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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   2398 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 29, 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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What's the deal with people who use their middle finger to point at things? Like if they're trying to show you a piece of paper and point to something specific on it. This is rare, but it has always struck me as an extraordinarily obtuse habit.

I think this is a Euro thing.

It's very difficult for me to fully straighten my index finger on one hand due to multiple fractures over the course of my life, along with arthritis. The middle finger is easier.

Do you say anything about it, or do you just go right ahead and 'show them the middle finger'?

I try to cross my middle finger over my index finger so it isn't as noticeable.

Good man.

It’s longer so it’s easier to close the distance I suppose. I find it strange too though. I’ve come to realize as of late that it’s probably not a good idea to take a nap in a public setting when there’s still a good chance your hands will be down your pants when you wake up and everyone else can see you. (This didn’t happen to me, but to someone who was sitting across from me.)

My fiancée just asked me what's the distaff counterpart to the term "manchild".

I told her that there isn't one, and that this lexical gap Says A Lot About Our Society.

Joking aside, any proposed neologisms to fill this gap? "Womanchild" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

“Airhead?” “Bimbo?”

Interesting. "Airhead" denotes a woman who's not very intelligent. "Bimbo" denotes a woman who's not very intelligent in addition to being physically attractive.

I'm not sure if either of these is quite the same as "manchild": I think the thing that makes "manchild" insulting is the accusation of immaturity, not idiocy. Some immature men can be intelligent, at least in a particular narrow domain.

"Spinster". However current western society expects, for better or for worse, almost nothing from women (one could argue, in a "the purpose of a system is what it does” sense, that it exists primarily for the whims of women) so the term is outdated.

It’s just the classic free rider problem in action. Too many of the current generation (and a substantially large percentage of my own quite sadly) want the benefits of civilization but refuse to cooperate with the group to make it possible. All one has to do is look at divorce rates alone to see that too many of them can’t be depended on to act loyally to their husbands (I’ve seen it repeatedly); all of whom are second rate when compared to their flights of fancy or for them to willingly accept the weight of vows they make on their day of marriage. It’s why so many cultures developed such intense suppressive measures on their behavior, because fleeting, short-term self-interest was always omnipresent and always rotting away the institutions needed to uphold functioning society.

If women fail to cooperate then men fail to participate and next thing you know we’re all thrown out of Eden.

Hmm. I think "manchild" refers to men who are immature, whereas to me "spinster" denotes a woman who failed to land a man. I think the closest equivalent in modern slang is "femcel".

Different connotation. A femcel is involuntarily celibate woman, but a manchild is a man who has failed to mature. A man child is not necessarily an incel. Ineed it's most often women in a relationship with a man who try to neg him into taking more of a responsibility in the relationship by calling him a manchild.

I agree, that's why I was saying I don't think "spinster" is the female equivalent to "manchild".

I’ve met high status and accomplished women who forego a relationship and family life due to their professional commitments or sense of a greater vision for something they’re passionate about. I don’t see that as a problem at all. It’s the ones who think they ‘can’ [and subsequently fail] to accomplish both that often become spinsters. These lifestyles are fine insofar as the costs get born by the women who make them. Where it becomes unacceptable is when the costs are paid (and generally wasted) by society via tax money.

In the past, men were responsible for providing for their wife and children (as they should be). They produce the surplus to support them and in return the woman provides household services and children for their husbands. Today that dynamic has now become a parasitic one, because women depend on the coercive power of the government to strong arm and extract wealth from men while providing them with nothing in return (child support and alimony testify to these examples); and it’s all to uphold a system of false “equality” that’s built entirely off massive wealth transfers. One result of this incidentally has meant that working age men have substantially less wealth to afford forming families of their own.

Well in my mind society deemed women mature when they fulfilled their gender tole which was mostly wife, mother, etc.

Also why spinster lacks a male equivalent

Also why spinster lacks a male equivalent

It's "(confirmed) bachelor."

I thought that was traditionally used as a euphemism for a gay man.

There are two definitions of “manchild.” One is a man who doesn’t uphold adult responsibilities, sarker’s definition. The other is a man whose hobbies are considered childish or underdeveloped. I guess this is more the counterpart of Quirk Chungus or 5434a’s Disney adult.

The two are frequently conflated, sometimes by women as a justification for their ick at male hobbies like gaming or science fiction or LEGO, and sometimes by men as a dominance play against other men they consider beneath them because they indulge in said icky hobbies. Sometimes women will just use “manchild” to refer to a man who is emotionally underdeveloped, in whatever way she thinks he is, like in the Sabrina Carpenter song.

All words with emotional valence eventually just become synonyms of “good” or “bad.” Manchild is one of them. We have plenty of female equivalents — “basic bitch” is one women like for the hobby sense, “foid” is closer to the Sabrina Carpenter usage as deployed by men. For the other equivalents used by men, read the motte.

Not as catchy and not explicitly gendered but when I hear "Disney adult" I think of women.

My fiancée just asked me what's the distaff counterpart to the term "manchild".

“Woman.”

I told her that there isn't one, and that this lexical gap Says A Lot About Our Society.

Just like how “strong, independent woman” is a buzzphrase but “strong, independent man” is not.

My good man, I'd have expected nothing less from you.

Isn't Quirk Chungus the counterpart to Manchild?

A manchild is a man who can't handle adult responsibilities, but a quirk chungus is just a woman with an annoying personality.

Depends on what you mean by "adult responsibilities", if it's just being able to support and take care of yourself then you're wrong. Here's a fellow poster calling himself manchild, and detailing what he means by that.

If by "adult responsibilities" you mean starting and supporting a family, or devoting yourself to some serious pursuit, then Quirk Chungus pretty analogous.

I didn't think that was a gendered term.

I don't think I've ever seen it used to refer to a man, and it's the literal counterpart to the "Man Child" in the original comic that popularized the phrase (which has left the original context specified in the comic - boring-ass Millennial slice-of-life webcomics).

I looked up the second panel shown in your link. Is this supposed to be some kind of a cuckold thing? She's got an arm around her but Man Child is sitting on the couch watching.

Yes, but note that that second image is not part of the original comic.

"Girlfailure", but it's more affectionate than disdainful, because apparently we don't in fact hold women to female-specific standards of maturity.

"I'm so random" maybe.

What's your stance on laptop stickers? It seems to me people either love laptop stickers and plaster their whole laptop lid with them, or they hate the idea of defacing their pristine machine with random cruft. I wonder if mottizens skew one way or the other.

I like stickers but find that laptop stickers are kind of cringe. My compromise is to stick them under my keyboard. Does this make me a pussy? Perhaps. Perhaps.

Here's the secret. The point of laptop stickers is to make it easy to find your MacBook on a table full of MacBooks.

I kind of like pristine laptops but when everyone on the team has the same model things can get confusing.

I'll generally throw one (1) small and nonthreatening sticker on the corner of a my laptops, just because there's so many people in my field running around with ThinkPad T480s that there's a serious concern I could unintentionally trade devices without a clear marker. Which could be Really Bad in more ways than the expected ones.

I'm... hesitant, beyond that. There's a lot of coastal people who do it as an obvious in-group signaling spiel, and typically a pretty incoherent one. That's not available to me, and I'd not take it even if it were, and not just for the 'I still hear people in Red States joking about lighting Teslas on fire' reasons.

But it also just looks bad. You could imagine a bunch of layered stickers that have a nice appearance in the same way that graffiti tags or murals can actually look good because they're so heavily layered. Nobody seems to actually do it like that, though. To be fair, sticker alignment is an absolute nightmare. To be less fair, it's often ugly in ways like 'text gets cut off' or 'stick has a crease', which is a lot easier to avoid.

Like tattoos. I’m not implacably opposed to them on principle but there are very few stickers that look better than no stickers.

I'm watching Severance with my wife currently (no spoilers please). The first few episodes are a great critique of the modern workplace and how unnatural its social patterns are. How I don't mix my work friends with my personal friends, how I drop what I'm doing at 5:00 and resume my personal life, then go back in and resume my work where I left off as if not a moment has passed. How I try my best not to talk about my work outside of it because I don't want my 9-to-5 to "define me." How sometimes someone I've been working with for years will suddenly announce his departure, and I'll never see him again, and that's that. How it doesn't really bother me that much when it happens. There are a lot of parallels to my modern corporate desk job that have me reconsidering how healthy my idea of "work life balance" is. It's uncanny. What I thought was healthy compartmentalizing, when exaggerated to the extent it is in the show, suddenly seems completely farcical. Maybe I just need to find another line of work.

But the pacing of the show...holy cliffhangers dude. It's almost unbearable at this point. We're several episodes in, and by now it's a familiar pattern of [45 minutes of nothing happening] then [crazy cliffhanger or reveal at the very end]. Then the next episode starts with [immediate aftermath of cliffhanger] or [business as usual, but now you know the revealed information] and then 45 more minutes of very slow burning buildup just to be hit with another cliffhanger.

