site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1975 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 8, 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.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I'm looking for some book recommendations in a specific vein, if anyone has suggestions. I'm looking for something a little pulpy, where the protagonists make a point of doing the right thing, and nothing in God's creation will set them from their chosen course. Think (early) Dresden Files Correia's saga of the forgotten warrior.

Beyond that, I'm looking for earnestness on the part of the author and the protagonist. I recently read Dungeon Crawler Carl after many recommendations, and it just felt a little too meta-ironic and quippy.

These are all different. But earnest author and protagonist are something they all seem to share. Hard to know if they fit the "pulpy" category for me.

John Carter of Mars. True pulp fiction in the sense of it was written in the pulp fiction era.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/87695/adamant-blood

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/107917/sky-pride

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/81002/the-years-of-apocalypse-a-time-loop-progression

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/47826/millennial-mage-a-slice-of-life-progression-fantasy

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/72498/sublight-drive-star-wars

Beyond that, I'm looking for earnestness on the part of the author and the protagonist. I recently read Dungeon Crawler Carl after many recommendations, and it just felt a little too meta-ironic and quippy.

I bounced off of Dungeon Crawler Carl as well. There was something tonally messed up about killing 99% of all humans and then making jokes. I guess I've liked other books that do this, like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but Douglas Adams did it better.

Seconding The Years of Apocalypse. It's a very good series which I would describe as "almost Mother of Learning" which is high praise from me since Mother of Learning is my favorite series of all time. In terms of having an earnest protagonist and general story tone, Mirian definitely ranks higher than Zorian. There is cynicism and politics and messy stuff going on in the story, but mostly in the form of other people doing messy human things and Mirian berating them for their petty squabbles instead of coming together to save the world.

I'm slightly annoyed by the leftist cliches sprinkled throughout. Of course the more western/technologically advanced countries are colonizing and oppressing their neighbors and causing a bunch of plot problems, while the foreigners who live in harmony with nature are generally kinder and have a bunch of useful alternate technology that none of the big countries take seriously. (And of course our main character lives in the big country but is ethnically from a foreign one). And some other stuff I don't want to spoil but clearly maps to a modern leftist talking point. But eh, it's tolerable in small doses and the author is still good and sane and earnest enough that their solution is "set aside your differences and come together, combine all of our unique talents together to save the world"

Maybe the Paksenarrion series? She is earnest to a fault and the story is to a large degree about where this takes her. I remember enjoying quite a bit as a close to the ground fantasy military fic.

If you want something quite pulpy, I'd recommend Penitent. It's one of the best examples of a Big Good protagonist I've read on the site. Selfless and generous, but not to the point of letting himself be used, with a party of good friends. It's mostly about smaller scale battles, but it changes as it goes on. The atmosphere in the early parts is really good with the banter with his friends. I don't like the latter part as much, but I still read all the chapters as they come out.

Another thing where it kind of stands out, (not that this matters if you don't real RoyalRoad stories) is that the protagonist becomes religious and actually starts proselytizing, and that is something I've not read in any story. A

It's finished on Patreon, and the RR story should wrap up in June according to the author.

On less pulpy note I'd recommend Curse of Chalion or the author's other series Penric and Desdemona. I loved Curse of Chalion, and it's just a regular novel, so it's easy to finish. Penric is more about short stories, but he's also a great protagonist, and I've really enjoyed reading it. They're both good and strive to do the right thing.

Robert E Howard's Solomon Kane short stories?

There above the dead man's torn body, man fought with demon under the pale light of the rising moon, with all the advantages with the demon, save one. And that one was enough to overcome the others. For if abstract hate may bring into material substance a ghostly thing, may not courage, equally abstract, form a concrete weapon to combat that ghost? Kane fought with his arms and his feet and his hands, and he was aware at last that the ghost began to give back before him, and the fearful slaughter changed to screams of baffled fury. For man's only weapon is courage that flinches not from the gates of Hell itself, and against such not even the legions of Hell can stand.

Sadly, I've already read Robert E Howard's full collection of works at least three times in my life so far.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that there's therefore also no reason to recommend Burroughs's Barsoom books?

Got it in one.

Quick question for you and @Mantergeistmann - I remember reading the Princess of Mars(like 20 years ago or smth, ancient history) but after the trilogy with the main character John Carter I remember the following one or two books being a letdown, in your opinion is it worth finishing the series?

I'm not the right person to ask. Once I start a series, it has to get truly horrendous before I'll abandon it.

Aubrey/Maturin? Strong men with strong convictions about king and country, honorable conduct, etc. Not that it keeps them from engaging in all manner of vice and self-sabotaging romanticism.

Highly recommend. It's a breath of fresh air for all the reasons OP described. (Though I guess I'm not clear on what's meant by "pulpy")

Also, the audiobook versions narrated by Patrick Tull really bring it to life. I can't read the books any more without hearing the way Jack says "Stephen!" after a long absence, and I wouldn't want to.

Chesterton is probably what you are looking for, though he's not pulpy.

I would recommend The Wandering Inn for anything. The main character is definitely always earnest.

I would not recommend The Wandering Inn. I've not read it, but it's insanely long. Last I checked it was like 12 million words, but I imagine it's over 13 by now. And even if the protagonist is earnest from what I know the story is all about multiple povs, so how much of her will you even get to see.

You can finish the entire LOTR series, the entire Wheel of Time, all of Discworld, and then web novels like Worm, and a dozen of other novels and you're still under Wandering Inn's wordcount. No matter the hype for Wandering Inn, there's no way it justifies its length.

Nobody is forcing you to read the entire thing. As I recently mentioned:

What matters is the journey, not the destination. Among non-professionally-published literary works, I think it's very possible that I've enjoyed more incomplete ones than complete ones.

Even among professionally-published works, there's nothing wrong with giving five stars to The Three Musketeers, four stars to Twenty Years After, and three stars plus "did not finish" to The Vicomte de Bragelonne.

If you like the early parts, but find that the story becomes less enjoyable as you progress, then just drop the story.

No matter the hype for Wandering Inn, there's no way it justifies its length.

I understand that it's a detraction for many people no doubt, but there is a reason there is hype for it. Honestly when I was getting caught up, I didn't even realize the length cause I was getting really sucked in. The books are getting real prints I believe so maybe that's a good way to get into it. My friends and I tried to convince a friend to read One Piece for over a decade and he always balked at the length. He started reading after he watched the One Piece Live Action to all of our dismay lol.

That somewhat describes the Marlowe novels by Raymond Chandler, but it definitely describes the Lew Archer novels by MacDonald. Archer is dedicated to doing the right thing, which tends to be dragging into the light the secrets of the rich and corrupt. Pulpy, but high grade pulp, and 100% earnest.

I love Marlowe

In that case, you should like the Archer novels. The plotting and writing are generally better, but the overall noir vibe isn't quite as good as the Marlowe novels.

I’ve been thinking about why Vanilla WoW was so good apart from nostalgia:

  • Unwanted reinforcer satiation was reduced as much as possible. If you want the player to feel awesome upon obtaining a colorful cloak or a new spell, then you don’t want everything in the world vivid and dazzling, because the novelty and pleasure of these things reduces the power of those reinforcers. If the mobs are colorful and the characters around you are all wearing awesome things, then picking up some basic “red cloak” is no longer as pleasant, and thus no longer reinforced. Pleasure from stimuli are competitive to each other. (In a boring classroom, even a black and white VHS is a good reinforcer; not so in a mall).

  • The above applies even to the aural components of the game. The ambient environmental “background sounds” in original WoW are low stimuli, in between music and sound effects. This means that the aural cues for looting, leveling up, fulfilling quest are more reinforced than if the game has a default high level of aural pleasure (a soundtrack too dazzling).

  • The greatest reinforcers are reserved for compelled immersion. By the time you’re bored with your spells, you travel to buy a new spell in a specific familiar environment. All of this immersion is secondarily-reinforced by the more primary reinforcer of Fun Ability + Novel Animation + Growth-Feeling. You have to spend money, which heightens and potentiates this experience. To get a new spell, you might have to travel for 10 minutes, remembering the things you did in the environment. Other great reinforcers are the discovery of a new area where the environmental cues (novelty) change abruptly, which only take on so much reinforcing power because the previous environment was not filled to the brim with novelty.

