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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   2375 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 24, 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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Ah, the dreaded TV license mail finally showed up at my doorstep. Oi, you gotta license for that telly?

If someone knows a good way to tell them to go fuck themselves, please let me know. The closest thing I have to a TV is on a desk, being used as a ridiculously oversized monitor for my PC. My flatmate is busy playing retro games on some CRT setup and he is definitely not the kind to hook that chonker up to BBC iPlayer.

Just ignore the mails. You can go online and state that you don't need a licence, but it's easier to just do nothing, and ignore any attempts at contacting you. The enforcement group has zero power and it's basically impossible for them to ever demonstrate you have watched the BBC unless you literally let them in your house while you're watching it.

I asked around and that's the general consensus. I suppose I pity them too much to pretend to be legally blind and claim that the TV is a just a modern painting. Thanks!

… A TV license? Like a license to own a flat panel in your living room? What kind of place do you live in dude?

A license to watch (and fund) public-funded broadcasts. The idea was that the BBC would get its money directly from the people and not from the government, thus remaining truly independent.

BBC hasn’t been independent for a very long time.

I'm surprised you know this, but didn't know about the TV license.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

(Yes I know about broadcasting licenses.)

Meghan Trainor looked better before she lost weight.

I disagree, although even now I wouldn't really say I find her particularly attractive.

I disagree, but my taste is heavily skewed towards ectomorphs and mesomorphs.

This makes sense seeing as, despite her focusing a lot on body positivity activism, she was, like her entire set, selected for fame on the basis of being attractive to begin with. I always assumed her body positivity activism that presented her as oppressed for being overweight was mostly countersignaling, but I guess she must have been genuinely insecure about it.

This really doesn't work, in any case, as an anti-Ozempic argument. The average person getting Ozempic is not Meghan Trainor, or even close.

Has anyone here ever played around with training their own language model from scratch? I've been led to believe that it's achievable at only minor expense as long as you don't need your creation to be smart or useful. I've been toying with the idea of at some point conjuring some sort of idiot cartoon character as a pet and then giving it memory and a ton of scaffolding to make it periodically wake up and do things.

The thing is, I don't just want an open source model roleplaying as Homer Simpson (or whatever), I want it thinking nothing but Homer thoughts from the ground up. Honestly some enterprising nerd should start selling them like Pokemon or something. Dopey little models that run locally, use a ton of scripting to act as "alive" as possible, maybe a visual avatar, but no expectation that they'll be able to answer trivia questions or write code.

I don't just want an open source model roleplaying as Homer Simpson (or whatever), I want it thinking nothing but Homer thoughts from the ground up.

The main problem for something like that will training data. You say "at only minor expense", which means you're considering renting GPUs (as opposed to just training on a gaming PC)? The most common tutorials on that scale use many hundreds of millions of tokens of training data (training on TinyStories (500M tokens) and Wikipedia English (4B tokens) is common, books3 (100B tokens) is sometimes used for more ambitious and capable toy models).

And even if you just take a small open source model (or your own toy model trained on TinyStories) and do some post-training fine tuning, you'll still need millions of tokens of training data. I'm not sure Homer had enough lines across the almost 40 seasons to even get this far.

Alas you're right, and it's not like I can afford to spend tens of thousands having ChatGPT Homerize Wikipedia for me. At least this is one of those ideas that will get easier the longer I procrastinate.

And even if you just take a small open source model (or your own toy model trained on TinyStories) and do some post-training fine tuning, you'll still need millions of tokens of training data.

This sounds much more manageable, I'll keep it in mind if I ever start planning to take a real poke at this, thanks.

I had a shopkeeper in London try to decline a purchase because I paid with a "Scottish" £10 note. Motherfucker, I pointed out that unless the SNP had really switched up their game while I was on vacation, it's still the same country. I had to recruit a few other people in the queue to get him to budge, though I suspect that their support was less to do with patriotism for Great Britain than a desire to get me out of the way so they could make their purchases and catch their train.

Up till this point, I had thought that people being daft about Scottish bank notes was more of a meme, but alas. There's always a bigger fool.

You just reminded me of how people in Northern Ireland would go and exchange their Northern Irish sterling for 'English money' before travelling. Even when I was younger I had relatives giving me specifically English notes as a gift when they heard I was going to England.

Tell’em you’ll pay with Bison dollars and wooden nickels next time.

The only time I've ever had Scottish money declined was on holiday in Cornwall. I had to walk down the road to a cash machine to get Bank of England notes before we could pay, since their cash machines were down.

My wife's family are all unionists, but I've never seen her so full of Braveheartian fury. Apparently all it took for her to pull out the blue facepaint was getting turned away for using bank notes with otters on them.

Do you often use cash? I hardly ever do nowadays. I'm thinking I really ought to swap my big leather wallet for something more compact, the only thing in there that's really of any use to me is my driver's license.

I don't use cash, but my wallet is still enormously useful. It's just that it's now a way to hold my credit cards, driver's license, and insurance ID cards rather than something which holds all my cash.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve used cash apart from going to the laundromat or something. A lot of people I know now store it on a clip or wallet slots made in their phone case. I’ve always been very skeptical of them. It just seems to exposed and I’d be wary of losing it. My most important cards like SSC, etc., I keep in storage, never in my wallet. Only the most basic stuff and also a Tile tracking card in case I ever lose it.

I'm a big believer in building redundancy into a system and don't like the idea of my entire life being in my phone/phone case. I pay for everything with Google Pay on my phone, but still carry my physical debit card with me in case I lose my phone or it dies. But my wallet now seems impractically large compared to the size of the contents within it I actually use.

Not if I can help it, but my bank "helpfully" replaced my card while I wasn't in the country, which meant I lacked both a physical card or a way to get it to work with contactless payments.

"That's legal tender!"

Man I was totally thinking of something else.

What I was ready to do was dubiously legal and definitely not tender.

Bahaha, I immediately thought of this clip.

So, I had an interesting problem at work, that revealed something fascinating I think.

I have to beat around the bush some, so bear with me. We're using a popular framework for our database layer. We went to do things to this database that theoretically the database is capable of, but the framework doesn't support. Sad face. All the web searches, and associated AI formulated answers confirm, it's not possible do said thing in said framework.

Except it is. The Framework is open source. You can just read the source code. Turns out you can ask for the handle to the underlying interop pointer, and it'll just give it to you. You don't even have to do weird fucky things like dig around in private data space. It's a public API call to just get the interop pointer. The driver it's calling is open source too, and you can just call the function you want on the interop pointer it gives you, and it just works. It's fine. If it's confusing, the test cases for the driver in it's github even shows you exactly how to do it, multiple ways. Reading unit tests are awesome for stuff like that. This is the furthest thing from impossible. It's practically spelled out for you with examples if you just read the fucking code.

So, why does AI all think it's impossible? Because as of 3 years ago, this functionality wasn't exposed by the driver. So all the stack exchange questions about this correctly stated that as of 3+ years ago, this was impossible. LLMs got trained on stack exchange (supposedly), and now stack exchange is a dead site. The LLMs (supposedly) killed off the source of knowledge they were being trained on, and now they can't learn that a few years later this task is not just possible, but trivially easy in like, 6 lines of code. Totally within the remit of the typical "how do I do thing" programming question.

why does AI all think it's impossible?

My immediate answer would be because AI does not think. It just rearranges known data. And known data says these things are not done, just as you noted. Moreover, somewhere in the RLHF phase they probably beat the tendency to seek unapproved shortcuts out from it, otherwise it'd advice you to rob a bank when asked how to get money easily. So it'd be trained to pretend things that are not allowed do not exist. So I am not surprised - and I have been in this situation many times, btw.

One of the reasons why I am not worried yet about being replaced by LLMs. Sure, they can generate code now. But generating code is the boringest part of the work. Figuring out which code to generate is the trick. Once you figure out what needs to be done - I am just fine letting the LLM to arrange the bits properly.

Just point it at the source code or github? Sometimes I get issues where it doesn't know what the right conventions are for calling its own API or recently released APIs, since that obviously comes after its training and I say 'go check it up' and then it does that.

Ideally it should do this by default, true.

But why? Within 30 minutes of finding the code, I found my answer. Within 10 minutes of dicking around in a sample project, I had my proof of concept. How would an LLM have improved on that? I don't need the LLMs validation or approval.

