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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2122 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 13, 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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Nathan Fillion announced on Instagram that a second Firefly season is in development. It's a cult classic/niche hit. Has at least a million dedicated fans, which is an unfortunate amount. Disney Plus, which holds the rights at the moment, would probably need the number of fans to be in the 10s of millions to consider beginning production. It sounds like Disney was open to Fillion bringing the rights somewhere else so maybe he could manage a low budget thing on Crunchy roll but I don't feel like that's his goal.

I always felt that Firefly would make a good fan-funded high-quality podcast serialized story, like The Magnus Archives. This is a little ambitious but we will see how it goes. If you think Firefly has more than 1 million fans, prove it by liking the Instagram post. We will see how it shakes out.

I'm a huge Firefly fan, but I hope this doesn't go anywhere. In the list of shows brought back from the dead, it's rare to see a successful one. Twin Peaks, Arrested Development, Futurama, X-Files, all terrible after they were brought back. The final season of Community was good, but I attribute that to no time having passed after it got dropped by the network.

Twin Peaks, Arrested Development, Futurama, X-Files, all terrible after they were brought back.

I agree with the latter 3, but I cite The Return as one of the few examples of a successful show resurrection.

I can understand disliking The Return on the grounds that it is arguably even weirder and/or "differently vibed" than the original show but I'm still glad it got made. "THIS IS WHAT WE DO IN THE FBI" cracks me up every time I think of it.

Nathan Fillion announced on Instagram that a second Firefly season is in development.

WHAT.

In development does not mean in production. He has approval from the rights holder (20th Century Fox/Disney) and the original show runner (Wheadon). He has the original cast and one of the show runners from Dollhouse on board. He has a script for at least the first episode of season 2. He has an animation studio that has declared interest.

It doesn't sound like he has money. Or as he puts it, "a home." But really it's the money needed to begin production which would be provided in the place where it will be distributed (these days a streaming service). Disney has first dibs, but would somewhere like Apple or Amazon pick it up? One thing that would encourage such a move would be to prove there are still fans out there, in sufficient quantities to make it worth it. Hence the hype campaign right now.

If the hype does not explode, this will go nowhere.

I mean, Firefly fans are legendary for their influence, from the full page Thank You ad to managing to help get the Big Damn Movie the green light, they've delivered. I'm sure they'll signal boost this as much as possible, but I personally had no idea that there was still even a torch to be carried for a second season to get this far!

As much as I would have given for a second season 20 years ago, I think that ship has sailed. The crew are old now. Nobody wants to see middle aged actors hobbling around pretending to be space pirates. Disney already ruined the real Han Solo. Don't let them ruin cult classic knockoff Han Solo too.

The crew are old now. Nobody wants to see middle aged actors hobbling around pretending to be space pirates.

Eh. There's definitely a show to be made with that concept. Not sure if the Serenity crew are the right ones for it tho.

Like nobody will ever do season 3 of Rome. WIth Ray Stevenson dead and John Milius as good as dead, what would be the point?

Rome's cancellation: one of the greatest crimes against quality TV enjoyers.

I honestly, really, actually, in truth and fact, just completely stopped watching TV at all after Rome. I had seen the best and wanted no more of all else.

That's why it's an animated series, I expect.

But like I said, I thought a podcast audio drama would be the best possibility.

I’m continuing my tradition of using The Motte as a wildly inappropriate forum for suggestions about media.

I recently watched Clueless (1995) and 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) which are modernized teenage high school romantic comedy adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma and Shakespeare’s Taming Of The Shrew. And I loved them. They are the perfect combination of lighthearted fun, warm and fuzzy positive vibes (particularly Clueless), (faux) nostalgia back to my teenage years, good performances (even iconic in the case of Alicia Silverstone’s Cher in Clueless) combined with great execution and obviously excellent source material.

What other similar light hearted teen rom com adjacent yet actually really good adaptations or even original movies from the late 80s to 2000s should I check out?

For another Austen adaptation: Bridget Jones' Diary is a fun and comfy version of Pride and Prejudice.

Joss Whedon also made a version of Much Ado About Nothing during the 2007 writer's strike. It's badically just a bunch of Firefly and Buffy actors hanging out around his house. I don't know if I've ever seen a bad production of Mich Ado About Nothing, but this one might be my favorite.

  • Trojan War (1997), starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and Will Friedle
  • Girl Next Door (2004), starring Elisha Cuthbert and Emile Hirsch
  • Overnight Delivery (1998), starring Reese Witherspoon and Paul Ruud

FiveHourMarathon's Can't Hardly Wait suggestion is a must watch for this genre.

Taking your question in a totally different direction: the essential Romantic Comedies to watch to survey the genre

-- Love Affair (1939) or An Affair to Remember (1957). The classic, referenced in Sleepless in Seattle among other places, caught both on Turner Classic Movies when I watched a lot of it while studying for the LSAT. The climactic scenes are iconic for a reason. They're the same movie, watch the earlier one if you prefer a suave French protagonist, the latter if you prefer him American.

-- How to Marry a Millionaire Three young women cynically try to ensnare themselves a rich husband. Hijinks ensue. Marilyn Monroe at the point where you understand how she was able to single handedly launch Playboy and be the love of Joltin' Joe Dimaggio's life while also schtupping the President and the attorney general. If you like this, you can explore 50s comedies like Some Like it Hot.

-- Marriage, Italian Style Prime Sophia Loren and Marcelo Mastroianni. An irresponsible Italian playboy has a multi-decade romance with a beautiful prostitute. The acting is so good, the costumes so beautiful, and the setting so charming. If you like this Marcelo and Sophia made a whole pile of movies together.

-- Annie Hall Woody Allen's best, at his most neurotic. Don't watch this unless you can handle an intensely Jewish experience, but it's essential, however much it might be denied elsewhere. Woody Allen, like Phillip Roth, captures something of the darkest nature of male heterosexuality in a light and funny way. If you like this, Woody Allen made about a dozen rom-coms that all rank among the best ever.

-- What's Up Doc? Streisand presages the manic pixie dream girl, trying to snatch a straight laced man away from his boring and bitchy fiancee. A rollicking farce that ends with a madcap chase scene that I watched a million times on VHS with my sister.

-- When Harry Met Sally The GOAT. Simply the best Romantic Comedy of all time. Two acquaintances go from dislike, to friends, to companions, to lovers, over years and years. Ships passing in the night. The writing is good, the chemistry is perfect, and the interviews with elderly couples about how they met are sappy and sweet. If you like this, Meg Ryan did Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail.

-- Sixteen Candles You need one of the John Hughes 80s classics, and I think Candles is better than Pretty in Pink and more of a pure romcom than The Breakfast Club, though I would also recommend TBC as a great film. Molly Ringwald turns 16, and through the homecoming dance gets the boy of her dreams. Watch it purely for Long Duc Dong, the exchange student often decried as a politically incorrect racist caricature, but who winds up with a STACKED white volleyball player by the end of the movie, so he does pretty well for himself I think.

-- Moonstruck Cher and Nicholas Cage star, and it's fascinating seeing Nick Cage in this offbeat part long before he'd be a bankable star for National Treasure type schlock. Intensely 80s, intensely NYC Italian. Cher is engaged to a schlubby man, but in order to complete the marriage must reconcile him to his brother, Nick Cage, who doesn't speak to his brother after losing his hand in an accident. Nick, of course, falls for Cher.

-- Mystic Pizza Three teenage girls in Mystic, Connecticut work at a pizza place, hang out, fall in love, get married, make mistakes. The paying the babysitter scene is the single greatest most gut wrenching scene in the entire RomCom genre. Julia Roberts at her best, better than Pretty Woman imo, though Mrs. FiveHour hates her teeth too much to pay attention to anything else. Slice of life New England stuff on top of the rest of it. Coming of age comedies don't come much better than this.

-- Tin Cup Kevin Costner did a whole pile of sports romcoms, I think this is the best, though Bull Durham gives me my personal text for the "IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE..." sign in my front lawn. Costner is a burnout loser golf course pro, who is inspired by losing his lady love to a straitlaced PGA tour pro to go win the US Open with his caddy Cheech. Filled with bon mots, it's a great sports movie in addition to a great romcom, with the climactic scene capturing something essentially masculine in a way that can be tough to do in a romcom format.

-- Four Weddings and a Funeral The film that launched Hugh Grant's career. A group of friends see each other at weddings over the years, their lives evolve and change, romance blooms. NEVER EVER LET YOUR FIANCEE DO WEDDING SHOPPING WITHOUT YOU, HUGH GRANT WILL FIND HER AND STEAL HER FROM YOU. The writing in this is just so good, it's only flaw is that I find the female lead so unattractive as to be unfuckable, I'd probably sleep with 90s Hugh Grant first. The charmingly disheveled vibe that Hugh Grant carries through the film is what every man wishes he could be.

