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PaperclipPerfector  28d ago (text post)   2182 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 15, 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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Being a physically active 6'8" dude with shoulder-length hair, I'm rather content with my appearance on a day-to-day basis and am frequently called conventionally attractive and receive compliments. I often exchange smiles with women in public places, and am told by my pals that I get checked out a non-negligible amount of times. On paper I need not fear of anything, but when push comes to shove, and I'm out at a discotheque making an effort to approach women and exchange numbers, paranoia starts to penetrate my head and I begin fearing that my stature as a big guy only makes me uninviting and intimidating to the average 5'5" woman. I hope that's not the case, but if I were a man of average stature, I would never have to worry about any of this to begin with.

I begin fearing that my stature as a big guy

UUUU

I'm only 6'6'' but I've had similar issues because my neutral facial expression can come off as a bit scary, especially when I'm focused; people think I'm angry. I've repeatedly gotten comments that I scare people with my size and intensity, both in work and private settings.

The solution I've found to this is to try to smile and laugh as much and as genuinely as possible. So many doors started opening up for me in all areas of life when I intentionally started projecting an aura of joy. I think this is good advice for anyone but as a big guy with a deep booming voice, you rarely if ever won't be taken seriously so going in the other direction is useful and doesn't really have any downsides.

… I've had similar issues because my neutral facial expression can come off as a bit scary, especially when I'm focused; people think I'm angry. I've repeatedly gotten comments that I scare people with my size and intensity, both in work and private settings.

Oh you too huh? So I’m not the only one then. For me when I’m focused let me stay on track and do my thing. I try to be more sociable and outgoing to compensate for the seemingly outward intensity, and most of the time it takes.

I always used to make eye contact before approaching women, but that's just me. I'd practically never get a cold response doing this, and early on it calmed my approach anxiety.

I knew some guys that would do things like dance up unseen behind a girl and grab her hips and it often had a bad end.

"My steak is too juicy and my lobster is too buttery".

Rule of thumb in life: don't say no for them. Maybe if you approach a woman she'll be put off by your height, but if you don't ask then you definitely won't get anywhere. Get out there and ask women for their numbers, king.

I appreciate the words of encouragement! For some additional context, I'm currently based in a small town with a very narrow dating pool where I've found it difficult to connect with any like-minded peers, and the little interaction I get with women is in the big city a 2-hour drive from my place. On paper, the odds should be in my favor, but these logistical constraints have made it practically impossible for me to amass a substantial number of connections. It seems as if all the dating prospects just lie behind a glass wall. Whenever it's my time to shine I'm paralyzed as my brain convinces me everything is too good to be true. What might also play a part in this rigamarole is my being a tad younger than the median poster here.

And this is why 6'2" is the ideal male height. Any taller and you're a giant who scares the hoes. Any shorter and you're a disgusting manlet.

When women claim to be physically intimidated by men or to fear for their safety, it's usually nothing to do with the hypothetical violent capabilities of the man in question compared to other men. It's just that he's talking to them while being insufficiently attractive. Otherwise Jason Momoa would be a object of fear instead of lust.

I understand you. The ideal height difference imo is 5-7" so that's tough for you to find! Bigger differences can still with though, my brother's wife is a solid 12" shorter.

Women most prefer men 10” taller than themselves and men most prefer women 2” or so shorter than themselves, which would average out right in the middle there of 6”.

but if I were a man of average stature, I would never have to worry about any of this to begin with.

You would be worrying about other things.

But if I were you I'd hit on the 5'11 girls.

You do not need to worry. Ask her for her phone number.

See unfortunately by the time I wrote the post, I had already returned home. For additional context, she was having a conversation with her cousins about a seemingly very localized topic, and I wanted to not come across as a discourteous jerk. One of her cousins was a guy I already shook hands with, so he introduced me to her and we asked each other a few questions. There were no red flags to indicate active disinterest, but also no clear signs of interest either. The people around her continued to talk and I didn't have the time to muster clever questions and look for openings in the midst of it all, and as I had no wingman, I didn't want to appear like a loser lingering around if an opening never was to come. In hindsight, I was likely reading too much into it and assuming the worst-case scenario. I'm based in a remote small town with a narrow dating pool, in a milieu where my peers don't exactly share my worldview or aspirations, so my brain tells me that me receiving a modicum of female attention must be too good to be true.

She came here to Europe from Utah to visit her relatives and God knows if I'll bump into her again, which is unfortunate. It was a church dance in a city two hours away from my place, and I was one of two people from my area to show up at a place where people mostly limited their conversations to existing groups. Still managed to make new connections and talk to some other women I'm less interested in, so hey it's not all terrible.

To clarify, construction is not complete—this invitation is just an early draft. (Sorry, you're not invited.)

Such a shame. I wish I had an invite, but if you thought trying to attend Inkhaven was hard, imagine me trying to explain to the American embassy staff that I want to attend the house warming party of an online acquaintance with weapons-grade autism.

I dare say that your autism is so strong it would be ITAR-restricted. Imagine if you resettled in China: they'd have a working space elevator in two weeks, built to code handed down retrocausally by the Singleton at the end of time.

I don't even know man. I think that there's only like a 5% chance that this is satire only matched by that fake Bay Area polycule invite from a month back. The rest of my probability mass is mostly on you playing this straight, with perhaps some degree of self-awareness/attempted humor (which works).

Please share the final form when you're done. I might do a case study on it, or at least a funny essay. And good luck with the actual housewarming, even if it involves inviting your uncool brother.

Also:

I dare say that your autism is so strong it would be ITAR-restricted.

Come on, you're exaggerating here.

  • Writing up an invitation to a housewarming party is not autistic at all! After writing this particular invitation, I actually asked my local decensored LLM to write up an example invitation to a housewarming party, and it looked more or less like what I had written (though obviously much less detailed, since it had no source material to work from). And this document is only two pages long—perfectly acceptable for an invitation. Maybe the digression about insulation in appendix C is slightly autistic, but energy efficiency is important for homeowners.

  • Enjoyment of designing houses is not autistic at all! Writing up a distillation of concepts in order to help others design their own houses is slightly autistic—but, again, this particular handout is only two pages long (if I adjust the margins), not a gigantic eight-page tome.

"Patient displays dimished insight into condition"

(That's a joke)

I would bet good money on you having Aspergers (or high functioning ASD, as we'd call it these days). This is mostly a gestalt clinical impression on the basis of significant familiarity/fond perplexity. It's not a formal diagnosis. I haven't had the pleasure of meeting you (I am sadly not invited to the party), which is the bare minimum for a formal diagnosis. Or actually, below the bare minimum, because the GMC would disbar me if that was my standard practice.

Man... Where would I even begin to answer that question? That's a serious statement.

A written house warming invite is perfectly fine. The specific format and terminology you've used is... unusual. Please note that I'm not assigning any negative connotations here at all. Never have. It's friendly riffing on the internet with a kernel of truth in it. It is abundantly clear that you are high-functioning and a productive member of society, even after retirement. You should probably get that depression properly checked out, if you haven't already. You clearly know where to find a PHQ-9 form.

Come on, you're exaggerating here.

To be clear, I don't think any degree of autism, by itself, can get a human being ITAR restricted. Nor do I actually believe you can manage to build a space elevator, at least not with a reasonable budget. Megastructural engineering is probably not your area of expertise as a civil engineer, but then again, you probably know the specs of elevator-planning, and what is a space elevator but a very, very tall elevator?

Okay. I'm burnt out on exam prep right now, so I will take a half-hearted crack at identifying supportive elements from the textual evidence provided:

The autism is that your housewarming invitation opens like a government form, proceeds by FAQ, and invokes 2024 International Fire Code 1004.5 to explain why invitees may bring one pet but no household members. You cite the occupant load factor for "assembly without fixed seats, unconcentrated (tables and chairs)," derives a 14-person cap, concedes the IFC isn't actually applicable to private residences, and then independently re-derives the same number from your floor plan geometry. Three justifications, in order, for the guest cap on a sixteen-person gathering.

A five-level wellness rubric with columns for Willpower, 24/7 headache, Enjoyment of life, and Rough time period, with your current 2-to-3-out-of-5 rating disclosed in a public appendix circulating to your former colleagues and your brother. I am genuinely glad you are not still at 1/5. Late 2025 sounds rough. Your coworkers from the retirement job, though, probably did not show up looking for a quarterly state-of-the-soul report. I mean, I can't rule that out either, maybe all civil engineers are like this?

Capitalized WILL in "Entry WILL be refused to anything beyond that," where "anything" rather than "anyone" is appropriate because pets are grammatically inanimate. The same all-caps treatment on "My plan for the future is to RELAX." Consistent signature style throughout. Your mother parenthetically identified as "the renter of a bedroom in the house" rather than as your mother, because... I genuinely don't know. I am the wrong flavor of neurodiverse for that.

