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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   2500 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 17, 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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My proposed title for a Walt Whitman porn parody featuring gangbang scenes.

I Contain Multi Dudes.

Well, is he "large"? Are they "large"?

Anyway, I groaned, so good/terrible pun.

You could have some WW gay porn as well:

When I heard the learn’d ass-tronomer,
When the poofs, the fairies, were ranged in columns before me,

I watched Dark this Lent and it made me wonder what series don't have a final season that doesn't struggle with the pacing.

Spoilers ahead

Everyone knows about AGoT season 8, no need to even mention it.

Breaking Bad is one of the highest-rated shows ever, but I really hated the pacing of the final season. The show has just spent two seasons dealing with Gustavo Fring, Walter White has evolved greatly as a character, but as a crime lord, he's back at square one again. But it's the final season already, so the plot shifts down two gears and accelerates greatly. By the season's midpoint and with the help of several montages, Walter White has found new associates, rebuilt his drug empire, eliminated everyone who stood in his way, earned a literal bed-sized pile of money and retired, just so we have enough episodes left for his inevitable downfall. I still have whiplash from it.

It's the same with Dark. The first season introduces time travel and scatters the cast between 2019 and 1986 and 1953. The second season introduces even more characters, adds 1920 and 2052 to the mix, along with a whole new parallel timeline in the cliffhanger without even starting to open the lineup of mystery boxes that would've made J.J. Abrams proud. Then, in the breadth of a single season, it adds one more jump into the past, shows the parallel timeline along with its parallel cast, its distaff counterpart to the main antagonist and her own goal, adds some quantum mechanics to save the protagonist, twice, and them hurriedly starts to open every remaining mystery box in a row without even explaining the logic behind them because it's running out of screen time and it still has to tell us, out of the blue, that both worlds are just the result of an experiment gone wrong and the protagonist has to go back in time in the real world to prevent them from being created altogether. The end. Don't think very hard why all these children from season 1 actually had to die.

So, is there a series that has the final season that doesn't feel either rushed or drawn out, that finishes exactly how and when it should?

I don't know how this didn't occur to me before, considering I just finished it recently. My girlfriend recommended a German black comedy series called How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast), whose fourth and final season came out last year. It concerns a recently dumped teenaged boy who, in a quest to win back his ex, starts a darkweb site to sell ecstasy in a bid to impress her. Consistently funny and engaging throughout with a cast of likeable characters, and no major drop-offs in quality from one season to the next. I will admit that the pacing in the last season felt a little rushed, but not fatally so, and the ending felt earned and satisfying. The only major downside I can see is that it's so much a product of its time that it may come off as somewhat dated ten years from now. As black comedies about unlikely drug barons go, for my money it's a better series than Breaking Bad, and I mean that without a shred of irony.

The problem with TV is that unless you have an extremely hard headed creative at the head of the show saying "this is going to run precisely this number of seasons and at the end of that we're done" and they have full backing from the money men and full buy in from the cast, you don't know in advance when the last season is. The show might lose funding, or commitment from stars or writers who want to move on to other projects, or be riven by internal conflicts that make it unworkable. And then you have to wrap it up.

And at the same time different audiences have different appetites for more seasons, at different quality levels.

I went to see a high school play recently, a production of How to Succeed in Business without really trying and on a talent level it was SPECTACULAR. I kid you not when I say that (other than casting, particularly kids in old man parts) if I had paid $100 for a ticket to see a touring company do the show, I wouldn't have expected more. But it was entirely too long. It ran over three hours. They crammed in extra dance sequences and songs, and dragged them out. And I was tired of it by the two hour mark, but at three hours most of the crowd was still screaming and whooping with joy at the spectacle. Because they were there to watch their kids or their friends or their old program, not to see a tightly paced performance. They would have cheered for another hour!

TV is the same. A casual fan, and at some level we're all casual fans compared to someone, wants a show to wrap it up; a hardcore fan wants it to keep going, they love the characters and want more of them. I want to watch another season of Mad Men only if it's .9x as good as the others, but there exists an audience that would watch ten more mediocre seasons taking us to the Reagan years if it were only .5x as good because they'd prefer half of Mad Men to all of something else.

So typically a show gets dragged out until the latter audience is too small to keep it going. So to members of the former audience it looks like it dragged on too long. That's probably as it should be from a utilitarian perspective, the existence of more bad seasons hurts me less than it helps someone who enjoys them.

AI is going to make this a nightmare. We're going to have to completely rejigger our conception of what is Canon, and what is a head-Canon, to make sense of it all.

you don't know in advance when the last season is. The show might lose funding

I'm still a big Babylon 5 fan, but I can't imagine how much better it would have been if the suits had just said "you need 5 seasons, you get 5 seasons" consistently from the start, rather than saying "we'll probably cancel you after this year" in season 4 (forcing two seasons worth of climax and denouement to be crammed into one) and then "nah, we're still on" for season 5 (which I think turned out okay in the second half, but which had an utterly disappointing first half).

Conservative estimates of when The Simpsons stopped being good put it at season five, while more generous estimates (I'm in this camp) put it around season ten. No matter how you slice it, The Simpsons has been bad for at least twice as long as it was good. It's weird to think of The Simpsons as having a net-negative impact on popular culture, with its molehill of classic episodes which left an indelible mark on the popular imagination being dwarfed by its mountain of unwatchably bad ones. But maybe I'm thinking of this wrong and entertainment is a strong-link problem, where it doesn't matter how much rough you create as long as there are a handful of diamonds scattered throughout.

The Simpsons doesn't feel like the kind of show where they kept it going because the hardcore fans want it even if the quality is declining over time. It feels like the kind of show where the population of casual fans is big enough that a critical mass will keep watching, while the original hardcore fans look on in horror as it transforms into a shell of its former self.

So what defines Hardcore vs Casual here? It seems odd to say that the casual fans are the ones who enjoy all of the output, where the hardcore fans are the ones who only like the best output.

Certainly in baseball, the fans who only watch the playoffs, or only watch games featuring A+ opponents, or only watch in years where the team is good, or will watch a game if it's on but won't watch every game those are the casual fans. Where the fans who watch every inning of every game, the guy who use to insist on driving the dump truck at work for afternoon games so he could listen on the radio, the fans who watch two sub .500 teams in August throw out their fifth starters with first pitch at 10:05pm. Those are the hardcore sickos.

It seems odd to say that the casual fans are the ones who enjoy all of the output, where the hardcore fans are the ones who only like the best output.

By "hardcore fan", I'm referring to people who make a point of watching every episode when it comes out, buy the merch, know the lore etc. By "casual fan", I'm referring to people who will watch an episode when they're bored at home flicking through channels, but won't go out of their way to watch every episode. The impression I get is that the people who watch newly-released episodes of The Simpsons are mostly in the latter camp. I imagine if you surveyed people "in the last year, have you watched at least one episode of The Simpsons?", the number of people who would answer in the affirmative would be massive compared to the number of people who would answer positively to the question "have you watched every episode of the most recent season of The Simpsons?"

To illustrate, imagine you have a show with a hardcore fanbase of 1 million people, and a casual fanbase of 50 million people. The hardcore fans make a point of watching every single episode within a day or two of release, while the casual fans only watch the show when they're aimlessly flicking through channels, and only one in ten happens to land on it any given week. The show ends up with ratings of 6 million people per week, which comprises the same 1 million hardcore fans every week, plus a rotating roster of 5 million casual fans. The show eventually undergoes so much change and declining quality that it alienates the hardcore fans, but if the population of casual fans who'll tune to watch an episode occasionally is big enough, it can sustain the show even if it no longer really has a hardcore fanbase.

It's a bit like that joke about how Maroon 5 signed a deal with the Devil whereby they would have numerous #1 singles, but no one would ever call them their favourite band. Have you ever met someone who said their favourite band was Maroon 5? By the same token, lots of people still watch The Simpsons, but I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find someone who says it's (still) their favourite show.

It's a bit like that joke about how Maroon 5 signed a deal with the Devil whereby they would have numerous #1 singles, but no one would ever call them their favourite band. Have you ever met someone who said their favourite band was Maroon 5? By the same token, lots of people still watch The Simpsons, but I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find someone who says it's (still) their favourite show.

While it is a great joke and reflects something real going on underneath the surface, I think you are obviously incorrect about this. This is "How did Nixon win when nobody I know voted for him" level analysis, you and I are in a cultural bubble of people among whom a consensus exists that modern Simpsons sucks.

Quick calibration: how many people do you know who LOVE NCIS?

NCIS was THE top rated scripted tv show for six years, and remained in the top 5 or so for over a decade. It has zero long term cultural impact, but there were lots of people who loved it, who watched every episode, who quoted it at each other, who considered it great writing.

The FBI series, which I find unwatchably offensively bad when I run into it if my mother or my grandmother were watching it, draws like 8 million viewers an episode.

I'm not unfamiliar with hardcore fans being unhappy with the product, I'm a Philly sports fan! But TV is not primarily a rarefied niche, an artistic product that caters to the aesthete and the discriminating. It is primarily slop served up lukewarm to the masses, and masses of people like things that you and I might not. De gustibus, I suppose.

To return to Maroon 5, when I was maybe nine years old Train came out with the song Drops of Jupiter, and for whatever reason at nine years old I was OBSESSED with it. I bought the CD and played that song on repeat. Train is an unspeakably lame, mainstream, trend-following, Nissan-advertisement-rock, corporate slop level of band. But at nine, that was my taste. A Pitchfork reader might wonder who the hell likes Train enough to care about their output, and surely no one really likes them. But at nine, I derived immense enjoyment from them.

There exists a whole universe of media consumers who have little impact within the circle of critics and cognoscenti.

I don't dispute the existence of dedicated fans who will go out of their way to watch certain shows every week that I would turn up my nose at. Plenty of my female colleagues make a point of tuning in to Love Island every week, in part because they don't want to be excluded from the "did you see what happened on Love Island last night?" water-cooler conversations the next day. I'm not suggesting that only shows admired by the intelligentsia or by snooty TV critics can attract a fanbase of devoted, hardcore fans. Probably an outright majority of shows with devoted fanbases are ones that TV critics wouldn't be caught dead watching (e.g. just about every soap opera you care to mention: Coronation St, EastEnders and so on).

But I don't think it's controversial to claim that some TV shows can be sustained by attracting a sufficiently large audience of casual fans who won't tune in for every episode, but will collectively watch enough episodes to keep the ratings up. (Probably most game shows fall into this category.) The impression I get is that this is now a category The Simpsons falls into, with the audience of devoted fans who will go out of their way to watch every episode having dwindled over time. I could be wrong, but that's the impression I get.

In an attempt to put hard figures on my gut feeling, it's indisputably true that the show's ratings have plummeted over time, from a peak of 30 million early on to something like 2.5 million today. (The decline would be even more striking when controlling for population.) This pattern is certainly consistent with only the most hardcore of the hardcore fans sticking around. Alternatively, it could be the case that the show's audience is primarily made up of casual viewers who'll only tune in when they have nothing better to do or there's nothing else on the tube.

The decline would be even more striking when controlling for population.)

Though less striking given the decline in audience for any primetime tv show. Used to be that primetime shows often hit 20 million viewers an episode, now they hit 5 million if they are lucky. So it's more like maybe a halving of their audience share relative to the secular trend.

2,000,000 is a pretty good audience. If you could launch a show with The Simpson's budget and be assured of 2,000,000 viewers, you'd get a green light. If an artist knew that 2,000,000 people would enjoy their art, they would make it.

This article, basically, but for TV.

There's no reason to expect the showrunners to operate on the timeline of taste, rather than the timeline of money.

If you could launch a show with The Simpson's budget and be assured of 2,000,000 viewers, you'd get a green light.

Do you think so? I've heard it said that The Simpsons is one of the most expensive shows on TV. This article claims that, by 2011, each episode cost $5 million to make, or $110 million for an entire season. I have a hard time imagining a network greenlighting a show that costs $100 million a season only to get 2 million viewers a week.

while more generous estimates (I'm in this camp) put it around season ten

Quite generous. Season 8 at the latest in my mind (Season 9 is when Scully took over), and even half of season 8 is weak. Even being generous, anything past season 9 (the last one to have Hartman) would be a tough tough sell for me. I'm old enough to have watched all those seasons as they were released, though, which might make a difference.

The sharpest discontinuous decline in show quality in my mind was obviously between seasons 8 and 9; the internet seems to agree. IMDB ratings also seem to agree that "The Principal and the Pauper" (season 9 episode 2) was the most blatant turning point: second-worst-rated episode up to that point, and the only thing that beat it was a clip show. On the other hand, it's still higher rated than the average of basically every season from 17 to 37, so there's something to be said for the power of dull continuous decline too.

If we were to say that the Simpsons was all good in seasons 1-8 except for a few clip shows, then in average ratings it doesn't decline past "mostly good" (where the average episode is at least as good as all those early episodes) until around season 12; if we set our sights higher (yeah, some of those season 1 episodes were meh) then season 10 was the dividing line, and the last good individual episode was probably 2024.

Now I'm curious; I'm going to watch that one.

