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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   1700 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 5, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I have a post I want to make, but I don't want to effort-post it, thought I probably should.

I was just browsing for games on Steam, and it's 90% trash. Some of the listed games didn't include the very tag I explicitly searched for. And this made me think of how other content is also turning into trash. And it's a very specific kind of trash.

The problem is not solely incentives but also a sort of degeneration or insanity in which one prefers the symbol of substance over actual substance. There's a sort of simulacraic collapse going on, and it's not dissimilar to drug-use, but it's happening in dimensions which previously had no drug equivalent.

"Relatable content" and "ASMR" are two new categories of needs-fulfilling content. But the collapse I'm complaining about is the concequence of collapsing a process into a reward, or into a symbolic process. In some older RPG games, you could go on expeditions. In the current Genshin Impact, "Go on an expedition" is a button. It just starts a timer. The process doesn't exist, the game just uses your understanding of expeditions as a macro and tells you to simulate its occurrence.

What bothers me is not that we're one step closer to the experience machine, but that the wireheaders behind it don't understand how the brain handles value and meaning. These are all lacking: Sincerity, realness, risk, skin-in-the-game, effort, depth, pain, realism.

Artistic taste is the ability to make a skinner's box not feel like one. This skill is being lost over time because degenerate creators lack it, and because degenerate consumers need less of it. Gatcha games like blue archive are incredibly simple. It's solely the art which makes it feel like a game or experience rather than an arcade demo. The reason it's so popular in the first place is because Asia has a higher baseline of artistic sense (e.g. less degeneracy) than the west.

Notice how MMORPGs have less and less PVP, That's degeneracy. Notice the increase in slice-of-life/slow-life animations, that's degeneracy too. Video games getting easier? You guessed it, degeneracy. When games becomes more arcade-like, it's because of degeneration (Diablo 2 (good), Diablo 3 (meh), Diablo Immortal (trash)). A very strong identifier is "mixing things which does not belong". A medival RPG game starts giving players bunny ear vanity items? The degeneration has started. Magic the gathering collabs with modern media? Again, degeneration (exact same degeneration as Fortnite). This form usually mirrors enshittification, as this kind of value extraction speeds up the demise of said media. Most degeneration may be downstream of short-term optimization.

Nietzsches complaints of "last men" as a category, and the auto-domestication of the modern man belong to the same categories that I've listed above. Religious descriptions of degeneracy overlap as well (Kali Yuga, Christian categories of sin, etc).

Even the ratio of "Creator/Engager/Lurker" is changing online, and that this mirrors consumer culture is no coincidence. An online community will feel massively better when the ratio is 3/17/80 than when it's 2/12/86, and the 2000s internet felt better because the ratio of creators was higher.

Anyone felt how online memes went from funny to relatable? And then people started fabricating things (lying) when they ran out of reality to draw from. And then they they started using examples from fiction. And then they gave up on that too, and just started sharing whatever wishful thinking came to them (usually as a subversion (i.e. the opposite) of reality or fiction. Comics in which hot girls are interested in the viewer for no good reason, or in which demons are kind, or in which succubi are loyal, etc). This progression is not much unlike how an actual loser would day dream and lie to themselves as their life falls apart. Suffering from X? Just imagine the opposite of X, have the two balance out, and enjoy the results. Lazy and crude manipulation of the human reward system. And don't get me started on irony and the psychology which leads to it.

This might look like a whole mess of unrelated things. It's not. The minimum set of things you need to counter all form of degeneracy is {Taste, standards, beauty over utility, enjoying life over trying to endure it}, and these things even overlap. If I were to turn this into a question, it would be "Does anyone else notice this, and how may we slow it down?"

You know, I'm doing the most "real" gaming I've done in years, I downloaded World of Warcraft TBC Classic Anniversary, 20 years after playing the original. And mostly I'm loving it and realizing that it's just the game for me. But Blizzard has made tons of little QoL changes, little things to make the game smoother and easier, and it's not that they ruin things, it's the way that the original was so intricately designed that even small changes throw things off.

Leveling is I think someone said around 30% easier in classic than it was in the original. Which itself is good, and for what it's worth I'm not sure that I'd play as much if I were grinding out one level at a time rather than blazing through, I'm not a bored bone idle teenager with no friends anymore I'm a busy adult who wants to relax for an hour or so. I'm not trying to prove anything or be better than anyone, so there's no reason for me to care. Except, and especially if you park your toon in an inn when you log out and get the 2x rested xp bonus, leveling faster makes questlines and areas all wrong. Especially if, like me, you love doing a PUG 5 man dungeon as basically the highest expression of WoW as a game; with rested XP you can basically gain a level running an instance, plus sometimes ending up on the wrong side of the world, and as a result you level right past the questing area you were in the middle of, and what was a pretty good storyline is ruined or cut short, because by the time I get to the final bit I'm 2-3 levels too high and not getting XP for it.

Another example: you get your mount much earlier. Which is good, nobody likes toddling along slowly to get to the summons in the southern barrens when your nearest fight point is ashenvale, but it also throws off the rhythm because at that level you have less time to save the gold up, especially with faster leveling, and I had to go back and power level herbalism to catch it up to my current zones and raise auction house cash, because otherwise I'd find myself unable to earn the gold necessary. Which, I could just not get the mount until the traditional level 40 (iirc) but what's the fun of playing poverty spec?

And that's the rub, strictly speaking I could choose to play differently but I won't. Rather than making sure to park in an inn or city for the rested XP bonus, I could make sure to leave my character outside to prevent it. I could do the quests anyway even though they deliver zero or minimal XP, to finish the story. Etc. But I'm not going to do those things, I want to play the game according to the incentives. Which means at least a little intuitive min-maxing.