-- Can't Hardly Wait Not a pure romcom, but one of the essential 1990s teen movies, which even at the time tried to be aggressively of its time. The whole film takes place over the course of a single party summer after senior year of high school. The iconic image of the high school rager, the wigger poser, the high school rock band drama. Gorgeous storytelling in this film, captures a vibe of the 90s like nothing else.

-- High Fidelity (2000) The film that best captures the essence of hipsterism, the dominant cultural force for much of white America from 2005-2015 or so. A fascinatingly misanthropic male lead, and Jack Black in the role that launched his career. John Cusack is a sad sack record store owner, whose best friends are his employees Jack Black and the other guy I don't remember, who he doesn't really pay much so much as they sit around and bullshit about the Smiths and the Jesus and Mary Chain all day.

-- Crazy Stupid Love Probably the most recent great romcom I can think of. Ensemble cast with intersecting stories ending in a giant farce. Does a good job of deconstructing the early PUA genre. If you like this, Steve Carrell did a lot of this kind of stuff, 40 Year Old Virgin and Date Night are pretty good. Stories intersect from Carrell's wife cheating on him and Carrell trying to find his masculinity again, with Ryan Gosling stepping in as PUA mentor. Romcom self referential, and emblematic of the best the genre has had to offer after 2003 or so.

She's the Man is an adaptation of Twelfth Night. I don't remember if it's good or not.

Joe versus the Volcano with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. It's a romcom with Meg Ryan playing several characters and Tom Hanks working a dead end office job, after being told by his doctor he is dying he is hired by a rich man to go jump into a volcano. It's a little off the wall but It is one of my all time favorites.

Another case of nominative determinism?

Thomas L. "Tom" Golden was a miner from Georgia, United States, who was one of the earliest prospectors in present-day Jefferson County, Colorado. Golden arrived in the then-Kansas Territory in 1858 around the beginning of the Pike's Peak Gold Rush. He later partnered with George A. Jackson, a native of Glasgow, Missouri who discovered gold at the confluence of Chicago Creek and Clear Creek on January 7, 1859

But it also seems entirely possible to me that he changed his name upon assuming his occupation.

entirely possible to me that he changed his name upon assuming his occupation.

That would be my guess. The ancestors of all those people named Smith didn't just take up the profession due to nominative determinism.

So I just finished the second book in Ian W. Toll's Pacific War Trilogy: Conquering Tide. This book begins with the battle for Guadalcanal, which takes up a third of the book and culminates in the disastrous (for the Japanese) battle of the Philippine Sea. I liked this one even more than Pacific Crucible, because it filled in many of the gaps that I saw in that book (submarine war, army/navy conflict), although the series continues to be very Navy and American-centric. This is not a problem for me as I'm trying to read this series to help me understand my country's history and don't mind reading another book to learn about ANZAC, Burma, and China. More thoughts listed in roughly chronological order below.

  1. Submarines were absolutely vital for the American effort in the Pacific, and were responsible for sinking something like 60% of the enemy tonnage throughout the course of the war. My favorite chapter in the book was one in which we followed the submarine crew of the Wahoo and its crazy Skipper "Mush" Morton throughout most of 1943. Unlike the Allies in the Atlantic, the Japanese didn't really give much of an effort in developing anti-submarine tactics, because of the "low prestige" of the job, nor did they really ramp up their own submarine attacks on American shipping. This seems like a huge oversight.

  2. Guadalcanal seems like it absolutely fucking sucked for everyone. Swampy malarial jungle, poor supply situation, and constant aerial bombardments meant neither the Japanese nor the Americans got much rest when they weren't fighting.

  3. American strategy at Guadalcanal seemed extremely smart to me: contest the islands just enough to continuously bleed Japanese air and sea power from bases further up the Solomons/Bismarks (mainly Rabaul). Kind of like the original plan for Verdun.

  4. Japanese leadership in general seemed extremely bad. A lot of decisions seemed to be made for ego-stroking reasons, rather than around any kind of grand strategy to win the war. Of course if Japan had had competent leadership, it never would have bombed Pearl Harbor, or even invaded China in the first place, but even so, there were many things that the Japanese leadership could have done to improve their performance in the war. More careful shepherding of human resources, above all pilots, more extensive aviation training programs, strategic giving up of territory, better cooperation between the army and navy all would have turned many of Japan's most catastrophic losses into victories, or at least less bloody retreats. The two worst examples of this were lack of pilot rotations, meaning almost all experienced pilots were killed in 1942-early 1943, and the army's repeated use of Banzai tactics against US marines. It's not the 19th century anymore folks! In contrast the US leadership, especially Nimitz, seemed to me to be extremely high caliber. Maybe this was because the US military actually had some oversight from the civilian government so incompetents and fanatics could be removed?

  5. Ideas like Elan, Warrior Spirit, and Bushido seem to be total bullshit in modern war. Time and time again Japanese troops and pilots make extremely brave and daring calls, but these aren't enough to overcome, and sometimes reinforce tactical stupidity. In contrast, the Americans are much more on a bell curve of bravery, but win the day because of better leadership and equipment. Of course the war was ultimately decided by American material might, but early in the book around Guadalcanal, Americans won engagements that they shouldn't have on paper because of far superior leadership and planning, despite maybe lower overall "quality" in the enlisted men.

  6. At the same time, American tolerance for causalities is super low. In the first island hopping campaign in the Marshalls, Toll makes a big deal about Americans losing ~2k dead taking Tarawa. Casualties are similarly low for much of the rest of the action of the book, including on Saipan and Guam. Even on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had only about 12k dead each. Compared to the Eastern Front, WW1, or even the Civil War, these are pathetic numbers that the media made a storm about. I don't mean to take these deaths lightly, but proportionally this is nothing. This attitude has only gotten worse (Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, current Iran war), and I think it makes it increasingly difficult to accomplish our geopolitical goals.

  7. Battle of the Philippine Sea (the biggest carrier battle ever apparently) was kind of sad and anticlimactic. The Japanese pilots were so undertrained that they were shot out of the sky like turkeys by American aces. Earlier in the war, better pilots might have taken down quite a bit of the American Navy.

  8. Complete and utter failure of Japanese intelligence and reconnaissance. The amount of times I read the words "surprisingly, the American fleet arrived undetected" was shocking, and indicates a lack of investment in code-breaking and reconnaissance by the Japanese leadership. Of course some of this was luck, but if something happens almost every time, it's not luck.

Japanese leadership in general seemed extremely bad. A lot of decisions seemed to be made for ego-stroking reasons, rather than around any kind of grand strategy to win the war.

Complete and utter failure of Japanese intelligence and reconnaissance.

If you're interested in a window to the Japanese perspective, I would highly recommend the book Memoirs of a Kamikaze. The author, Kazuo Odachi, was one of extremely few surviving kamikaze pilots (he was sent on a kamikaze mission, failed to find any American ships, and returned to base; literally while he was on the runway for a second attempt, the war ended). It's short, and just his personal story, but that story is a very interesting one. He talks a lot about what the Japanese leadership looked like "from the inside" and why/how the Japanese soldiers were so fanatical.

It also includes some very interesting stories of his life adjusting to US-occupied Japan after the war, and what the country was like at this time -- you can imagine that going from kamikaze pilot to a defeated subject living at peace is not the simplest transition.

Ideas like Elan, Warrior Spirit, and Bushido seem to be total bullshit in modern war

Whenever there was rough material parity, the Japanese usually won. They often won while outnumbered. The Allies never achieved a feat like the Malaya campaign where they steamrolled a Japanese force that outnumbered or outgunned them. You see battles like Guadalcanal and it's always the same story. Allies: 60,000+ men. Japan: 36,200 men. Not exactly an impressive feat of arms, winning with more men!

Warrior spirit and elan really is important. What happened in Korea? The Chinese soldiers really wanted to win and that apparently is enough to compensate for having no armour, airpower, motorized supply, just being a light infantry force... They put North Korea back on the map with elan.

Sufficient firepower can overwhelm warrior spirit of course, supplies are obviously needed... At the end of the day it doesn't matter how you win so long as you do.

But look at Afghanistan! What did the Taliban have, exactly? Money? Weapons? Training? Numbers? Or was it just elan and will to win, determination and confidence in their values? I doubt 1 in 10 of our soldiers would tolerate fighting like the Taliban did, without medivac, without armour, without sophisticated training, without airpower, without all our advanced technology.