I deal with this shit all the time. My day job involves maintaining a very old application that has seen continuous upgrades and maintenance over a two decade timeline, but some vestigial bits haven't been touched since the application's inception due to manpower constraints. We all assumed ai would help us deal with the backlog of "not quite important enough to move forward to the top of the stack" items that cause a drag on developer productivity, but always get sidelined by more pressing concerns.

Unfortunately, our codebase takes every AI product we've tried and sends it spiraling down a garden path of schizophrenic recursion.

Before I continue, let me get the usual reflexive responses out of the way:

  • We have tried multiple times, with multiple LLMs, including whatever the zeitgeist considered to the SotA at the time. No, I am not going to go back and retest because Opus-4.8-thinking-xhigh-ultra-planner-with-cheese is truly a revolutionary improvement.
  • If you claim we are Prompting It Wrong, I will personally figure out how to send you to at least four of the eighteen Chinese hells. Seven different people on my team have tried, all with varying backgrounds and writing styles. Two of us are published authors. One is literally a technical writer who writes concise, complete, and detailed prose for a living.
  • No, I'm not going to take a two million line, twenty year old application that runs in regulated environments and rewrite it in Go-lang, even if Claude is really good at it.

The problem is that one single fix or feature can easily involve traveling through over a decade of code-strata, and the LLMs invariably over index on the idioms that they encounter first. The end result is that even a detailed plan on how to replace a deprecated method from a library with a documented replacement tends to make it imagine that it has to do things it doesn't.

I'm going to be vague here, but I'm going to share a personal story from work.

Due to our support contracts, we occasionally have to release security patches for very old releases of our product. We recently had an issue where one of our very old releases was using library $FOO on version N. Version N of $FOO had a very hard to exploit but potentially real security issue that could cause an information disclosure. Normally we'd just tell people to upgrade, but one of our clients operates in a regulated environment and can't do a major upgrade in less than 12 months for anything short of a nuclear bomb going off. Given that, we'd normally upgrade the library and move on with our lives. However $FOO has officially EOLed version N, so no more updates.

We had to do a manual mitigation, and I'm the guy who catches that kind of work, so I got started. A co-worker said "hey, this is high priority, and I think I can get it done in 15 minutes if I use AI". Since it was high priority, the boss told us both to get to work and whatever made it through all our automated tests and reviews first would go in.

I did my fix by integrating with some functionality provided by $FOO that allowed me to catch invalid data before it made it to the offending code. I missed an edge case that got caught by the automated tests, but either way, the PR landed in the codebase with half an hour to spare before the end of the day.

I decided to see where my coworker was, and the answer was "nowhere close to a working solution ". I could only see his draft PRs and not the prompts, but it looked like the LLM tried two different approaches and shit the bed both times. The first time, it looks like he/the LLM tried to catch invalid data at every single entry point into the system - the top of the funnel, rather than the bottom. The problem is, we have thousands of entry points. The code got completely out of control and eventually the LLM started over fitting and trying to apply the mitigation to things that didn't even make sense. Thr second approach involved manipulating JVM bytecode to try and hot-patch the offending class. That didn't even compile, but it looks suspiciously like an old stack overflow post about a different problem with the library.

The other guy is pretty sharp, and in some areas I think he's genuinely more talented than I am. But looking at the work he did that day, you'd assume he was fresh out of a boot camp and in way over his head.

I'm not really sure what to make of it.

Due to our support contracts, we occasionally have to release security patches for very old releases of our product.

How old? Ten years? Twenty?

I think we recently had to have a stern-yet-loving talk with a customer who was still resisting an upgrade after eleven years.

I am happy to work at a place that has a firm policy of "if your version is more than 2 years old, we love you but if you want any fixes or assistance you're going to need to upgrade. We will help you if you want but we're not gonna dig up a prehistoric version of code and try to figure out what's going on there".

The amount of money they pay for the privilege is eye-watering, so it works out.

Too many vendors I have worked with don't have a consistent support policy. Too often it's "we only support the latest version" coupled with "but if your CTO threatens us enough, we'll agree to backport any fix". I think Oracle, of all companies, had the best one, with clearly defined LTS versions, regular, extended and premium support windows, all getting progressively more expensive, of course.

Maybe if you get part of that money. I am paid pretty much the same anyway (at least while I'm employed), whether I do fun new things or dig up old smelly garbage, so I prefer the former. If my salary substantially depended on it, I probably would think differently.

Reminds me when I was in communication with customer support in regards to a software suite with a question of 'Can I do this thing?' and the reply being 'You cannot.'

...the very next day, I figured out how to do said thing in said system.

I guess LLMs have advanced to the point they include artificial stupidity and ignorance, as well.

Finally caught a flight with Starlink access. Ah, this is the fucking future, I could get used to this. Watching QHD YouTube? Using a VPN to get around the annoying as hell content restrictions? Good times. Best flight I've ever been on, even if I'm traveling in cattle class.

Using a VPN to get around the annoying as hell content restrictions? Good times.

Does Starlink block access to The Motte otherwise?

I don't think so, and I suspect any content filters are put in place by the airline.

Ordered Chinese food tonight and then watched Kung Fu Panda with my 5 year old and wife. The older 7 year old still doesn't like movies, hates any kind of tension building or "scary" parts as she calls them. Solid movie. Any other kid+family movies that still kick but?

The Lion King

and here I was hoping you'd post the better version. i cry evrytim

WALL-E unless they need something fast-paced, which it isn't.

Man, I want Chinese food now. Sounds delicious.

Avatar the Last Airbender, while a show, is awesome. Another great kids movie is the Pokemon Movie with Mewtoo, the first one I believe.

I instantly read your first sentence as “… and then watched Kung Fu Panda with my 5 year old wife…”

Morning’s been rough.

How about Paddington?

George of the Jungle. It even has a part where the narrator pauses to reassure the audience that everyone is all right.

Cars? Is the nightmare sequence too scary?

I remember refusing to show my sons Cars because of the frenetic pace of the editing. It seemed like a film designed to induce ADHD.

If the seven year old shows any interest in athleticism, there are a ton of great old sports movies that may be more tolerable. The Mighty Ducks trilogy, Sandlot, Rookie of the Year, Little Big League.

In this house, we watch Remember the Titans on loop.

Shaolin Soccer was also a big hit with my kids, and it's so goofy that it might slip through the scariness.

The dog from Sandlot still gives me nightmares. It may or may not be why I have such visceral disgust for dog slobber to this day.

Disney Renaissance animated movies, in particular Aladdin, The Lion King and Mulan.

I like The Rescuers Down Under and Beauty and the Beast. The three you name aren't bad, but they're a bit pop-y/meme-y, in the Shrek vibe sense, whereas these two are a bit more classic flavour.

The Lion King? No scary, tension-building parts? Seriously?

Edit: wait, there are two kids, I see

Children's movies without any tension building or scary parts barely exist. Ones that "kick butt" and don't have tension I genuinely don't think exist.

And honestly, there's probably one of the easiest cases to argue for it being good for a kid's development to make them face their fears in the form of gentle tension building in family movies while surrounded by their family for support. It's hardly "losing" their kids in the forest with a compass and a knife.

How To Train Your Dragon 1, The Iron Giant (but sounds like your 7 year old would hate this), all Pixar movies through Toy Story 3, Wreck-It Ralph 1, Big Hero 6

After reading a headline, I thought that mainstream media had finally put out some timely reporting on AI. But no. They were reporting about Claude Mythos two weeks after it was publicized, and hadn't even noticed Opus 4.7 was released five days before they published it.

Those of you who dabble in writing fiction, how do you keep your characters from derailing your plot? Or is just the sign that the original plot sucked?

I've given up on planning my stories beyond the starting circumstances. My best ideas come to me while I'm in the midst of writing. Potentialities that I can spot, take notes on, sometimes even act on before they flutter away from my brain each night while I sleep. The key is to just dedicate unbroken blocks of time, I've found, and to think about projects frequently. As far as hardcoded outlines go, those have never worked for me. My mind goes blank when I try to enact them.

I usually figure out how the novel ends when I've written about 60% of it. If you wanted to write a particular plot, then you need to take pains from the outset to write the sort of characters that support it. Fiction is an art of fitting together details. That's all it is, when it comes down to it, details that create the texture of a world a reader can believe. You will never get everything to fit perfectly, but the best stories are those where the character tensions and plot holes are so subtle as to be unnoticeable. More actionably, you'd be surprised how easily you can move characters by leveraging random chance in a believable way. Need an idiot ball? He was drinking hard that night. Need to force aggression? Bad day, foul mood, poor choices. A war is fated to occur but both parties are reasonable? Add an unreasonable subordinate.