I do think a big part of it is the shift in the audience. TBC Classic is being played by 34 year old me, I have a hundred other things to do, I want a mild distraction not a new avocation. Which I think is a growing market over time in gaming, I would guess that every year after 1998 the total market share of video games occupied by 13-25 year old boys, the core hardcore gamer constituency, has gotten smaller. The market for video games has gotten older, more feminine, and consequently less competitive, less dedicated to the craft, more casual, every single year. Eventually Video Games as a category have become something that middle aged moms engage in just as often as 16 year olds fueled by Mountain Dew and thwarted hormones.

One of those things does not seem like the other. How is slice of life the same stripping down of meaningfullness as cutting gameplay out of games, in your opinion?

Thanks for engaging! Meaning is very similar to value, and the value requires scarcity or victories (that something is fought for). Slice of life is the victory without the fight. In videogame terms, it's starting at maximum level. All the recent "I was reborn with a cheat skill" anime is similar (because, unlike traditional power fantasies, the cheat skill is used for relaxation rather than conquering. One-Punch-Man is in-between these two categories).

The category of menial relaxation in general (truck simulator, farming simulator, walking-simulator games, power-washing simulator, stardew valley, heartopia) too betrays a lack of ambition, and therefore exhaustion/dejection, not unlike applying for early retirement as a result of chronic depression or burnout. Most of the categories I've listed so far are in the opposite direction of "fighting spirit". The kind of people who always play on hard mode (or hardcode mode) tend to be more mentally healthy than those who prefer easy or creative modes. Nietzsche, in trying to breed the overman into existence, advocated for militarism, and claimed that the corruption of morals was downstream of weakness of will (this fits slice-of-life) and the need for strong stimuli (this fits with all the porn games, and the general trend of exaggeration in media due to the hedonic treadmill, e.g. power-levels in dragonball, or the modern category of incremental games which must now use arbitrary-precision floating-point libraries)

Slice of life is also just an image of a good life, an idea. And one uses this idea to warm themselves, rather than attempting to create it in reality. Cutting gameplay out of games is when players want to skip tedius mechanics by collapsing them into abstractions of themselves (e.g. fast-travel), and the two feels similar in the desire to skip ahead. They're the intolerance of effort, the desire for novelty after one has gotten sick of what is. You may find that people who are mentally unwell change one or more of these often: The layout of their home, their online profile picture/avatar, their online username/identity, the place where they hang out, their image. Ones general lack of well-being blend into their every day life, so that everything in their every day life reminds them of negative things, and I believe this is one of the causes of escapism/the need to be distracted (the latter is often a result of getting sick of ones own thought-loops)

The things I'm tying together may only seem close on higher levels of abstraction, or the similarities may only exist in their up-stream causes, but hopefully I'm making sense

@pigeonburger @YoungAchamian @The_Nybbler @bolido_sentimental

So i made post a while back about the job search. I've got some good news! I got callbacks recently, And Im coming up on 5 opportunities.

2 - Sys Admin positions: One that pays about 65k, for an engineering firm, another that pays 75k, but its a financial institution.

Internship (Network Engineer) - Traveling internship that pays 17 an hour, Im kinda hoping that I can work my way up and score a full time job there.

IT Support full time at a school institution - 45k a year, not too much different from what Im doing right now.

IT Support Assistant - Another support job for a building maintance/blue collar company, about 25 an hour.

Im not 100% done with the interview process for all of them. But im done with the engineering firm, the Internship, and i have a 3rd final round interview with the school institution. Im doing a phone screening for the building maintnce company and a 2nd round interview with the financial.

Im excited, but I dont know:

How to keep each opportunity in arms reach... (Obviously i wan the best paying one, but I kinda dont want to be in a situation where i get a call back from one of these places 1st, say yes, and then bail once another opportunity comes in, id like to be sure i can fall back on something if i dont get an offer for whatever reason)

And Im honestly kind scared, a little bit. I dont know how much good ill be at these jobs, imposter syndrome is real. Ive never maintained real live enterprise equipment before, so this will be a first.

Ideally I get call backs for all 5 and can choose, but honestly, Im grateful if i get at least one (regardless of the pay, its better than where Im at now!)

Good luck to your search, truly; but right now the market for this stuff is getting ‘hammered’ and is over saturated as of late. The word among the people I know is if you have a good job already, keep it. Don’t make the jump. If what you’ve got looks promising, make the jump, but be careful.

I actually ended up getting laid off of previous job, luckily i was already looking before hand anyway, and there is a good chance i nab one of these. But yeah, its definitely tough. Im really grateful that i've made it this far out.

I think I responded to your original post, great to hear you're getting calls back in this market.

If it helps your decision-making at all, I'm making $50k in a small-med business tech support call center for a major ISP in a mid-large city after working there ~1.5 years, and I started at $41k. My qualifications were a tech-adjacent business bachelor's and a minor in IT heavy on network classes (which I should have majored in from the beginning). To be honest I don't think they looked at my academic creds much, they mostly asked about my phone experience taking pizza orders during the interviews and saw my network knowledge as a bonus.

I will caveat this by saying I am generally an unserious retard and I do not recommend following this path (I like my job now but I got extremely lucky with my current chain of command, which consists of a person that has worked in other coaxial cable industry tech support positions for 8 years immediately above me and another guy that was originally a cable TV field technician that's been with the company over 30 years immediately above them; he may have fixed your parents' cable in the 1990s or 00s if you lived in the carolinas)

Why'd you choose the ISP? Or was it just not your first choice, you just got a job? Honestly, I am actually thinking about taking bluecollar company job (Sadly, the financial firm fell through, and i suspect the engineering firm job has as well, leaving me with the 3 others remaining.) Its a combination of IT Support and some minor office administration work. I'm highly curious about it.