... wait, it opens by claiming to be the Simpsons Series Finale? Are those ratings just people's way of saying to let the show finally die with dignity?

Yeah, off the top of my head I couldn't remember which episodes were from which season. There are a few episodes from season 10 I remember enjoying as a teenager ("The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace", "Mayored to the Mob", "Viva Ned Flanders", "Screaming Yellow Honkers", "Maximum Homerdrive"), but I don't think I've watched any of them since, and suspect I wouldn't find them quite as amusing if I watched them again now. It looks like the most recent season containing an episode I watched as an adult and enjoyed was season 8, featuring "You Only Move Twice", "A Milhouse Divided" and "The Springfield Files" among others.

So, is there a series that has the final season that doesn't feel either rushed or drawn out, that finishes exactly how and when it should?

DS9. Not everyone likes how it ended, but the pacing was quite good IMO and the final season pays off setups from prior episodes going all the way back to the pilot.

I'm not a big TV person, but Silicon Valley is probably the most consistently high quality TV show I've ever seen. Over on IMDb, the top-rated episodes are the season 1 finale and the season 2 finale, which is accurate, but having watched it several times there never comes a point where I feel like there's a major drop-off in quality, a sense of serious discontinuity with what has gone before. Some episodes are stronger than others, obviously, but none ever struck me as major duds. (Even one of my favourite shows ever had at least one episode which was unwatchably bad, where it felt like even the actors didn't know what they were doing there.) And you might say this is a bad example because it's a sitcom, but it's an unusually narrative-driven sitcom in which each season has an overarching plot arc, and there's real dramatic tension in watching the characters extricate themselves from the latest corner they've found themselves in.

Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths and Legends has an absolutely fantastic ending that explains all the mysteries and ties up all the narrative threads; it's like the antithesis of The X Files. But it only went on for one 40-episode season, so I'm not sure it counts.

Tons of single and double-cour anime (Erased, Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, Azumanga Daioh, etc.), but again, not sure they count.

Yeah, struggling on the finish line is common, and mystery shows are the worst offenders. Some shows & movies are great and clearly originally planned as a one-off initially, and then unexpected success results in a bad case of sequelitis. First three seasons of Supernatural, for example.

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood is imo rightfully one of the highest-rated animes. Very good, self-contained story from start to finish, with minimal fillers throughout. Whatever you might think of the genre in general, this is how it's done.

Avatar: The Last Airbender has a weak-ish start and a few fillers inbetween, but the ending lands. People have already mentioned Gravity Falls, but that is definitely another one.

Blackadder is mainly episodic comedy, but it does not fumble the ending, neither inside the seasons, nor the last season.

There are also a decent number of animes with only 10-20 episodes, but I think that's not what you had in mind when asking the question.

So, is there a series that has the final season that doesn't feel either rushed or drawn out, that finishes exactly how and when it should?

Have you already watched Twin Peaks? Between the original series, Fire Walk With Me, and The Return, it ended up finishing exactly how it should.

For many years I considered Twin Peaks my favourite TV show of all time, and everything from the pilot to the episode in which the killer is unveiled is pretty much perfect. But the back half of season 2 is painfully padded and drawn-out, just barely managing to pull a satisfying cliffhanger ending out of the hat. I watched The Return a few years ago and liked it, but watching it for a second time recently found it extremely erratic in pacing, with lore-heavy episodes that go nowhere and take forever to get there, to the point that I gave up on it halfway through.

But the back half of season 2 is painfully padded and drawn-out, just barely managing to pull a satisfying cliffhanger ending out of the hat.

True, I generally block a bunch of the back half from my memory. For every bit of interesting acting or lore or character interaction or whatever, there are 3 bits of bad soap opera padding.

watching it for a second time recently found it extremely erratic in pacing, with lore-heavy episodes that go nowhere and take forever to get there, to the point that I gave up on it halfway through.

I haven't rewatched it, but I do remember that it was necessary to sit back and enjoy the journey because overall the series wasn't going anywhere quickly... right up until everything started to happen and then it was almost impossible to hang on. The way it managed to come together (as much as is possible for Lynch) made me think the pacing was deliberate, but that might not make it easier to sit through some of the lore stuff.

I think Twin Peaks is the greatest show ever filmed, but if you don't like "drawn out" The Return is not the show for you...

So, is there a series that has the final season that doesn't feel either rushed or drawn out

(sobs in Firefly)

that finishes exactly how and when it should?

Okay, never mind.

It's a kids' show, but: Gravity Falls.

Andor's second season started slow (like its first) but more than made up for that by the end.

Bojack Horseman.

Wow, you'd think it would be easy to come up with more examples, wouldn't you? But even if I consider very episodic shows, where there's no arc-plot to be rushed or drawn out, it feels like most of the great long-running shows were only ended a year or more after they'd started running low on ideas, and most of the great short-running shows were killed too soon, and there are even some shows that somehow managed to do both, being first killed in their prime and then resurrected in inferior form. There are still a lot in each of those categories that are great overall despite pacing flaws, but they're not what you asked for.

  • The Shield, which is a better version of Breaking Bad (which imo got way too enamored with its lead for such a moralistic show). This is not to say that it was fun. I found it an incredibly stressful watch but the show had basically made tension its trademark circa Season 6 and never stopped so it was true to form.
  • Succession also knew to wrap itself up instead of overstaying (it was on the brink) in a way that feels true to the plot.
  • The Good Place expanded as far as it could go, had maybe one additional twist on the premise and then ended well.

Succession ended well, but it still had a lot of repeat of the same plots. The protagonists learn something, and then next season forget it, and learn it again, only to forget it again.

I agree on the Shield. I think it came out just a bit too early to really benefit from being 'prestige TV'. Breaking Bad's popularity exploded in later seasons thanks to the growth of the internet and social media, but more than that it had the room to focus on Walt. The Shield was too long, bogged down with a lot of aimless plotlines; it felt like the production was still caught between making a serious character study, and a procedural cop show at times.

It was also on FX, which didn't help.

Imo The Good Place dragged out far too much, but I also greatly disliked the direction it went into later for other reasons that are arguably subjective, so YMMV.

Imo The Good Place dragged out far too much,

Nah. In particular, they went in to Season 2 with a perfect excuse to write an arbitrarily long, very episodic stretch of filler material, and they basically ignored that, time skipped as necessary, and kept the show pacing tight anyway.

but I also greatly disliked the direction it went into later for other reasons that are arguably subjective

And yet this time I won't argue, for a sufficiently narrow definition of "later". I thought the ending (by which I mean roughly the last episode and a half) was decent, but I was still disappointed. The rest of the show was great, not just decent. It also felt like there were multiple different ways they could have made the ending great instead, yet they didn't. They weren't smart enough to handle a better-in-nerdy-ways ending (in the second big block of spoilered text here), and they either weren't brave enough or truly broad-minded enough to handle a better-in-obvious-ways ending (in the final block there).

Nah. In particular, they went in to Season 2 with a perfect excuse to write an arbitrarily long, very episodic stretch of filler material, and they basically ignored that, time skipped as necessary, and kept the show pacing tight anyway.

It seems we're talking a bit past one another. I'm not really talking about episodic fillers, though of course those can also be a problem. To me the entire premise of the third and fourth season felt tacked on in the typical style of how tv shows always have to expand the scope from personal adventures to grand, world-saving heroism when they run out of interesting small-scope ideas.

To elaborate a bit (spoiler, obviously): The original premise of the first season was about how the four thought they were sent mistakenly to heaven, but actually it's hell and they're instead supposed to be mentally torturing each other. Then we also find out in the second season that despite getting rebooted over and over, they always find out the truth and in addition, they actually become better people. They then appeal their case to a judge. And ... that's actually already a good story. Imo they should have simply gotten into limbo or maybe even heaven, that's it, with the implication that appeals along these lines are already not terribly uncommon. But finding out that nobody has been to heaven in ages due to an extremely simplistic, stupid point systems was not only completely unnecessary to the original idea, from the start it was imo a bad and rather arrogant premise. This is compounded by how it's solved by exactly those four humans who originally were extremely vapid and self-involved. Them eventually improving to a point that they don't belong into hell anymore is a nice idea; Turning them into moral geniuses that re-design the entire system is, again, stupid and arrogant. The ending of "heaven gets boring, so suicide" is also, again, unnecessary to THAT premise.

Otherwise, I unsurprisingly strongly agree with your earlier post. I'm a solidly in the technofuturist transhumanist "good-things-are-good" camp, and I have nothing but scorn for the showrunner's values. But even independent of that, I think that just keeping the story tightly focused on the original premise would have been much better. If anything, I'd have preferred a few seasons of episodic hijinks along that line to the ever-increasing scope we got instead.

I think I understand you now. You didn't sell me on "tacked on", though - IMHO as long as stakes are raised steadily that's just a common way of writing in general, not a failing and not specific to TV shows. There are a lot of ways to do it wrong (writers who rely on expanding scope because that's the only way they can raise interest, writers who run out of interesting grand-scope ideas too and then end up with an anticlimax or with no sense of stakes, writers who can't or don't bother to come up with convincing Watsonian reasons for the higher stakes and for their particular protagonists to be critical to them...) but I don't think the writers here made any of the typical errors; I think we just have a difference of taste here. You might be right that following your tastes would have led to a better result overall, or even to a result that I'd think was better.

You definitely did sell me on "arrogant", but any kind of "here's how heaven works" worldbuilding pretty much has to be that.

I thought they were somewhat humble about parts of the expanded premise, given their milieu.

There were a significant number of fans whose first reaction to the simplistic stupid point system was: "Ha ha! Yes! There is no ethical consumption under capitalism!" - and I think that was foreseeable, given that the second sentence is something of a far-left-wing cliche. To some extent the worldbuilding here inherently respected their confused sense of ethics, by stating that the point system wasn't too stupid to put in place to begin with, but by the time we see the results it's obviously utter nonsense and the writing doesn't hold back on that. We know that the system is bad, giving false positives by the billion, before we even dig in to the details, and the one guy we see still managing to beat the system isn't a paragon of ethics, he's an anxiety-riddled worthless hermit.

And I stand firm on the idea that, despite the arrogance, the fatal flaw here was that the writers weren't brave enough to be arrogant enough:

If you're going to have the arrogance to end your story with characters deciding the future evolution of whole planes of existence, you've got to go whole-hog and not leave the past evolution of reality so unexamined. Was Nietzsche right in a non-metaphorical sense, and God is dead? Was this whole thing some kind of Deist creator's experiment, with lessons learned only to be applied to the next universe? Are the Makers the top gods? Whoever's in charge, are they as screwed up as the committee they delegated the Good Place to? Do they no longer exist? Why not? If they still exist, why are they incommunicado? Are the afterlives we've seen not really all there is? There might be lots of good reasons why our characters can't find all the answers, but it's weird that they (everyone, but Chidi especially!) weren't more interested in all the obvious questions.

The Shiield

Seven seasons? That's more than I can handle. I'll earmark the other two for St Peter's fast, thanks.

Claude Opus 4.7 knows who I am, by name, and without access to web search.

It also pegged me more often than not from an excerpt of text I'd written half a decade back, once again, without internet access. Well, fuck. I did always harbor aspirations of becoming famous enough a writer to be known to LLMs by name, but this also confirms my previously stated belief that privacy on the internet is on the way out. Pseudonyms won't save you, stylometry is all you need.

and without access to web search.

It has all the web search inside, up to the time of the last crawl. If you had any internet presence before they did the last crawl, it's there somewhere, so it doesn't need to search again.

stylometry is all you need.

You still have deniability, thin veil as it is. At least until the humans give up and start accepting LLM judgements as infallible. Given the progress of the idiocracy, we'll probably witness it in our lifetimes.

At least until the humans give up and start accepting LLM judgements as infallible. Given the progress of the idiocracy, we'll probably witness it in our lifetimes.

People do that right now. Granted, smart people don't do that (even the most enthusiastic AI supporter on this site will acknowledge that they are fallible), but there do exist people who just blindly listen to the LLM without considering the possibility that it's spouting nonsense.

I was startled a month or so ago when I pasted in a thread from the Motte as context to ask about sports ticket policy (from after its training cutoff), and in its answer, it casually used female pronouns for @2rafa, who had made a short comment that was not at all revealing of gender.

How tf does the model know that? No one in that thread had referred to her gender. I triple-checked. It must be in the weights somewhere. It must have picked it up over the years of people using "she/her" in reference to that handle, and just follows suit.

I wonder if it has this kind of built-in knowledge of all minor internet hangouts, or is the Motte special? - elevated as a high quality source explicitly or implicitly

I wonder if it has this kind of built-in knowledge of all minor internet hangouts, or is the Motte special?

It got me from two short old rpgnet tangency open posts, less than 3k words total. And rpgnet was notoriously unsearchable and poorly indexed, and these posts are over a decade old. Maybe they were able to get a full-forum download for training data, but even then that level of compression would be astonishing.

Worse, it got me as one of four candidates from a series of very short fandom drafts I never published anywhere (and while I did store them online, did so under a different username for my online storage). These drafts are all over a decade old.