Maybe I've revealed myself as a midwit by admitting that this show makes me think or manages to surprise me. But here it is.

It's a fantastic show. Without spoiling anything in particular, you have to be patient with it at least until the last episode of S1. I understand how the pacing would come off as slow at this stage, but all of the setup pays off hugely with one of my favourite season finales put to screen.

S2 is more of a mixed bag in my opinion with some borderline nonsensical plot points towards the second half of the season, but still manages to pull itself together in a satisfying way and is very worth your time.

Apparently The Protomen released Act III: This City Made Us earlier this year and I wasn't aware. Upon listening to the album, my first reaction is that it's good, but I'm not sure that it rises to the heights of Act II.

In case anyone isn't familiar (why would you be) The Protomen are a band whose main works are inspired by Megaman, the beloved video game franchise. In their main albums, The Protomen, Act II: The Father of Death, and Act III: This City Made Us collectively tell the tale of the dystopian city and the fight to end the reign of the evil Dr. Wiley. However, instead of the bright colors and fun atmosphere of the Megaman games, the albums are fairly dark, with fairly downer endings.

While the band was fresh, with a new sound and premise in 2005, in 2026, the entire concept is almost quaint. Another dark remake of a previously fun and lighthearted children's videogame. While the premise is no longer as fresh as it was in the aughts, the band is still worth a listen to. Act I leaned into its concept much more, with a deliberate lo-fi sound representing the decrepit state of the city (this is the post-hoc justification for why the first album sounds so horrible compared to Acts II and III). Act II is a complete change of pace, going from a western-inspired sound to an 80s rock album. Act III continues the trend of Act II, with deliberate callbacks to earlier songs.

Like I said before, I believe that Act II is definitely The Protomen's magnum opus. The story is quite clear from the music itself, and the songs are the best out of all three albums in my opinion. Even without the theming and context of Act I, Act II is still worth listening to just because the songs are so good. To be honest, if Act II wasn't so good, I probably wouldn't even have bothered listening to Act III after 16 years. Act III is much more akin to Act II than Act I, and while I don't think there are as many stand out songs as there were in Act II, the songs themselves are still good, with one or two that I will definitely come back to by themselves.

My ranking of the three albums are:

Act I: 7.5/10 Fresh for when it was released. The songs themselves are fairly good with a few standouts. "The Stand (Man or Machine)" and "The Sons of Fate" are definitely my favorites. The lo-fi nature of the album is an artistic choice as opposed to incompetence, so I don't dock it too much for that, but it does grate on my ears toward the end. The album itself tells a good, emotional story that was legitimately interesting for the time it was released. Maybe nowadays it's nothing special, but when it first came out, it was legitimately a breath of fresh air for me.

Act II: 9/10 Coming out 4 years after Act I, it was a complete change of pace. Act II sounds almost completely different from Act I, and it's a welcome change. It's much cleaner and in a completely different style from Act I. The album is full of songs that just good to listen to. "Light Up the Night," "The Hounds," and "Father of Death" are probably my favorites, but the I'd say that more than half of the album are songs I listen to individually. The story is also good, being a prequel to Act I. Overall, it's one of my favorite albums. There's a reason that I still return to it 16 years later.

Act III: 8/10 Coming out 16 years after Act III, it finishes the original trilogy. Act III sounds very similar to Act II. It's a continuation of Act I in terms of plot, and generally ties the story together. So far, "This City Made Us" is my stand out song from this album. I don't know how I feel about how Act III ends the story. I know that the story can't have a happy ending since it's at its core a rock opera story, but it seems that there was much more focus on finishing Act II's story than Act I's. I'm sure my reactions will change as I listen to the album over the next couple of weeks as I give the album a couple more listens.

Overall, If you've never heard of The Protomen, I'd suggest giving all three albums a listen in release order (Act I then Act II then Act III). If you're a returning fan who hasn't gotten to Act III yet, it's definitely worth listening to just for the nostalgia factor alone.

Also, what has everyone else been listening to?

I randomly stumbled across Light up the Night on a Spotify shuffle, absolutely loved it, and eagerly dove into the band's other work only to find out that nothing else they've produced sounds remotely like that, everything else is a totally different style that's way slower and not what I was looking for at all from Light up the Night.

Even the Iron Maiden Trooper cover, which I usually love to see in a band, is just kind of uninspired with some weird vocal effects that only take away from the core melody. And actually Iron Maiden is a great example: it's like hearing Run to the Hills, getting excited, and then finding out that everything else they've produced is oriented around Wasting Love.

I can definitely enjoy story albums (Kamelot's Epica/The Black Halo is probably my favorite album taken as a whole), and the story seems interesting, but I can't survive on story alone.

"The Good Doctor Pt 2,", "Calling Out", and "Light's Last Stand" are my absolute favorites from the new album, but overall I agree with your assessment.

I don't know how I feel about how Act III ends the story. I know that the story can't have a happy ending since it's at its core a rock opera story, but it seems that there was much more focus on finishing Act II's story than Act I's

So, weirdly, despite being friends with people in Nashville way into the Protomen early on in their career, the first song I ever heard from them was "The Fight", recommended for me on Spotify a few years ago. It's a single, and as I understand it from listening, takes place effectively after Act 3. And it changed the entire character of the plot/ending from "dark" to "the fight isn’t over yet". Which is great. Love it. Rock on!

If I'm not interpreting it and its location in the story correctly, though, yeah, the ending is dark, there's a pointless sacrifice (which I fucking hate in fiction), and it's pretty lame.

Never heard of the Protomen, but now I'mma have to check them out. Somewhere in the detritus of all of my old files I have a copy of some group that I swear called themselves Project X that covered all of the music from Mega Man 2. So I've got that going for me.

I've been listening to the new Boards of Canada album Inferno, which released just two days ago. My expectations for this one were high, given they were a seminal electronic band of the 90s, and Inferno breaks a massive thirteen-year hiatus where they all but went radio silent and left the entire fanbase twisting in the wind. It's all too easy for artists to fumble a comeback after an extended hiatus (looking at you, James Murphy, American Dream has all of your worst music), but I'm glad to say that this is one of their best albums. It also doesn't feel at all like a cheap attempt at nostalgia-bait where an artist tries and fails to capture the sounds of their heyday; in fact they go in a completely fresh sonic direction that couldn't contrast more with the fuzzy, warm, childhood tape sounds of their first two albums.

The tracks here are extremely dark in tone, as well as sharp-edged and unmistakably electronic in their sound. They also draw from a far more eclectic range of inspirations than any of the tracks on their other albums - most of their other albums had a much clearer singular source of inspiration; Music Has The Right To Children and Geogaddi are clearly based off the music and sounds on old educational tapes and Parks Canada ads, whereas Tomorrow's Harvest is obviously a pastiche of 70s/80s apocalypse film soundtracks. The Campfire Headphase is a bit less cohesive and incorporates aspects of acoustic folk into its sound, but still relies on the more pastoral and sweet atmospheres of their early days. Inferno, however, is... not that. In spite of the music on here bearing superficial hallmarks of their earlier work such as ambiguous transposed chords and extensive samples ranging from Hare Krishna chanting and televangelists to educational docs and so on, their sound is now unexpectedly jagged and hi-fidelity. The production is absolutely immaculate, which is not a typical approach for Boards of Canada.

So many highlights. Prophecy at 1420 MHz, Father And Son, The Word Becomes Flesh, Into The Magic Land, Deep Time and All Reason Departs are fantastic tracks that really epitomise what the album has to offer. The second Prophecy comes in you know you're going to be in for a ride, the onslaught of hard-hitting drums and the electronic synth textures are infectious. But probably the biggest surprise on the album is the penultimate track You Retreat In Time And Space, which is placed on the album after a whole onslaught of increasingly ominous and evil tracks; it acts as a climax to the album with an absolutely blissful slow synth-funk ballad featuring a whole lot of guitars, bells and warbly synths that almost appear to sparkle. One could almost mistake it for a Daft Punk track if they didn't know Boards of Canada made it, albeit on a second look it's not all too difficult to see their DNA all over the track.

The fact that a band this old and this heralded is still putting out quality works this late in the game is great. Fantastic album. 8.7/10.

Damn, didn't know they had a new release. Twoism is one of my favorite EPs of all time, and Geogaddi is one of my favorite albums.

Oh god, I was so fucked last week. As in, right up until last night.

Had a patient come in. Clint Eastwood-looking fellow, albeit a bit yellow. He'd clearly been to Shanghai and had a good time, whereas I only seem to get Shanghai'd into work and am the wrong kind of Asian for it.

He was not in a good mood. When the senior consultant led the ward round, the rest of us tagging along like ducklings who'd imprinted on the wrong mother, he had concerns. Said we should help, that the NHS was clearly failing him. I cannot in good conscience disagree, having extensive evidence on the matter, but we did need a slightly more itemised complaint. Turned out the gentleman in the next bed had wet himself and nobody had come. My patient, who could not reliably tell you the year, had correctly identified a real institutional failure and appointed himself its ombudsman. The consultant was mildly put out at being mistaken for a nurse. She was far too professional to show it to a man in hepatic encephalopathy, and I was the only one who caught it, because spite recognises spite.