It was not my first choice, but it was the best out of available options. I got an offer from an MSP in the same city but it would have paid significantly less than $20 an hour. The ISP at least paid a somewhat liveable wage for the area CoL. Plus I've always kinda liked the idea of working for a national infrastructure-type company, which helped me swallow the situation, I just didn't figure I'd end up in a call center. So it goes, for gen z. Those were the only two offers I got in 6 months of looking, though I wasn't grinding as hard as I could have been with applications.

At one point I was considering trying to switch to a field tech role with my current employer, which I still haven't ruled out completely. They are well-compensated in our company (for what the job entails) and can hit well north of 70k (more in HCOL or unionized areas) after just 2 years on the job if you know what you're doing without even having to re-interview just by passing tests, with room to move up beyond that into interviewed positions. I'm not exactly in shape but I'm skinny and wouldn't have any issues climbing utility ladders or working 48 inches below distribution voltage. I'd have to learn how to drill into masonry though. A significant cohort of my call center colleagues are older guys that used to be business class field techs, they say it's a mixed bag.

I could (and have been encouraged to) promote into our Enterprise division tech support for a significant pay bump (~60k starting with room to advance based on test results since I'd be able to stack it on my existing pay grade) but they run that shit like an actual sweatshop, exactly what people think of when they hear "call center", which would be a massive quality of life downgrade from my current department which is run by mostly sane and reasonable humans. I'm hoping that department will cool down and stabilize within the next year and become tolerable to work for, at which point I will make the jump.

And before anyone tries to tell me I'm going to be replaced by an AI agent, yes, I probably am, but not for at least another 10 years because this company is so ridiculously inefficient and nepotistic and incompetent that we're more likely to see AGI first. We are a fucking dinosaur corp. (Not Comcast, the other one. Though I have it on good authority that Comcast is basically just as bad [plus, fun fact, they use the exact same back end biller/accounting-provisioning system that we use; CSG International])

At the very least I'm getting experience with BMC Remedy, which we use for bigboy real problems that are outside the scope of our in-house internal ticket systems designed to cover routine issues.

I need the same type of help but for retail management - should make a post next week.

Good job !

Congratulations on the progress. Keep up the grind. I put out something like 260 application in a month, back in 2024 when I was laid off. It's work, it feels hopeless, but just preserve. You got this.

a situation where i get a call back from one of these places 1st, say yes, and then bail once another opportunity comes in

I would recommend not doing this. The boomer response is that companies talk, and sure maybe if its a niche area like the Bay, but realistically it never happens. However doing it essentially is a torching of the commons of the job market. The commons are already pretty torched but I sleep better at night knowing I am not contributing to it. I have friends who do it/have done it, they got some temporary boost, but the company(specifically your boss) knows, they know you are mercenary af, and they treat you like it. Now some companies are shit holes and it doesn't matter but some companies aren't and they care about that sort of thing.

Yeah, I know it would be a shitty move, id just hate to accept an offer from one of these places, only to be given a better offer else ware.

What is it that sysadmins actually do on a daily basis? From my point of view it seems like these systems are mostly stable and run themselves. Outside of actual incidents that require response, what do you do all day?

Ill Copy & Paste the responsibilities for one of the roles here, so you can get a general idea, but titles in the IT world are notorious for not meaning shit.

Shift Coverage & Support

Manage the US shift starting at 12:30 PM EST while providing coverage for early Japan shift operations, delivering L2 support across Windows and Linux environments. Serve as an on-call resource during weekends and off-hours to oversee production changes and respond to critical incidents, ensuring 24/7 availability for Windows and Red Hat Linux infrastructure.

Technical Operations

Coordinate hardware break-fix activities with vendors including Microsoft, Red Hat, Cisco, and HPE. Plan and execute scheduled system changes during maintenance windows, including patching, updates, and routine maintenance across hybrid Windows and Linux environments. Fulfill user requests and ensure operational continuity across both platforms.

Incident & Change Management

Lead response efforts for production incidents by participating in bridge calls alongside application and infrastructure teams. Escalate complex issues to engineering teams and serve as a liaison throughout the resolution process. Partner with regional peers to plan and implement changes across global infrastructure, adhering to ITIL best practices for incident, problem, and change management.

Cross-Platform Integration

Drive seamless interoperability between Windows and Linux environments in support of hybrid cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Maintain accurate, up-to-date documentation covering system configurations, operational procedures, and cross-platform dependencies to support team continuity and knowledge sharing.

What's the deal with new housing going up like crazy in places that have few jobs and negative population growth?

I asked an AI about this, and it said something about how even though people are leaving the region, there's still a backlog of housing supply, especially for smaller units such as apartments and starter homes. I do in fact see a lot of apartments going up, and I suppose "starter homes," though the kind that costs more than the median home price for the area (which is not especially high). And then the expectation is that when Xers and Millenials get older, they'll buy the sprawling houses that are currently occupied by boomers? These houses seem very large, and I don't really understand them.

I sort of get what's happening in places like Arizona and Florida, where a larger than usual retiree cohort wants to live somewhere warm in a nice new easy to maintain house. I guess Phoenix is still adding subdivisions by sheer force of cheapness?

Some of these places have no local jobs, but serve as commuterville for places that do.

What's the deal with new housing going up like crazy in places that have few jobs and negative population growth?

High-paying remote work allows people to live almost anywhere.