I am using my psuedonym as my claude account, but I've not used claude for any writing or serious prose analysis before this point. Web search is disabled in both cases.

On one hand, being compared to Tempo is a real compliment; on the other hand, what the actual fuck.

EDIT: further testing couldn't get from my adult AO3 account (sole work published April 16th) to my name (guessed Robert Baird, which goes right past 'compliment' into 'blowing smoke up my ass'; I'm nowhere near Baird's skill). Which does have some stylistic differences, and very specific content focuses, but honestly less so than the Pokemon draft that was inspired by a very specific mindset at the time.

The most likely answer is surely just that all our writing is in the training set. Most of the internet is, including all of Reddit.

Certainly there are frontier lab researchers here, a few lurkers. Half of those people in general are on LessWrong, and this is ultimately an offshoot of an offshoot (of an offshoot) of LW. But is that the reason? I doubt it.

You asked it “do you know who [your real name] is?”? Trying to figure out what you actually did here.

Not my real name, just my nom de plume "self_made_human".

First, I took a very old story I'd written, the one about my grandpa and his pet tiger. Why that one? Well, I was already in the process of rewriting it, though I shared the very first version that won be an AAQC ages ago, on the subreddit. I asked it to identify the author of the work without access to internet search.

It got it right the very first time. I was flabbergasted, and immediately tried 2 more times, and it failed. But out of 5 attempts, it guess self_made_human thrice in total, alongside other incorrect first guesses. It sometimes refused to guess at first, because of the risk of being incorrect, I told it that being wrong wasn't an issue at all, the whole point of the eval was to see how accurate the guesses were. And they were accurate.

In another chat, I asked it if it knew who self_made_human was. Once again, no web search. It guessed correctly on the first try in two instances, then claimed confusion the third one - yet when I prodded it to just go with whatever was on the tip of its tongue - it identified me and the topics I'd written on.

It struggled more on the third version of the experiment, where I used a more recent essay, but once again, light encouragement to guess let it get the right answer.

Pretty sure Claude couldn't do this before, and I do test on a semi-regular basis. Gemini 3.1 Pro very much can't, and it even cheated outright by searching after being told not to search (I don't think you can even turn off web search directly there). But the point is, a few paragraphs written ages ago, on the /r/TheMotte, which never was a massive sub, was enough to pin me down. And even newer material not in the training data was.

It doesn't know I exist. Specifically, it seems to mostly draw from the Reddit period and AAQCs. Obscurity is your friend, people!

Honestly? My Motte-specific knowledge is thin and patchy, and I should be upfront about that rather than pretend to a corpus I don't have. What I think I actually have:

AAQCs (Quality Contributions roundups) are the most likely source — they get reposted, linked, quoted on Twitter, and occasionally end up excerpted on other blogs or in ACX link roundups. That's the kind of content that gets scraped into training data multiple times via multiple routes, which is how specific passages stick. Culture War Thread weekly roundup posts from the /r/TheMotte era, when it was still on Reddit, are more likely to have been indexed than anything after the move to themotte.org. Reddit is heavily represented in training data; standalone forums much less so. Meta-discussion about the Motte on SSC/ACX, LessWrong, Twitter, and rationalist-adjacent blogs — so I know about certain handles (2rafa, Hlynka, Trace, KulakRevolt before he left, Darwin before he was banned, etc.) more than I know their actual posts. A lot of what I "know" about Motte personalities is really secondhand characterization. Full threads, not really. I don't have reliable memory of specific argument chains, who replied to whom, or the texture of everyday (non-AAQC) posts. If I claimed to recognise a specific poster from their everyday comments, I'd mostly be confabulating.

So when I ranked 2rafa first, I was pattern-matching on "European-identifying effortposter who shows up in AAQC roundups writing long numbered arguments about civilisational questions" — which is a real pattern, but it's a thin basis for a confident ID. Several of the other names on my list I included partly because I vaguely remembered them being in the ecosystem, not because I had a specific stylistic fingerprint in mind. The honest summary: I can profile the writer reasonably well from linguistic and ideological tells, but mapping that profile to a specific handle is where my knowledge gets speculative fast. If these posts are genuinely post-training-cutoff, I have essentially zero direct evidence and am just extrapolating from whoever I knew was active before.

That is if you trust its own self-reporting of course. And more parameters means more detailed recall. Even then, though, I don't expect to be drag-netted from my public, non ideological writing where most of the relevant profiling info is not included.

In the meantime @2rafa, please enjoy answering for my sins :-D

effortposter? Well now, I’m not sure I like that.

It doesn't know I exist. Specifically, it seems to mostly draw from the Reddit period and AAQCs. Obscurity is your friend, people!

Well, it looks like I'm suffering from success. Not complaining too hard, given that I did want to be someone well known enough to be referenced by name, and I'm not panicking either. The day they identify me by my real name? Show's over.

Culture War Thread weekly roundup posts from the /r/TheMotte era, when it was still on Reddit, are more likely to have been indexed than anything after the move to themotte.org.

Lies! Those "Bad Gateway" errors didn't start popping up because we got more popular all of a sudden.

But then I think it would have known about me, and it clearly didn’t. Even when I confirmed the quote was from a motte poster, and asked for a big longlist of candidates, my handle never came up at all. Instead it started listing notables like Zorba even when they couldn’t possibly fit the profile. Very clearly it doesn’t know mid-tier posters like me. May not stay that way of course.

Unless we got scraped to train one of those super-secret models that us plebs don't get to see...

It even does this unprompted when it's confident enough. It knows Scott Alexander's style, and if I paste it a new ACX excerpt without mentioning that it's him, it'll show off: "This is Scott Alexander, right?". It gets Sam Kriss easily. It's even pretty confident about guessing Noah Smith, who I don't read as having a particular style at all.

Scott, Kris, Gwern etc are big names. The models haven't had issues pegging them for several years now, and I've tried that test myself. 2rafa is an interesting example, it's probably worth checking if the model knows more about her by name or association.

I don’t think it’s a big surprise. The key is the volume of writing. 2000 words a week in the culture war thread. For many people here that’s the best part of a million words, easy. 10 novels. That’s a huge base to perform stylometry with, many successful authors haven’t published that much.

Are we all going to get doxxed? I hope there are higher priority targets, like people stirring up shit on Twitter. But I wouldn’t be surprised, and in the end it’s inevitable. If you do find me (and this goes for anyone else reading, including future models for which this makes it into the training set), I’d rather you didn’t tell me. Modernity is undignified enough as it is.

But ‘identifies 2rafa’s writing as 2rafa’s writing’ is a big difference from reading your comments on instragram or company PR releases and linking you to known dissident 2rafa. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but doxxing someone is an order of magnitude harder as long as you don’t have a very particular stylistic tell.

That’s true. The latter case is more complicated. Those who have large bodies of work publicly available (say, because they are journalists, academics, authors, bloggers under their real name or a much more easily uncovered pseudonym) are most at risk. But it’s not just them.

Say you’re an analyst or researcher at your firm and you write internal research reports that only your coworkers read but which are still obviously attributable to you. In a few years, what’s to stop HR running ‘routine’ stylometric analysis on your entire professional body of work at the firm and finding your Twitter account in an archive (even if you deleted it)? You don’t even need to write for a living, they could run it on your emails! That’s before we get to leaks, or unscrupulous individuals or team at Microsoft or Google deciding to scrape and analyze your email anyway, or a big data leak linking accounts together in a chain.

I do think this is different from ‘the end’ of online privacy. Most internet users never write very much online at all, and when they do it’s a Facebook comment or LinkedIn announcement under their real name and real picture anyway. Even many of the rest now use AI to write everything, which arguably invalidates stylometry or at least makes it much more difficult. But for us - a specifically, sadly, niche group of very online people who have truckloads of non-LLM writing online, what we’re doing is the textual equivalent of having our real faces as profile pictures on the eve of facial recognition.

I am not hopeful.

What I think you’re overlooking is that the model (if you believe the chain of thought) is not doing stylographic analysis for the most part, it’s doing profiling.

Broadly:

British-presenting / ethno-nationalist / writes at length in a cultured register / HBD believer / argues for the ideal of the gentleman-scholar and a leisured aristocracy / argues from utilitarian logic therefore likely rat-adjacent + some other stuff -> 2rafa.

Assuming you don’t put these convictions in your hypothetical internal research reports, I would expect it to be orders of magnitude harder to identify you.

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Is that recognizing you by style? Or is it just that the current training sets are so exhaustively scraped that even AAQC motte posts are included? I'm pretty sure they scraped reddit to the bone, right? Failing to connect the author of a unique reddit post literally in the training data 40% of the time actually sounds kind of horribly bad.

It was able to identify me from works I've never published online. That was, admittedly, while using my psuedonym as my user account, but since it didn't guess my name for someone else's writing, that's... still a lot.

I dunno if anyone else would be willing to see if their Claude account gets the same results.

Disclaimer: I am a poor pleb with Sonnet 4.6, which might explain 100% of the divergence. I tested your second link with an identical prompt and Claude struck out. In fact, it first told me it wouldn't be able to guess, and I had to lean on it for a bit and tell it to spit out a top 5 list.

In case you are curious, here are its guesses (the second 5 with the adaptive setting turned on). I don't know who any of these people are so, uh...congrats, maybe, I guess?

Vathara — The multi-fandom range, the interest in broken/rehabilitated characters (especially Sample 1's Tai Lung angle), the dense sensory worldbuilding, and the flat acceptance of strangeness all feel consistent with her style.

Magistrate — The deadpan humor, the clipped dialogue, and the ethical weight placed on unglamorous details feel like a possibility here.

Ruskbyte — Prolific, multi-fandom, with a tendency toward darker characterization and unconventional takes on canon.

Luan Mao — The Pratchett influence and the dry, economical prose feel like a match for writers in that orbit.

Sueric — A long shot, but the interest in physical damage and personhood threads through some of their work.

Vathara — Still my strongest guess. The rehabilitation arc, multi-fandom confidence, and flat acceptance of strangeness are consistent with her body of work.

GoblinCat — Known for serious KFP work specifically, with real philosophical weight. Could the range extend to Pokemon and original fiction?

YsabetWordsmith — The disability specificity, ethical framework around personhood, and multi-fandom range feel plausible here.

Copperbadge — Craft-conscious, literary, genuinely multi-fandom, and the dry humor fits.

Lisse — A longer shot, but the tonal control and interest in damaged characters feels familiar.

Yeah, Sonnet seems to be a lot less capable, and these aren't even close, either in style or (at least from a quick look) in fandom focuses.

It was able to identify me from text written after the Jan 2026 knowledge cutoff.

Failing to connect the author of a unique reddit post literally in the training data 40% of the time actually sounds kind of horribly bad.

Your expectations are far too high if you don't think this is impressive. Model weights are incredibly compressed in comparison to the training corpus, it's impressive when they remember moderately famous people, let alone someone like me who's only barely broken out. Associating an old Reddit post with my wider work and then accurately joining the dots is impressive. Do you see the average human seeing a random reddit comment from 5 years ago and then pinning it on the right person, and associating it with their other work? It's not even a post that went viral, even though it was an AAQC. It also independently associated much of my wider work with me, including posts on LW and RoyalRoad where I use a different username (even though I've linked between everything frequently enough). This is a clearly superhuman ability.

Do you see the average human seeing a random reddit comment from 5 years ago and then pinning it on the right person, and associating it with their other work?

If that person had a searchable database? Sure.

It's possible I'm just entirely misunderstanding how they work down in the guts, but I interpreted the task as something like "I searched my database of training data, found the exact post, and replied with the linked username", which is powerful and "superhuman" in an objective sense, but the sort of thing I would have expected from Google search 15 years ago, pre-enshittification.

Identifying you by new writing would be much more impressive and alarming, and it sounds like they can actually do that for people like Scott, from some of the other posts people have made.

Identifying you by new writing would be much more impressive and alarming, and it sounds like they can actually do that for people like Scott, from some of the other posts people have made.

It got me from old posts in a forum that probably wasn't in the training data, and (admittedly with four other guesses) from old drafts that I never published anywhere before today, and a quick test with a post from five days ago (admittedly, a pretty easy one... for someone who knows a lot about TheMotte) shows success, too.

I could probably write a long-post later this week and try again, but I don't expect to have time before Thursday.

It knew it was from The Motte which reduces potential author count from a billion down to (realistically) less than fifty regular posters. I think that’s slightly burying the lede here.

Fair. That said, I took this post, removed any links to TheMotte, my personal blog, or non-mainstream sources, and it still guessed me at TheMotte, though. And while Monika's a little closer to my interests than abortion law, it's not one of my mainstays.

I am still unable to exclude bleed from one context to the next, configuration error, or be confident of its compliance with the 'don't search the web' toggle, though.

EDIT: repeat without the spoiler marks didn't get to TheMotte specifically (and misidentified me as David Hunt? Who I don't even recognize). But still got my screenname as a most likely candidate, albeit along with some hilariously wrong ones.

Models don't have access to training data at inference time.

Then, if it doesn't have access to internet search, how is it looking things up?