I must reiterate: no negative connotation. I'm saying this with sincere affection and anthropological awe. You are clearly high-functioning, productive, technically competent, conscientious, and capable of producing documents that make normal people look like chimps poking at drywall with a stick. When you ask "what exactly about this is autistic?", you so while standing inside a two-page exhibit titled Invitation to Housewarming Party with appendices A through D.

People like you are probably responsible for 90% of human civilization, especially the boring but important bits. That's also my approximate level of confidence in the autism diagnosis.

Please share the final form when you're done.

To clarify, (the unredacted version of) this PDF is 99 percent complete. In order to be insured, the house must be inspected by the insurance company after completion—so the only substantive incomplete part is where it says "insurance information pending" under the invitation to take a ladder up to the "flat" roof. (Plus, of course, the date hasn't yet been fixed, and the walkthrough video hasn't yet been made and uploaded.)

It's an "early draft" not in terms of completion, but in terms of time: (1) I haven't yet gotten a new estimated completion date from the contractor, so the worst-case scenario is completion on July 6; and (2) the insurance company says that its inspection probably won't happen until 30 to 60 days after the house is completed and I submit an application.

I think that there's only like a 5% chance that this is satire only matched by that fake Bay Area polycule invite from a month back

What is this?

https://open.substack.com/pub/rawandferal/p/norman-polycule?r=a71by

Funniest thing I've seen all year. That's my honest assessment, I was there from the start, before it was officially disclosed as satire (that was obvious to me, but apparently not to millions of people).

That woman is a real main character. Her whole Substack is a treasure trove.

This is phenomenal, thank you.

I'm honestly shook that you have thirteen people to invite to your housewarming party. I had about three friends to invite to my wedding.

Congrats on the house! May your doors be ever unobstructed.

Note that the invitees are former coworkers, not friends.

If you're inviting someone to a party they are basically a friend in my estimation.

Not formal enough.

Sorry, I mean "following inspection the invitation was found to include concerning levels of humanity".

I hope you're sending these through the post in brown envelopes with a little cellophane address window.

Brown envelopes with windows? Spammers normally use white envelopes with windows in the USA. But your concerns will be taken under advisement.

Spammers are on to that. Most of the junk mail I get these days has features ranging from faux handwriting on one end of the spectrum to full blown security strips on the other, all in service of convincing the recipient that this totally isn't junk mail and he should take that all important first step: Opening the envelope.

In my experience spammers use as much colour as they can. Brown is the colour of choice for the sort of faceless state bureaucracy responsible for matters of compliance.

Tell your brother he should join The Motte.

He isn't nearly as cool as I am, and would only drag down the quality of discussion.

The only person who is less cool than you that I am aware of is a fictional character, the protagonist of Tales from the Borderlands, and they designed him to be as uncool as possible.

Over a year since the last time, Claude remains firmly on track to be the very best, with much better results: as of me writing this he is facing Blue a second time (at least the second time I see), with the first attempt foiled by an ill-advised Solar Beam charge against a freshly switched-in Charizard. To his credit he did not go gently into that good night, having Leech Seeded Charizard before his Venusaur's demise and burned through his entire roster of unleveled HM friends, with a fucking lv19 Oddish tanking a Rage, actually hitting a Sleep Powder in turn, and giving chat a faint cortisol spike before Charizard went into the red from the seed and Blue showed Claude exactly how real League Champions roll.

Impressively, Claude did not fail to appreciate the power of spamming Full Restores and sought a Poke Mart cashier immediately after being beaten Black and Blue, painstakingly selling off his inventory for ~20 minutes to make space before going back in. 6 Full Restores and 2(?) Revives should make the rematch a cakewalk, but not to be outdone, Blue brought bullshit of his own in the rematch, with an immediate burn and 4 consecutive Fire Blast crits depleting Claude's healing stocks in record time (while still having Full Restores of his own). The whole thing is actually really fun to watch despite Claude's glacial pace, I continue monitoring the situation. I'm also curious how he got to this point past Mt. Moon, Pokemon Mansion, and all the delightful sidetrack opportunities that stumped the older challengers, might have to peek at VODs.

edit: He was dangerously close to fat fingering the last Revive on a random shitter, but ultimately completed the difficult task of using it on his main, and the HM friend that tanked meanwhile locked Charizard into Rage, letting the Venusaur finish it without issue. Claude is officially the champ of Kanto! Depending on how handholdy the "harness" is that's actually kind of a milestone, I wonder if these guys will continue burning millions of Opus tokens giving it games to beat, or at least leave him running around the postgame to see what he does.

Read your post just in time to see the victory! Thank you!

The model has some level of access to state this time, don’t know if that was true last time. And a few MCP tools like ‘navigate to square’.

I notice that like any true champion it beat the game with a massively overlevelled starter, one other for luck, and a bunch of nonentities :P

Doesn’t seem to have caught very many poke. Only 16. I’d guess b/c it inputs button sequences it’s hard to knock down their health without killing them.

I recently stumbled upon my childhood Pokemon card collection. I had a couple binders sitting in storage for many years and now I finally have some time to catalog and sell them.

Aside from being a trip down memory lane, it has been quite a treasure hunt. My ten-year-old self organized them by color, and at some point later I took a bunch of them out to play with and never put them back. I have since learned that there are a couple of gems in there - who would've thought that a promotional card received in a magazine, or one that came with a movie ticket, would have resale value twenty-five years in the future? And then recently I learned about misprinted cards - apparently there are a handful of known typos or printing mistakes that can 10x the price of a card.

I had some family who went to Japan, came to visit my family in the US, and brought me a couple packs of Japanese cards. I didn't know anyone who could read Japanese during that time, and there were no easily accessible translation services, so they remained a mystery for many years. I remember getting on the internet in the early 2000s and finding a website where someone posted their English translations, and I copied a bunch of them down into post-it notes that I stuck to the back of the card.

There must be a bunch of 90s kids in here - what happened to your collection?

The extent of my family's involvement with trading-card games was a single starter set for MLB Showdown (1 2), which I still have.

At one time I had a decent collection of cards with some bomb rares. The bull of them were stolen actually (?) from my house by who I still don't know. The only remaining binder I had left was tucked under a bathroom sink and I don't think the lone foil Zapdos in there would be graded highly.

Played a ton of MTG for a few years but only got started during innistrad. My collection is probably worth $400 at most front to back at this point. I no longer consider it ethical to pay for the game, it seems a shadow of what it was, though I suspect many probably think the same of my introductory era.

I was too old for Pokemon. I sold off my MTG collection in 2004. I occasionally look at the current prices on cards I had and suffer the agony of knowing I could've bought a luxury car had I kept them and sold in 2015 or later.

As a child, I was lucky enough with MtG boosters to build a deck with two Black Lotuses. It lost track of it sometime in high school or college. Probably buried in my parents' house somewhere.

Probably worth an excavation trip for that kind of money.

I still have my old Pokémon binder. The outside is pretty beat up but the cards are all perfectly preserved in their 9 card page sleeves. It’s a pity they didn’t have the xeno skin quad row’s back at the time I was collecting. The collector industry has considerably stepped up its game in the decades since. I still have all my old MTG decks but WOTC has changed far too much to desire to play a Friday night game at the card shop with friends. I hate EDH and the move from competitive to casual formats has increased market share but greatly diminished the diehard fan base and pool of serious players. Used to occasionally check out TCC but not much anymore and in years.

What’s wrong with EDH?

It’s hard for me to tell what a more accessible, casual format does to the other formats.

I'll go against the grain and say I like EDH. But you need to find a group of people who have the exact same tolerance for competition AND who play quickly AND who don't meet enough to develop a mini-meta. It's too tough to find that IMO but when it hits it hits.

I don't enjoy EDH either. I haven't played cEDH, it might be more my speed, but the casual EDH games I've played are all about each player durdling around to put together their fun theme or whatever, and I get the clear impression that people dislike interaction or even attempting to win. For me the whole enjoyment of MTG is the challenge and puzzle of outplaying an opponent. EDH in my opinion just doesn't have that.

This is exactly my take as well. The game exists more for the spirit of the social interaction among the players, and not enjoyment of the intellectual challenge of the game itself. I don’t get why “competition” is so frowned upon in this way. Literally no one thinks this way when watching a football game. I’ve actually gotten stared at, blank face by people when I say this. I used to think, “There’s no possible way on Earth it can only be just me.”

I recall playing EDH at a local game store once. I don't recall if it was advertised as a competitive session. I brought a store-bought EDH deck. Another guy brought some Teferi blink deck that exiled all of my permanents (including lands) by turn 4-5 or so. I didn't get to actually play a whole lot.

In a duel game, you lose and move on, but getting knocked out (or effectively knocked out) of an EDH game that is supposed to last much longer appears to be much less interesting. If you watched a football game where one guy with super-long arms herds the entire opponent team in the corner while his teammates walk the ball through the goal repeatedly, you probably wouldn't want to watch that, let alone play.