I did this. FAANG job, live in Appalachia. Living at work isn't all its cracked up to be but I like it now.

Living at work isn't all its cracked up to be but I like it now.

Way better than commuting two hours a day to sit in video calls at an office.

There's no way there's this many people with remote high-paying jobs.

COVID changed things quite a bit for a lot of people. I’ve had my questions marks with some of the people I’ve met, but usually there’s other things going on in the background. I’ve seen some surprising familial organizing of finances, deals cut, and a couple of creative financing loans made out in the Menlo Park area as well as Fresno.

During a family gathering around the holidays last year, a couple relatives of mine made some home purchases out in Utah and a couple places elsewhere that they had plans for as it relates to business developments they wanted to expand. Which is interesting because some years back my landlord who I’d known for years did something remarkably similar. None of it made much sense to me at a first pass but there’s a conflux of interesting undercurrents driving this behavior I think.

It doesn't make sense to me. If people were leaving cities for small towns and villages, that should cause the price in cities to drop, or at least stabilize. Ditto, if they were leaving some country for another, but everywhere seems to be affected.

I would guess that this is not answerable with any degree of rigor without a specific example, which you are presumably unwilling to offer because it's too close to home.

That said, in a general sense I can think of a few reasons. you see that pattern:

  1. You have a warped perception of a place. There are lots of towns that had a bad reputation when I was growing up, but have since turned around completely, and it often takes a while for my perception to catch up to the reality. What do you mean hip young people are moving to Pittsburgh? This can also be a case of using county level statistics when you're dealing with the housing supply in a smaller area, the county is shrinking but [town] is growing.

  2. The industry in an area is shrinking overall, but the jobs that do exist are shifting, so the housing stock is shifting as well. You have a town that used to have a cardboard box factory employing 1,000 people at an adjusted wage of $25,000/yr, 1,000 houses were built to accommodate the workers. Now that factory only employs 500 people at an adjusted wage of $50,000/yr and a SaaS payroll company opened up an office in town where they employ 100 people at an adjusted wage of $100,000/yr. On the one hand you'd say well there's 1,000 houses and only 600 workers, there's plenty of housing! On the other, you'd say all the existing housing was designed for a worker making $25k, and there's no housing for people making $100k. The old, bad, factory housing is a decrepit slum at the same time that the new shiny stuff is being built.

  3. Shifting tastes. Greater sprawl is more in fashion with online shopping and less socializing, there's less need to reach amenities, so you see rural housing on large acreage sold as a luxury good, no neighbors is awesome and it doesn't really matter that you can't get to the mall. Flip side, apartments and dense mixed use developments are more in fashion among a different subset of buyers, who highly value being able to walk to get a quart of milk or a beer, and don't want to spend their Saturdays on lawn care.

It doesn't have a bad reputation in comparison to other places, it just doesn't have much of an economic base. Maybe it's just the last place in the country for all the subsistence farmers' children to move to an apartment in town. Maybe the Intel plant is a bigger economic force than I realized?

  1. & 3 Possibly!They have a mix of old and sprawling. Currently they're building apartment complexes and the kind of subdivisions everyone else built in the 90s, like the city planners saw Phoenix or Houston and admired them. People are anxious about this -- there's even less access to water than Phoenix or Houston. My neighborhood is on water restrictions right now.

Where is an example of this?

Smallish but historical cities of the Southwest.

If you mean apartments going up, then I don't know. But for houses, there appear to be hordes of people fleeing places with high property prices and paying to build rather large houses in or around smaller historical cities/towns in the Southwest. From what I've seen, this is especially prevalent around various small places in Utah that are adjacent to national parks/great outdoor stuff. It seems like many places are turning into unofficial 55+ communities (especially for white people).

Is it me, or do the contents of this article just boil down to "true communism progressivism has never been tried?"

(Here if you don't have access.)

The first thing that stands out to me is that the abstract uses "conservative" functionally as a slur, and among other points implies that proving something originates from conservative thought is in itself showing that someone is (morally) wrong.

The next is that the implication that anti- vs pro-shipper is the main source of harassment campaigns. At least in my experience, this is completely wrong; The great majority of anti-shippers just avoid the entire shipping fanfiction altogether. On the other hand, shippers are by their nature already involved and frequently highly emotional about which particular ship is the right one. Most of them still manage to get along despite differences, but if campaigns are started, it's by shippers who either consider one particular ship to be especially terrible, or vice versa by people who consider one particular ship to be so obviously true that all others are necessarily awful.

Finally, it's hard not to think that the authors major claim, namely that people’s fictional interests are not indicative of their real-life values, beliefs, and behaviours, is something they would disagree for other media, or even for the same media, but with inverted connotation. Think militaristic fiction, for example. Progressives have no issue implying that enjoying such media is problematic.

The great majority of anti-shippers just avoid the entire shipping fanfiction altogether. On the other hand, shippers are by their nature already involved and frequently highly emotional about which particular ship is the right one. Most of them still manage to get along despite differences, but if campaigns are started, it's by shippers who either consider one particular ship to be especially terrible, or vice versa by people who consider one particular ship to be so obviously true that all others are necessarily awful.

(Emphasis mine)

Before even reading the article, I think there may be some terminology confusion going on. "Antis" as I've seen the term used in the past decade or so are not people disinterested in shipping, they're people who are very much invested against specific pairings or themes, the ones you're talking about in the bolded part. The type specimen, for me, is the person who wrote "fiction is reality" about some Voltron fanfiction.

Right. Not "people who are anti-shipping" but "shippers who are anti-'various crimes against feminism/justice/society/diversity/whatever you like.'" Think two groups shouting "You're the straight white cis male!" "No, you're the straight white cis male!" at each other forever.