Later, I had to put an Adults With Incapacity form in place for him. He couldn't consent, so the job was to consent on his behalf, which is the polite clinical phrasing for deciding things about a man's body in a room he isn't really in. It wasn't urgent enough to skip waiting for the family, so I waited for the family. They came. The wife told me he used to have a sense of humour like mine. I said that probably explained the liver. She laughed, which I'm choosing to log as a therapeutic outcome. I'm sure she was a gorgeous lady once, albeit too old even for me. She was suitably apologetic for her husband getting rather angry when I put on my usual song and dance, and possibly interpreted it as coming onto his wife. Bit late for that bud. He was not amused. He said "don't quit your day job."

How rude. Wasn't planning to, but that is precisely what I would say in his shoes. And I don't even have the loving wife, lovely daughters, and the grandkids. Or the dementia and what is possibly a HPB carcinoma. Win some, lose some.

Here's what they don't put in the GMC curriculum: he was, by every account in the room, a good man. A lawyer who gardened. Combative, his wife said, but never rude to anyone he understood was trying to help, which is a finer distinction than most healthy people manage. Then dementia, then the loss of his legs, then the drink, in roughly that order, each one a door that only opens one way. I wrote the cognitive and alcohol history and I will admit, with the appropriate amount of shame, that I enjoyed writing it, because it was the first time in months the job felt like the one I trained for. My colleagues said I was the right person for it. I suspect this is because I am the only underemployed psychiatry resident in the building, but I'll take the compliment at face value, since I'm short on those and long on face.

What I did not enjoy: watching the poor bastard suffer, and the fact that my replacement NHS ID badge was not handed to me that day as promised, despite an email, an appointment, and a confirmation that very morning. Isn't there something clarifying about being trusted to make life decisions for an incapacitated stranger while the same institution cannot be trusted to hand you back a piece of laminated plastic?

Then, because the week was apparently being written by someone with a heavy hand, I went on a date. Long journey, no sleep, the usual baseline of grey. She seemed nice, but I really wasn't hoping for much. I went on that date because I wanted to do something other than dissociate in my bed that weekend. I was more unhinged than usual, past the point where I come off as charming and confident, and appear slightly delirious myself. We talked for an hour or two, as many drinks. She came back from the loo, told me she wasn't feeling it, didn't want to lead me on, and would rather go home. Which is, I want to stress, the considerate way to do it, the rejection equivalent of a clean surgical margin. I told myself this. It did not take. I'm a psychiatrist; I can narrate my own distress in correct terminology while it ignores me completely.

I won't bore the thread with the bit in the middle. There were mushrooms. There was a bus station, a kebab, an emotional support lesbian* who has so far declined to be anything more, and a great deal of being talked down off my own ledge by parties who shall remain anonymous. The short version is that I am better now than I was, by a margin that won't mean much to most of you and means a great deal to me.

The old man's still on the ward. I think about the one-way doors. I've got the kind that still open, for now, and I intend to keep walking through them, if only out of spite, which is the one mature defence mechanism Vaillant forgot to list.

*I call her that to her face, and it makes her giggle. Good to know that lesbians, old grannies, the delirious, the psychotic, and other characters find me funny. Also, she is into some really freaky stuff, and I suppose knowing what Langhans lines are might help. Shame that she is probably not lying about being asexual or a lesbian, but I've had worse company. I am nothing if not an optimist.

She came back from the loo, told me she wasn't feeling it, didn't want to lead me on, and would rather go home. Which is, I want to stress, the considerate way to do it, the rejection equivalent of a clean surgical margin. I told myself this. It did not take. I'm a psychiatrist; I can narrate my own distress in correct terminology while it ignores me completely.

There's always a bit of sting to rejection, even by people you aren't interested in. With the exception of those you're looking for a way to escape from. Kudos to this girl for saying it cleanly and to your face though rather than ghosting you after the date.

I really don't blame her for what the NHS is really causing. I did thank her for letting me know, shook her hand goodbye, and confirmed that she made it home in one piece. I try to keep my problems my own, and she didn't need to know that something that small was all it took to make me begin unraveling.

After a fairly long stretch of rejections, I just had a piece shortlisted for a fiction anthology. It feels good to have a little success.

It really felt like 2025 was a dead year for hack writers like me, but 2026 might be improving. Any other writers here? How's your luck?

Had another op-ed rejected; and forgot to join in the ACX book review competition. Oh well.

ACX book review competition

Maybe it's for the best. I've noticed, perhaps somewhat uncharitably, that the greater Scott-diaspora and larger rationalist community tend to treat writing as a sport, or even as a naked dominance exercise.

It's fascinating to read as a case study in rhetoric and status-jockeying, but it's also tiring after a while. We get it. You're smart. You're smarter than me. Your 160,000 word blog post on why mormons would have built superintelligent AI on the moon if it weren't for female empowerment and declining cultural notions of Asabiyyah has proven that you are a very smart and special boy. Good job. Now that you've scored your points, can we get back to the original goal of meeting in the middle and finding a truth that's greater than the ones we each hold?

If you've never read it, Neal Stephenson did an interview decades ago where he talked about the two classes of writer. It's worth a read.

Stephenson belongs to his own class. While I loved the former, there aren’t that many authors that produce works similar to Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon.

Diamond Age is my favorite but nothing really compares to the Baroque Cycle.

That interview reminds me of Ian Fleming's old article on writing:

I have a charming relative who is an angry young litterateur of renown. He is maddened by the fact that more people read my books than his. Not long ago we had semi-friendly words on the subject and I tried to cool his boiling ego by saying that his artistic purpose was far, far higher than mine. The target of his books was the head and, to some extent at least, the heart. The target of my books, I said, lay somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh. These self-deprecatory remarks did nothing to mollify him and finally, with some impatience and perhaps with something of an ironical glint in my eye, I asked him how he described himself on his passport.

“I bet you call yourself an ‘Author’,” I said. He agreed, with a shade of reluctance, perhaps because he scented sarcasm on the way. “Just so,” I said. “Well, I describe myself as a ‘Writer’. There are authors and artists, and then again there are writers and painters.”

This rather spiteful jibe, which forced him, most unwillingly, into the ranks of The Establishment, while stealing for myself the halo of a simple craftsman of the people, made the angry young man angrier than ever and I don’t now see him as often as I used to. But the point I wish to make is that if you decide to become a professional writer, you must, broadly speaking, decide whether you wish to write for fame, for pleasure or for money. I write, unashamedly, for pleasure and money.

+1 for the rec, it's a great essay.

Good on you. I am not a real writer. I've always kind of sort of wished I was better at writing because sometimes I have cool and interesting ideas for stories and then if I start writing my standards are way higher than my talents, I get frustrated, then I get bored and quit a week or two later.

I just started trying again since I had the idea of using AI to critique my work and offer suggestions. Its actual suggests for prose are always garbage, but its critiques of which parts of what I wrote are bad and why help me focus on how to improve beyond my own vague instincts of "this isn't satisfying but I'm not sure why."

I managed to write one chapter in three weeks (as a side project, again, not a real writer). I suspect I need to just write more and edit less until later. At least that's advice I've heard about writing, but I'm not entirely convinced. I don't think my main character has a sufficiently well-developed personality yet but I made a lot of progress on establishing him better by rewriting scenes over and over again until they felt more interesting.

Any advice?

My advice would be to start out doing short stories. They have a couple of advantages.

First, they have a quicker turnaround. You can get a first draft done in a week or less. This means that you have more time on the back end to rework what you have into something that works. A lot of good writing that you see in books is actually rewritten, and often several times. If you have a story that’s ten to fifteen pages, you can easily rewrite the bad prose, or fix the plotting or see where the characters are doing weird things.

Second, the level of detail you need to get started is a bit less. You don’t have the space for a long detailed plot, or fifteen pages worth of world building information. You don’t have the space in the story to worry about what happened to your main character in the fifth grade and all the trauma it caused him. In all of that, you have time to hit the highlights and move on. This removes the temptation to follow Tolkien in the sense of spending large amounts of time building an entire universe and not writing the story.

Third, they’re easy to put out into the world. You can just put it on a blog, or a website. You can submit to short story contests, you can print them at kinkos and hand them out on street corners. Thus the need to worry about gatekeepers is less.

As far as characters, I personally use the type descriptions from personality tests (MBTI or Socionics or Enneagram) simply to get a sense of how the character might think. That helps me because if I don’t make a point of giving each character a different personality, they all end up sounding like me.

I’ll also recommend looking up the Brandon Sanderson lectures on either podcast or YouTube. He’s dealing with a more advanced level of writer, but it’s helpful. You can also find podcasts about the technical skills of writing like characters and descriptions and so on.