I doubt 1 in 10 of our soldiers would tolerate fighting like the Taliban did, without medivac, without armour, without sophisticated training, without airpower, without all our advanced technology.

Certainly not for Aghanistan.

What did the Taliban have, exactly?

Integeration into the native population.

Ideas like Elan, Warrior Spirit, and Bushido seem to be total bullshit in modern war.

FWIW, I don't think this is exactly true, or at least I want to pick it apart a little. (Apologies in advance for the long tangent to your very interesting review, which I appreciate.)

At a minimum, I think physical courage is still important. However, I think that coolness under fire is an extremely important but less visible part of the virtue of courage, and recklessness has diminishing value in a modern war, while coolness has increasing value.

A sort of seemingly reckless courage could be pretty valuable in physical combat when rushing at someone with a pointed object could cause them to break and flee (this is why Surovov trained his troops on bayonet drills: at the time, troops rarely broke from gunfire alone, but bayonet charges usually resulted in one side or the other breaking before the lines made contact). However in modern warfare, instead of bayonets being "step 2" of a battle, they are more like "step 50" and the battle is usually decided before that point. Particularly in the naval and air category, reckless courage is not likely to "scare" the enemy due to the interpersonal nature of the conflict (although you might successfully bluff them), and it's likely to cause you to make a mistake while you are operating a complex piece of machinery. Whereas if you get rattled while operating a complex piece of machinery, you're going to operate less effectively.

Interestingly, naval air operations you mention in the book likely required more psychological resilience or courage than modern air combat (this is based on studies done during IIRC the Vietnam War that found that carrier landings caused more stress than taking enemy fire). So coolness is essential and being reckless means you'll wash out of the flight program or worse.

But coolness is less obvious an aspect of courage than conspicuous risk-taking. (Or, to put it another way, if you're in naval air operations or a submariner, the conspicuous risk-taking is already "baked in" - you're landing a plane on a boat! You're in a boat under the water!!)

I do think elan still has a place today. Something like the Maduro capture operation requires a certain amount of elan (literally, that means "dash," doesn't it?) and willingness to expose oneself to potentially hostile fire, and in certain circumstances (such as house-to-house combat) what seems like reckless courage can rise in value again: the guy who will actually charge you with a fixed bayonet in a crowded space may prevail against a dozen enemies where a more hesitant approach would fail.

I don't think "coolness" and "elan" are really opposites. (For instance, Taffy 3's actions off Samar I think seem like a good example of elan, but it also seems to me that it demonstrated considerable coolness under fire – but I'd be curious for your thoughts, since you're the one who's been reading the history, although I guess I'll have to wait until you read the next book?) I do think truly reckless bravery is simpler and perhaps more difficult than coolness under fire, because the latter requires more judgment. I think it's good that the idea of elan is still around, particularly in infantry units that are more likely to need to tap into that sort of tradition. I don't think elan is a replacement for strategy, doctrine, or proficiency – you cannot just decide that your collective path to victory is predicated on will alone. But sometimes it can be decisive for individuals. And I think the ideal warrior spirit would capture the essence of both, with the understand that sometimes right judgment might lead one to act with elan.

Overall I agree with everything you said. But I'd love to see a source for the following claim:

this is based on studies done during IIRC the Vietnam War that found that carrier landings caused more stress than taking enemy fire

I really doubt this is true. I've been around naval aviators a bunch and never heard anyone say this. But there's a huge range of carrier landings (night, storm, low fuel) and a huge range of enemy fire (small arms, dog fight machine gun, SAM). I'm certain that an F8 landing on a carrier in a storm would be more stressful than the same pilot being shot at by an AK47 while on mission.

But there's a huge range of carrier landings (night, storm, low fuel) and a huge range of enemy fire (small arms, dog fight machine gun, SAM). I'm certain that an F8 landing on a carrier in a storm would be more stressful than the same pilot being shot at by an AK47 while on mission.

I haven't personally talked to anyone who could compare it to getting shot at. What I have heard firsthand is that night landings specifically are very stressful.

I'd love to see a source for the following claim

I was first exposed to it in the short Navy/Grumman recruiting piece/documentary "Sea Legs" which you'd probably enjoy (and isn't very long).

On a quick Google, you can also see it referenced here. Relevant excerpt:

During the Vietnam War, Hubbard said, researchers attached sensors to pilots’ bodies to see when they experienced the most anxiety during night missions over North Vietnam.

The highest readings were not when the pilots braved ground-to-air missiles or flew in areas patrolled by enemy aircraft. The greatest stress was when the pilots came home and tried to snag that cable.

I suspect part of the thing at play here might be that someone shooting a missile at you is both reasonably unexpected and something that is over fairly quickly – like a near-accident while driving. Landing on a carrier is something that you can anticipate (including, with reasonable precision, if it is going to be in e.g. low light conditions) and so you have more time to dread it.

Overall I agree with everything you said.

Good to know, because you'd know better than me!

Submarines were absolutely vital for the American effort in the Pacific, and were responsible for sinking something like 60% of the enemy tonnage throughout the course of the war. My favorite chapter in the book was one in which we followed the submarine crew of the Wahoo and its crazy Skipper "Mush" Morton throughout most of 1943. Unlike the Allies in the Atlantic, the Japanese didn't really give much of an effort in developing anti-submarine tactics, because of the "low prestige" of the job, nor did they really ramp up their own submarine attacks on American shipping. This seems like a huge oversight.

I sometimes want to write a cynical version of the American war in the Pacific. We often get the "heroic" view, of daring pilots and fearless marines raising flags. But the cynical view starts with Japan as basically a 3rd world economy, stretched to the breaking point on long-range shipping, completely dependent on resource imports. The US starts with the completely broken Mark 14 torpedo as a result of institutional incompetance, but once they finally get a working torpedo, they quickly sink the entirety of the Japanese transport fleet, which had no defense at all. The home islands are left starving and quickly surrender. The entire "island hopping" strategy was a wasted effort except for propaganda purposes.

The two worst examples of this were lack of pilot rotations, meaning almost all experienced pilots were killed in 1942-early 1943

I know this is conventional wisdom, but that one always rubbed me the wrong way. It was obvious (even at the time) that the Americans had vastly more material resources- if Japan was going to have any chance at all of winning, they needed to win quickly. Pulling back experienced pilots to train new ones seems like a very American-centric way of thinking, that they'd be able to sustain a very long war with heavy casualties. They needed to repeat something like Pearl Harbour or Tsushima rapidly, not keep up in a war of attrition.

Making elite pilots trainers instead of meat is the right call in any conflict longer than a couple months. C'mon.

Takes longer than a couple months to train elite pilots! Those guys who died in Midway all had years of experience. I dont see any realistic way for them to replace that. If anything, they should have switched to Kamikazes sooner.

At the same time, American tolerance for causalities is super low. In the first island hopping campaign in the Marshalls, Toll makes a big deal about Americans losing ~2k dead taking Tarawa. Casualties are similarly low for much of the rest of the action of the book, including on Saipan and Guam. Even on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had only about 12k dead each. Compared to the Eastern Front, WW1, or even the Civil War, these are pathetic numbers that the media made a storm about. I don't mean to take these deaths lightly, but proportionally this is nothing. This attitude has only gotten worse (Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, current Iran war), and I think it makes it increasingly difficult to accomplish our geopolitical goals.

These casualties aren't really low, they are just lower compared to the totalitarian regimes the western Allies were pitted against (and allied with). Looking only at the dead is misleading too, especially when comparing with fighting elsewhere, as both non-combat and psychiatric casualties among American forces were much higher in the Pacific than elsewhere.

The other factor is that America had entered the war with a deliberate strategy to center its industrial might rather than its population wealth. They chose the 90 division army rather than the 200 division army. The American economy that was able to produce endless amounts of Liberty ships, aircraft carriers, tanks, munitions, fuel, food, etc. was made conscious with a deliberate decision to run as close to the wire as possible with the manpower put into the field. With Europe being the primary focus almost right until the war's conclusion there, the Pacific theater commanders did not have an endless supply of bodies to throw into operations against the Japanese.

They chose the 90 division army rather than the 200 division army.

Sort of.

Through [Lend-Lease], the US sent the 2026 equivalent of almost $700bn to allies, mostly USSR and Great Britain. To the USSR alone;

Those shipments included 400,000 vehicles, 14,000 aircraft, 13,000 tanks, 8,000 tractors, 4.5 million tons of food, and 2.7 million tons of petroleum products, as well as millions of blankets, uniforms, and boots, and 107,000 tons of cotton.