I consider myself at least above-average at English literacy and I have no idea what any of this means. How does it relate to lowest common denominator political arguments of socialists/communists?

"True communism has never been tried" is an old cliché. The article has nothing to do with communism (which is why I struck out and replaced that word).

(It's genre fiction/fandom stuff. If you're not familiar with the space/people/politics it won't make sense.)

The "report reason" text-box for "other" is often insufficient to say what I want; could it be, maybe, twice as long?

I'm legitimately surprised that, to the best of my knowledge, no one made a top-level post in any of the CWR threads about Lindy West's latest memoir, Adult Braces. For the last few weeks it's all that certain corners of the internet have been able to talk about.

I have been blessed to never memorize the names or faces of shitlibs whose careers are focused on triggering me. I obsessed over the worst person in the world continuously baiting me at my undergrad before ceasing the practice.

I'd like to think it's a successful example of seeing through bait.

Literally who?

I'm assuming you're relatively young and/or you didn't follow the culture war back in the old days? I haven't heard her name in a long time but I remembered it after reading it here. She was a rather active rage-baiting feminist culture warrior and talking head back in the days when the US culture war was focused on the issue of sex as opposed to the issue of race, so roughly before 2014.

I think I heard Louise Perry talking about it on her podcast, but that was the first I'd heard of Lindy West, and it wasn't clear why people care, or what West is known for. Surely she can't be known simply for being fat and abrasive?

She was a very prominent journalist when she wrote for Jezebel in its heyday. My understanding is that a previous memoir she wrote was adapted into a TV series, although I haven't heard of either before the recent kerfuffle.

Jezebel

Yeah, when I looked her up just now, an article that came up mentioned the TV show, which I had never heard of. Her website has her most recent articles in famous places like The New York Times and The Guardian, which look dreary.

What are the certain internet corners saying?

There's basically lot of rubbernecking and popcorn-eating over the fact that her husband convinced her to go poly so he'd be free to sleep with other women, and even got her to accept another woman moving in with them, and she claims that she's totally fallen in love with this other woman herself, but the way she writes about it in her memoir makes it sound like she really is quite unhappy with the situation but believes those feelings are wrong and un-woke so she's constantly trying to convince herself she likes it.

"Tech bro" and "finance bro" are well-known archetypes. That we don't have equivalents for other high-profile, high-status, high-paying fields like "law bro" or "med bro" probably says something, but what exactly?

Third example: "lit bro", a stereotype of a man who's very interested in fiction but whose reading is limited to the oeuvres of uber-masculine powerhouses like Ernest Hemingway and, um, David Foster Wallace. Freddie deBoer is convinced it's a category with no members, a literal empty set.

The difference is that lawyers and doctors are relatively evenly spread geographically.

Where NYC is crawling in finance bros, and the bay area is full of tech bros. There's a vast horde of guys all working in the same field at the same companies who went to the same colleges dominating the social and romantic market in these places.

You never have the same phenomenon of seemingly EVERYONE working in medicine or law, outside of colleges for those progressions.

It's interesting that certain professions are seen as intrinsically high-status. Doctors are presumptively taken to be morally upstanding individuals, to the point that "he's a doctor, but he treats everyone like shit" is seen as such a surprising twist it can power an entire TV series for eight seasons. More darkly, I wonder if this presupposition might be the root of the Lucy Letby truther movement: perhaps these people just cannot believe that a trained nurse could be this spectacularly vicious. I was once speaking to a former veterinarian who complained that, whenever she reads a novel in which a character is a veterinarian, it's always used a shorthand for that character being of good moral character: "aww, look at him, he cares about teh animals!!" But in her experience, most vets are dickheads.

I feel like law and medicine do have some of those stereotypes but they are usually only within subfields. Like surgeons are supposedly the jocks of the medical profession. The show Scrubs describes some of the stereotypes.

Lawyers also have their stereotypes with corporate lawyers being the boring ones. Rich defense lawyers being morally bankrupt. Prosecutors being aggressive career climbers. Etc.

I think the main unfairness to tech and finance is that a small subset of them that deserve the label is being use to describe the whole industry. Silicon valley was great for splitting up and labelling the various tech archetypes.

Rich defense lawyers being morally bankrupt.

So ethics is the thing keeping me from getting rich? I knew it!

Strange isn’t it? If you want to be ethical and rich, law is one discipline you’re better off avoiding relative to other career paths.

like surgeons are supposedly the jocks of the medical profession. The show Scrubs describes some of the stereotypes.

Yes just so.

Ortho, Pathology, and Internal Medicine are probably further apart in temperament and day to day work than a Lawyer, Tech-bro, and Finance-bro.

This makes us much harder to stereotype although there are definitely some (like being bad at finances).

What is the pathology stereotype, out of curiosity? One of my academic mentors had a side gig as a professor of pathology, wondering if he would fit.

Outside of specific subfields pathology is a pretty anti-social specialty with a lot of time working on their own/outside the hospital milieu and near zero patient interaction. Communication skills are therefore weaker. The work is also quite a bit more basic science oriented. When Glaucomflecken makes fun of pathologists they are unhealthily attached to their microscopes.

The other major anti-social specialty is Radiology, but Rads is up in everyone else's business and is required to know an incredible variety of shit. Sometimes get called the physician's physician because they know a lot and heavily guide decisions. Communication skills are a lot better because Rads gets called more often and reports are more nuanced and need clinical correlation and therefore shit like theory of mind. When Glaucomflecken makes fun of Radiologists it's about wearing sunglasses indoors (because they live in dark rooms with fancy computers).