I suspect I need to just write more and edit less until later. At least that's advice I've heard about writing, but I'm not entirely convinced

My biggest weakness as an author is that I am convinced that my output is absolute dogshit. I've thrown out multiple novels that were over 70% finished because I was disgusted with the work. I'll end up in rewrite spirals and give up.

Lately, I've had a lot more success by Just Writing. I don't do anything but write forward until I have every major story beat on paper. Then and only then, do I allow myself to go back and rework things.

I don't think my main character has a sufficiently well-developed personality yet but I made a lot of progress on establishing him better by rewriting scenes over and over again until they felt more interesting.

I do this by doing two things:

  1. I write character sketches before starting for major characters. It's a pulp tool, but knowing a few things they'll always do, a few things they'll never do, the first thing you'd notice if you saw them, and the first thing you'd notice if you heard them helps a lot.
  2. If my main character starts driving the story off the rails? Well, then I have good character development and I need to change the story.

I once had a pretty large indie publisher ask about my novel. I told them that I have a lot of shit on my plate, and I do not expect to finish it in a timely manner. I deserve points for honesty.

Beyond that? Someone pledged money to my Substack, which is something I only vaguely dreamed of monetizing, and do not go around begging money for. I accept upvotes and engagement as valid currency. He's a big name, and $8 is $8, even if it's a theoretical $8 that I can't be arsed to redeem just yet.

I am very glad that writing is just a hobby, and I don't want to go full-time pro. My work and life gives me the material for the writing anyway.

$8 is $8

I'm not gonna lie - that line has gotten me into some real trouble in the past.

Well, if you're looking for money through writing, I can imagine. For me, it's $20, $3.50 or free.

Oh, I never said anything about writing.

But yeah, also writing. You wouldn't believe what kind of per-word you can get doing werewolf erotica.

That's disgusting! I'd never sell out my art like that for mere astounding wads of cash! Now, where can I find these sorts of markets so I know how to avoid them?

I usually use submission grinder to start.

There must be a correlation with certain highly specialised kinks, autism, IQ and earning potential.

I don't recall ever meeting a stupid furry. I had a talented artist friend once and 90% of her commissions were for drawings of furry porn.

I don't know about furries, but my editor at the time told me that the "alternative erotica" market is basically 100% driven by women.

So far as I can tell, if you include literary works in the "porn" category, then the average female porn-consumer is faaar more degenerate than the average male.

It kinda blew my mind.

Because I refuse to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited and instead buy my Kindle books so that the authors can actually at least attempt to make a living, I used to see that stuff pop up on Kindle Countdown deals all the time and yeah, it's eye-opening for sure.

Now, as a gentleman enthusiast of the literary arts, how to find these people...

Maybe a career switch is advisable. I will consult our resident furries for advice.

How's your luck?

Non-existent. Congratulations, though!

Your substack is bigger than mine though.

True. I meant writing in the sense of writing fiction.

There's talk in the main thread about the Trump $250. I think we do need some larger bills. I'd suggest Nixon rather than Trump. Not only is he properly deceased, since many of our bills have a building on the reverse, it designs itself: The Watergate Hotel.

My wife suggests we have a bill containing a montage of some of the more obscure Presidents -- Tyler, Taylor, Polk, etc. She also thought we should put some women on. Obviously Susan Anthony and some of the others are way overdone. We came up with Sally Ride (the astronaut), and Carrie Nation -- presumably the front would be her famous hatchet pic, and the back would depict a busted-up saloon.

A truly ostentatious change would be to make the $250 bill orange instead of green.

There's even precedent

I'd be fine with Nixon on the $250. The Tricky Dick 2-fiddy.

montage of some of the more obscure Presidents -- Tyler, Taylor, Polk

Fun fact about Tyler: his last living grandson died in 2025.

It's not printed anymore, but Grover Cleveland was on the $1,000 bill.

I don't think Cleveland is obscure enough for the montage anyway; he's gotten some slight recent attention for being the first president with discontinuous terms. The guy in the middle (Benjamin Harrison) counts, though.

Lovable, furry old Grover Cleveland, yeah.

I'd suggest Nixon rather than Trump. Not only is he properly deceased

Habesne corpus? I expect that he shall return in time, or at least his jarréd head, propelled along by the headless Body of Agnew, when his people need him most.

Come, Lord Nixon, come.

My wife suggests we have a bill containing a montage of some of the more obscure Presidents -- Tyler, Taylor, Polk, etc.

"Yeah don't worry if you haven't heard of him; he's one of them montage presidents."

She also thought we should put some women on

Strongly against, on principle.

Just finished Independence Day on Netflix.

I loved it. Despite its two and a half hour runtime, the pacing is great, and the movie goes by very quickly; it only feels like it drags at a couple of points, such as the first alien dogfight over the desert, which lasts a little too long, or the ending, which goes on for about fifteen minutes after the climax.

The movie is a model of 90's racial colorblindness; you have the white hero (President Whitmore), the black hero (Captain Hiller), and the jewish hero (David Levinson) working together to save the Earth, with nobody ever noticing or remarking upon this fact.

Despite the scale of destruction (dozens of cities wiped out, millions dead), the film has a fun, swashbuckly atmosphere. I particularly enjoyed the president's speech, and the way he personally leads the counterattack against the aliens.

Negatives? The Will Smith dialogue can get annoying ("I got to get me one of these!", "Elvis has left the building!", etc.), but thankfully he only gets a third of the screen time. I'm not sure the little boy or (especially) the dog contributed anything to the movie. And why the hell is that officer waving a gun around while looking at a map?

An excellent summer blockbuster. Highly recommended.

This one defined a childhood summer for me. I rode my bike to the movie theater at least a dozen times to watch that. No idea where I got the money for tickets. Sometimes I went with friends. It was a white town and we could just leave our bikes unlocked outside the theater. Why would we lock them up? Every time I went to see it I made a pit stop at a convenience store and bought a sprite, and every time (except the last one) I looked under the bottle cap and won a free bottle, for which I'd trade that cap in the next time I went to see the movie.

This break in luck portended many things, in retrospect. The next year our school was suddenly about 40% Mexican and we didn't learn much in class anymore. Most of my friends had their bikes stolen from one front yard or another, where they'd been trustingly thrown to the lawn while visiting each other. Mine never was but then I'd wised up quickly. Pretty early in that school year this Mexican boy named Ricardo and his flunkies surrounded me at lunch and made a bunch of threats; I don't recall the details. They got too close and started shoving me around.

I had taken a week-long karate course not long before and the 'sensei' told us a story about a fox and, let's say (because I forget), a hare. They met up and recognized each other as martial artists. The hare bragged about how he knew a thousand techniques; he had a move for everything. The fox said, well, I only know one move, but I've practiced it a lot. Just then a group of hounds burst in upon them. The rabbit hesitated, trying to decide which technique to use, and was torn to pieces. The fox executed his one move perfectly: he ran away, and lived.

Running wasn't an option for me, and I calculated that if I wanted it to be I'd need a distraction. And anyway the story had a second moral, which I'd decided was "Just get really good at one move." I really liked the snap-kick. Look it up and try it; it feels great. So while everyone else in my dojo did all kinds of other things I just worked at the snap kick for the second half of the week.

Ricardo's eyes about popped out of his head when I delivered a flawless kick into his solar plexus. Folded over and dropped with the least resistance I've ever seen from someone who wasn't already unconscious. The henchmen gaped. I ran.

They caught up to me out in the field; idk why our school had such a big play area, or why none of the adult peacekeepers were around. Anyway my next memory is of six boys kicking the living shit out of me while I tried to maintain something like a fetal position on the ground. How that feels on the ribs. Shadowy impressions of their forms around me against the too-bright sky. Nothing after that until the disciplinary hearing, where they were all let off with detention and I was suspended for three days because I 'threw the first punch.'

My dad had told me that if I ever got suspended for self-defense he'd take me to Taco Bell, and that's what we did. The Mexicans still gave me shit after that but only softly. Softly.

So anyway yeah, great movie. Really takes me back.

a story about a fox and, let's say (because I forget), a hare. They met up and recognized each other as martial artists. The hare bragged about how he knew a thousand techniques; he had a move for everything. The fox said, well, I only know one move, but I've practiced it a lot.

The version of that sort of fable I know is a fox and a hedgehog. The fox knows many tricks, but the hedgehog knows one great trick.

My dad had told me that if I ever got suspended for self-defense he'd take me to Taco Bell, and that's what we did. The Mexicans still gave me shit after that but only softly. Softly.

If I ever have a son this is basically my bully plan. Complete permission for self defense, telling him he will need to unfairly get 'punished' by the teachers and then I'll take him to the movies.

Haven't seen that one, but 𝖒𝖔𝖛𝖎𝖊 𝖙𝖍𝖗𝖊𝖆𝖉.

