny, but to me the point is more just something fun to look at and talk about in between the ads

Why is country music so bad? I turned on the TPUSA half-time show and its honestly worse than the "real" show that's in Spanish.

The pre-war stuff was a lot more interesting. Jimmie Davis, all those yodeling cowboys. (The W part of CW pretty much completely died circa 1960.)

Because for a few decades now there's intense pressure NOT to innovate in any way shape or form... and music fundamentally does have some inherent limitations in terms of how differentiated it can be within rigid paradigms. In math terms, there aren't enough "degrees of freedom" within the "country music" narrow genre to allow meaningful variety, much less appeal outside the borders.

I don't think that's it. There are plenty of other genres that all sound the same but still sound good.

Sturgeon's law. 90% of everything is crap.

If you actually want something decent, I'd gladly offer suggestions.

You have three suggestion slots before I permanantly write-off the genre for the rest of my life.

Trying to convince you that at least some country music is worth listening to requires knowledge of what kind of music you already prefer. That being said, as the resident music maven I feel obliged to give my opinion as someone who agrees that the TPUSA halftime country was garbage:

Emmylou Harris - Boulder to Birmingham

Townes Van Zandt - Pancho and Lefty

Kathy Mattea - 18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses

It's interesting that you went with older pieces for your suggestions. I covered Pancho and Lefty way back in college.

Orville Peck - Let Me Drown

Matt King - Hell's Kitchen

Sturgill Simpson - Sing Along.

If you don't agree that Sing Along is Country, my back up option is K-Mag Yoyo by Hayes Carll.

Let Me Drown was amazing, damn. Any other recs by him?

I also like Daytona Sand a lot.

Damn, this guy owns!! Loving both Let Me Drown and even more so, Daytona Sand. I didn't know country could be so good.

If you're looking for a similar vibe, check out Prayed for Rain by Paul Cauthen. He does some duets with Peck as well, under the name "The Unrighteous Brothers".

Joe Ely's first album. Don't be put off by the extra shitkicker-sounding first track. The wordplay gets good in later songs.

Gene Clark's No Other. Coked-out 70s country rock with all the stops pulled out. The title track is a bizarre gospel country funk monster.

Here's the way I look at the whole dueling halftime show thing: Some people wanted a country music halftime show, and some wanted a Hispanic halftime show. They could have just gotten whatever version of the Texas Tornados is still touring and called it a day, and everyone would have agreed that it was the best halftime show ever. There could have even been a surprise appearance by Linda Ronstadt. And of course they would have performed their cover of Ely's "She Never Spoke Spanish to Me", which seems like a fitting commentary on the current situation, though I'm not sure exactly why.

If anyone plays turn-based strategy games, MENACE went into early access last Thursday. If that is your genre, I do recommend, but with caveats.

While social media types have characterized it as a new XCOM-like, since it is sci-fi with aliens, it's really more like a tabletop wargame. Specifically, it uses a points-buy list-building format, where your company-scale force is built with every model and equipment costing points to field, as opposed to capping you to a maximum of X characters of most squad-scale tactics game. It also has an alternating-activation system more akin to chess as opposed to you-go-I-go turn order of moving all your pieces at once ala XCOM. Add in some of its own systems, and it's proving to be more of a (de)buff meta, as opposed to the XCOM alpha-strike meta that most XCOM-likes fall into. Plus, no overwatch, so no glacial-but-optimal defensive turtle crawl across the map.

Instead, MENACE uses a suppression system of heavy debuffs to suppressed unit actions and accuracy that promote a find-fix-flank-finish combat loop. This combines with the point-buy system because every weapon, manpower body, and even promotions increases the cost to field a unit. Every point you spend on fielding or upgrading one asset is a point that can't buy another capability or upgrade. Specialization is the cost-efficient name of the game, but over-specialization can make you brittle. It's a combination of systems that can be rough to learn or pick up, but a very high skill ceiling means that when you do, battles can transition from brutal grinds to practically dancing.

There are rogue-like progression elements to the system, meaning no two campaigns will be quite the same in terms of character recruitment, gear progression, or mission format. The game breaks missions into operations of 3-5 missions each, with more rogue-like progression for selecting between different rewards or modifiers for the mission. There is no tech/R&D/manufacturing system, but instead a barter-economy market where you trade in (RNG) salvaged enemy gear towards a (RNG) selection of items, with a rotating selection of offers that means you can't just save for good things that may not come. Since the gear system under point-buy means sidegrades are often preferrable to upgrades, you get get different sorts of tensions as its rarely 'what's best' but 'what is best for what,' which in turn depends on character builds and promotions.

All the same, the game is very clearly in early access, and not complete. This is normal for the developer, who did the cult-hit Battle Brothers which was in early access for a year. Here it means the story and character writing is only at the introductory level, there are clearly unfinished assets, and various balance aspects will doubtless be revisited. There is also the inevitable jank that comes from RNG maps and, meaning sometimes RNJesus will bless you and sometimes you will feel abandoned. It is still an excellent tactical combat system, but you can be forgiven for holding off.

Price-wise, MENACE will probably maintain a $40 base price. However, Steam has a 25% discount for the next week and a half, so $30 thru 19 Feb.

I do recommend, and if it seems like I'll be posting less for a while, well, yeah.

Does it have the same "fuck you" RNG that XCOM and Battle Brothers have? I'm generally fond of tactics combat gameplay, but didn't especially like either of those games because they felt too punishing and capricious. It feels really bad to make a mistake and have some veteran that I've spent however long levelling and upgrading get one shot and be permadead. It feels even worse when I'm reasonably safe and not noticeably making mistakes and just get permakilled from a 5% chance hit anyway.

I'd say no. It's less about fuck-you RNG, and more about being very unforgiving if you make mistakes like 'I think I'll try running a glass cannon mass infantry build against a faction with literal artillery and laser designators' or 'they couldn't hit an elephant at that distance' without actually investing in the appropriate enablers. However, there is always a counter or three to any given threat, it will just come with tradeoffs (opportunity costs annd otherwise).

(I will note that for now you should only play on the lower two difficulties- the highest difficulty is pretty unbalanced, basically giving you something like 60% supply and giving the AI 140% supply and breaking a lot of the ammo economy logic. This isn't RNG though, just list economy.)

The game's RNG is low in tactical shenanigans, typically following a law of averages approach, but high in mission framings like map setup. Tactically, the game follows a per-bullet-accuracy salvo, in which each bullet in a 10 shot salvo has its own accuracy and armor penetration roles, as opposed to XCOM's all-or-nothing salvos. This does mean your high-power/single-shot anti-armor weapons are swingy, but there are ways to get literal guaranteed hits with certain weapons.

The game's start-of-mission map settup is procedural generation, however, so it's quite possible to have particularly hard/brutal maps, like enemies with artillery who have spotters hidden in high-concealment forests or who can start killing units before most of your units can reach. There are absolutely tools to mitigate this, but until you learn what and how...

