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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   2064 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 22, 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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I've expressed here in the past that I'm not seeing the huge gains from LLM based coding that a lot of other parties are seeing. A new research paper suggests that maybe I'm not just prompting it wrong.

We present a systematic study evaluating how well agents handle structural constraints in multi-file backend generation. By fixing a unified API contract across 80 greenfield generation tasks and 20 feature-implementation tasks spanning eight web frameworks, we isolate the effect of structural complexity using a dual evaluation with end-to-end behavioral tests and static verifiers. Our findings reveal a phenomenon of constraint decay: as structural requirements accumulate, agent performance exhibits a substantial decline. Capable configurations lose 30 points on average in assertion pass rates from baseline to fully specified tasks, while some weaker configurations approach zero.

Specifically, the paper calls out convention based frameworks and ORMs as particularly problematic, and I'm using both. It feels good to see some evidence that I'm not crazy and incompetent.

Speaking of AI disappointments, here's Claude Sonnet 4.6 today:

Prompt:

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

Claude:

Should You Walk or Drive to the Car Wash?

You should walk, of course! 🚶

Here's why driving doesn't make much sense:

It's only 50 meters away — that's roughly half a football field, or about a 30–60 second walk.
Driving defeats the purpose — your car will get dirty again just driving those 50 meters, especially the tires and wheel wells.
Practical issues with driving:
    You'd spend more time buckling up and adjusting mirrors than actually traveling.
    Parking/maneuvering in such a short distance wastes fuel.
    You'd likely get the car wash queue dirty before you even start.

Gemini was cleverer:

Walking over is a great option if you just want to grab a detail spray, buy a voucher, or stretch your legs, but if you're planning to actually wash the vehicle, walking a block over leaves you with one minor logistical problem: your car is still in the driveway!

It went on for a couple of paragraphs about car washes, and gave me a fun tip about letting rain wash my car: spray it down with a hose after a storm before the rain dries completely to clear the dust dissolved in the rain.

For a while, Gemini had patched this, but if you said you were driving a truck or changed the distance, it would revert right back to the broken behavior.

The recent updates to Gemini that I’ve experienced have felt like night and day compared with the iterations of maybe 3-6 months ago. It seems to parse and select for data that’s relevant to what I ask it without losing context as easily. It’s getting better at handling edge cases too, but it’s still imperfect.

Given the relatively high median eloquence of posters on this site, perhaps it's the wrong place to ask but I've been dealing with a rather frustrating issue. I find that my natural writing style (which I've had since I started writing essays in grade school with the usual refinements that come with age) tends to be pretty easily mistaken for LLM-style writing. I don't really know what that says about me as a person. Regardless, I've cut out em-dashes and negative parallelisms despite having used them for years. Anyone else encounter this issue and has it changed your approach to writing at all?

I'd recommend trying to write how you speak to others. Perhaps record yourself and use an AI to have the transcript written out. You preserve a lot more of your unique style that way and you can work your writing style to model that.

Never been accused of writing like an LLM, no. Maybe it’ll happen one day though. People have said I tend to be overly descriptive or over explain things. It’s become a necessary habit overtime after seeing more than a few pseudo-intellectual jackasses “ackshually,” their way through your argument, as if they’ve said anything meaningful or substantive against your point. My natural writing style takes the form of shutting off and closing the door to objections I’m anticipating, so it rigidly keeps my interlocutor on track and focused on what I’m saying. It’s a fairly well known phenomenon in the psychology of argument that people tend to ignore all the strong and conclusive evidence you can muster, then pick on the weakest point in your argument, writing an objection against that and then ignore all the rest of what you’ve said. That kind of behavior annoys me as well. It’s also why adding a bad argument to your armamentarium of good arguments actually worsens your case. Because when people think they can refute your bad argument, they automatically assume they can do the same to the rest of your arguments and don’t bother to address it at all.

Not really? The most obvious AI tells (em dashes, negative parallelisms, didactic disclaimers, emojis as formatting, etc.) are things I have never used in my writing. AI is aiming for some combination of HR inoffensive, highbrow literary, and "how do you do fellow kids"; none of it matches my style.

I’ve almost entirely abandoned negative parallelisms, and I’ve become much more judicious in my use of the em-dash. If I’m writing for an audience who knows nothing about me (for example, reference letters, external emails, and job application cover letters), I avoid em-dashes entirely.

Yeah, the em dash has been destroyed. It's infuriating, because there are so many sentences that are punchier with a dash thrown in.

I'm glad in many ways that I finished my bachelor's in a writing-heavy field before the advent of generative AI.

It's infuriating, because there are so many sentences that are punchier with a dash thrown in.

My man, just put in the minus sign :trollface:

For professional or semi-professional writing, that appears sloppy and unprofessional.

For personal writing, it makes no difference. Normies can't tell the difference between ASCII 0x2D (-) and Unicode U+2014 (—). Even when writing dashes with "--", I've been accused of being AI. The assumption among sophisticated audiences is that you AI-generated the text and then edited the characters you used to disguise it. And most people aren't so sophisticated that they're looking at detailed character codes, they see any writing with dash-separated clauses and they presume it's AI.

they see any writing with dash-separated clauses and they presume it's AI.

Good. Maybe we'll finally get rid of that stupid looking em-dash. Let the hate flow through you.

I’ve become much more judicious in my use of the em-dash

The Chad solution to this is to accept that there is only one dash and that it is also hyphen and the minus sign. Aka the ascii character 0x2D.

What is this, the 1970s? Even then, typists knew to use two hyphens for an en-dash and three for an em-dash.

Nah, that's not the Chad solution — the Chad solution is to start overusing the em dash even if you've never used them before and have to ask AI how to find it on your phone keyboard. It doesn't just show that you don't care about being mistaken for an LLM — it shows that you revel in it! And the best part? You're not just using em dashes — you're weaponizing them. And honestly? That's the real Chad move.

Begone, foul beast of Chaos!

This calls for Ordo Malleus. We may need a full exterminatus here.

Thanks, I hate it.

You can pry my minus sign dash from my cold, dead hands.

I haven't encountered it. I've tried changing my writing by removing extra crap. Having shorter writing probably helps.

all LLMs actually trained on your essays, which is why they took your styles. even their alter-name AI is derived from your username. see.

While doing my unpaid janitorial duties (filtering spam, not cleaning my own toilet), I saw a bot trying to push a tax advice app for entrepreneurial Brits to the front page on this site.

I was sad to see it go. I can almost see it being a targeted and appropriate advertisement for me. Well, not quite, but better than what I get on Twitter anyway. RIP unnamed and unloved ad company that spams our niche forum, you will won't be missed.

Edinburgh has to be my favorite city in the UK, with Manchester lagging behind in second place.

London? I've warmed to it considerably since my first visit in 2022, but I've also cooled on the prices. There's no way I'm going to spend that much money on rent and general expenses, particularly in a profession with little scope for geographical arbitrage.

Edinburgh strikes a nice balance. It's got good vibes, plenty of places to see or things to do. I mean, I'm not actually going to do any of those things, but it's the thought that counts. I suspect that I'm biased towards Manchester because I have family there, its not that remarkable. It's clearly not in the same league as London, it's just reasonably priced and not a complete snooze-fest.

Glasgow? Bruh. There's something in the air. A faint stink of rot (which might well be literal). The day I was in Glasgow probably increased the average mood when considering the population average, and I'm depressed. It just feels wrong, and I was in the nicer parts, staying in a fancy hotel. I didn't feel physically unsafe (I've been in some shady places for reasons I'd rather not get into, thanks), but it's gloomy and lacks the architectural charm of Edinburgh. I've only felt as utterly disappointed by a city when I visited Aberdeen, and that's so far north you run into polar bears.

In contrast, Edinburgh rents are reasonable, it's got a cultural scene that I could get into, in theory (it hosts ACX meetups!), and it's not super expensive. I could see myself living there, modulo futures where I do settle down in the UK.

I loved Edinburgh. My night at The Stand was still to this day the most fun I've had a comedy show, all the food we had was decent, and it was just plain beautiful to walk around unguided. I was extremely happy with how friendly people were, despite the fact that I was there to see Taylor Swift (I'd rather not get into it, thanks).

I did feel like quite the fool though - after waking up earlier than everyone else in the UK, I stumbled upon a completely empty Victoria Street (I had done no research). I thought to myself "Wow, this is such a magical space! I love the colors!"

3 Hours later it was revealed as a crappy tourist trap with queues to get into shops selling chinese harry potter swag. But I eventually dragged our party just a block or two away for coffee, and things were nice again.

I stayed in converted apartments deep in old town. I had eyed them almost 8 years ago, amazed at how cool they were for the price. The TS premium was brutal, but I decided to splurge and am glad I did. They've now been taken over by Marriott and are lifeless shells of what they were.

And perhaps this is why I feel some anxiety about traveling and the opportunity cost of "settling down" for years as I hit prime earning age. Cool places die all the time.

You're triggering fond memories of my Scottish vacation.

I completely agree on Glasgow. I'm not sure what their problem is, but I'm glad we didn't spend the night there. It felt somehow post-apocalyptic, but with all the technology working fine. If that makes sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_effect

The Glasgow effect is a socially constructed theory that describes the unexplained lower life expectancy of residents of Glasgow, specifically when compared to other municipalities across the United Kingdom.[1] Although lower income levels are generally associated with poor health and a shorter lifespan, epidemiologists have argued that poverty alone does not appear to account for the disparity found in Glasgow.[1][2][3][4][5][6] Equally deprived areas of the UK such as Liverpool and Manchester have higher life expectancies, and the wealthiest ten per cent of the Glasgow population have a lower life expectancy than the same group in other cities.[7] One in four men in Glasgow will die before their sixty-fifth birthday.[8]

I blame aliens. We've ruled out everything else.

One in four men in Glasgow will die before their sixty-fifth birthday.[8]

25% dead by 65 isn't exactly disastrous. I thought I heard at some point that 1/3 of us will be dead by 67 or so. Maybe that information was outdated or applied to a worldwide basis and not just WEIRD countries.

Why could it not be some kind of pollen, or breathable but slightly poisonous molecule in the air? Something in very low concentration, and only sporadically released into the air? Something not yet detectable by modern instruments because we are unaware of it?

I have no idea, my best bet was background radiation, but I think I looked it up and the levels were fine. Even talked to a nuclear engineer in the family.

The reason we don't know is because we don't know, and people have tried pretty hard to figure out what's going on.

Huh. So the inverse of the Roseto Effect?

Later studies failed to find evidence supporting this thesis and raised numerous methodological flaws with it, noting that Roseto's rate of deaths from heart attacks is comparable to Framingham, Massachusetts, the only other town from the era for which comparable data exists. A study also attributed any difference in heart disease to the town's diet, particularly moderate wine consumption

Apparently that one doesn't hold up, while Glasgow's does.

The first claim is unsourced, and the second is from Oeno One, "a peer-reviewed Open Access journal in the field of vine, grape and wine sciences", which may be slightly less than unbiased about positive effects of drinking wine.

The source for the second claim also doesn't say what the Wikipedia entry says: it certainly does not attribute "any difference to the town's diet." I think there's some of the usual Wikipedia shenanigans going on, but damfino why this page of all of them

Last time (December 2002) I was in Edinburgh I was with my mother on my birthday. We were staying in a hotel with a plano bar across the street.

After she went back to the hotel, I got drunker and went home with a woman I'd met at the bar.

After she went back to the hotel, I got drunker and went home with a woman I'd met at the bar.