Sometimes it's worth following where the characters go. That's easiest when it's a detour - often a big scene just needs a different setup, or to happen in a different order, or have just one character out of the room - but sometimes it means changing the crux of the story. It doesn't always make it better, and I have seen it make the work much less coherent, but it's worth at least considering.

That said, if this is for the one-handed novelette or some major climactic scene, though, that may not be what you're looking for. You don't want to switch out a big action, drama, or sex scene just because your characters are getting cold feet or wouldn't be that adventurous.

... but I'd point out that very few people are perfectly attached to their principles and character. Throw temptation: would they do it for money, or pussy (or dick), or status? Throw time pressure: would they do it because someone threw a grenade into the room and they reacted instinctively, or because they only had a half-second to say no? Throw their judgement into question: would they do it if drunk as a skunk, or enraged to the breaking point, or half-asleep, or bleeding? Throw their certainty in question: have their peers judge them for their principles, or the villain tell them persuasively why their principles don't work, or have a valued ally suffer from their unflinching behavior earlier.

Alternatively, it can be a good reason to explore why this one out-of-character moment exists. Why is your brave warrior is fleeing like a coward can make a whole movie. That's one of the more dangerous ones, because it can take over or change the themes of a work heavily if the reason is heavy, even if it has no impact on the plot, but it can be all the more valuable for it.

climactic scene

I see what you did there.

And thanks for the advice, I really appreciate it. It's a one-handed novella already, btw, sitting at 24411 words right now with at least eight more scenes left.

That's the secret.

You don't.

Seriously, some of the best moments when writing has occurred when some character promptly does something that makes perfect sense in-character, but utterly derails my plans.

Then again, I suppose if you're an actual professional, this might be more than a bit annoying. ... Conversely, I know of atleast one writer that wrote of his kitchy slop just to get it on paper and out of the way with no intent on publishing only to have his fans go 'I really want to see!' and turned it into a multi-novel series. So...

Writers are sometimes broken into two categories. Architects plan everything in advance, and then go fill in the outline. Brandon Sanderson is an architect. IIRC, his writing process is something like "set up the outline with all story beats, then a more detailed outline, then fill it in with descriptions, then produce a beta manuscript, then a real manuscript, then five editing passes".

The other category is Gardeners, who plant a seed and just see where the story takes them. GRRM is a gardener, and there are a thousand essays comparing him with Brando Sando on this regard.

For your case, it might not be that the plot "sucked", as that the characters weren't quite right for it. You probably have to alter one or the other to make it fit right. This is where the "kill your darlings" advice comes in. Sometimes hard choices have to be made, but you can always recycle anything you cut.

My characters derailed the plot.

I didn't have a plot to derail.

Mostly i wrote situations and starting settings and only had a vague sense of where things might go in a chapter or two. I would lean towards interesting stuff happening.

This was partly a result of my experience being a dungeon master. The people I played with would always derail whatever I had planned. So I learned to only prepare for the session I was hosting and no further.

I've tried to write out extended outlines and plans for stories. But I always got bored writing those stories, since I knew what was going to happen it stripped me of my main motivation to write more.

I was going to answer from my experience, writing homework essays in high school since I bullshat practically every one I ever wrote, and it was highly fictional.

How many people here actually write genuine fiction?

I think we've got at least 3 or 4.

I try.

I'm not a writer, but I imagine if that happens you either go back and rewrite the character to have a personality that makes the plot work, or you rewrite the plot to accommodate the personalities of the characters, right?

But sometimes I guess it might mean that the original plot was just irrational.

Is everyone unemployed these days? 2pm on a wednesday and gym, grocery store, cafes, fast food joints at the local plaza are full. There's even a small line at crumbl. I don't think it's ever been like this in my area

A lot of people, myself included, who work traditional office jobs have a lot of flexibility when we have to be at the office, even if we're technically 100% in-person. I'm sure the government and some large globocorporations have detailed sign-in procedures, but no one at any non-governmental office I've ever worked at paid much attention to when you were coming and going. My father, who punched a clock his whole life, never understood how cavalier I could be about what time I got to the office, since being 5 or 10 or even an hour late never mattered much so long as I got my work done. Same thing with lunch breaks—I could and still can disappear for half the afternoon without anyone realizing I'm gone.

There are also a lot of people who just work odd hours. Industrial work, retail, and healthcare are the most notorious for this, but my neighbor, for instance, in a floor manager at a casino and works 3am to 11am, so she's home during the afternoon every day, and her days off are Wednesday and Thursday. A friend of mine who drives a tow truck for PennDOT works 4 tens followed by two days off, so his "weekends" are always shifting. Another friend who is a stationary engineer works a similarly goofy schedule. A friend of mine who does power plant outage work only works in the spring and fall, but racks up enough overtime to cover his expenses for the whole year. Teachers don't work much over the summer and have random days off. I have several friends who work for paving companies and are effectively off all winter. The idea that everyone besides young people, retirees, housewives, and the unemployed is stuck at work all day during the week is an overgeneralization.

Lowest non-COVID workforce participation rate in my lifetime, but that just means 62% down from a peak of 67%. Optimistically I'll guess there's just more and more jobs with flexible hours. If the nature of the work allows for it, a smart boss will realize that if you like to eat lunch at 2 that just means you'll be able to get back with less delay and there'll be someone around to handle any emergencies at noon.

Boomers aren't working - check prime age lfpr: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

Nearly at an all time high, and higher than pre covid.

God I wish that were me. Being funemployed that is, not being in line at a cookie dealer.

The US unemployment rate is about 4.3%, well within the target range.

The official unemployment figures are always heavily massaged. Look at workforce participation too.

It more misinterpreted than massaged - unemployment tracks people who are currently looking for work (at least notionally) but haven't found it yet. By definition - unlike, as you correctly noted, workforce participation numbers - they do not include those who, for any reason, are not looking. There are actually 6 official measures of labor utilization: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm and plenty of unofficial ones.

It's been like this ever since Covid. Between remote work and unemployment and who knows what else, the traffic never abates. If I take time off work to run errands, it's an infinite sea of people clogging everything (and I doubt they have also all taken the day off).

Has anyone found LLM performance to actually improve with memory on? At least on ChatGPT, I find it overfits pretty severely to my previous chats and noticeably increases the rate of hallucination. For example, if I asked it to solve a geometry question in a previous chat, then ask it the exact same structure of question but with different parameters, it will sometimes give an incorrect answer that seems to have been poisoned by the output of the previous chat.

I keep going back and forth on how powerful I think these models are. There are moments where I am impressed by a seemingly new thought that it had to have extrapolated or reasoned out for itself as it's unlikely anyone would write this out (usually some combination of too niche and too obvious). Yet at some point, every time this would happen I started to ask it for a source and sure enough it links to a page where someone at some point did indeed spell it out explicitly on the internet. Each new model gives outputs that take me longer to find cracks, but the cracks are always there, and they are generally cracks of the same type as the example above - that is, the kind suggestive of a lack of world model and simple stochastic interpolation of existing texts. I especially get the feeling that their understanding of the relations between objects in 3D space is rather poor. This apparent asymptotic improvement makes me think that what's needed is a rather drastic change in the fundamental structure of LLMs. But I'm just a layman, so interested to hear others' thoughts and experiences.

Has anyone found LLM performance to actually improve with memory on?

I turned this off within 5 minutes of the feature releasing, and haven't turned it on since. Your input context is precious, and it's already so full of system prompt-slop and the like

I keep going back and forth on how powerful I think these models are

They're both. They are both really powerful and really fucking stupid.

I especially get the feeling that their understanding of the relations between objects in 3D space is rather poor.

Yeah they are basically the platonically perfect wordcells. You can get around it with .skills. Render the results to an image and give it the image. Or have a tool that will check details about the 3d space.

In your experience, is their ability to understand spatial relationships from a 2D image any better? My limited experience trying to get it to edit photos suggests not.

So I've been mostly working on Minecraft stuff, and it can handle small 2d grids. A full image is going to get you into trouble. I don't really have my head around how the llm image analysis works, it's quite complex.

Gemini with memory on seems to make reasonable guesses about the reasons why I ask a question, which so far is only a little useful for me, but which could possibly make it a better source of answers than I often am for some of the sorts of XY-Problem questions I sometimes get from others.