The game is actually pretty low-lethality for your irreplaceable investments. MENACE is a platoon-level tactics game, and your named/controlled characters are squad leaders. Squaddies are the members of your squads, and they act as both an increase to your primary squad-weapon damage output (1 more guy holds 1 more gun to shoot with) and as HP gates. The squad leaders- who are what you invest promotions and gear investments into- will never go down until all the other squaddies do, and when you do you have 4 turns to stabilize them to save them, and there are medevac assets you can invest / find in operations. Squaddies in turn are a relatively fragile-but-replaceable strategic resource. It doesn't take much to kill a squaddie, but you can invest in a base upgrade to recruit 2 a mission, and start with a medical center that will save 1 from death and has a 15% chance to save each subsequent casualty.

The game can be quite punishing if you ignore various threats and make bad investments at a list-building level. Every faction has its unique strengths, and good lessons learned against some factions become very bad against others. This also applies to specific mission formats, where sometimes a concentration of forces is all you need, and other times it's bad. I enjoy this in the sense that you need to not be complacent or try to build an all-rounder build, but constantly re-adjust your list. Other people hate it, and do things like call defense missions impossible (because they invest all their points in a few super squads who can't maintain enough map control).

The key system that helps mitigate/tie all of this together is the intel system. Intel is a campaign stat that indicates how much insight into the enemy you'll have. At the starting level 0, you'll only have a blip that there is something in a general area, at levels 2 you might generally know if it's infantry or vehicles with some units specifically identified, but at levels 5-6 you'll know exactly what type of unit is where. This system comes at the opportunity cost of other investments, but lets you align the right units and the right gear the right way. This basically removes most of the 'surprise!' elements that are technically RNG from you not knowing the full enemy list in advance.

The demo was very good, I agree it feels much more wargamey than X-COMy.

It's on my wishlist because of its nice graphics. Might wait for the full release to play it though.

Got it as soon as it hit the store, because Battle Brothers is an eternal favorite of mine.

I knew I was going to be disappointed by the lack of open sandbox and the similar lack of procedurally generated characters. IMO those two are central to what kept Battle Brothers replayable. Alas, Overhype Studios felt the need to fix what wasn't broken (or at least to try something new), and what we get now is a campaign with limited shelf-life and scripted characters that, by and large, don't really contribute to the game. I'm sure they have plans for them that will make the change worth it. Or at least I hope so. Right now they're pretty bland. Some are outright annoying. Some are OK. Rewa is fun, and I conclusively ended my first and last campaign when she died in the line of duty (unnecessarily, due to sheer carelessness on my part) because my little tank berserker was the centerpiece of my team, and neither Greek LARPer nor stereotypical american alcoholic could fill the void left by the passing of the only entertaining character.

The fixed characters are a real problem in my opinion. With BB's proc-gen brothers, there was always room for buildcrafting, and trying to make the misshapen mongrels you got as recruits work nicely with your company. But in MENACE, the characters are utterly fixed, so the room for buildcrafting collapses into one or two meta builds per character, and that's it. Very sad. I really hope the devs have plans to shake this up, or else it's stale before it even leaves Early Access.

Other than that, I like it. The point-buy system is right up my alley. Trade-offs, trade-offs everywhere. And the enemy plays by the same rules (though with a bigger budget to compensate for the mediocre AI). The tactical combat is also pretty good. Moment-to-moment, it's engaging and nicely punishes dumb mistakes. It gets a little samey, but that's probably down to this being the minimum viable product they were willing to go into EA with. More content will help.

Having to march to an extraction zone after trashing the enemy is annoying busywork, though. I wish you could skip that.

The environments are a little drab IMO.

FWIW, I got it for 20€ because of the discount combined with the fact that I am a good little Hooded Horse consoomer and thus got an additional bundle discount (I already owned Battle Brothers, Heart Of The Machine and Xenonauts 2).

The fixed characters are a real problem in my opinion. With BB's proc-gen brothers, there was always room for buildcrafting, and trying to make the misshapen mongrels you got as recruits work nicely with your company. But in MENACE, the characters are utterly fixed, so the room for buildcrafting collapses into one or two meta builds per character, and that's it. Very sad. I really hope the devs have plans to shake this up, or else it's stale before it even leaves Early Access.

I don't intend to disagree about pre-defined characters in a characterization sense, but I find MENACE's mechanical build-sets far more flexible than BB's. BB was pretty much as fixed in meta terms once you started building for specific roles, which any meta-optimizer did. Even if you try to fit MENACE leaders into two each- and I think it's pretty clear/consistent that there is a big-squad route and a smaller squad route for most characters- that's still 2x [size of cast] variations to play with. Even if you insist on always every character-unique perk, there are certainly ways to justify your spread of the remainder on repeat games. And that's if you even have the same characters, given how the recruit new leaders system works.

I particularly think part of MENACE's build-composition flexibility is because of how the point-buy, promotion cost-scaling systems, and weariness systems work together to encourage you to take different, and worse/cheaper, units into the field. This is such a contrast to the XCOM-like model of hyper-scaling your best members repeatedly, with only a backup team as necessary, and it invites all sorts of compromises and adjustments in the process.

Like, don't get me wrong. I like my attack dog Rewa. But I learned to love Bog in his battle bus, and then make up for his poor accuracy by taking the sort of weapons that don't need accuracy. Or Ivory, who has a floor of 1/3rd hits, and can get a massive increase to lethality if she has a partner to designate targets (or self-designates).

Other than that, I like it. The point-buy system is right up my alley. Trade-offs, trade-offs everywhere. And the enemy plays by the same rules (though with a bigger budget to compensate for the mediocre AI). The tactical combat is also pretty good. Moment-to-moment, it's engaging and nicely punishes dumb mistakes. It gets a little samey, but that's probably down to this being the minimum viable product they were willing to go into EA with. More content will help.

Tradeoffs is a big thing I'm loving. One of my favorite dynamics of a point-buy system versus a traditional progression system is that there is an incentive to take worse weapons, just because they are cheaper. Trying to make those work, and finding the synergies that can, has been fun.

For example- there's a specific enemy in the [spoiler] faction that is notoriously tanky. Absurdly so. It typically takes a whole lot of concentrated fire to grind it down, and a lot of discussion focuses on late/end-game weapons to brute force it.

Unless... you find out that 25% in damage modifiers from any source can make one of the 'worst' anti-tank weapons one-shot each model. And now it's a challenge of who in the crew can pull that off.

Figuring out who can make the cheap-o options work is such a treat, and even if it will be a 'solved problem' at some point it can allow for a fair bit more build diversity beyond 'get the next tier of weapon.'

But I digress. (And hope you have enough fun.)

Do you know if they have the same writer or not?

They do. Casey Hollingshead is on board. What do you make of that?

I liked the writing in Battle brothers so that's a big positive to me.

Did you read any of his books? See https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/6559488.Casey_Hollingshead.

Nope, but I might, didn't know he had written books. Have you read them?

I read all the Battle Brothers tie-ins, and had a brief email exhange with the author about historical source material. He pointed out My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue, by Samuel Chamberlain, which I should've read long ago since it's also a main component of Blood Meridian.