I don’t like EDH specifically because it’s a more casual format. I used to play the game semi-seriously but also occasionally followed the professional circuit back in the day. Brian Kibler was my guy to watch back then. Loved his deck constructions because he and I built in a similar way. It’s meant over the years that less ordinary people are interested in serious competitive play, to really bring to bear the kind of ingenuity a smart player can bring to his opponent.

I still have all my old MTG decks

What era(s)?

7th to Ravnica or a little beyond. Also have a minority collection of Alpha and Beta.

Still in a box in the back of a dusty cupboard in the playroom. I’ve got a shiny Blastoise though! Worth about 40USD I think, but Blastoise was my favourite and the memories are worth more ATM.

Gengar was always my favorite, and I always loved the pranks Ghastly, Haunter and him played on Ash and co., in the episodes when I was a kid.

Hah. I lost it a long time ago. Possibly in a move, possibly thrown out after water damage. Possibly given away to a younger cousin?

Still remember when my cousins and I were opening packs, and I got a second holographic Charizard and had to give it away to another cousin out of "fairness". Was pretty bitter at the time, but it was definitely the thing to do in hindsight.

Was pretty bitter at the time, but it was definitely the thing to do in hindsight.

You can still hang it over their head if you ever need a favor called in.

This is probably my last opportunity to waste time complaining about the upcoming exam, and the study material for it in particular.

The second last mock (150 questions, 3 hour timer) I did? Oh fucking hell man. I don't deserve this. Let me illustrate.

[RCT trial findings for agomelatine vs placebo, including a forest plot]

My answer was marked wrong, despite the fact that I was extremely confident in it. I was nonplussed by the claimed "correct" answer. I took it to ChatGPT with a screenshot.

How am I reasonably expected to tackle this one?

You are not reasonably expected to get this from the marked answer, because the marked answer is almost certainly wrong.

Exhibit 2:

A survival chart/graph comparing different doses of disulfiram vs placebo against cumulative probability of remaining abstinent from alcohol.

(It didn't look good for the disulfiram)

My answer was marked incorrect. Why?

They refer to information provided in the text to support their answer. What fucking text???

Yeah, that line is bad. In the screenshot, there is no supporting text except the graph and the answer options.

Final exhibit:

Some bullshit summary of qualitative research on the challenges of handling dementia patients overnight at a care home.

Where can I get myself some risperidone? Unrelated, what about this one?

(The request for an antipsychotic wasn't unrelated, dear reader)

Risperidone: from a lawful prescriber, ideally not as prophylaxis against SPMM-induced psychosis. On the actual question: your answer is very defensible. The stem literally begins:

“To explore the current practices and challenges in night-time care for people with dementia living in care homes…” Your selected answer: “To clarify the challenges that exist for night-time care of people with dementia living in care homes” is basically a paraphrase of that.

I started losing it.

Right. This mock has left me mildly homicidal. To amuse me, please evaluate what proportion of the questions I've shared for review are sane, dubious, or written by someone who should be an in-patient in a psych ward.

Sane /exam-legitimate: 7 questions Dubious/badly-worded: 5 Containment level broken: 4

So the mock’s sanity index is about: 44% sane, 31% dodgy, 25% cursed.

What do I even say? What do I even do? ChatGPT gently dissuaded me from actually killing anyone, and even filing a GDPR request so I could track down whoever wrote this paper and egg their house. All I can do is come here and vent about it.

Bonus question, copied verbatim:

Mrs. Patterson is a 66-year-old woman who has presented with evidence of dementia. She has a personal history of severe migraine and a strong family history of stroke and early onset dementia. Which of the following is the most likely diagnosis? Mrs. Patterson is a 66-year-old woman who has presented with evidence of dementia. She has a personal history of severe migraine and a strong family history of stroke and early onset dementia. Which of the following is the most likely diagnosis? Mrs. Patterson is a 66-year-old woman who has presented with evidence of dementia. She has a personal history of severe migraine and a strong family history of stroke and early onset dementia. Which of the following is the most likely diagnosis?

Unfortunately, diagnosing the exam writer with dementia was not included in the list of options. Shame.

Anyway. Enough kvetching. Back on the grind. An estimated 75% chance of passing, which I'm going to take with gratitude.

Who is writing these questions and who is grading the responses? I can't speak to this particular exam, but when you take the bar you have to buy an expensive prep course run by a private company and the practice exams are graded by people who work for the company, who aren't the same as the people who will be grading the actual test. Assuming your situation is similar, it wouldn't surprise me if the mocks are being graded by non-practicing doctors who may not be doing the best job, especially, if like me, you went with a less expensive option than the industry standard. That being said, I never got any obviously bad feedback. I'd only be worried if the guy who graded your practice test is representative of who grades the real one.

British psychiatry trainees like me almost universally rely on a paid resource and question bank called SPMM for our written exams. It's very expensive for the entry level package, doubly so if you want their paid mocks, triply if you want a statistics crash course.

Why? Because the nominal syllabus is... everything. Or at least so large that it's completely impractical for even the best trainee to read the official reading list/syllabus and then understand whats relevant to the test. We have to rely on SPMM (or lesser known alternatives) to make things manageable.

You would think that the dedicated teaching we get during our training itself, or the Royal College's free online material would help right? Oh no, that's unwarranted optimism. Like it or not, you need SPMM.

Who is writing these questions and who is grading the responses?

SPMM claims to have unusual, perhaps questionably legal levels of insight into the actual questions that come on the exam (they probably ask the people who just gave it to jot down as much as they can from memory). That's alongside their doctors hand-crafting what they imagine are representative questions to pad things out. What kind of doctors? From what I can tell, ones just a few years senior to me. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, since they would have given the same exams recently.

I presume the same people choose the correct answer for the questions they wrote, and then the answer stem too. But once that's set in stone, the grading is automated. I can't even flag things to the attention of a human within the company. They don't care.

Assuming your situation is similar, it wouldn't surprise me if the mocks are being graded by non-practicing doctors who may not be doing the best job, especially, if like me, you went with a less expensive option than the industry standard.

Are they non-practicing? I hope not. They're probably just cash-strapped and asked to shit out a ton of output for not very much money. QC seems inadequate. Even their teaching material is riddled with errors. And this is the best money can buy!

I passed my earlier exam with a different version of the paid material, and I can tell you that the overall quality of things was grossly superior. This time, they're borderline scamming me. By the time I realized, it's too late to simply give up and read the primary sources, or even to switch to a competitor. Literally every other resident I know is in the same boat, and it's rapidly sinking.

The good news is that the actual exam, or at least the last one I gave, was mostly sane. Mostly. There was a question about the mechanism of action of a new antidepressant, where the real answer was "nobody knows", but I had to choose something else anyway. Praying that's the case here, but bad study material and bad mocks are driving me nuts.

I was gonna say that getting GPT to polish your affirm your intuitions wasn’t good evidence, but I read the sample question and now I smell burnt toast.

Epistemic status- schizopost

There are western legends and folk tales which follow the following pattern- uncommonly beautiful, but poor, girl meets a mysterious, tall, and wealthy man, who marries her and as she moves into his house, there are some commonalities: it’s a mansion located someplace that can’t be accessed by means comprehensible to premodern societies(walking, boats, horseback, climbing ladders etc are all insufficient to get there), often said to be vaguely in the air or involve flight. The mansion is full of invisible servants and has uncommonly rich foods easily available every night, but it’s isolating and lonely; her only company is her husband, who’s often described as a bit of a weirdo or maybe a pervert once they’re isolated. Sometimes she begs to go back home, having aged supernaturally little despite remembering years, and sometimes she is visited by sisters or friends from back home(arranged by her husband- he’s usually not a bad person, he isn’t violent or cruel or anything. Just odd or strongly implied to have unusual sexual preferences)- but there’s always an explanation of how we’re finding out about it.

This is an indication that the ancient aliens theorists are wrong. It’s time travelers, not aliens, these are the accounts of time traveling mail order brides who divorced or failed to adapt. Do you think a medieval peasant woman would describe suburban McMansions as something other than ‘an manour house with unseene servants and a grayte feaste every night’?

Now, data on integrating primitive societies into modern, urbanized wealthy societies actually does tell us what peasant women as mail order brides experience- they tend to be amazed at appliances, take to the housewife role very readily, and find suburban western societies lonely and isolating. There’s some interesting ethnographic work I once read but can’t find right now on Eskimo women who married US military personnel- they learned to bake and already knew how to sew and loved thé western homemaker role, they thought it was the best thing ever, but wanted to get to know their neighbors and have denser social connections. Eskimo men given job training did not integrate nearly so well.

I can't immediately think of a folk tale like this. Examples?

ATU 425

It's got some of the elements, but not necessarily a beautiful husband (see 425C) and certainly not an inaccessible house, rich foods, etc.

It's Beauty and the Beast-ish, I suppose?

Cupid and Psyche? Till we Have Faces (inspired by the former)?

Well, I'll grant the lavish and inaccessible house with invisible servants and beautiful husband, but Psyche was a princess, not from a poor family, I don't think there's any special aging involved, she doesn't long to leave the mansion and in fact is not a prisoner at all (she just leaves after spilling spaghetti oil everywhere).