I recently finished the game Esoteric Ebb and think it is fantastic. For those unfamiliar, think Disco Elysium meets Dungeons and Dragons meets competence. It is the game that Disco Elysium was meant to be.

You play as an Arcane Cleric (meaning you can cast every type of spell, not just divine) sent by your order to investigate a Tea Shop explosion in the city of Tolstad. You’re there to investigate the explosion and bring any possible perpetrators to justice, and also talk about politics with everyone, because Tolstad is about to have their first ever Democratic Election in five days! Democracy, in my fantasy setting? Well yes, the people are intrigued by this new concept, having previously been ruled by Wizard Kings in the days of old, and then by aristocrats after magic began to weaken and the Wizard Kings lost their power. But now it’s time to have an election, and everyone has a say on how they want the new government to be run, including your brain and its six aspects.

Much like Disco Elysium, the actual gameplay consists of you talking to people and looking at objects, and doing skill checks which you pass or fail based on a die roll and modifiers. Oh and you might be crazy because your brain is constantly babbling at you with different perspectives, personified by your six main stats. Each has their own personality, and they argue with each other frequently. Some of what they talk about is personality stuff, a lot of it is politics. Coming from a Swedish indie developer, I think they did a very good job of giving a good and balanced perspective on most of the issues by using this mechanic. Each attribute takes on a different perspective and steelmans that perspective, while the others argue against it in your mind, and you get to choose which (if any) you want to favor. Simultaneously, factions in the actual world represent these ideas and you can choose to favor them or not during quests.

-Your Strength wants you to support the Nationalists, who believe humans are superior to other races like Dwarves or Goblins. It also wants you to act like a MAN and put women in their place.

-Your Constitution is obnoxiously apolitical, thinking you’re above all this politics stuff and should focus on things that matter like eating food and enjoying yourself. Or something, I had a low Constitution score and didn’t make many choices that lined up with this, so I didn’t hear from it as much and didn't get as good of an understanding of its nuances.

-Your Dexterity wants you to support the free trade capitalist party. Improve society by increasing material wealth for everyone, but especially yourself. Also steal everything. Greed is good.

-Your Intelligence thinks that the Wizard Kings were right, things were better back when they were in charge. Instead of having constant political in-fighting, have one person in charge who can do things in a coherent and unified way, and use their arcane powers to protect and feed the masses. You literally have spells that can summon food out of thin air. Not only this, but YOU should be this wizard king. Despite being a newcomer to this city and a bit of a bumbling fool, and there not actually being a proper Arcanist party in the election, and you having no realistic chance of winning, you can (and I did) go around insisting that everyone ought to vote for you as a write in.

-Your Wisdom wants you to support the socialists. Empower the oppressed minorities, bring down the patriarchy. Almost typical leftism, blah blah blah, though refreshingly devoid of any stuff about sexual orientation or transgenderism. They actually make a stronger case for this than you would see in real life due to the focus on real oppression. The minorities are actually different races, and have actually been near-genocided by the humans in the recent past, not hundreds of years ago.

-Your Charisma doesn’t seem to take a proper stance on politics, but mostly wants you to fit in socially and flatter the ego of whoever you happen to be talking to at the moment. A social chameleon. It’s less concerned with having principles and trying to use them to build a better society, and more concerned about making sure you ally yourself with the winning side. Or every side.

I want to give props to the developer for trying to balance all of these and make all of them display both their good sides and their bad sides, not just having some be obviously good and some be obviously evil and horrible. I’m pretty sure they are left-leaning, as they seem to be overly generous to the socialists by making them actually oppressed and making their primary flaw be “unrealistic idealism that won’t be strong enough to enact the change they desire” rather than “likely to starve everyone” or “soft on crime” or other flaws that leftism has. And in this world the Wizard Kings don’t even have a party because they objectively failed in the past. But he’s clearly trying to keep things balanced, and I appreciate it.

Beyond all this, it captures my favorite feature of (the first half of) Disco Elysium, in that you are (or at least can choose to be) a bumbling idiot and it’s hilarious. I went all in on Dexterity, Intelligence, and Charisma, which ought to make me intelligent and socially competent, but it mostly just let me get away with my bumbling idiocy, which I played into on purpose. I walked into a secret socialist printing press and insulted everyone there before proceeding to help them with their quest, I pickpocketed most people (especially after getting a perk that gave me advantage on pickpocket rolls), and even had someone get mildly annoyed after they attempted to reward me with an item for helping them only to notice that I had already taken it from them. And I flirted with pretty much every female in the game, including a Sphinx and an Angel. I cannot overstate how good the writing is. Your character has all sorts of hangups about women (at least mine did, I’m not sure how much this is just because my Strength was a dump stat), and sufficient embarrassment causes damage. My favorite moment in the game was when I decided to flirt with an Orc lady and rolled really poorly (also it was a really difficult check because she had no reason to like me yet and I just started flirting for no reason). My character stammers out “D…D….DATE!” That’s it. He just yells the word date out of nowhere and all of my internal voices start freaking out about what a failure I am and I took 1d8 damage out of sheer embarrassment. Which rolled an 8, taking out half of my 16 health (since Constitution was another dump stat). Luckily as a Cleric, I can just cast a healing spell and move on, though at some cost to my limited reserves. You're also very incompetent during combat since you can't equip a real weapon, and most of my time was spent dodging with my high dexterity and desperately healing myself while my companions did the real fighting. Again, I'm not sure how much of this was me making Strength and Constitution dump stats, but I very much appreciated the consistency of the proud but bumbling fool.

And UNLIKE Disco Elysium, it doesn’t rug pull and punish you for this. I never finished Disco Elysium because halfway through the game there’s a big Event and because I was having fun goofing off and not taking it seriously, bad things happened and everything was awful and things turned from comedic to depressing real fast. Realistic? Sure. Fun? No. Meanwhile, I played Esoteric Ebb as an arrogant kleptomaniac wannabe wizard king (who’s still trying in their own sort of way) the whole way through and things turned out great. Maybe I just got lucky, or maybe the game just gave me more agency. There were some darker dialogue choices I could have made if I wanted to be evil, but unlike Disco Elysium it never punished me for being a goof.

I didn’t mean to write so much, this has turned into a whole game review at this point. But it’s fantastic. It’s barely an actual “game”, in that you mostly read text and wander around point and click mysterying. Even combat is reduced to unique scenarios in which things are attacking you and you have to click on predetermined options for how to handle that scenario. There’s a whole array of spells you can unlock and cast, most of which do nothing most of the time but sometimes offer up unique opportunities or just big heals to recover from failed checks. Also it’s not especially difficult, since there are a large array of healing items, multiple ways to solve most objectives (or just a lot of optional objectives), items you can use to re-attempt many checks, and if you really need to you can savescum failed rolls when re-attempts aren’t an option. I really like how most quests or even actions within quests are optional but completing them unlocks perks and bonuses to future stuff. Supposedly there’s a time limit, but I finished at the very beginning of the 5th day instead of the end, and people on the internet say that you can actually keep doing stuff even if you go over time and then at the end it rewinds the clock to the time when the game is supposed to end. So quite forgiving. But I found it to be an interesting and compelling narrative, and thought it was worth exemplifying as a game that is very much about politics, but fair and nuanced in its handling of it instead of beating you over the head with it. And more importantly is just a good game. If you like dialogue heavy RPGs I recommend playing it.

I gotta try this one, thanks.

My copotype was "boring", so I didn't get the worst result at the big event, but I think DE isn't this bleak. To me, the moral of its story is "you can't save the whole world, so choose your battles to make a difference". It means both letting go of your past mistakes, because even the figurines won't win her back, and understanding that things won't always go your way even if you do your best, but you can still do something that matters, you are not defined by what you haven't achieved, but by what you have.

That's also kind of the message of Esoteric Ebb, I just think it has a more optimistic lean to it. I only played (half of) DE once, so I don't know what all the alternatives are, but the problem with DE was less me being a goof and more The only way I found to get my gun back was doing a dirty job for a scummy landlord where you extort his tenants for rent or something like that. I didn't want to do that, so I didn't get my gun back, hoping I'd eventually find an alternate way of getting it, only to get the crisis sprung on me without realizing I'd need my gun then and there. A bunch of people died and my character started hating himself for being such a failure. It became super bleak. Maybe if you're willing to compromise on your morals it turns out a lot less bleak. Or maybe I missed a clever way to get the gun some other way. I don't want to spoiler Esoteric Ebb too much in the comparison, but the dilemmas that exist in the game were not quite that bleak, and were much more honestly presented. Choose A or B, with both having tradeoffs. DE never explicitly offered me a choice "exploit the tenants or people will die", it just played out that way later.