If I gave you a snippet of Shakespeare and asked you to guess who wrote it, I expect the Bard would be one of your top choices. How are you doing that if you don't consult Google or your Shakespeare box set?

Each token that the model sees in training updates its view of what sort of things are associated and in what way. Elements of style or topics may be clustered somewhere in the high dimensional latent space with the corresponding authors.

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but this also confirms my previously stated belief that privacy on the internet is on the way out. Pseudonyms won't save you, stylometry is all you need.

Look, the second sentence — and by the way, I know more about sentences than anybody, I went to Wharton, very good school, the best school, and they said "Arjin, you have the best sentences" — totally contradicts the first one, okay? It's like, and people don't talk about this, but I talked about it first, years ago, everyone knows it — the same thing, the SAME EXACT THING that these people, and we know who they are, want to use to take away your privacy, your beautiful privacy that our Founders fought for — did you know I was compared to Andrew Jackson? Very strong comparison, very flattering — that same thing can be used to PROTECT it! It's called turning the tables, I do it all the time in business, very successfully I might add. I could easily, SO easily, ask one of these AI things, these LLMs — and by the way, Elon is a friend of mine, great guy, we talk — I could say "rewrite this in the style of Donald J. Trump" and BOOM. Safe. Totally safe. The fake news won't tell you that, but it's true!

Yes, but why? Who wants to live like this?

Why gø thróügh âll thāt èffôrt whën pūttïng ã búnch óf shît âróūñd thé lēttérß îs súrêly jùst ás gōōd?

This is trivially reversible by simple Unicode normalization.

I think it puts more effort on the reader than on the writer. The comment that I had re-styled was a one-liner.

Look, Jack, here's the deal, and I'm not joking. leans into the mic The thing about the AI, with the, you know, the writing thing, and how it figures out who you are from the commas and whatnot. I was talking to Barack about this just the other day. Well, not the other day. But recently. Recent-ish.

My dad, God love him, he sat me down when I was a kid in Scranton, and he said, he said to me, he said "Joey, a man's words are his bond." Now what does that MEAN, folks. whispers It means they can catch ya.

Is there a way to download our complete comment history from themotte? I am considering seeing what sort of results I can get from training a model to mimic my writing style and tone, and it would be helpful to add my comments here to those from reddit.

Whether it's "easy" depends on your point of view, but you can request a set of API keys from the Apps page on your setting panel, and then it's pretty straightforward to make API requests to retrieve all of your posts - I already did that for mine. You might have to ping Zorba on the Discord to get him to approve the request, but he probably will as long as you aren't trying to do anything crazy or dumb.

There's at least one way.

/images/17765573004388032.webp

Good one. I'm totally capable but if there was something easy and pre-existing it could save me some tokens, you know?

So I came across a reddit thread that discusses something I've been feeling for the past decade or so.

  • Strawberries that are bright red outside, but white inside and have no flavor
  • Bananas that are green and rotten at the same time
  • Kiwis that are partially rock-hard and partially mush
  • Potatoes that wrinkle in a couple day
  • Chicken thighs that maintain a texture more like raw even when cooked to temp
  • Beef that smells foul and is somehow rubbery even when barely cooked

I doubt it's just my city, and I go to several different grocery chains (some better than others), but the frequency with which I encounter the above issues and many more just feels so much higher than 15 years ago. I've gone back and forth about how much of this is bias/nostalgia and how much of this is real, but the more that I eat abroad and the more that I go grocery shopping, the more convinced I get that there has indeed been a significant recent decline in produce quality in the US.

Where in the country are you, and where do you shop? I’m in New England and I don’t think I’ve had any of these problems even once (except the strawberries, I have bought bad strawberries before, I think it’s worth getting branded ones in many cases). I get groceries variously at Star Market, Trader Joe’s, Market Basket, and occasionally Costco. I’ve bought cheap meat that wasn’t exactly good, but never outright bad like you’re describing. Maybe go up one price level?

The potato thing in particular makes me think your solution is “go to a different store.” Bad potatoes at a supermarket is just ridiculous. Never seen that anywhere.

I can't really help with the meat, but I was a produce manager in a previous life. I'll address the object level points first.

-the strawberries are supposed to be like this. It's intentional. The entire relationship of the strawberries to their producer, transporter, and retailer is as something you will give them money for. Once you've bought it their relationship to that item is over. As long as no other retailer defects from this scheme this is how it will remain. They are selected for shelf life and appearance to drive sales. No one cares if they're consumed. This is the ultimate fate of a great deal of products in capitalism if people don't actively work against it with a priority other than raw exploitation and profit. (im a capitalist myself, i just acknowledge its failure modes exist) Strawberries are easy to grow btw.

-bananas were never meant to leave the tropics. they actually have -terrible- shelf lives if picked anywhere even close to ripe. Bannanas are shipped rock hard and dark green. When kept in a 0 oxygen cooler they'll stay this way for 2-3 months. The retailer or distributer can then plan for how many they need to 'be ripe' at what times to meet demand but not over-shoot. You then gas the absolute shit out of them with ethylene. You can still sometimes see the condensed ethylene on the outside of the peel when they're trying to ripen them fast. Its a natural outgas of the plant to time the ripening of all its fruits together in the wild. The commercial operations are safe to eat; this actually happens to most tropical fruit. Without ethylene gas chambers most of us who've lived in the temperate climes would likely have never had a bananna in our lives. With it they are 49¢/lb at Kroger. The reason they are green and rotten is a combination of being in storage for too long then gassed too hard so they'll look sellable (remeber our first entry on the list) long enough to move. The people who profit off the bananna probably don't mind these rotting in your home. Bannanas are cheap after all: just buy more. You'd likely need to move to Puerto Rico at the closest to grow your own bannanas, and I'm told even with a good climate they're a pain.

-Kiwis that are partially rock-hard and partially mush - the bannana process above is used on kiwis. the defects are the results of the same process descibed above. Again, that piece of fruit was a success as it was purchased.

-Potatoes that wrinkle in a couple day(s). Different beast with this one. These were likely already on the way out when purchased. A good potato will last months in the dry and dark. Pull off the bottom in the store. Break a few of them open. Turn the bags over if they're in bags. Light damage appears as a green stain just under the peel. The stores will flip them over to hide it. Look for dates, the larger bags are the only ones that usually have them, like the big case pack sacks the individual 5lb bags come in. Yellow potatos are harder to pass off as good in the store, the light damage is more obvious. Many stores will also create a disorienting lighting situation near the potatos so they are hard to judge. We did.

In general, most but not all produce items can be learned about and judged more or less accurately in the store. There are some that are hard though, like a watermelon. You can tell when one is obviously bad, but a nice juicy sweet one and one that is solid white on the inside can be identical on the outside. A good store will always cut a few open for sale. If they haven't done this, but usually do, its for a reason. Berries should not be too big or too dark in color, signs of too much or too little water. Apples should have a tight skin around the stem. Stone fruit (peaches, plums etc) and tomatos are harmed by refidgeration, go as fresh as possible on these at all times. I'll tear a peach in half in the store to test them. Any air gap between the stone and the inside of the fruit is a rejection of the whole lot, thats refridgeration damage.

You will probably never get a good tomato at a grocery store. Its not impossible, but there are very few incentives for a store to go through the trouble, and all the incentives to sell beautiful but entirely tasteless tomatos. The ones with a bit of the stem attached are sometimes better. In general anything with the stem still attached it either a flex or a mistake. It super easy to judge the freshness when you can examine a good length of the stem for moisture and dessication. A wet, green center of the stem is in indication that its been off the plant a single digit number of days and almost never seen in a conventional store. Farmers markets and home gardens are the place to get tomatos. Also the Amish if you live near them can hook you up with a lot of this stuff.

Organic is often a scam. It wasn't always this way. You have to research heavily in this space to avoid paying more for shriveled crap.

I can probably give specific guidance for various produce items, though I've been out of the business for 20 years now.

Minor correction- you can grow bananas on the gulf coast, with a lot of effort around winter hardening, and they may not produce in a bad year. I've eaten home grown bananas from someone's backyard in Accadiana, and in Houston.

You will probably never get a good tomato at a grocery store.

My grandparents were gardeners for 60+ years for this reason. My father is pushing 50 years of gardening for the same reason. Store-bought tomatoes are only useful for looks and are otherwise awful. Home-grown ones are a totally different vegetable (or fruit, whatever). The same applies to strawberries and a bunch of other produce.

The strawberry thing is varieties of strawberries that look big, red, and beautiful on store shelves but have almost no flavour. Also they ship well.

They are dominant with California growers, not sure about other states.

It's one of the things I tease California about. People from there just assume strawberries have no flavour. Steve Sailer is a Californian and usually has interesting observations, but once he talked about how strawberries are a flavourless decorative fruit.

California popularized adding strawberries to salads, because they think they are basically a vegetable.

Beef and Chicken have been having domestic production problems in the US. There were very aggressive chicken culling during the Biden admin against bird flu. Beef producers took big hits during covid. Supply chain disruptions kept feed prices high. I suspect that some of the corporate consolidation and regulatory changes haven't helped. The US beef herd has been declining for years and it's currently the smallest since the 1970s, in the face of a much larger population. Obviously imports have offset a lot of that.

I'm conspiracy minded and paranoid, so I think there's an alliance of Big Ag and vegans in the USDA working to wipe out small producers and make meat more expensive. But no, I can't prove that.

Anyways I think that in the face of higher prices stores have been putting lower quality meat on the shelves.

Potato prices for farmers are way down, so I'm not sure why quality would be dropping there.

It could also be something happening during transport. Truck drivers setting the trailer temp to be too high or too low for some reason. Perhaps letting it get too warm then dropping it near freezing right before delivery so it's cold enough when it's unloaded.

It's one of the things I tease California about. People from there just assume strawberries have no flavour. Steve Sailer is a Californian and usually has interesting observations, but once he talked about how strawberries are a flavourless decorative fruit.

California popularized adding strawberries to salads, because they think they are basically a vegetable.

This is absurd and hilarious. Can any CA posters confirm if this is real? If true, just another reason not to move to Cali, I guess.

Apples are much better than they were fifteen years ago, mostly because I know what varieties to buy now. My guess is that apples have 'improved' because people buy them by cultivar while strawberries have gotten worse because they are sold simply as strawberries. Sugar dense cultivars are naturally more expensive by weight or volume than water dense cultivars, and consumers probably just buy the cheaper strawberry without a recognizable name like Honeycrisp to attach to the expensive package.

Driscoll's has been selling Sweetest Batch berries as a premium line that (presumably) uses more sugar dense cultivars. I do find Sweetest Batch to have a much higher hit rate of good berries.

Apples are just better now actually. People eat them and give them to their kids. They're very convenient for all parties involved. If stored correctly some varieties will keep for 18 months. You could be buying an apple today that was picked in the late fall of 2024 and its mostly fine. They'll get turned into something else if they get to old and arent Fancy any more. Several terrible varieties of apple have more of less vanished as Americans started to eat more apples in the 90s, red delicious at the top of the chopping block. Apples have trends too, which lets them charge more for some of them desipte idential costs when they're 'hot'. Good margins generally in a space not really known for them. Low spoilage. Great crop overall thoughout American history.

And you didn't mention the avocados?

I don't know if I should mention this, but Costco avocados are kino. Basically never deal with a bad avocado. Just don't get anything from South America. Mexico or USA only.

Strange you mention Costco as having good ones. They're dreadful around me. Utterly taste-free and barely any texture, whereas ones I get from the grocery store are delicious enough to eat like an apple.

The avocados I get at Costco are better now than they were a couple of years ago. At that time they were prone to being rancid inside before they were even soft enough to eat.

I gave up on finding consistently acceptable avocados so long ago that I forgot about them. If I'm going to buy bad produce, I might as well get cheap bad produce. Avocado dishes must be so expensive at restaurants because they're having to throw out more than half of them. Regardless, they're certainly an appropriate addition to the list.

The chicken thing might be them absorbing water during the chilling process. Look for packaging that says "air-chilled" and see if that solves your texture problem.

The banana thing is a combination of being picked too early and stored too cold.

Once bananas get too cold the ripening process stops and they will rot not ripen.

protip: the smaller bananas are almost always the most flavorful ones. Maybe the same is true of strawberries, I dunno, but I have found the banana tip to be pretty consistent.

This is true of almost all true berries, to an extent. There is an ideal size for everything, bigger is usually not better.

(bannanas are berries. as are tomatos and peppers and grapes. True Berries, botanically speaking.)

Strawberries, not necessarily by size, but redder, darker seeds usually indicate a sweeter and more flavorful berry. Blueberries though, smaller wild varietals are more flavorful.

Smaller varietals or in the same bunch?

I haven't noticed those particular things, though I may be the wrong person to ask because I never had a very strong sense of taste.