  • Summarizing some of these above points: you want to reduce the novelty and fun of every single part of the game which is not earned after immersion. This is a balancing act, because obviously it can’t be so boring that you don’t want to play at all. But you actually want the player to be as bored as possible while still playing, so that all of the great reinforcement occurs when he is compelled to feel immersed in the character and world.

  • I think Vanilla devs were like wizards of psychology, at least in practice, because they arranged boredom in an intelligent way. The WoW player is actually bored, and even in a state of annoyance and displeasure, when he has collected 8 leather scraps and needs 2 more to go. But he keeps playing, because of the Ovsiankina Effect (w wish to continue what we started). There is even a “biological preparedness” factor at play, because when we are frustrated we don’t mind bashing some enemies. So the WoW player is put into a carefully-managed negative and bored state for an amount of time, which he might associate with a particular set of mobs (rather than the game entirely), and by the time he has collected 10/10, he is now biased toward collecting the reward for the quest rather than quitting. The period of boredom is forgotten. There is now something else to do. And it’s also forgotten because the “frustrated / boredom state” occurs at a mnemonically-weak point in the game. Finding a new mob is fun and memorable; returning home for a reward is fun and memorable; but the weaponized boredom happens at a moment that is naturally unforgettable, lacking serial-position bias or novelty bias.

  • The reason why immersion is essential is not because it’s just one pleasant feeling among many. It’s an essential condition for continued engagement with the product, because if the fun you’re having in the game can be found elsewhere, then you may decide to simply have that fun elsewhere. If “exploring” is the fun, you might decide to explore a new game. If “fighting”, you might play a better fighting game. But you can’t find Azeroth or ChunkNorris the dwarf warrior anywhere else, and you’ve become addicted to that as it exists as a collection of cues which govern all the greatest rewards (reinforcers) of WoW.

There are then some other things worth exploring, but I’ve already written too much: the zone soundtracks often contain an odd sound you would never hear anywhere else, increasing the power of its associative memory potential because of uniqueness; there is a “biological preparedness” factor of increasing status and strength as a grunt character (versus already being a hero).

All of this was part of it. But the novelty of exploration was also a big deal, and embraced that same philosophy. Vanilla WoW made travel punishing. Even on-level for a zone you could die to taking the wrong shortcut and pulling one elite, or three or four regular mobs. Even with an epic mount, you could die taking a wrong turn through a naga camp if you weren't way overlevelled. Dungeons were confusing messes. Getting a group together was a trial without a warlock, and you'd often have 15 minutes of anticipation or slow pulls waiting for that last guy to make his way there. Most dungeon bosses had like a 5 item drop table, and discovering what was on it that was good for your character was huge. Every upgrade mattered. Class quests often sent you across the world, and rewarded genuinely valuable features that would just be handed to you now, like cat form, or warlock pets. And the social aspect was reinforced by all of these challenges. You often had little to do except talk during travel periods or while waiting for someone. You needed friends to access a lot of fairly core content. The way all these details tied together was masterful.

Thanks for this.

I think there is a lot to be said for the fact that mastery was rewarding. Sure you can keep hitting things with the first spell you learned, but wouldn't it be more fun to make a spreadsheet with the current dps numbers for your spells and spend 10m finding a new leveling rotation?

Addons too, infinite ways to tweak yourself better.

… If you want the player to feel awesome upon obtaining a colorful cloak or a new spell, then you don’t want everything in the world vivid and dazzling, because the novelty and pleasure of these things reduces the power of those reinforcers. If the mobs are colorful and the characters around you are all wearing awesome things, then picking up some basic “red cloak” is no longer as pleasant, and thus no longer reinforced. Pleasure from stimuli are competitive to each other. (In a boring classroom, even a black and white VHS is a good reinforcer; not so in a mall)...

I’ve had thoughts about this in real life and have come to the opposite conclusion. One thing I love looking at the buildings of North Korea for (Yeah. I know.) is their obsession with pastel colors, looking like a city full of abandoned colored marshmallows. When I walk around the parking lot of my employer and I see the same silver, white, gray, black colored cars everywhere, it really leaves things looking incredibly sterile, with the life having been sucked out of everything.

I don’t think you want an actively hostile environment like American suburbia in a game. But as an example, if Elywnn Forest had too much beautiful red foliage and flowers and apples galore, then it’s not as nice to receive a small red cloak, as you’ve seen red everywhere. If the starting castle wasn’t so small, it wouldn’t be nice to get to Stormwind. Or if it already contained different kinds of grasses, then there’s no novelty reinforcement from entering Westfall. In a theoretical gamified North Korea, maybe they’d want to reinforce the loyal citizen of Pyongyang by introducing a new color or color scheme every 5-15min walking pace, like with WoW zones.

DJ Claudify

I've been meaning to try this for ages, but kept being too lazy to bother. There's a website called Exportify that dumps your saved Spotify playlists into a csv. The setup is painless: approve access, no suspicious permissions, and you walk away with every track you've ever saved alongside metadata like timestamps and Spotify's own popularity scores.

I exported the lot. I don't really do dedicated playlists; my method is to encounter a song I like, save it on the spot, or, on rare occasions, find something decent on the recommended page. The result is a library in strict chronological order, where almost every track carries temporal and emotional baggage. Here's the song I was listening to during a breakup. That's the one that was playing when I first stepped off the plane in Scotland. Consistency and curation are for try-hards; if I don't like what's playing I queue something better, or jump down the list.

I fed the csv to Opus 4.7 and ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking and asked them to chart my mood and vibes over time. Both did remarkably well, well past reading tea leaves. Then I asked for recommendations, ideally things I hadn't heard before.

From Claude:

"176 tracks in your library have a Spotify popularity score of zero. 244 sit below 10. About a quarter of your library is essentially invisible to the algorithm. Names like Chikoi The Maid, Holy Fawn, Suave Punk, Caleb Bryant, Mokadelic show up there. Meanwhile your highest-popularity saves are exactly the global hits everyone agrees on (Blinding Lights, I Wanna Be Yours, Espresso, deja vu, Hey Ya, 505). That bimodal shape tells me you save the songs everyone agrees on and you save the songs almost no one knows, with a thinner middle than most people have."

Yeah Boi. I can out-hipster the hipsters, I listen to songs and genres you people have never even heard of. All while not predicating my personality around it, because I do listen to normal, human music. Sabrina Carpenter? You've heard of her.

Both delivered. Claude was a touch better, with something like a 50% hit rate by recommendation-to-save ratio. Better than any human I know. Better than Spotify's own recommendations, which is the part that surprised me. Spotify has spent over a decade and presumably a small country's GDP building a hybrid recommender that fuses collaborative filtering, raw audio analysis via convolutional nets, and NLP over reviews and metadata. They have every play, skip, save, and 30-second-bailout from half a billion users.

In other words, they try pretty hard.

And yet a model that has never heard a single waveform is beating them on my library, presumably because it's drawing on the entire written corpus of human music criticism: every RateYourMusic thread, every Pitchfork review, every breathless Reddit comment about a B-side. Collaborative filtering also has a pull toward the popular middle, which an LLM doesn't share, since it isn't trained on user-item interaction logs at all.

Easy chronology probably helps too. Spotify mostly sees a bag of vectors with timestamps; a language model can read your library as a story and notice when the vibe shifts.

You should try it. It helps to give honest, immediate feedback on what works and what doesn't. A sampler:

"Avril sounds like something they'd play in an aquarium that sprang a leak. It's definitely for someone, I'm not sure if that someone is me."

"Blink sounds like elevator music on ketamine. A maybe?"

"Loretta fucked my ear canal and got it pregnant. Instant add."

"Mona Lisa can stay in the museum."

"Vapour has a lot going on. Someone else can get it on, fucking hell, there are notes in there that are best appreciated by a cat."

"Catamaran sounds like it was recorded inside a toilet. From the adjacent stall. Miss."

"Mountains isn't bad, but it's for a very moody teen girl, or a middle aged woman going through a divorce/mid life crisis. Close but no cigar. Sigh. I'll add it anyway."

The whole experience was unreasonably pleasant, especially given that I'm not even sure Claude can ingest audio, or was meaningfully trained on music samples. The rest of you are getting mogged by a blind deaf entity that lives in a computer. I added something like 20 songs over the hour, which is a ridiculous number against my usual rate of about one a week.

Fun exercise - shuffle the CSV and get entirely different outputs! Not a bad thing per se, just abusing the Lost in the Middle problem to get more different songs you might like.

In other words, they try pretty hard.