When I went to the Path lab as a medical student they'd be happy to see me, apologize for things still being pending, offer to show me slides, and get me tea. When I went to find the imaging room I'd have to walk through a secret door in the back of a nursing locker room in the third sub-basement wherein I would get bitched at for exactly 30 seconds which was followed by exactly 30 seconds of clearly explaining the context behind the read. I would then flee.

The above is an exaggeration. ...And also not.

In my experience Pathologists make excellent pre-clinical teachers and mentors when inclined because they know and are interested in the more science stuff, and the ones who are involved have the patience and communication skills to be good teachers (otherwise they wouldn't do it). Radiologists make better clinical teachers and mentors because they have to be efficient/excellent at time management, and deal with a lot of risk and uncertainty.

Lastly, my friends in Radiology can still be trusted to know and remember basic clinical medicine shit. The pathologists...no.

Interesting. I would say that kind of tracks, someone who only socializes on his own terms. He was a great fellow and an excellent teacher in my field (when not working at the med school/research lab, he taught modernist/postmodern literature, with some divinity school courses on Aquinas, as well as adult education teaching God knows what). I saw his Google Calendar once and there must have been maybe ten events for the week in it, one of which was our meeting.

These days an intellectual life outside of medicine has been mostly beaten out of the field, so anyone who does that sort of thing is usually exceptional in some way (often in peculiarity and surplus of intellectual horsepower.

This makes me curious where your temperament lines up with the stereotype of your subfield.

Thankfully I'm a tremendously non-central example otherwise I couldn't write here. I'm sure someone who knew me very well in person would peg me immediately, which is a risk - in terms of more general opsec and guessing my specialty... my combination of rambling detailed knowledge and pontificating bullshit doesn't really meld with the periodic grumpy cursing incisiveness.

Those are pretty firmly going in two different directions stereotype wise.

I supposed I best fit the stereotype of an old-style PCP but they are pretty much dying out at this point.

I supposed I best fit the stereotype of an old-style PCP

Fooled me; I always figured that you were a crusty old GP!

"Tech bro" is a tricky one, because it's coming from two directions at once.

On one hand, you have what is generally a younger, left wing contingent that dislikes the Alex Karps and Marc Andreeesens of the world, and that splashes out to the industry at large. Whether I like it or not, I have to admit that there's a narcissistic, sociopathic, bloviating, stimulant-addled contingent of people in silicon valley who do a fantastic job of ruining the image of the entire industry.

On the other hand, you have the executive class. They loathe the jumped-up peasants who have the raw fucking audacity to earn a decent wage without getting a degree from an Ivy League school and getting a certificate that lets them work in a highly gatekept field. At this point, I think a lot of them would gladly detonate their own companies if they thought it would hurt the tech employees more (I'm looking at you, Jassy).

Tech bros, finance bros, and Bernie bros are linguistic weapons used to punch what's understood as a lower social class and form consensus around that fact. The chattering media class decided tech was gross and its wealthy, intelligent, too libertarianish inhabitants were also gross. As a concept, these people are too white, too male, too corporate, and too far disconnected from the greater diversity impetus. Finance bros already had their makeover in the 80's, and now everyone understands finance as an unclean field filled with morally bankrupt creatures. Tech on the other hand was a new thing with new types and we needed to know how we felt about them.

The -bros stereotypes do represent some truth as well which may be necessary to generate a stereotype to punch or look down upon. Law and medicine are sufficiently diverse and understood broadly as good. We don't need to know how we feel about lawyers or doctors, because we already know. It'd be like making a -bro stereotype for teachers.

Don’t forget Joe Rogan as a “dude bro,” and “bro science” as a term. They’re terms that are meant to draw mockery to the irrationality you find in these groups.

Well, they're coined as envious attempts to insult tech guys and finance guys (I have yet to hear the term "tech bro" followed by an intelligent and measured evaluation of the problems of the tech industry). Kind of in different ways, in that the techbros have betrayed their low-status origins and become successful when they shouldn't have, and for the finance bros that they're still just dumb frat jocks who don't deserve their money. Now, the general public doesn't tend to like insulting doctors (I'm sure there are Feminism in Medicine blogs attacking "med bros"), and "lawyer" is already enough of an insult.

Math nerds are still lower status than wordcels.

Are non-quant finance bros mostly math nerds? My understanding was that outside of quants the job was more soft skills?

You’re thinking more the analyst or sales side of things. “I can generate these complex models but can’t sell anything,” is the division where one breaks from the other and the latter washes out. Not all forms of high finance are mathematical, even though many are. Warren Buffet uses fairly simple accounting mixed with his own taste and judgment. Jack Welch was another story. Then of course in hedge funds you have extremely mathematical, complicated stochastic processes. There are multiple ways to be successful in finance.

Isn't "finance bro" specifically referring to quants (and similar "upstarts") though? Or am I misunderstanding the usage?

There are higher and lower culturally acceptable usages of the term. When Martin Shkreli hiked the price of Daraprim, the media tagged him with the label of a “Pharma Bro,” and that was because of the way he carried himself. He used to do livestreams of himself sitting around on the computer, accepting calls from people and shootin’ the shit as normal human beings do. He didn’t like most drug CEO’s and they didn’t like him because he used the language and mannerisms of ordinary people.

The way I hear most people use “finance bro,” it’s a disparaging term used to refer to the idiots you saw in YouTube commercials pitching selling options courses and driving crypto scams.

I've mostly seen it in reference to client-facing roles in investment banking and private equity.

So, what are you reading?

I'm retrying Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, among other things.

