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PaperclipPerfector  5hr ago (text post)   176 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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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?

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

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.

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 race 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.

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 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

???

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.

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.

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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