As for Hollingshead's books, so far I'd say they're...weird. I wouldn't call him an outright good author. He makes plenty of technical mistakes, his worldbuilding is paper-thin, the plot often seems to make no sense or to exist only to move the characters from set-piece to set-piece, the dialogues can at times be unnatural in the extreme. But as a package deal, it's kinda enjoyable. A guilty pleasure? The action hits hard, he pulls few punches, and sometimes he gets a nice turn of phrase in. If you enjoyed the Battle Brothers writing, I'd recommend giving his books a try, they're cheap after all. Curious to hear what others think.

I have a few other things on my reading docket but I'll try first book eventually and I'll get back to you.

tfw the voices are extremely annoying (more than the ones in XCOM 2) and YouTubers don't turn them off

Anyone follow American Football 🏈?

I don't follow but I usually watch the Superbowl, and I'm interested in knowing the season backstory for both teams. Anyone want to rant about them, or just tell me they are both boring?

Patriots were the most successful / most hated team for the better part of the millennium until their HOF QB and coach that got them there both left and they started to suck. Everyone had gotten tired of them being good for so long, and so kind of hoped they would stay bad for awhile, but now they are annoyingly good again with a new star QB and coach and back in the SB (with a few lucky breaks along the way; they had the easiest schedule in the league this year and their biggest competition in the conference lost their starting QB the playoff game before they played, so people will say they had sort of a cake walk to the title game). People will probably be rooting against them for this reason.

The Seahawks have been a consistently solid team over the same time period, having a brief dominant run about a decade and a half ago. They now have a new coach who has kind of made a name for himself as a defensive whiz kid and taken the league by storm, similar to how Sean McVay did a few years ago on the offensive side with the Rams. McVay lost his first Super Bowl to the old Patriots dynasty, so now we'll see if "defensive McVay" will lose to the Patriots in his first appearance as well.

Everyone had gotten tired of them being good for so long...

That's what Patriots fans will tell you at any rate. The truth is more that they were perceived as unsportsmanlike and arrogant (which people don't like), and they were known to have cheated (which people like even less). It's not so much about them being good, as the character (or lack thereof) they had during that time. Now that Belichick and Brady are gone, I don't really think people care very much.

This guy does it better than I will.

UTree is entertaining, but as someone who watches a lot of his videos, it's clear that he knows very little about football. He's basically a go-to if you want to hear a distilled version of three hours of sports talk callers.

Yeah, he's definitely not a film guy, but he's fun for a casual shitposter.

On that note this season's Raiders were arguably the worst team they've trotted out since '06, so I didn't spend much time watching. That season ending tank bowl against the Giants was pretty funny, though.

Heard a friend of a friend describing how her girlfriend had a string of tempestuous relationships with guys that involved emotional turmoil and hot sex ("like, against the wall") in equal measure. Now the girlfriend is getting married to a guy who she says makes her happy all the time but the highs are not as high - she rationalizes this by saying that she's not settling, it's the highs with Chad only seemed high because the lows were so low. Myself, I'm not so sure - I guess I can only hope that her fiance doesn't know Chad made her feel. Bros, I don't feel so good...

Do men not have the same thing?

Men also have that borderline girlfriend, you know, the one that's an artist, where the sex was hot af but the relationship was otherwise tumultuous and they had to stop seeing them because they kept getting fall down intoxicated in public while out by themselves. Eventually they "settle" for the girl who doesn't have the mental illness and drug abuse issues but it's true they don't like to dirtytalk as much.

I guess presumably some men have the same thing but still - feeling that your wife is a step down from an ex in terms of raw attraction, and then telling people about it, seems pretty depressing. My male friends haven't told me that they feel this way, at least.

By "sex was hot af" I don't mean "the person was more attractive", but rather "sex with crazy/sociopathic people is exhilerating".

Yeah. I imagine people would say russian roulette (or any unhealthy, high-stakes gambling) is exhilarating, but that doesn't mean a gambler is not being true to themselves if they decide to drop the unhealthy habit.

That said, I can easily understand a steady girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband being insecure about the idea that maybe the unhealthiness is not inherent to the hotness, and that the person they see as their soulmate is gonna drop them when they find someone that's both exhilarating to be with AND not destructive.

Well, what's the actual difference between someone who marries you that thinks you're perfect versus someone that marries you because you check a lot of boxes but not all of them? The person who thinks you're perfect could still discover some other person that's better than you in some way and leave you for them?

This is just a difference in the way status works in same-sex groups between men and women. As is often said, women like complaining without advice more than men do, because masculinity has more emphasis on agency. A man who complains that he settled is low status even if he’s only voicing how many men feel, a woman who does is sharing in a kind of same-gender camaraderie.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/unpredictable-reward-predictable IV. points to that. In my mind I feel I've read something even more fitting how this delta of emotions isn't available to people in healthy relationships. But I can't find that post.

she rationalizes this by saying that she's not settling, it's the highs with Chad only seemed high because the lows were so low.

hamster_running_on_wheel.gif

Such is the fate of many a man, to serve unwittingly as an alpha widow’s retirement plan after she’s Had Her Fun.

I wish you would become a comedy writer on Substack or something, your talents are wasted here. The other day I told my brother your "Stochastic Frankenbrad" line and he roared laughing.

I don't think I have it in me at this point in my life to run a writing-based platform.

It's a lot easier to proffer amusing/interesting comments when first prompted by amusing/interesting posts/comments of other Mottizens than to have to bake the whole cake from scratch. I also comment relatively infrequently, like my median number of comments per day is likely literally 0 (for the mean is less than 1), which is probably not the kind of work-output conducive to running a Substack.

I do find it quite wholesome and heartwarming that you have at least one sibling receptive to wrongthink. Send him a referral link to the Motte!

My brother and I are very alike along numerous axes, but he's significantly less Online than I am, and often mocks me for wasting my time arguing with strangers on the internet. (Something I do on multiple platforms, not just this one.)

I have been accused of posting sexual topics in this thread in order to satisfy a prurient interest. Let's lean into the accusation. >:-)

A cursory search for "skirt waist height" on Google* indicates that the waist of a skirt generally is supposed to be placed near the woman's natural waist/bellybutton. A cursory search for "skirt midriff standing" on Gelbooru indicates that this style is followed surprisingly often (with the skirt waist just barely below the bellybutton) even in erotic art, where the woman is skinny and there is no incentive to hide a bulging belly. I find this somewhat interesting in contrast with the normal practice for a man, who normally will put the pants waist way down at the hip bone, significantly below the bellybutton (at least in my personal experience), and will put it up at the waist/bellybutton only if his belly bulge is huge. (Or maybe I'm out of touch with men's fashion. But to me wearing the pants waist way above the hip bone seems rather uncomfortable.)

On a somewhat related topic, one item that has confused me for a long time in erotic art is the popularity of outfits (most prominently the iconic "bunny suit", but also many one-piece swimsuits and bikini bottoms) where the edge of the fabric rises from the crotch at a very steep angle (i. e., straight to a point lying above the hip bone), rather than a gentler, almost flat angle (to a point lying in the middle of the hip bone, or even below it) that to me seems much more alluring. But I guess it's just a case of differing tastes. (Also, I guess a predominantly-horizontal bikini bottom might have trouble actually staying up IRL, since a belt cannot be used with it.)