  1. A Private Life (2025). 3/5. Jodie Foster as a psychiatrist in Paris who convinces herself that her patient was murdered. RT shows a pretty poor audience rating, but I think it was competently done, even if it was obvious from the start that she wasn't murdered. Foster's character overall feels believable and real.

  2. Le Circle Rouge (1970). 4/5. Classic French heist film. The heist sequence is simply kino, and there's several other scenes that are pretty high quality. The plan isn't revealed until it's put into action, which keeps you rapt. Perhaps a little anticlimactic at the end, and my wife fell asleep.

  3. There Will Be Blood (2007). 5/5. Probably this movie has been discussed to death but I hadn't seen it before. The opening sequence does its best to make oil extraction seem evil and almost demonic, which is a little ridiculous and overwrought, but Day-Lewis's performance is just excellent. A very uncomfortable moment for me when I hear a speech like this and find it not entirely unrelatable:

    I hate most people. There are times when I... I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money I can get away from everyone. I see the worst in people, Henry. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I've built up my hatreds over the years, little by little. Having you here gives me a second breath of life. I can't keep doing this on my own... with these, umm... people. [laughs]

Since you started this, I'll suggest Nomads (1986). Same year as Well before Independence Day (which I've never seen but will now, thanks, @erwgv3g34 .

Roger Ebert, whose reviews I enjoyed reading usually, absolutely hated it. It has a poor rating on IMDB.

I thought it was fantastic. John McTiernan director, before Die Hard put him on the map. Pierce Brosnan, Lesley-Anne Down. I don't know why I like it so much. The soundtrack seems very dated (a lot of Ted Nugent guitar). And the plot at some point just becomes twisted into a confusing pretzel. I don't care. It was a great movie experience for my teenage self (though is saw it on television a year or two after it was released.) The most distracting thing was Brosnan putting on a French accent, but once you get passed that (if you can) it's a great weird ride.

Independence Day was 1996, not 1986. For a really good underrated McTiernan film closet to that, I recommend Last Action Hero from 93, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger with middle-aged Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones) as the villain. It was overshadowed by the Jurassic Park juggernaut, but it's a fantastic meta comedy action film parody. Feels a decade or two ahead of its time, as this kind of self-referential satires became far more common in this century than the last.

My decades collide. You're correct of course. Charles Dance always brings it. I do remember Last Action Hero but don't believe I ever saw it.

You should watch I Am Legend next.

I watched that one in high school (our AP Physics teacher put it on). Didn't like it as much; I Am Legend has a gloomier, more somber tone, but lacks the substance to make it work. Plus the infected (vampires? zombies?) looked goofy; this was around the time when CGI was replacing practical effects, and it shows.

Still, the shots of New York City deserted were amazing. The first half of the movie (before all the plot happens, when it's just running on aesthetics) is the best part.

I was once exploring a new (to us) state park with my wife, just hiking around at random. Asked the ranger at the entry booth where we could go that wouldn't be too bad for ticks. He recommended the 'Bobcat Trail', so we did that.

When we encountered a second ranger later and related the story he laughed and said "Well, that wasn't nice." And yeah, I don't think I've ever seen so many ticks per linear foot of trail before or since. Not by half, or maybe even a tenth.

Anyway @erwgv3g34 I haven't seen I Am Legend but suspect it is that kind of recommendation.

Lmao. It’s just a good will smith movie bro chill!!!!

What are you playing?

Dunno why I'm starting the thread when I'm barely playing anything but I finished an Ascension 2 and an Ascension 3 run in Slay the Spire 2 this week! :D

I saw that a Sims-like game released this week, called Paralives. Hopefully you can do horrendous things to the characters. That was half (all?) the fun in those terrible old games.

I wouldn't mind trying the new Lego Batman game at some point.

I played through Esoteric ebb and thought it was a really mixed bag. I liked the art and the music was OK, but I found the writing to be really uneven, and that's a problem when the writing is the centerpiece of your game.

It's like a low rent disco Elysium in D&D stage dressing. If you're going to vomit massive amounts of text at the player then it better be compelling. Here its mostly just OK. Some of the writing and worldbuilding was good but it's surrounded by so much just serviceable writing that it gets lost in the mix.

I tried EE as well, but it didn't really grab me either. The six D&D stats have always been a poor choice, and using them in a Disco Elysium clone is a double mistake.

I understand why he did this. Whether they are good or not, Strdexconintwischa are a D&D staple, and without them the game would have practically no link to the D&D at all. But this doesn't make the experience less clunky.

The new diablo 4 explansion. the game turns into path of exile light. That is a good thing in my book. What can I say - junkies gonna junk.

When I have time for gaming (lol) I'm currently prone to hitting either Manor Lords or Factorio, in which I'm just now getting Gleba up and running after spending like 80 hours getting Vulcanus just so. 216 simultaneous rockets launching every time the cargo ship comes in is such a rush! Fulgora was first and that decision has paid off enormously. Anyway I put off Gleba for a long time because it sounded like a pain in the ass, and I mean to some degree it is and that's just the nature of the game, but actually I think it's my favorite of the three. I find it pretty and laid-back, and I like the ag vibe and weird self-sustaining supply chains. Only downside is that the surface can be a bit difficult visually.

In a hotel on a work trip tonight and was just trying to decide which of those two to play. I think sometimes about how my analogues a generation ago would have been turning on pay-per-view porn. But actually I think I'm gonna watch a couple-few hours of Legend of Galactic Heroes. It's that kind of night.

Original LoGH is better than the remake. But the remake has a great opening song.

I haven't really been gaming for some years now, but I'm strongly considering picking up Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition from GOG on sale and giving it a whirl. Been a fan of the cyberpunk genre ever since it became a Thing, and AFAICT it actually grew into a good game years ago, so why not?

It grew into a game without as many bugs. I feel mixed recommending the game too strongly despite having a few dozen hours in it.

The main story didn't hook me too strongly. Its one of those main storylines where the more you progress down the storyline the worse things get for the protagonist. If you like the protagonist you don't want to torture them. If you don't like the protagonist you just feel disconnected from the whole thing. I started with liking the protagonist but ended up more on the side of not liking them.

The side missions and exploration was a lot of fun. I especially enjoyed infiltration/theft missions which offered a variety of solutions. Either quiet hacking stealth mode, guns blazing mode, stealth killing, stealth knockouts, or just running in and out. Or some blend of all the options.

Hmm, any thoughts on how its "open world" compares to similar games like GTA/SR or Elder Scrolls games? Asking because I kinda feel like if I were to spend a few dozen hours just appreciating the beauty and depth of the game world then I might be reasonably happy with it, and you do make the side quests sound good enough for the purchase.

The city areas always felt pretty busy and active. But under the paint there isn't a whole lot to do most of the time.

I liked getting fast vehicles and driving them in the desert areas at full speed. Some of the country vistas looked pretty awesome.

I've never personally liked cities, so they bothered me with some of their gritty realism.

I recommend it, especially if you're interested in highly story-based games and enjoyed The Witcher 3. It's not the "be literally anything you want to be!" game that it was pitched as, but it's very, very good for fans of story-based games. The gameplay is also excellent, and I say this as someone who usually doesn't enjoy first-person shooters. You feel like your cyberware actually enhances your character, makes you more powerful. At a certain point in progression you feel invincible.

I didn't play until a few years after it came out, so most of the major bugs were ironed out. There are still lots of bugs, but they're manageable.

Thanks, appreciate the recommendation!

I'm looking for new games to play at this point. I'm thinking of replaying Halo 3 with the boys. Not sure. I might give Clair Obscur another try, saw my fiance beat it but it seems fun to play myself.

Clair Obscur is fun and, at 50 to 60 hours of gameplay, it doesn't overstay its welcome.

Librarian - Tidy up the arcane library. Had more fun with this game than anything else this year.

It would be extremely funny if a next-level masochist were to obtain the catalog and floor plan of a real library and create a similar game with that dataset. There could even be separate game modes for different classification schemes—e. g., Universal Decimal vs. Dewey Decimal.

A great idea but you'd need to tweak it. Real books fit a lot more per shelf than arcana codex books, which have a sort of minimum size for ease of manipulation. Damn if I don't love the idea though.

why limit yourself to physical libraries?

I picked up Remnant: From the Ashes after a multi year break, and I forgot how much fun it was. More than anything, I love the intentional vagueness of the narrative. Over-explaining is rampant in the medium.

I'm happy someone else played this game

I think there's a sequel now

Over-explaining is rampant in the medium.

It really is. I think I have yet to see a video game with subtle facial expressions or vocalization. It's all made veeery obvious and simple. Which is fair for a game that's fit to be played when your brain is fried after a long day, but they shouldn't all have to be like that...

I’m playing Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2. Continuing my registered fondness for widely-considered-to-be-bad RPGs, I’m quite enjoying it! The writing is nothing special but it’s regularly entertaining, I really like the night-time-in-Seattle vibe (and am a sucker for games set in the modern day / ‘real life’ in any case), and the gameplay is surprisingly not terrible. I bounced off the original years ago, so don’t have the fondness that others do, but it’s pretty fun.