I wish to imagine that by "home" you mean that you abandoned your poor, elderly mother and replaced her with a newer model. Not a step-mom, but the mom that stepped out of her pants.

Fellas, this is what watching too much porn does to a mf. Take notes. No, you're not supposed to be taking notes about me, I'm a psychiatrist, I got that handled.

It was a little porny, but not that genre.

I was tired, having driven from London that day. My not yet elderly mother had gone to the piano bar on her own.

I was awakened by a knocking at my door by two women I didn't recognize. They explained they'd met my mother who had told them about me who was alone alone in my room across the street on my birthday. My first thought, was that my mother got me prostitutes for my birthday. I accompanied them across the street to the bar, and then back to hers. They weren't prostitutes, school teachers.

I'm sorry man, but you've left me dazed and bemused. Why doesn't my mom ever do something this nice for me? Best she's done so far is send along arranged marriage proposals, and not directly to my bedroom.

It was the only time, though she was very friendly and a bit maudlin when she'd drink.

Finished the final season of Stranger Things this past week. I think I'm agreement with the general consensus that it was a step down from 4th season. The first two episodes were strong and had some cool ideas (a base in the upside-down, etc), but somewhere around the third episode they started to lose the plot and I decided I had to stop thinking too hard about things and just roll with it. That said, I loved the 40 minute "18 months later" epilogue that provided closure, more or less, for all our characters. Was this accomplished with transparent emotional manipulation backed up by an iconic soundtrack? Yes it was, what's your point? When the door to the Wheeler's basement closed for the last time and Bowie began playing over the end credits, I felt all the things I was supposed to feel. Judge me if you must.

But considering that Stranger Things started ten years ago, it occurred to me that we're due for the 90s nostalgia period pieces to start hitting any day now. So I started wondering, what would a 90s version of Stranger Things look like? By that, I mean a broadly sci-fi story that exploits the cultural memory of slightly-nerdy nineties kids the way Stranger Things exploits the cultural memory of slightly-nerdy 80s kids, building a plot around copious references to games, movies, common childhood experiences et cetera.

Off the top of my head, in no particular order:

a) Console/PC gaming and the internet were all coming into the mainstream in the nineties. I spent hours playing Civ 2 on the family computer.

b) I'm not a huge comic reader, but I do have the sense that comic books (as opposed to movies based on comics) were at peak popularity.

c)UFOs and government conspiracies were both pretty big, though I'm not necessarily sure they were or less popular fiction fodder than they were in the previous decade.

Regarding point (c), various types of conspiracy theories (JFK, Aliens, Illuminati/Satanic Panic, Deep State/Black Helicopters, Anti-Semitic/White Replacement) had been percolating in the 70s and 80s, and then they had a big boom with the rise of Internet in the 90s. So yes, the 90s was kind of the golden age of conspiracy theories. Part of why the early seasons of the X-Files were so good is that they were drawing on a lot of “real” conspiracy folklore from the time.

Material for the 1990s revival, here we go:

Nerd angle: X-files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Babylon 5? Anime was breaking through to Western consciousness, upscale productions like Ghibli movies got better international release through Disney.

In mainstream, we have: Jurassic Park. Saving Private Ryan. Titanic, movies with Leonardo DiCaprio. Disney was pumping out successful traditionally animated movies with relatively traditional plotline, one after another every year. Perhaps Disney can make a nostalgia trip back and start making mvies that are earnest again.

In cinema: Lots of golden darlings of movie buffs, moody but not necessarily bleak European movies by directors with unpronounceable names like The Three Colours. On the darker and edgier side, we have Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, ... actually I am not sure if metafictional post-modernism has ever ceased, so how can it make a comeback? As a case in point, Coen brothers are still making Coen brothers kind of movies, Fargo turned from one movie with interesting takes into a overtly long tv show with 5 seasons of 10 years that just finished. The Matrix has the same issue. Family / kid friendly space, the 2nd* best known cultural media icon from Bristol, Wallace and Gromit debuted, though Aardman is still here.

Fashion: I think we are already there?

(* the best known cultural media icon from Bristol is Banksy, the UK graffeurist laureate who indubitably will be declared British national treasure alongside Stephen Fry sooner or later )

At what point does Stargate (particularly SG-1) rotate back into consciousness?

For me, about five years ago.

Love me some SG1.

Honestly Stargate still has a lot of fans. It's just not a critical darling and there's not a whole company built around endlessly reiterated spinoffs like some other franchises I could name.

Yeah I agree with you and the two siblings that it's still a good show and very enjoyable to watch. The franchise had its spinoffs and its run and then died, but now Amazon MGM is attempting to revive it. What I'm asking is more: at what point does it become a referent in the nostalgia cycle whose 'memberberries can be harvested? It doesn't seem as ready to go as classic 90's conspiracy theory stuff (which would absolutely be part of 90s!Stranger Things), X-Files, etc.

Speaking as someone who used to watch Stargate with his parents and siblings every week as a teenager, I think it's probably there now. You just need clever enough writers who can work some references in without it feeling too forced. It is about a secret government program after all, albeit a benevolent one.

That's the rub, writers and the fanbase they interact with (ie: the reddit crowd) are not in the mood for optimistic sci-fi, Star Trek writers had to be dragged screaming into making Strange New Worlds, otherwise we'd still be stuck with nothing "actually, Star Trek has always been about opposing Trump and Brexit".

Stargate is inherently optimistic, but not blind either, about humanity. Not a hypothetical future humanity like Star Trek, but humanity as it currently is. The government and military are not perfect, but mostly act in the interest of the people. As you say, benevolent conspiracy. Even with a big technological disadvantage, humanity is able to more than pull its weight on the galactic scene. And its not foreign values that makes humanity powerful, it's deeply human ones. Even our flaws are cast as advantages, frequent wars on earth made humans good at fighting, at making weapons, better in many ways than warrior races (Mass Effect put this idea too in its lore).

If they were to try making it now, the writers would have to write it while thinking "if it were real, Trump would be the highest authority in charge of the Stargate program". Their own biases made it easy to ignore when it was Clinton, and they did push more evil politician stories during the Bush era, but that was after establishing the program as benevolent. But I don't think they would be able to do it now.

For me, it never left

Babylon 5 is a core memory for me, X-Files and Buffy were both super popular, arguably some of the first SF media to hit mainstream recognition. I actually only watched Wallace and Gromit as an adult with my kids, and was shocked to realize how little of it there actually was, cuz you're right, it was everywhere for a while.

I had more or less the exact same impression of the final season of Stranger Things. I get people who were too turned off by it's obvious inferior quality to immerse themselves in the 40 minute farewell to these kids we watched grow up. But damnit, I was still a sucker for it. Especially Dustin. I think he was the only "child" actor who was still even trying. Finn Wolfhard sure as shit wasn't.

I'm not sure what 90's nostalgia looks like. I'm not sure they ever really went away. We still have all the same video game genres, more or less frozen in time from the 90's minus how they've been mutated into live services or mobile games. Virtually every IP from the 90's has been rebooted. Honestly the 90's might have been the last time the nation had a more or less common culture before the internet killed it, and so in many ways it remains hovering over us like a ghost. Not entirely relevant anymore, but never entirely displaced either.

But who knows, maybe people who came of age in the 80's felt the same way.

Your second paragraph raises a good point. Appearing right at the threshold of digitization has allowed a lot of 90s culture to persist as though trapped in amber. I would place the end of a common culture more in the 2010s but yeah, there's no doubt that media is much more fragmented and balkanized now than it used to be. Presumably that's why we keep rebooting stuff from the era; they're the only things with big enough draw for these huge corporations to perceive as a worthwhile investment.

As a 90s kid, I think Nintendo/Sega/Doom would probably be somewhat analogous to the D&D from the 80s. Playground arguments about some obscure (false) cheat code that requires some elaborate set of steps or one's "uncle at Nintendo" leaking them some upcoming release would be fitting and certainly accurate. Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were 2 of the more iconic films for boys in that era. Perhaps a lot of low-fat foods packed with sugar? OJ Simpson would be big enough in the news for kids to know something about, too. Getting a new AOL CD with a free 15 hours of dial-up internet every month/week/day would make sense. Speaking of which, the dial-up modem connecting sound (I recently watched a zoomer streamer comment utter disbelief at her chatters saying that it was a real thing, when she had thought that it was just some meme up to that point).

That said, I loved the 40 minute "18 months later" epilogue that provided closure, more or less, for all our characters. Was this accomplished with transparent emotional manipulation backed up by an iconic soundtrack? Yes it was, what's your point?

To me, this felt like trying to tickle yourself or have sex with your hand. When I am made consciously aware that the events are happening because the writers wanted to manipulate me, rather than because of reasonable action-and-consequence within the world in which it was built, the suspension of disbelief is lost, and I'm left emotionlessly thinking about the writers instead of emotionally empathizing with the characters. I'll also say that, with both Stranger Things and Game of Thrones, I was shocked by how many people thought that the final season was a sharp dropoff from the penultimate one; for both, I had thought that the penultimate season was garbage, and the final season just felt like a continuation of the trajectory.

About that...

But yeah, old enough to remember dial-up has become a generational marker

I was shocked by how many people thought that the final season was a sharp dropoff from the penultimate one; for both, I had thought that the penultimate season was garbage, and the final season just felt like a continuation of the trajectory.

The penultimate season was garbage, but it still at least had some promise (and felt like it had some stakes, and hadn't gone all Dark Fate on the protagonist).

Also, the final season forced you to wait for the worst episode(s). And over the holidays, too. Likely wouldn't have been so bad at any other time.

A cancelled season is always as good as the fans make it. A rushed season is bad forever. I get that the show-writers were dealt a bad hand with it taking way too long to film everything but in truth the cracks were visible from S2 (mainly because they reset most of the character development and hit the protagonist with the idiot ball, which S3 and S4 actually seemed to be safer from).

When I am made consciously aware that the events are happening because the writers wanted to manipulate me

The writers didn't respect the characters enough and it shows. (Which goes double for character types society in general does not respect; kid characters being the most obvious.) I'm led to believe the same thing occurs in the final season of GOT.

When I am made consciously aware that the events are happening because the writers wanted to manipulate me, rather than because of reasonable action-and-consequence within the world in which it was built, the suspension of disbelief is lost, and I'm left emotionlessly thinking about the writers instead of emotionally empathizing with the characters.

The 90s nostalgia that has already been written has been pretty good so far. Granted, it's also not really trying to be this right now. But outside of Deltarune and Omori it's going to take a lot more effort to pull it off because there really isn't very much kids of that time will remember about the '90s- there's a lot of difference culturally between the '60s and '80s, but not a lot of difference between the '90s and now (this is kind of the cost of extended adolescence, by the way). At least, not in the West; the East probably sees it differently.

Playground arguments about some obscure (false) cheat code that requires some elaborate set of steps.

I once convinced my classmates that you could get a boat in the second Liberty City level of GTA, somewhere in Hackenslash. Used up all my cred, but it was worth it.

have sex with your hand

I'm afraid I have bad news for you. Or great news, depending on how you look at things.

Probably not the worst analogy to the Stranger Things denouement. It's a good enough simulation of the actual thing to give a lot of the same feelings, but there's a core missing that just prevents it from achieving the same things as what it's simulating. And it's a lousy way to finish a 10-year-long relationship.

One prominent sex-education website claims that masturbation should be considered a form of sex.

Is Masturbation Better Than Sex?