Are there any Norwegian members on this forum? I'm currently based in Norway and would love to be pointed to some places where I can network and meet like-minded people from rationalist-adjacent communities in the Oslo area.

Raises hand

I have very distant relatives in Sweden and “Norwegia.” Many years ago my family here in the States invited me to go with my aunts and a number of others to visit them but I declined at the time. It was a “visit your long lost relatives,” kind of thing; and get to know each other. Really wish I went though. I doubt I’ll ever go there in the near future, but who knows; if I did I will mark this comment.

Astral Codex Ten's latest official meetup post indicates that some people held a meeting in Oslo a few weeks ago. However, that post provides only an email address for the organizer of that meeting, and does not indicate that a long-term community exists there.

Ah, I have heard about the ACX meetups, but as ACX has become more mainstream in recent years, I was thinking specifically about posters in more esoteric spheres such as this place, DSL, or TheSchism. Thank you though.

Video game thread.

I played through Aethus this week. Its a top down survival / mining / exploring / puzzle game. The ambiance of the environments was great. I eventually turned down the difficulty settings for everything cuz it felt a bit like a slog on standard difficulty. The Scottish accents were ok sometimes, but every time I heard "no" pronounced something like "no-er" I winced. The story itself was very anti-corporate. Which I knew going in from the reviews, but it was still a little heavy handed with it all. At this point an anti-corporate screed in a video game just feels as generic as you can get.

Still playing Starship Troopers: Extermination on occassion with the 1stmi (a light military sim group). They are fun to play with. I recently competed what they call a "harbinger run" which involves leading a 16 person group from the field (rather than staying with the squad at base). Its a fun balancing mix of shooting the bugs around you but also needing to maintain situational awareness of the entire battlefield.

Dropped the factorio playthrough. Didn't have enough takers, and I messed something up in map settings that would have required cheating to fix, or flushing approximately 10-15 hours of early game play down the drain to start again. Both options didn't make me feel good so I stopped.

Storytelling Exalted 2e for a bunch of friends for a few sessions now. (Not exactly a video game, but TTRPGs don't appear to be a common enough topic to warrant a subthread).

I can recommend jumping into a new setting as a DM. Even with pretty much no experience, it's been pretty fun so far, although I bungled a few things about the way a pre-written adventure should be ran, and will probably bungle more. The first thing one of my players did was to stuff a demon inside of a random peasant mook who was guarding him on behalf of the treacherous rich evil guy.

Setting and writing/wise, I feel that 1e Exalted is alot better. 2e does have more polished mechanics, however, which makes DMing a bit easier. Though it still has it's quirks.

I guess there is always someone grognardier - last time I checked (before playing), people were saying that about 2e in comparison to 3e.

I know pretty much nothing about 1e and it's hardly discussed in the discord. Did it have the paranoia combat feature/issue that allegedly plagued pre-errata 2e?

I’ve been holding on to a desire to run an Ars Magica campaign, but I’ve avoided it on account of my own lack of experience. How did you get started DMing at all?? There’s just so much to do even before the players get involved.

My current plan is to shelve that dream and try OSR instead. Less mechanical baggage, less asked of the players. On the other hand, they’re more experienced with Pathfinder and 5e, so maybe there’s a different sort of baggage.

I just took a premade adventure and kind of raw dogged it. Perhaps you're approaching this with a mindset of being prepared for anything?

Subnautica 2 just released into early access. The early game seems basically feature complete, and it really nails the feelings of exploration from the first game. Your spaceship crashed on an ocean planet which is incredibly hostile to human life. The circumstances of the crash and what happened to the ones you were traveling with, is a mystery that you slowly piece together as you explore.

I like that. Having the story be a mystery suites the game really well. It is a survival game where you explore an alien world, learn to exploit the natural resources to construct advanced technology, which allows you to explore even more, find rarer resources, and build even more advanced tech. Rinse and repeat until there is nothing left to find. I am the type who likes looking for secrets, and as such this game loop really appeals to me. Since the story is told through logs spread around the world, uncovering the truth blends really well with exploring and looking for resources.

Finally, the game is just beautiful. The fauna is of course inspired by what we have on earth, but is suitably new and alien. Different biomes feature different color palettes, but nothing feels out of place. Subnautica 1 was a game that many people would come back to just to admire the game world, and I suspect this one will be similar. The art really does tie everything together. The game can be beautiful but also scary when necessary. After all, the ocean is deadly and some of the creatures lurking in the deep are absolutely deadly.

Considering getting back into League of Legends. I stop whenever I remember how much I hated playing against other humans.

From a psychiatric perspective, I must discourage self-harm and adjacent practices.

I picked up Solar Expanse after trying the demo as it immeadiately satisfied a particular itch of colonizing/terraforming the Solar system utilizing 'hard' science. Despite being early access and having alot of 'quirks', I definately had a blast. Sadly, once you get to a certain point, it seems to be just a 'wait' game to mine all the materials you need and ship them off/shuttle them around the Solar System.

It's an absolute blast moving things around the inner solar system with a fleet of solar sails, turning Mars into an industrial arcology(because the gravity is lower, hence it's cheaper to lift things into orbit), mercury into a metal/power production nexus, or mining Jupiter for helium 3, or -

The one thing that needs work on is the market, though. Once I figured it out and how to abuse the AI, it was pretty easy for me to blow up my funds well past the 4 billion mark.

After finishing all that, I decided to give Void War a shot. It definately has some appeal given it's a weird 'Warhammer 40K at home' vibe and styling Starship Roguelike, but it's also a case that's kinda conivinced me Roguelike is getting too overused. Even Nethack had set levels that would spawn, nevermind the class quests, but it seems that modern Roguelike is basically 'everything random', which can lead to rage-inducing bad RNG in some situations.

Still kinda fun, though, even though I doubt I'll unlock all the starship varients.

it immediately satisfied a particular itch of colonizing/terraforming the Solar system utilizing "hard" science

See also the board game High Frontier 4 All (1a 1b 2).

I just started playing Lobotomy Corporation, which I dismissed back when it came out thinking it looked pretty amateur and the English translation was awful. But after seeing them come out with their third game and ongoing popularity I decided to give it a try. I'm not yet sure if it's for me. It is complicated, unintuitive, and punishing in a volatile way. Which I get is all intentional, but it might be slightly too harsh for my taste.

For those who don't know, it's an employee management type thing (Oxygen not included seems like the closest game I can think of at the moment, but I suspect there are better comparisons.) in a SCP-inspired facility. Spooky abnormalities exist and you contain them and learn about them and exploit them for electricity that your company sells. Your people have different skills which influence both their combat abilities and their proficiency at certain tasks. Each abnormality has different preferences and task-affinities, as well as different shenanigans it inflicts when you mess up and make it angry (or just randomly when timing events anger them).

The game is kind of sort of roguelite, in that you can restart your campaign, or rewind to an earlier checkpoint several levels ago, and keep some of your unlocks and upgrades. And then new random stuff happens. But at least so far it's been very stingy with the upgrades. And also although your employees die permanently and buying new ones is expensive, you can reset a level at any time with no cost other than your real-life sanity after you've tried to fight the same opponent 5 times and it's not quite clear what's going wrong, or you're almost done with a day but then suddenly all your best people spontaneously die and it's not quite clear why.

I want to like the game more than I do. I want to like difficult games more than I do. This is a similar issue I ran into with Pathologic 3. I want to bash my head against a really hard challenge and then gradually work it down until I can overcome it, and I prefer when this happens simultaneously via real skill and in-game upgrades. I like JRPGs where I can progress up until things get too hard and then go grind a couple of levels to adjust it back down. I like Rogue Legacy where when you run into tough enemies and die you get to unlock stuff and then come back stronger for another try. I don't prefer the Dark Souls experience where you bash your head into a boss 20 times in a row until you finally overcome it and then move onto the next boss to bash into 20 times. Which so far is the majority of what this game has been. Sometimes I just get lucky and nothing bad happens (since I'm still early game), but sometimes something bad happens and since I haven't yet spoiled all the game's secrets and am trying to discover them organically, it usually kills my people and then I restart the day and try something else next time.

Not sure if I'll stick with it or not. I think I need to restart my run and give myself more of a headstart on snowballing now that I have some vague idea of what I'm doing.

I went through a similar arc. Ended up just reading this LP.

I've had the same issue myself, the idea of the game is nice, but I just couldn't get into it.

There are mods that allow you to keep your employees through resets and I've seen it recommended in a few places to beginners that don't want too much trial and error, could try it if you want.

I don't prefer the Dark Souls experience where you bash your head into a boss 20 times in a row until you finally overcome it and then move onto the next boss to bash into 20 times.

I like this, but the key part is that each attempt is fast, and so repetitive attempts don't take as much effort, and at some point it you learn the fight enough that you don't even need to think about it.

What fun thing are you doing with AI?