Oh, this is the first time I've seen anyone talk about the sequel (except I saw there's debate on whether it should be considered a sequel). Why'd you bounce off the original? Did you play it many years after its launch? I played it at launch, during a time when you had to get used to bugs and jank. It was pretty fun. Very unpolished, but fun. I think they got the atmosphere very much right, even if the combat wasn't great.

We know the common cliche of a guy (or girl) who's "the brain" at their school but has a major crisis when they find out they're merely average compared to everyone else when they start university. I'm curious how many folks here were nothing special in elementary and high school but went on to achieve something substantial academically?

I did mostly decently in school but was never anywhere close to a top tier student. Barely got into the high school I wanted, ie. the one with the shortest distance from my home (Finnish high school entrance is determined by your grades in 9th year). Had to settle for my second choice in university (EE) because I couldn't get in to study CS (and the actually hard to get in programs would have been right out). I went on to publish a couple of semi-influential papers in a subfield and AFAIK my professor still considers me one of his star students even though I never ended up doing a PhD (and let me tell you it's really fucking weird to keep receiving fan mail about a publication for a full decade from random people who've gone to the effort of figuring out your twice changed email address just for a single message).

I'm curious how many folks here were nothing special in elementary and high school but went on to achieve something substantial academically?

I feel like this describes me pretty well: my parents put me in the normal public school track through third grade, and none of my grades were particularly outstanding. None of the work was hard, but it was darn boring: who wants to sit there practicing adding multi-digit numbers together or "silent reading" for 30 minutes while the teacher focuses on the couple students having trouble with the concepts. I didn't do a good job doing the work and only got mediocre grades and messed around more than I should have, and nothing looked too unusual until I finally took a standardized test (the Stanford series) from the district and I scored remarkably well.

At that point, some combination of the teacher and my parents decided that maybe I'd do better in an advanced program, so I transferred to a different elementary school with such a program, and I immediately did a lot better academically because I found the work more challenging (although getting dropped into a new school always has its challenges), and I continued in advanced programs through high school and went to a rather well-ranked university, got a graduate degree, and now I do IMO complex engineering stuff for work. At each point in there, I'm rather proud I was (generally) able to rise to the challenge and perform well, although I'm certainly no von Neumann or Shannon, and I have a sense of the limit of my abilities.

I'm a firm believer in magnet programs, though.

I'm curious how many folks here were nothing special in elementary and high school but went on to achieve something substantial academically?

The high school I graduated from was in the state top ten for per capita overdoses, vehicle deaths, suicides, and teen pregnancies. I was suspended multiple times, had six weeks of unexcused absences my senior year, and nearly got expelled once.

I graduated from college. It's not much, but it's a win for me.

I’m curious to know what hood you come from and what set you claim. Lol.

Just redneck shit

The high school I graduated from was in the state top ten for per capita overdoses, vehicle deaths, suicides, and teen pregnancies.

Gotta say, even the existence of such statistics (ie. there being more than one per decade) already sounds bizarre to me. Cultural differences and all that.

I graduated from college. It's not much, but it's a win for me.

I say that definitely counts as a win.

had six weeks of unexcused absences my senior year

Ours was a very progressive high school as far as student freedom and responsibility went. You could be absent from up to 20% of classes from one course without requiring a reason and 30% if you had a doctor's note or similar. I had some "slight" motivation problems in my last year so I ended up skipping 50% of the math classes in the last period and the teacher didn't even notice (I missed something like 15 classes, he thought I missed 5). I outright arranged my schedule for that last period such that I only went to school three days a week. Good times.

Gotta say, even the existence of such statistics (ie. there being more than one per decade) already sounds bizarre to me. Cultural differences and all that.

How big are your high schools? It varies a lot across the US, but OP might be describing a school with over a thousand students per grade level, and you might be able to get meaningful statistics over a few years.

Graduating class was 216.

I was only there for a year and a half. In that time, we had four lethal overdoses, three suicides, six vehicle deaths (two accidents), one farm related fatality, one murder, and somewhere on the order of 30 pregnancies.

My high school had about 500 seniors but about half of them didn't graduate -- I barely did, on such thin margins that it literally came down to my grade on my math final -- so I guess our graduating class was also 250ish? Not sure how that works. There seems to be an assumption implicit in the term that pretty much everyone will graduate.

Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to show up to a reunion. Can't imagine many do. Not even sure they happen.

Location also matters. Rural schools usually have a much higher fatality rate than urban schools (some data here), typically due to a combination of dangerous farm work, dangerous driving habits, more miles driven, and more dangerous hobbies.

My own experience may be illustrative. I went to a rural high school of about 400 students. My freshman year was the first in 25 years not to see a single student death, though there were four more deaths my sophomore through senior years. In contrast, the large city schools near me (student population ~3,000–4,000) usually only have one or two deaths per decade.

Does Finland have a system where high school is different than the US definition? That sounds almost like my first year of college

It's the "same" but from what I've gathered of US high schools, also quite different. First, there are entry requirements (based on 9th year grades). Second, they changed it to course form just before I started in the mid 90s, so you got to pick and choose which courses to take and when. There's a bunch of mandatory courses and then the rest are optional within limits (eg. I took max amount of math and physics and only the minimum required history, biology and such). The entry requirements did wonders because while my high school wasn't anything particularly "elite" back then (it would acquire such reputation some years later), only people who actually wanted to study went there. The curriculum was and is still normal high school (which in practise means somewhat higher level than US but similar to the rest of EU).

First, Congrats! Hopefully the weirdness is offset by the enjoyment of being seen as important. For what it's worth I'm one of the people that will dig a bit to say "Thank you" when a piece of art or science transcends the mundane. I pretty much never receive a response but I figure people get negative feedback so often on things it's a way to put some positivity out there.

I was unable to meaningfully achieve anything academically. My ascent from a mediocre student to decent mid-level professional guy was a happy surprise. It's still crazy that the company I "co-founded" is still around almost a decade later and making $40m a year from $0.

I thought school was a monumental waste of time and hated nearly every minute of it. Now that I'm an adult, I'm even more miffed at all the people around me who tried to gaslight me into thinking it wasn't. I was absolutely fuckin' right about that.

Compulsory education is a repulsive mockery of genuine scholarship. I hate the people who defile the noble legacy of academia with this metric-chasing midwittery.

Had to settle for my second choice in university (EE) because I couldn't get in to study CS (and the actually hard to get in programs would have been right out).

What were the hard programs?

and let me tell you it's really fucking weird to keep receiving fan mail about a publication for a full decade from random people who've gone to the effort of figuring out your twice changed email address just for a single message

Were these, uh, Indians?

What were the hard programs?

Industrial engineering (think fast track to management for people who know math) and industrial physics (which for obvious reasons attracts people who are really good at math and physics).

and let me tell you it's really fucking weird to keep receiving fan mail about a publication for a full decade from random people who've gone to the effort of figuring out your twice changed email address just for a single message

Were these, uh, Indians?

No. Random people in the field and the occasional amateur interested in the topic. Eg. a few years ago I got a Facebook message from a German guy working for a prominent company in the same field saying he was a huge fan of my (then over 15 years old) work.

I’m curious about another scenario. I went to a private school in NYC where not everyone, but probably 40-60% of people were pretty smart. It wasn’t hugely selective but because it has or at least had at that time a reputation as being more academic than the hippie private schools, had a large contingent of smart kids. I did OK, maybe 70-80th percentile but outside of English and History was never top of the class. I went to a competitive and selective but again not HYPS tier college.

So I have the interesting but probably common experience (including professionally) of being mostly in ‘my league’ my whole life intellectually. I meet people both smarter and dumber than me all the time.

My life has felt similar. Was at a highschool that wasn't anything super special. But had enough well off kids that I was solidly in the middle of the top classes. Got into a large state school, but was in the honors program there. So again it was just me sitting in the middle of the top class. Got into the workforce and it felt similar. Was at a good tech company with smart people but I was still only in the middle.

Feels the same around here. If there is a group of people that belong in the top tenth percentile of users here I'd place myself in it. But I'm only in like the middle among that top 10th percentile.

One time I remember truly feeling dumb was playing a board game with Robin Hanson and another Econ professor at Bryan Caplan's house. Robin and I were new to the game, the other econ professor was not. There was a recognizable meta to the card game that I partly pieced together after having played it. Robin Hanson asked enough questions at the beginning that I realized afterwards he was piecing together the meta just based on the rules. I got slaughtered in the game basically playing according to the rules but without a useful strategy. Hanson and the other professor nearly tied, with Hanson losing out just barely. I only give myself partial credit for understanding the meta cuz of Hanson's questions, and some of his comments afterwards led me to 'get it'.

I meet people both smarter and dumber than me all the time.

