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PaperclipPerfector  9hr ago (text post)   343 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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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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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'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)

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 them 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?

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'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

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

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

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.)

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.

  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
                      ___________ |       |__|___________
                          |       |          |       |
                          |       |__......__|       |
                          |                          |
                          |__________________________|

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.

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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