*Hilariously, most of the Reddit results of this search are from transgender and nonbinary subreddits, with only a few from sewing subreddits.

A few weeks ago, after dabbling with local LLMs, I tried my hand at (non-AI-assisted) pornographic fiction. The result was two of the most excruciatingly boring """erotic""" stories imaginable (1 2). However, it's somewhat interesting to compare these two stories from year 2026 to two significantly better stories that I was inspired to write back in 2018 and 2017 by prompts found on 4chan's /trash/ board. Probably, the entire difference can be explained by the hypothesis that my brain has been completely fried by depression since 2022.

Men's fashion is cyclical, like any other fashion. Low waistlines were dominant in the 00s and the 10s, now high waistlines are back in style. Most retailers now offer high-waisted trousers with side tabs that sit on your natural waist, example. Levi's is all about 501 and 505 jeans again.

I own a couple of high-rise trousers and they are quite comfortable. The only problem I have is that some manufacturers don't realize that the higher the waistline, the longer the zipper should be, or you won't be able to fish out your junk through the fly.

Your pornographic fiction is about as pornographic as von Trier's Nymphomaniac. That is, the parts are technically moving, but the reader is revolted, not aroused. The shortest good advice I've read was, "write your porn while horny".

The second shortest good advice I've read was, "good porn is like good pussy: tight, wet, and clean". That is, the story doesn't wander, doesn't introduce unnecessary friction and doesn't dwell on the unsavory aspects of the bodies and acts. All of these subrules can be broken, there's a very good story that breaks all three, but if your goal is pure smut, following them is prudent.

The third advice is my own. Go through some mail-order paperback classics and build a thesaurus. There's a limited number of things limbs and genitals can do and people can feel, and it's good to be able to say "he moved his penis in an out of her vagina, she liked the sensation" ten different ways in a row.

I was visiting my psychiatrist uncle while his dad was over. As part of Standard Indian Hospitality, they tried offloading their spare wardrobe onto me. This included a pair of high-waisted grandpa trousers.

I'm sold. They're surprisingly comfy, look good on me, and go with everything. Highly recommend.

The incredibly loud and sequined suits? Less so, but you take the good with the bad.

This included a pair of high-waisted grandpa trousers.

My understanding is that these exist for men with no hips after their ass shrinks from old age.

cough

Unrelated to the main thrust of your post, I've read that men tend to wear their trousers higher and higher the older they get, which may be related to their bodies producing less testosterone as they age (don't ask me to explain the causal mechanism here, that's just what I've heard).

A prominent example of this is this compilation of clips of director William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist, Cruising), well-known for his bluntness and sharp tongue. One of the top comments quips "the higher the pants, the shorter the temper".

On a somewhat related topic, one item that has confused me for a long time in erotic art is the popularity of outfits (most prominently the iconic "bunny suit", but also many one-piece swimsuits and bikini bottoms) where the edge of the fabric rises from the crotch at a very steep angle (i. e., straight to a point lying above the hip bone), rather than a gentler, almost flat angle (to a point lying in the middle of the hip bone, or even below it) that to me seems much more alluring.

I think the idea is that it "frames" the waist in such a way as to give the impression that the wearer has wider hips and a narrower waist than she really does. A lot of women's clothing is designed to accentuate these features (e.g. if a woman is wearing a striped top, it will almost invariably have horizontal rather than vertical stripes, so as to make her curves more prominent).

[if you're reading this from the firehose feed, you probably don't want to]

A cursory search for "skirt waist height" on Google* indicates that the waist of a skirt generally is supposed to be placed near the woman's natural waist/bellybutton. A cursory search for "skirt midriff standing" on Gelbooru indicates that this style is followed surprisingly often (with the skirt waist just barely below the bellybutton) even in erotic art, where the woman is skinny and there is no incentive to hide a bulging belly.

Uh... at least to my knowledge, most modern skirts of that style use pretty stretchy elastic banding as a single point of contact, where pants are naturally stuck with a compromise between the waist and the crotch that limit how high they can go. The most comfortable location to wear that will naturally be where your figure is most narrow. For most women and a surprising number of men without pronounced guts, that's generally pretty close to the belly button, just because of hips. Anything lower will ride up as you walk, anything higher will feel like it's trying to escape.

((TMI : ... yes, that's from personal experience. I don't grok gender well enough for crossdress to do much if anything for me, but there's some fun 'ease of access' roleplay that's not really possible in anything else, even jockstraps.))

It's kinda interesting that it shows up that way in erotica? Guys are quite willing to imagine targets of lust without interest or awareness in their comfort, as evidenced by the prevalence of girl-on-girl smut with long fingernails. But a lot of focus on the abs and hip lines near the abdomen have always struck me as more androphillic an interest, and while it shows up sometimes there, it's far from universal, as would be expected by androphiles liking focus on the space in men's clothing too. (cw: no nudity, but really gay.)

I'd expect that for straight guys (and possibly lesbians?) this is one of those cultural things where you fixate on what you're exposed to, and what you're exposed to is more driven by what's realistic. Teenage guys can see a lot of women in skirts in the real world; they're not going to get invited to many non-porn girl-on-girl scenes where they can make any analysis of lesbian preferences re: fingernail length.

On a somewhat related topic, one item that has confused me for a long time in erotic art is the popularity of outfits (most prominently the iconic "bunny suit", but also many one-piece swimsuits and bikini bottoms) where the edge of the fabric rises from the crotch at a very steep angle (i. e., straight to a point lying above the hip bone), rather than a gentler, almost flat angle (to a point lying in the middle of the hip bone, or even below it) that to me seems much more alluring.(Also, I guess a predominantly-horizontal bikini bottom might have trouble actually staying up IRL, since a belt cannot be used with it.)

Yeah, this one confuses me a bit, too.

For bikinis, there's a physics explanation. Attaching any less-than-maximally-stretchy cloth from the groin to the outside of the thighs is going to Cause Problems for anyone walking, sitting, kneeling, anything other than legs straight. There's a porno trope about swimwear working its way loose, but I think a lot of that trope works off of 'surprisingly' being naked, so not gonna really function if it's completely unrealistic wear.

But on the other hand, there are very stretchy fabrics, and they’re pretty commonly used for bikini-like clothing. The counterintuitively-named boyshorts are sometimes designed with the near-flat crotch-to-hip angle and do work perfectly fine, even for women with very pronounced shapes (either hourglass or apple), even if they're still not quite comparable to a men's speedo. They can be pretty hot on women and are imo underutiltized (cw: women in underwear for once)... but then again, I'm looking for different things (cw: guy in women's underwear, kinda?) than straight guys are.

There's some fun options that only work with the steeper profiles ("underwear aside" has 18k submissions on e621) and is hilariously uncomfortable in boxers, and presumably the greater-if-only-in-theory 'proximity' of bathing-suit-areas to not-bathing-suit-coverage is part of things, but I doubt that's driving that much of it.