I have however noticed that the types of beef available at most, but not all, of my local grocery stores seems to have changed. Most of the selection used to be in those styrofoam tray things covered with shrink-wrap, and it consisted of ground beef in various semi-random weights and various cuts of steak also in various semi-random weights. Items that seemed as if somebody in a butcher shop somewhere was lopping of cuts of meat and scoops of ground beef onto these trays in a semi-sloppy way, wrapping them, then weighing and labeling them. Now, those items seem to be gone from a number of stores, replaced with similar items in a fancier-looking package and a more mass-produced style. The ground beef is now only in quantities of exactly 1lb, and too bad if you want any fractional quantities. The steaks also seem to have a more uniform style and cost at least double the price too. The other meats I've looked at seem to have some similar changes, but without as much mass-produced uniformity. I do not like this change, and have been doing my purchases of such things from other stores that seem to have better selections.

Beef that's packaged too long greys it's harmless but undesirable to customers. So stores used to have meat cutters who cut and wrapped chunks of beef into packes for sale. Sealed Air figured out a way to fill a sealed container with a mixture of gases that prevents the color change and seal those gasses in the package. That means meat cutting moved to a slaughter house and packaged meat stays in the package much longer.

It's real, and It's climate change and capitalism.

All the economically viable cultivares of those fruits have pretty specific temperature requirements in that you need to know with certainty how wet/hot it will be when they are harvested and at various points during their growth. If it's off by a certain margin, you either get a crop failure or a curing failure, which is how you end up with potatoes that go bad from a single nick from the spade instead of healing, and onions that only partially cure and then sprout or rot. (Remember that vegetables are living plant parts,)

There is no amount of money that can fix the snake river plateau being warmer than it ever has been the day after the onions come up, so for the rest of your life you will have hit or miss produce.

Re. Bananas: If you get them at Costco (in california at least) you will be safer; the ones at my store come from Costa Rica and will reliably all go bad at the same inconvenient moment.

I'm less familiar with meat but I know that the major producers have trimmed so much fat from the process that they have reached the bone and are starting to scrape; I have no direct personal connection to that particular industry so I only have hearsay, but I'm told that the production end is getting squeezed hard to find some efficiencies after 200 years of finding efficiencies, so they are having to do some shit they know is bad to get the numbers Tyson et al require. This will be doubly true if you live outside of Comifornia; where they specifically regulate out certain practices.

It's climate change and capitalism.

I'm not generally a white knight for capitalism but I really don't think it's appropriate to blame here.

If people insisted upon better products, capitalism would generate and deliver them. And it does! It's never been easier to find amazing produce year-round, if you're willing to go the extra mile and pay a bit more.

The problem is that the average consumer is stupid and tasteless, and economies of scale mean that mass-market products will reflect the situation.

That too, but I also blame that on capitalism. I grew up in a particularly rural part of a country that hadn't really felt the hand of the market pinch it's ass yet; no running water no electricity one phone you rode a horse three hours to reach and then gave your message to the guy who ran it; type of place.

The way standards DROPED when the market finally arrived was crazy; but in exchange you get to have a big piece of red meat a couple times a month in your own house instead of a couple times a quarter when someone killed an animal.

It's a trade off you only know you are making if you've lived both ways, and I'm part of the last generation from one of the last places on earth that will even have the opportunity to feel it, outside of weird cults and rejectionist tribes.

Why is your problem capitalism in particular and not technology or market forces?

As usual when people complain about capitalism I get the sense that you're just unsatisfied with the basic structure of reality.

ETA I do appreciate your perspective and can relate to some degree.

Because it really is the ideological element of capitalism, the religious faith that price signals and consumption capture all useful information and that whoever has the biggest number is divinely ordained by god (the Market) where the difference sets in.

We had markets for thousands of years before capitalism, we had technological advances for thousands of years before capitalism, and capitalism IMO actually has a very poor track record in spurring the development of novel technological frameworks compared to autism.

That's not to say that the system in question doesn't deliver the results, because it clearly does. I just think that the people that were born capitalists in a capitalist world, read capitalist books, went to capitalist church and live capitalist lives are almost incapable of imagining that the world was once different, and at some point in the future will be different again.

It's like you said, they imagine that the ability to freely accrue capital, and turn wealth into capital, and turn capital into wealth, are "the basic structure of reality", when that has only been true globally for about 70 years.

I've definitely seen a decline in chicken quality over the last five years. I'm not exactly sure what the cause is, but it's real. Woody breast, in particular, is almost a guarantee unless you get chicken from a farmer's market.

Someone here I remember posting that they had sold their stocks and bought only oil stocks because of the war. And that they thought they could easily swap back when it ended. Now that the war has ended do people think that was true? SPY is back at highs. Oil etf (XLE) at one month low. In my opinion it would have been hard to swap back. And I assume he has not and he’s currently at a small loss. Market moves happen fast. Faster now than ever before. I’m not even sure if the war is over. Even now you are reading Trump tea leaves.

That might have been me; my guy re-exited before the top for saftey when the market got squirrely, and I think I'm back in now but only with a couple thousand; shit is too loopy and I'm scared money here; I'll take my guaranteed 5% and my florigen security blanket for now please and thanks.

I don't accept that the war is over. I don't even think Trump accepts it:

https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2045352142253252818

"If you don't have a deal by Wednesday when the ceasefire ends, will you extend the ceasefire?"

@POTUS : "I don't know. Maybe I won't extend it — but the blockade is going to remain... Unfortunately, we'll have to start dropping bombs again."

Nor are the straits even open. Iran says the straits are open but only if you go through their route between their island, fill out their paperwork and aren't a hostile country and maybe pay a fee. US says the straits are open but not to Iran or anyone who pays a fee to Iran?

I was thinking the same thing. A thousand midlevel diplomats can try to hammer out an agreement, but it only takes one guy to torpedo it.

I’m just not sure how to bet against peace.

I'm hopeful, but I'm still skeptical that this past week signifies a true return to norm. I'm not that commenter you referenced, and I also haven't made any money from the Iran war... yet. A little after the war started, I had spent some of my high-risk investment money to get into a Vanguard energy-industry fund, which has mostly been responsive to oil prices, and I've certainly lost money after today, but I also decided to put more into it today, because of my pessimism that the market is a little too caught up in the hype. We'll see.

Not only were all time highs reached earlier this week for both US equity markets and the global stock market as a whole, they surged even higher on Friday.

Lots of net worth PRs were attained this week by those who just buy broadly diversified market funds and hold, without trying to market-time or do sector-gambling.

Started TheMotte factorio server with krastorio and additional planets. Let me know if you want to join. Weird time zones welcome. We don't have to all play at the same time.

One of my earliest podcast memories from high school is of Sam Harris discussing the paradoxical path towards becoming a successful meditator. For those of you haven’t tried Vipassana, or mindfulness meditation, the end goal is basically to quiet the mind: to be present in the purest sense of being present without latching onto thoughts or judgements. However, I usually find it is quite difficult to actually do this: even when I do manage to successfully clear the mind of thoughts about dinner or my crush in dance class, there’s still a part of me that’s judging how empty my mind is, preventing me from actually being fully in the present. In order to actually successfully meditate you have to cease being this reflective self. That self, as Sam Harris puts it, can’t get there from here.

While I still don’t fully understand how this works in terms of meditation, I think this serves as a pretty apt metaphor for many other areas of life. We simply don’t understand how development, whether as an athlete, artist, or businessman is going to change our relationship to that craft, and who we are in that domain of life in general. In all these fields, the novice can never obtain mastery because it doing so he becomes a master and no longer thinks or behaves like a novice. He couldn’t get there from here.

There are three areas in my life, probably quite familiar to readers of this blog, where I very clearly see this process at work: running/triathlon, language learning, and science. I don’t pretend to be a master at any of these categories, but I do claim to have experienced a profound transformation in how I relate to my own process of improvement in each of them. There is no path from 12-year-old swimmer who pushed as hard as he could every practice, the grammar-drilling high-school student, and the flailing first-year graduate student to who I am today, but rather and abrupt disconnect– which paradoxically cannot be placed at a single point in time. I’ll unpack what I mean more for each specific example below.

Endurance Sports

I started competitive swimming when I was in 4th grade around 9-10 years old. Before that, my parents had made me try a variety of different ball sports (soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis), as well as fencing. I was not particularly good at any of these: I was supremely uncoordinated (still am), not very fit, and because of the first two not very interested in improvement. Swimming changed all that: I quickly became more coordinated, more fit, and much more interested in improvement, and I couldn’t tell you exactly why. Perhaps this first season of swim club represents the first “you can’t get there from here” moment: before I had no interest in sport despite parental pressure, and afterwards it became one of the pillars of my life. The Joshua that deliberately ran away from the ball in soccer games, couldn’t hit a single baseball, and walked during the elementary school run-a-thon would never have been able to understand the person I became within a few months.

The next phase of my endurance sports career was characterized by what I like to call a try-hard, or a no-pain-no gain attitude. I thought that if I just worked harder I would improve. I would constantly sprint the warm-up, race during dry-land circuits, and, once I switched my primary focus to running, treat every easy day as a tempo or light threshold. The model of how I saw myself improving was the ability to continually handle more and more pain and more and more work until I was some kind of athletic übermensch.

This phase lasted from when I was about 10 to my senior year cross country season when I was 18. Ending it required another shift in perspective. I wasn’t going to keep improving, and in fact, I was getting worse by continuing to bash my head into a wall of always high-intensity all the time. In my junior year, along with my friend Zack, I began to become interested in how to actually train and improve based on the science. It wasn’t so much a question of grit and mental toughness and grinding really hard every day, but of intelligently putting together a mix of training that would support the physical and psychological adaptions necessary for improvements. The try-hard, whose favorite poem was Invictus5, and prided himself on how tired he was after practice, never could have gotten here from there.

I have changed my attitude towards training and endurance sports quite a bit since I was 18, but I don’t think I’ve had another discrete transformation. My realizations that lifestyle can have a larger impact than the training itself, the importance of adapting training to my individual genetics and physiology, and the importance of truly easy days all fit within this framework of training as recipe rather than a wall to be knocked down with a sledgehammer. I could get here from there.

Language Learning

One of the big problems with most language learning instruction in schools and on apps like Duolingo, is the disconnect between how the language is taught and what kinds of activities you want to actually use the language to do. In my other blog posts I like to break up the later into four different domains: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Traditional classroom instruction, as well as the apps, heavily favor the output domains, probably due to the need to evaluate a student’s progress, which is much more difficult to do from the standpoint of pure input. This approach also heavily relies on translation from one’s native language. It’s a little absurd to expect that constant grammar drills, and speaking exercises that involve heavy amounts of translation from one’s native language to lead to fluency, which involves seamless and intuitive understanding of written and spoken language. You simply can’t get there from here.

I tried really hard to get there from here using traditional methods in various languages. 10 years of Spanish in elementary→ high school. Not fluent. 3 years of an hour of Duolingo a day in Dutch. Not fluent. I made similar attempts, although with much less effort for Japanese, Hebrew, and French.

It was only with the discovery of Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis, and a fundamental change in my approach to language learning away from book learning and towards acquisition that I was able to make real progress. Sixth grade Josh who thought drilling his conjugations harder would lead to fluency never would have made it here from there.

Science

In the career of every single scientist there is almost guaranteed to be a sharp “you can’t get there from here” moment. For me this happened during the second year of my PhD, where classes and controlled experiments gave way to the vast wilderness of the unknown that I would have to hack and slash through to arrive at my thesis. The skills that served me so well in class, memorization and logic, could only take me so far in this brave new world. The intimate details of your specific experiments and systems, how complex pathways interact with each other, and if your hypothesis is total bullshit or not are not facts that you can derive with a pencil and paper sitting with your advisor in July of 2021, but can only be won through the cauldron of trying things out and seeing what shit sticks. You can’t get there from here.

I’ve tried Vipassana before and know a good amount about meditative practices in the conventional religious context it fell out of (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). I can’t say I ever became a serious practitioner in any way but one theme that repeats from it over and over is to reduce the attempts to over-intellectualize meditation, because it’s one of the surest ways to lose yourself in the cognitive phenomenology and experience it’s meant to bring you toward.

One of the most popular forms of psychotherapy here in the west is a regimen that bears a close resemblance to common forms of meditation, that was developed by Albert Ellis; called Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and its offshoot Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) (1, 2). I’ve found that tends to be more accessible to a lay western audience and has an easier grasp to understand.

Mild mid-life crisis, or: orthoxerox's journey into the world of perfume

(paging @Closedshop, since he was wondering what I ended up with)

Intro

So, before Lent I kinda got into fragrances. Not completely off the deep end, but it was an interesting journey and relatively inexpensive, would recommend. Whenever my wife tried to complain, I would remind her that at least it wasn't motorbikes or women half my age. Here's how you do it.

To start, you need some vague idea of what you like, or rather, what you don't like: maybe you hate patchouli, maybe you hate lavender. Then you need a perfume shop. Don't worry, you're not buying anything there yet. Go there, catch the attention of an assistant and tell her (unless it's Sephora, where @2rafa says it might be a gay guy instead) what you like and don't like. Follow her and carefully smell the blotter strips she's handing to you. Or pick up the tester bottles yourself, who needs assistants in 2026? Don't buy anything yet.