I clearly move in the wrong circles because it's fairly rare for me to meet people who are obviously smarter than me while unfortunately the other end is not nearly as rare. I've arranged my life so I can mostly deal with my peers on that level but unfortunately such selection isn't always possible at the workplace. Internet forums are of course a near complete disaster when it comes to that.

I recently completed a gravel cycling race in Hot Springs, NC. For the uninitiated, the appeal of these sorts of programs is that you have an excuse to grace the middle of nowhere with your presence and wallet. Many of the spots where great gravel routes exist are towns you don't even see from the interstate, but are beautiful and remote.

The distance wasn't anything special, but 7,000 vertical feet in a day is.... non-trivial. This was essentially a climbing race. My performance was abysmal. A number of factors contributed to it - work has killed my training regimen and maybe I'm just not as tough as I thought. But I also lost my electrolyte water bottles just before the race, leading to inordinate cramping, and took a wrong turn that cost me critical minutes. The end result was I lost to competitors I really shouldn't have as a mid-30s male.

It does make me consider the role of races in my personal enjoyment of the hobby. I rented a cabin on the river and brought my family, and in an alternate universe I would be waking up in the morning with a coffee, enjoying the beautiful views at the top of each mountain, having actually delicious food/drink packed on the bike (for those evaluating electrolyte drinks, Neversecond was what the organizers provided, and holy fuck it tasted awful), and face no pressure to break any bones on gnarly descents (at least one racer had to be pulled off a mountain via ambulance). Instead I paid $80 for a water bottle and a timer to come in the bottom half of the pack.

I've visited the areas hit by Helene a couple of times at this point. There's been something indefinably different - traumatized - among the locals that I interact with. Of course not everyone loves cyclists, but oftentimes I'm not dressed as one. I think some of that small town charm that people would expect has dissipated and will take more years to return. The physical scars aren't even healed yet, and you can still see 100 year old oaks tossed to the ground like children's toys in many places. I still love being there, and it is funny that the stereotypical Appalachian mountain man still does exist in spades. You can go talk with him right now over a beer.

@FiveHourMarathon Did you ever end up tackling your 100-miler?

@FiveHourMarathon Did you ever end up tackling your 100-miler?

I have not. I'm still hoping on doing a 100k this spring, but my pregnant wife has been much less tolerant of hobbies that involve me leaving for hours during time I could be spending with her. Which is, yeah, totally reasonable. But complicated by her disjointed sleep patterns, which no longer allow me to easily sneak out at 5am and lose nothing.

It does make me consider the role of races in my personal enjoyment of the hobby. I rented a cabin on the river and brought my family, and in an alternate universe I would be waking up in the morning with a coffee, enjoying the beautiful views at the top of each mountain, having actually delicious food/drink packed on the bike (for those evaluating electrolyte drinks, Neversecond was what the organizers provided, and holy fuck it tasted awful), and face no pressure to break any bones on gnarly descents (at least one racer had to be pulled off a mountain via ambulance). Instead I paid $80 for a water bottle and a timer to come in the bottom half of the pack.

I have had similar thoughts about traveling to do running trail races. Why don't I just travel and hang out in a pretty place with my wife, do some day hikes, enjoy the views, and generally try to recharge? Or I can spend extra money and stress out about logistics that don't matter because there's no chance I'm finishing in the top third for my age group and do a run that I enjoy less than a random trail run near my house since there's a bunch of additional people around.

My favourite SNL UK sketch from this week, dating advice from Scrimpch.

Why is this funny? Is he supposed to be some kind of British stock character? Or is it just supposed to be random chungus holds up spork?

It's basically surrealist humour, combined with the familiarity most of us have with eccentric Europeans.

Mildly entertaining exercise: Rendition of a random UN Security Council resolution into HTML, with dozens of bullet points added in order to improve intelligibility

Interesting Gallup article on "span of control" (the number of subordinates per manager)

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there is roughly one manager for every 11.5 employees. Gallup data show a similar pattern: The average number of people reporting to managers has increased from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. This is a nearly-50-% increase in team size [from 8.2] since Gallup first measured in 2013.

At the same time, the median team size has held steady at about five to six employees per manager or leader. In other words, a minority of very large teams is pulling the average up, while most managers still lead relatively small teams. Gallup data show that 37 % of managers or leaders oversee fewer than five people, while roughly two-thirds (66 %) manage fewer than 10. About one in five managers (22 %) has 10 to 24 direct reports, and only 13 % oversee 25 or more employees.

Team size is only as effective as the engagement behind it. Highly engaged teams of 12 or more workers who are supported by effective management—double the current median of six workers per team—can thrive, while poorly managed teams struggle even when small.

There is no information on the number of managers per subordinate.

There has recently been some discussion of partition actions: a property is owned in common by several people, but one of the owners wants to sell his share. One of this website's illustrious lawyer denizens has mentioned how he (1) hates division of property between heirs because it results in huge complications over time, and therefore (2) prefers primogeniture. Do you have any opinions or experiences on this topic?

In the 1970s, my grandfather in the US Virgin Islands (a wretched hive of scum, villainy, and hurricanes) died young. After a probate process that for some reason took eight years (I am in possession of the "final adjudication and decree of distribution" but none of the other court documents, so I don't know the details), his house was split between his heirs—1/3 to his wife (my grandmother), and 1/9 to each of his six children (two by a previous wife and four (including my mother) by my grandmother). As the decades rolled by, all of these seven heirs ceased living in the property. Ironically, at present the property's only inhabitant is a non-heir—the son of my grandmother by a previous husband. He is a layabout and has allowed the property (assessed at market value of 95 k$; Zillow does not produce Zestimates in this backwater) to fall into disrepair.

I am hoping that, after my grandmother dies, I will be able to convince my mother to start a partition action in order to convert her share of this albatross into cash. The USVI has enacted the Uniform Partition of Heirs' Property Act, so if my mother were to start a partition action her siblings (including the half-brother, since he would have finally become a part-owner) would have a chance to buy her out before any forced sale of the entire property. But she expects that they would be either uninterested in, or incapable of, buying her out. Also, there is a possible complication: My grandfather's two children by his first wife (already adult and moved out when he died) allegedly gave their shares to my grandmother (out of charity—my grandfather had no life insurance, so his death threw my grandmother into poverty), but if this property transfer occurred it apparently was never officially recorded. I look forward to the hullabaloo.

To be clear, my endorsement of primogeniture was sarcastic, but anyway...

I am hoping that, after my grandmother dies, I will be able to convince my mother to start a partition action in order to convert her share of this albatross into cash.

Any time you're contemplating a situation like this, you have to consider whether something is worth paying a large amount of money in hopes of getting a larger amount, or paying a small amount of money to be rid of the thing entirely, and this looks like one of the latter cases. I am not your lawyer, nor am I licensed in USVI, but I've done partitions before, and they are not a quick, easy process. What you describe is even more expensive because the division goes back 50 years and we don't even know what kind of title your grandfather had when he died. I know you seem pretty sure of who owns what, but 40 years is a long time, and you've already alluded to the possibility of an unrecorded transaction, which means that if I'm handling this the first thing I'm doing is a title search to make sure that I don't leave anyone out of the suit or misstate the interests, which could make things more expensive or even get the case dismissed. And that's before you can even file.

You're probably looking at a retainer somewhere in the 5k–10k range just to get a suit started, though since it's an heirs property you're probably looking at the higher end of that range. This is all out of pocket before you've recovered any money from the property. If someone, say the half-brother living in the house, decides to contest the partition, it could cost several times more than that. If your lawyer wants to take a deposition, that's a few grand right there. If the opponent's lawyer wants to depose your mother, they'll just send a notice telling her to appear at the Hampton Inn in Charlotte Amelie on October 9. Sure, you can get it rescheduled to be taken remotely, but you will still get billed for the rescheduling, and billed again for a copy of the transcript. The key thing here is that the distribution of the proceeds isn't a straight "1/6 ownership gets 1/6 the money", but an equitable distribution. What's equitable? The court will appoint a master to decide. He will charge for this service.

Realistically, if nothing else, somebody has been paying property tax on this house, and that person is entitled to credit for the amount they paid. If the half-brother has done necessary repairs, he's entitled to credit for them. You can argue over what repairs are necessary. You can argue over whether he has sufficient proof. You can argue over a lot of things. You will be charged for this service. And unless you can convince the brother to move out prior to listing the house, the market value is practically zero, since nobody is going to pay fair market value for a property that requires an ejectment action to get possession. There was some talk yesterday about how difficult evictions have become in some places, but trust me, they're a breeze compared to ejectments. Obstinate tenants can hold up evictions, sure, but the process is designed to be streamlined, and a diligent landlord can get the guy out within a couple months. The ejectment process is not streamlined and operates on the same schedule as any other lawsuit, meaning you need to hire a lawyer, conduct discovery, have pretrial conferences, etc. It's no 15 day notice then off to the magistrate.