A few weeks ago, after dabbling with local LLMs...

I've had better success, even success with pretty weird kinks, using a script-like prompt format: give the characters, setting, conventions, and major plot points to ask for an outline, then have the LLM go through each scene one by one. Doesn't help with every LLM weirdness, but especially for kinks where it probably doesn't understand where the 'climax' isn't just because someone climaxed once, can avoid the problems that throwing negatives or indirection tends to get.

The result was two of the most excruciatingly boring """erotic""" stories imaginable (1 2)... Probably, the entire difference can be explained by the hypothesis that my brain has been completely fried by depression since 2022.

That's leaning pretty hard into the allegations. With the caveat that I don't grok a lot of the kinks, here...

Anhedonia definitely doesn't help writing, and especially writing erotic fiction, but I think some of what's going on reflects a difference in the expected forms and conventions of a story. You've got a lot of skill as a conversational writer, and given your professional background I assume you've done a lot of technical writing, but the expectations in genre fiction and especially erotic genre fiction are different enough that a lot of behaviors that are preferred elsewhere just don't work in normal storytelling, or are actively counterproductive. In technical writing you want to bring the priorities, plans, and details as far forward and early as possible with as much precision as possible knowing that readers will start skimming; in genre fiction, that’s going to get in the way.

Let's look at "A Brothel Visit" first. That's a pretty well-established set of story beats, but it's one that can work out reasonably well. Where it's failing to be erotic, it's not because of the author not wanting anything or the character not getting what they think they want -- if anything, it's a little direct there -- but because it's written like an epistolary story. You're telling people what happened, rather than giving them reason to want to know what's going to happen. In particular:

  • You need a grabber. For short stories, you've one to three sentences (for novellas, one to three paragraphs; novels might get a whole page). The ideal grabber has implications for what's going to be the central theme of the story, a motive or contradiction for the main character, and leaves some unanswered question. More realistic grabbers hit one of these three, hard. You've got that in your full story: the tension between sex and masturbation isn't very highbrow, but it's still a question; whether this visit to a prostitute means something deeper is literally a classic trope. You just don't get there until sentence five, where it feels like an afterthought, and it doesn't really drive whether the action here will happen so much as whether the protagonist will enjoy it.
  • When possible, add something that's a) uncertain and b) answered at the climax. That's a little tricky in smut, because 'x gets laid' isn't uncertain outside of cuckolding. But some form of rising tension is necessary, and that's the easy one.
  • When possible, give central characters a twist, usually something that only shows up more than a loose hint as you near the climax. Tomboys have a sensitive feminine side in bed, the most masc top can really want to cuddle, the sub starts getting pushy, yada. Not enough to override their normal character, maybe not even enough to put them at 'average' for whatever that trait is, but enough to add some complexity. If the protagonist here is supposed to be really fastidious and analytical, have him get increasingly figurative or approximate; if he's supposed to be cautious, throw a bit of spontaneity. This is a lazy way of just signaling to the reader that the character is getting worked up or emotionally vulnerable, but it's also a nice bit of realism. Short story characters are prone to becoming stereotypes, and this doesn’t solve matters alone, but worth using.
  • Smut is almost always written from either first-person or third-person limited perspective, and in the latter case, put a big emphasis on 'limited'. It's not just that the viewer isn't going to know things that the viewpoint character doesn't know. They aren't even going to think about things unless the viewpoint character would, or did, at that time. If you want a protagonist that practiced with condoms back at the hotel, you need a reason why that matters to them that very second : did their hands tremble for their first time doing so in front of an expert, or were they confident, or overconfident? If they notice that the prostitute is wet, they don't assume one option, they guess multiple possibilities and at best only one answer can be right.
  • The saying "great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people" is a little... out of its normal wheelhouse when talking about smut, but it's a good rule of thumb for writing, at least in terms of priorities. Specifically, the pneumatics are seldom going to be very interesting in vanilla sex, and even a lot of pretty deep kink. Anything plausible to write is going to make your male character(s) look like one-pump chumps, but leaving that aside you're just going to get more mileage from how people react, what they touch or respond, and how they sound or feel beyond just the holes and/or poles. This one's very genre-specific -- doesn't matter the gender of a sub in a breeding kink story, they're gonna notice when they get filled with wet heat because that's the point -- so you can excise too much. Unless you're into cherry popping, though, "X entered Y" isn't doing you any good. Unless you specifically want the sex to be awkward and mechanical (which can sometimes be a useful trick, I'll admit, as someone into orientation play!), put more emphasis on reactions, sounds, anything to keep the partner from seeming like a dead fish. Your reader is already able to stimulate themselves; you want to tell them what their sexual partner being stimulated does in return. That's a particularly valuable space here if you want the protagonist's analytical nature to err into paranoia or imposter syndrome (sure, the prostitute's having sex with him for money, but she's still an expert and will know if he's big or not, or good or not; even self-conscious and selfish considerations about how she seems him makes him come across as multifaceted and less schizoid).
  • Excise what's unnecessary, procrastinate what is necessary. There are a very few number of writers that can get away with highly-detailed ultra-realistic sex scenes, but you're almost always going to do better leaning into vague verisimilitude. (alternatives: comedy or drama). Not explaining what 'special service' acts as a good example, here, since readers could presume it's anything from anal to femdom to bareback, but you can do the same from currency conversion to background plans to specifying ages beyond decade-level bands or less direct hints. Procrastination is more subtle: think 'this woman is wearing a bikini and getting wet' starts with 'noticing a damp spot', then 'testing with a finger', then 'oh, this hole's self-lubricating and it slides in'. It's a cheap way to tie details and observations together, and a clever way to have the observing character seem focused on what he's doing.
  • Alternatively, if you really want to push hyperrealism, you gotta go the whole way. If your protagonist puts his underwear back on after a shower, either spell out something happening to them before he puts on a condom, or readers will assume he's using his fly like the world's least comfortable cock ring. If you're having a guy initiate PIV from the edge of a bed with a woman laying face-up, unless the guy's dick naturally stands at the exact right height, somebody's going to have to do some work to penetrate or be penetrated comfortably. If your main character is a virgin (and sober), he's nearly always going to have nerves and struggle for a little bit with his aim. To make it sexy, you take these things and make them relatable, like you did with the aside about labia. Given your themes, draw out how it's different from porn, sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better, and then fold the bits that are worse into opportunities to see something different.
  • Pacing absolutely drives smut, and pacing of descriptions are one of the easiest ways to tell readers what the protagonist is thinking about and focusing on. If your protagonist is faced with a choice of three women, the one that he describes in the most detail is the one he's going to read as most attracted toward; the parts of her he focused on will tell what his interests are. A short paragraph can have the viewpoint character's breath catch in their throat or dick twitching in their pants; a long one can mean he's introspective or deliberating or spiraling.
  • Avoid parentheticals and asides. Yes, I'm a hypocrite. They still fuck over pacing in genre fiction. Most publishing houses will just axe them, entirely. In fanfic or lj-style writing, you can get away with one a page, maybe.
  • The goal is rising tension. They're kinda stupid, but look up a Fap Hero video matching your preferences with your pants zipped up, and you'll notice how the pacing and speed is set to ebb and flow until it hits the climax, ideally around the same time the in-universe and reader money shots are happening. A lot of smut-writing's just higher-brow approaches to that.
  • Word choice matters a lot. Connotations can pull people entirely out of the right headspace: whether a vagina is 'slimy', 'moist', 'wet', and "dripping" is saying the same thing, but they imply 'gross', 'clammy', 'neutral' and 'aroused', respectively. Likewise, the complexity of the word matters. Just as you can increase tension and perceived speed of action by favoring shorter sentences and paragraphs, dropping down to simpler words will do the same. This part tends to be hardest for non-native speakers or for very specific kinks (both sadism and cherry-popping needs a little bit of blood and wincing that'd tell vanilla people they did something wrong; voraphiles have entirely different connotations to 'slimy', for example).
  • While there are a few genuine sensation-only links (eg silk, feet, some water sports), the overwhelming majority are bound more to social affiliation, often with multiple variations depending on the kinkster. As a writer, you want to id a possible social affiliation, and make it into a process, then tie it into the progression of the sex itself. Noncon can be about losing responsibility for doing and enjoying a β€˜wrong’ thing; writing noncon stories in that facing benefits from having the victim character fighting as much with his or her growing enjoyment as with the assailant. Breeding can be about making or being made indelibly tied to another person; exploring that needs the top to make the bottom β€œforever mine” well before the cumshot. Dollification can be partly about being β€˜made’ into an attractive and unglazed form; exploring that means noticing long-standing imperfections as they’re removed.
  • Barring some extremely specific kinks, you're generally going to want a viewpoint character to have a good, complete orgasm at least one 'scene' before the end of a work, before their 'twist', major change in perspective, or denouement happens. For short stories that's usually around 3/4s in; novellas and novels can have it get closer to the end. Porn usually runs on the tethercat principle, so if you end on someone getting fucked that can imply they're having an orgasm forever... but you can't have that transition period go forever. It needs to be a one-and-done, with enough separation that the character (or observers) can reflect and identify how much they've changed. For really dark works that can err on the side of bad end, mind break, permanent chastity finally getting to them, but 'corpse bride' isn't specific enough.