Ivanhoe

I have a weird habit of talking like the author of whatever I'm reading at the moment and while my wife quite enjoyed the week I was reading Jane Austen she's annoyed now that I speak like its 1194

Almost done with my current book. Next one I have close to me is Night of Power. I abhor Fisk’s writing style and it’s extremely difficult for me to read narrative history; I’ve always found it incredibly boring. It was recommended to me by a friend after I recommended to him The Fall of Israel.

Still on A Canticle for Leibowitz.

That book spurred me on to start writing fiction again. I hate what I write but it at least made me want to do it. 10/10 would read again

Excalibur, the third and final book of the Warlord Chronicles. Enemy of God was even better than the first book. The author has already covered all the scraps of Arthuriana I'm familiar with, so I have no idea where the story will go next. 10/10 would recommend.

I thoroughly enjoyed Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy (Imperium, Lustrum, and Dictator), the great orator’s professional life and the waning of the Republic seen through the eyes of Cicero’s scribal slave.

Your recommendation for post-Roman Britain is now on hold in my library audiobook app.

That sounds really interesting as well. I'm halfway through the last book, so I'll check it out next.

I'm a big fan of Arthuriana and may check this out. However, a quick glance at the wiki page suggests that it subverts a lot of things I'd rather not see subverted. While the stance on Christianity isn't clear, I've run into... too many examples to enumerate of ~Arthurian fiction from that era which indulge heavily in eye-rolling disparagement. At least this one doesn't sound obnoxiously feminist?

Curious as to your take.

Personally I adore Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle, especially the first two books, which do something really cool by weaving in the Atlantis myth. Also, I think because of Lawhead's progressive brain tumor, his writing seems to have gotten steadily worse over his career after those books, but last I checked (a while ago admittedly) they still stand up well.

Cornwell is compelled to shit on Christianity (at least in the Arthurian trilogy, Warlord Chronicles, the archer books, and at least one of the Sharpe books), with a consistency that bothers me. It’s his single biggest deficiency. I can’t think of anyone else who writes battles so well.

I have the same aesthetic aversions that you do, I think. There is no girlbossing, women are portrayed as either passive victims, clever manipulators of the egos of men, or wild eyed semi-feral holy women, all of which are (to me) very plausible and period accurate.

The author justifies his revisions by putting the story in the mouth of a narrator with a very specific POV. The narrator is a pagan, a warrior, and a commoner who by chance learns how to read a bit when young and who is at the right place at the right time to witness or participate in many of the greatest eventa of Arthurian legend. One of his best friends, a noble born Christian cavalryman ("knight") would have told the same story but with different emphases and interpretations, and it would sound much more familiar to fans of "Le Mort D'Arthur."

I get the sense that the author is both a fan of Arthurian legend and of 5th century British history and has done his best to reconcile the two without doing a disservice to either. It's gritty and real, but it's not "grimdark." And there is no projection of 20th century morality back in time.

I'm not a huge Arthuriana buff. He does change some characters I think, but in a way that leaves the door open for the later "canonical" interpretations of them to still make sense. Arthur, for example, has the air of confidence, nobility, and invincibility you've come to expect when leading men or speaking publicly. But in private, when confiding to the main character, he reveals that he is sometimes wracked with doubt or grief or barely-controlled anger. I think it's pretty clever. Instead of tearing down or subverting the Arthur you expect, or making him into the bad guy, the author shows the psychological toll that singlehandedly bearing the destiny of Britain on his shoulders takes on him.

I've been listening to To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. It reminds me of my experience trying to read James Joyce: mostly confusion. But since it's an audiobook, at least I can accomplish tasks while I listen.

Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch.

My youngest brother is working through a Latin class, so I'm working through the Aeneid in the original Latin to help him out before his exams.

Hollywood's Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and the Bundy Drive Boys

The same friend who lent me the biography of Errol Flynn lent me this one. Along the same tack, though not quite as wild a ride. Those were definitely different days.

Once you finish Bloom you can read The Coddling of the American Mind, if you haven't already.

I'd normally ask this in the wellness thread, but it doesn't quite fit.

My father is going through chemotherapy, which has absolutely trashed his appetite, and he has some issues with swallowing due to previous radiation treatment. He's managing to keep his weight stable now by pounding shakes made from ensure, ice cream, protein powder, and peanut butter, but he doesn't exactly enjoy it.

I recently made him bread pudding from scratch (with homemade bread) and he nearly made himself sick eating it. I think part of it is that his usual staples aren't quite appetizing enough to cut through the side effects of the treatment, and he might have better luck with something new.

Cooks of themotte, can you recommend any recipes that are tasty, easy to swallow, and have absolutely degenerate amounts of calories in each serving? The doctor has said that all the usual rules about healthy eating are out the window here, if it tastes and smells good enough to give him an appetite, and it fattens him up, it's a win.

I have a bacon colcannon that might be of interest. Start by preparing some potatoes as you would if you were making regular mashed potatoes. Then, fry up some bacon, remove the bacon from the pan to chop up but leave the rendered fat in, and fry up some onion and cabbage in the bacon fat until they're as well-cooked as you like. Mix the vegetables, bacon, and bacon fat into the potatoes, and add salt+pepper to taste. Add more cream and/or mix in some grated cheese for even more calories. You could also bake this in the oven with a cheese or buttered-crumb topping.

Damn, I might make this for myself if he doesn't like it

This is one of the rare occasions where I would earnestly encourage him to ask his doctor about trying marijuana if it's locally legal/available and he's not diametrically opposed. It really does do wonders for stimulating appetite, and there are ways to get the medical benefits while limiting the psychoactive effects.

A lot of people have brought it up, and he's not keen on the idea.

