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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2646 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 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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It's been a slow week in work, so I've been binging the master AAQC roundup of the last ~8 years. I haven't been reading the posts exhaustively, but just clicking on any that sound interesting to me. I happened upon a comment explaining the difference between good and bad satire, and arguing that good satire doesn't just attack the outgroup but also forces the audience to confront things about themselves they don't like. To illustrate his point, the commenter cited S1E3 of Black Mirror, "The Entire History of You" as an example of satire done right.

For those unfamiliar, Black Mirror is an anthology sci-fi series created by Charlie Brooker. Each episode imagines some hypothetical near-future technology and the societal impacts thereof: the results tend to be bleak, if not a bit darkly amusing. I had previously seen "Nosedive", "Playtest" and "Arkangel": of these, the latter is the only one I could really say I liked without major qualifications. The premise of "The Entire History of You" (and the context in which the comment above brought it up) sounded intriguing, so I watched it this evening.

The episode's premise is very similar to Ted Chiang's short story "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling", although this episode came out two years prior. In the near future, a technology has been invented called "Grain" which entails installing a microchip in one's brain which records audiovisual inputs from your optic nerve and ear canal. This allows you to revisit objective records of your own experiences (which the characters refer to as "re-dos") and even cast them to smart TVs.

Our protagonist, Liam, is invited to a dinner party of some of his wife Ffion's old college friends. Almost immediately, Liam becomes suspicious of Ffion's friend Jonas, a brazen cad who has recently broken off his engagement with his fiancée. After the dinner party, Ffion admits that she had been romantically involved with Jonas years ago, but that she'd omitted key details for the sake of Liam's feelings. The confession only provokes Liam's jealousy further, and he spends the following day getting drunk and obsessively re-doing memories from the dinner party, hunting for micro-expressions or body language which might indicate Ffion still holds a candle for Jonas.

Right off the bat, this episode was a very different breed from the previous episodes of Black Mirror I'd watched. The first few seasons were produced by the UK's Channel 4, after which the show migrated to Netflix: this pre-migration episode features an entirely British cast and a distinctly English approach to social awkwardness and discomfort. (Hardly surprising that this episode was written by one of the creators of Peep Show: if Mark Corrigan had access to this technology, this is exactly how he'd behave.) It's also wonderfully concise at under 50 minutes, when my understanding is that later episodes have been criticised for being unnecessarily padded. Just as the AAQC comment suggested, I recognised myself in some of Liam's harmful mental habits. (Even more shamefully, I recognised myself in Jonas a little bit too.) For the first two acts of the episode I was on the edge of my seat, eyes fixed to the screen. I thought it was making a clever point about how technology enables and aggravates our most neurotic and obsessive tendencies. Liam's endlessly re-doing of the last night's dinner party, even forcing the babysitter to express an opinion on whether Jonas's joke was funny enough to warrant such an uproarious reaction from Ffion, is pathetic and destructive – but it's only a difference in degree from people rereading WhatsApp messages and hunting for subtext in the emojis, not a difference in kind. Sharply observed.

That is, until the climax. In a drunken, jealous rage, Liam confronts Jonas and forces him to show Liam all the memories he's collected of Ffion. Included among these is a memory of Jonas in bed with Ffion eighteen months prior. Liam confronts Ffion, who admits to the affair. Their marriage collapses, and Liam elects to remove his microchip, unable to bear being confronted with happy memories of Ffion whenever he walks through his home.

Whew. As I said above, I thought the point of the episode was to highlight how this near-future technology aggravates and exacerbates Liam's negative character traits, specifically convincing him that he's being cuckolded when he isn't. But in point of fact, he really had been cuckolded, and he was entirely right to be jealous and suspicious of Jonas! If not for this technology, he never would have discovered he'd been made a cuckold. The episode even floats the idea that Jonas may be the biological father of Ffion's baby. From Liam's point of view, there really is no downside to this technology: without it, his wife would have gotten away with cheating on him, and he might well have invested resources into raising a child which wasn't his own without his knowledge. So, I'm a bit confused about what the takeaway was meant to be here. It certainly can't be a story about Othello syndrome if your wife really is being unfaithful to you.

Mixed messages aside, an exceptionally well-made, well-acted, thought-provoking piece of TV, and the best episode of Black Mirror I've seen by a country mile. Highly recommended.

On this topic, what Black Mirror episodes would theMotte recommend? I love the idea of the series, and at least a few episodes I watched were great - I'll see whether I can find them again - but so much is way too poisoned by the writer's contemporary politics to really be the incisive commentary on possible futures as it was intended. Orange Man Bad IN SPACE !, basically.