Sorry, Wrong Question

So first of all the question is wrong for three reasons. Sorry about that.

(1) Masturbation is sex and so if something is a thing it can’t be better than that thing. This is called philosophy.

(2) The question implies that the only kind of sex that is real sex is sex with another person, which is wrong. Solo sex is sex.

(3) It also makes out that masturbation itself isn’t sex and that only penetration is ‘real’ sex. There is no ‘real sex’, just sex. I think that if we start to see sex as what may or may not be enjoyable to us, rather than what is ‘real’ or not, then we might find it easier to enjoy.

Solo Sex

Some people just prefer not to have sexual and/or romantic relationships with other people. It doesn’t mean that they don’t like sex, they just want to do it with themselves. Maybe they have had difficult relationships in the past, or just don’t really feel very connected to many people. Perhaps they’ve had sex with other people and it was crap, or non-consensual and just don’t want to go back there. There are many reasons why people just prefer to have sex with themselves – and it’s totally totally okay.

ToaKraka, you are a wise man. I am less wise, and wish to enquire if it's masturbation when one side of a Siamese twin jerks off the other.

In all honesty, arguing about whether masturbation is "sex" is arguing about semantics. I'm fond of that kind of mental masturbation, but I think trying to use it as a central example is inappropriate. If I ask a patient if they're sexually active, I don't want to know if they had a recent date with Rosie Palm and her five sisters. In a non-clinical context, if my buddy rings me up and tells me about the great sex he had last night, I'd kick him in the butt if it was that banal.

If it doesn't involve physical contact with and penetration of another person, doesn't count for me.

if my buddy rings me up and tells me about the great sex he had last night, I'd kick him in the butt if it was that banal.

On the other hand, perhaps you'd slap him on the palm if it was banal?

I'm glad you noticed the innuendo. I'll update the tally accordingly.

To be clear, I was just pointing out the fact that at least some people seriously hold this view, not actually endorsing the view.

ToaKraka, you are a wise man.

LOL.

Away from me, spirit of Satan!

Lending yourself a hand is the best way to get rid of the spawn. Can't comment on the diabolical nature of the process without gross hypocrisy.

Playground arguments about some obscure (false) cheat code that requires some elaborate set of steps or one's "uncle at Nintendo" leaking them some upcoming release

Ah, the truck and how to get Mew in the original Pokemon...

The actual story of the MissingNo bug feels pretty unrealistic, but fits the bill too and wasn't a lie. It did probably make the others more believable, though.

Well, about that...

Vampire the masquerade was a big nerd thing at the time, especially in the artistic side. Anne Rice was still taken seriously too. Horror in general was a surprisingly big deal then compared to now.

Somebody introduced me to Warhammer for the first time in the 90s. Thank God I didn't take to it.

In the 90s, the nerd/punk overlap mirrored the nerd/metalhead overlap of the 80s. The live music scene was going through something of a golden age with the festivals starting back up in earnest (Lollapalooza, Lilith, HFStival, Woodstock 99).

Cell phones existed, but not everyone had them and they didn't work well. As I write this, how much of this 1980s nostalgia is a top-down consensus campaign by writers who just don't want to deal with how cell phones negate 90% of the easy ways to create danger and tension in a narrative?

Vampire was huge. I was too young for it but the fact I knew about is probably a good indicator of how popular it was. Vampire media in general were really popular up until I think the mid 2000s, about the time Underworld and the Twilight movies started coming out.

Funnily enough, I have seen multiple pen-and-paper RPGs which say something like "you can set your campaign in the modern world, but probably no later than the nineties or so" precisely because the premise becomes unworkable once everyone has smartphone.

Vampire the masquerade

Was? I thought it has had stable subculture ever since. But out of all 1990 White Wolf products, I think time is ripe for the true coming of Mage the Ascension. Reality is what you and/or other powerful people make it to be.

It could still be, but I'm too old to keep track of that shit anymore.

how much of this 1980s nostalgia is a top-down consensus campaign by writers who just don't want to deal with how cell phones negate 90% of the easy ways to create danger and tension in a narrative?

If it means the shows have 80s music I really couldn't give a damn :)

As I write this, how much of this 1980s nostalgia is a top-down consensus campaign by writers who just don't want to deal with how cell phones negate 90% of the easy ways to create danger and tension in a narrative?

I've noticed just how many modern crime/noir novels are set pre-2000 for what I assume is this reason.

This isn't fun but it's fun related:

Did Google find a new way to hinder users of alternative (ad free) apps for viewing YT videos? What's new right now is that none of the channels display any videos. You can still enter and view videos from search results and playlists or direct video URLs, but the main channel content is gone from listing in Newpipe and Freetube.

NewPipe broke for a few days, but the latest update fixed it for me.

NewPipe still works for me on Android.

NewPipe started working again for me too but FreeTube still can't load any channel videos

The RSS workaround doesn't work for you? It's not 100% reliable, it seems to break every day but once it gets going, it seems to work fine for the rest of the day.

It does work for the "subscriptions" overview. But if I enter a channel it's empty, requiring me to go via a playlist to find anything.

Ah yeah, that's a separate bug. They're quite a bit slower with fixing these latest issues, than they nirmally are.

Vanced worked on my android phone until 2023. Seems it stopped getting updated. I guess Google's lawyers killed it.

They changed something in how they format the data. This happens every once in a while and usually gets fixed within a few days.

There's a workaround for Freetube. Settings > Subscription > turn on RSS. The thumbnails will lack the runtime and some other minor things but it's better than nothing.

That works quite well, thanks!

Did Google find a new way to hinder users of alternative (ad free) apps for viewing YT videos?

I don't know about those apps specifically, but my assumption is yes. I'm no longer able to watch videos in Firefox browser in private mode--the video won't play unless I sign in. Watching videos in Brave browser still works, but they take longer than they previously did to load and play, especially if it's part of a playlist.

Video game thread.

Got sucked into a week-long Space Haven rabbit hole - a spaceship survival / colony sim game that had been in early access forever and is now out. I'm sure there are dozens like it. You start with 3-4 crew, build a ship, try not to die .. profit? Comes with a moderate depth of systems + some "The Sims" elements, like the crew forming friendships/relationships, and having personality traits. e.g. one of mine has "antisocial", which gives a passive -5 mood condition "did something I dislike" every time another crew member tries to socialize with her, which is often on a tiny cramped ship, especially when another has the "comedian" background and "charming" trait.

Anyway, turns out surviving in space is really hard: too much work to be done, not enough hands to do it. My tiny crew of 3 was living hand to mouth with almost no time to do anything beyond basic needs. After a month of this, the shiny "enslavement facility" upgrade in the tech tree was looking real tempting. Fine. I guess we're slavers now.

Using the element of surprise, we picked a neutral faction, the galactic military, bribed them with the last of our money and nearly the last of our fuel until they were friendly enough to let us board their prison ship. The initial plan was to steal some prisoners, but it turns out you can use drugs on allied NPCs without turning them hostile. Probably an oversight. We come back with a load of sedatives, drug all the guards, pick them up one by one, and shuttle them back to our ship, locking each in a separate room to be dealt with later so that we can deal with each 3v1 when they wake up.

Once we've abducted as many as we can fit, we spool up the hyperdrives and jump systems. The game informs me this is "kidnapping" and will turn the military hostile. No problem. Expected. I locked them all in separate rooms for that reason. Unexpected: for some reason jumping systems resets everything, meaning the guards all wake up and, crucially, the doors on the ship all unlock, letting them group up. What follows is a chaotic and destructive ~30v3 fighting retreat which leaves our injured crew locked (manually) on the bridge, and 23 surviving angry guards on the other side of the door. To solve this problem, we open the airlock vents, causing a massive amount of damage to the interior of the ship, but dropping O2 low enough that the guards pass out. We quickly close the airlocks, don spacesuits, take the guards prisoner and put the slave collars on.

That's the start of our problems. We now have 23 nearly-dead slaves, no money, little fuel, on a ship with most of its critical systems broken. We need to, in rough order of priority: repair/build more oxygen generators to support that many people, find a source of energy cells (each slave collar runs on a specific type of battery that needs to be crafted with electronics + power), heal the slaves and make sure they rest enough so that they don't die, expand the ship and get a farming operation running so that we don't run out of food given the expanded headcount, and source raw materials to support all that - this, in an already very resource-starved survival game, and having just made enemies of a major well-armed faction.

The adventures that follow are pure emergent gameplay, riding the tiger of our slave enterprise, evading the space cops, and trying to turn enough of a profit to keep it all together. Would recommend if you have time to burn and like this sort of thing.

I've been playing Windrose. It's a pirate game. It's closer to a survival game like Conan exiles than it is to other pirate games like Black Flag.

The good

  • The base building in the game has a well working quick build mode. Usually I find it a chore to build bases in survival games but this turned it into enjoyable again.
  • Combat against same level enemies feels good. There is an element of danger and some amount of basic tactics you need to adhere to or you will get wrecked.
  • Sailing on the seas feels cool, the waves are big as hell out in the ocean. Its not a flat expanse of water. The waves add a challenge to the naval combat, where if you don't aim well your shot will hit the wave blocking enemy ships or pass over them as they ride a dip into the waves.
  • Story has a pirates of the Caribbean vibe going. With some weird magic creating the undead.

The bad

  • The combat is entirely gated by your character and gear level. You can fight maybe one or two levels up, but more is usually a slow suicide fighting a few levels down is just easy. This applies to ground combat and ship combat.
  • The map is totally blank until it is explored. And finding all the tiny islands is annoying.
  • The combat system works much better on open land. On ship boarding actions you can get screwed over randomly. The safe/optimal strategy is to take pot shots at the enemy from your own ship and let your own boarders slowly whittle them down. But that strategy is boring and takes a while.
  • The fast travel system has artificial limitations. Limited number of locations you can setup and a limit on where you can place them.

Do you have to tack to sail into the wind?

No, all the sailing is fake

ugh. I want to check it out, but it looks like it suffers from terminal camera-off-to-the-leftism

Never heard of that term, but the camera has been fine in my experience. Camera control via the mouse. Movement with WASD

trend in modern gaming to do a 3rd-person PoV with the camera offset to one side so the player has the center of the screen open in an attempt to be a hybrid of 3rd person (advantage for melee action, jumping, and narcissistic obsession with seeing what your character looks like during every second of gameplay) and 1st person (advantage for precision shooting, crafting placement, seeing stuff that is not your character).

It achieves this by sacrificing symmetry in a way that my OCD can't handle. It feels so wrong to be moving something on the left or right third of the screen. What if something comes at you from the left? You're missing that part of your peripheral vision! You're left-sided. Everything is off balance. It's not right, I say! Worst offender and probable source of the trend: Fortnite

If a game wants to have both, that's fine, but it should do it by allowing swapping between centered 3rd person and centered 1st person POV camera like the old Jedi Knight games did.

Never bothered me, but ya this game does have that kind of camera. Except when steering the ship. The forward mast thingy gets in the way.

Getting snuck up on isn't a thing. There is an on screen indicator when you have an enemy's attention. And the camera is zoomed out enough in melee that you always have enough reaction time between enemy on screen and enemy attacking.

Stealth on your part is also not a thing. Which is probably consider 'good' but I guess that's a more controversial opinion than some of my other "good" items.