As I understand it, you need signatures from people living in a village which would displace them, but you could forge them instead, which is implied to be caught later and so has no bad effects for them. Also, there are a minimum of two other options, one getting Ruby's gun and the other crafting a Molotov Cocktail. But looking at the trailer I think there's no question that EE is a lot more fun, for lack of a better word, than DE. The world of DE is supposed to be quite bleak, if you don't like that it's not the game for you. Always knowing all consequences is obviously convenient, but imo DE's take is not bad once in a while. Though it's not the kind of story I'd always want to play, that's true.

EE has a world which is, in my opinion, a perfect amount of bleak. Less than DE but still some. I don't want to spoil the details about why, even in this spoiler tag. But there's a whole bunch of lore about how things were in the past and why they changed and all the problems that's causing here and now. But ultimately it comes out in favor of optimism. XYZ things are bad and worse now than it was before but instead of hopelessly clinging to the past we should forge ahead and improve the world we find ourselves in and make a new future. I would really like to resurrect this discussion after you or other people have played the game, because there's some really really clever and interesting stuff at the end of the game. Hopefully me even saying that is not too much of a spoiler. I very much agree with the author's general philosophy even if I disagree with a couple of their individual ideas.

Thanks for the rec, I'll check it out for sure!

Democracy, in my fantasy setting?

Metaphor: ReFantazio intensifies.

Thanks for this, stopped reading halfway to avoid spoilers.

Sounds fun! I liked Disco Elysium (and finished it), though I admit it was a bit depressing. Even though I played it straight and one can say after the Big Event - if I understand correctly what you mean - I kind of ended up on top, but still the overall thing is pretty bleak. Intentionally so, as I understand.

Thank you for a very detailed review!

Candidates for most agonizing recent song?

I submit for your consideration Lucinda Williams’ World Gone Wrong, a shambling eulogy for the Current Moment. Naturally, it’s seeing a lot of airtime on my local radio.

While I could provide any number of objections to its lyricism or production, I’d rather take a page from Clench Racing’s lesser-known cousin: Complete the Poem. Use your skill and judgment to complete the following lines.

A lot of people getting put on the street
It’s getting harder ___
He comes home every night ___
And wonders how much longer ___

If you need a hint, imagine the most drawn-out warble possible. The relevant rhymes should jump right into your brain.

The 2026 World Cup single Lighter by some things called Jelly Roll, Cirkut and Carin Leon.

Lucinda Williams’ World Gone Wrong

I had to turn it off after less than a minute. Good job.

I wasn't ready for the AAAA rhyme scheme.

A lot of people getting put on the street
It's getting harder to stay off the street
He comes home every night past tents on his street
And wonders how much longer till he's out on the street

A lot of people getting put on the street

It’s getting harder to skeet

He comes home every night to beat

And wonders how much longer he can use my feet

to beat his meat surely.

No, no. This is soulless protest music for gen-X, not gen-Z.

Ah my bad

A lot of people getting put on the street

It’s getting harder to avoid pajeet

He comes home every night to browse zillow

And wonders how much longer he can stand his low thread count pillow

I really can't come up with a clear answer to this. Pretty much anything by Tate McCrae or Sabrina Carpenter or virtually anybody else in this new generation of pop artists is about as aggressively painful as it gets, to be honest. After a while everything melts away into the same homogenised corpus of liquidised shit that is modern pop music. It's virtually all irredeemable, there's no sense talking about "worse" or "better" in such a context.

At least stuff that's unintentionally but parodically bad such as Liz Phair's lyrical and musical masterpieces (Bollywood, U Hate It) are fun to listen to, these songs can't even aspire to that.

Tate McRae's voice is so annoying. She's lucky she's hot.

I watched one video, and I'm still not sure how much of that is her voice. I know I should have gotten inured to modern over-AutoTuned production over the decades, but 𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮 I really don't think I'm strong enough! 𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

She's got great taste in underwear, though.

She's got great taste in underwear, though.

Citation requested.

(I apologise, that was rather Reddit of me.)

My second YouTube search came up with the same top result, and far be it from me to refuse a polite request.

But I'm not making a third search. My kids occasionally use my YouTube account on our living room computer, and at some point I'd worry about the algorithm deciding that my current math/science/art balance needs more "art" and that my "artists" need fewer clothes.

Why did women get into F1 racing all of a sudden in the past ten years? Feels like a psyop but if you asked me if you could psyop women into give a shit about dudes driving around in circles for an hour and a half I'd say no. I could at least understand if they got women driving the cars, but they don't.

Formula 1 teamed up with Netflix to repackage the sport as a reality TV show.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_1:_Drive_to_Survive

The show has received recognition for the additional insight it offers fans, and is credited with attracting new audiences (particularly American) to the sport. The condensing of season-long themes into single-episode narratives has drawn praise for adapting "the natural drama of a racing season into a narrative that can encourage a fan to tune into the real thing."

However, Drive to Survive has been criticized for including fake or misplaced commentary and team radios, staging certain scenes, placing undue importance on test and practice sessions, and over-dramatizing or misrepresenting certain events and relationships within the Formula One paddock. The continued criticism from both audiences and drivers led to discussions between Netflix and team managers, as well as between Formula One and the drivers.

Max Verstappen refused to participate in interviews for seasons 3 and 4 as he believed that the show dramatized some drivers by portraying them as villains and manufactured fake rivalries.

It's funny how well the psyop worked in F1, when there have been so many efforts over the years to get women into gaming and none of it ever stuck. It seems like such an obvious formula too.

If I turn the sound off, this video could be very useful.

She's got that "heavy" kind of face that I'm really not a fan of.

I know what you mean by saying "heavy," but it's strange to look at photos of her face and be unable to identify what exactly the "heavy" is describing, or what a better description for it would be. Something about her jawline, nose, eyelids...?

Yeah, it's hard to define. I see this type most often among Jewish and Armenian women. I would define it as bored eyes, a long (vertical projection, not necessarily protruding) nose and a slightly slack jaw on a face that doesn't narrow perceptibly towards the chin.

She can look very different from photo to photo and I haven't seen her in motion, but she has a face like this on at least half of them.

I would define it as bored eyes

I think this is just the default Gen Z expression. Say what you will about millennial cringe, at least we weren't cutting about looking like we just woke up all the time.

As much as I think we've lost something in the way of common culture -- when I was a kid we definitely all heard the same music -- I've gotta say it's nice to be almost entirely insulated from modern pop music. Sometimes I go to a grocery store or a restaurant and hear what's current and can only shake my head in despair and irritation, but for the most part I'm just free, free as a bird, and like it this way.

Are you free as a bird or free as the wind blows?

More like Free Fallin

NB: Haven't watched the music video for a long time - it's such a 90's time capsule it hurts

Sometimes I go to a grocery store or a restaurant and hear what's current

I rarely hear what's current at a restaurant, store, or coffee shop. 95% of the time it's classic rock, and being in any of those places more than 30 minutes means a 100% chance of hearing a Buckingham/Nicks-era Fleetwood Mac song.

An Irish radio station recently polled their listeners on the greatest song of the twenty-first century so far. The winner was "Pink Pony Club" by Chappelle Roan. Jesus. It's not even her best song. Not "agonizing", just repetitive and irritating.

It wasn't a bad song until I had to listen to it 20 times a day. I predict that in 25 years it will have the same status as "Dreamlover" by Mariah Carey, i.e. it's so ubiquitous that everyone collectively gets tired of it and agrees to never speak of it again.

That was my experience as well. I heard it. It was fun! I listened five times of so, and that was enough. Now sometimes I hear it and groan. That's also how I feel about "Golden," but since I have little girls, I'll continue hearing it for some time, probably.

I had the opposite experience. I hated Pink Pony Club the first ten thousand times I heard it and then I decided to give up and now I love it :(

At least you didn't have to listen to Cotton Eyed Joe.

Transnational Media Thread

I am very tired after a long week of work. Any local art, music, film, etc you've been consuming from far-flung parts of the globe? Anime still doesn't count.