And, from a logistical standpoint;

Addressing this need, Americans provided almost 2,000 locomotives along with 11,000 railcars to help ship goods and equipment from factories to the front.

link

The heuristic I've seen is that the U.S. provided the equipment for something like 50 to as much as 100 "divisions" of the Soviet Army. The quibbles here are on doctrinal definitions vs reality of divisional sizes and readiness. I think that's all besides the point. Lend-Lease was a colossal operation and did represent the shifting of national resources away from our own armed forces. The 90 divisions weren't a result of a short fall of men or material, but a deliberate policy move.

Here's the official U.S. Army history on "The 90 Division Gamble" -- link

Arguing over division size and our ability to equipment them isn't a nerdy armchair general exercise. The American way of war since WW2 has been to simply overwhelm the opposing force with MORE of everything. Through the 50s and 60s, there was real fear that we might not be able to do this toe-to-toe with the Russians in Europe. We never got to that point. The largest conflict we did engage in at that time, Vietnam, resulted in American forces losing precisely zero engagements over about a company sized magnitude. Even the Tet Offensive was, militarily, a pretty handy defeat. The problem, of course, is policy and politics.

The United States loves to fight with one hand behind it's back for a whole host of shitty political reasons. A lot of it can be grouped under the umbrella term "optics" -- screaming babies, women and children running away from a burning village / town / city, our own soldiers coming back maimed or shellshocked. War is ugly and bad and Washington has developed the idea that it can be "managed" with policy to make it less and ugly and bad and, somehow, also just as "effective" (whatever that means).

Another culprit is the relationship between Civilian and Military leadership. "No" isn't a word you use with a superior in the military and that culture translates over to how they (Military leadership) "work" with Congress. There's a lot of pants-on-head retarded requests from Congress and even the President - "Can we do this with half as many troops? Or, wait, what about special operations ONLY? No planes. No artillery. Just secret ninjas!" And very few senior military leaders have the elan to dissuade the policy maker or executive on the other side of the table from his or her harebrained plan. Having worked with a few retired generals / admirals in my GovCon days, many of them say that being a general in today's military is a colossal let down. You aren't actually training, equipping, and commanding a division (or ship, or air wing), you're lobbying about budgets and base renaming bullshit in D.C. much of the time.

There is some interesting historical foreshadowing of this. Famous, General Marshall was in D.C. for most of World War 2 despite being, perhaps, more qualified that many (most?) of the field commanders in Europe / Africa. The problem was he was too valuable in terms of political ability to have him away for any large length of time.

All of this ties to the discussion of "warrior spirit" here. Outside of infantry and special operations units, I would content it doesn't exist in the U.S. military and hasn't in quite some time. We run a managerial military and it's the best in the world because we just have so. much. more of everything. Remember the old joke; after the U.S. Air Force, who has the second largest air force in the world? The. U.S. Army. The third? The U.S. Navy. The fourth? The Marines (I don't know if this last one is true anymore). But, like many "managerial" things, much of military decision making has been captured in a consensus-driven, consultant-corporateese style thinking.

Great writeup. And now you definitely need to read Thunder Below.

I want to point out that 12,000 dead is actually a lot. Gettysburg saw 3,100 Union soldiers killed and maybe 4,700 Confederates. You might be thinking of casualty numbers.

More commentary to follow, maybe, but in short I think aversion to casualties is more complicated.

Gwern-senpai noticed me (again)!

This time, he restacked a Substack post of mine (the one about a regrettable decision to use AI to generate pictures of the children I wish I had), and shared it on his own private subreddit /r/Gwern (it's also private in the sense that you can only join or view it after being whitelisted).

(The previous incident was some kind of link roundup he maintains on his site. It took me some digging to figure out why Substack's analytics claimed that I was getting traffic from gwern.net)

I had to shown up and gush about it, though he immediately congratulated me on my expedition into uncharted AI-psychosis territory. I believe that is mostly a joke, but for the sake of completeness, I told him that it was better described as an AI-mediated acute stress reaction. Look, neither diagnosis is in the DSM, I get to call it whatever I like. I am definitely not crazy, ChatGPT says so itself.

As achievements go, this is the rare kind that is both incredibly niche but also incredibly important (to me). I wish I could frame it on the wall. If I can't do that (my landlord is not accommodating of any holes that weren't there when I moved in), then I will come here to brag instead.

Command strips are the way to go. They don't leave any marks on the wall when you remove them.

Ayy, Congrats.

I saw it on here the other day - https://old.reddit.com/r/MediaSynthesis/comments/1rrhart/do_not_render_your_counterfactuals_selfmadehuman/

It was good one too. Read it way back, and the cosmic horror comes through.

Embarrassingly, I did not heed the advice, and asked ChatGPT to create hypothetical kids for my girlfriend and I.

/r/gwern : you are an approved user on this subreddit.

🥲

And here I am making real children the traditional way, like a chump.

Embarrassingly, I did not heed the advice, and asked ChatGPT to create hypothetical kids for my girlfriend and I.

It's okay. In hindsight, I should have expected that sharing that essay would immediately prompt a few dozen people to try their hand at repeating my mistake. That is the downside of posting on rationalist/contrarian forums, everyone wants to touch the stove to see if it's actually hot. My burns were temporary, and you sound like you've made a full recovery 🙏

Back in the day I hung lots of things in apartments with "no holes" policies. I mean 50+ holes at least. With a putty knife and spackle they never caught me. Their universal choice of flat white walls does them in every time.

You are a braver man than I am. I might be able to get away with it (the walls are white), but I'm honestly not that strongly inclined to decorate. Maybe once I own my own place.

my landlord is not accommodating of any holes that weren't there when I moved in

I believe the standard solution for such problems is a hook with adhesive on the back.

I used a bunch of those at my last apartment. Guess how many holes in the plaster I had to patch...

I considered that. It's also explicitly forbidden in my tenancy agreement, which doesn't allow for the use of adhesives on walls.

Honestly, I would ignore that provision if it was me, because it's unreasonable. I've used a ton of Command products (both the hooks and the velcro strips), and there's never been any damage to the wall from it.

The construction of my much-maligned* (1 2 3) custom house has begun.

  • Photograph 1: My neighbor apparently planted some plants on my side of the property line. But they're on his side of the fence line (indicated by the rebar, six inches from the property line), so whatever.

  • Photograph 2: The white pipe in the ground on the left is the sewer pipe (I think). The white pipe sticking out of the ground on the right is the water pipe. The black circle in the ground and in a line with the water pipe is the "water-meter pit".

  • Photograph 3: From right to left, this photograph shows: Foundation insulation; foundation forms; a level instrument of some kind, being used to ensure that the foundation trench is dug to the correct depth; and the trench for the foundation.

*This is a humorous exaggeration.

Tomorrow is Pi Day (2026-03-14). As a publicity stunt, cloud-storage provider Backblaze is now hosting the current record-holding computation of 314 trillion digits of pi (130 TB).

Transnational Media Thread

Any local art, music, film, etc you've been consuming from far-flung parts of the globe? (No, anime doesn't count, that shit has been thoroughly mainstreamed and globalised by now.)

For my part, I've been enjoying quite a lot of Mande music as of late (basically the folk musical tradition of Mali that began with the 13th century Mali empire). They developed a highly polyphonic music style independently from Western traditions, passed down through the centuries by hereditary griot storytellers; their music was modernised in the 1970s, fusing quite a lot with other styles. One of my favourite artists to play in this tradition is Toumani Diabate, a ridiculously prolific musician who specialises in the kora, a 21-stringed instrument that falls somewhere between a lute and a harp. Here is a particularly nice example of traditional kora music from him, and here and here are examples of some of the fusion he has produced. I find there's an exceptionally atmospheric, almost mystical sound to a lot of this music I can't get enough of.

When it comes to art, traditional Song Dynasty handscroll paintings are just incredible. Yes, I am continuing my recent trend of Sinoposting, deal with it. They were painted on these massive pieces of silk meant to be slowly unravelled from right to left, revealing different parts of the painting as it went along. Probably the most famous one in existence is Zhang Zeduan's impossibly detailed 12th century Along The River During The Qingming Festival, depicting the commotion in the Song capital Kaifeng during the Tomb Sweeping Day. Other art in this vein is the extremely fluent 13th century Nine Dragons handscroll by Chen Rong, Composing Poetry on a Spring Outing by Ma Yuan, and Water Map by Ma Yuan, a uniquely liminal painting focusing on the rendition of water textures. (For Water Map, here are all the panels in the handscroll presented individually; I can't find it in the University of Chicago's archive of scrolls, and the one on Wikimedia is so large that it's capable of causing your browser to stall, and zooms in too much).