It's not right, I say! Worst offender and probable source of the trend: Fortnite

My guess is that Gears of War was really the source of the trend. I recall it was a major splash back in ye olde Xbox 360 dayes as an exclusive (by Epic, the same devs as Fortnite, no less) that really showed off its power as well as the online functionality. Up to that point, I think almost every popular online shooter was first person (Halo, Quake, Epic's own Unreal Tournament), and Gears of War really stood out, and its success resulted in a spate of games coming out right after that aped its over-the-shoulder camera style.

I remember it from Mass Effect

The first story mission has one big Babylon 5 reference, your fighter is basically a Starfury, and the entire art-style reminds of me of old-school X-Com. 10/10 game, will continue playing. I just wish that you could shift perspective in the overhead view and trying to design any starship that isn't a giant flying brick is an exercise in creativity and tetris-style arrangement.

In that theme, I'm honestly surprised you wasted the time going for slave collars and didn't work toward blitzing into Robots. If anything, that's one gripe I have about the game - to really get everything up and running, you need a minimal crew of around 8 to 10 crewmembers to manage a single ship, and 4 of those are going to be dedicated toward scavenging derelicts. Granted, if you go robotic, you then run into the issue of keeping them supplied with power. So...

I mentioned X-Com earlier, and if there's any complaint I can make, it's that they didn't go all-in on the combat side of things and make it even more like X-Com, as being able to sling around det-packs at enemies and setting everything on fire would make for far more engaging combat.

As I discovered, you also can't count on the in-game AI being sessile, either. It's quite the experience to be prepping to explore a derilict, only to have another ship jump in and promptly head over to steal your prize. Granted, this CAN backfire...

I'm not sure where the mod scene with this game is going to go, but if it takes off akin to Rimworld, there's a monstrous amount of stuff we'll probably end up seeing.

I love Babylon 5. Incredible show.

I went for slaves over robots because they can do farming/industry/mining. The bots are useful for specific, narrow tasks. It's worth having some salvage bots to scrap derelicts and do simple logistics. The combat bots are hilariously overpowered killing machines, and I think optimal combat strategy might be to have a full ship of them, just point the army at what you want to die, and don't even send any crew.

Truthfully, I found slaves to probably not be worth it when factoring in the food and energy costs (demands ongoing resource intake), and I should have put a bullet in most of my captives and cut losses, but at that point, running a successful slave operation was kind of its own goal, and after sacrificing everything to get those slaves in the first place, it felt right.

for sure, the combat is a bit shallow at the moment, and I'm very interested to see where modding takes it.

I tried out Forza Horizon 6. It's sorta impressive graphically, and sorta isn't. The water in particular does not hold up to whatever you might expect from "Extreme + RT" settings in 2026.

Despite being set in Japan, there's no real exoticism. The franchise is as bland and globalized-homogenized as almost anything could be. I like the idea of driving around Japan, but it's hard to get a moment's respite from the shitty vanilla layer that covers everything. It's very very "safe". I suspect it's made for the sort of teenager who needs her parents' approval of the game to get them to buy it for her. The whole "Horizon Festival" gimmick bores the shit out of me. The characters, if you can call them that, all suck so far. I wish I could just drive around Japan and race without these characters and gimmicks chiming in constantly.

Then I returned to Slay the Spire 2. I've beaten Ascension 2 and Ascension 1 a few times over the last few days with various characters. I'm still not very good at the game (it's very much knowledge based) but I'm winning half of my runs now. When I started out I needed like 40 runs just to get my first win.

Forza fans have been begging for Japan for years now. The new game looks somewhat interesting, but I'm particularly annoyed by how they made Japanese roads to American highway standards. They're way too wide, and I think newer racing games strongly underweight how having at least some narrow track adds to a visceral sense of speed. Last Forza game I genuinely enjoyed was 3, 4 annoyed me because I couldn't run over the sheep, and 5 was just a new coat of paint.

To be fair, so is 6. It's the Place Japan meme incarnate, but the series has clearly settled into a rhythm, and one that's appealing to many. I can tell you the series absolutely murdered NFS, which was my childhood. I would have absolutely loved a simcade alternative at the time, now I don't particularly care.

The location names seem to have been americanized too. All the homogenization makes me wonder what's the point in using different settings. It defeats the purpose. Yeah, you have Mount Fuji in the background (and Japanese space rockets and fighter jets flying overhead just when you reach a finish line; because player = center of universe!!), but these are just some decorations compared to everything that's very very similar the to other settings.

They're way too wide

I might just suck at the game; I seem to find them a bit narrower than 5's. Then again, 5's set in the fictional Dei region of Mexico, and them not being able to afford paint, or more than 3 roads and one mountain, is realistic I guess. You can't run over the cows in 6 either, which is unfortunate; gone are the days of secret minigames in benchmarking programs where you could shoot down flying cows with a missile launcher mounted on the back of your monster truck (which, annoyingly, I can't find any good footage of, though you can see the aftermath of it here).

NFS Heat was very good but I haven't heard much out of them lately (I know they made a new game but I also know nothing about it). Hey, at least the AI cheats as hard as it did in those games, so you too can experience the classics, like picking a 3000 HP drag car and losing to a Beat.
Which was funny, but come on.

I'm about 8 hours into Detroit: Become Human, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure game from 2018 about near-future Detroit where AI-based androids have become normalized in society, leading to mass unemployment and such. I have been shocked (though I shouldn't have been*) by just how bad the writing and world-building are, given the generally positive reception it got.

There was basically no attempt at thinking through the implications of how a world where near-human-indistinguishable androids are common would work. E.g. one of the 3 player characters is a detective android, who creates resentment among the human detectives for taking their jobs, instead of using them as force multipliers to solve/prevent more crimes. There's also no signs of android police being deployed en masse as street-level police thanks to their greater speed, strength, accuracy, and expendability. Other issues include things like each android model being built with the same face and specialty for that model, when, with computers, it should be easy to mix-and-match (assuming each specialty requires so much data that the android only has enough data storage space for a single specialty). They also lack any sort of "black box" and must be interrogated as witnesses, and their memory is gone when they "die."

Plot points strike me as nonsensical as well, including the use of a local TV station to announce a revolution well before anyone has even conquered a single block, much less the entirety of Detroit, and even less the entire United States and the world, or a human androids-owner just standing there and yelling at them while they rebel and tear him limb from limb. There's also a clear attempt throughout the game to depict the androids as a sort of "second class citizen human," but no effort was made to depict the androids as capable of having qualia, and so the whole thing just feels like playing make-believe with dolls. This came out 2 years after the TV show Westworld at least made a valiant effort at depicting androids as having qualities deserving of empathy, and this game didn't even go that far.

I'd give it a solid 2/10 so far. Solid, because the graphics, level design, and voice acting are quite good, the former especially for a game that's old enough to be in 3rd grade. I'd be curious how a modern remake, using modern AI tech as the guide for how future androids will make decisions, would look. It may be one of the last major AI-focused fictional media before the recent beginning of the age of AI in 2022.

* I shouldn't have been surprised, because the only other Quantic Dream game I played was also awful in terms of writing. This was Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, a sort of urban fantasy mystery game that had an absolute banger opening scene (your player character, in a trance, murders a man in a diner bathroom, and then awakens to give you control to figure out how to get out of there without alerting the cop eating at the diner) followed by a good first 1/3, a mediocre middle 1/3, and god-awful final 1/3.

David Cage is a hack. Twenty years after his first interactive fiction/CYOA thing, his writing skills don't appear to have improved one iota.

I played it shortly after launch. I think I only played the first third, which was boring enough to make me expect it could only go downhill from there.

I was also surprised by the mostly positive feedback the game received from players. The main sticking point for me was something you bring up: Why the f should we assume that these robots have a subjective human-like experience of being alive? This is supposed to be taken for granted in the game, but the qualia is never even attempted to be established. They look almost human - so they must be human inside their digital cpus? Really?

We play the game from their perspective. This is literally the necessary and sufficient condition to establish qualia, I think.

We play the game from their perspective. This is literally the necessary and sufficient condition to establish qualia, I think.

This is a bizarre perspective. That the medium in which a work of fiction is presented actually influences the facts about the fictional world is something I've never encountered and something that seems completely wrong. Controlling a video game character (or "character" or "object,") established that the person dictating the actions of the character has qualia, not that the character within the world does.

Even if we were to posit that it did work that way, this doesn't get around the problem that the game is filled with NPC androids who are treated by the game as if they have qualia. NPCs, obviously by definition, have no human controlling them, and so they fail to meet this sufficent and necessary criterion for having qualia. Thus, it would make no sense for the game to present them as having them, and likewise for the in-universe characters to do so. Likewise, NPC humans - the fleshy kind - lack a human controlling them, and thus they fail to meet this criterion. Yet the game presents them as having qualia deserving of empathy, and in-universe characters treat them as if they do.

I don't think this is a good criterion for this particular thing.

I mean, I don't know of any way to hard-prove consciousness other than experiencing it. That's the problem. We assume other people have it either because of religious dogma or by induction from each of us having it and other humans looking similar enough to us. This can extend to the NPC androids.

I don't think humans looking similar to ourselves is why we believe they have qualia. For instance, I don't believe that a wax statue has qualia, nor do I believe that a cardboard cutout of Harry Potter has qualia. I think there's something about the actual physical (biological) similarity to ourselves, not merely the appearance, that make us believe that other humans have qualia. Whether or not androids are sufficiently similar to us to justify such a belief is an interesting question that has been talked about in scifi at least since Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick, and I'd guess even earlier, and the only thing we know so far is that no one knows the correct answer.

You haven't explained the actual sufficient and necessary criterion you outlined, though. Could you explain the reasoning for why "being controlled by the player" makes sense as the one single criterion for a fictional character having qualia within their fictional universe? Would you say that, any game like a Walking Dead or Mass Effect where the in-universe characters and sometimes the game tone itself presents life-or-death decisions about NPCs as important is making no sense, since these NPCs definitionally have no human controller and thus no qualia to lose?

When I was talking about appearance I was implying also the biological similarity.

Within the fictional universe, no one but any given android can know for sure that this android has qualia. Just how a human can only know that about themselves. If you're wondering why others in-universe believe an android has qualia, I believe "anthropomorphization" is sufficient as an explanation. Some people think ChatGPT has qualia in real life. And it's not like everyone in-universe believes it, either - have you missed the entire status quo that assumes androids aren't people?

As for why the player should believe an android has qualia, that's what my argument is for. We see through its eyes and witness it breaking through its programming. That's the most evidence we could possibly get. If it's not sufficient for you, nothing is.

If you're wondering why others in-universe believe an android has qualia, I believe "anthropomorphization" is sufficient as an explanation.

I'm not wondering why this, because I do find "anthropomorphization" sufficient. It's a separate criticism I have of the game, that this explanation isn't properly told or explored. It's a very minor criticism, though, since it can largely be just accepted as part of the premise. Though this, too, I thought was poorly done in terms of world building and making believable types of people in terms of their reactions to androids that appear nigh indistinguishable from humans even in behavior.

As for why the player should believe an android has qualia, that's what my argument is for. We see through its eyes and witness it breaking through its programming. That's the most evidence we could possibly get. If it's not sufficient for you, nothing is.

I'm wondering why the player should believe that all androids have qualia. I don't see how seeing through something's eyes and having it break through the programming is such definitive evidence of the in-universe android having qualia. Seeing through something's eyes merely tells us something about where the virtual camera is. The virtual camera is not actually something that's part of the world and reflects artistic decisions rather than some underlying reality about the world. Though it certainly can indicate that the director wants us to feel that we're experiencing the same things as some conscious being within the world.