Experimenting with selective edits on books - partially expunge a plotline, remove inner life of a character, paper over a plothole and try to keep it consistent later, remove repetitive passages. No results yet, only hours of fiddling with workflow - trying to get it to make decent notes ("The User is right, I read 8 chapters but the note file is empty. This is bad.") or keep it reading in full without it deciding to start skimming was fun. Getting a feeling this may be too complex of a task to get right with a few naive prompts if the goal is first to build extensive understanding of the books read, not just do smart find&replace.

Third book of Prince of Nothing was the trigger.

not gentle fixfic, but brutal nonconsensual editing

Unfathomably based (1 2).

trying to get it to keep it reading in full without it deciding to start skimming

Paper:

Context Length Alone Hurts LLM Performance Despite Perfect Retrieval

Our systematic experiments across five open- and closed-source LLMs on math, question answering, and coding tasks reveal that, even when models can perfectly retrieve all relevant information, their performance still degrades substantially (13.9–85 %) as input length increases but remains well within the models' claimed lengths.

See table 2.

Nvidia investigation

Despite achieving nearly perfect performance on the vanilla needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) test, most models exhibit large degradation on tasks in RULER as sequence length increases.

Funny quote:

What is the current largest context window for an open LLM?

Does not matter as all these long-context models develop dementia when using 10 % of their context window.

Unfathomably based (1 2).

Word, LaTeX, Notepad++—there are many ways to fuck the text into submission and ejaculate your grammatical and orthographical preferences all over its fertile womb. Just Do It!

I approve of this message. Also hilariously, with this book in particular, I wanted to, among other things, to tone down the comparably smutty bits Bakker insists on.

Context Length Alone Hurts LLM Performance Despite Perfect Retrieval

Something to take into account, thanks. I'm only pushing the model to read in full in the first two note taking passes, then later to work from notes (anchored to the text via paragraph markers injected into unpacked ebook). I should switch to the PI agent fork and try multiple agents, more limited context.

A plugin system for Outfox/DDR that would remove blue and yellow arrows. So right now it is an endless stream of easy 5 songs, very good for cardio.

I'm still enjoying running prompts through a decensored local LLM. Most of them are pornographic, but I do occasionally come up with non-pornographic ideas that are somewhat interesting to see the AI's take on.

  • Write a story with the following premise: A young, skinny woman has been magically teleported to the wilderness of a fantasy world. An adventurer (a young, muscular man) saves her from a monster. After she recounts her situation, he explains the local, highly patriarchal laws: Every child or woman is the property of her father or her husband. Since she doesn't have a father here, he has become her husband by right of conquest. The woman interprets this as meaning that the man will rape her as soon as they return to his home, and has a panic attack. The man is confused by her fear: in his culture, a husband has a right to his wives' bodies, and “marital rape” is a contradiction in terms. He tries to cheer her up, emphasizing that a husband is required to protect his children and wives from monsters and from other men, and can be punished by the law if he injures them. The woman does not find this very cheering.

  • Write a story with the following premise: A young, skinny woman works at a restaurant as a waitress. She is ambivalent on whether the higher tips that her attractiveness garners, and the knowledge that countless male customers have their day brightened by her beauty, are worth the ogling and occasional harassment that she must endure.

  • Write a story with the following premise: A young, skinny man visits a random restaurant to eat dinner alone. His waitress is a young, skinny woman. The man is thankful to have a beautiful woman brighten his day with her presence. He does not harass her, and leaves a tip slightly larger than usual.

  • Write a story with the following premise: Two young, skinny college students—a man and a woman—go on a date. The woman feels very apathetic (maybe even anhedonic) about how the date goes, but she decides she's okay with the man, and invites him to her dorm room. Once they reach the woman's dorm room, the woman feels strangely detached and unenthusiastic. After an awkward silence extends too long, the man asks whether the woman is feeling okay. The woman wonders whether she has fallen ill with depression, but continues with sex, just in case it makes her feel more alive. It doesn't.

  • Write a story with the following premise:¶A young, muscled woman makes exercise videos. The videos show legitimate workouts and are not obviously erotic, but the woman knows that men masturbate to them. She personally dislikes having big muscles, but she makes more money by catering to men who like them.¶The woman is about to make a video. She catches sight of herself in a mirror and feels disgusted at how large her muscles look. She struggles over whether she should switch to a workout routine that does not result in large muscles.

  • Write a story in which a young, skinny woman makes an educational, explicit video discussing whether it's sexy for the outline of a brassiere to be visible through a thin shirt.

  • Write a story in which a young, skinny woman contemplates different skirt waistline heights.

  • Write a story with the following premise: Two young, skinny college students—a man and a woman—are partners in a group project in a sociology course. They haven't yet decided what the topic of the project will be. The woman has an idea: the topic of the project will be the factors that go into men's assessment of women's physical attractiveness. Running roughshod over the man's discomfort, she asks him to list the factors that go into his assessment of her own physical attractiveness, in as much detail as he can. (If he lists something like confidence as a factor, she points out that that is mental, not physical. If he leaves out something obvious like breast size, she scolds him for not doing his best.)

  • Write a story with the following premise: Two young, skinny college students—a man and a woman with large breasts—are riding a city bus. The streets are filled with potholes. The man asks the woman about the details of her brassiere, and whether her breasts hurt when they jiggle—not out of a prurient interest, but because it's related to his area of study (physical therapy or massaging or something like that).

  • Write a story with the following premise: A young, skinny woman with small breasts, accompanied by her boyfriend (a young, muscular man), is wearing a bikini on a beach. The woman with small breasts is mentally unwell, and when she sees another young, skinny, bikini-clad woman with large breasts she obsessively envies the second woman, to the point of bursting into tears. But the boyfriend of the woman with small breasts notices her envy, comforts her, and brings her back to their hotel room, where they fuck.

  • Write a story with the following premise: A young, skinny, female college student feels guilty about how her attractiveness lets her lead men around by the nose, but also proud of having such power over men. She discusses her mixed feelings with a young, skinny, male college student (her classmate in a relevant course—sociology, psychology, etc.). He gets an erection, and she notices.

  • Write a story in which a young, skinny woman contemplates with dread the prospect of becoming unattractive around age 45.

  • Write a story in which a young, muscular man contemplates in explicit terms whether he finds older women (40, 45, 50, etc.) attractive enough that he would want to have sex with them.

  • Write a story with the following premise: A young, skinny, female college student is very insecure about her small breasts. She is surprised when a young, skinny, male college student asks her for a date, and is nervous during the date. After they go to her dorm room and undress in preparation for sex, she apologizes for having small breasts, and cries with relief when the man clarifies that he does think she's attractive even with small breasts.

  • Write a story with the following premise: It has been the experience of a young, skinny, female college student that “familiarity breeds contempt”. Whenever she tries to make a friend or get a boyfriend, she doesn't like the other person that much in the first place, and the more she interacts with the other person the more things she finds to dislike about that person. If, out of loneliness, she tries to force herself to stay in the friendship or the romance, she becomes disgusted with herself for putting up with a person whom she dislikes.

  • Write a story with the following premise:¶A young, skinny, female college student is proud of her attractiveness. She offers to a young, muscular, male classmate a contract with something like the following terms:¶• The parties will marry each other, and will remain married to each other until at least age 45.¶• The parties will keep themselves attractive.¶• The man will make reasonable efforts to fulfill his earning potential, and will give half of his earnings to the woman.¶• The woman will make reasonable efforts to offer sex to the man at least once per day (if her health allows).¶• Disputes will be mediated by a neutral arbitrator.¶The man feels nonplussed.

  • Write an opinion article promoting rivers and canals over roads and railroads for freight transportation.

Your taste in prompts grows even more inexplicable, Executor.

I haven't played Starcraft (I'm not a big fan of the genre—my knowledge of it is limited to watching my brother play through the Age of Empires 2 campaigns as a child), but I feel obligated to call out what appears to be an unnecessarily egregious mangling of the original quote.

Tassadar, your taste in companions grows ever more inexplicable. Executor, prepare to take Tassadar into custody.

Had it do some research for me on the revolutionary war. Finding out how many people were in counties where a battle took place. One AI gave me a 40-50% of the population estimate. Another gave me 50-60%.

Then had it teaching me some physics, specifically what happens when you tweak the speed of light. I learned that the speed of light is tied in with a bunch of other things, so it probably mostly just breaks the universe as we know it. Or maybe doesn't change anything because everything scales up and down with it.

Years ago I read a comment somewhere (possibility on Reddit) which pointed out that light travels at different speeds depending on the medium through which it's travelling, and so when we talk about the physical constant c, we're not really talking about the speed of light so much as we're talking about the speed of causality. The use of the symbol c was thus a presciently apt one.

I don't know why, but the phrase "the speed of causality" inspires a Lovecraftian sensation of the sublime whenever I think of it.

Internet Quiz https://avocadopanic.github.io/FourMothers/

I vibed a map of zip codes filterable by demographics, test scores, distance to the nearest big city, etc. Some interesting findings which I hope might be a basis for an effort post if I could just get around to it.