A lot of these aren't really 'written down' as rules. You can break them, once you know what you're doing. But they reflect an evolved equilibrium regarding what people expect, and what people are going to find most gratifying (uh, mostly men: women's erotic fiction and some chastity stuff tends to a more gradual pacing and can handle a number of sequential 'money shots' in ways most men don't). That's one of the reasons that erotic fiction can be either squicky or arousing to write -- successful works consider, whether at the level of awareness or not, what's the reader's doing with one hand.

[cw: very hard death-related kink]

And I don't think your 2018 piece avoids these problems. Having a strong core to your story's plot papers over a lot of habits incompatible with genre fiction, and having a strong core to a genre's style does even more, but it's still going to struggle to get third-party arousal.

Take the example of the "trapped soul" story. It has a strong grabber, and that grabber comes with some level of question driving readers about when or if the main character will be freed (uh, for people not actively repelled by death/snuff as a framing story, and dollification as the kink). That holds a lot more attention than "A Brothel Visit" info-dumping about the traits of the main character: had "trapped soul" started by listing the protagonist's breast size and economic class, it would have been stolid as well. And some of the time-weirdness and discomforting word choice is (presumably? dollification isn't my thing, and the furry version is drastically different) part of the kinks conventions, so I won't criticize that too much.

But the rising tension needs work. You've got opportunities -- both 'why aren't I getting out of here yet' and 'oh no, I'm getting trapped more and more' -- but the former is a static condition, and latter is only dropped in three quarters of the way through the story. Janice's body doesn't have reactions, but her spirit and brother is supposed to... and they're more emoting at each other rather than telling us how they're being driven to act or react. There's a lot of background detail being dropped, but it's given early enough that it feels disjointed rather than a genuine observation. Jason is rich and has criminal connections, but it's not introduced as something Janice finds out as he's able to have her corpse dollified, just because it's setting him up to be creepy and the dollification is a result of that. Too many parentheticals, characters being having screen time or being named that don't matter, and a main character that who doesn't really work up to the radical change in personality toward the end so much as dive into it wholesale.

Sorry, that came across as more harsh criticism than I'd intended, but it's important to see writing not as a state where your muse drops from the sky and everything comes out right, but a set of rules and habits that have to be cultivated to push you toward that flow state. Writing smut well is a hard skill, not one well-taught if it's taught at all, and one that's hard to evaluate yourself how it's going.

That comes with the gripping hand that it's something you can improve on, even when fighting with depression.

You're telling people what happened, rather than giving them reason to want to know what's going to happen.

In technical writing you want to bring the priorities, plans, and details as far forward and early as possible with as much precision as possible knowing that readers will start skimming; in genre fiction, that’s going to get in the way.

It's true that it probably would be more accurate to describe all four of these stories as "robotic narrations of erotic events" rather than "erotic stories". Maybe that's all that I was going forβ€”I'm not sure myself. I often think to myself that my local-LLM-generated "erotic descriptions of young, skinny women in clothing X and/or location Y" are four times as long as what I would have been able to write on the same topic ("A young, skinny, black woman stands in a shopping mall. Her tight, low-waisted jeans shorts and midriff-baring top expose lots of shiny, dark-chocolate-colored skin. Her kinky hair is cut just long enough to avoid being mistaken for a man's fade. She's smoking hot! What more is there to say?"), and that the stories that I find on Archive Of Our Own are twice as long as what I would have been able to write.

Alternatively, if you really want to push hyperrealism, you gotta go the whole way…

This is a very interesting paragraph.

That comes with the gripping hand that it's something you can improve on, even when fighting with depression.

I'm not really seeking to improve. The 2026 stories are just idle dabblings as I wait (perhaps in vain) for my depression to disappear so that I can go back to the multi-hour video-game-playing and PDF-to-HTML-converting sessions that are my true calling in life. It's interesting to try to imagine what flowery details a more skilled writer would be able to add, though.

(

One upside is the somewhat hilarious local-LLM reviews to which these stories can give rise. For example:

Overall, "A Brothel Visit" is an engaging and realistic look at a first-time brothel experience. It offers a nuanced portrayal of its protagonist and a clear-eyed view of the sex industry. While it could be enhanced by more exploration of the perspectives of the sex workers, it remains a compelling read.

Star Rating: β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜†β˜† (3 out of 5 stars)

Β )

Fair, and apologies for the unsolicited advice. Hope you're feeling better soon.

Sometimes I read a post from you gattsuru and I end up having a 20-minute personal reflection on personal interests because you're just so matter-of-fact I can't help it.

But a lot of focus on the abs and hip lines near the abdomen have always struck me as more androphillic an interest

I don't want to say I'm the ambassador of the straights, but yeah. That's not to say that a woman who's thin in a fit way isn't seen as attractive, straight guys really don't focus on the abdomen to the point where "fit" is meaningfully distinguished from "thin and untoned."