Breaking through its programming is actually evidence, though that in itself isn't sufficient, as the discussions about modern AI show. It at least shows some level of free will and agency, and notably this is one major thing that Westworld leaned on to make its valiant effort to make the case that these androids have qualia. It wasn't good enough, because, as you've stated before, nothing is or could be (the problem of solipsism, perhaps). But the effort still counted for something enough to make the idea that these androids had qualia somewhat understandable. And even then, Westworld was reserved enough not to push into our faces sob stories about raped/tortured androids as if it expected us to automatically believe there was something to sympathize with (at least until season 2, which was largely a dumpster fire).

D:BH made no such effort, and it has been not at all reserved. It could have explored how the Deviants' behaviors could indicate a sort of qualia and presented a sort of believable version of events where every android was conscious but only Deviants had free will, or if normal androids lacked consciousness but Deviants gained it through some mysterious process. Or it could have gone full Star Wars and just made androids being conscious as just a premise of the story. But it didn't do any of these things (at least in my first 8 hours, which is enough), and the storytelling just appears as if the presence of Deviants is, in itself, enough to just convince the player that androids are all in a (ironically enough) I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream situation.

As for why the player should believe an android has qualia, that's what my argument is for. We see through its eyes and witness it breaking through its programming. That's the most evidence we could possibly get. If it's not sufficient for you, nothing is.

Well, not really. Not anymore than how R2D2 in Star Wars acting idiosyncratically and agentically makes all the robots in that universe have qualia.

More comments

Why the f should we assume that these robots have a subjective human-like experience of being alive? This is supposed to be taken for granted in the game, but the qualia is never even attempted to be established. They look almost human - so they must be human inside their digital cpus? Really?

My half-baked hypothesis is that some writers just don't have empathy for other humans or consider them as conscious beings that have inner experience similar to themselves; they only behave like they do because that's the "rules of society." As such, they think that, if they set up a new fictional world where androids appear as humans, then the same "rules of society" must apply to them also.

This almost sounds like old school Oregon Trail, but in space. I love classic adventurism in video games but it seems like they’ve just gotten so damn complex these days, and Alpha Centauri was complicated enough decades ago. In a way your initial description also somewhat reminded me of the movie Pitch Black (which is one of my favorite movies). Perhaps I’ll take a look.

I've had Space Haven on my wishlist for a while, since I almost never get Early Access games. Now that it's out I'll have to try it out sometime.

I've been playing a couple games on and off, most notably I've stuck with Lobotomy Corporation. I've warmed up to it a bit since my frustration last week. It helps that I have a much better idea of the mechanics and strategies after looking up some mostly non-spoilery guides. Importantly, after you complete enough tasks and finish the requirements to complete a day, you can still keep doing stuff to grind out your people's stats. Early on I had dismissed this as a gimmick/exploit, but it turns out that this is super important and necessary if you want to avoid being under-leveled long term, as the game's difficulty ramps up much faster than you will if you're just filling the quota. After resetting my run and doing a whole bunch of grinding on early levels I'm in much better shape. And for the most part it avoids being an exploit because as the day goes on the crises that occur become worse, and also you risk wasting more of your time if some stupid RNG kills your fancy people and forces you to restart.

I'm still kind of annoyed at the volatility. Having your people level long term seems to require that you have 0 or almost 0 deaths each day so you aren't constantly replacing them with low level noobs. And the game doesn't warn you if someone is about to die, only after they're already dead. So I can be like 5 minutes into a day then whoops, you made one mistake or just had bad rng and one of your guys is dead, guess you're restarting the level! And then 6 minutes into trying again it happens again and you have to restart again. There's a certain type of crisis that happens which randomly rolls one of several boss monsters to face, and one of them just insta-kills all of your people who are sitting in their home base. You know when that crisis level is going to occur ahead of time, but not which boss, so prior to it occurring you have to select and move all of your people out of each base, just in case that boss gets rolled. It's annoying and tedious, and was super annoying when it killed me several times before I knew that was a thing you had to do AND had to do prior to it even showing up since there's not enough time to react once it triggers.

But it's fine. I like the core gameplay loop of sending the right people to do the right tasks, and without nasty threats the game wouldn't have a challenge. I just kind of wish it was more strategic maneuvering and resource managing type of threats rather than gimmicky insta-kill type things that force you to restart with no warning.

Can we talk about the bizarre cast of characters involved in the Hantavirus outbreak?

We've got:

  1. A Pitcairn Island resident. Pitcairn, population 35, is 400 miles away from the nearest inhabited island and is famous for being settled by mutineers from the HMS Bounty, the descendants of whom pass the time by molesting children. This woman went on a brief pacific tour before quarantining:

    The woman had flown from San Francisco on 7 May and travelled through the island of Tahiti and then Mangareva in French Polynesia, the French Polynesian government said.

    It's unclear to me how she ended up in SF to begin with.

  2. A Tristan da Cunha resident. Tristan is the most remote inhabited island in the world (population 221) and the UK military had to airdrop medical personnel and equipment to monitor the case.

  3. An American woman who "mostly lives in Ecuador".

Perhaps others?

Keep in mind there were about 150 passengers and crew total aboard the MV Hondius during the hantavirus cruise.

At this dangerous time We hope you appreciated this article. Before you close this tab, we want to ask if you could support the Guardian at this dangerous time for journalism in the US.

According to a leading global watchdog, American democracy is now more imperiled than at any point since the 1960s, marked by a precipitous decline in press freedom – driven by mounting pressure from the Trump administration in the form of threats, criminal investigations, politicized regulation, frivolous lawsuits and, for public media, catastrophic funding cuts. Meanwhile, organizations that are supposed to be independent like the FBI and the FCC, our radio and television regulator, have also been targeting press freedom under Trump-aligned leadership, with the FBI raiding a reporter’s home and the FCC threatening ABC’s TV licenses after Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about Melania Trump.

The response from some ultra-wealthy and corporate media owners, keen to appease the president, has been chilling: CBS News has been taken over by a Trump ally; CNN is poised to be taken over by the same billionaire; Jeff Bezos has continued to impose cuts and editorial interventions at the Washington Post; and multiple outlets have settled multimillion-dollar lawsuits from the administration to protect their business interests.

Democracy is best served by a robust, thriving free press. But when that freedom is under attack, it falls to a determined few news organizations to ensure the full truth still reaches the public. Owned neither by a billionaire nor a corporation, the Guardian remains dedicated to covering this administration with uncompromising moral and factual clarity – and to keeping trustworthy journalism paywall-free for the world.

What in the hell is this?

I have a hard time remembering anything so off putting that I’ve read prior, but it’s been an interesting past 12-15 years for me reading news articles.

That's just the Guardian being the Guardian.

They've been running a variant of that as their "donate to Wikipedia us here at The Guardian" appeal for years now. I don't recall for sure, but I think it's been getting more and more fearmongering over the years.

Still, it at least means they're honest about where their bias is, unlike some (read: most) news organizations.

A Pitcairner and a Tristanian? Is someone assembling a team? Just need someone from Desolation Island and the ultra-remote Inuit villages.

There was somebody from the Yukon who came down with symptoms upon return and is quarantining IIRC!

Does anyone like or collect watches? I never had much interest in them as an adult, especially after the cell phone explosion around my teens/20s made them mostly obsolete, but as I got older, I realized that it's an important piece of jewelry for the typical formal male outfit, and so I started wearing them again a couple years ago. First super-cheap quartz watches from Amazon, which can usually be found for $10-$20, then I found better automatic ones from AliExpress for $30-$300*.

Then, likely through motivated reasoning, it occurred to me that if AI takes off and everyday goods become crazy cheap, positional luxury goods that are expensive primarily because of the brand name could appreciate in value, so I actually bought a handful of automatics from well known brands for $500-$3,000, in the hopes that they'll appreciate in the next few years (also I liked the designs). If you know anything about watch prices, you know that that's not enough to get to the actual luxury luxury tier, so last weekend, I decided to step into a local Rolex boutique on a whim, and it was quite a bit of a culture shock.

I had to wait in line for 20 minutes just to get in, and then once I was in, a single salesman was assigned to me, ready to show me anything I wanted. He had me sit in a lounging area and offered me coffee while he collected the watches I wanted to check out. No price labels on any of them (I'm guessing it's a "if you have to ask how much it costs, then you can't afford it" situation - I had a rough idea that the cheapest would cost around $10K and was prepared to spend on that order of magnitude, but, if you know more about Rolex than I did at the time, you already know that I didn't spend that on that day). I was most interested in a black Submariner with date (basically the prototypical dive watch that every other manufacturer apes with their own dive watches), and the salesman told me that there was a 1-2-year wait list. By which time, given the progress of AI, I have no idea if I'll be alive, have a job, have enough money to afford one, or if Rolex will even be around. But I decided to give him my information and received an email. He recommended that I email him a reminder every month or two, which struck me as odd, given that queue technology is millennia old.

Doing some more research, it seemed that Rolex liked to make customers play games and jump through hoops to get them, which I suppose makes sense when you're the top name in the luxury [anything] space, since the exclusivity is part of the appeal of the brand, and there's no alternative that people can go to. But as a fairly non-/anti-social autist (not literally, but, you know), I kinda resented the notion that I had to socially butter up the salesman to be deserving of one of their products. So I'm not sure how much, if any, I'll follow up. In terms of investment potential, there doesn't seem to be any brand as low-risk as Rolex, but maybe I should just invest that money intelligently in the market instead. In the secondary market, like most fairly free markets, the appreciation is already priced in, so it's not really a great opportunity for making money. It'd also be nice to have a Rolex I could give to my future kid(s) to sell when they're middle-aged or senior citizens, since properly-taken-care-of vintage Rolexes seem to be valued highly, so giving them a pretty insurance policy that both I and they could get use out of in the meanwhile seems nice.

Anyway, now I'm in the hold phase of buy-and-hold and don't plan on buying any more expensive ones in the foreseeable future. We'll see if I end up with a bunch of worthless pretty bracelets or a nice profit soon enough, I suppose.

* Two brands popular on AliExpress (and present on Amazon) that tickled me were BiDen and Berny, for what should be obvious reasons. BiDen is cheap ($30-$100) and fairly mediocre in my experience, with a handful of automatic models that generally look pretty ugly, but I bought some just for the brand name. Berny (they claim to be named after Bern, Switzerland, where a Chinese watchmaker went to study watchmaking) is pricier ($90-$300) and has a large variety, including, like most Chinese manufacturers, lots of knockoffs of more expensive/famous brands. The quality of the ones I've bought seem good. I don't know if there's a Trump brand watch company, but I see a business opportunity here for some Chinese manufacturer.

I'm surprised to see this entire discussion of watches pass by without a single reference to smartwatches. I understand that you're significantly influenced by the idea of a watch as an investment piece... But i feel like it's are least worth mentioning that we do still have a class of watches designed primarily for functionality. My Garmin Fenix coming in handy literally every day. And while the design perhaps isn't up to rolex standards, a smartwatch is still its own type of social signal. Given how often I see them worn by high-earning men in IT leadership, I associate them with what we in the business call "technical leadership." I.E., the management-class people who's eyes don't glaze over when you start to explain some esoteric about how an SQL variant works.

The main downside of course is the depreciation... But I really don't think watches are the best anti-AI hedge in any case. Watches buy you social status and (maybe) utility. They're not going to outperform land with mineral rights or magic the gathering cards as items of exchange with the post AI nobility.