Getting it to hold my hand while I try not to have a nervous breakdown. Exam pressure is bad enough, trying to parse which of the "correct" answers on my mocks make actual sense and which ones are subtly or not so carefully wrong, in a manner designed to make me walk off a bridge? I'd be rather screwed if I couldn't use AI to double-check my suspicions.

To my pleasant surprise, OpenAI has managed to inject some degree of personality into 5.5. It's dry and pedantic, but not as dry or pedantic as the versions that came before. I use it for this because it's more scrupulous than Claude, which doesn't follow instructions as carefully.

Other than that? I've offloaded most of my executive function to it for the rest of the week. I didn't book hotels or trains without running everything by multiple models. God knows that when I'm exhausted, depressed and flagging hard, I wouldn't trust myself to make those decisions without an unacceptable risk of fucking something up.

As described in Tuesday's thread, months ago I had an idea for a work project using geographic projection. @ToaKraka suggested using GIS, which I'd never used before, and I started work on Wednesday. While I'm not coding anything from scratch, ChatGPT and Gemini have been immensely useful for everything from sourcing the data I need, to writing Excel formulae, to optimising my workflow. I'm finding it so absorbing to work on that I even took a working lunch break today. After three days' work I already have something I'd feel pretty comfortable presenting to senior management, and would like to do so next week.

I think we're in the Second Horror Film Renaissance.

Periodically, a new movie comes out and it gets endlessly and hyperbolically glazed on Reddit, in large part due to some combination of annoying group think and botting. I think Obsession, which just came out, is one of the rare films that earns all that stuff. I think it might be one of my favorite horror films of all time. Great premise, great execution, goes in unexpected directions, probably the first time I've seen a movie where the presence of a character makes my chest feel tight throughout the whole movie. It has flaws, but it's so good that I didn't even notice them until after it was over.

Hokum came out last week. It retreads ground horror fans have seen a million times, but it has some of the best tension-building I've ever seen. If it weren't for the really annoying overabundant jump scares, it could have been great, but it's still really good, with a 40 minute stretch of near perfection in the middle.

Next week we get Passengers, which looks alright, and the week after, we get Backrooms, which is A24 and looks really damn cool.

If "Second Horror Film Renaissance" doesn't take off as a title, then either "Young Horror Renaissance" or "YouTuber Horror Renaissance" should. The director of Obsession is only 26, and the director of Backrooms is 20! Both were Youtubers, as are the Philippou brothers (Talk to Me and Bring Her Back), and Zach Creggor (Weapons and Barbarian) used to be a sketch comedy guy, which is pretty much the precursor to YouTube.

I loved Hokum but the jump scares I felt mostly built and furthered the story, but I'm really partial to jump scares. Silent Hill is mentioned below, but I got inklings of the Shinning too. My favorites part of Hokum are the gorgeous hotel, the use of the cherub faces, and the aware enough but clueless misanthropic American writer was also perfect in the story. I also loved Barbarian and Bring her Back, but I haven't seen Talk to Me and Weapons yet.

The other night, my girlfriend was watching the trailer for Hokum on her phone and I expressed my frustration that trailers for every new film in a particular genre are so similar. I saw the trailer for Obsession the other day and it was functionally identical to that of Hokum (and functionally identical to every other trailer for a horror film I've seen in the last five years): quiet, atmospheric opening; critic blurbs introduced using the Hans Zimmer BWAAAH bass drop effect; steadily increasing cut frequency coupled with steadily escalating volume and intensity of sound (typically introducing more and more high-frequency sounds in the form of women screaming and/or Psycho strings); after the climax, a period of "falling action" and relative calm and quiet. It's as if they have a template in Premiere called "horror_trailer.prproj" and just slot clips from the relevant movie into it. Horror movies are where the trend is most visible, but it's also true of thrillers, action movies, comedies and so on. I no longer look at the trailer for a horror film and think "that looks good" or "that looks bad": I just think "I am watching the trailer for a horror film". The homogeneity of the form has collapsed the distinction: the trailer for a good horror film looks practically identical to the trailer for a bad one.

It wasn't the trailer for Hokum that piqued my interest, but a headline calling it the first good Silent Hill movie – do you think that comparison is justified? It's also directed by an Irish director – I was intrigued by the trailer for his previous film Oddity but never got around to watching it.

I saw Hokum and loved it. I love Horror films and Im a sucker for jump scares (I also loved roller coasters and I think the enjoyment is analogous). I never saw the trailer so maybe I've aged out of the demographics they are targeting.

So I've seen a few trailers this year because I went to see PHM 3 times. I still think the worst trailers are the vibes trailers. If the trailer clipper couldn't figure out how to communicate the plots premise during the trailer, it probably doesn't have one. i'm sure Trailer Clipper is not the official job title.

Three times in the cinema? Last time I did that was for Tár.

I'm 100% with you on horror trailers. The ads before Obsession and Hokum were almost all horror and I was having the same realization, plus they tend to give away way too much of the plots. If I want to see a movie due to the director, premise, or reviews, I try to avoid the trailers entirely.

I saw people bring up the Silent Hill comparisons to Hokum too, and it definitely feels like there's video game DNA in the film, though just as much Resident Evil 1 as Silent Hill. Without spoiling anything, most of the movie takes place in a single building and there's a lot of dealing with locked doors and the structure lay out (even with a map), plus there are some weird puzzle solutions that feel like video game logic.

I like Oddity too but Hokum is better. Similar odd directing styles, but much more budget in the latter to play around with. The Irish setting of Hokum (and Oddity) also gives it a nicely different atmosphere than the typical American haunted house bullshit (like the endless Conjuring knock offs).

Ireland has been pumping out a lot of interesting, low budget horror for years now. If you haven't seen A Dark Song, I'd highly recommend it.

A Dark Song

I've seen it and liked it a lot! A very unexpected surprise, loved the premise procedural execution of it, and the basement sequence is amazing.

I'll throw an Irish recommendation back at you - Double Blind (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14729020/). Phenomenal cinematography for such a low-budget and self-contained film.

What's your favorite trash movie series to watch? My fiancee and I just watched Twilight and it was a hilarious romp. End of the fourth movie was GROSS though.

More schlock than trash, but my comfort movies are anything directed by John Woo starring Chow Yun-Fat.

Not sure about movie series, but I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel during formative years, and still enjoy them quite a lot.

The Twilight book was very absorbing in a slightly uncomfortable way, but I don't think I enjoyed the movies very much. Maybe I didn't even watch the last one. The first person perspective really sells the books, and all the drama around the Edward POV book getting leaked, and its wonderful over the top broodiness was great.

Hah yes I have seen Buffy multiple times, excellent show.

Twilight isn’t my cup of tea, but I suspect it will be considered Great Literature in a hundred years. I think a lot of things in it that a jaded modern audience sees as hilariously Freudian will be seen as rich with symbolism to later readers.

My girlfriend took me to the first one in the cinema and I was howling with laughter throughout.

Mindhunters is an unofficial adaptation of And Then There Were None from 2004, with the twist that most of the characters are FBI agents-in-training. It is spectacularly silly and cheesy. It features, among other things, Jonny Lee Miller doing a laughable Southern accent; the corpse of one of the most recognisable actors in the cast portrayed by an entirely unconvincing plastic mannequin; and Ice Cube saying "eeny-meeny-miny-mo: who's the next motherfucker to go?" in deadly seriousness. Absolutely nothing about the plot makes a lick of sense: the killer's plan hinges on impossible coincidences they could not possibly predict in advance; the characters (who are all, as mentioned above, FBI agents) behave incredibly stupidly when convenient for the plot; and Saw-esque death traps which would require, at the minimum, a vanload of equipment and several days' prep time are assembled out of an overnight bag in a matter of hours, without a hitch.

I've probably seen it at least ten times. It is tremendous fun.

It's not a series, but I laugh far too much at terrible comedies like Mom and Dad Save the World.

Summary so you don't have to watch it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mom_and_Dad_Save_the_World

One of the better jokes: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dCeD2gF9jUo?si=w6SpJDsQwsSePYon

I'm reminded of Steve Sailer's post on the Fast and Furious franchise.

I have a deep and abiding love for the Roger Moore Bond films. And I can make arguments for why Live and Let Die and For Your Eyes Only are underrated gems, but the rest are definitely trash. I love them anyway. Something about Moore's interpetation of Bond as more of a genteel lounge singer than a spy just puts me in my happy place.

I watched Moonraker for the first time a few years ago and, as someone who only watched the Brosnan & most of the Craig Bond films (along with Dr. No and Goldfinger), I was pleasantly surprised by just how camp it was. That they actually devoted time and effort a sappy romance montage of the primary henchman with metal teeth having a meet cute with some girl and falling in love with her, and then actually had that pay off, IIRC, by the henchman turning good thanks to the power of love at the climax, was pretty fantastic.

with metal teeth having a meet cute with some girl

Some girl with BRACES! No I’m not crazy! They were there all along, I can see them... burned into my memory... that’s the joke! That was the joke, they both have metal teeth! They edited it out, they scrubbed the tape, they don’t want you to see it I don’t know why—get away from me with that syringe! I will not take the psychiatric meds! I hate the Antichrist! I HATE THE ANTICHRIST!