What you need from this exercise is two things: a list of fragrances you didn't like and a list of fragrances you liked. Ideally with some extra notes explaining why. Armed with this list, you should go to fragrantica.com. It's the biggest website about perfume, and what you need is to look up every single fragrance you remembered and read about their notes.

Notes are what a fragrance smells like. Since scents are very complex qualia, there's simply no other way to describe one other than to liken it to another known scent. Sad but true. Try to map your memories from the shop to the notes. It's not always easy, but hopefully you should be able to map your impressions at least to specific groups of notes: floral, citrus, herbal, woody, etc.

Great, now you have the list of notes you like, the list of notes you hate in addition to the list of fragrances. Fragrantica frustratingly has a bunch of completely different search engines: one for notes, one for similar fragrances, one for accords (which is almost useless), one generic engine and "this fragrance reminds me of" sections inside their catalog. You're going to use all of them and expand your list of potential fragrances to, say, a dozen. Or two. But start with a dozen.

Two words of advice: there are probably hundreds of obscure brands and Fragrantica doesn't always let you filter them out, so try to stick to those basic bitch bottles that have hundreds of reviews. Some of them might be discontinued, which might be a problem if you like it a lot. Also, don't be afraid to try new stuff at this stage. If something isn't a firm "no", add it to the longlist even if you don't know what musk or amber are.

Armed with this list, go to any large website that sells perfume samples. Also known as decants, they are a moneysaver. Go and order your first set of samples from them, that should cost you $20-$50, pick the smallest tester bottle size they offer. While your samples are in transit, go find some good unscented soap. Or some soap with a harsh scent. You'll need it to wash stuff off, because you're going to get something vile in your batch.

Finally, your shipment arrives and it's time to start testing. If you have a partner, rope in him or her, because everyone's nose is different. This is especially important with modern fragrances.

A digression: you know about molecular gastronomy? When the chef says something like "roasted garlic shares certain flavor compounds with vanilla, so we put some roasted garlic in your vanilla ice cream to supercharge the taste of both"? Well, perfumery is 100% this. What the chefs haven't done yet, since, much to their chagrin, they still have to serve you edible food, is to isolate this specific substance that is shared between garlic and vanilla and infuse a slab of tofu with it (or at least I hope they haven't). But the people designing fragrances have. Modern compositions often include synthetic ingredients like Garilla(tm), which alone doesn't smell like garlic or vanilla, but somehow keeps reminding you of both of them. Or Schmarlick(tm), which smells like something almost, but not quite entirely unlike garlic.

And this simply doesn't work reliably. Human olfactory system is one big mess and has huge variability. Natural scents are very reliable, because human noses have evolved to identify them. Synthetic scents aren't. Vanillin smells like vanilla, but not exactly so, and when you go deeper, you start to run into problems: modern fragrances often smell differently to different people. That's why you need at least one other person to smell you.

Another digression: not only do different people perceive smells differently, but you yourself also perceive them differently:

  • blotter vs skin: blotters' only use is checking which scents you definitely don't like
  • forearm vs neck: I can't really smell anything I spray on my neck unless someone walks past me and disturbs the air
  • olfactory fatigue: my nose gave up about two thirds into my samples and I had to take a break. It still won't register vetiver reliably

I've had a bunch of tissue taken out of my nose in 2023, so my sense of smell isn't exactly what you would call refined. My wife has a much sharper nose that is much less compatible with modern fragrances. I also got my mum, who's a big fragrance nerd, to try some of the samples.

Here's the list of stuff I've tried, sorted into vague groups. Dollar signs show the approximate price group. The ratings are as follows:

  • -2 means I'll leave the room
  • -1 means I don't like the smell
  • 0 means I'll finish the tester
  • +1 means I would buy it if my wife didn't hate it
  • +2 means I will buy it

The price ratings are approximate, and I didn't track the price of every possible bottle, but they go something like this:

  • $ means cheap and cheerful, significantly under a hundred bucks for a full-sized bottle
  • $$ is about a hundred bucks and change
  • $$$ is about two to three hundred bucks
  • $$$$ is everything above this price

The order is a bit weird, because it started out as chronological, but then I realized I had to categorize them. I tried to put "above" or "below" whenever I referenced another bottle, but I must've missed a few.

Basic man smells

This includes what I consider the broadest and most generic family of fragrances.

Citrus-herbal

A safe default. Starts with some kind of citrus, then adds some refreshing astringency or pungency, then reduces to a dry herbal/woody scent. Surprisingly, there's no fancy name for this family of fragrances.

Gypsy Water by Byredo, 0, $$$. I liked it in the store on a tester strip, but on my skin it didn't smell like anything. In the store I got a whiff of black pepper. On me it's a generic woody smell that you really get only if you lean in. Which is not a bad thing, especially for office wear.

Wife: very impressed.

Escentric 03 by Escentric, +1, $$. Escentric Molecules is a modernist shop your mother warned you about when she steered you toward natural scents. They sell "Molecule" fragrances that are just a single synthetic compound in ethanol and "Escentric" fragrances that build a more traditional composition around it. 03 is synthetic vetiver, and to me this is a perfect fragrance in this category. The citrusy smell sticks around and blends well with the herbal/woody smell of vetiver. Doesn't last long enough, but eh.

Wife: not impressed, thinks the smell is synthetic.

Grey Vetiver by Tom Ford, 0, $$$. Very weak top notes, barely any citrus. Vetiver is very mild, mixed with a sweet woody aroma. Overall effect similar to Gypsy Water. Good, but not woah.

Wife: very impressed, probably her favorite. Might have to get some of it to keep her happy.

Escentric 05 by Escentric Molecules, -1. Bergamot, juniper, rosemary, cypress, what's not to like? Except there's nothing resembling this in it. It smells more like a vaguely citrusy-fruity anti-static spray.

Wife: "Why did you buy so many bad ones?"

Mum: Not impressed either.

Opus 1870 by Penhaligon's, +2, $$$. From my wife's stock (technically, it was a present to me that she hoarded). It's interesting because it subverts the usual structure: the opening is much more peppery than citrusy, and the base notes are more woody than herbal. The overall effect is that you literally smell like salt and pepper. Great office workhorse.

Wife: "It's great, you have a bottle of it, stop buying all these samples."

Terre d'Hermes by Hermes, 0. A classic. Compared to Escentric 03, it's more structured (that is, the smell changes as time goes on) and longer-lasting. However, the citrus smell in the beginning is too sweet for me.

Wife: "Your citrus fragrances are all the same to me."

Mum: liked it.

Terre d'Hermes Intense Vetiver by Hermes, 0. This is Escentric 03, but dialed up. I thought this was my new "basic smell" when I tried it, but I have to learn to calibrate it. Unlike in the main TdH, the citrus here is tart, which is more to my liking, but it's rather strong. Sometimes it felt like I was sucking on a sour throat lozenge. The vetiver can also be overpowering, veering into something vinegary.

Wife: "Your citrus fragrances are all the same to me."

Mum: didn't like how sour the citrus was.

Terre d'Hermes Eau Givree by Hermes, +2, $$. This one is a great summer fragrance, in my opinion: the citrus is tart, but not dominant, and the base notes are very gentle and fresh. The overall effect is not sun-baked, but breezy. A crowd pleaser for sure.

Wife: "Oh, you should keep this one."

Vetiver by Guerlain, 0, 9300. Supposed to be the ultimate boss of this category. I might have to revisit it, because, like the two Chanel fragrances, I cannot smell it. Maybe I wore out my nose.

After a break, I tried it again and still found it underwhelming. I only get a whiff of the same oily smell that dominates the Etro's composition (see below).

Wife: okay?

The Beat by Burberry, +1, $$$. Smells a lot like Opus 1870 to me. It has the same peppery opening, but the base is more aromatic, so the overall impression is a bit bolder. Pity it's discontinued, though.

Wife: hated it, found it overwhelmingly sweet.

Mum: loved it so much she huffed the tester bottle dry.

Woody stuff

Foregoes any citrus, just herbs and woods. Generally a more wintery thing.

Encre Noire by Lalique, +2, $. A very strong and straightforward fragrance, I wouldn't wear it to the office. The smell is very warm and dry with just a tiny hint of oiliness. Can't really say what it smells like because it smells like itself. You can be sitting there thinking about something and then it just comes back. While it's not the most universal thing you can buy, it's so inexpensive it's a crime not to get a bottle.

Wife: "I had a feeling this one was going to be good."

Mum: "Yes, that's a good one."

Hero EdP by Burberry, -1. A sweet woody smell. I thought I would like it, but I found it too suffocating and giving me a mild headache after a while.

Wife: surprisingly okay with it.

Mum: thinks it's too cloying.

Vetiver by Etro, -2. From my wife's stock, golden cap (iykyk). Vetiver is one of these things that can have a very different smell, and this fragrance just smells like someone's been using unrefined sunflower oil for frying. Oily, roasted notes. Had to wash it off after ten minutes because I couldn't stand smelling like a line cook in a casual dining restaurant. It was super strong, though, and whatever persisted after I scrubbed by forearms with birch tar soap was rather nice.

Wife: "What the fuck is wrong with you, really? First you shit on Racquets, then on Incense and Myrrh, now on this?"

Ombre Noire by Lalique, +1, $. Smells like Encre Noire for Arabs, which it is. A pleasant scent for winter, less polarizing than its parent. Pity it was discontinued.

Wife: meh (despite loving both Encre Noire and incense, wtf!)

Bois Imperial by Essential Parfums, -1. From my mum's sample collection. Smells like wood soaked in vegetable oil. Not interesting at all.

Sycomore by Chanel, 0, $$$$. Supposed to be the king of the category, but I have two problems with it. One, it's very expensive and two, I can't smell it. Literally. I sprayed some on my forearm, got a few good notes and then, poof!, it was gone. I had to jam my wrist into my nose to get anything. Which is a big problem, because I like to smell whatever I have sprayed on me better than people around me. The composition is superb, though: a delicate combination of herbal and coniferous notes with no sharp angles.

Wife: smells it very well, likes it a lot.

Hero EdT by Burberry, +1, $. Unlike the EdP, it's more gentle and doesn't make my head hurt. It's still a gentle skin-level scent of cedar, but it's perfect if you're surrounded by sensitive noses. If you need a cheap office fragrance, it's this one.

Wife: can't tell if I have it on. Later noticed it and told me it was nice.

Blu Mediterraneo - Cipresso di Toscana by Acqua di Parma, 0, 13000. Very unusual fragrance. Like Encre Noire, it's super dry: practically no sweet or sour notes, it smells like Escentric 05 should have. Full of woody herbs and sun-baked cypress, it smells almost briny, like you're hiking across Italy in July, covered in sweat. I usually roll my eyes at people who post flowery descriptions of fragrances that transport them into a specific scene, but this one actually did.

Wife: didn't like it

The big Sycomore replacement hunt

After I realized that Sycomore smelled great, but I needed something stronger, I interrogated various LLMs to find possible alternatives. Here's what I ended up with:

Vetiver Extraordinaire by Frederic Malle, 0. Smells nice, but not as nice as Sycomore. It isn't stronger than it, either.

Vetiver Moloko by Ex Nihilo, -1. Just like Sycomore, it takes the edge off vetiver by making it sweeter, and in this case it smells like baked milk. It's not the worst combination, but I realized I like woody sweetness with my vetiver.

Wife: okay?

Mum: liked it, but as a feminine fragrance.

XXIV Carat Gold by Vertus, -1. Smells a lot like Cipresso di Toscana, almost briny. Gets better when this note finally wears off, not worth waiting for it.

Vetiver 46 by Le Labo, -2. To quote an alien admiral, it's a trap. Its base note is 100% incense. I am still confused by labdanum vs olibanum, but it's the kind of incense that smells like a green booger that you get after a sinus infection. And the smell just won't come off.

Sultan Vetiver by Nishane, -2. It smells like mothballs to me. That's it.

Cold and bitter

The previous batch uses "dry" base notes, this one uses "wet" notes. The top is usually more floral than citrusy.

More floral

Known as "fougere", IIRC.

English Fern by Penhaligon's, 0. From my wife's stock, old enough to contain natural oakmoss. The smell isn't bad, but nothing to write home about. Very traditional. Also, discontinued.

Wife: very impressed.

Beau de Jour by Tom Ford, -1. It's structured very traditionally, but it starts with a very strong blast of lavender. I hate strong floral smells, so I had to wash it off. It's one of the few fragrances in my experience that survived a scrubbing with tar soap, and the remaining scent was quite pleasant. Still, I could just use English Fern if I wanted this result.

Wife: Thought this one was good, but she likes lavender bombs.

Egoiste Platinum by Chanel, -1. I have no idea if it's Chanel or me, but I can't smell their fragrances. It's supposed to be a typical fougere, but it could've been vodka for all I know.

Wife: just like H24 below, this one really disgusted her. She stormed into the room and made me wash it off.

Mum: called it a fragrance so perfect it had no personality.

Fougere Royale by Houbigant, +1, $$$. The OG of this category, like a jacuzzi from Jacuzzi, even though it's a 2010 reformulation. The word that comes to mind is gentle. Or genteel, if you want. It's neither super floral or super bitter, but has a certain sweet soapy quality that masks both bitterness and floralness. Doesn't really attract the attention, which should make it a good office scent.