I've heard it said that the most popular watch in the world is the Apple Watch, and it seems believable. So perhaps, in the future, when people say "watch," they'll think of mini-tablets with a strap for the wrist, like how when people say "phone" now, we think of a mini-tablet with a cell connection, not something attached to the wall with a keypad or a rotary thingy. But if they're really that popular, I feel like it's hard for them to signal anything. I think Apple Watches are square or rectangular, versus many other Android smartwatches having round faces, so perhaps having a round-faced smartwatch will signal being a tech leader-type. Though, since they're not that expensive, it could just signal being a nerdy Android-type in general.

I personally don't like smartwatches, primarily because I personally don't get value out of having notifications available on my watch rather than my phone. And also because they require much more maintenance than dumbwatches - you need to charge them multiple times a week, if not every day. A trivial inconvenience, but an inconvenience nonetheless. That said, I did buy a cheap $10 smartwatch from AliExpress, because smartwatches offer 2 obvious huge advantages in terms of use and looks: since they sync with a phone, they always have very accurate time, and since their dials are actually fully functional LCD screens, they have near-infinite flexibility in terms of the look. Unfortunately, the cheap one I bought doesn't actually offer that near-infinite flexibility and only allows you to download from some set of dial designs they have, which number in the hundreds, but that's basically zero compared to the possibility space. I use it primarily for just setting the time of my other watches when I don't want to take my phone out of my pocket and open the clock app.

Phone brand smartwatches (apple, samsung) tell you whatever the phone brand tells you about that person in your cultural context. Usually they're a pretty straightforward status signal, but in my experience more for young women than for anyone else. (Apple cachet remains...)

As for garmins, they differentiate from other smartphones by having much longer lasting batteries (my fenix solar lasts 10 days under normal conditions and closer to 14 when I'm out and about a lot) and being notably more feature rich. No individual feature is killer, but in aggregate I end up using a whole lot of them. The sleep tracking + heartbeat sensing isn't unique among smartphones but having them has improved my self discipline. The heartbeat tracking in particular came in clutch when I had altitude sickness in colorado-- helping me notice my tachycardia and then validate that wim hof breathing actually helped me drop my heartrate from 100 to 80. The Maps+GPS+Compass works better than google maps on my phone for hiking and it saves on phone battery. (Plus it's fun to track walks/hikes) The weather+sunset/sunrise display is something I could do with a phone app but it's convenient to just have it on my wrist, especially when I'm driving. I definitely do appreciate not having to pull my phone out for notifications. There's an app for electric unicycles that can show my speed and battery readout on my watch, which I used fairly often before I got an upgraded wheel with a built-in display. Also I use the flashlight literally every day. Something about it being wrist-mounter makes it so much more more useful than a phone flashlight.

I almost feel bad for shilling them this much but my buddy works for them and got me mine for the employee discount so I feel like they've more than earned a few paragraphs of shilling.

I usually buy some with clean design from Temu/Aliexpress that cost 30$, have really clean design and have lots of their movement exposed. A good skeleton watch is mesmerizing.

I've got a couple of watches I really like that serve as unique conversation pieces, but I have neither the funds nor the inclination to be a serious collector, and will almost certainly never own a Rolex.

I have an Original Grain wooden watch made from old whiskey barrels, and a completely impractical watch from Mr. Jones Watches that I can barely read but looks absolutely gorgeous.

I have an Original Grain wooden watch made from old whiskey barrels

I had never heard of such a thing, and they're gorgeous. I have some friends who got me into enjoying whiskey as my hard liquor of choice in my 20s, and these would probably make some solid gifts for them.

It's my favorite because it's so unique, while not costing anything more than some random off-brand steel watch you'd pick up at Macys.

I have two 800$ ish Seiko’s I enjoy.

One gold and one silver.

I like wearing them - it makes me feel fancy.

I did get them for 52% off when I worked at Dillard’s during our 4X annual double discount days.

Would like a nice, black Movado as well one day.

A grand Seiko maybe for retirement.

It’ll look good with my long sleeve Hawaiian shirts.

I have two 800$ ish Seiko’s I enjoy.

This is a brand I've heard almost nothing but good things about, but I didn't really check them out much. As of tomorrow, I'm going to have two Seikos that I hope to enjoy, one of each of the Seiko 5 Pepsi collaboration watches. Most watch collectors are familiar with nicknames for various Rolex GMT/Submariner models, such as "Hulk" for an all-green one or "Batman" for a half-black, half-blue one, and one of the most popular is the "Pepsi," which is half-blue, half-red - and I have to respect that Seiko decided to take that and actually make it a real thing, at less than 7% of the price of a Rolex. I also happen to be one of the superior minority that prefers Pepsi over Coke, so I felt like I just had to have these in my collection. There's 7k of each produced in the limited run, and I'm hoping that maybe something crazy will happen with Pepsi in a few decades that would drive a complete collection of both of these watches up in value.

One of my relatives does precisely this. I’ll forward him this post and see what his thoughts are, because he collects them. Don’t know much about this kind of thing but I always liked the aesthetic feel and look of G-Shock watches. A friend of mine introduced me to the brand several years ago. I never really wore watches though out of appearance factors but for their practical use. G-Shock accomplishes something of a blend between the two but also as I’m getting older, it’s becoming difficult for me to determine what’s in vogue for the new coming of age.

I honestly think, for most people, IF they want to wear a watch and are willing to pay more than like $50, a Casio G-Shock is probably the best choice. I happen to just prefer the analog aesthetic, but digital is generally easier to read and use and set, has much more functionality like timers and alarms, and, of course, G-Shocks are just really, really durable. Ever since I started wearing a watch again as an adult, I've taken notice of how careful I tend to be when swinging my left arm while walking and such, which is extra mental work (though perhaps it's also prevented injuries to my left hand, so it's worth it in the long run?). If I'm wearing a watch at all during any physical activity (which I usually don't, but there are many occasions when such timing is useful), it's usually the G-Shock I got as a present.

G-Shock accomplishes something of a blend between the two but also as I’m getting older, it’s becoming difficult for me to determine what’s in vogue for the new coming of age.

I think, with watches, it honestly doesn't matter, because basically no one notices. It's one of those things that I feel like I need to complete the look when I'm dressing formally, but it's not like people pay much attention to that part anyway, and in everyday wear, it's even less. Though, who knows, perhaps as non-smart watches become more and more relics of the past, a G-Shock with its sometimes hulking design or distinctive screen setup will become a conversation starter.

I follow Nick Shabazz' sagely advice, so I own just a single watch. It's a Seiko SBPG001. Digital, retro-styled, with a stainless-steel body and a solar-powered battery. I should have bought some other one with a regular button battery, because the battery in it died and the authorized repair center in Moscow told me to fly to Tokyo if I wanted to replace it.

Seiko SBPG001

In terms of digital watches, I only have a bunch of cheap $5-$30 ones (as a recovering weeb, I enjoy the occasional $5 anime-branded Casio knockoff), along with a Casio G-Shock I got as a gift, I gotta say, that's one sexy-looking watch. I've been interested in getting a solar-powered digital watch, because I hate paying to replace batteries (though, it's not like automatics are any cheaper, in terms of regular maintenance - it's just that I can fool myself into ignoring the necessary maintenance with them), and I might look into that one.

I hope you have more sun wherever you live in, because it's very annoying to have your watch start dying on you every winter.

I like watches in that I have a couple of nice watches I wear if I'm dressing up. Both of them were gifts from my wife: one is a quartz Fossil she gave me for our first anniversary, the other is a mechanical Tissot she got me for my birthday one year. I generally use the Tissot if I wear a watch, as it's both more comfortable and I enjoy the craftsmanship and engineering which goes into a mechanical watch. I also have a pocket watch I like, though that obviously doesn't get as much use as a wristwatch.

I definitely don't collect watches, though. The three I have are more than enough for me. And I would never in a hundred years get a Rolex. I'm not interested in paying obscene prices to play silly status symbol games. Heck I wouldn't have even bought the Tissot that I have - at $800 it is way more than I would spend on a watch, and I made my wife promise to skip giving me Christmas presents that year when I found out how much it cost. Needless to say a Rolex or other luxury watch brand isn't something I would ever consider buying.

Tissot was actually the first "nice" watch I bought, on a whim at an airport jewelry shop while waiting for a flight. After taking my jaw off the floor at the watch prices, I zeroed in on the cheapest one and got a $200 quartz Dream Classic with Roman numerals (for which I'm a sucker) with a large 42mm dial, for the easy readability. I knew practically nothing about watches and mechanical vs automatic and whatnot back then, but I learned later that Tissot had a really good reputation as a Swiss brand for the sub-$1k market (that this is considered a "cheap niche" rather than "premium" is just... perhaps SNAFU is the right term). I bought another Tissot, a Le Locle (also with Roman numerals), at about $500 some time later, and I do like both of them. Very light and slim, and discreet.

As someone who rides a bus and subway most workdays of the week, I've certainly realized that I'm never going to regularly wear a real luxury watch or even "premium" watch, which is one reason among many that I've gravitated towards cheap Chinese knockoffs. Crime in my commute is pretty much not an issue, but the thought of having multiple $thousands taken off of me in a near-untraceable way triggers my paranoia quite a bit.

Everything I know about watches (aka practically nothing) I learned from Paul Graham's recent post on the subject.

It's kind of funny (and interesting) how Rolex has developed over the years, from a solid, reliable, hard-working brand associated with the military into a high-end bougie peice of artwork sold through high-pressure tactics.

Talking with my boss one day(ex-Naxy), he remarked that he had a watch he bought way back when that he can't wear simply due to insurance if he got it damanged/lost and wanted it replaced, and I immeadiately pegged it as a old Submariner.

Listening to some guys talk has turned me off Rolex before I could get any serious interest in it. If I was going for a high-price watch as a daily driver(assuming I had the money to spend), I'd probably be aiming for an Omega or Bulova(ie, the other moonwatch). Bulova actually put out a version of the watch where the face was a carved slice of meteor - I had to seriously hold myself back from doing something useless and stupid despite being really flipping cool.

Granted, I do like space. My one 'white whale' for a watch is Omega Speedmaster's 'Moon to Mars' - yeah, I'm not getting ahold of that anytime soon unless I get stupidly lucky.

If you want another watch rabbit hole to go down, look into Vostok - it's basically a USSR/Russian brand watch that has so many variations in terms of looks and facing it's hilariously awesome. Plus, a number of them are wind-up, which I like the appeal of.

Listening to some guys talk has turned me off Rolex before I could get any serious interest in it. If I was going for a high-price watch as a daily driver(assuming I had the money to spend), I'd probably be aiming for an Omega or Bulova(ie, the other moonwatch).

Going to a Rolex boutique has certainly turned me off them. But it's probably just sour grapes for me not being high-enough status that Rolex doesn't just bring out the secret stash from the back for me. My money is just as good as fake Johnny Depp's, damnit! After that experience at Rolex, I've certainly started considering an Omega Speedmaster, but I haven't done enough research into them yet, as they seem to have a bunch of different models, and I don't know which ones have the proper lunar landing connections to be good for value speculation.

I mean, if your aim is to go for originals(in terms of Omegas), you're going to be paying a steep price. I suppose one could argue that they'd have good valuation, but I've never really sketched out how the market price has changed over time. I was going to point toward an article about the history of early Omegas and their space-race pedigree, but apparently it's been taken offline. Go figure. [Edit] Nevermind, I found a good replacement article with plenty of pictures. Maybe I'm easy to please, but I have to admit, I really do like the look of Speedmasters. Gorgeous things.