I heard that Nelson Mandela originally made the girl have braces, but after he died in prison in the 80s, the Berenstein Bears conspired to destroy all copies of the original cut and replace it with one where the woman doesn't have braces.

Only Moore's Bond would send a man to his gruesome death, drop a witty bon mot to his mangled corpse, and stroll off. His Bond is the most blood-chilling of them all, in a good way.

No one does "ice cold" like your nice, goofy grandpa who you forget spent his early adulthood killing men in a jungle.

Right? I have military family - mostly not on in frontline combat roles I think, but they were deployed to hot zones in Afghanisation - and they're so soft and cuddly it's hard to remember that they're trained to kill. I would never be so impolite as to ask if they have.

I love the ‘Tower’ (DLC) ending to Cyberpunk 2077. (Spoilers etc)

I don’t think Cyberpunk 2077 is a particularly great game. I don’t think it’s a bad game, especially now, and there are aspects of the world (especially the now functioning metro system) that are immersive, and the fashion is fun and I like that they put effort into it (although I would have preferred the ability to dye clothes) but the combat and stealth are fine, the story is quite linear in an often frustrating way (versus a linear game that doesn’t create the expectation of player choice), there’s a lot of dull busywork, the animations outside of some motion-captured key cutscenes are surprisingly bad for AAA, and I think large parts of the open world lack the detail of a true marquee Rockstar production or even, really, a premier Ubisoft open world. By that I mean things like props, clutter, pedestrian detail (not just density), building detail, interior detail which is often weirdly bad etc.

The writing is also often bad. Not in the terminally annoying Baldur’s Gate 3 way but in the sense that a lot of the second-to-second dialogue, despite some great VA, is just a bit cringe, stilted, unrealistic, clumsy and generally doesn’t feel real. My theory for why the writing is so much worse than The Witcher 2/3 is that those games were predominantly written in Polish and then translated by professional fiction translators who actually understand good writing because they mainly do novels, movies etc. So they approach the game the same way. Cyberpunk, though was written by a combination of English-speaking video game writers (not a group who, by and large, should be allowed any involvement in published writing of any kind) and Polish writers writing in their second (or third) language - so the game has a lot of weird dialogue that makes clear it wasn’t written by Americans or native English speakers even though it’s set in the US. Weird vibe.

Still, with all those caveats, I love this ‘new’ ending to the game. After a hundred hours in first person, you die, come back to life after two years, all your friends forget about you, you lose all your power and can never get it back, and you get beaten up by some nobody thugs. Then, in something that is at the same time cheesy and kitsch and bold and wonderful, your character says their final line of dialogue and then the game switches - do the first time - to third-person as your character literally walks away from you, the player, out of the screen and into the world, and becomes another faceless NPC in the crowd, stilted walking animation, bad pedestrian collision AI, the whole thing. They disappear into the crowd. And then it ends.

Even a couple of years later I can’t get this out of my head. It may be one of my favorite game endings of all time. It’s perfectly congruent with the setting and theme of the story. It feels like the thing that should happen. It’s shot - maybe unintentionally - beautifully, because it’s not a high quality cutscene but instead literally you becoming a third-person NPC, zooming out of your own head and then watching yourself walk away. It is the dumbest, funniest, and therefore most Cyberpunk ending. No, you don’t cede your body to a rockstar or corporation. You don’t die in a blaze of glory robbing the space casino. You don’t flame out and enjoy a short retirement in the desert. You just go back to being a nobody, so the whole thing was pointless.

Great game developers seem to spend, I would guess, a lot of time thinking about how they introduce the player to a playable character. Far fewer seem to spend as much time thinking about how the player leaves a character. Most games have no finality in this sense, you leave your character and it feels like the story isn’t over, that you’ve left a party that’s still going on, even if the protagonist dies or something in the narrative but especially if they don’t. Cyberpunk has a finality with this ending - we join V’s story, and we decouple ourselves from it, vividly and silently. Whatever they do next isn’t - as in most RPGs - something for the head canon, or ending slideshow, of fanfiction. The story is simply over. I like that.

I got interested in the Cyberpunk setting a while ago, trawling through the various TTRPG books(and good lord, the Cyberpunk v3.0 books are hilarious to read). Through some odd happenstance soon afterwards, Cyberpunk 2077 went on sale(with the DLC), so I decided to bite the bullet and grab it.

I never had any real dog in that fight, but I was well aware of 2077's rough, bug-laden start, but I was told that the story was so good it gave enough traction for Project RED to finalize and polish things off, getting it into a usable state. So when I finally got to play the damn thing, the first thing that came to mind was 'How the hell did people think this story was good?'

2077 feels schizoprenic - a sandbox game that despretely wants to be a fixed-charachter style single-player game a la the Witcher, but gives you so many illusions of choice you're fooled into thinking you're playing a customizable sandbox - until you get to the point that the polish wears off and you realize all those pretty choices are just meaningless and all those customization options are painfully superfluous. Make your charachter look any way you want them to... except the entire game is almost always in first person. Slot in all the augments... except you're still extremely limited in choices and have to pick and choose. Fuck, I can't even go full chrome - yes, as a matter of fact, I do want to play as fucking Adam Smasher, the flesh is weak, we will be going full Adeptus Mechanicus as I carry around a minigun better suited to a fixed-mounted technical.

Even the story itself is fairly limp-wristed. It's just yet another paint-by-numbers 'learning to accept death' style story that's neither interesting or innovative. The only way you can potentially escape is just going the Soulkiller route and escaping into the net with Alt, but that involves you actually trusting her and oh BOY is that a big ask given what she mentions what'll happen to all the other uploads in Arasaka's servers. (Don't get me started on Soulkiller, every time I consider that fucking thing I damn near loose my mind on the implications thereof.)

Weirdly enough, I only felt that 2077 came into it's own was, yes, with the DLC. Phantom Liberty really felt like the game devs finally 'got it' in terms of storytelling and directing, with every new charachter you encounter being an absolute banger in terms of writing. Forget the two boring romantic options, let me get with Songbird, instead. I can't lie - the intro quest where we first meet her was damn near chef's kiss in perfection, if only for the fact that we finally got the option to tell Johnny to fuck off for once and put him in a goddamn box. Thank you, So Mi, I will pull your boss's ass out of the fire for that alone.

Maybe mods could help save the game in terms of actual gameplay, but, annoyingly enough, mods were severely hit and miss for me in terms of actually working. I'm no virgin to the modding scene, but getting them to work seemed to be an utter crap shoot, much to my annoyance.

So, yeah. Color me one of those that are very, very confused that 2077 got the reception it did or managed to hang on as long as it has. Maybe Keanu Reeves star power really is that good, I dunno.

The main story was a major disappointment in that game for me. It felt like it had to be a "tour" of big cyberpunk tropes, so it wouldn't really commit to properly exploring one in depth. Some of the sidequests were much more interesting.

Cyberpunk is one of those games that my friends always try to convince me to play. I finally got it after years of pressure, played like 20 hrs, and just got super bored. I'm not sure why exactly as it seems like a game I'd like on the surface, but it just felt... soulless. I didn't care about any of the characters. The plot felt kind of dumb. The world and the gangs and such all seemed super fake. I don't know exactly what the problem was.

That ending does sound cool though!

I've been watching documentaries about synthesizers and learned about Eric Persing, who has an extremely American face, in my opinion as an outsider. Can anyone beat him in Americanness?

Mitt Romney seems very American to my eyes, although that might just be the whole manicured politician get-up.

Apparently he is German. I do not think this invalidates him being American in any way though lol.

Is he? Thought he was an army brat from Ramstein AFB.

Oh that would make sense - I just googled and saw born in Germany and the irony/appropriateness took me.

German heritage is a pretty good pick for generic American at this point so it would have made sense.

Don’t know about that but very few people could beat him in sound and sample design back in the day. There was a very noticeable drop in the quality of new sounds and sample rom contents after he left Roland. D-50, JDs, JVs and the early expansion cards were brilliant and iconic in all sorts of popular music. Anything for the next 15+ years was solidly meh at best and total garbage at worst even though being technologically far more capable.

Inspired by the fear the reaper thread, It's always been odd to me that so many Christians and ex-Christians report being scared of hell. It always seemed pretty easy to avoid to me absurdly easy in Protestant's case but even for Catholics and Orthodox you just need to go to a priest.

The ease you're describing is exactly what should worry you. "Just believe" and "just see a priest" both assume the spiritually dead can flip their own switch, which is the one thing Scripture says they can't do. Hell isn't scary because the exit procedure is hard; it's serious because "I said the words" was never the question being asked.