At this point you may be thinking "That's not going to happen. My family gets along, and the half-brother has no case and no money to fight it, and he'll leave well in advance of the judgment if the house is sold." To which I say "Great! You don't need to file a partition!" If you were to come to my office with your situation I'd tell you that for a small fraction of the cost of a partition I could draw up a sale agreement and if you could get everyone to sign it we'd list the property. The buyer can worry about the title. And if you can't get everyone to agree on that, then you can be assured that a partition is going to be a long, expensive endeavor for everyone involved. Based on the value of the property and the number of shares, a contested partition action is likely to cost your mother more money than she could expect to make from the sale. If I were in her shoes and those were the options I'd offer to convey my interest via quitclaim deed to anyone willing to pay for drafting and recording fees, and disclaim any interest from your grandmother's inheritance. It's much easier that way.

Sounds like @ToaKraka needs to consult with the Crusader Kings community, all of whom are domain experts in dealing with the problems arising from gavelkind/partition succession. I'm not saying he should plot the murder of his relatives so that they aren't in the way of his demesne consolidation... but I'm not saying he shouldn't do that, either.

I do have a lot of advice here generally (ultimogeniture is much better) but in my analysis our colleague seems to have inherited a more or less intractable problem. Should have thought of this generations ago.

In any case his position can probably be improved by invading Brittany, and provided he hasn't pissed the Jews off recently they should be good for a loan.

Now you have me curious. Why ultimogeniture over primogeniture? Obviously anything is better than gavelkind, but I can't say I've ever had a reason to prefer one heir over another to be the one who inherits.

Two main reasons.

The obvious one is that with ultimogeniture you get longer reigns, since your heir is younger when you die. Since a lot of the game is re-consolidating after succession, this helps a lot.

But the more interesting and admittedly gamey angle is that with primogeniture you're more or less stuck with your first child as your heir, which is quite the roll of the dice, whereas with ultimogeniture you can just keep having kids until you get a good one, then stop. So not only is your next ruler going to have a long reign but he's also going to be a strong attractive genius. Or something in that direction, at least.

Main downside is that if you die early or keep having kids well into old age, he'll have to deal with a regent and, possibly, jealous older brothers, but in practice this isn't too hard to manage and is well worth the hassle.

Unfortunately, I am an Insightful Thinker, not an Elusive Shadow.

It's all right. You can hire a spymaster for that!

At this point you may be thinking: "My family gets along."

LOL.

Based on the value of the property and the number of shares, a contested partition action is likely to cost your mother more money than she could expect to make from the sale.

I will temper my pestering of her accordingly.

I finished the recently released DCC book and it was by far the weakest yet.

The narration was top notch as always but the actual book was boring. I found myself zoning out frequently but there were like two moments in the book that were interesting (the start of one races and what happened at the very end).

It felt like the book lacked stakes and the plot and the solutions to the issues presented in the plot were not legible to the reader and things came off as mostly random shit happening and Deus ex machina rather than the characters making clever decisions with the resources they have available. The author relies a lot on not telling the audience what the characters are planning which is both profoundly unsatisfying and no longer justified by the narrative.

This book should probably have been condensed down to a few chapters of breakneck introduction to the next part of the story rather than be dragged out to an entire book. There wasn't really anything happening, no plot, no character development and no character power progression.

At this point I'm barely even interested in the next book but given the stakes set up at the end it could be interesting, but that depends on things actually progressing and the plot not feeling like Deus ex machina.

So prior to 8 coming out I reread 1-5 and 7. I think the loss of Katia really shows. He's done all the main character development and exploration for Carl and Donut, and the only other deep character is resolved. He can claim "Imani is the heart of the group" "Louis is the heart of the group" but at the end of the day those aren't statements he's emotionally invested me in. I also think we've lost a lot to our Heros Journey, in that at this point in the journey we can't be relying on the old wise man (Mordecai) anymore, and he was a good character! I didn't hate the race premise like the cards, but there just wasn't real emotional core this time. It takes a lot to top books 5 and 7 and this just wasn't it. I think this should be wrapped up with book 9 rather than dragging it out two more novels.

Agreed, for me, it still had a few great moments, but as an individual novel it's not much. The tone was a little too crapsack/gritty, there was negligible character and relationship development, and the majority of the book was preoccupied with side quests and meta level exposition that took too much away from the main plot of the novel itself, stretching it too thin and making it feel forced. I think Dinniman is definitely aware that this is a Thing that is happening with his series, as he said something to the effect that he understood how authors got bogged down in their own works in the afterword, which of course immediately made me think of ASOIAF, (though it would have easily been just as applicable for other sprawling series like, say WoT,) but it's clear that the world that he's building took precedence in this particular book and the characters were just along for the ride.

I've written one novel, about 100k words, with only two major characters and even within that I got about 85% of the way done and then took twice as long to finish it, because connecting everything seamlessly is very hard work and intractable dilemmas pop up everywhere. Can't imagine doing a whole series.

Congratulations on getting that far! I think the best I've done is halfway so far, and that's been over a decade now. I have a new idea brewing, but IDK if it'll ever amount to more than a few chapters because despite telling myself to write first, edit later, I can't even write more than a few sentences at a time without going back and tweaking something. Sadly, that's a significant improvement from my worst!

I think he's painted himself into a bit of a corner, from a storytelling perspective. He's fallen into a pattern that's common in sci-fi and fantasy authors, where in the stakes must rise in each book. They see that readers like a thing, then try to do more of it. I get it on some level - as a writer you want to give the audience what they want. On the other hand, it's not sustainable. Imagine a version of the Odyssey where Odysseus had to personally kick Poseidon in the balls before he made it home.

This book feels like a conscious attempt by Dinniman to scale things back before the escalation reaches the point where he can't manage it anymore. I don't know if I enjoyed it much as a reader, but I think I see the reasoning.

Yep. Specifically, the tension between Carl trying to save everyone in a dungeon where each level is supposed to get progressively more difficult and kill many more crawlers was always going to come to a head, and Dinniman did manage to get the majority of the crawlers out of the picture moving forward, but largely at the expense of the novel itself. The underlying problem as a reader is that we never met most of those crawlers in the first place, and so we have zero investment in them as individual characters, and regardless of how much we don't want the generic crawlers to suffer and die, it's not enough of a hook to hang the meat of a novel on, so we're left to vaguely hope that the last two novels can get back to the good stuff while slogging through the necessary resolution of that particular longstanding point of tension in the overall meta.

I was filling out a form last night which asked for some demographic information about me.

  • Sex:
    • Male
    • Female
    • Intersex
    • Prefer not to say
    • Not known

???

Well, are you going to keep us in suspense which you ticked?

I'd prefer not to say. ;)

Is this a form that might plausibly be filled out by a social worker on someone's behalf, while they aren't present?

Definitely not.

Defensive measure against the crazies. It's easier to put a couple more lines in the form than to fend off a never-ending stream of offended individuals with a lot of free time (they always have a lot of free time) and zero common sense (they always have zero common sense). What a time to live in.

I thought of that, but I really cannot imagine how that isn't already adequately covered by "prefer not to say".

It's for the AI agents filling out the form?

It’s possible (until puberty, alternatively one can be extremely stupid)

If we don't collect the data we'll never understand the statistical sigificance of people who don't know their own sex.

I'm reminded of some sort of social justice guideline for gender inclusivity in forms that I read in the mid 2010s that said that it was a harmful bias or something to imply that there was only a finite number of genders. This, of course, is a statement of fact that there exists at least one human who has infinite genders, since there are only a finite number of humans who exist, and if each one only has a finite number of genders, then the number of genders is, at most, the sum of products of only finite numbers, which is also finite. I'm not sure if I've run into this mythical being yet, though there have been candidates.

Well, there could be an infinite number of potential genders, though not all of them yet instantiated. If genders can be generated on-demand (which as I understand is a basic premise of gender theory) then a simple diagonal procedure makes it not only infinite, but potentially uncountable number of genders. The question whether the cardinality of gender set is larger than the cardinality of continuum is unclear - I think there's a combined math-gender-theory PhD lurking in there somewhere.

This, of course, is a statement of fact that there exists at least one human who has infinite genders, since there are only a finite number of humans who exist, and if each one only has a finite number of genders, then the number of genders is, at most, the sum of products of only finite numbers, which is also finite.

Have you considered that people can change their gender arbitrarily often? And that genders don't need to be instantiated in a human to exist, because they exist in the realm of platonic forms until people discover them? You chud.

Fair point on the chuddiness and the lack of requirement of instantiation. That's a level of postmodernism than even I thought possible.

But for the other point, there's arbitrarily often and there's arbitrarily often. Given the limits of biology, I don't think it's possible for a human to change genders in a literally infinitely small amount of time, and, as such, however often a human were to change their/xir/zir/etc gender in their/xir/zir/etc finite lifespan, it would only sum up to a finite number. As such, all that does is to have another finite number to be multiplied by, which means the result is still finite.

Government trap for the Ayys.

You know how some individuals have a certain silhoutte and hairstyle that makes it hard to tell? Maybe that happens in the mirror too sometimes.

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