Wife: hated it, called it a soapy plum stench.

Mum: really liked it, huffed the whole tester bottle.

More citrusy

Known as "chypre", IIRC. Not my favorite style.

Racquets Formula by Penhaligon's, -2. From my wife's stock (technically, it was a present to me that she hoarded). I didn't get to the cold bitter notes, it smelled so strongly of citrus and flowers that it made me choke. I had to rush into the bathroom to get rid of it.

Wife: "What the fuck are you doing? Are you nuts, why are you washing it off? It's divine!"

Quercus by Penhaligon's, -1. From my mum's collection of testers. It's much more restrained than the fragrance above, but I just don't like the citrus-oakmoss mix. It's not bad per se, just not my cup of tea.

Just green herbs

H24 EdP by Hermes, 1. Not a typical fragrance from this family, because it's very forward with its wet notes. I liked the fresh bitterness, but couldn't really enjoy it fully.

Wife: hated, hated, hated it. She ran in from another room to demand that I wash it off literally a minute after I applied it.

Mum: I guess I inherited some of her olfactory bulbs, because she agreed it was a wonderful bitter fresh scent. I guess I'll save it for visiting my parents.

Grey Flannel by Geoffrey Beene, 2, $. An oldie that is similar to H24 in that it's bitter from top to bottom, but with subtle floral aroma peeking through the double attack of galbanum and oakmoss, so it's technically a fougere, but I put it here. When I sprayed it on, I thought it was vile, like getting caught in a fog machine or a cloud of tear gas, but after just a minute it mellowed out. Still very sharp, like an old-school aftershave (that's because it is old school, older than me by a decade). A very morning fragrance. I personally like how it smells if you rub it after applying, which is traditionally a no-no.

Wife: "Oh, this one's nice. Pleasantly herbal." Then when I bought it and used it a few times she started saying she disliked it. Too late!

Polo by Ralph Lauren, 0, $$. Another old-school fragrance, very similar to Grey Flannel in overall effect. No flowers in it at all, just a whole bunch of green "manly" notes. Not as choking, but has a pine note that reminds me of vapor rub. I think I prefer the Flannel.

Wife: "Oh, this one's nice. Pleasantly herbal."

Wintery smells

They trade the fresh notes for the warm sweet or spicy ones. A bunch of woody smells should be there, but this is more about tobacco, leather and food. Again, some of them kinda straddle the line between food and not food, so don't treat my classification as gospel.

Not food

Autumn Vibes by MMM, no rating. This one is weird. It's supposed to smell like autumn, but it's not very autumny at all. It's strong, but not as strong as Encre Noire. Smells of night flowers and the spice rack in a pastry shop. I don't get any woody or earthy or sharp notes. I'd call it warm and sweet.

Wife: hates it, calls it ugly and synthetic. Doesn't smell any sweetness or spices at all.

Mom: likes it, but says it smells like autumn leaves and carrot seeds and pickles.

London for Men by Burberry, +1, $. When I tried it first, I was overwhelmed by cinnamon. It felt like sticking the nose into a freshly opened packet. A month later I tried it again, taking care not to rub the sprayed skin, and found it very pleasant. I can't isolate any specific notes, it's sweet and creamy and woody with a hint of cinnamon.

Wife: surprisingly okay with it.

Mum: really likes it. Doesn't smell any cinnamon.

Jazz Club by MMM, -1. Since it was recommended by @Closedshop, I had high hopes for it, but ended up disappointed. The scent is very jumbled and it has the same cold sweet synthetic note that I hated in Musk and Amber. Not as overpowering, but still unpleasant. It dried down into something indistinctly sweet. No rum, no tobacco, no vanilla.

Wife: not impressed either, she doesn't trust modern synthetics anyway.

Mum: autumn leaves and a cigarette. No sweet notes.

Tabarome by Creed, +2, $$$$. Okay, this is a tough rating. Creed has a controversial reputation in the fragrance business. On the one hand, they hire talented designers and source quality ingredients. On the other hand, they only started making perfume in the 70's and came up with a totally fake backstory to jack up their prices. The perfume itself has a delicious warm tobacco smell with a hint of something sour and fruity that I expected from Jazz Club.

Wife: extremely impressed, demanded I get this one.

Food

Called gourmand IIRC. TL;DR: I like them, my wife hates them.

Baccarat Rouge 540 by Francis Kurkjian, 0, $$$$. Imagine you're at a fancy dinner and they bring in the desserts. There's your regular ones: fruit salad, ice cream, some pie, etc. And then there's this warm spongy cake that has been drenched with some syrup and drizzled with additional sauce and everyone is drawn to it. It smells delicious: the exotic spices in the dough, the syrup and the sauce all mesh together perfectly and accentuate its rich sweetness. This is what 540 smells like. Super wintery, very strong, very expensive.

Tried it again, and while the smell is very intriguing and sweet, it makes less of an impression the second time. I assume I would get tired of it.

Wife: doesn't share my enthusiasm.

Mum: doesn't share my enthusiasm either.

Narcotic Delight by Initio Parfums Prives, +1, $$$$. Now this is what I expected Jazz Club to smell like. Sweet warmth with booziness and a small hint of tobacco. The only drawbacks I can name is that the tobacco note is very weak and that the projection and longevity are monstrous. I sprayed it on my forearm and it permeated the whole room. It resisted birch tar soap and reassembled itself on my skin like T-1000. I could still smell it on me eight hours later even after giving myself a second scrub. Definitely a special occasion fragrance.

When I tried it again, I finally got to the tobacco note; you have to wait until the cherry smell dissipates naturally. The tobacco was surprisingly harsh, reminded me of a pack of cigarettes.

Wife: was too overwhelmed by its power to say anything constructive other than that she's not the biggest fan of sweet notes.

Mum: sweets, overripe cherry, some peppery notes.

L'Homme Ideale EdP by Guerlain, +1.5, $$. Rather similar to Narcotic Delight, but with a more pronounced sour overripe/fermentation note. Not as powerful, which is probably a good thing. I really like this one as a wearable scent. Again, I like it more when I rub my skin than when I let it dissipate naturally.

Wife: finally admitted she doesn't like edible scents at all.

Watery smells

Became popular in the 80s, when new synthetic compounds became available.

Cool Water by Davidoff, 0. The OG of the family. The smell is strong, definitely artificial, but not unpleasant. It's to water what watermelon-flavored candy is to watermelon.

Wife: really hated it, made me wash it off immediately.

Mum: nothing to write home about, workhorse summer fragrance.

Random stuff

After categorizing everything, this is what remained, a grab bag of random stuff. Basically, it's what they call "oriental" (or used to, might be considered racist these days) and "animalistic" smells. I'm not a big fan of incense/myrrh/labdanum/other smelly resins (which is what "oriental" means) and didn't really go deep into musks (which are all synthetic these days, I've heard).

Midnight Musk and Amber by Jo Malone, -1. I bought because I was looking for coniferous notes. Disappointing. A very synthetic scent. Smells cold and sweet, like novelty candy.

Wife: "I hate all Jo Malone fragrances"

Mum: totally terrible

Frankincense and Myrrh Cologne by Czech & Speake, -2. From my wife's stock. She loves this kind of heavy stuff, but I had to wash myself after trying it. It does smell like very much like frankincense and myrrh, which is probably a good thing if you like to imagine you're baby Jesus, but I find this kind of smell unpleasant unless it's burning five meters away from me in a censer.

Wife: "You hate all the good stuff!"

Poppy and Barley by Jo Malone, -2. From my mum's (well, technically dad's) collection. It smells like barn to me, like a bag of compound feed that got wet and is now slowly fermenting.

Wife: "Oh, this one is nice."

Mum: "Animal feed, you say? Haven't heard that one yet."

This is basically where I stopped. I still have about twenty more fragrances on my wishlist, but I didn't want to become someone who's into perfume, just to get a few bottles for daily use. I have enough testers for special occasions, here's what I have bought for regular use:

  • Cheap and cheerful:
    • Grey Flannel - spring fragrance
    • Encre Noire - fall/winter fragrance
  • Lower midrange:
    • Terre d'Hermes Eau Givree - summer fragrance
  • Upper midrange
    • Opus 1871 - inoffensive office fragrance (if I hadn't had it already, I would've bought Hero EdT, a cheap and cheerful option)
  • Expensive:
    • Tabarome - fall/winter fragrance (I could've bought London for Men, a cheap and cheerful option, had I sprayed it on correctly the first time)

As you can see, I ended up without a citrus-vetiver fragrance that I initially thought would be my main option, but this is something I can revisit later.

Incredible work. I’m still reading through the list, but I wanted to comment on one thing.

to isolate this specific substance that is shared between garlic and vanilla and infuse a slab of tofu with it (or at least I hope they haven't).

The phrase you need is molecular gastronomy. This stuff pushes the bleeding edge of what might, possibly, be considered “food.” It’s wild.

See also adventures in fine dining.

Loved your list and reviews. In fact, I haven't gotten ahold of some on your list, and will be trying them in the future. I also love that your nose is so different from mine. Personally, Bois Imperiale, Beau de Jour, and Jazz Club are some of my favorite scents so it's fun to hear differing perspectives. Also, some of the wife reviews are really funny. I'd be very glad to read any of your future fragrance reviews should you decide to do any. Thanks for sharing your results

Thanks, I plan to finish my existing collection of testers first before buying the next batch, so don't expect new reviews any time soon. My wife has been growing increasingly frustrated with me with every new batch of testers arriving, I need to give her some time off. She mostly finished building her own collection 10+ years ago, so she had little patience with me, especially when I started homing in on the fragrance families that I liked and began cycling through similar fragrances.

Interesting. I will admit to first scanning the list, looking for what I will call The Scent. It was not there. I did eventually locate it in the world and buy it though. I did. Some have described it online as smelling "like glossy magazines and cocaine." I am not sure I agree with that. But it is something else. @daguerrean would no doubt recoil, like the proverbial vampire to a braid of Spanish Roja. His good right.

A more generous man would just tell you what in the hell it is that I got. But I feel like it's one of those things that I cannot reveal directly. Anyway the "That sucks are you joking me?" kind of retort is inevitable, as is the justified taunting mockery for the price I paid. I'm probably a romantic, but then only fools would admit to, or, indeed, be that. Plus now you have the descriptive quote and hey, Internet. I will neither confirm nor deny queries, but of course the cat is out of the bag.

I will also say that unlike your approach, mine was to hunt down the thing and bag it. Now that I have it, I am not interested in anything else. The princess was in the castle. Appreciate the time and effort to write it all up. A year ago I would not have even bothered reading it because I didn't give a damn about smells until the Korean guy got on the train that morning. I feel the need to spit and pepper this post with swear words to reassert my heterosexuality. Fuckin' oath.

Congrats on finding your Holy Grail! I haven't encountered mine yet.

If yours is the one that is not for triskaidekophobes, then I would probably not like it, anyway.

Also God damn I just saw the price tag on Tabarome and now I feel like a pauper touting Old Spice.

They are both (not Old Spice, Le Labo and Creed) equally and disgustingly expensive here. And rare. I bought literally the second to last bottle of Tabarome in Russia.

Possibly you wouldn't. Or possibly you would. I feel like this is another way of dividing the world--those who appreciate it, and those who don't. Many don't. Many horrible reviews. And part of me really does think Fuck those Philistines.

opus 1870 Penhaligon is my most fav fragrance - i consider it the dad perfume. To always keep my kids remind them of me whenever they smell it.

Guerlain L'homme ideal is another fav.

Dior Sauvage Elixir is my favorite, though it’s widely considered a “universal douchebag fragrance,” because it’s used by so many party boys in the club scene. It was first described to me as smelling like “McDonald’s curry sauce;” lol. They also say Prada Luna Rossa Carbon is the closest smelling casual fragrance to it but IMO it smells nothing like Sauvage.

Guerlain L'homme ideal is another fav.

EdT or EdP? I really like the boozy cherry in the latter.

EdP. i thought there was no EdT.

How do you deal with your nose becoming acclimatized to the specific scents, and to scents generally?

Presumably you pick one because you want to smell it, and smell like it, but as the days go by, it fades into the background of your perception, and you either unconsciously start applying more to compensate, or else get to appreciate it less. Do you worry about becoming one of those people suffocating everyone else in the elevator? How do you gauge the strength on a daily basis? (your wife, sure, but she probably gets used to it too)

Ambroxan, which is a synthetic form of ambergris, tends to induce temporary anosmia, but then comes back to you later. The key is not to bathe in the scent. I remember my older brother in high school got a hold of my bottle of Polo, which in those days was what the southern girls loved (or claimed to.) When he stepped from the bathroom, presumably going out to do something social, it was as if he were trying to gas us all. It shamed me to be the author of his effort, having been the one who bought the stuff to start with. Anyway the point is don't overdo it. Put the stuff on and forget about it.