I don't think they do. They certainly could but frankly their recommendation algorithms have always been utter garbage and they've gone out of their way to make it impossible for users to even manually help them. For example I can't say "Never recommend this artist for this playlist" nor can I say "Never recommend this album or song for anything (but do recommend other songs from this artist)". Their recommendations to playlists keep repeating the same small number of songs over and over and can't even distinguish multiple identical versions (so a playlist that has song X from the original album will get recommendations for song X from a compilation album).

This runs in parallel with them having a massive team to work on the Spotify client with the result that it has only degraded with time since people need to justfify their existence while the real development needs could be filled by just a couple of small teams.

I find the "discover weekly" recommendations not bad, and "release radar " sometimes has something I want to hear. Totally agree that radio is dogshit though.

Until recently the shuffle algorithm was also totally fucked and would get stuck in loops - literally play e.g. 20 songs, then go back and play those same 20 again. I don't know what the fuck kind of shuffle algorithm could result in that, but it rinsed several tracks so bad I can't listen to them anymore.

Now they are trying to push Spotify as a video platform so sometimes I open the app and see some ridiculous TDS thumbnail. I'd probably jump ship if there was another platform with good music recommendation algorithms. I don't know what the eight thousand Spotify employees are doing all day, but I'm not sure it's making my life better.

I don't know what the fuck kind of shuffle algorithm could result in that, but it rinsed several tracks so bad I can't listen to them anymore.

There is a new function that will go back through your whole listening history and find songs that you listened to a lot at one point, and then stopped playing. I think it just heavily weights skips as "I don't actually like this song" rather than "Not in the mood just now, but there's a reason it's on the playlist."

I just want a braindead "roll the dice" shuffle. Yeah, it might result in some tracks playing twice in a surprisingly short window, but you can do a lot worse (repeating sequences of 20 tracks) and you can't easily do a lot better in my view.

Wow, an LLM told you you had unique and discerning taste? Incredible!

I had Claude write a simple set of scripts to interact with my Spotify library (fetch playlists, create playlists, look for songs) and set up a directory for it to keep track of different musical threads I asked it to help me explore. It updates files in the directories with my feedback on each playlist and creates a new one with the next batch of recommendations. The files let it maintain state and focus on particular themes and expand the "frontier" in directions I'm interested in. I've had some success with this setup.

Wow, an LLM told you you had unique and discerning taste? Incredible!

Heh. Claude isn't sycophantic enough to do that. I declared that I have unique and discerning taste.

A sufficiently advanced intelligence can glaze without direct sycophancy.

It’s the secular guardian angel.

Absolutely. But it was using Spotify's own metrics to assess popularity, and ran the scripts to collate those figures. We're talking evidence-based, rigorous, scientific glazing. At that point, it's not sycophancy, it's acknowledgement of my clear superiority over other mortals when it comes to diversity in musical taste.

Among ten thousand dimensions of the latent space, there's always one along which the user can be glazed.

I have the impression many people here are weird old people who like strange media, so I would like to humbly plug my strange radio station.

tspigot radio

It's been my personal project the past 6+ years; I collect obscure, old, weird, and beautiful music from everywhere and have software mixing it together 24/7. It's up to almost 16,000 tracks now, all hand selected by me. It's not for profit and probably illegal. I hope you check it out and enjoy it.

I dig it.

I've been listening today. Pretty cool. The first 2 times I tried yesterday it was playing something I would associate with being dragged to a terrible club, but I hit a good streak today starting with a Skip Spence song. I'd say it's about 1/4 songs I think are particularly good or interesting, 2/4 that are okay and have something about them I like, and 1/4 I find almost unlistenable. For a free station with no commercials, I can live with that.

Have you already raided the AOR Disco archives? The site is defunct, but it's still possible to download some playlists or find them through soundcloud or bandcamp. Some super rare 70s stuff there only released on 45s, for example, and fun yacht rock mixes, weird remixes and edits, and more.

11:49:31 I Think In a Minute or So I'll Explode by Flashbulb

It's by The Flashbulb. Downvoted and reported to the RIAA tip line.

What's your process for discovering and acquiring music?

cleaning and correcting metadata is a neverending labour :(

The digging and curation is a lifelong obsession, so I have a lot of angles. I have a script to trawl the youtube API for long playlists with certain criteria that indicate curation of obscure music; when I find those I rabbit-hole down them hunting for gold. I am sometimes active on Soundcloud/Bandcamp and make connections with artists there. When I find a great obscure single, I rabbithole the artist and their label/connections to find more.

cleaning and correcting metadata is a neverending labour :(

I've had a lot of success fetching data from musicbrainz with something like https://beets.io/.

I have a script to trawl the youtube API for long playlists with certain criteria that indicate curation of obscure music; when I find those I rabbit-hole down them hunting for gold. I am sometimes active on Soundcloud/Bandcamp and make connections with artists there. When I find a great obscure single, I rabbithole the artist and their label/connections to find more.

I guess you are mostly ripping from YouTube/downloading from Bandcamp and SoundCloud then? What kind of criteria do you use to find playlists?

I've found that as I've gotten older I've had less time to explore new music. When do you find time to listen to new tracks?

Mostly yeah, although I do old fashioned crate digging and rip vinyl myself sometimes. I search for long (>100 tracks) playlists, the component videos of which have <20k views; this gets me enough candidate playlists to find good music collections. I also sometimes look at similar-artist tools to find new bands from obscure gems I find.

Curation has become a constant background activity for me; if I'm coding for work, reading a forum, or browsing web stuff, I'm probably also auditioning some playlist or artist in the background.

I also sometimes look at similar-artist tools to find new bands from obscure gems I find.

I've had a bit of luck using the Spotify API for this. Any other good sources for connections like this?

oh thank you that is interesting, I just assumed the Spotify API would be locked down and useless, I'll check it out! I generally use music-map.com for finding similar artists (by hand).

What are your favourite inherently funny words?

Almost all incel slang makes me laugh, owing to the incongruity between how silly it sounds and the deadly seriousness with which members of the community use it. Clavicular, sounding like he's on the brink of tears, spitting out "I am not your JESTER!"? Hilarious. It is utterly beyond me how anyone can use the phrase "cock carousel" with a straight face: how can you say it and not picture a literal carousel, but with all of the plastic horses replaced with gargantuan plastic penises? Basically any portmanteau ending with "-maxx" ("looksmaxx", "moneymaxx", "lethalitymaxx") will make me laugh regardless of context. Their terms for assorted sub-categories of incel ("currycel" for desi incels, "ricecel" for Asian incels) are delightful, and inevitably invite the creation of neologisms ("potatocel" for incels of Hibernian extraction; a Turkish friend proposed "kebabcel").

But the incels' crowning achievement in unintentional (?) hilarity is the abbreviated form of their term for a disfavoured woman, "femoid". The word "femoid" is not particularly funny, and doesn't scan: neither "FEE-moyd" nor "FEM-oyd" really sound satisfying to say, and tend to break the rhythm of the sentence in which they are spoken. Perhaps in recognition of this, some incels abbreviated the word and produced a linguistic masterpiece: foid.

Foid. Foid. Fooooyyd. Foid! FOID.

Utterly marvelous. Pretty much any tweet that uses it will have me laughing, regardless of context. Sometimes these will be clever plays on words (e.g. someone discovered that the First Lady of New York had drawn a comic depicting herself lying on the ground with a police officer kneeling on her back, to which someone quipped "Finally – George Foid"), but they needn't be: simply using it in a completely unrelated context is a reliable recipe for hilarity. It's one of the purest invocations of the WHEEZE meme I've seen in years.

But I want to emphasise: I don't find this word funny because of what it means. "Foid" is funny in a way that "bitch", "whore", "slut", "cunt"* etc. are not, despite being roughly synonymous. It's an inherently funny word: it just sounds funny, completely independent of its meaning.

What are some other examples of inherently funny words?

*Wikipedia has a category page called "Pejorative terms for women", and the first listed example is "adult human female". Uhh, sure thing guys.

the first listed example is "adult human female"

It's first because they're in alphabetical order.

I'm not an idiot, I know why it was listed first. I'm questioning why it was included on the page at all, given that it's not a pejorative term for women. I think you knew that I knew this and are just taking an opportunity to jeer at me like an adolescent.

I got curious too but well, it's the same reason that Tranny was included in the list for Pejorative terms for women.