EDIT: A funny detail in the Nine Dragons scroll is the overabundance of Emperor Qianlong's massive seals and even poems throughout the body of the painting. While it's actually desirable to place seals on paintings - in fact Chinese paintings often leave spaces for stamps for collectors to leave their mark, with seals being a sign of history and provenance, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it, and Qianlong was unfortunately a prolific art connoisseur who had no sense of taste himself. I'm pretty sure I've heard him called "Stamp Demon" before in Chinese.

Hope I have something for every need!

That is a good list.

I've been on a bit of a roll listening to gamelan lately (going to Singapore had something to do with it).

Gamelan is very nice. There's a few regional types extant in Indonesia; Balinese and Javanese are the major traditions. The one you posted (and the one that seems to have gotten popular among Western listeners) is the Balinese style, which I suppose is understandable since Bali was the first Indonesian island to be developed for international travellers, and it is fantastic - but I would actually say the Javanese style is the more elegant and delicate of the two. It's such an utterly alien sound and it even still gets played as court music in Yogyakarta, here's a pretty good example of what it's like. Indonesia generally has a lot of very fascinating regionalised culture, much of which doesn’t get exported.

There's also other musical traditions in Southeast Asia that stem from a similar root of "bronze gong culture", such as the piphat of Thailand, Laos, Burma, etc and the kulintang of the Philippines and Borneo. All worth checking out in my opinion.

How was Singapore, by the way?

Your post reminded me of a kora jazz piece that someone introduced me to in grad school.

Saved this one. West African fusion pretty much never fails to grab me.

You said no anime, but maybe non-anime Japanese material is fair game? I rather like some of Shiina Ringo's songs.

As long as it's sufficiently local and hasn't been globalised in the same way that anime has (Nintendo would not be an acceptable answer either), Japanoposting is fine. I see your Shiina Ringo, and raise you another obscure Japanese artist called JAGATARA, here's an exceptionally funky album from that band I particularly enjoy.

Some good things come of this, like this appropriation of a Thai-adjacent people's choral tradition for dark techno game BGM.

It's not all too common to see modern Mainland Chinese media mentioned in forums, so you get extra points for that. Been getting into a good amount of Chinese music too myself; there's a surprising amount of fantastic media from China that goes virtually unnoticed like the underground Beijing and Wuhan punk/post-punk scenes. RE-TROS is a particular favourite of mine, here and here are two songs of theirs.

There's been a lot of posts here about Mainland China's lack of global cultural appeal and why this is the case; I've been meaning to make a post in the Fun Thread detailing some excellent Mainland Chinese media that I think people should check out (for example the Shanghai Animation Film Studio's 20th century works of ink-wash animation are beautiful in a distinctly Chinese way), but I'm lazy. The sheer amount of important media properties that are only culturally relevant in China and receives no traction outside of that sphere is staggering.

Not far flung, but...

Been enjoying French Afro-pop - Vegedream (Ramenez la coupe à la maison) and Dadju (Mwasi wa Congo). French roommate introduced me to it, and they're proper ear-worms. It's poppy but rhythmically complex. Fun to play on drums.

I have a soft spot for classical Chinese poetry. Of course, I can only read the translations. It says something about me that my favorite is:

Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man.

Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.

Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.

Hey. I'm not trying to be an edgelord. I just like it.

Alternatively:

Night after night you used to massacre rats

Guarding the grain store so ferociously

So why do you now act as if you live within palace walls

Eating fish every day and sleeping in my bed?

(Very different authors)

I do not own a cat, though I my attitude towards them is mildly positive. But if I imagine a dog instead, it warms the chilly cockles of my heart. There's one lying on my feet, warming them while taking up half my bed. He snores and is very gassy, and I will sleep poorly, but I do not have the heart to move him. If that is not love, what is?

(I can imagine my future wife describing me in those terms.)

Fine, back to being an edgelord again:

Stroking the sword while lamenting the social realities

Though that's more of a seal than a poem. The calligraphy looks sick.

Then:

"Oh great sea, you are made of water."

"Oh horse, you have four legs."

"Oh beauty, you have large eyes and a mouth!"

I promise that this is very hilarious in context. Go read Reverend Insanity.

Chinese poetry is absolute crack, though I hear not knowing Chinese kind of takes the teeth out of them. A lot of them are based in the peculiarities of the Chinese language and are thus untranslatable.

The cat poem you quoted is even funnier in context, by the way, because that's a Southern Song poem. Song Chinese were absolute ailurophiles, and they even had cat contracts known as namaoqi (納貓契) specifying the cat's obligations to its owner and vice versa, signed with a paw print. Here is such an example where the cat agrees to patrol tirelessly, catch mice, and leave the numnums alone.

In my experience China to this day is full of cats roaming freely as well, the country is practically covered in them. They prowl sections of the Great Wall, climb over pagodas, and so on: they're just everywhere.

The cat poem you quoted is even funnier in context, by the way, because that's a Southern Song poem. Song Chinese were absolute aiurophiles, and they even had cat contracts known as naomaoqi (納貓契) specifying the cat's obligations to its owner and vice versa, signed with a paw print. Here is such an example where the cat agrees to patrol tirelessly, catch mice, and leave the numnums alone.

I'm not surprised that the Song Chinese would have significant overlap with the preferences of "musical men" as my hypothetical/nonexistent Irish grandmother would put it.

Jokes aside, thanks for the context! I think it's a damn shame that I don't have the time or energy to make the investment that would let me maximally appreciate Chinese culture. The little I know is very appealing.

Stroking the sword

Ya doing that with your left hand or your right hand?

¿Porque no los dos?

Does Latin content count?

I got my kids into watching minecraftium and magister craft. Both channels use minecraft to teach kids latin. It's not a full-blown course, but it's rather fun.

Was exploring Georgian Orthodox music recently.

Video Game Thread

What are you playing this week?

After 20 hours total spent on the game, I finally finished a run in Slay the Spire 2. Very happy. :) I used The Defect and lots of 0 cost attack cards + draws.

Synthetik and Synthetik 2 are both fantastic games. The gunplay is punchy and fun. The sound design is immersive, and everything just flows like a dream. Synthetik 2 is a little more stop and go, but in Synthetik 1, once you get into the zone, it really is a symphony of violence.

Here are unhinged reviews of both by SsethTzeentach, where I first heard about Synthetik:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=r5tsEJgPn30

https://youtube.com/watch?v=T4fv4_zqYLU

Finished Stoneblock 4, at least to opening up the creative chapter. Mixed feelings, like a lot of FTB modpacks, it's got a good early-game but gets bogged down as you go on, and it suffers a lot from making certain progression assumptions that the actual content doesn't back up. By the point you're doing actual automation challenges you have so many raw materials anything you can't just Replicate can be solved with simple spam, and by the point you've unlocked much of the combat stuff you have to beat the hardest available boss first and then it's just facestomping a bunch of also-rans. And it doesn't help that I'm not a huge fan of Mekanism, even if building a silly-large reactor is kinda entertaining. But there's a lot of effort that went into polishing the content and order that was there. Probably 3/5.

Trying Society: Sunlit Valley. It's not the first Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley-but-Minecraft-like I've played, but it's far more committed to the bit. (Most) crops and animals are tied to the day/night cycle for growth and harvest, there's a large number of new processing blocks that are similarly tied to daily cycles, equipment has to either be found in-world or upgraded from stone-iron-gold-diamond-iridium (lots of things drop gold gear!), a lot of fabricated materials can be purchased from villagers, and focusing on profit or collecting a variety of materials for the Community Center. Not perfectly happy with the pacing and progression. Since villagers are used for a pretty wide variety of important components and items you'd normally craft, and only certain materials sell for meaningful amounts of money, that means a lot of optimal play has you either grinding beer, simple meals, or raw ore to immediately dump for sale. On the other hand, props for being one of the first modpacks to put Create late in progression, and still make it meaningfully useful and powerful. But I also haven't had much time with it.

Endless Sky an FOSS remake of the old Mac series Escape Velocity (a top down space ship) game. It's fun but, it really could use some branches to it's major plot.

I like the gameplay direction Naev went more than Endless Sky's. It gives you rechargeable missile and fighter bays, actually-long-distance travel, and severe nerfs to capturing ships and building fleets. Also, fighters can usually dodge heavy laser fire and battleships can largely ignore light weapons, which forces some variety into your builds.

Nice! Thanks, I'll check it out.

Been playing far to much Vintage Story, still.