That said, this from Toa:

one item that has confused me for a long time in erotic art is the popularity of outfits (most prominently the iconic "bunny suit", but also many one-piece swimsuits and bikini bottoms) where the edge of the fabric rises from the crotch at a very steep angle (i. e., straight to a point lying above the hip bone), rather than a gentler, almost flat angle (to a point lying in the middle of the hip bone, or even below it) that to me seems much more alluring.

Is completely sensible to me. The attraction of the steep angle is it shows significantly more of the crotch region and forms a kind of sharp arrow down to the genitals. Every inch of skin in that space is considered pretty revealing if shown, and the mons pubis itself is subject to considerable erotic interest for straight men. I think the point of being attracted to this angle in bodysuits and swimsuts is that it's essentially the bare minimum angle before you're actually just displaying your genitals; it's right on the line without crossing it.

The counterintuitively-named boyshorts are sometimes designed with the near-flat flat angle and do work perfectly fine, even for women with very pronounced shapes (either hourglass or apple), even if they're still not quite comparable to a men's speedo. They can be pretty hot on women and are imo underutiltized

I don't know, I'm going to disagree with you there. Boyshorts aren't really interesting to me at all. They seem femboyish to me. Actually the twitter, uh, meme? strikes me as more resembling boyish aesthetics than what I associate with straight women, even though the characters are depicted with breasts. Maybe they're tomboyish?

I'd expect that for straight guys this is one of those cultural things where you fixate on what you're exposed to

It's funny that you'd say this in a post where you've linked to images of what I take to be furry femboys in striped thigh-highs.

My first serious girlfriend in high school liked wearing a striped, purple and black blouse a lot. Eventually just the shirt itself became attractive to me, and then striped clothing in general. In eroticwear the main use of stripes is in thigh-highs, and straight men have a thing for women's legwear in general, so I guess naturally the "stripes are hot" thing migrated there... so striped thigh-highs are my thing, as in "my college girlfriend actually bought striped thigh-highs in order to wear them for me" level of being my thing.

So it's always been kind of surreal to me that they became principally associated with femboys and transbians and... programmers??. I've definitely met a few of the Discord creatures that wear these as a mark of identity.

I think before that it had an association with scene girls, and that subculture was definitely around at a formative time for me, so I guess maybe it was a straight thing before it was a gay one.

I don't want to say I'm the ambassador of the straights, but yeah. That's not to say that a woman who's thin in a fit way isn't seen as attractive, straight guys really don't focus on the abdomen to the point where "fit" is meaningfully distinguished from "thin and untoned."

Maybe I'm an outlier, but if a girl goes full trilobite, she has a very different effect on me than someone who just has a hint of semilunar lines or a soft belly. It's the same with well-defined upper back. Not talking about massive lats, but there's a woman that goes to the same gym as I on Saturdays and she usually wears a backless gym suit. When she's doing pullups (like a machine!), damn, the whole area around her shoulder blades ripples and it's just hnng.

And no, muscles on dudes or quads on girls don't do anything to me.

I don't want to say I'm the ambassador of the straights, but yeah. That's not to say that a woman who's thin in a fit way isn't seen as attractive, straight guys really don't focus on the abdomen to the point where "fit" is meaningfully distinguished from "thin and untoned."

Huh. Surprised that it's so broad rather than just not T&A-priority, but would explain a bit.

I don't know, I'm going to disagree with you there. Boyshorts aren't really interesting to me at all. They seem femboyish to me. Actually the twitter, uh, meme? strikes me as more resembling boyish aesthetics than what I associate with straight women, even though the characters are depicted with breasts. Maybe they're tomboyish?

Ah, that could be a good part of it, and one that's not accessible to me.

It's funny that you'd say this in a post where you've linked to images of what I take to be furry femboys in striped thigh-highs... I think before that it had an association with scene girls, and that subculture was definitely around at a formative time for me, so I guess maybe it was a straight thing before it was a gay one.

Tbf, I'm pretty sure outside of Always Online subcultures, you're still going to see more straight (not-trans) variants of the striped thigh-highs bit. Even for furries, it's pretty close to a 1:1 ratio on e621, and that's about as tech-programmer-trans as you'll get outside of a Rust convention. Definitely something the gay and trans side of things stole, but not exactly something taken over.

It just interests me how much of this stuff is just accidents of fate, and how quickly and randomly it can swing around. Hell, I resemble that remark myself : obviously furry fandom as a whole is about fixating on a concept, since there's people glomming on a foxy Robin Hood (checks notes 50 years later?!), but there's a very specific video I can point to regarding topping guys in plaid skirts, or for a hetero-friendly example the whole 'male swimwear challenge' (cw: female furries topless, but with featureless nudity aka no nips) was something with basically zero presence outside of porn, didn't have any presence there until the meme took off and wouldn't make sense before the late 1950s, but just unlocks something for some people.

Contrast it with more mechanical or sensation-focused kinks, or where social interactions are the real drivers, or where the material is available to get fixated on but it doesn't seem to connect to almost anyone, and it's kinda fascinating how varied interests can get.

Huh. Surprised that it's so broad rather than just not T&A-priority, but would explain a bit.

Women naturally have higher bodyfat% than men, even before modern obesity, and so women with abs are rare enough that most guys will never encounter one in their intimate life or even their crushes. You've got to be a real connoisseur.

That's not to say that a woman who's thin in a fit way isn't seen as attractive, straight guys really don't focus on the abdomen to the point where "fit" is meaningfully distinguished from "thin and untoned."

Huh. Surprised that it's so broad rather than just not T&A-priority, but would explain a bit.

Just my 2Β’ as a straight guy, but I find moderate abdominal musculature quite attractive on women. It's not a primary feature for me, but I like how a firm tummy bridges the soft jiggly bits above and below. There's a risk of the torso becoming too boxy at a certain point, but I'm not sure how much of that effect is just anti-selection (women with great WHRs are probably less likely to get super into strength training).

So it's always been kind of surreal to me that they became principally associated with femboys and transbians and... programmers??. I've definitely met a few of the Discord creatures that wear these as a mark of identity.

Wait, are you saying that non-femboy / non-trans programmers actually wear thigh high socks instead of just memeing about it?

No, I'm saying that I have met femboy/trans programmers who wear thigh high socks and hang out on Discord. If heterosexual programmers are wearing thigh-highs that'd be news to me too.

So it's always been kind of surreal to me that they became principally associated with femboys and transbians and... programmers??. I've definitely met a few of the Discord creatures that wear these as a mark of identity.

Thigh-highs in general are an ultrafeminine accessory, so it makes sense that someone who wants to signal "I am a pretty girl!" would wear them. It's like transmen being too much into tailored menswear.

As a data point: I wear casual pants (jeans) with the waist band down at my hip bone, and dress pants up around my belly button. I find the latter very uncomfortable (especially because I'm a fat fuck), but IMO it looks so much better when I'm wearing a suit if my pants are up higher.

Different waistband heights at different ages. That article doesn’t seem to care if the effect is upstream or downstream of historical fashion. I would guess what was popular in 1960 had become firmly entrenched as β€œold people fashion” by 1990. Add a few iterations of counter-countersignaling and here we are.