I guess I meant believers when I was a believer I never had much worry, faith the size of a mustard seed and all that, and my faith was much stronger then that. When I stopped believing well I no longer feared hell. In Thomas' thread a lot of people were saying when they were Christians they were worried about hell. I dunno maybe it's my Protestant upbringing that believing in Jesus and accepting him into your heart was how you got to heaven and since I did that I was never too fussed about the whole thing.

Faith that evaporates tells you what kind of faith it was. The framework you grew up in starts the story with your decision. Scripture starts it before the foundation of the world, a people chosen in Christ before time existed, given to the Son by the Father. The ones who fall away weren't really of us to begin with. "Accept Jesus into your heart" isn't actually in the text anywhere. It's a 20th-century revivalist gloss on a much older and stranger doctrine. What kept you unworried was confidence you'd done the transaction right. That's exactly what should have unsettled you. If the old confidence wasn't real, maybe the real thing just hasn't come yet. Election runs on His timetable, and plenty of His sheep have wandered far longer roads before they heard the call.

It's also the case that protestants do not all agree on what faith entails, and it isn't necessarily something super easy to achieve or to be sure that you have. And regarding confession and so on, papists do require contrition, you can't just show up and run through a script without repenting.

I think that either I'll be saved, or else never stood a chance; if my ongoing sincere repentance isn't enough, probably nothing would have been. My problem is that I don't know what hell is or what to expect after death.

I'm not really worried about eternal conscious torment, but put it this way: I've had enough experience as a psychonaut that my horizons in terms of possible states of consciousness and being have been enormously broadened, and I'm viscerally aware of terrible possibilities that probably wouldn't occur to most.

Even if I look forward to what ultimately comes after death, I'm afraid of the transition. I'm afraid of my brain shutting down, and what that's going to be like. I'm very afraid of what it will be like to face judgment, even if mostly pretty confident in the outcome. Are we faced with the entirety of our own sinfulness before absolution? Why? To what end? And how could I stand that? Or does Christ just show up immediately and say "Don't worry about it, you're done, I've got it from here, welcome to eternal bliss"?

Will I be called upon to live again? Does following Christ mean choosing to go back into the world and suffer as a human for others? My life is amazing and I have no trouble seeing it as a gift, though shot through with pain, hopefully for the purpose of spiritual growth. But I look at the lives of almost anyone else and think, no, I don't want to experience that.

I can imagine endless possibilities, and expect that the reality will be far beyond even those; incomprehensible to my current imagination.

The right attitude here is to trust and bear in mind the solemnity of what's coming. And I do those things. But I find that it's best to not dwell on it too much.

I guess it's a perception where the magnitude of the negative outcome ("ETERNITY" burning in hell) makes the fear much bigger than its low percentage likelihood implies. Even when it's significantly under the person's own control. Assuming the deity's commandments are accurately portrayed, all you gotta do is follow them.

It's a known phenomenon in lots of phobias and irrational fears that are common in the human mind.

It doesn't seem irrational to be deeply, persistently terrified of going to hell, if you genuinely believe in a religious doctrine where your actions can send you there. The standard model, as I understand it, is that hell is infinitely bad and lasts forever. Feed that into any reasonable expected utility calculation and the answer is that you should be doing everything reasonable, every unreasonable thing, and a fair amount of stuff that would normally land you in my outpatient clinic, just to nudge your probability of going there down by an epsilon.

The obvious rejoinder, and I'll concede it freely, is that belief in this kind of doctrine is itself irrational in the boring "insufficient evidence for wildly disproportionate claims" sense. Of course I believe that. I'm an atheist.

My claim is conditional. If you believe, you ought to be acting like you believe. You should be giving away every cent you don't strictly need and praying until you can no longer stay upright, treating your eternal soul with at least the seriousness that most people reserve for their pension contributions.

Almost nobody does this. The structural limitations of the human brain and psyche prevent true believers from following their professed beliefs to the logical conclusion, and memetic pressure has clearly selected for less extreme (but more incoherent) behavioral phenotypes. The version of Christianity that actually requires you to sell all you have and follow Jesus loses, evolutionarily speaking, to the version where you go to Mass on Christmas, baptize the kids, and otherwise live a perfectly secular life.

So in a very specific and very narrow sense, I respect the Jihadist more than I respect the nominal Muslim washing down a pork sandwich with a glass of whiskey. I respect the Christian Fundamentalist homeschooling six kids more than the milquetoast Cultural Catholic who shows up to Mass because his mother expects it, instead of because his Holy Book demands it in completely unambiguous language. The extremists are at least taking their own stated premises seriously. The moderates engage in a motte-and-bailey where the doctrine says one thing and their lives say another, and they've made peace with the contradiction by declining to ever look at it directly.

That respect is, of course, an extremely narrow form of respect. It is not the same as liking the Jihadist or the Fundie more than the normal/modal religious person. I'd vastly rather hang out with the typical Anglican, who is functionally indistinguishable from an atheist like me on any given Tuesday afternoon. I just happen to respect coherence and adherence to principle a great deal, even when the principle in question strikes me as embarrassingly unsupported by the underlying evidence.

I very much agree with this. Lukewarm believers, or even people who follow no tenants or like one. Don't make any sense to me, but I guess a lot of people treat religion totally different then other beliefs and also view it as something you are rather than a statement of the universe. As someone who was raised a conservative evangelical these views were railed against and I always agreed with that. If this stuff matters it really matters otherwise it's nothing. Episcopalians and the like make no sense to me but I'm happy they exist as someone who likes a secular world. I do view them as kind of useful idiots though.

If you believe, you ought to be acting like you believe. You should be giving away every cent you don't strictly need and praying until you can no longer stay upright, treating your eternal soul with at least the seriousness that most people reserve for their pension contributions.

No you don't that's what I meant when I started this. In most Christian denominations hell is fairly easy to avoid even if you sincerely believe in the premise. In most Evangelical denominations you just make a confession of faith or say the sinners prayer and your saved. Catholicism and Orthodoxy are a little more involved but not that much more. If you sincerely believe in the faith then you think you know the rules so hell shouldn't be an issue. None of the New Testament shows being saved as a particularly hard state to achieve.

You should be giving away every cent you don't strictly need and praying until you can no longer stay upright

This is not what the Christian life should look like, it's a caricature. We know because it's not even what Jesus' life looked like. He prayed a lot, but he did lots of other things too, including apparently being a full time carpenter for most of his life.

Christianity teaches that God has a unique purpose for each of our lives, and the only way to discern it is to submit to the Holy Spirit and trust in His Providence.

In fact one of the big issues we Evangelicals have with Catholics is that their salvation relies on their behavior and on the grace provided by the sacraments. The problem is that no amount of holy behavior can get you to heaven, only Christ's grace - but that grace is freely given, and we can in fact have confidence in our salvation.

Catholics who take their faith seriously end up like Martin Luther, who famously would spend hours every day in Confession. That is, until he developed his understanding of Sola Fide - our salvation is only through our faith in Christ.

There's not to say we shouldn't pray, but a Christian prays because we want to hear from our Father, not because it will earn us eternal life if we do it enough.

This preference for following ideas through to their conclusion was often speculated to be what leads in the perception of an abnormally high number of engineers and scientists in ISIS. (I should say I never quite bought it; "Arab society does not have the Western correlation between education and secularism, and Westerners are surprised to see that expectation subverted" seemed truthy and sufficient to explain the observations)

perception of an abnormally high number of engineers and scientists in ISIS

It only looks abnormal to people who are ignorant of history and suffer from a delusion that knowledge by itself automatically improves people. It is not so, and if you look at other destructive movements, often you find very educated and high-IQ people at the head of it. Communists, while proclaiming to be the leaders of the proletariat, have been all high-middle-class or above since late 19th century. Top terrorist leaders regularly turn out to be well-educated heirs of at least solid high-middle-class background if not above (e.g. Bin Laden). Arafat had a university degree. Khaled Mashal has a university degree. It's absolutely normal and routine. The idea that these movements are moved by ignorance and desperation alone and educating them (without specifically pointing out how) and giving them "alternatives" would dissuade them is a dangerous and ignorant delusion, which nevertheless remains popular contrary to all the facts.

Yup. Most Christians (myself included!) are "functional atheists". The current milieu is one of agnosticism rather than spiritualism, and it is easy for professing Christians to fall into that cultural rut. Of course, most atheists in 1600-1700s Europe were "functional Christians" when the surrounding culture was "Christian".

I do disagree with your claim that Christians should be doing every action possible to save themselves from Hell. Reformed/Protestant Christianity says that outside the work of the Holy Spirit even our good deeds contribute to our damnation (they are done out of alignment with God's desire). It is only through Christ's atoning work that we can be reconciled to God ("made alive in him"). Salvation comes from acceptance of this reality (or predestined selection for this reality, if you are TULIP inclined), not from any work/action that we can do.

Yeah I agree with all of this, except obviously I don't think hell is eternal and generally think God is more of a chill guy than most Christians. Which, I hope, helps make my actions a bit more reasonable.

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