I have to confess, this is probably my longest and most accomplished run. The fortress I built is working very well for my needs, I've got a double-stack windmill giving me more than enough power to drive the gear ratios I've got setup and the devices I need, and this is the first time I've actually started to work toward developing steel and building up the end-game Jonas devices. Turns out, melting cupronickel, despite being a copper alloy, requires coke to reach the requisite temperatures. And if I want to start dying clothing, mining chromium requires steel pickaxes.

Goddamit.

My favorite autobattler, Mechabellum, ended season 6 and started season 7 with a new unit, the Vortex.

Also StS2, lots of that. I'm up to Ascension 3 on each character, and up to A6 with Regent. Had my first Ironclad run go infinite, albeit erratically, at A4. I'm struggling with Defect. Everything will change, of course, it's EA and only been out a week.

Timberborn 1.0 is out, and it's been two years since I last played it, so I'm planning on taking a look at that.

I don't know why they added the vortex, another 'can steamroll if you get the right techs' unit like the arclight. I guess it's weak to light units? Seems like it can get oppressive at times with that dps.

They're not even selling new units like league of legends or overwatch, they could just stop adding units.

Working on finishing RDR2, hopefully I'll finish this weekend. I have found the game to be very overrated - the story is good, but it isn't uniquely so, the gameplay is worse than the previous game due to Rockstar pursuing "immersion" over fun in various ways, and the game is a buggy mess (at least on PC). I have enjoyed it well enough, but once I finish I doubt very much if I will ever play it again, and I certainly don't think it's as good as it gets hyped up to be.

Have to disagree. The slowness is the point. I feel strongly that Red Dead 2 is a game designed to be played in ~10 8-hour sessions. One must be fully immersed, this is an all-day activity. That is inconvenient, but it’s hardly unique, plenty of hobbies have that kind of time commitment, just not most video games.

The slowness is the point because the game is holistically and intentionally designed to reject game convention. Like GTAIV (Rockstar’s other masterpiece, and the game closest to Red Dead 2 in both tone and style, albeit compromised by immaturity and GTA convention), it is as much about the slice of life activities and the general vibe as about the actual main storyline. The minimalist soundtrack is a masterpiece, tense beats, the occasional restrained strum, a handful of songs that fit perfectly deployed at precisely the right moment. The story is more conservative than any major comparable game, the rich inner lives and stories of Arthur’s companions fully present (and clearly known to the writers) but revealed only in fragments, rarely explicitly, just there, if you care for it. The game does not care particularly for the player, which is a great argument in its favor. You may come to camp at the right time, on the right day, in between story missions and see an entire, extensive, motion captured and voiced and acted vignette between Arthur’s companions. Other players may miss it, the game doesn’t care, unlike any other game, in which there would be a mandatory reminder to return to camp and the event would only trigger when the player did so.

the gameplay is worse than the previous game due to Rockstar pursuing "immersion" over fun in various ways

While I've never played RDR1, I agree wholeheartedly. The second game wastes so much of my time. I get Rockstar's desire to flex both their auteurial taste and their massive development budget, but come the fuck on. I don't need a ten second animation everytime I skin a deer or pick up a bottle off a shelf. At the very least, give us a fast-forward button.

Unfortunately, I've been spoiled on the plot by virtue of just being around the internet too long, so I'm unlikely to come back to the game. Damn shame, the plot was interesting for the half a dozen hours I played, but I am categorically unwilling to tolerate that pace till the end.

I have enjoyed it well enough, but once I finish I doubt very much if I will ever play it again, and I certainly don't think it's as good as it gets hyped up to be.

Those were more or less my feelings about the game too. I played it on the PS4 at launch and I figured I would at least fire it up again on a stronger PC just to enjoy the visually beautiful 'nature experiences' of fishing and hunting in that world again. But I never really did. Possible spoiler: I felt the story (Arthur's) ended so badly that the whole thing became a bit meaningless. And the way 'everyone' on the internet were so impressed by tHe sTorY and dialogue (the tone everyone drones on in wore on me), made me think most of them had never read a good novel.

I have about 35 hours in STS2, Just finished ascension 10 with the silent and am on ascension 7 with the Necro. I think Silent is really overpowered. The shiv decks are strong, discard is strong, that one poison power that causes poison to trigger twice (3x upgraded) is downright nasty. The discard 2/draw 2 in a deck with sly's is broken. Meanwhile the regent just feels bad.

From what I've read, The Regent is very situational and more random as to whether you'll succeed. I think it can be really strong with tons of stars.

Silent does seem to be the strongest class in STS2. But her aesthetic is crap IMO. My least favorite character by far.

I've done a couple ascension 2 runs with the Regent, and stars is the way to go, but it just feels so restrictive. Like here's the "box that you can play in" it's very small. The one consolation is that the game is still in early access so I imagine there will be buffs to the newly designed character

I also played STS2! I immediately won my first run with the Ironclad (mixed build). Then I won my first run with the Silent (poison). Then I lost two and won on the third try with the regent (mixed build). Then I won my first with the Defect (claw, just like you probably did). Then it took me another few tries with the Necrobinder until I got a win in. The pattern is pretty clear - game knowledge from the first STS is still fully applicable, and the top builds from back then still work. So it didn't take me 20 hours to get that far. Around 3, I think.

and the top builds from back then still work

Sorta, the lack of energy relics is definitely felt, as is the removal of certain cards. I do miss fire-breathing on Clad

Now that you mention it, I did feel more energy constrained. High-draw decks with +energy cards are still viable, though.

Ironclad in general seems to have been tuned much more for spending health as a currency - which IMO is not viable overall. I will use Offering to pay health to jump-start each battle, okay, but paying health for every attack, or paying health every turn, that just goes over my head. You only get 6 health back per fight normally - and I can't really picture myself routing through bonfires only to heal up, and pass up on upgrades and shops. I'm probably wrong here, but so far I don't feel it.

The thing about blood wall, blood letting, hemokinesis and such, is that they often end the battle with less total damage taken including the self damage. If you can't full block anyway, blood wall is just a block 13 for 1 energy. Blood letting is take another turn but you failed to block by 3 and the enemy doesn't scale. Playing hemokinesis twice (4 hp) instead of strike is about another full turns worth of damage.

I get it. I do. It just doesn't seem sustainable compared to more conservative high-block strategies.

You really need that strength from self damage power if you want to go a blood build in my opinion. I haven't tried a lot of Clad yet.

So it didn't take me 20 hours to get that far. Around 3, I think.

Except it sorta did. You leaned on all your STS knowledge where you no doubt spent many hours.

Absolutely true. Many more than 20, then.

I'm actually playing STS1 now. It's alright, though clearly less polished than the sequel, even in the latter's EA state.

I just finished my first real run in it, using The Silent. It seemed way easier than any run in 2. I barely even lost any hp to the act 3 boss. Maybe Silent is even more OP in 1 than she is in 2?

StS 1 doesn't have Flanking, so that's automatically wrong. :P

Joking aside, Silent in 1 has the most difficult early game of all the characters - she has the largest starting deck and the lowest damage output, so she demands more transforms/removes and more thought put into your routing to achieve any level of consistency. While she has tons of synergies available, getting of her engines online takes comparitively more pieces (draw/discard cards, energy generation, upgrades) than Watcher or even Ironclad. Not to say she's weak per se, but she's far from overpowered especially when Watcher exists.

Silent is my only A20H character, incidentally. I haven't finished pushing A20 on the others because I plan on pushing Defect and oops I picked knife wife again.

Silent in 1 has the most difficult early game of all the characters

I always figured it was the Defect, who if you hit the Gremlin Nob as the first elite would generally wipe your silly robot ass from existence.

Dualcast is 16 damage though, and your starting lightning orb is a free half-strike per turn.

Sure, but Silent is in a similar boat against Nob and especially Lagavulin.

This happened to me on my first Defect run in STS1. :(

Also tried Silent again and it didn't go so well. I think I probably got lucky with the first STS1 Silent run.

Did beat the game with Ironclad yesterday though!

I wouldn't give too much weight to a one-run impression. It is a roguelikeish after all, and randomness plays a large role.

True. The skilled streamers always(?) win their runs though. So skill can apparently make up for bad luck.

I failed at sts1 with Ironclad and I have now failed with Defect too. Still need to git gud. :)

Do you think that mathematical theorems are discovered or invented? I have a segue I want to make from this question (it involves a book that was popular w few years ago), but first I'd like to hear your opinions on that.

I would say invented, because any arguments about them being "discovered" or "already out there waiting to be found", while mostly true, apply equally to literal inventions. Was the telephone discovered or invented? Well, kind of both. The laws of physics always allowed sound waves to convert into electric signals and travel across wires to be converted back into sound waves. Someone just had to figure that out.