I haven't really mentioned Soviet media around here much, except for the time I wrote about my experience with Tarkovsky's Stalker a while back, but I've had a longstanding love affair with it. There's an inexplicable poetic, sometimes haunted desolation to a lot of Soviet art that really grabs me, and I find no other nation manages to capture this as well as the Russians do. The latest music I've been very into is a Soviet rock band named Kino; they found quite a bit of popularity in the Soviet Union but not quite so much outside of it, and their relevance in the global music scene has steeply declined ever since the founder and helmsman Viktor Tsoi died and the group disbanded. But the music is so very timeless, with some incredibly evocative lyrics and musicianship. Gruppa Krovi is a great introduction; it's a very strong and immediately likeable number that's probably Kino's best known song (and was my introduction to the group), but Spokoynaya Noch is their masterpiece and towers head and shoulders above the rest of their discography. It's a six-and-a-half minute long rock ballad that manages to craft the most potent atmosphere I've encountered in the genre, with some very poetic and abstract lyrics; I never tire of listening to it.

On another note, here is your regular daily dose of Sinoposting; I continue to be surprised at how much interesting stuff there is in China that is just completely internationally unknown. This time, I've been looking at their 20th century works of ink-wash animation, which are so very singular and unique I'm surprised that I barely ever hear about them. The project started in the 50s, when the state-funded Shanghai Animation Film Studio was tasked with creating cartoons for children, and the animators working there quickly started trying to create something that looked uniquely Chinese in the style of traditional painting. The technique they used to create their animations was unorthodox, and it's mostly secret even today, but apparently it was so laborious that according to one of the creators it was possible to create four "traditionally animated" films in the time that it took to make one in the ink-wash style. Such a style was really only viable in the days of socialist state funding and ownership, and after the market reforms of the Deng era this style declined due to the introduction of financial and commercial incentives. As such, there are only four "original" ink-wash animation films, and of these four probably the best and most refined is Feeling from Mountain and Water (1988), which is completely wordless and stunning. A close second for me is Buffalo Boy and his Flute (1963). Apparently ink-wash techniques have slowly made some resurgence in Chinese animation ever since then with the introduction of more modern animation techniques that made it more cost-effective to produce, but these early works have a very good vibe to them.

Kino is legendary, but I prefer to claim I like Zoopark more.

Kino and its sound have left too big of an influence on what is defined as "Russian rock". For several decades Russian rock scene was dominated by simple chords, minimal guitar effects, unstrained vocals, serious lyrics and a subtle sense of smug superiority that Viktor himself didn't have. Only The King and The Jester managed to shake up this swamp, but were too inimitable to change the scene overall.

Mike and Zoopark were bigger than that. He was always ready to mock the latest Eastern religious fad, write a song that was a blatantly transparent hornypost, or let his lead guitarist experiment with his new pedal instead of coming up with a tune. He loved rock music the way it was, he didn't think it had to be adapted to the mysterious Russian soul.

RIP Mike, you were James the brother of Jesus of Russian rock.

  • The Vanishing (ridiculously titled Spoorloos in their absurd meme language): gripping Dutch crime movie. Ending may or may not be somewhat frustrating, but it's grown on me.
  • Force Majeure: a fascinating study of women getting the ick.
  • No Other Choice: hilarious Korean movie about getting ahead in the lucrative field of paper manufacturing.
  • Caché: Kind of a mixed recommendation. Emotionally impactful, but overall slow paced and takes for granted that you agree with the woke premise.
  • A Separation: Iranian divorce movie. "Things can always get worse."

IIRC Force Majeure got an English-language remake with Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, I haven't seen it though.

Hard agree on the first two recommendations, haven't seen the others.

I first saw The Vanishing after reading a review of Seven which claimed that Seven had the scariest ending to a thriller since The Vanishing. It didn't disappoint. The only thing I didn't like about it was the soundtrack.

To be honest I didn't find it scary. It was suspenseful, sure, but I was pretty certain that he was gonna die, although I didn't quite expect it would be such a bad way to go.

Force Majeure: a fascinating study of women getting the ick.

Great one-line summary. Women getting the ick and men failing shit tests.

Tomas reluctantly agrees the footage shows someone running, but is silent when Mats speculates that Tomas was running away so that he could come back and dig out his family later. As Fanny and Mats leave, Fanny suggests that she would expect Mats to react in the same way as Tomas. Mats is offended, and after arguing all night their relationship is changed for the rest of the trip.

C’mon Mats, (dis)agree and amplify was right there!

“What?! No way, honey, I’d run much faster than that slowass motherfucker.”

This seems as good a time as any to talk about my favourite Irish narrative films:

  • Intermission: a very dark comedy-drama from the 2000s. Using the "hyperlink cinema" style popularised by Tarantino, it follows a diverse* cast of Dubliners whose lives intersect in surprising ways. Features a young Cillian Murphy (of Oppenheimer fame) and Colin Farrell, among many others.
  • A Date for Mad Mary: a present-day comedy-drama. The titular character is released from prison and returns to her hometown, where she must scramble to locate a date to bring with her to her best friend's wedding. Seána Kerslake's starring turn is mercurial and mesmerising. Probably my favourite Irish film after Intermission above.
  • The Wind that Shakes the Barley: excellent war film depicting the Irish war of independence and ensuing civil war. Makes no effort to portray the former conflict even-handedly: the atrocities committed by British soldiers are depicted gruesomely, approaching torture porn; while every Brit shot by the Irish goes down without a drop of blood spilled. The director, outspoken English socialist Ken Loach, does not disguise his thesis statement (that Irish independence was a missed opportunity to establish a socialist utopia, instead of just exchanging English landlords for Irish), which I disagree with. Still a cracking and powerful film for all that. Also starring a young Cillian Murphy, along with several actors you might recognise from their later turns in Game of Thrones.
  • Michael Collins: a film depicting the same events as TWtStB, but following the mastermind of Ireland's guerrilla warfare campaign, the titular Michael Collins, portrayed by Liam Neeson (Schindler's List). An invigorating and blood-pumping war film, whose only significant weakness is the decision to cast Julia Roberts as Collins's love interest, when she neither looks Irish nor is equipped to do a persuasive Irish accent. (One day I'd like to do a fan edit which cuts her out entirely: I genuinely think it would improve the film substantially.) Aidan Gillen just about manages, and Alan Rickman's turn as Eamonn deValera is surprisingly convincing, aided by his striking resemblance to the genuine article.
  • An Cailín Ciúin (also released as The Quiet Girl, a literal translation of its Irish title): a period drama set in the 1980s, adapted from the novella Foster by Claire Keegan. It follows a young girl sent to live with her aunt and uncle for the summer, as her parents aren't really capable of looking after her (or themselves, for that matter). Patient, carefully observed, quietly devastating: you will be shedding tears. Notable for the majority of the dialogue being in the Irish language.
  • Black '47: a film about the Great Famine that hit Ireland in the 1840s. But this is no depressing period drama where nothing happens and then everyone dies, no – this is a Western, with six shooters and love-to-hate villains and horseback riding! Tremendous fun. When I saw it in the cinema, I remember thinking that this was the best way to get modern audiences interested in an overlooked part of history: meet them halfway, with a legitimately entertaining crowd-pleaser that incorporates history organically into its story. Bit strange that they cast an Australian actor to play the Irish protagonist, but sure look. Also features Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith, Elrond) and Barry Keoghan; I'd honestly forgotten the latter was in it, which shows what kind of impression he made.
  • In Bruges: A crime comedy-drama set in the titular Belgian city, starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes. From the trailers I was expecting a Tarantino-esque black comedy with brutal violence played for laughs. It's kind of that, but also a surprisingly dark and melancholic film depicting its protagonist processing guilt in a psychologically realistic way. The tonal shifts from wacky humour to morbid pathos might come off as a little jarring, but on the whole I'd still say the movie works. Also notable for featuring the best discussion of the logistics of the imminent race war I've ever seen outside of – well, this site, I suppose.
  • Adam and Paul: a Brechtian comedy-drama depicting one day in the life of two heroin addicts in Dublin. The debut by director Lenny Abrahamson, who later went on to direct Room starring Brie Larson. Years since I've seen it, but it made a big impression on me, especially the ending.