Mind, if you're honestly aiming to have a 'proper' Rolex, in terms of them built before it became an over-priced brand, you could always go to Japan. Japan is apparently know for it's used-Rolex market due to Japan Reasons. Mind, in this case 'used' doesn't exactly mean 'cheap', but...

I'm pretty sure I saw Trump do his own Trump-brand watches, which look, you know, how you would expect. The more reputable Chinese watch brand names in the single-digit-hundreds range generally have quite high quality like you've discovered. Right now for big-name Western brands, subjectively, you get what you pay for up to about 3-5k MSRP and after that you're paying for soft factors (such as willingness to put up with Rolex bullshit)

@07mk Trump himself wears a Patek Philippe Golden Ellipse, which is a rather surprisingly understated watch for Trump.

I'm pretty sure I saw Trump do his own Trump-brand watches, which look, you know, how you would expect.

Hm, you're right. Its FAQ explains that they're actually sold by a company called TheBestWatchesOnEarth LLC, which I'm absolutely shocked is not an actual Trump company, and which licenses the Trump name and brand and everything. The first 3 types of watches listed for Men's are: Fighter, Warrior, and Mugshot Suit. As always, Trump proves un-parody-able.

The more reputable Chinese watch brand names in the single-digit-hundreds range generally have quite high quality like you've discovered.

I haven't had any of them long enough to say, but that's certainly been my experience so far, from a few I've bought in the $70-$300 range from Chinese brands Tandorio, Berny, Addiesdive, and San Martin. San Martin is the most expensive of those, and I just had to get one of their watches which featured Chinese characters for the numbers, which I haven't been able to find in any other brand, not even other Chinese brands. I bought a few from Tandorio with customized engravings (and one with customized dial) since even with the customization they came out to the $120-$250 range, and I just hope they're made well enough to last long enough that I'm capable of feeling nostalgia for the reasons for the customizations. I'll probably turn to Tandorio for gifts every once in a while for my male relatives/friends.

Don't know much about watches, but based on my careful study of /r/watchescirclejerk, try giving the AD a charcuterie board and a night with your wife if you want to get the call earlier. If you want the privilege to exchange funds for goods you need to go the extra mile.

It'd also be nice to have a Rolex I could give to my future kid(s) to sell when they're middle-aged or senior citizens, since properly-taken-care-of vintage Rolexes seem to be valued highly, so giving them a pretty insurance policy that both I and they could get use out of in the meanwhile seems nice.

I don't think your kids would much care for a watch.

If I'm fortunate enough to survive as a POW or at least have a close friend of mine survive as a POW instead of being turned into a goop of chemical bonds for fuelling AI killbots in the coming robot wars, I certainly don't plan on sticking anything up my ass just to keep it. Then again, if I demand my wife bite the bullet (or rather not bite anything, unless the AD's into that) to help secure such an artifact for our child, perhaps I should be willing to at least carry a hunk of metal in my ass for a few years. I don't expect to have any friends nearly as cool as Christopher Walken, though.

Now that the dust has settled, can we all agree that the Nintendo Wii-mote accelerometer is the 21st Century’s equivalent to the Minié ball?

Do any popular games other than the Splatoon series and Super Mario Odyssey use that fancy gyroscopic-aiming stuff? I thought it was mostly dead.

No. Not many games used it in 2016 either. The production lines needed something to do, so all those unused gyroscopes were sold to drone companies like DJI for cheap, causing a huge leap in quad-copter drone development, changing the face of warfare as we know it.

FPS often offer gyro aiming on controllers that have a gyro, it allows quick precision adjustments for aiming, helping bridge the gap between controllers and kb+m players. The idea is that you make fast turns with the thumbstick and small adjustments in aim at the same time with the gyro.

The Metroid remasters and Prime 4 do, but I hesitate to call those popular, sadly.

That being said, though, the obvious answer is certain smartphone games, Pokemon Go in particular. VR headsets use them as well.

A New Testament That Actually Feels Like an Anthology:

Most of these translations are available on BibleHub, except Phillips, and BibleGateway, except Weymouth. The REB is available on neither.

At some point it makes more sense to just learn Greek and read the original text.

I mean, Hart already did that.

The New Testament: A Translation by the Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart, first published in 2017.

Hart explicitly stated that his goal was to provide a "pitilessly literal translation" that preserves the distinct linguistic talents—or lack thereof—of each individual writer, rather than smoothing them out into an artificial, uniform majesty.

I’m planning on grabbing a copy soon.

that preserves the distinct linguistic talents—or lack thereof—of each individual writer

Kek, which apostle is he throwing shade at?

Probably Mark. His Greek is noticeably unpolished, even for Koine (“common” Greek, as opposed to the more refined literary forms of Attic Greek).

Which, ironically, makes his the most likely to have been genuinely attributed to a scribe writing out the memories of a Galilean fisherman.

I personally take the traditional attributions at face value. Between AD 30 and the destruction of the Temple, the movement (and the Jerusalem church in particular) swelled to such size that good scribes and decent writers would have been readily available to help the Apostles write out their recollections of the Master’s teachings, and their letters to other cities’ bodies of believers.

As for who wrote Hebrews, since we don’t know which human wrote it, we can call it the book of the Bible in which the authorial guidance of the Holy Spirit is most transparent.

Learning Latin was bad enough. Please don't make me go through another classical language.

I have one, and lexicons that help me parse my way through reading it, but I’ve always been hopeless when it came to learning other languages. I’ve heard that reading the Epistle to the Hebrews (originally written in Koine) is some of the best Greek ever written of that time period and is beautiful for those who understand it. The closer you can go to the Greek makes it evident why scholars reject the traditional ascriptions to the authorship of the New Testament. The earliest Christian sect wasn’t illiterate, or uneducated or some random fishermen. The movement was either originated or taken over by educated elites who clearly went through the best schools of the Roman Empire and learned how to compose elegant works of literature. They clearly understand Greek very well (and also the contemporary rhetoric very well) and were very well trained in it.

I'm only vaguely familiar with the various English Bible translations. What was the thought process around your curation choices? Just trying to show a diversity of perspectives? Or do you have specific reasons for each translation of each book?

Yes, my process was thoughtful and my choices are specific. Translation teams tend to homogenize their output across authors, not deliberately but by unconscious bias. My goal was to make it truly feel like an anthology written by different authors with different thought processes.

The 1978-2011 NIV is a Bible for everyone, with the most vulgar (low grade level) contemporary plain English. This matches the low phrasing of Mark, widely believed to have been Peter’s scribe. Thus, the Gospel of Mark and Peter’s letters.

JB Phillips translated the New Testament in the 1950’s with an eye for digestibility and teasing out a sense of meaning and spirituality. Thus, the Gospel, Revelation, and letters of John, the Apostle of light and love.

The 1990s’ ESV is a retranslation of the KJV, ASV, and RSV, consistent and clear in translated word choices, and suitable for Bible study and doctrine. It’s the one I’ve spent the longest time reading, 18 years of weekly Bible study. Doctor Luke, Paul’s Greek scribe, compiled the accounts and anecdotes in Luke and Acts as two volumes of faithful and accurate testimony for Paul’s trial in Rome.

The 1903 Weymouth translation is an attempt by a master translator to write as if the authors natively thought and spoke in British English, like Dickens or Doyle. “Translated from the original Greek text into modern English, Weymouth's goal was to produce a Bible version without theological or ecclesiastical bias.” - Google. Lately I’ve found unique phrasing in Weymouth’s Paul’s letters that makes them a good match for Paul’s lawyerly writing.

The 1999 HCSB New Testament has a deliberate focus on adding a Hebraic flavor to the New Testament; for example, by using Messiah instead of Christ in many places. It also has higher phrasing than the ESV with a similar translation philosophy. I find it a delight to read, my current favored translation, and a match for the Hebraic (Jewish) focus of both Matthew and Hebrews.

James and Jude, believed to have been the sons of Joseph, and thus Jesus’ half brothers, are given two translations favored by groups of denominations. “While the NASB is favored by independent conservative evangelicals, the REB was a massive collaborative effort sponsored by virtually all major mainline Protestant and Catholic bodies in the UK and Ireland.” - Google

Fascinating summary, thank you for elaborating. I like how you're trying to recreate the different biblical authors distinctive voices. It never even occurred to me as a goal, but it's certainly a worthy one, and actually serves as a nice homage to the Bible's choice to split the life of Jesus into four distinct accounts rather than attempt to provide a single, unitary narrative.

What are some unusual items you've got on your bucket list?

Someday, I will finally finish my bootleg HTML/EPUB version of For Want of a Nail (currently available for purchase only as a used physical book).

Footjob from every nationality.

Be 50% cyborg.

From the waist down?

Hiking 10k miles. Only another 7k to go...

A mildly-interesting two-story house design (including a version with cl*sets, plus one-story parent designs for comparison purposes): In theory (to satisfy code requirements), the living room is on floor 1 and the dining room is on floor 2. But, in practice, the room on floor 1 serves both living and dining purposes, and the room on floor 2 is just an extra living room.

Whether it makes sense hinges on how the first-floor room is reconfigured between living and dining uses. Obviously, folding tables and folding chairs are perfect for dining use. For living use, folding couches apparently are available for purchase, though I'm not sure how compactly they actually fold up. Alternatively, perhaps the folding chairs and folding couches can be replaced with comfy, headrest-equipped office chairs that can serve for both living and dining.

You censor "closet" after this comment?

You know, I really will never truly understand you.

Censoring words that are totally innocuous is a very common online joke. On /r/mapporncirclejerk, a few months ago it was extremely popular for people to say "Fr*nce", and jokingly complain in the comments that anyone who failed to do so was using coarse language in the presence of children. That trend has died out at the moment, but see also this humorous post where the use of "Gr*ece", "K*rdistan", and "Arm*nia" was hardly questioned.

Why do I enjoy calling myself a nigger without censorship on this website (past instances: 1 2 3)? I don't know. I guess I'm just being edgy for no good reason.

I'm grateful for the explanation, but I must note that you've explained the thing that least needs explaining. It's all good. You clearly know more about floor planning or the lived experience of Blackness than I can ever hope to.

cl*sets

May I enquire as to why you censored the term "closets", what is the new secret most awful problematic usage of this commonplace word? And if it is so terrible a word that we must return to the 18th century habit of writing, why not replace it with "walk-in wardrobe" or some other euphemism?

I'd also say that having the kitchen and dining room on separate floors is a bad idea, unless you're going to incorporate a dumb waiter or the likes. Just take five minutes to imagine having to carry the Sunday roast upstairs. Combination living/dining room is a better idea. Or make the kitchen bigger and turn that into a combination kitchen/dining area.

May I enquire as to why you censored the term "closets"?

I personally dislike closets (which, being immovable, needlessly constrain the rearrangement of furniture) and much prefer shelving units and wardrobes. Past discussion: 1 2

I'd also say that having the kitchen and dining room on separate floors is a bad idea.

Read what I wrote again. For code-compliance purposes, the living room is on the first floor and the dining room is on the second floor—but, in everyday life, the room labeled "living room" serves double duty as either a living room or a dining room depending on circumstances, and the room labeled "dining room" serves as a living room for the people occupying the upstairs bedrooms.

I personally dislike closets (which, being immovable, needlessly constrain the rearrangement of furniture) and much prefer shelving units and wardrobes.