My longtime favorite is 15 Million Merits for being a particularly effective allegory about media consumption, celebrity culture, reality TV, corporate monetization of everything, and now it seems to have inadvertently predicted the future of doomscrolling short form videos and AI slop.

Nosedive is well-executed and still relevant.

Playtest is the most viscerally horrifying and genuinely dark episode in my opinion. With the possible exception of the one immediately after that, Shut up and Dance, which is honestly so grim its surprising they aired it.

Damn. Basically just watch season 3. The fourth episode is a bit of a palate cleanser and while I find it overall underwhelming a LOT Of people loved it.

I couldn't keep watching Black Mirror as I became convinced that its production team actually has a visceral dislike, even at times contempt, for humanity, and I don't need my own misanthropic tendencies given any more fuel (misanthropy eventually logically ends up in self-hatred.) But it is at times really well-made, and if I had to recommend one episode it would be "Be Right Back." We're not quite to the world of the episode yet but we're barrelling toward it. Hayley Atwell, Domhnall Gleeson.

I had high hopes given the premise and the buzz but the only Black Mirror episodes I enjoyed were 'Striking Vipers' and 'Hang the DJ'. The rest were too boring or dumb.

It's probably my fault.

I love me some good Black Mirror - lots of decent ones, and I'd heartily recommend the episode right before this one, Fifteen Million Merits, as an incongruously clear-eyed dystopian tale that feels like it came right out of a high-quality post from here, /pol/, or X - but I always took for granted that the creators are Euro-establishment-progpilled enough to believe that infidelity isn’t a big deal, the protagonist is unsympathetic for being unwilling to suck it up and ignore it, and he would obviously be better off if unable to confirm his suspicions. Which is a vile view, obviously, but expected of that crowd.

I've heard paternity tests are illegal in France, but the context implied this was a French issue. Is it a more common thing across Europe?

Such a cuck culture is not limited to France; it’s the West in general.

There’s an unholy alliance of progressives and social conservatives who encourages men to wife up single mothers (“you wouldn’t be the stepdad, you’d be the one who stepped up”) and discourages men victimized by paternity fraud from ditching the children that resulted (“don’t punish the child”).

It Just So Happens the best interests of the children in question coincide with the best interests of the mothers committing the fraud. Men’s best interests don’t matter, of course.

It’s a toothless, unhealthy trend you find in the west. To the people who preach this shit they don’t even realize it’s like encouraging people to marry alcoholics, or people with severe and unresolved psychological problems.

I’m a firm believer that the interests of the child do tend to override the personal interests of either parent, because that’s what the unity of the family essentially turns on. The problem is it applies with equal weight and force to both parents and not just one of them.

I've only ever heard of that legislation as regards France, but I understand the sentiment behind it to be much more widespread. You even see it among ultraprogs in the US, it's just much further from the mainstream. But in any case I'd expect "cuck" probably exploded as a political insult in areas where people's opponents would have a harder time laughing it off as a non sequitir accusation, it just also got broadcast to us in the US because the internet is global.

I always took for granted that the creators are Euro-establishment-progpilled enough to believe that infidelity isn’t a big deal, the protagonist is unsympathetic for being unwilling to suck it up and ignore it, and he would obviously be better off if unable to confirm his suspicions.

I don't want you to be right, but you probably are.

Reading through my oldest AAQCs was a trip. I felt quite a bit of cringe at the quality of the writing, alongside relief that I became a much better writer (yes, even before I started using AI to tidy things up, which I do less of now than I used to). A good example would that one about the smoking area behind an oncology hospital, which is probably one of my personal favorites to this day, despite being written while sleep deprived to a degree that almost induced hypomania.

On a tangent: I think AAQCs as a concept are one of the best things about this site. They have very little pragmatic value, but at least for my specific flavor of nerd, they're an excellent extrinsic motivator for trying harder. Nothing hits as good as a post that I put time and sweat into getting an AAQC, nothing hurts quite as much as such a post not getting AAQC'd, and nothing confuses me more than a throwaway, rambling post acquiring one. Eh, I guess the variable ratio reinforcement schedule is effective for a reason.

Most of the comments I write that get AAQC's were absolutely NOT intended as such at the time I started writing them.

But then at some point when I realize just how much thought and effort I'm pouring into it and I'm only halfway done writing it and I think "whelp, if I'm this committed, better make it worthwhile just in case it gets selected."

I think I topped out as a writer in highschool and things have been slightly downhill since then. I'm usually pretty happy with all my old writing and some of it seems even clearer than my current stuff.

I'm sorry to learn about the early-onset dementia. But c'mon, that can't be true? Unless you had a lot of time to devote to writing back then, and none later. Most people do improve with time and effort, particularly when they receive clear feedback signals, I'd be surprised if that was genuinely not the case for you.