I immediately thought of this old video. Back in the days I liked to try and pronounce "academia" to match the sketch's diction for "macadamia".

Also I'd argue kyōiku mama is not particularly derogatory but descriptive. Kyōiku simply means education. There are other terms like onibaba that refer to more fierce and literally demon-hags that nag their children about xyz. A woman might even describe herself as a kyōiku mama though no woman would describe herself as onibaba.

But this may have been added by a Japanese person with a different view.

edit: A lesbian friend of mine once said the term woman was often meant derogatorily. As in "That woman said..." This was only a few years after Bill Clinton's denials about sexual relations with Monica, so maybe that's what she was thinking of. I didn't ask what term she'd prefer.

Well, you know, most of the feminine pronouns do have mocking but not necessarily misogynistic undertones.

I think Brave Story uses the term ijiwaru baba when MC's mother is forbidding him to see his beloved uncle, with whom she has a vendetta.

A lesbian friend of mine once said the term woman was often meant derogatorily. As in "That woman said..."

I think there's something to this, though I would say that "often" is overstating it. People will sometimes use "woman" as a form of address or even an interjection of frustration ("women!"), which does carry a hint of derogation. Of course, the word "man" sometimes gets used by women in the same way, so it's not a one way phenomenon.

Prefer "men of wo"?

Sounds like a good response to the guy asking for pulp recommendations.

kyōiku mama sounds like the Japanese equivalent of "tiger mom".

Probably, though associated mostly with a mom who closely curates schoolwork, what schools to apply for, study time, juku or cram schools, etc. I understand the Amy Chua version as much more all-encompassing (i.e. never allow your child unstructured free time, period.)

I had a German acquaintance once upon a time, and one night we were having a get together at his place. He got so high that he forgot the word for "pony", and he called it a "compressed horse".

Now, whenever I hear pony, I immediately think of that and chuckle.

Along those lines, but I guess it's more of a phrase than word, "based and [blank] pilled," where the [blank] is ridiculous will always get a chortle from me. Like a schizo rant I saw that mentioned only eating one meal every other day and one comment was simply "based and snakepilled."

Based and based and pilled pilled

My friend always found kumquat to be an inherently funny word, and I think I agree with him.

Based and kumquat pilled.

Heh heh cumsquirt.

I had my third encounter with the Mormons of the Bridge.

For the second time running, two bubbly blonde girls intercepted me as I was hustling my exhausted ass back to my apartment. I wasn't paying attention, had earphones in, and assumed I was being asked for directions. I popped out a bud, made the mildly inconvenienced face one gives lost tourists, and was instead asked if I would like to find God and attend church on Sunday.

What I really, really wanted to be doing was lying in bed, dissociating, queueing up another dose of stimulants, and grinding my nose against my exam notes. But I wanted to be polite. So I told them the main thing God could help me with this weekend was exam prep.

The two of them looked at each other and communicated telepathically (as Mormons do), then informed me, with the cheerful assurance of customer service reps reading from a flowchart, that this was no problem at all. God wears many hats, and is a first-line service worker for the academically distressed.

I considered asking whether He might sit the exam for me, reconsidered on grounds of basic civility, and told them I'd be spending the weekend at the altar of an entirely different kind of book.

By this point the exchange had run unusually long. Normally I dispatch them inside fifteen seconds with a polite "thanks, but I'm not interested." It seems my willingness to engage past the standard cutoff registered as encouragement, because they then asked for my number, so they could send a friendly reminder once exams were behind me.

It pained me to decline such requests from reasonably attractive young women, particularly the taller one. But academics come first. I told them this. I didn't tell them that God has nothing if not time, because that would prompt them to argue that I'm the one with limited time under the sun, with the stakes being my immortal soul. However, I plan, eventually, to outlast Him from inside a Matrioshka Brain, at which point the sun has finite time under me. None of which I said aloud, on the grounds that what I was facing was, functionally, a sales pitch, and they'd been rather polite so far. Nor was a windy, windy bridge the best place for a debate about applied transhumanism.

They took non-disinterest as a green light and pressed further. They volunteered the address of their church and helpfully clarified that they belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Yeah. Couldn't have inferred that from physiognomy alone, let alone the badge. I'm genuinely impressed by how they mass-produce these people from a single template perfected somewhere in Utah: clean shaven, soberly dressed young men; clean skinned, soberly dressed young women, big honkers as standard issue. The willingness to press without quite tipping into overbearing serves them well in respectable sales careers and at the CIA. I'm less impressed by their theology, though I've seen worse from people far less well-groomed.

In fairness, the operation is well-oiled. The median LDS missionary baptizes 3 to 5 converts a year, which is more impressive than I'd thought.

Why do they keep approaching me? On 2/3 of these encounters I've been the only human on the bridge, so it was me or the seagulls, who are Anglican and not open to conversion. Maybe I look like a particularly lost lamb. Maybe I look like a lost lamb because I am undercaffeinated, in which case they are correctly identifying a state I'm authentically in and misattributing it to spiritual rather than circadian causes. In fact, becoming a Mormon would probably make the coffee-problem worse. Maybe a brown Indian man scores well on diversity-funnel metrics. I'm sorely tempted to attend one Sunday just to see what happens, which is, of course, exactly how they get you.

I told them I'd keep it in mind, and that I knew where to find them. Which I do.

I kept walking.

Are you going to pursue talking with them after your exams? I remember you said you might when I suggested you join Scientology.

I will hasten to point out that that was a joke, or at least 99% a joke. It might slightly amuse me to go attend a Mormon sermon if I'm very bored, but I'm not looking to be converted. I don't particularly want to be converted either. I wouldn't go there to pick a fight, I'd sit there quietly, be honest about my opinions if asked, and maybe learn something. I've been to Protestant sermons before, because my school used to be run by missionaries (technically, the religious indoctrination was half-arsed and quarter-hearted). Mormons though? It would be interesting to see what they're doing in there firsthand.

I think it's a significantly more inoffensive/benign alternative to kookier religions like Scientology, because I wouldn't even consider intentionally showing up to one of those gigs. Mormons seem like decent people, despite my strong reservations about the factual merit of their beliefs.

Ah well it went over my head. After your adventures at the gay bar I thought this was going to be your next human interest post I gotta say I was looking forward to your adventures with the Mormons alas.

I am always loathe to let my most dedicated readers down. No promises, but I have the time and energy, I might visit after my exams. And you're correct, I expect to get a good story out of it nothing else!

Darn those pesky young attractive clean-skinned blondes with big honkers who keep approaching you on that bridge. Which bridge in Utah is this specifically, though? There's just so many of them.

If I've moved to Utah, it's been more damp than I expected. These are export-grade Mormons, perhaps they've been through stricter QC than is the norm. Or God is putting an uncommon degree of effort into the sales pitch. I deserve it. I've seen some shit.

It is probably a bridge in Scotland, but yes pray tell so we all know which horrible bridge to avoid.

You sound slightly amenable to conversion, actually. If you could turn off the logical brain at-will, and saw some good incentives (a few buxom wives) I'd think you'd convert just for the big, beautiful benefits.

I deeply deeply hate human pop-up ads, especially when they're trading on the illusion of female attention.

Human pop-up ads is a great way to describe it. At least the LDS chicks approaching self_made_human sound like good sports, although overly persistent.

A few weeks ago I went to go pickup some goyslop; a few meters outside of the restaurant at a portable table sat an older lady and standing in front of the table was a young attractive woman. Me being genre savvy, I was prepared when I came out of the restaurant and the young woman followed me to give me a pitch for some cause or another. I didn't break stride while I looked at her, said "no thanks," and just kept walking away. She made a massive pouty stank face and didn't even give a token courtesy goodbye like "no problem, have a good day!", as if it were an affront to her Wonderfulness that I wasn't so enamored by her attention as to stop, listen further, and become a paypig.

When I was younger and less thot-fatigued I used to try variations of "no thanks, but I'll take your number though" in such situations. I did get some digits that way but never did manage to advance on those beyond the exchanging-texts-stage from there. Nowadays it's just its_all_so_tiresome.jpg.

By this point I have an immediate avoidance reaction whenever a woman goes out of her way to interact with me, because it's almost always ultimately some kind of grift or ploy.

I was the paypig about 16 years ago to the tune of $20, from some young girl canvassing donations for natural disaster relief. Got me good, wasn't prepared at all.