You can make a strong argument that invention is a subset of discovery. You can make a strong argument that mathematical theorems are a form of discovery. You can't really make arguments that they aren't inventions except by sneaking in a hidden assumption that these are mutually exclusive, when actually they're not.

I would say "discovery" is unearthing the physical laws governing our universe, and "invention" is designing tools which apply those laws practically. It's the difference between science and engineering.

You can make a strong argument that invention is a subset of discovery.

I'd agree, but since having more distinct words is more useful than having fewer, I'd like to be able to say it's a proper subset, in which case there would have to be such a thing as a discovery which isn't also an invention. Then we'd be back to having a reasonable question to ask: once we fix a definition of what makes a discovery also an "invention", which mathematical discoveries are inventions and which aren't?

Could we classify non-invention-discoveries as distinct from invention-discoveries because the latter were created to solve problems and the former weren't? The laws of physics include ways to convert sound waves into electrical signals via a piezoelectric sensor, and that was an "invention" because telephones were awesome, but the same laws include ways to convert audible sound waves into seismic waves via amplifiers and a giant ground-thumping piston, and that was a "discovery" not worth noting because actually doing that would suck.

What's weird about mathematics is that so many of our pure "discoveries" keep getting hijacked and finding important applications later. Maybe some of that is selection bias, because if someone comes up with a neat mathematical game with no use cases then we only teach everyone about it if it's either closely related to something with use cases or really cool in some way or both? Maybe there are whole fields of "alien mathematicses" that we just never get into because they're really completely disconnected from anything useful?

But often even when we try to just "discover" interesting-but-useless math it turns out we're not very good at avoiding coming up with useful ideas. A couple of my favorite quotes are ironic in this way:

"I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world." - G. H. Hardy, inventor (discoverer?) of math which turned out to be fundamental to population genetics and quantum physics.

Was Hardy an inventor? He certainly wasn't trying to be, but that didn't stop his discoveries from at least being the load-bearing components of inventive ideas.

"No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years." - G. H. Hardy again, in "A Mathematician's Apology", written at the same time that secret number theory research was becoming a decisive factor in World War II via code-making and code-breaking, and secret relativistic physics research was leading to the atom bomb.

If a discovery is finding something that you, or the people around you, didn't know about at then telling them about it, then an invention is finding a way to make something or do something, while a non-invention discovery is finding something that already existed. You discover a new plant or a ruin, you invent a lightbulb or a martial art or a programming language. The theoretical concept of how to do these things can be imagined to have existed somewhere in imagination land, but if no human being actually has this knowledge then the knowledge itself literally did not exist until you caused it to exist by putting into people's minds. And in the case of physical inventions like a lightbulb the actual thing itself also did not exist until you created one. If you had chosen to change the methods of your creation, the features of it would change. In some sense this is inventing a different thing rather than the original thing, but in many cases it's minor tweaks that don't fundamentally change its nature but are superficial (you might add a different number of coils to your lightbulb design, or you might put the steps in your mathematical proof in a slightly different order).

Meanwhile, before you discover a new plant that plant is still on the Earth doing its thing. You unambiguously did not invent the plant, it was already there before you arrived. You can't tweak the plant's discovery in minor ways to alter what it looks like (or at least, any tweaking is something you do afterwards and is not a part of the discovery process). It was already there, and you did not cause it to manifest in the real world in the way you do with an invention.

Usually both. There is an underlying structure to our thought processes waiting to be discovered. In so far as that those structures can be expressed in different ways, the specific frameworks we use are invented.

Typically discovered, but as you get into more niche parts of mathematics, I think the construction of useful, novel axioms and the proofs therefrom move closer to invented. "The Rubicks Cube group has always existed" is a valid take, but feels weird to me.

I suppose this is related to the question of whether the basic axioms and concepts are truly universal (true in any universe), or whether, say, a hypothetical universe with different prime numbers could exist. Did God create the integers?

I’d say that Newton invented calculus and discovered the laws of gravity, but I really view both actions as synonymous. On reflection, I’d say there’s an element of invention in both cases, but that both should really be described more as discoveries.

Discovered.

As promised, effortpost on bars.

I wanted to put a bit of effort into a post about how my understanding of bars changed over time, but I realized halfway through writing it that I couldn’t go into it without discussing how my relationship with alcohol changed over the course of my life. They feed into each other; whereas the bar and alcohol can be separated from each other the way I understand and relate to both are interlinked.

As a young person I didn’t understand alcohol. It’s a poison. Industrially useful, produced from many things, but I could not grasp why people would willingly drink it. As a teenager my experiences basically ended at alcopops, shandies, and an occasional finagled beer with a meal. I had a fairly independent childhood and went to a boarding school where the reality of the world was beaten into me from a very early age, and while I regretted it at the time I didn’t come to realize the advantages this gave me until later.

The first of those occasions where I came to realize this was one of my formative experiences with alcohol, and it wasn’t even me getting smashed.

By the standards of people entering university for the first time and coming to grips with the first brush of real independence, I was a functioning and experienced drinker. Capable of drinking, capable of having a conversation without drinking, and aware of the social expectations of drinking, in what circumstances drinking was polite, and how to turn down a drink and take a drink without it being any kind of statement on who I was.

You have no idea the kind of impact it made on me seeing people I knew and sort of liked make absolute buffoons of themselves. I saw the most beautiful girl in our social group, one with a ‘remote boyfriend back home’, someone every red blooded male had a secret crush on, intentionally lead people on before complaining of an alcohol-induced headache; I saw a friend who had been besotted with her for months drunkenly try to break down her locked door to gain access. We had to manhandle him out of the building and all but dunk him with a bucket before he sobered up to realize what he looked like.

So – the bar. I wasn’t a party animal. Bars were where you went to ‘party’, by which they meant it was a place to get cheap drinks and become inebriated enough to instill a lack of self-control. Many people I knew had worked it out to a science. They had mapped out routes in the city to take advantage of key happy hour deals, and usually wouldn’t call it a night until they had gone through three bars minimum. The purpose of the bar was obvious – to get hammered, and to engage with the other sex.

As someone who was fairly cynical about both and had observed the situation mentioned above, I didn’t visit many bars. My rationale was simple; no matter how cheap the happy hour, it didn’t beat buying booze at the convenience store or supermarket, and I wouldn’t want to engage with a woman that required alcohol to tolerate/required alcohol to tolerate me. At least the people around me grew to understand the first eventually, but “pre-game” became more common with time; the seasoned young drinkers knew that getting pleasantly buzzed and putting down a few drinks before heading to the first bar generally worked out better economically.

Becoming a working adult changed this, although the fundamental understanding of bars as a place people went to pick up girls never really went away. After all, depending on the area (and the bar) you get to observe humanity at all its social attempts in chemically-assisted, or impaired, pair bonding. Right down to arguments, drama, hair-pulling, fights in the bar, fights outside the bar, fights at the takeout close to the bar, etc.

As a working adult who had to sell things to other people, I had to close deals, negotiate for projects, negotiate during the projects, keep people sweet and get good terms. And when that happened, inevitably the best deals happened after a heavy lunch and a few hours at the bar. I’m a seasoned hustler by now, but what the media tells you is only half of it. Nothing makes a deal better than building a relationship, and it’s incredibly easy to build an easier working relationship by giving someone a drink and showing some genuine interest in who they are and what they’re doing. I referred to this as a maintenance cost.

My relatives complained, of course, that I was spending a lot of money taking people to nice bars, as it often wasn’t covered as a business expense, but I maintained that it was a necessary part of the job. Bars became offices, places of work. A transactional relationship, an investment where I’d trade attention and money and alcohol for ease-of-work. The bar became a marketing object.

Of course, the type of bar that students go to in order to get the cheapest-cocktail-for-cost is an entirely different thing to the type of bar you take a prospective client to. You seek out bars with good wine or whisky lists, with bartenders that have accolades, bars that have memorable designs or décor or live music. The businessperson might not remember you or even the deal, but they’ll remember a visually striking bar, a bartender showily setting an expensive cocktail on fire, a rare cognac.

It was a few years into the work that I had another hugely formative experience with alcohol. There was an aged Italian businessman I had on the hook as someone halfway between client and teacher, someone who had spent decades in the industry. I was determined to pick his brain and learn all I could. It helped that I got along with him just fine and wasn’t intimidated like the rest of my colleagues by his frequent death threats, outbursts of emotion and loud complaints – this is just generally how old Italian men are. He invited me to lunch one weekend and told me to bring wine or food. I brought some good scotch.