Desserts are going to be a solid win here. This is one of my favorites, it takes very little effort, is delicious, and has a ton of calories.

Make a graham cracker crust (look up any recipe you care to, they are all basically graham cracker crumbs + melted butter + sugar), press into a 9x13 pan. Cream together 8 oz cream cheese and 1/2c peanut butter, fold in 1c cool whip and 1c powdered sugar. Spread over graham cracker crust. Prepare 2 packages of instant chocolate pudding, pour over previous layer. Spread rest of cool whip container over pudding layer. Chill in the fridge for at least a couple of hours, decorate with some shaved chocolate if you like.

It's obviously very empty calories, but I assume that is fine given the criteria you set out. It goes down easily (cause it's all soft stuff), and I at least think it tastes absolutely delicious.

Reminds me of a Twitter thread (eigen robot maybe?) where his dad was losing weight while home health was trying to get him to eat healthy and he finally just made him bananas foster and his dad ate all of it, followed by him being like "what are we doing here"

So, bananas foster?

Anything with heavy cream in it. Even straight, if he likes the taste. (I do, but I'm a little bit weird.)

1 cup of heavy cream has 500 calories, is low in sugar, heavy in fats.

...well, assuming he's not lactose intolerant. Otherwise, akward.

Tzadziki, ajvar, lutenitsa, katuk, Kyopolou - almost any balkan and middle eastern spread/dip is easy to swallow, digest and ungodly tasty Fresh mozarella with good olive oil Humus. Take good white cheese (turkish, bulgarian style, feta is tad too rich and creamy) crumble it finely and mix with honey. Any kind of caviar paste. Dulce de leche Different types of pates or foie gras Crepes are amazing and you could stuff them with melted cheese or nutella. Home made brioche - modernist cuisine recipe is rock solid. remove the crusts and the rest melts. Mushrooms in lots of butter. Sous vide potatoes in butter. Japanese milk bread Salmon mi cuit. (triple check safety here)

Those are the tenderest foods I can come up with.

Home made French toast was always fun. Probably pretty similar to the bread pudding. Its also very easy.

Fudge can be easy to make or really difficult depending on the ingredients you use. It is super calorie dense. Dedicated stores with fudge will usually make all kinds of weird and fun flavors. Maybe find one he enjoys and then try to replicate it at home?

If he wants more savory stuff I've always been partial to stews and chillis. Add cheese and creams for more calories.

Cheeseburger casserole with heavy cream

2 lb ground beef 1 lb bacon 8 eggs 1 cup heavy whipping cream 12 oz. Cheddar cheese 1/2 tsp salt 1/4 tsp black pepper (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Cook beef and bacon separately over medium heat until brown. Place beef in a casserole pan, add the bacon, mix well, and spread in an even layer. Mix eggs, cream, salt, (and pepper) well. Add 3/4 of the Cheddar cheese. Pour the batter over the beef and bacon and sprinkle the remaining Cheddar on its top. Bake in the preheated oven for about 30 minutes until golden brown.

Its a carnivore recipe, so extremely calorie dense, and easy to digest. How health it is depends on your personal level of trust with nutritional science.

My God that sounds so good. What’s your food background?

the recipe sounds great but I am not entirely certain if this will fraternize well with your parent's digestive tract considering how overwhelming all of this sounds together with the heavy fats, there's a reason why the ice cream shakes work

I have an MCAD deficiency. I’ll be fine.

Nothing fancy, I do most of the cooking in our house and just try to keep things simple and relatively quick. I used to go more all out and do more sophisticated stuff, but nowadays I just shoot for quick, relatively cheap, and tasty. This is just one of about a dozen or so casserole variations I do, none of them take very long, and you basically just throw whatever ingredients you have into an AI and it will come up with good suggestions.

Thanks! This is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for.

How many female victims of bears have there been since April of 2024?

I cannot think or comprehend of anything more cucked than having a daughter. Honestly, think about it rationally. You were feeding, clothing, raising and rearing a girl for at least 18 years solely so she could hike off into the woods and get eaten by a bear. All the hard work you put into your beautiful little girl - reading her stories at bedtime, making her go to sports practice, making sure she had a healthy diet, educating her, playing with her. All of it had one simple result: her body was more enjoyable for the bear who would eventually feast on her every limb.

Raised the perfect girl? Great. Who benefits? If you're lucky, a random bear who had nothing to do with the way she grew up, who eats her. He gets to chow down on her tight juicy body. He gets the benefits of her wholesome and nutritious organs that came from the way you raised her.

As a man who has a daughter, you are LITERALLY dedicating at least 20 years of your life simply to produce bear feed. It is the ULTIMATE AND FINAL cuck. Think about it logically.

copypasta like this is more appropriate for the Friday Fun Thread, and arguably not there.

Bears kill an average of 2 people per year in North America, so without googling, I'm gonna go with 'less than five'.

You aren't doing the men of America any favours here by quoting the stats. We need a malinformation suppression team in here stat!

Let's do a natural experiment by dropping a quarter million bears into Baltimore and see what happens.

Please no!

Won’t someone think of the bears!

There aren’t that many grizzly bears in the world, so it won’t be that dangerous.

There are a lot of kinds of bears. We don't have to be picky. The experiment could probably bear a little variance.

(I appreciate your forebearance on the puns. They're what make my life bearable)

Yeah, a quarter million American black bears wouldn’t be that dangerous.

Depends upon how high they're falling from, and in what concentration.

Can we drop them into DC instead?

That would be a cruel and unusual punishment for the bears.

They usually predate (or are preyed on) by twinks. Most of the time, it doesn't come to police attention as the damage is limited to the psyche.

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