Slight amenable is generous, and I must note that the logical/empirical part of my brain does not switch off easy. Not even when I actively try. Maybe a proper night out with the lads might lead to a blackout and then waking up with at the aisle with a standard issue Mormon wife, but I'd probably run from the altar. I can't handle the divorce man, I ain't got much to lose.

And pretty sure the Scottish Mormons are... disapproving of polygamy. I don't think there's a DailyMail article about it, which is the minimum standard for reporting on the lurid and unusual. A single blonde wife? Who'll get mad if I drink coffee? Goddammit. Not quite sold. My immortal soul goes to the highest bidder.

Just need to start your own fundamentalist Mormon cult to get those extra Scottish wives. Lure those missionaries in and convince them coffee and polygamy and definitely no divorce are your newest revelations. You might need to write a newer new testament, but that seems within your ability.

Either they stop bothering you permanently lest they fall into heresy, or you have yourself the beginning of a very nice life. You did say that these women approached you freely.

Unfortunately, you will definitely be the subject of a DailyMail article if you can seduce these women, but alas, that is the price of success.

"Indian man changes his name to David Joseph Smith and claims new revelation! Local community aghast, new figures reveal cults on the rise..."

Just need to start your own fundamentalist Mormon cult to get those extra Scottish wives. Lure those missionaries in and convince them coffee and polygamy and definitely no divorce are your newest revelations.

This plan worked out well for the FLDS for a number of decades, but the wheels have come off in the past 10 years.

He only needs to steer clear of making daughter-wives and human trafficking and he should be in the clear.

Also has to avoid the widespread welfare fraud the feds used to pursue a bunch of the FLDS.

If the FLDS hadn't abused it with their own stores and letting their families go hungry, it would have been perfectly legitimate. Nothing illegal about the plural wives claiming welfare otherwise.

Hm interesting, never heard anyone claim that being well-endowed is standard issue among LDS women. Not when compared to the buxom jewesses in any case. Facially they're very cute, which is what matters most in my book. I'm glad to have such smokin' hot coreligionists as prospective wives and it strengthens my testimony that we are truly members of God's church on Earth.

Do let me know if you have any theological questions about my faith and I would love to be of assistance as I consider myself to be decently read in apologetics.

Good at apologetics? You just told me that it's not common for Mormon ladies to have massive mammaries. That is the biggest downsell you could hand me, though I appreciate the honesty.

(This is mostly a joke. Mostly. I'm fond of beautiful women.)

I suppose that missionaries are explicitly or implicitly sorted for charisma/looks. I wouldn't want to have uggos repping me if I can help it, though I have little choice in the matter. Thank goodness I mostly communicate through text.

For what it's worth, I have met a total of 7 Mormons in-person, at least that I knew were Mormon. 6 of them were missionaries. 1 of them was my driving instructor, who was a genuinely nice person. I'm an atheist, and an anti-theist, except I don't have the time or energy to get it into those debates these days. The pragmatic reason for it is that religious debate rarely achieves anything - the expected value calculation is poor, for me. I suppose that if you must know, I think Mormonism is particularly suspect as a religion because of the well-documented nature of its founding, which makes the implausible historical claims particularly jarring to me. Other, more established religions have the minor fig leaf of being founded so far back in the past that the truth is murkier, even if I still don't believe in them.

Otherwise? Uh, I have no real reason to dislike you guys. No Mormon has ever bothered me beyond asking me for a few seconds of my time. I just don't think I'm a good candidate for conversion, and I don't want to be converted. I like alcohol, nicotine through vapes, and "drugs", the last category apparently inclusive of coffee. I think I'm reasonably familiar with your religious tenets, but if you still want to explain after I've said everything above, be my guest. I genuinely don't mind.

You just told me that it's not common for Mormon ladies to have massive mammaries. That is the biggest downsell you could hand me

That is just because you're a heretical unbeliever who is doomed to eternity in hell...

Unlike those of us who are righteous unbelievers because we can appreciate the beauty of smaller breasts.

Excuse you? My taste in women is cosmopolitan, even if I have a particular weakness for thick thighs. Breasts? As long as they're bigger than mine, the primary consideration is whether they let me touch 'em.

For your viewing pleasure:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y2Y5KVtU810

doomed to eternity

Eternity? Yay!

in hell

Oh. Not too bad. That's where my friends are going to be. I'll ask to be cremated with an air conditioner.

That is the biggest downsell you could hand me

Well hey, it all depends on your frame of reference, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to pursue JAPs prior to my conversion and pivot to courting BYU blondes. I don't think LDS mammaries are any bigger or smaller than the national average, you simply have to know where to look to find the size that works best for you.

I think Mormonism is particularly suspect as a religion because of the well-documented nature of its founding, which makes the implausible historical claims particularly jarring to me.

I respect your disinterest in litigating a theological debate here and as such I will not actively proselytize, but I want to briefly clarify that as a rule of thumb, every theological debate is more nuanced than a 10 minute video essay or an /r/exmormon post, they don't have the last word on the founding of the church, far from it. Joseph Smith had eleven witnesses affirming that he did have the ancient records he claimed to possess, who stood by that testimony even after apostatizing following a feud and believing that Joseph Smith lost his divine authority in the restoration of the gospel. Disproved anachronisms, authentic Mesoamerican and Ancient Near East correspondences, the war strategies delineated in the Book of Mormon that weren't just poetic accounts of Napoleonic warfare contemporaneous to the time of translation, the duration of the translation process and use of Hebraic poetry all convinced me of the veracity of the Church's supernatural claims. If you are interested in critically engaging with LDS truth claims, anthropologist John L. Sorenson's Mormon's Codex is a fascinating read, my irreligious acquaintances who were not looking to be persuaded share this sentiment.

I just don't think I'm a good candidate for conversion, and I don't want to be converted. I like alcohol, nicotine through vapes, and "drugs", the last category apparently inclusive of coffee. I think I'm reasonably familiar with your religious tenets, but if you still want to explain after I've said everything above, be my guest.

I don't think one's religious affiliation (or lack thereof) should be contingent on how compatible it is with one's priors. On the contrary, the entire purpose of religion is to instill humility and charity into people through their awareness of a higher power's existence, altering their calculus to one that is not aligned with the irrational and egoistic human nature. God is viewed as an entity possessing eternal intelligence, an asymptote we won't reach at this juncture if you will, and as such we believe our worldly intuition will inevitably serve us wrong and that we are meant to be inconvenienced at times, because ultimately that is what will maximize our well-being in the long term. In my experience, most Christian churches offer doctrines, services, etc. as ancillaries to entice people to join, i.e., you're Catholic because mass is cool. If you're looking for a good community, they fit the bill. Our church by contrast, emphasizes that one joins it because they believe it is truly the very church that Jesus Christ established during his earthly ministry, and has been restored through Joseph Smith.

We do not view coffee as a biohazard. I myself love drinking mock coffee made from barley and chicory and popping some caffeine pills, twice as potent as real coffee 😉 Tiramisu and coffee ice cream are superlative. We believe that upon our baptism, we have covenanted with God to abstain from coffee and tea as a sacrifice, similar to the Jewish abstention to shellfish which is not rooted in health grounds. I don't think it's a coincidence that tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco are all "rituals" served by hosts to guests in hospitality, transcending cultural barriers. There are obvious benefits to not partaking in substances like alcohol, but by refusing them and making ourselves stick out like sore thumbs in the crowd, it's a way of subliminally attracting publicity to our gospel.

As cool as it would be to boast about being a lifelong member descended from the original Scandinavian and English pioneers who migrated to Utah, I am a convert who took 8 months of my precious time to ponder over what the Church offered to me. I myself have long been beholden to coffee, booze, and cigars. After a little cost-benefit analysis, I arrived to the conclusion that if the Church is true, I should be able to find joy and purpose in life without these ephemeral niceties, but rather from the rich company and safety net I have thanks to my coreligionists. I don't think any less of people who don't share my outlook, I view it as a personal matter and they have not entered the covenants I have, there's no contract they are bound by to abstain from any of those substances. I do see benefit in alcohol at an individual level, though I believe strong social and institutional cohesion in a community is an even better alternative to the benefits alcohol does offer. Speaking of which, another reason we abstain from drinking and smoking is because we want to set the right precedents and stand in solidarity with the people who are less capable of drinking and smoking within reasonable measure, "for the weakest of saints" as we say.

No Mormon has ever bothered me beyond asking me for a few seconds of my time.