There’s got to be a clinical term to describe this. Lol. I don’t have a great relationship with them either. Closets always dredge up the memories of where all my mother stored my toys when I was grounded and not allowed to play. On one occasion I went and grabbed my father’s toolbox and step ladder and removed the hinges off the closet door and my mother found me inside, playing with my toys. Yeah, I was whooped pretty hard, and I was a very young child.

There’s got to be a clinical term to describe this.

Autism. I have a case study:

https://www.themotte.org/post/3755/friday-fun-thread-for-may-15/443629?context=8#context

<- You’re talking to a case study right here, :/.

Yeah buddy, I know. The diagnosis was never in dispute. Luckily (?) you aren't as autistic as TK. He's hella autistic. He needs his own entry in the DSM-6.

Not that it takes a particularly good psychiatrist to figure that out. If I wanted to reliably find autistic nerds on the internet, I'd start here (or on LessWrong). I'm a nerd with ADHD instead, so I suppose I can pass/mask, or at least meet you guys half way.

He's hella autistic. He needs his own entry in the DSM-6.

Level 6, huh? Damn. He’s way more advanced than me then. But I highly doubt LW was ever more autistic than StarCraft Battle.net channels back in the day.

I personally dislike closets

Ah, so you're French. Truely, this explains alot.

(I'm joking. This explains nothing, nor are you actually French. Unless you are, in which case it explains everything.)

I can understand the dislike, personally. Though it might be due to having to deal with some very awkwardly designed closets that I've forcibly redesigned into something approximating a walk-in wardrobe.

which, being immovable, needlessly constrain the rearrangement of furniture

And yet you design floor plans that only allow for one reasonable arrangement of furniture, if that

I don't know what you mean by that. My bathrooms and laundry/utility rooms are cramped enough that the accusation may be accurate there. But my kitchens, living rooms, and dining rooms are ample. And I believe that my bedrooms permit a few different configurations even at maximum occupancy—and how often are bedrooms at maximum occupancy anyway? (For example, the design that I am having built will have nominal occupancy of five but actual occupancy of just two.)

Have you considered sliding into the wall doors for the bedrooms access into their respective bathrooms? That way, it avoids the risk of two people trying to enter the bathroom simultaneously from different doors and slamming into each other. Most likely when there are guests invited who are not familiar with the layout.

Edit: The laundry room and front door are a greater risk of collision, actually.

In this design, it is not intended that a bathroom will ever have both doors unlocked at the same time. Rather:

  • 99 percent of the time, each bathroom will be in "private mode", with the door to the living/dining room locked from the bathroom side.

  • On the rare occasion that a guest is present, at least one bathroom will be in "guest mode", with the door to the bedroom locked from both sides.

Also, it's my understanding that sliding doors are very bad at blocking sounds and odors, so using them on bathrooms is ill-advised.

Regarding the laundry/utility-room door, I could have used a sliding door there, but I saw no reason to. IMO, having eight swinging doors is simpler than having seven swinging doors and one sliding door.

I understand your point on bathroom sliding doors, indeed they block sound poorly. But maybe if you have not started constructing your home yet you can widen the entire house just for the laundry door. If you and your roommate or wife live in the unit together, eventually someone will be exiting the laundry room at the same time someone is entering the home. Or someone will forget something in the house and step in quickly to retrieve it (keys, wallet, credit card, etc) and not communicate the entry as normal to the other person, knocking them senseless in a rush.

But maybe if you have not started constructing your home yet you can widen the entire house just for the laundry door.

(1) Construction already is underway.

(2) The house already takes up the entire buildable width of the lot (34′2″ vs. 35′).

If you and your roommate live in the unit together, eventually someone will be exiting the laundry room at the same time someone is entering the home. Or someone will forget something in the house and step in quickly to retrieve it (keys, wallet, credit card, etc.) and not communicate the entry as normal to the other person, knocking him senseless in a rush.

I do not assign much probability to this hypothetical event. If you disagree, you can join the betting pool with @orthoxerox. (Come on! Are you people in the habit of opening opaque doors with all your strength? I certainly am not. People can be standing behind doors unbeknownst to you even if those doors don't swing into other doors.)

More comments

I'm talking about realistic configurations, not theoretical ones where you use office furniture in the living room and people always keep doors closed.

I normally do not use office furniture in the living room in my designs. I just had that idea this week, and the designs at the top of this thread are the only ones that use such rigmarole.

If you don't keep your doors closed when you're not using them, I don't know what to tell you.

One floor plan that I can't get right is a five-bay colonial with a mudroom-style entrance. Traditional foyers are designed for people who have no coats or wet boots or kids that track dirt everywhere.

I am looking at something like 13.2x8 or 12.8x8.4m (so that the footprint of the house is around 100m2). But no matter how I try, I can't design a staircase that feels natural without interrupting the regularity of the facade.

Having incorporated the rest of your comments to get an idea of what you are looking for, I think I may have a solution for you. A few preliminary items:

  1. I'm assuming that when you say "Colonial" you are referring to what is known as "Colonial Revival", which is a 20th century update of the Georgian and Federal styles that were popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Basically, I'm assuming you aren't referring to French Colonial, or Spanish Colonial, or Dutch Colonial, or any of the other "Colonial" styles which may exist in North America.
  2. As a 20th century American style, this type of house would have no need for a mudroom per se. Most of these were built in auto-centric suburbs beginning in the 1920s, meaning the front door would not be used much. Early examples of this style were mostly built in more upscale neighborhoods, and once it became more common after World War II most people would have had a car. Prewar suburbs with these houses would have likely had detached garages behind the house, and later examples would have had attached garages. In Pittsburgh, the terrain is hilly and the garage is usually integral and opens into the basement. What I'm getting at is that the home's occupant's wouldn't normally use the front door, so a mudroom would be built in the back, off the garage, or it would have an unfinished basement to use for that purpose.
  3. Despite the ever-ballooning American house size, the dimensions you've proposed aren't modest. I don't use foreign units without conversion so you'll have to bear with me here, but 100 sq. meters is about 1076 sq. feet. Since this is a two-story house, doubling that gets you to 2152 sq. ft., which is plenty big.

To give an example to tie it all together, this is a 5-bay Colonial Revival home in a suburb of Pittsburgh. It was built in 1968 by Bryan, who is a reputable local builder that mostly focuses on custom homes these days but was doing tract houses in the 1960s and 1970s (not to be confused with Ryan Homes, a national developer of tract houses that's been building junk since at least the 1970s). The total area is 1890 sq. ft., though the footprint is only 875 as the second story slightly overhangs on both sides. It has 4 bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths. You will notice that the driveway goes down the hill behind the house and the garage is integrated into the basement. Ignore the assymetrical front layout. Here's a more upscale example from 1910. While it precedes the era of widespread automobile ownership, at 6900 square feet, it owner would have probably had a car, or at least a horse. [Note how the driveway leads to a carriage house in the rear [https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4513598,-79.9114955,3a,24.5y,311.56h,95.08t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1s_vxsZmkSMf0FSWoXMHGrIw!2e0!5s20220901T000000!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-5.0819782887585205%26panoid%3D_vxsZmkSMf0FSWoXMHGrIw%26yaw%3D311.55661009264486!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDUyMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D]. The owner would not have entered through the front door.

I initially intended to tell you that your problem was hopeless if you wished to remain architecturally correct, so I consulted The Bible, namely Virginia Savage McAlester's indispensible A Field Guide to American Houses and consulted the sections on Colonial Revival, Georgian, and Federal houses. What I discovered was that, contrary to my mental image of a colonial house, there is a rare variation with a centered gable. While these gables are usually small, and may not protrude from the central mass at all, it would be possible to bump this out and create a large enough area for a mud room. Unfortunately, since, per the book, this occurs in fewer than 5% of Colonial Revival houses and 10% of Georgian and Federal houses, it's hard to find pictures, and bump-outs of sufficient size are less common still. But I don't see why it couldn't be done. This House only bumps out slightly, but you could extend this by 5 feet or so and get a small mud room out of it. Some people build small mudrooms on their houses and they always look tacked-on, but with a central gable running all the way up it would be an integral part of the house, and from there you could just use a standard floor plan.

Beyond this, I don't see why there would be a problem with the stairs. Every house like this I've been in (and I can almost guarantee the layout of the first example) has the stairwell in the center of the house. Basically you'd walk in and there would be an entryway with a foyer leading down the center of the house to the kitchen in the back, with the stairwell running parallel on whichever side you want. To the right there's a family room, and to the left a living room and dining room. You can sacrifice some family room space for a half bath or hide one under the stairs. These houses almost always have four bedrooms.

  1. Staircase goes at the back; perpendicular to the long axis of the house and either facing the entry or above the basement stairs. (which would then be facing the entry, probably behind a door)

  2. The traditional mudroom is behind the backdoor (which is probably on the side of a colonial); front doors are for guests, and you should be taking their coats for them and laying them on the bed in the spare room! However, you could build something like #2 or #4 here in which the exterior wall of the house (including the front door) is bumped out about 3 feet in some part of the porch area, the roof of which extends something like a further 3 three feet). This creates space for hangers inside the entry and funnels people into the living area; there's a nice spot for a closet if you have winter coats. (or just want to piss @ToaKraka off)

Like this:

                          (stairs are up here somewhere)
                                   
                                  |        __
               Optional wall -->  |       |  |  (some other room here)
       (nice place for hooks tho) |       |  |<--closet
                      ___________ |       |__|___________
                          |       |          |       |
                          |       |__......__|       |
                          |                          |
                          |__________________________|

Fuck guests, if I am using the house every day, I want it to be tailored to my needs.

One floor plan that I can't get right is a five-bay colonial with a mudroom-style entrance. I am looking at something like 13.2 m × 8 m or 12.8 m × 8.4 m (so that the footprint of the house is around 100 m2).

Extremely lazy spitball sketch (though possibly a bit too big)

But, no matter how I try, I can't design a staircase that feels natural without interrupting the regularity of the façade.

I don't get it. What does the stairway have to do with the façade?

Traditional foyers are designed for people who have no coats or wet boots or kids that track dirt everywhere.

Just add a closet under the stairway, and/or a wardrobe next to the wall.

How do you get into the kitchen, through the master suite?

I don't get it. What does the stairway have to do with the façade?

In your plan, nothing. But if the stairway touches the external wall, it has to fit between the window openings.

But if the stairway touches the external wall, it has to fit between the window openings.

You could have a window in the stairwell, offset vertically if necessary to have it a reasonable height off the floor.

offset vertically

And this is precisely what I try to avoid.

Have you tried making the house deeper than eight meters? I'd be surprised if there were any actual colonial houses of such modest dimensions.

I also find it amusing that the colonial house plan is now colonizing Rus'.

It's colonizing me personally, no one's building them here. It's all "Mikea" clones if it has one floor and "Wright style" if it has two (and I hope you can wrap some copper wire around ol' Frank's body for some free electricity, because it's always a gloomy brick-clad cube with vertical accents).

And I can't make the house too deep, or it will be too big. I have a great 10.4x10.8 floor plan, and I want to see if I can squish it into a more oblong rectangle.

As an architecture fan I'd be interested if you could find any pictures of what you're describing, and if you're really generous letting me feel free to use those terms if I find them apt. Especially since I'm guessing the "Wright Style" has only the most superficial resemblance to anything actually designed by Wright.

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How do you get into the kitchen? Through the master suite?

The line between the dining room and the kitchen does not represent a wall.

And that's exactly what I've been trying to avoid: pathways that lead through the foyer. I want it to be semi-contained: there's the front door, maybe the door to the utility room, the door that leads to the rest of the house. No through indoor traffic.

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