If you have a copy of something you wrote way back then, and you want to share, I can take a look.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6z1t8d/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_following_sept_9/dn276ge/?context=1

That is the oldest good thing I could easily find. Because it was posted above.

I think about this a lot. In purely abstract domains (mathematics, music), people tend to produce their best work at a young age. Basically every notable popular musician in this century and the one before it produced their most recognisable work in their twenties: there are precious few examples of a rock band whose seventh album is widely considered their magnum opus. No one in the world would take Lennon or McCartney's solo material over their Beatles material. The Fields Medal is awarded to mathematicians under the age of forty, in part because there has basically never been a mathematician producing valuable maths when they were older than that.

For less abstract domains like writing fiction, a certain amount of life experience seems to be necessary to composing something that really works (Douglas Coupland once said that almost no one is prepared to write a novel before the age of thirty). Unlike in music, there have been cases of novelists producing what is widely considered their best work in their forties or fifties.

From a personal perspective, while I still consider myself musical, I know that I'm far less musically creative than I used to be, and think it's increasingly unlikely I'll ever top the mathcore EP I recorded when I was 24.

there has basically never been a mathematician producing valuable maths older than that.

Yitang Zhang didn't prove that the lim inf of the prime gap was 2 (which would have verified a 150 year old conjecture), but he was the first to prove it was finite, at age 58. Listing and Moëbius were in their 50s when they formalized the idea of non-orientable surfaces (which I would consider to be literally "producing" math rather than just "solving" it). The first version of the Weierstrass Approximation Theorem (which led to whole fields of the most economically valuable results in mathematics, in my biased applied-math+engineering opinion) was proven when Weierstrass was 70.

But, damn, are they the exceptions who prove the rule, so long as we leave that "basically" qualifier intact? Kolmogorov was in his 50s when he solved Hilbert's thirteenth problem, but that was in joint work with a 19 year old student. Euler, Gauss, and Cauchy were doing great work in their old age, but arguably only after doing greater work as younger men. Searching for mathematical discoveries by importance and then looking up age (rather than searching specifically for discoveries made at older ages), the bulk do seem to be between 25 and 45.

I wonder if the trend is moving older (because things that were groundbreaking discoveries 300 years ago are basic undergrad background today and you need to learn much more to get to the cutting edge) or younger (because subsidized institutional math research gets more output but at the cost of making older mathematicians spend all their time teaching and mentoring and writing proposals and hiring and so on, while their grad students and postdocs are the ones who can actually focus on the work).

I think the episode's "lesson" is pretty simple - being able to replay your own trauma in perfect fidelity, over and over again, isn't valuable. In fact, it's dangerous enough to outweigh the benefits of reliving previously enjoyable memories.

I loved/hated the episode as well. I'll confess that I've dug deep into old facebook messages every once in a while, imagining the hard disks that store the data creaking back to life as I do so, a blip on their user metrics and behavior pattterns so exotic it's a rounding error in every dashboard.

It's an unhealthy habit, but thank Christ I deleted the threads I needed to more than a decade ago, and SMS backups weren't a thing until I grew up. Black mirror indeed.

Hahaaaaa. I've still got the old AOL Instant Messenger (remember that, kiddos?) logs from when I used to chat with my high school girlfriend right up until she broke up with me in college.

I won't be getting rid of them because, as I have mentioned a couple times, she died in college and almost all my memories around her are actually good and pleasant. Not memories I actually want destroyed, especially since the person I share them with is gone.

I've still got the old AOL Instant Messenger (remember that, kiddos?) logs from when I used to chat with my high school girlfriend right up until she broke up with me

Same (well, MSN Messenger logs). I'm planning to use them along with other sources of information (photographs, memories, etc.) to create a fork of her after the singularity. Which, now that I think about it, would also make for a pretty good Black Mirror episode!

Its funny, I think it was mostly just a hoarding instinct at the time, but now that we see that its trivial to train up AIs on people's writings and other outputs, I am saving as much of my own writing as I can specifically so my presence in the post-singularity can have the highest fidelity possible.

I've still got almost ALL of the digital footprint I created from my youth. Old school assignments, chat logs, saved game files, a little softcore porn, scans of old physical photographs, its all on physical hard drives I still have in my possession.

The question now is whether I should add those to an internet facing storage unit. so that the superintelligence can more easily vacuum them up.

I will caution that unused drives, especially unused solid state drives, will bleed data fidelity over time. If you want to maintain those files, regardless of how, it's worth copying them or writing in place even if you're 'just' intending them as cold storage.

I spin them up every so often just to make sure the data is still easily recoverable.

But most of these are old HDDs with pitiful capacities. I built my first computer in the early 2000's.

My current to-do is getting things transferred to my own on-site server, AND an off-site backup.

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