Erotica is weird and follows different dynamics than fashion. Also, the subset you’re talking about is heavily, heavily skewed by Japanese culture. I bet you can trace skirt height back to some year’s seifuku standards.

On a somewhat related topic, one item that has confused me for a long time in erotic art is the popularity of outfits (most prominently the iconic "bunny suit", but also many one-piece swimsuits and bikini bottoms) where the edge of the fabric rises from the crotch at a very steep angle (i. e., straight to a point lying above the hip bone), rather than a gentler, almost flat angle (to a point lying in the middle of the hip bone, or even below it) that to me seems much more alluring.

I feel like this flips back and forth the way fashion does and that guys prefer ever was popular when they first noticed girls didn't have cooties.

As a prefer of the former look, the best version has the hip openings go all the way up to the natural waist.

Did you guys know Patton wrote poetry?

I read this making the same face and noises that my son does when watching highlight reels of high school sports.

Speaking of poetry, there is an Australian Comedian, James Donald Forbes McCann, that writes books of poetry. And then advertises that he is the best selling poet in Australia. The joke being that he has basically zero competition for his poetry books.

The classic fanzine article which introduced β€œclench racing” begins with a lesser-known section on poetry.

Leonard Nimoy, currently directing his own resurrection in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, is the author of two books of poems rightly considered too hot for bookshops to handle. They're distributed solely through Athena poster shops, in the same series of icky little volumes with tinted pages and silhouettes of weeds that has given the world the if anything even more deathless works of the legendary Susan Polis Schutz, the Colorado Sappho.

I’d say McCann is late to the party, except I’m not sure Nimoy was actually in on the joke.

He was a pretty cool dude. The eponymous movie about him is worth watching.

I haven't laughed this hard in a long time (link courtesy Scott's "links for February"): https://x.com/peligrietzer/status/2018198275237556472

A few live performances from the 70s tv show The Midnight Special for your Friday viewing/listening:

  1. Spooky Tooth doing "I am the Walrus" as a slow-burning English blues song.
  2. War doing a 10-minute version of "The World is a Ghetto."
  3. The Cars doing "Moving in Stereo," which is remarkably good live considering how layered the studio version is.

rdrama, the /r/drama spinoff site that themotte.org's code is based off of, experienced roughly a day and a half of downtime from late Wednesday until half an hour ago. This was the longest outage event in the site's history (previous record was ~7 hours) and the first that was not caused by botched code deployment.

This time, the cause is "the hosting provider lost physical access to and control over their [edit for clarity: rented] US datacenter".

[sound warning, rdrama warning, bright colors warning] https://rdrama.net/post/790694/pictured-leaked-screenshot-from-our-illustrious

The site is currently in its annual "Donkey Kong December" theme event, which takes place in February.

The most recent backup that was not hosted in the same lost datacenter is from September of last year, so there has been a substantial rollback. Admins are working to retrieve a 2/4/2026 backup from another provider, but negotiations are ongoing.

[sound warning, rdrama warning, bright colors warning]

I have to ask: How can anyone use that site when it's explicitly been made so user hostile?

Truly, it is a wonder that The Motte is usable at all given the origin of the codebase.

If you have an account there is a toggle by the name of "poor mode" that turns off most of that stuff.

As fate would have it, the service we used to store our daily automated backup also banned us 3 days ago. We're appealing this and hopefully can merge the backups soon.

Banned? :-o

I read it as "the datacenter owner lost access to the whole data center", which would be extremely eye-popping event. But it looks like in reality, the data center owner just decided to kick those folks out. Which is always a risk, especially for high-drama platforms.

Well, rdrama is presumably not the only customer of the hosting provider that got booted. But it is entirely possible that the hosting provider only served similarly radioactive clients. Details are scant.

"Bulletproof hosting" is a thing, and they specialize on that kind of clients (and there's no reason for another kind of clients to pay the premium they'd necessarily charge). I don't know what kind of host rdrama used, but this certainly is a real thing.

This time, the cause is "the hosting provider lost physical access to and control over their US datacenter".

Is this a legal thing, or is this like when Meta put the key card control system in a data center that didn't have physical keys?

Legal thing by the looks of it. Hosting provider is not US-based, but rents from a US datacenter. Datacenter unexpectedly and forcefully terminated relationship with hosting provider. Unknown whether rdrama being hosted there had anything to do with it. Unlikely, I'd say.

Want to fly farther?

Get that dick up, king <-- This is a link.

TLDR;

Ski jumpers, ahead of the winter Olympics (which begin, officially, today!) have, allegedly, been inflating their penises via various methods in order to expand the surface area of their ski jumping suits during official fitting.

After they've de-cocked, so to speak, the extra suit material acts as a small "sail" and they stay aloft just a bit longer.

Anything for an edge, I guess. This leaves me to mourn mostly for whichever ski jumper is legitimately packing a howitzer downstairs. That poor fellow will probably have a room full of scrutinizing IOC eyeballs on his Johnson.

Any other good sports cheating stories like this?

This is the real reason BLS changed its metrics for inflation.

Can't you do the same with, I don't know, your chest or belly? Why it has to be the penis?

And, of course, how hilarious would be the countermeasures? Are they all going to have their penises inspected before the jump now? Or maybe required weekly inspections for a year before the event, to establish the baseline and prevent the anomalous inflation?

Or maybe required weekly inspections for a year before the event, to establish the baseline and prevent the anomalous inflation?

If there isn't a "Norwegian Penis Inspection Team" t-shirt, there should be.

I feel like it would be less hassle to take a heroic dose of viagra and then think of England.

They'd probably know something's up if you show with a raging boner. The goal is a big hog not a tentpole.

How are they fitting the suits? Couldn't the athletes just stuff a sock down there rather than inject paraffin into their cocks? Or are the suits fitted during penis inspection day?

Or are the suits fitted during penis inspection day?

It's this one.

The rule is the crotch of the suit is based on the bottom of your genitals. So, bigger genitals, longer suit, and bigger wing. The point is you can't wear a squirrel suit, and so there are rules about how big and webbed the suit can be. Exactly this big, depending.

This seems ACTUALLY unfair to guys who are growers not showers.

Seems like they should probably standardize something regarding the uniforms here to make it so jump length isn't so directly correlated with junk length.

Wouldn't it be the opposite? The grower could get aroused for the fitting and experience significant shrinkage when he gets out into the cold air.

This is the type of question that would have caused 50 pages of rowdy debate on a 2014 bodybuilding forum.

Or pick the largest junk and set everyone else's to that length.

And have everyone competing to be the guy that sets the standard?

I feel like Goodhart's law would become a problem real quick LMAO.

This seems ACTUALLY unfair to guys who are growers not showers.

Shouldn't be a problem unless you're chuffing before the jump.

DO YOU NOT?

That poor fellow will probably have a room full of scrutinizing IOC eyeballs on his Johnson

That poor soul having to endure a room of people staring at his giant penis. Truly the stuff of nightmares.

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