Honourable mentions:

  • Man About Dog: if you want to watch an extremely silly, juvenile, vulgar comedy film in the vein of American Pie or There's Something About Mary, this is the one for you.
  • The General: a perfectly passable crime biopic depicting the Irish gangster Martin Cahill, portrayed by Brendan Gleeson.
  • The Commitments: a charming, good-natured and intermittently funny musical comedy which practically every Irish person over the age of thirty has seen at one point or another. The title of the very first post on my blog is a paraphrased quote from it, which features at the very beginning of the article.
  • Small Things Like These: another recent adaptation of a Claire Keegan novella. While well-acted and presented, it didn't quite work from me, and something about it felt too self-congratulatory in the same way that Mad Men was sometimes accused of during its run (as Mark Greif put it, "an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better"). Yes, the Magdalene laundries treated young women terribly: there were theatrically released studio films making that point more than twenty years before this one came out. We get it.
  • In America: a shamelessly sentimental tear-jerker, it's a semi-autobiographical depiction of an Irish family who migrate to the US in the 1980s following the death of one of their children.
  • The Butcher Boy: an utterly bonkers black comedy, based on the novel of the same name by Patrick McCabe. Go into it blind. Nothing I say can prepare you for it.

Now on to the bad:

  • Halal Daddy: the single worst Irish film I've ever watched from start to finish. A waste of a talented cast. While watching it, you feel like the screenwriter didn't even want to write the screenplay, and just assembled a Jenga tower of clichés to pad out the running time.
  • Dollhouse: if Halal Daddy didn't clinch it, this would be the worst Irish film I've ever watched in full. Jim Sheridan (In America, above) has made many successful films; his daughter Kirsten attempted to ride his coattails to nepo baby-dom, to appalling results. This largely improvised (hence directionless and unmotivated) film features actors who later went on to bigger and better things: Seána Kerslake, mentioned above, and Jack Reynor, who appeared in the Transformers films. It's an utter waste of their talents. Nothing in the film is earned, none of the actors playing working-class Dubs are remotely convincing, and at the end you just feel annoyed and cheated. It comes as little surprise to me that, in the nearly fifteen years since this one came out, Kirsten Sheridan has yet to direct another film.
  • The Guard: So bad that not even Don Cheadle could make me stick around. I left after the first twenty minutes.
  • Perrier's Bounty: Likewise.
  • Seven Psychopaths: A marginal example given its primarily American cast and setting, but I'm including it as it was written and directed by Martin McDonagh (who wrote and directed In Bruges, above) and stars Colin Farrell. What a tiresome tryhard movie, trying to do the meta self-referential thing in a way that's even more annoying than usual. I understand that even McDonagh has more or less disowned it, and he was right to do so.
  • The Banshees of Inisherin: The fourth feature-length by Martin McDonagh, adapted from his play of the same name, this one reunites Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson from In Bruges. It's a period drama set on the titular island amidst the civil war of the 1920s. I have absolutely no idea what the point of it was supposed to be, none of the characters' motivations make a lick of sense** and McDonagh's attempts to draw parallels between the civil war and the principal characters' deteriorating relationship (absent from the original play) are sophomoric, historically dubious, and irrelevant. Truthfully, I don't even know what kind of emotional reaction it was aiming for: when I saw it in the cinema, there were a few polite chuckles in the first half, while the entire audience was dead silent for the second half, and it didn't even feel like the film was trying to be funny. But my sister also went to see it in the cinema, and told me that the entire audience was howling with laughter throughout, which seems insane to me. Also features Barry Keoghan in a supporting role in which he is entirely unconvincing. For McDonagh, that's two Ls and one W – unless Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri turns out to be amazing, I'm comfortable saying In Bruges was a fluke.
  • Sing Street: I've heard director John Carney's film Once is really quite good, but have yet to get around to seeing it, perhaps in protest of how inescapable its promotional single "Falling Slowly" was in the two or three years following its release. But having seen two of his other films (this one and Begin Again), I'm unpersuaded. While watching both films, I experienced this horrible uncanny valley feeling that Carney has never actually met another human being, and that everything he knows about the human condition, he gleaned from watching films by other, more talented directors. (See also: Nolan, Christopher.) This one's an exercise in escapist nostalgia, following a teenaged boy in 1980s Dublin who starts a band in an effort to impress a girl he's crushing on. On paper, I should like it: starting a band to impress a girl is something I literally did several times as a teenager; I've walked past the secondary school from which the film derives its title a hundred times, and recognised a dozen other shooting locations; I love the 80s new wave and synth-pop songs which inspired the film's original compositions. But it doesn't quite hang together, it's impossible to care about any of the characters, and the ending just feels so disconnected from everything that came before it that it can't help but feel like a disappointment. I'm not against musicals on general principle (Singin' in the Rain is brilliant), but they do seem a lot harder to pull off than other genres.

*In the classic sense of "from varying walks of life", not in the DEI sense: I think literally every character is white and Irish, even if some are played by British actors.
**Near the start of the film, Colm (Brendan Gleeson) says he doesn't want to waste any more time listening to Pádraic's (Colin Farrell) inane stories, and would rather spend his remaining years focusing on his fiddle playing, which gives him a sense of purpose and satisfaction. Cool, makes sense. But then when Pádraic refuses to leave Colm alone, to illustrate the extent to which he doesn't want to be bothered, Colm decides to chop off several fingers from one of his hands and throw them at Pádraic's house. How exactly does this illustrate his desire to be left alone? If playing the fiddle is the only thing that gives his life meaning and purpose, why did he just maim himself in such a way that he will never be able to do so ever again? Apologists will say "that's the point, the characters are irrational and self-defeating!" I don't think the characters are irrational: I think the screenplay is badly written.

The Commitments

"It's roid, Sally, roid, not roy-id, Sally, roy-id!"

I'm sorry to tell you this, but I got to halfway through Tarkovsky's Stalker and turned it off. I managed to read Roadside Picnic and play Shadow of Chernobyl all the way through, but the movie was different. The book and game resembled books and games pretty well, but the movie was extremely slow, shot weirdly, with characters that didn't really have names, with dialogue that wasn't particularly interesting to me. It is funny to see so much praise of this movie, everywhere. I guess only a certain type of person seeks it out? On the other hand, Roadside Picnic is probably my favorite book.

I've been listening to the Metro 2033 audiobook in my car while driving. Pretty good. Not as good as Roadside Picnic, but pretty good. The narrator has a great voice and he can do the Russian accent well. There are a lot less trips to the surface, way less fighting, seemingly more supernatural stuff to the tunnels. I will say that the game character Uncle Bourbon is far superior to the book version, and I think the Dark One hallucinations add something to the game.

Tarkovsky's Stalker has very little to do with Roadside Picnic except for the basic setup and the overarching idea in the very broadest of senses. But the style, the storytelling, the means, the approach - all completely different. You have to watch it for Tarkovsky, not for the plot or setting, and if you're not into this particular kind of art, it's not for you. The Roadside Picnic has much more generic appeal, and while Strtugatsky brothers are certainly masters of their craft as writers, the driver there is the story, not the art. That's the big difference between the two.

Tarkovsky is the cinematic equivalent of Joyce or Proust. I refuse to watch anything by him on principle.

My wife and I got halfway through Stalker, sped it up to 1.5x, and managed to make it to the end. I’m glad I watched it, if only to change my answer to “what was the last movie you watched?” Plodding Soviet atmospheric fantasy is more respectable than Marvel. She didn’t think it was worth it.

I would say it worked as an artistic experience, which is not the same thing as being a good movie. The plot was basically nonfunctional. When there was actual conflict, it had goofy choreography (the train) or laughable props (the bomb). Likewise for the characters, who oscillated between cryptic assholishness and physical comedy.

My favorite scene was the Stalker lying down in a puddle for 15 minutes. It actually got me questioning what was real and what the characters thought was real. I’m not joking; this was the scene which best conveyed what other commenters are saying about a dreamlike, threatening atmosphere.

I can’t imagine it would have been any better if we hadn’t both played STALKER. Again, incoherent plot. On the other hand, she’d read Picnic and I hadn’t. Maybe that’s the secret sauce.

The next movie we watched was Escape From New York, having recently played Metal Gear Solid. Ridiculous, but actually fun to watch.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I will have to remember the 1.5x speed trick.

While the world gained a legendary weird arthouse movie, it is quite sad that the book will never have had a proper movie adaptation. There was a LOT to like about it, one of the densest entertainment values in any book ever. Just 4 chapters and each one introduces multiple new angles on the premise. For how popular it was, it must have taken quite some restraint to keep it to that length and then not even write a sequel.

Movie or game adaptations almost always create a division in the fandom, and so do sequels. Thus, I kind of resent the movie for being so radically different, creating a bigger division than necessary. Should have been its own thing.