I'm pleased to hear that. Our missionaries do tend to be more compassionate and less aggressive in their proselytizing tactics than the Jehovah's Witnesses, as the training programs for missionaries emphasizes not viewing prospective new members as statistics or homogeneous units, or treating their ministry as solely transactional, but rather gaining tangible experience in serving others and leaving one's comfort zone. You will have some inexperienced 18 year olds potentially ask you to get baptized 2 months after visiting with them, but they mean well. If you do decide to attend, I think your boundaries would be absolutely respected if stated clearly, as we absolutely enjoy building rapport with curious people of other backgrounds :)

Thanks for taking the time to explain! I can't productively engage with the specifics, but I appreciate the effort nonetheless.

We do not view coffee as a biohazard. I myself love drinking mock coffee made from barley and chicory and popping some caffeine pills, twice as potent as real coffee 😉 Tiramisu and coffee ice cream are superlative. We believe that upon our baptism, we have covenanted with God to abstain from coffee and tea as a sacrifice, similar to the Jewish abstention to shellfish which is not rooted in health grounds. I don't think it's a coincidence that tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco are all "rituals" served by hosts to guests in hospitality, transcending cultural barriers. There are obvious benefits to not partaking in substances like alcohol, but by refusing them and making ourselves stick out like sore thumbs in the crowd, it's a way of subliminally attracting publicity to our gospel.

Hmm. I understand the mindset, but it doesn't really appeal to me. Or at least I like tea and coffee too much to sacrifice it for anyone, even God. If he didn't want me to drink the stuff, he shouldn't have made extracted insecticide so delicious and compatible with my neurotransmitter receptors. Then again, he does have a tendency to make plants you're not supposed to eat, and then putting them right next to you with not so much as a chainlink fence for protection. It's in character.

I do believe that your current explanation is idiosyncratic, in the sense that the typical Mormon wouldn't see caffeine pills as an acceptable way of dodging their nominal religious obligations. I respect you for that, of course. Very Jewish coded, and I like Jews. Anyone who bases their theology around arguing with God and sometimes winning that argument (Rabbi Eliezer?) has my vote.

Out of curiosity, what would happen if someone were to get baptized, and then very conspicuously continue drinking coffee? Polite tutting? The Bishop grabbing you by the collar and throwing you out? A Dyson hand dryer (as opposed to the swarm) being used to un-baptize you? I don't know! It's an academic question, I like drugs in general, for personal consumption and as a peddler for pay. I don't know any Mormon doctors, but I wouldn't want to be one on a night shift.

Apologies for the late response, was inundated with my finals but finally got the lion's share out of the way.

Or at least I like tea and coffee too much to sacrifice it for anyone, even God.

Humility is paramount to establishing a relationship with God. I believe He is the only one who knows my obstacles and deficits perfectly, and has helped me surmount them through His divine providence. I believe the instruction to avoid coffee is His divine revelation, and I am ready to sacrifice that as He offered me a 180 in my lifestyle and brought me a sustainable, long-term sense of peace that nothing else did.

Obviously you don't have that testimony of God's existence and we're on totally different wavelengths. It is a high-stakes, long-term commitment with many implications on your social life and even epicurean experiences. In Matthew 4, a Galilean fisherman holding a net sees an unfamiliar man from Nazareth standing on the shore, saying "come, follow me", entirely oblivious to the incredible journey that lied ahead. Our church doesn't have monks or priests who pledge themselves to live a higher way of life because that is something we believe all members in the Church can do and what we expect them to do. Because of the vicissitudes of life, there will be periods when it's more difficult to maintain this devotion, but, in return, you gain a peace of soul and a proximity to Jesus Christ that you can then use to maximize your well-being and assist others.

I understand that humans have a natural yearning towards vices, in part because of our curiosity. Perhaps you'll be pleased to know that psilocybin and kava is fair game.

I do believe that your current explanation is idiosyncratic, in the sense that the typical Mormon wouldn't see caffeine pills as an acceptable way of dodging their nominal religious obligations.

You'd be surprised, my disposition is hardly idiosyncratic. The prohibition does not extend to any form of caffeine, but solely to beverages that come from the coffee bean specifically. Decaffeinated coffee is every bit as disallowed. Sure, you have a subset of the LDS population that is more traditional and legalistic and is likely to say "when in doubt, don't" but that sentiment is not doctrinal nor in any way representative of the faith. The church emphasizes the individual's agency and as Joseph Smith said "I teach them correct principles and they govern themselves." It it not the church's role to hold our hands and micromanage everything that can potentially be corrosive to the spirit of the Word of Wisdom. Drinking yerba mate or an inordinate amount of Red Bulls is common practice among my cohorts. Utah is actually known in the United States as a hotspot for the establishment of several quirky chains selling customized sodas (Google dirty Dr Pepper).

From former President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Boyd K. Packer: "People write asking what is the position of the Church on the Word of Wisdom, for instance, on soft drinks or something. And we think, “Why do they have to ask?” It is a principle, and you have the freedom to do as you will. You do not have to be commanded in all things. Without having to have the Church deliver a statement on it, you should know what the Lord’s position is on abortion or cloning or same-gender marriage or birth control. All of those things are built in as a part of what we know and what we are."

Out of curiosity, what would happen if someone were to get baptized, and then very conspicuously continue drinking coffee? Polite tutting? The Bishop grabbing you by the collar and throwing you out?

As anticlimactic as the answer is, none of the following. As mentioned earlier, the ball is in our court to do the right thing, and it's between the big man and us. The Church can be said to be a rather libertarian institution, operating on an honor system. No punitive measures are carried out by intermediaries- if the Church's policy is not honored, that lies on one's guilty conscience. The exception to this is if you have a temple recommend card, as the temple is a place where sacred ordinances are performed, and access is granted to it after an interview where one is asked whether or not they abide by the Word of Wisdom. If one is not honoring the covenants, in other words, agreements one entered with God, they are better off excommunicated to not be bound by an agreement they refuse to honor.

Thank you for taking the time to explain! Well, if they like psilocybin and kava, that's putting you guys ahead of the pack. But what LSD, MDMA or ketamine? Serious question.

The exception to this is if you have a temple recommend card, as the temple is a place where sacred ordinances are performed, and access is granted to it after an interview where one is asked whether or not they abide by the Word of Wisdom. If one is not honoring the covenants, in other words, agreements one entered with God, they are better off excommunicated to not be bound by an agreement they refuse to honor.

How big of a deal Is it to get one of those?

I seem to recall that Mormons pay tithes to the Church. How does that work?

But what LSD, MDMA or ketamine? Serious question.

LSD is more of a gray area. Psilocybin is legal and sold commercially in the Netherlands and several Californian cities. It's not addictive, not known to cause any long-term cognitive impairment the way cannabis does, and doesn't cause you to lose your judgment the way one can with a high dose of alcohol. In the case of LSD, the duration is significantly longer, there's more psychological strain and it is probably more difficult to navigate if things go south. I'm at an age where my prefrontal cortex hasn't fully matured, but I've entertained taking LSD at some point when I'm less vulnerable to first-episode psychosis and schizophrenia onset. The prodrugs for it are legal, and the legislation against it exists largely to disincentivize its consumption rather than to actively prosecute somebody who does it privately without advertising it, with the negative externalities being low, so in my book it's fine.

MDMA and ket are fundamentally different beasts; they activate dopamine pathways, cause neurotoxicity, and destroy your kidneys in the case of ketamine. The Church counsels against illegal substances and we abide by a principle known as the law of the land, sustaining the law irrespective of our personal disagreements to maintain peace and stability.

How big of a deal Is it to get one of those?

It's largely part of a linear progression. Obtaining a temple recommend requires undergoing an interview where one is asked if they are honoring the same standards they have promised to follow upon their baptism, e.g. the Word of Wisdom, the law of tithing, the law of chastity, etc. It valorizes the experience as we must actively choose to qualify for it. If anyone was free to stop by, it'd lose its meaning. The exclusiveness and difficulty of being admitted into Harvard is what gives the institution its merit, even if some comparable education could be obtained outside of it. Because temple worthiness is difficult to achieve, it gives it great value, ipso facto great joy. It's a high standard, but one that we encourage every member to strive for.

I seem to recall that Mormons pay tithes to the Church. How does that work?