You have not truly lived until an Italian who actually likes you invites you to lunch. I was expecting a relatively brisk lunch, and I almost lined up dinner plans. I also arrived before noon. What I didn’t expect was an experience that kind of set the bar for how I want Saturdays to go for the rest of my life. I was welcomed by his four-decade-younger Asian wife, very attractively brown and very outgoing, who was clearly there for his money and quite brazen about it. He had invited a bunch of Italian expats and friends as well, they also brought food, and wine. What followed was a leisurely six hours of which I remember very little of the exact details. I remember wine, grappa. Being stuffed to the gills on homemade gnocco fritto, cured Italian meats and cheeses, a pasta course three hours after everyone was already full. I remember lying on his balcony staring at the sunset, entirely satisfied and very drunk, knowing that if the world ended at that moment I would call it a good end. I’ve been chasing this experience, and this feeling, ever since.

Getting further in my career changed my relationship with bars and alcohol again. It became another form of transactional relationship; aftercare for colleagues or people working under me. Project team bonding. The form of alcohol changed, from cocktails and expensive boozes to draft beers paired with large-volume crowd pleasing food. Monthly team socializing activities, team dinners where the main course was just a super-size volume of alcohol fueled bitching about work that I footed the bill for. Being a sane and reasonable human being, I knew that this would be significantly better for team morale and team building than corporate-sponsored icebreakers or trust exercises. The purpose changed; ice cold macro lager was the nectar of choice, its crisp bitterness taking the sting off work and pairing well with strongly flavored or greasy foods.

There’s something that happens to a person engaged in extremely difficult or strenuous work that just makes beer taste different. I’m not sure what it is or exactly what causes it; all I can say is that it definitely happens. I went from turning my nose up at beer to swigging it as a food pairing regularly, and in decent volumes to boot. Good food, socializing in a large group, beer towers and kegs are both practical and accessible. And so alcohol consumption moved towards large group restaurants open late or with low costs.

I again stopped seeing the point of bars, as I was, career-wise, past the era where I needed to close deals personally or meet potential clients. But something else happened, and I think it really led me to my current understanding. At the time, it struck me as quite sad that I took over thirty years of life before I genuinely understood and experienced something I could confidently call a real bar.

The experience was an izakaya. I was consciously dodging home. Going home meant doing chores, sorting out stuff you’re supposed to sort out that you’ve been putting off because of work. Dealing with people you don’t want to deal with, taking social calls you don’t want to. Handling life, is the term. I was supposed to pick up some stuff for the house, I can’t remember exactly what.

And instead I stopped at a nearby izakaya with no other customers and I got a beer. I wanted a skewer of something to go with it. The proprietor asked me how I was doing. Offered to upsell me on a whisky highball or some sake, mentioned they had some very good fish for sashimi air delivered that day. Gave me the drink. A mini dish of pickled burdock root. Crisp beer. I got the sashimi. They took the rest of the fish bones and carcass, made a stock with it without being asked, and served it to me gratis.

The stress I felt leaving my body over the next hour was a physical sensation. I felt lighter. I felt like I could go home, and clean the fucking bathroom, sort out the recycling I forgot to manage, do a bunch of tax paperwork and call the relatives I was supposed to call without losing my fucking mind.

Of course, that place is no longer in business, because the world can’t leave a good thing well enough alone. But walking out of there, I got it. I understood why izakayas are almost a lifestyle, why Japanese salarymen go to these places religiously. It’s the intangibles. I’ve had the same experience at western bars, sometimes alone, sometimes with others. A good bartender who knows how to engage – and when not to – is part of it.

A bar is not a place to pick up members of the opposite sex with lowered inhibitions. It is not a place to get blackout drunk. It is not a place to conduct business negotiations. It can do all of those things, but that is not its purpose.

The purpose of a bar is to provide a space where people can put their shit down for a while.

I realize that all of this sounds quaint in the hyperconnected era of now. The youth I see today seem to rarely get past where I was at the beginning; they have little experience with true independence and attempts at screwing up when given personal responsibility, and they don’t engage with others often enough in the real world to the point where they begin to understand alcohol or its purpose.

That having been said, I think a lot of them could do with a place. A physical place, with a counter, some comfortable stools, a bartender that knows when to shut the fuck up or ask a couple questions. A place where they can put down their baggage, their cares and their worries, and just be for a moment. Where existence outside, with all its noise, urgency, and stress of living can be put aside, and you can focus on nothing but the bitterness of an ale, the acid pucker of a chilled cider, the richness of a stout, the burn of high-proof bourbon or the finish of a well-made scotch.

I think we need real bars. I think they serve an important function missing in the current landscape. How well they live up to or fail to meet that criteria is how I judge them as a good or bad bar.

Bar Leone is currently considered the number one bar in the world, ranked on some list of the world’s fifty best. I want to go there, one day, and see if it actually functions as a bar. But I’m not sure, judging by the Instagram photos and the reputation for long queues.

Now I drink pretty nearly exclusively single malt scotch. In small amounts, as a thinking drink. This thinking is often done alone, or with a couple of close friends at maximum. As before, there’s an economic calculus there – the good stuff is rarely available at bars outside of specialized whisky bars, and specialized whisky bars often charge significantly upwards. But I’ve still paid the premium to go to a couple I like a few times more than is strictly necessary, if only just to appreciate a space that allows passersby to avoid carrying that weight for a bit.

Once again, Wisconsin is leading the way. Kidding aside, I really have come to appreciate the "bar as neighborhood rec room" that is very common here, as opposed to "bar as establishment/nightclub". The music is lower, the drinks are reasonably priced, the popcorn is free, and you can chat with people, play some games, watch TV, or sit by the fire and read. I appreciate as a singleton that there is no particular expectation that you provide your own company.

But I'm most likely to experience that feeling of complete ease and satisfaction, that I think is called Gemütlichkeit, at the beer garden. In a rare moment of sanity, civic leaders have permitted operators to serve beer in the public parks (the parks getting a hefty slice of proceeds, natch), and the experience of sitting above a rolling river under a stand of towering old oaks, or the closer shelter of leafy maples, on a warm summer's afternoon, eating picnic food and quaffing a couple liters of fine lager over several hours - it's the closest thing to bliss that I can imagine.

Of course, that place is no longer in business, because the world can’t leave a good thing well enough alone.

Still very common in Japan, for what it's worth. During my time there I always really enjoyed the izakaya culture you described (although there's also ones that people go to just to get hammered to hit on women or whatever). I think it kinda depends, though, on having a very hardworking backroom/owner to keep up with all the food orders while working for minimal pay to keep costs down. Otherwise it's just too expensive, so people do what you did- buy their drinks from a convenience store to pregame, then have just one drink, or don't even go at all.

There's a sacred American hymn extolling this very philosophy.

The purpose of a bar is to provide a space where people can put their shit down for a while.

I Like this definition, and it reminds me a lot of the saddest of bar patrons that you tend to see at any place that is cheap or has deals. The sad drunk that is carrying way too much shit in life. They'll deflate and sink into the bar as the weight leaves their body, but they just can't muster the strength to get up from the bar, pick their shit back up and leave.

I'd also add a category of bar: The Sports Bar. A kind of raucous ambiance where men loudly cheer or curse as their team succeeds or fails. It exudes an unapologetic male energy that feels missing in most areas of life. The men aren't looking for partners or hookups, most of them are paired up and just taking a break from the lady to hang out with the lads. It can also be a very enjoyable place after exercising or participating in some rec-league level sport. Copious amounts of light beer, and greasy meaty foods to imitate the sensation of refueling. But also to wind down from the exertion of the sport.

Great write up.

I went to a bar once when I was 22/23? Because my buddy wanted to buy me a drink and tell me he was getting married. I called him nuts. Drank a shitty Jack.

Then my next time was when I was 32/33 when a sex for money lady was upset that her 30 year elder hookup was hooking up with another woman and wanted me to spy on them in exchange for a free session. Had a few beers, the food was incredible, gave the fellow a few looks (he was indeed there with another lady), went home and got my free session.

After that, I’ve gone several times to mostly bar / grill types.

Your post made me realize that I should try a better bar, since I like dressing a little better and I enjoy a good whisky or cocktail.

I still have my trepidations about it.

I don't know if it's just me but most of my time in bars have been with male friends, drinking and shooting the shit.

If you wanted to meet girls you generally went to a club, not a bar.

The reason you go to a bar instead of just being at home is because it's a convenient meeting point after work, you don't have to clean up, they have interesting beers/drinks, they serve you and they provide a nice atmosphere.

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