Escape from New York is great.

it is quite sad that the book will never have had a proper movie adaptation

There were several attempts, as far as I know, but none was completed and released. I am sad about it too, it would make a decent SciFi, even with world-building potential - one could make even TV series with several seasons out of the setting, with not much difficulty. I would watch it, and certainly better than squeezing the last juices out of old IP that the entertainment execs are mining now. But that's just my opinion.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but I got to halfway through Tarkovsky's Stalker and turned it off.

You made the right choice. I sat through the whole thing and it didn't improve.

It's bad enough when people die as a result of making a good movie. No one should die as a result of making a boring movie that sucks.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but I got to halfway through Tarkovsky's Stalker and turned it off. I managed to read Roadside Picnic and play Shadow of Chernobyl all the way through, but the movie was different. The book and game resembled books and games pretty well, but the movie was extremely slow, shot weirdly, with characters that didn't really have names, with dialogue that wasn't particularly interesting to me.

I definitely get it, it's a weird niche movie that's extremely slow-paced and abstruse; I have a hard time justifying recommending it to anyone because of that. Your general perceptions of the movie probably correlates with how much patience you have for arthouse, and how much you enjoy the vibe (which is the aspect that carries the entire movie). For the most part, I wasn't expecting to like it either. I don't usually like exceptionally pretentious types of media and consider myself sort of ambivalent on arthouse (some are good, some aren't) and I'd heard Stalker was a particularly difficult one to get through. So imagine my surprise when I'd finished the whole thing and felt as if only an hour had passed, it was very dreamlike.

I suppose part of the reason why I had a different takeaway was because I conceptualised the movie in a bit of a different way than I do other films? It kind of felt a bit like a fable or myth to me, and I engaged with it as such. Your familiarity with the source material probably also has an impact since I never read Roadside Picnic and never built up any expectations.

  • Websites listing fan conventions: 1 (including a hidden list of adults-only fan conventions), 2 (apparently poorly translated from French)

  • Websites listing professional conferences: 1, 2, 3

Do you think anybody would attend a meetup on the topic of nonconsensual editing? (This is approximately half a joke.)

My vomit-inducing custom house is approximately three-fourths complete.

  • Photograph 1: Apparently, in plumbing the modern practice is to divvy up all the water pipes through a "manifold" (like a circuit-breaker box), which looks pretty cool.

  • Photograph 2: Spray-foam insulation

  • Photograph 3: Behold! A boring beige box!

Which variations of the cylindrical equal-area projection are your favorites?

I am inclined to pick Behrmann (standard parallels ±30 °, so that exactly half of the map's area is stretched vertically and half is squashed vertically; aspect ratio ∼2.4) and Smyth/Craster (aspect ratio 2∶1; standard parallels ∼±37 °).

>Invents new map projection to counter Eurocentrism and emphasize the true importance of the Global South.

>Has horrible distortion at every lattitude except 45° N and S.

Ibram X. Kendi never grifted as hard as Arno Peters.

The cable periscope kills me.

How much did this whole thing set you back (minus the cost of the land)?

The total bill is 224 k$ for 858 ft2 of house, 720 ft2 of driveway (not including ∼110 ft2 that's government-owned), 395 ft2 of sidewalk (including 270 ft2 that's government-owned), and 396 ft of fence. (An item-by-item breakdown is not available.)

The land was 29 k$ for 1/6 of an acre.

My vomit-inducing custom house is approximately three-fourths complete.

This is the first I've noticed your roof is so shallow and you have no eves. I live in perfect-weather-california, and even here I know of lots of homeowners who complain about weather-induced problems from this type of roof.

I am jealous that you actually know where all your pipes/wires are and what they do...

The roof is metal panels at 1/12 slope (comparable to a sidewalk curb ramp), not plastic sheeting or built-up asphalt at 1/24 (comparable to a road shoulder) or 1/48 (comparable to a road travel lane or a non-curb-ramp sidewalk). I don't expect any problems stemming from bad drainage.

insert an image of a flooded curb ramp

That happens because bad coordination between the sidewalk installation and the road paving makes the road higher than the bottom of the curb ramp. No such problems exist on a roof.

My vomit-inducing custom house

I don't know, I think it wouldn't look out of place as a supervisor's office at some remote lumber mill or mine.

But right now it looks like an anti-Georgist countermeasure.

According to § 155.03.01 of the Standard Specifications of the New Jersey Department of Transportation, a contractor's field office must have at least one room with 288 ft2 of area. Unfortunately, my design does not fulfill this requirement, as the living/dining room is only 214 ft2 (though you arguably could add the adjoining kitchen to that area). However, the Pennsylvania DOT's requirements (§ 609 table A) are not so picky—they have no minimum room area.

Which variations of the cylindrical equal-area projection are your favorite?

None, all of them should be illegal and punishable by getting run over by a steamroller.

This comment is harming the cylinder(s’ feelings).

The cylinder shouldn't have LARPed as a sphere.

punishable by getting run over by a steamroller.

"Hey bro, I heard you like cylindrical projections...."

That's a rather harsh response. What are your preferred map projections, then? (They had better not be compromise projections.)

Maybe I’m a cartographic basic bitch, but I like that Robinson projection more than the cylindrical ones. It’s closer to my head canon of what the continents look like.

The cylindrical ones look goofy to me, kind of like the Mercator but in a different way.

Compromise projections are the best projections. The purpose of a world map is to see where things are at, not to make precise measurements, unless you're a sailor or something. I don't care if size or shape are distorted a little, as long as it doesn't look ridiculous, and compromise projections are the only ones that don't look ridiculous. If we're talking local maps then Transverse Mercator is the only way to go, since the meridian is chosen based on the local area you're mapping. If people are going to be so insistent about the metric system then I'm going to be insistent about UTM, which by all rights should replace latitude/longitude since a grid is inherently superior to an angular system. If someone decides to send me a pin for directions I'm going to insist that it's in UTM from now on, in case my phone dies and I have to navigate with map and compass.

The purpose of a world map is to see where things are at, not to make precise measurements, unless you're a sailor or something. I don't care if size or shape are distorted a little, as long as it doesn't look ridiculous, and Compromise projections are the only ones that don't look ridiculous

In the first place, I disagree with the idea that the cylindrical equal-area projection looks ridiculous. Use the Behrmann variant (standard parallels ±30 °) for global evenhandedness, or the Gall/Peters variant (±45 °) for a bit of Eurocentrism.

In the second place, you can just use the equirectangular projection instead of a wacky compromise projection. The Robinson projection's convolutions are totally unnecessary.

If people are going to be so insistent about the metric system then I'm going to be insistent about UTM, which by all rights should replace latitude/longitude since a grid is inherently superior to an angular system.

But latitude and longitude are a grid already.

No compromise, compromise projections only! Kavraysky VII one love.

None! None! Map projections are madness! Use satellite imagery, or globes, or just go outside and look at the world with your own eyes! Maps should not attempt to show two sides of a sphere at once! It's unnatural!

Maps should not attempt to show two sides of a sphere at once!

You gotta choose a projection long before you try to show both sides of the earth at once.

Use satellite imagery

Sure! I'll just display those images on my flat monitor by ... hmmm ...

No, you don't understand. Just look at the original image, not some strange collage glued together from several images.

Just look at the original image

Which follow-up joke would you say is even harder to miss: "Okay: 100100101011010101011...", or "I'd love to, but my spacesuit is still in the shop"?

No need to get confusing. Just get a globe. That is the one proper way to display a map of Earth.

Google Earth is a thing. Having a monitor/phone and other modern tech actually decreases the relative utility of a flat map projection, as opposed to the days of yesteryear where it would have been much more convenient to carry an easily storable map around instead of an unwieldy globe, and most people's practical use of maps would (usually) have been in local small-scale contexts where the distortion would have been negligible. Now, though? I wonder why there are any map apps that don't project their satellite imagery onto a sphere.

Google Earth is a thing.

It is! It uses a near-sided perspective projection.

You may have missed the joke.

The sphere of Google Earth is projected onto the rectangular plane of your phone screen.

How is transforming the 3D surface of the sphere that Google Earth internally manipulates into a 2D image that can be rendered on a planar phone screen not a map projection?

I'll pencil you down as "myriahedral projection" (gnomonic onto a zillion-faced polyhedron).

Is that a dymaxion map I see, hiding in the options?

Technically, Dymaxion and icosahedron are not quite the same thing.

Yeah OK, I can live with that. Not actually make meaningful use of it, but at least it doesn't require the malfeasant who drew the map to be struck by lightning.

Still, I'd prefer just taking that projection and wrap it back around a sphere. Pardon, around a polyhedron.

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