We pay 10% of our annual income to the Church, which is used to fund the logistics of constructing and operating new Church infrastructure, as well as supporting various humanitarian efforts globally. Whether we want to pay gross or net is left to our own discretion. Personally, gross is more intuitive as the entire purpose of tithing is to inculcate selflessness and take upon us the willingness to make sacrifices for the Lord. Giving away 10% of our income incentivizes us to manage our finances more responsibly, and by paying gross income, it reminds me that the Lord takes precedence before all else, even the revenue agency.

I do believe that your current explanation is idiosyncratic, in the sense that the typical Mormon wouldn't see caffeine pills as an acceptable way of dodging their nominal religious obligations.

The Mormon prohibition of tea and coffee is much more akin to the prohibition of Jews eating pork than a prohibition of caffeine. There is official clarification from the church that the prohibition is about hot drinks not caffeine. This was done precisely because of the reasons you state. But it's totally kosher for Mormon teens to drink monster.

Out of curiosity, what would happen if someone were to get baptized, and then very conspicuously continue drinking coffee? Polite tutting?

Giving you the side eye plus not getting a temple recommend which would likely distress your buxom Mormon bride. Ironically if you weren't baptized but attended church people would tolerate it a lot better. As for Mormon doctors they are free to consume all manner of energy drinks, just no tea or coffee,

Mormon prohibition of tea and coffee

Reading around apparently it comes from the Mormon Words Of Wisdom "hot drinks are not for the body or belly", which gets interpreted as tea and coffee. But drinking hot herbal tea is okay, and hot chocolate is okay, and caffeine in non-coffee drinks is okay, but cold tea and coffee aren't, even though the original text doesn't mention tea, coffee or caffeine.

I couldn't find a clear answer whether you can drink cold decaffeinated coffee. Some say yes, some some say no.

The most common hot beverages consumed at the time were coffee and tea (black or green tea that comes from the camellia sinensis plant), hence the use of the term. Coffee and tea are counseled against regardless of their serving temperature as the substance remains the same. Anybody who claims drinking cold coffee is permissible, or that the Word of Wisdom prohibits caffeine or beverages that happen to be hot has poor command of the doctrine.

I just find it interesting that effectively someone can sit there drinking one hot drink while condemning someone else for drinking a different hot drink, or potentially a drink that has never been hot, under the authority of and despite the relevant passage unambiguously referring to "hot drinks".

I'm not trying to start an argument but this seems like it's purpose built for starting arguments.

More comments

I do believe that your current explanation is idiosyncratic, in the sense that the typical Mormon wouldn't see caffeine pills as an acceptable way of dodging their nominal religious obligations.

I know many LDS members, and quite a few live on energy drinks, full-sugar caffeinated sodas, or caffeine supplements of some kind. They strictly abide the "no coffee or tea" but are quite happy to get synthetic caffeine sources. The Word of Wisdom prohibits coffee and tea, not caffeine itself.

I suppose that missionaries are explicitly or implicitly sorted for charisma/looks.

Something like two thirds of Mormon missionaries are male, and something like 80-90% of active Mormon young men go on a mission; not much sorting there. The percentage of active Mormon young women who go on a mission is rising, but still only at like 30% ... and (rude/speculative/half-baked/outdated thoughts you should probably ignore begin here:) because it's a self-selected 30%, it may select slightly against attractiveness. Young Mormon men tend to go on missions before seriously thinking about marriage (skipping it being considered a bit of a red flag among prospective partners), whereas young Mormon women are more likely to seek and/or get marriage offers early (I had a friend whose first was at 18) and the ones who get early offers aren't likely to leave their new fiance or spouse for a year and a half stretch.

I always thought mission was equally required for both men and women, and only adult converts "get out" of mission.

How did Brigham Young manage to breed big honkers into his flock? Surely polygyny means women should be subject to less sexual selection, not more.

Surely polygyny means women should be subject to less sexual selection, not more.

Attractive women do not just come from attractive mothers; they also come from high value fathers with substantial resources (such as would be needed to support families with multiple wives). Additionally, Utah was disproportionately settled by immigrants from Scandinavia and the British Isles. You can find similar phenotypes in the Midwest, especially Wisconsin and Minnesota. This is probably also an HBD explanation for why Mormons and Midwesterners have such rhyming cultural stereotypes (e.g. passive-aggressive politeness, or Mormon "funeral potatoes" versus Minnesotan "hot dish").

In the midwest we have both funeral potatoes (assuming you mean the tasty dish ones with sour cream and cornflakes on top, yes?) and many casseroles which can be called hot dish (not a single specific recipe). Notable for their flavor cheat inclusion of "cream of" soups. The Pioneer Woman has multiple such casseroles, if anyone is curious.

It’s actually kind of funny how religions practice eugenics in a way. Any system that organizes relationships that imply family formation do this.

All worldviews like this apply a selection template that involves… more or less “breeding” (if you want to call it that) for certain features. Eliezer once made a pretty funny remark in dialogue with Adam Frank that it shouldn’t be a surprise why you might find concentrations of individuals in societies today with full blown religious adaptations because until very recently, non-believers were regularly burnt at the stake.

Wasn't Utah settled from the Midwest?

Either way, English girls are more famous for being fat all over these days, there must be something the Mormons are doing right. I know they love cosmetic surgery almost as much as the Koreans, but I think s_m_h would've noticed that.

Wasn't Utah settled from the Midwest?

Initially, yes. But the earliest Utah settlers were quickly joined by converts from all over the world, albeit mostly England and Scandinavia.

I know they love cosmetic surgery almost as much as the Koreans, but I think s_m_h would've noticed that.

I think this is a "Mormon moms" thing ("staying hot for hubby")--girls out seeking converts will most often be in their early 20s, when cosmetic surgery would in most cases be premature.

I'm told by reliable yet confidential sources, that the trek to Utah provided ample eugenic pressure. Mostly by killing off the women with inadequate fat stores.

Am I just being stupid by not seeing that this is obviously a joke? In any other context I'd be sure it was, yet The Motte is the sort of place where we love to broadly speculate about even wild evo-psych hypotheticals, so I feel like I can't just dismiss an evo-boobs theory out of hand!

Famously some early emigrants to Utah walked there, pulling handcarts, which does seem like the sort of thing fat stores were made for. But that was only around 5% of even the earliest emigrants, and only around 7% of those died of exposure or starvation. Cutting out 0.4% of the gene pool wouldn't make much of a difference to anything, and in any case the strongest selection effect among that 5% would have been on whatever genes correlated with "go with one of the 8 handcart companies who planned semi-competently, not the 2 who didn't".

only around 7% of those died of exposure or starvation

I be fair to the evo-hypotheticals. You don't have to literately die for there to be evolutionary pressure on selecting for adequate fat stores. Starvation suppresses fertility.

I'm also not sure that @orthoxerox is right that "polygyny means women should be subject to less sexual selection, not more." If you assume some limited capacity to feed children and support pregnant women per group, maybe the ones with big honkers were more likely to be selected from within a cule.

It is a joke. But I do appreciate the accidental nerd-snipe, that's an interesting tit-bit tidbit!

I have no idea if these ladies came from OG Mormon stock, or if they were made in a lab in Scotland. Presumably plenty of Utah Mormons came from here in the first place, and there's no shortage of (fake) blondes in these parts.

Who should I follow on X? I follow exactly zero people, and my feed is mostly low-quality culture war.

I want a high-quality feed, not necessarily CW, anything goes as long as I don't close the app feeling like I've just eaten at Hooters.

https://x.com/allTheYud

https://x.com/bryan_caplan

https://x.com/KelseyTuoc

https://x.com/sapinker

https://x.com/avidseries

https://x.com/esrtweet

https://x.com/Aella_Girl

https://x.com/razibkhan

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil

https://x.com/FromKulak

Winner of the Most Schizophrenic Timeline Challenge.

I should really ask my patients to follow me on Twitter. F4F life.

You should avoid it, IMO.

Twitter delenda est.

It's pronounced "shitter" for a reason.

Depends on your fields of interest. For rationalist-adjacent content you have the TPOT-sphere (That Part of Twitter) with the prolific posters being Eigenrobot, Growing Daniel, Cremieux, etc. Otherwise most of the Substack writers I peruse will typically also have a non-negligible presence on Twitter.

Follow me! https://x.com/Thomasdelvasto_

I also recommend @vividvoid and @simonsarris

Howling Mutant is one of the funniest people on X, but you're not going to feel good about it.

Hard to say without knowing what content you want/need to receive in your feed.