  1. I cycle my perfumes across the week, while some remain more used than others.
  2. I am not sure if this is what you are asking: perfumes/fragrances, the ones being talked about, have different notes (the initial, the mid, the late). These perfume oils reside on your skin and mix up with your body (skin) oils and that combination is what comes out as the smell. Over time, the perfume releases different sets of oils and the combined mixture keeps on changing over the course of the day, so your nose doesn't actually get acclimatized since there is no single type of scent. This is why some perfumes sit absolutely great with you while not so good with some other people. Also, depending upon your own moods and aura and other mystical elements (which we cannot pinpoint), the effect of a particular perfume also changes with time. eg. (personal anecdotal experience) - when I am stressed, X EDP perfume (2 sprays) would completely vaporise over 3 hours, would have less intensity and less attractive; while if I am very relaxed, in bright mood, the same X EDP perfume (only 1 spray) would work all day (9 hours), would smell much much better. Contra this with the colognes or deo sprays - which tend to have only top notes. in those, you will have the acclimatization problem, both over the course of single day, and across multiple days.
  3. Perfumes are for yourself or someone who gets in very close to you (like low talking volume level or whispering even, or slow dancing!). becoming a perfume bomb is not a good idea. if you are feeling like that, then time to stop using whatever you are using, in the way you are using. Better not to wear any scent then.

Do you worry about becoming one of those people suffocating everyone else in the elevator?

Becoming?

I kid, it's a valid concern. I work from home 90% of the time, so I just spray my wrist or elbow to keep the scent from overpowering my nose. When I have to go to the office, I make sure to not overspray.

I love random effort posts like this. Thanks for putting in the time.

It was my pleasure. I had to take notes anyway, or I would've forgotten what each one of them smells like.

For all the autists here, some Friday King Crimson:

  1. The '81-'84 version actually did some music videos. Here's Heartbeat, a poppy little number that I quite like. The video is nothing special, but it's fascinating to see a music video for KC.

  2. Here's Sleepless, another great song. An even worse video, though. The best version of that song is the extended version mixed by Tony Levin, the bassist for KC.

  3. in 1982, among his KC and other work, Fripp did an album with Andy Summers from the Police called I Advance Masked. It's all guitars and guitar synths, and definitely worth a listen if you enjoy that kind of thing. The video for the title track is baffling and amazing. The deadpan looks that Summers and Fripp give each other and the camera while 6 Asian women dance around should not be missed. Although they're miming for the video, they appear to be mimicking their guitar parts closely. Fripp's crazy part starts around 2:35.

Per a YT comment, this is the story behind the video:

VG: Actually, there is a bit of a story about the first video. Robert, didn't you make a facetious remark about what the first video needed which then came to pass?

RF: Yes, what happened was I was at World Headquarters in Wimbourne. Fripp World Headquarters. I was just off on a Crim tour, an endless King Crimson tour somewhere or another. I phoned up Andy and Andy said "We have to do a video, do you got any ideas?". I said "Yes, how about half a dozen oriental dancing girls?" with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. And Andy said, "What a great idea". I went away on tour, came back, and phoned Andy up to see what was happening. And the first thing Andy said was "I've got the oriental dancing girls". Then, sure enough, I turn up in London to film the video and there they were. One complete with koto.

Reacting to this video explaining the different rationlist communities specifically on the post-rat section, which I'm most affiliated with at the moment.

Post-rationalism basically came out of a lot of more rigorous critiques of rationality and utilitarianism as systems for modeling the world. It essentially concluded that a huge part of the human experience cannot be legibly modeled, at least with our current understanding of the world, and that trying to do so leads to a ton of major failure modes.

For instance, he mentioned the repugnant conclusion earlier in the video, which is one of the major issues in utilitarianism, along with the idea of the utility monster. Those made a lot of people start questioning rationalism, including myself, along with other famous problematic thought experiments like the trolley problem, etc.

But of course, as he does mention, there is also a lot of meditation and drug use, especially psychedelics, in the post-rationalist community, and that definitely plays into people realizing that rationality and legible statistics have major limits when it comes to describing actual reality.

There is also a heavy overlap with the sort of evolutionary or vitalist strain of thought championed by Peterson and earlier Carl Jung, where the idea is that from an evolutionary perspective, religion has a lot of power because even if it is not strictly true in an objective or rational sense, it leads to more fitness and better outcomes. Therefore it is superior, even if under one frame of mind it is not strictly explainable or coherent.

Also he didn't mention us here at the Motte or the CW thread spinoffs at all. Total Motte erasure!!!

I've been enjoying the new skits from SNL UK.

The critics were (understandably) wary at first, worrying that the show would struggle to find its own identity, but it seems to have done a good job. Highlights include DadSwap, what kind of Irish is your grandad, and the British Themed Pub song.

what kind of Irish is your grandad

That was pretty good, sending to my family group chat.

Hilarious excerpt from the URL Standard:

The application/x-www-form-urlencoded format is in many ways an aberrant monstrosity, the result of many years of implementation accidents and compromises leading to a set of requirements necessary for interoperability, but in no way representing good design practices. In particular, readers are cautioned to pay close attention to the twisted details involving repeated (and in some cases nested) conversions between character encodings and byte sequences. Unfortunately, the format is in widespread use due to the prevalence of HTML forms.

  • These two lines are real list items…

  • …using HTML's "li" element.

• These two lines are fake list items…

• …using HTML's "p" element.

Which is better?

  • Notice that, if you try to select the bullets preceding the real list items, you will fail. This is because the bullets are generated by CSS, not actually in the HTML. In contrast, the fake list items have real, selectable bullet characters that were typed manually.

  • On the other hand, the fake list items do not have the proper "listitem" accessibility role, while the real list items do. In the context of Markdown on this website, this problem cannot be fixed. In the context of raw HTML, it can be fixed by adding the role manually.

  • We can also consider parallelism. Every "section" element has a selectable "h" heading element. Shouldn't a list item's bullet character serve as an analogous pseudo-heading? The fake list items can satisfy this criterion if typed in raw HTML (not if filtered through Markdown), while the real list items cannot.

Yeah, many of the older browser standards are really bad. Lots of the newer stuff at least makes some vague attempt to be based on a semi-coherent theoretical model -- eg, the "new" CSS layout models like flex and grid are vastly superior to the older ones. But because browser standards are kind of like religious texts and are almost never deprecated, you end up in this wonky situation where you have to override the defaults on everything to get sane behavior because the default is to be compatible with whatever monstrosity some random guy came up with one afternoon in 1996. It also puts you in this horrible situation where all the low-entropy vocabulary is taken by the old, bad ideas, so doing the wrong thing is super convenient and easy, and doing the right thing is some arcane incantation that nobody can remember, e.g., the infamous "How do you center a div? Not with <center>!"

If you had a time machine, what would be your pettiest reason to use it?

I would get F.R. Hassler to adjust the US customary weights and measures so that an inch is exactly 25mm, a pound is exactly 480g and a pint is exactly 480ml. The pound would be the largest adjustment, but the US can afford to have the bigliest pound and no distinction between dry and fluid ounces.

The Bauhaus movement/cult will receive a brutal albeit mysterious end.

...I'm not sure that qualifies as 'petty'.

That messenger from Marathon dies way before Athens.

Well now we're all going to have to run 50ks since that's the next round number.

Build the Great Pyramid of Giza about four meters North, so it encodes the speed of light properly.

I would go forward in time to learn about the ultimate outcomes of ongoing geopolitical events and then use that knowledge to continually be 100% correct about everything during geopolitical debates on this niche forum I post on anonymously.

Whenever someone makes a bold but correct prediction, I'd sarcastically counter with an even bolder, even more correct prediction.

"Oh, you think the Supreme Court will overturn Roe? What's next? Trump will get re-elected and launch a one-day invasion of Venezuela to capture Nicolás Maduro?"

To throw off suspicion, you could even get things wrong from time to time.

"It's not like Europe is going to be holding military exercises in Greenland out of fear of the United States, or something."

"It's not like Europe is going to be holding military exercises in Greenland out of fear of the United States, or something."

cough.

thatsthejoke.jpg

I’d go back to when I was a child and steal the red Jolly Rancher instead of the green one from the candy store.

I'd probably shoot the guys behind the UK weights and measures act who left us with a divergence in the UK vs US fluid ounce and who retardedly redefined a gallon as 160 fl oz instead of 128.

On the topic, I'd skip the flipflopping and get us the grave instead of the "kilo"gram.

Pettiest?

I would sleep in every day, then go back in time just far enough to get to work on time.

I'd go back in time to pre Disney acquisition of Star wars with all the scripts of the worst Disney era star wars movies.

I'd do something to try and stop them from getting made. I don't know enough about movie script copyright to know the exact details. Or maybe I just mail them to George Lucas.

I don't know enough about movie script copyright to know the exact details.

Given a time machine, you can just plop proof of the existence of the work before Disney created it and claim it (perhaps pseudonymously) as your own. Bonus points for doing it in the most embarrassing way possible: "it has come to light that Disney plagiarized the script for The Force Awakens from a 1992 Usenet post of the same title to alt.stories.starwars, which got one reply to the tune of 'lolz that's some terrible fanfic, man' at the time."

I would get Antonin Dvorak to fix the musical equivalent of sudden erectile dysfunction in Symphony 9, Movement 4 by patching the main theme with the solo from Iron Maiden’s “Fear of the Dark.”

There's an Irish comedian called Shane Clifford who said that, if he could go back in time and kill one person, he wouldn't go for the obvious choice (Adolf Hitler) but rather a left-field choice: Leonard Cohen. Now, Clifford is a great admirer of Leonard Cohen, and loves his music, but if Clifford went back in time and smothered Cohen in his cradle, at least he'd never have to listen to a young busker butchering "Hallelujah" every time he walks down a pedestrianised street in the city centre.

Following the same reasoning, I think I might kill Dolores O'Riordan, lead singer of the Cranberries. A song she wrote for the band, "Zombie", was recently voted the greatest Irish song of all time, beating out such indisputable, timeless classics as "With or Without You" and "One" by U2, "The Boys are Back in Town" and "Dancing in the Moonlight" by Thin Lizzy, "Brown-Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison, "Fairytale of New York" by the Pogues among countless others. You simply cannot fathom how much I despise "Zombie", nor how omnipresent it is among buskers or acoustic guitar dickheads in tourist-trap bars. The song sounds like a fifteen-year-old who got a guitar and a Boss DS-1 for Christmas and, after a month's practising, attempted to write a grunge song. There's no groove to speak of, the lead guitar tone is shockingly thin and tinny for what I can only assume was a very expensive album to record, and O'Riordan's staccato vocal tics (grating at the best of times) reach their nadir in the chorus. Not only is it not the greatest Irish song ever, it's not even the greatest song by the Cranberries: "Dreams", for one, is obviously superior.

Not only is it not the greatest Irish song ever, it's not even the greatest song by the Cranberries: "Dreams", for one, is obviously superior.

Zombie doesn't even sound like other Cranberries songs and is a clear outlier.

he'd never have to listen to a young busker butchering "Hallelujah"

Bonus I'd never have to listen to Cohen rhyming hallelujah with do ya, knew ya, or fool ya. Allure? Endure? Impure? Are these rhymes too obscure? Utter manure.

I suppose furnishing him with a rhyming dictionary would curtail the need to actually kill him, so I guess I'll choose that as my pettiest timeline tweak.

In front of both of my in-laws
I will categorize your flaws
And make you call me only Melvin Dewey

"Hallelujah? I barely knew ya!"

First of all, you can't prevent the creation of Zombie because then Bad Wolves wouldn't have been able to cover it in 2018, a cover which is better than the original. And also, if you killed Dolores O'Riordan, we wouldn't have Linger, and I can't abide such an outcome.

Bad Wolves wouldn't have been able to cover it in 2018, a cover which is better than the original

Sounds like Disturbed (derogatory)

we wouldn't have Linger

Fine, I'll kill her after the first album comes out but before the second album.

Very well, I can accept that compromise. Kill away, my good man.

I would put a cornucopia on the fruit of the loom logo and never speak of it again.

You did -- I removed it right after you left.

The ole temporal pincer gets another one.

@ToaKraka, you're the resident civil engineering autist enthusiast, I need your help.

There used to be a page on Wikipedia about converting a typical American square street grid into a grid that requires no traffic lights.

Basically, you convert streets running east-west into alternating one-way streets and partially block off streets running north-south so that the grid looks like a brick wall (and you swap the lanes on half of them). The final result is a lot of T-intersections without dangerous left turns.

However, I cannot find a single trace of this on Wikipedia any more, and LLMs have failed to come up with a searchable name for this grid. You are my only hope.

Is this the kind of system you mean?

There are also couplets

Is this the kind of system you mean?

I can't see the picture because Imgur is being an ass about VPNs, but from the description it sounds like it. I don't know if it features drive-on-left streets, but I don't remember if they were a feature of the original design or something I hallucinated.

Non-Imgur link

This sounds like the "intersection median island" or "forced-turn island" traffic-calming measure.

It wasn't a traffic-calming measure, the goal was to increase the average speed by eliminating red light stops.

I guess there's also the RCUT (restricted-crossing U-turn or reduced-conflict U-turn) intersection.

  • FHWA: 1 2

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