I follow A.Shipwright and one other artist, and my feed is filled with art (IMO only mediocre but I’m picky).

Someone rec me a good TL of the Illiad/Odyssey.

It's been a long time since I've read/studied it and I'm out of date. I at least dimly remember a lot of pushback from some better-read people than I about the Emily Wilson TL of the Odyssey.

I kind of want to read a passable translation again for posterity's sake due to some discussion and dissatisfaction I've noticed with the latest trailer for Nolan's attempt at Homer. Not in prose if possible, ideally the power and scope of the oral poetry should be preserved. Despite the power of the "Sing, O Muse, of the Rage of Achilles" line, many of the recommended or popular TLs I've seen have far shittier renditions of that verse.

I was taught through the Alexander Pope Translation and it's the first translation of the Iliad I'd ever read.

https://gutenberg.org/files/6130/6130-h/6130-h.htm#chap01

To me it's very enjoyable. Though technically not as accurate to the original as some others, in English, it's one of the best translations out there.

Piggyback-ing off this, has anyone read T. E. Lawrence's translation? I've only seen the meme about how shit Emily Wilson is that had the opening, but it seemed much more flowery/prose based. I have a copy of the Samuel Butler translation in a set of "Great Books of the Western World" but didn't love his Illiad.

I just read Ho epi Troian Polemos. It's an easy-greek reader that tells the story of the Illiad using only ~400 greek words. It's designed for someone who has had about 1 semester of greek studies.

If you're actually interested enough in the books to re-read a translation, then I recommend starting to just go to the original language!

Robert Fitzgerald's 1961 translation is the standard modern version of The Odyssey (or, at least, the one all the school textbooks seem to have):

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.

He saw the townlands
and learned the minds of many distant men,
and weathered many bitter nights and days
in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only
to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.
But not by will nor valor could he save them,
for their own recklessness destroyed them all—
children and fools, they killed and feasted on
the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun,
and he who moves all day through heaven
took from their eyes the dawn of their return.

Of these adventures, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
tell us in our time, lift the great song again.

But if you're looking for something a little more trad, Alexander Pope's 1725 translation is excellent:

The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound;
Who, when his arms had wrought the destined fall
Of sacred Troy, and razed her heaven-built wall,
Wandering from clime to clime, observant stray’d,
Their manners noted, and their states survey’d,
On stormy seas unnumber’d toils he bore,
Safe with his friends to gain his natal shore:
Vain toils! their impious folly dared to prey
On herds devoted to the god of day;
The god vindictive doom’d them never more
(Ah, men unbless’d!) to touch that natal shore.
Oh, snatch some portion of these acts from fate,
Celestial Muse! and to our world relate.

And whatever you do, don't read Samuel Butler's 1900's translation (which is, inexplicably, the most popular version on Project Gutenberg):

Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, oh daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them.

Alexander Pope's 1725 translation is excellent

"It is a pretty poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer."

I have an irrational hatred for poetic elision. People who can follow the meter only by resorting to the methods of Procrustes shouldn't write poetry.

Is it only for English, or does transforming "желание" into "желанье" disqualify a poet in your eyes as well?

It's only for English, all these apostrophes turn me into a slobbering dyslexic. And и/ь alternation is not just poetic.

Not a translation, so perhaps not what you're looking for, but I enjoyed the War Nerd's version.

Lattimore aims to serve as a line-for-line, verbatim translation of the Ancient Greek into English, so if you're looking to replicate the experience of reading it in its language of origin without actually doing so, it's a safe bet. Fitzgerald uses a more vivid and contemporary prose without being highly verbose, while also not sacrificing accuracy.

I have NEVER seen translation abbreviated as TL, and I was very confused until you mentioned Emily Wilson.

Fagles is the one that comes most commonly recommended as accurate and well done. I enjoyed Wilson's Odyssey, but I see where people didn't like it, I think Wilson is an interesting pairing with the War Nerd Iliad.

My favorite translation though, is Pope's

Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.[41]
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove![42

Seconding Fagles. I found those to be enjoyable and comprehensible without feeling like I was reading Homer for Dummies (which they might be, for all I know, since I haven't read other translations).

Definitive editions with copious endnotes! Aren't they cool?

Example endnote:

Les noms de villages et de lieux-dits correspondent à des réalités géographiques. L'édition originale imprimait Herlies pour Herlier, se qui a été corrigé par la suite. Goskal n'existe, remarque Charles Samaran, que sur la carte de Cassini. Dumas ou Maquet l'ont-ils consultée? CS ne le croit pas, mais suppose que Dumas a noté le nom en se promenant dans la région de Béthune. Enfin l'édition originale porte non pas Erquinghem mais Enguinghem.

Via Google Translate, with obvious liberties curtailed:

The names of villages and hamlets [in The Three Musketeers chapter 65 (Judgment)] correspond to geographical realities. The original edition printed "Herlies" instead of "Herlier", which was subsequently corrected. Goskal does not exist, Charles Samaran notes, except on the Cassini map. Did Dumas or Maquet consult it? CS does not believe so, but surmises that Dumas noted the name while walking through the Béthune region. Finally, the original edition features not "Erquinghem" but "Enguinghem".

The evolution of my custom house's construction schedule:

  • 2025-07-23: The contractor offers me a contract with tentative schedule extending from 2025-10-13 to 2026-01-13 (13 weeks). I clarify that such an early completion date is not convenient for me. (At the time, I plan to retire in 2027-02.)

  • 2025-07-24: I sign a contract with tentative schedule extending from 2026-08-03 to 2026-10-03 (9 weeks).

  • 2025-09: I am overwhelmed by depression, retire ASAP, and inform the contractor that I am ready to proceed with construction earlier than I said previously.

  • 2025-12-16: I sign a contract with tentative schedule extending from 2026-03-30 to 2026-07-06 (14 weeks).

  • 2026-02-17: Via email (not in a contract), the contractor gives me a tentative schedule extending from 2026-03-02 to 2026-05-06 (9 weeks).

  • 2026-03-02: Construction starts.

  • 2026-05-04: I make my weekly visit to the site, note that completion within the next two days seems impossible, and via email ask the contractor for a new tentative completion date.

  • 2026-05-07: The "construction coordinator" informs me that both the "sales director" who gave me the date of 2026-05-06 and the project manager who has been overseeing the project no longer work at the contractor, and she will obtain a new tentative completion date soon.

This was this project's second project manager, too (replacing the one that I complained about previously). I don't know whether (1) the rats are fleeing the sinking ship, or (2) this churn is just a natural part of the renaming/restructuring/reshuffling that the contractor is going through (which started in 2025-11).

Photograph: Unpainted drywall; R-49 ceiling insulation

Interesting excerpt from the latest annual SEC filing of Opendoor, perennially-unprofitable startup number umpteen:

Market Overview

The current landscape is highly fragmented. Today, nearly 90% of residential real estate transactions in the United States involve an agent. There are over two million licensed real estate agents in the United States, who each complete approximately four transactions on average per year, and many of whom do not solely work in real estate. Without appropriate support, this can lead to an inconsistent experience for consumers looking for guidance in what is typically the largest financial decision of their lives. Consumer satisfaction reflects this broken experience, with traditional real estate transactions generating Net Promoter Scores around 30, significantly below other major consumer categories and well below Opendoor's average NPS of nearly 80.

Net promoter score is calculated as follows:

  • To your customers, give a survey: "On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?"

  • People who answer 10 or 9 are categorized as "promoters"; people who answer 8 or 7, "passives"; and people who answer 6 or lower, "detractors". (Insert complaint about rating inflation.)

  • Net promoter score is defined as promoters minus detractors (in percentage terms), and ranges from −100 to +100. According to popular survey administrator Qualtrics, 1 to 20 is "good", 21 to 50 is "favorable", 51 to 80 is "excellent", and 81 to 100 is "world-class". According to popular survey administrator SurveyMonkey, scores of 30 to 45 are average, and scores of 55 to 75 are in the top 25 percent of companies in a selection of popular industries.

Of course, this number is from Opendoor's SEC filing, so it probably is biased toward Opendoor. But 80 versus 30 is a pretty wide margin.

In my reply to @clo above I mention having just read an easy-greek reader of The Illiad... but since you mention Sherlock Holmes... I feel obligated now to mention that I just received an attic greek translation of Sherlock Holmes from amazon this week. I've been really enjoying reading these "modern ancient greek" stories recently.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats