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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   2167 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 31, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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When a gay couple has a baby, how rude is it to ask which one is the biological parent?

Depends heavily on the couple and your relationship to them, along with the question you ask. A rando is going to feel like oblivious or even like an attack; a distant coworker or friend-of-friend is going to seem invasive and maybe clueless; and close friend, happy family, or long-time near coworker I’d expect all but the most cautious to find just awkward rather the mean… but it even then, there’s polite forms and less polite forms.

I’ll start with the caveat that for gay men, they might not know. There are some pragmatic arguments for certainty, but there’s social and relationship arguments for specifically obfuscating it even from yourself.

For most of the gay guys who get into surrogacy, be aware that ‘bio dad’ is entirely different a question than who’s the ‘real father’. Even for couples who did only use one semen source or where the parentage is going to be obvious, both guys are still dads, and that’s an important part of the mental framework. Anything that scrapes it is going to be much more unpleasant or unintentionally cruel than just the awkward normie question of ‘how they decided the genetic donor’.

Under that, be aware you’re asking about people’s reproductive lives. There’s a joke in straight comedy that congratulating a guy on his wife’s pregnancy is just a less crude way of brofisting and saying ‘nice creampie’. You’re not quite doing the same thing, because jerking off into a jar (usually) not part of their sex lives, but it’s still not something you should ask in a crowded space, in mixed company, in a business environment, or in front of kids, no matter how clinical you name it.

And the answer might well be either “none of your business” or two proud gay guys who have way more info than you wanted to know.

For lesbians it’s a little easier. Asking who carried isn’t actually the same thing as who is the biological mom, since lesbian ova transfer is a thing, but it’s a lot less loaded a question. Still not something I would ask random strangers at a Pride event, though.

… and I’ll also caveat that even today, a nonzero part of gay and lesbian couples with kids have them from past heterosexual relationships, or adopted the kid. So be aware that the answer could well be ‘neither’, or an entirely different minefield than the expected one.

I think it depends how phrase it and how well you know the couple. Maybe don’t say it like “So, whose sperm was it?” when you’re holding the baby.

Is there a reason you want to know though?

Is there a reason you want to know though?

What a weird question. Child legitimacy and family lineage has followed us around for millennia fueling scandal and intrigue. I mean, this hypothetical child will be born a bastard. Taking an unnatural approach such as two men bringing in a child to the household is bound to cause tensions in a culture that has only recently begun insisting this is perfectly okay.

Lots of things have followed us around for just as long. Doesn’t mean asking about them is reasonable.

“Hey, is your daughter a virgin?”

“How do you feel about your foreskin?”

“But can you prove you were born a free man?”

Are we talking about the reasonableness of asking or reasonableness of wanting to know? Am I to write a full defense of curiosity per se? Are we going to pretend that these social dynamics were wholly arbitrary figments of a stupider, worldwide people?

how rude is it to ask

I figured we were talking about the gap between curiosity and need-to-know. I’m not going to begrudge anyone the former.

I mean, this hypothetical child will be born a bastard.

A troublesome prospect if the child wants to inherit his noble father’s land and title. But AFAIK the adoptive parents are what matters legally so if the gay couple is married, I don’t think it counts as a “child out of wedlock”.

Although does anybody care about this in any developed western country? My parents weren’t married and that’s the case for >50% of children where I live. Nobody will seriously use the word “bastard” in that way unless they’re a medieval history enthusiast.

Taking an unnatural approach such as two men bringing in a child to the household is bound to cause tensions in a culture that has only recently begun insisting this is perfectly okay.

I think we’re a bit past the point of worrying about what’s natural and what’s unnatural in our hyper connected post industrial society where we’re utterly reliant on thinking rocks. Homosexual penguin couples have adopted and raised chicks (although eventually divorced), so if anything gay adoption is more natural than antibiotics and social media.

I don't see it as being about capital L legitimacy or anything like that, more about how to engage in normal observations about stuff like how a kid takes after their parents. Nobody particularly cares whether a kid has one parent's nose or whatever (apart from their parents, obviously), but those aspects still represent and embody small L lineage and legitimacy.

With straight parents the natural assumption is that they are the biological parents and so there's no question to ask, and explicitly asking who the "real" parent is would be liable to start a fight. With a gay couple it's a natural assumption that at least one of them isn't the biological parent for obvious reasons, and as such it's natural to be curious which one is. But it's usually rude to ask, hence OP's question of just how rude it would be.

If you think this is weird did you know in Iceland, citizens use a dating app that lets them know if they’re related to the person they’re seeing, out of fears of incest? It’s due to the extreme homogeneity of the population, but there’s a twist to it. There was a study specifically on the Icelandic population that showed that the healthiest and most reproductively successful couples there are third and fourth cousins (which only share < 1% of the same genetic makeup).

One argument in support of that reproductive logic is it may reduce a woman's chance of having a miscarriage that’s caused by immunological incompatibility between a mother and her child. Some individuals have a Rhesus factor on the surface of their RBC’s during a second pregnancy and she and the fetus could have incompatible blood cells (which triggers the mother's immune system to treat the fetus as a foreign intruder, causing a miscarriage.).

Still though. The idea is gross. There are a lot of very attractive women in my extended family. I have a cousin in my family who’s a gorgeous girl and we’ve been tight ever since we were growing up, but she was adopted at birth. Even then the idea is disgusting to me.

I have a cousin in my family who’s a gorgeous girl and we’ve been tight ever since we were growing up, but she was adopted at birth. Even then the idea is disgusting to me.

I think being close since childhood is the factor here? That’s definitely how the disgust evolved, a fourth cousin you only met as an adult is not going to cause the same response as an adoptive sibling.

Pretty much. We knew she was adopted from a very early age and so did she. My extended family is massive and spread throughout the whole US, with concentrations in certain pockets of the country. So whenever there was some kind of get together, we’d all balkanize and split into camps, and we’d whisper and talk “who the people over there by the lake are,” or “who are the kids on the back patio?,” because we didn’t know who these other family members were.

A lot of times the older cousins and adults introduced us all to each other and we became very friendly and open. Large groups of us would run to my grandfather’s game room down the hall or we’d go down to the basement and we’d all play pool or football outside. One time though, one of my very distant cousins comes up to me and goes “Hey, who’s that girl over there?” (Referring to her.) I tell him who she was and he goes, “She may be family, but if I don’t know her, it don’t count right?”

a fourth cousin you only met as an adult is not going to cause the same response as an adoptive sibling.

I think you got carried away with the example here. I'm pretty sure even explicit anti-cousin-marriage laws/norms don't prohibit relations between fourth cousins.

A troublesome prospect if the child wants to inherit his noble father’s land and title.

Genuinely funny, haha.

Were you feigning confusion so that you could start talking about gay penguins? You do remember a time when homosexual couple were controversial…right? Are you 9 years old?

It’s perfectly intuitive why someone would be curious about another’s parents if it were obvious both biological ones weren’t around. To the extent it’s not intuitive to you, you’ve been trained to forget.

You do remember a time when homosexual couple were controversial…right? Are you 9 years old?

Actually that’s a very good point. I’m not 9 years old but I was around that age when gay marriage was legalised where I live, and I genuinely don’t remember gay couples being controversial unless someone was talking about the Middle East or the Bible Belt.

Are you a millennial or from a more conservative region? This definitely could be a generational divide thing.

Were you feigning confusion so that you could start talking about gay penguins?

The gay penguins came later, I was mostly trying to say that homosexuality and gay adoption is a lot more natural than all the man made horrors/wonders beyond our comprehension that we’ve invented. A good portion of the population literally wastes hours every day watching AI hallucinated videos in a borderline trance, and a surprisingly large minority has a sycophantic chatbot as their only friend and even lover.

Also the penguins were bi IIRC. Even penguins suffer from bi erasure, alas.

The thought was prompted by seeing public figures on Twitter who everyone here knows posting their new arrivals and being oddly consumed by the thought that I don't even know if it's their real child.

I figure that I ought to sort this out before I find myself in such a situation IRL.

We want to register for an encyclopedia. Which encyclopedias do the esteemed autists of the Motte recommend?

What are your goals? Do you want a physical repository of information as insurance against AI sloppification or some kind of catastrophe? Do you want an old-fashioned collector's item with beautiful binding and illustrations to put in your home library? Do you want something to assist with your children's education? Do you want a snapshot of what the world looked like at a particular point in time? You're obviously looking for something more than just general reference information, which can be obtained much more efficiently online.

For most applications, I'd probably recommend a full edition of Britannica from 20 or so years ago: recent enough that most of the information is still good, but old enough to be before the collapse of traditional publishing and all the corner cutting that led to. The older the edition, the higher quality the physical books, illustrations, etc. are likely to be. If you want something current, the World Book is (I think) the only general reference encyclopedia still publishing a print edition every year, so you really don't have many options unless you're interested in something like The Book, which you probably saw youtube or instagram ads for last year, but that's more of a coffee table book than a true encyclopedia.

I definitely don't want current - goal is a reference book for kids so they don't have to go in the Internet to learn everything. I'm fine with it being a bit outdated. The Brittanica seems like a good choice yeah.

I grew up with a ~20 yr old classroom set of Brittanica and it was awesome. The volumes were large and full of pictures and easy explanations. My family would randomly look things up. And it was useful even when out of date - e.g. my folks would have us look up the names of the continents at the library and we could discuss why knowledge changes over time.

Yesterday my daughter asked if we really needed a dead tree dictionary, and if I insisted we did did we really need both a Websters and an Oxford English dictionary. (In her defense, dyslexia makes using dictionaries particularly challenging.)

We plan to limit our kid's internet time so encylopedias are important!

In that case, you can find some great deals at estate sales. Nobody wants to lug around 120 pounds worth of outdated reference material, and local libraries won't take them, so you can get entire like-new collections for a fraction of what you'd pay online. Probably for free if you bring your kid.

I have yet to see a set in my cruises of estate sales. Clearly, that means they’re in high demand.

Though if he brings his kid, there’s an elevated risk of acquiring kitcsh.

Craigslist and facebook marketplace have kind of ruined the fun of thrifting, garage sales, etc, it's true. Someone has usually already gone through and grabbed all the good stuff for resale before you even get there.

And even if it's not the one that answers your question, there's apparently one edition of the Britannica that's considered peak. Does anyone remember which it is?

You're probably thinking of the 11th edition, which is notable for being a high point of scholarship, but also because, having come out in 1911, it was the last edition[1] to enter the American public domain before the Mickey Mouse Protection Act froze copyright for 20 years. As a result, it left a deep impact in popular culture, such as forming the initial basis of many Wikipedia articles and being featured in Eric Flint's 1632 series[2].

When in doubt--"look it up" in the Encyclopedia Britannica; the only book, except the Bible, which has followed the Anglo-Saxon around the world.

[1] Well, kind of. The 12th edition came out in 1922, just in time to avoid getting caught in the freeze. However, it consisted of three volumes supplementing the 11th (primarily with articles about World War I), rather than a whole new edition.

[2] From 1634: The Baltic War by Eric Flint & David Weber:

In retrospect, Eddie knew he was lucky that he hadn't fallen afoul of the king's temper much sooner. He'd known that Christian IV had a complete edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in his possession, since the king bragged about it constantly. But Eddie had assumed that since the king of Denmark had spent a small fortune to get his hands on a copy of the entire Britannica, he'd had enough sense to get the great 1911 edition, which was by far the most useful one for down-timers.

What an idiot he'd been! With Christian's obsession with gadgetry and all things modern, Eddie should have realized the Danish king would have insisted on the most recent edition in Grantville. That was the 1982 edition, if he remembered correctly.

Which, of course—once someone checked—had plenty of references to the various individuals that Eddie had mentioned in his sundry lies to the king. At the time, especially with his brain pickled in alcohol half the time since the king insisted he carouse with him, Eddie had thought he'd been very clever.

Ah, yes, Your Majesty, we have superb armaments technicians. The best are probably Walt Disney, Harpo Marx, and Clint Eastwood.

Oh, and by far the best gunsmith is Elvis Presley.

And from 1634: The Bavarian Crisis by Eric Flint & Virginia DeMarce:

Encyclopedias, Duke Albrecht thought, the wondrous encyclopedias.

If the future had learned nothing else from the Jesuits, he mused wryly, it had learned the Art of Extraction that they taught so painstakingly to their students—how to go through a nearly unmanageable body of material, reduce it to its essence, and take notes with marginal indices that enabled one to find the needed reference again without immense waste of time. The books of the up-timers were all very well, but Father Contzen had complained to him more than once that finding something in them was like searching for a needle in a haystack. Which book might have it, if, indeed, any book had it at all? But the encyclopedias, all of them: alphabetically arranged, with cross references at the end of one article indicating where the researcher could find related material in the compendium. Not just the great one, the 1911 Britannica, which they guarded so carefully, but all of them—the later Britannica editions, the World Book and Americana, Columbia, and Funk and Wagnalls, old and new, large and small. Some more useful than others, but each one a treasure trove.

Duke Albrecht had been told that Father Kircher devoted all the time that he could spare to encyclopedias. But more, there were a half dozen other young Jesuits, five of them from the English College and thus able to handle the language more effectively, whom the order was subsidizing to spend their days sitting in Grantville's libraries. Once they translated their valuable discoveries into Latin, of course, the information was available to every man of learning in Europe.

I believe you're thinking of the 11th edition from 1911, the last edition produced before World War I. However I've also heard that the 14th edition from 1929 is held in esteem as the true peak of the old ways before the Depression and WWII changed everything again.

I know that 14th edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is considered peak, but it's not quite an encyclopedia (but should still be part of every household!)

And? Idk I would love and answer here.

I can't find any good community things about this. Could be the 13th? That's got things like Houdini writing about "Conjuring", Marconi writing about wireless telegraphy, etc:

The contributors included Niels Bohr (“Atom”), Marie and Irène Curie (“Radium”), Albert Einstein (“Space-Time”), Henry Ford (“Mass Production”), Sigmund Freud (“Psycho-analysis”), George Bernard Shaw (“Socialism: Principles and Outlook”), and Leon Trotsky (“Lenin”).

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Encyclopaedia-Britannica-English-language-reference-work/Thirteenth-edition

So, what are you reading?

I'm finished with Sayers' Whose Body. Lord Whimsey was great, and it had enough intensity at times to grab my interest. I feel like the confrontation was a missed opportunity, given the convergence of themes which was implicit in the scene. A good read nevertheless.

Picking up Churchill's Savrola, because it has occurred to me that I've read more Hitler and Stalin than Churchill.

Finished my Worm reread. Incredibly good. Now I'm on The Story of Philosophy by Durant.

Story of Civilization I loved growing up. It was one of my first ‘broad sweep’ reads of history. The way him and Ariel wrote is so superficial without sacrificing depth, that type of literary style I have a great affinity for, and I actually re-read The Lessons of History maybe little more than half a year ago. Their work is now being made into audio format and might have finally completed. I bought the audio CD of Our Oriental Heritage 5 years ago(?) or so.

That's awesome! Yeah I wanted to read this one as a sort of tester, if I really like it I'll move on to the big one.

I've heard that Worm is obscenely long. How long did it take you to read, roughly?

a week and a half to two weeks for me. It ate up pretty much all my free time over that span, though.

Took me about a week and a half. It's only 7.7k pages, about the size of a reasonably dense epic fantasy series. Not crazy at all, and imo there is actually quite little filler. If anything the ending arcs go by TOO fast and there's too much action packed in them!!

Then again I'm a pretty obsessive reader and this stint especially was pretty intense. Would prolly take me a few weeks in a more 'normal' time frame.

I've heard that Worm is obscenely long.

To be a bit more specific, the word count is 1.7 million.

You replied to the wrong comment.

It's that kind of morning.

I’m halfway through A Fire Upon The Deep but recently I had an urge to re-read Rendezvous With Rama but no longer have an on-hand copy of it. I’ll probably just go Kindle on my phone.

… it has occurred to me that I've read more Hitler and Stalin than Churchill.

Haven’t we all. Lol. Have you read any of Steve Kotkin’s volumes on Stalin? I read Paradoxes of Power a few years back and really liked it, and his writing style. I enjoyed it more than Court of the Red Tsar by Montifiore.

Finishing up Chuck Klosterman's Football, which isn't so much a book about football as a series of essays about the phenomenon of American football as it exists in 2026. Most of these are at least somewhat controversial: The fact that the game only has eleven minutes of action counterintuitively is what makes it ideal for television, that Jim Thorpe is actually the greatest player of all time, a brief diversion on how the US customary system is superior to metric. The assertion that received the most press during the book tour was that football as the country's most popular sport would end sometime within the next fifty years, and nobody would notice or care.

I've often said that I generally don't like books written by journalists, but Klosterman is an exception, mainly because he knows how to write a book that doesn't come across as a magazine article. His worst books are the anthologies that include a combination of new and previously released material, and it's always clear what the new material is, because he's writing about theoretical concepts that wouldn't make sense in most magazines.

The best book about football is The League, which is also by a journalist but reads as if it were written by a historian. While Football is ultimately too lightweight to reach that height, they share the one singular virtue that all great nonfiction writing has—the ability to interest the reader in a subject they didn't expect to find interesting. I've read a ton of books about hockey and they were all obviously written for someone who was already into hockey . Klosterman is primarily known as a music writer who almost apologized every time he writes about sports, so while I'm obviously already inclined to read a book about football, it's clear that he's aiming for a broader audience, as one of the book's themes is that football is so pervasive in American culture that nobody can avoid its influence, as even not liking it says something about who you are. The main reason The League is better is because its subject, the machinations of NFL ownership in the 1970s and 1980s, is so esoteric that most football fans probably aren't interested in 800 pages on it, but the story he tells is so intriguing that it obviously doesn't matter if anyone was predisposed to read the book.

The only other football book I would say is better is Pat Kirwan's Keep Your Eye Off the Ball, which is an in-depth look at how the game is actually played. Unlike the other two books, the only person who could live it is someone who is so into the game that they want to learn all the esoteric stuff that allows one to watch the game not like a fan but like a coach (the second edition was spiral bound and contained extra margin space for notes, a feature included by popular request). It has the position it does because the only conclusion one can draw after reading it is that 95% of fans and sports journalists simply do not know what they're talking about. It's the kind of thing you can't unsee and completely changes your relationship with the sport. It's no surprise that Kirwan's radio show is one of the few I can enjoy listening to.

most popular sport would end sometime within the next fifty years, and nobody would notice or care.

I think most of our sports will eventually go that way. Football has the disadvantage of being expensive to play, expensive to attend, and thus really only works as a TV show. Add in that there are more commercials than playing time and that really nothing much matters between the 35-40 yard lines of the respective teams, and you have a problem.

Baseball will probably go first, as much as I like the sport. The games are too long for TV and Internet, especially when you have innings of play where nobody does anything. When you need to put a guy on base to shorten the game in extra innings, you have a problem, namely that your game is long enough and boring enough that overtime is a problem for you.

While Football is ultimately too lightweight to reach that height, they share the one singular virtue that all great nonfiction writing has—the ability to interest the reader in a subject they didn't expect to find interesting.

I felt just this way about Mark Bowden's Bringing the Heat, speaking of football.

Do you have an opinion on John McPhee? Levels of the Game did this for tennis. On the other hand, I’d say it still has magazine-voice. His geology books didn’t come across that way at all, though.

I've read a ton of books about hockey and they were all obviously written for someone who was already into hockey.

Bit of a digression on this point but your opinion on Klosterman is exactly why I love Isaac Asimov’s non-fiction so much; even more than his science fiction. He managed to turn my interest to topics other people always kept it away from. Hockey is actually where I got my handle. When I was a kid I hated physical sports. I was very good at playing it, I just never had an interest in it. Not out of an intrinsic dislike but was never properly acquainted with it by someone who could relate it to me, and it wasn’t until I was a teenager when that began to change and I’d play sports outside frequently with family, friends and neighbor kids across the street.

Anyway, one day we went to play Basketball on the black top at a church very close to where I lived. When we got there there were a bunch of kids playing street hockey. They asked if we wanted to play (we never tried it before), but we agreed. I played goaltender (and was pretty good). One of the kids randomly remarked at one point, “You play like Tretiak.” I had no idea what he was talking about and he asked if I ever watched the Disney movie Miracle (the one where the US hockey team defeated the Soviets) and I said no. Later we watched it and he goes, “You play really good defense like that guy (Vladislav Tretiak).” And among my friends and neighborhood kids, it stuck ever since. To this day, they will still call me “Tre,” or “Tret” when they see me. There’s only one single person I’ve ever met in my entire life who when he heard what others called me he looked at me and said “Hockey?” I had one of the biggest grins when he said that. He knew the reference.

I have a horrible habit of reading a book 2/3rd of the way through and then setting it off to the side to read another, but I finally got around to finishing Laurence Gonzales's 'Deep Survival'(recommended to me by a fanfic, of all things).

It's certainly an easy read, and informative, with a wide plethora of examples. I do find it interesting that amoung the 'ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' advice to stay out a situation where you need to survive can basically be boiled down to 1) Always assume ignorance, 2) Trust your gut, and 3) don't give in to peer pressure/mob rule.

I do recommend it, if people are curious about such things.

Dead World: Convergence book 6 by Craig Alanson. Other than being thoroughly annoyed by the, bad habit he's picked up of, placing out of place commas, in his sentence structure and much of his dialogue, I'm enjoying it thus far.

I enjoyed it. However in the audiobook RC Bray did the Duke voice for Mr Boots a couple of times, which was a bit annoying.

Alanson is a great story teller, he's especially good with the fun and witty banter between the main character and the foil of the moment, but his twists and turns can be great as well. My older brother actually introduced him to me because I had talked about how I was reading a lot of military themed sci-fi, enough that Columbus Day sounded like a dozen other novels I had read and I wasn't really that into reading yet another one, but I eventually got around to it, and whoa did that ever go six different kinds of sideways fast, and I've been enjoying the ride ever since!

What else have you enjoyed? I'm always working on adding to my backlog.

Good question! With my usual caveat that my bar for decent reads is not very high, the answer for the past couple of years, at least, has been way too much LitRPG, though urban fantasy (when done right) is a perennial favorite, as is old-school sci-fi and fantasy in general. If you're looking for a specific genre, I can talk more specifically about what I've been reading in those departments, but without knowing any more detail, recent reads that I've enjoyed would be the Unbound series by Nicoli Gonnella (LitRPG), the Noobtown series by Ryan Rimmel (humor/LitRPG), The Assembly series by Steve McHugh (Urban Fantasy/Vampires), the Book of the Dead series by RinoZ (LitRPG/necromancer), absolutely everything by Nathan Lowell (all Slice-of-Life/Setting Things Right, mostly merchant marines in space), the He Who Fights With Monsters series by Shirtaloon (LitRPG), The Hollows series by Kim Harrison (Urban Fantasy), and of course, my only must-read author, The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, which is also urban fantasy.

Started reading Artemis by Andy Weir, also known for the Martian. I'm about 60% through, and I like it quite well so far. The Sci-Fi seems pretty hard so far - all of the technology and systems seem reasonable by current-day or near-future tech and physics. If anything is a bit implausible, it's the politics - a Moon colony formed by a space industry based out of Kenya, just based on the government deciding to let rocket companies do what they feel like with minimal taxes and regulations? And becoming sufficiently populous to resemble a real city with hardly any real government at all? Seems like a bit much of a Libertarian pipe-dream to me. The story is engaging and keeps me wanting to read more though. It does lean a bit hard on the trope of desperately poor but plucky young girl saves the world through daring and determination, but I'll allow it. I might have more to say when I finish it, but I doubt it - Weir's books so far seem to be more about telling a pretty good if somewhat predictable story with some Sci-Fi elements, not so much surprising plot twists and daring societal commentary.

If anything is a bit implausible, it's the politics - a Moon colony formed by a space industry based out of Kenya, just based on the government deciding to let rocket companies do what they feel like with minimal taxes and regulations? And becoming sufficiently populous to resemble a real city with hardly any real government at all? Seems like a bit much of a Libertarian pipe-dream to me.

Have you read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein? Similar libertarian themes.

Yeah, I've read it, it's been a while though.

Personally, I think the first space colony is likely to be a stiflingly regulated affair populated only by people the supporting state considers to be scrupulously rule-following good boys and girls. Maybe possibly the tenth might be a little more frontier-like.

I haven't red a ton of Heinlein, but I got the impression that the politics of his books vary widely over a bunch of axes. Like he's trying to explore or feel out a variety of viewpoints rather than jamming any one particular one down everyone's throat.

He was a Libertarian Socialist himself. Save for his political explorations in Starship Troopers.

I’ve read, possibly on the old SSC comments, an argument that Heinlein covered a ridiculous diversity of societies. No pun intended. Troopers wasn’t the exception so much as another instance of his speculative style. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar enough with his work to give a full inventory. Friday was pretty lib-soc.

Yeah, I really liked most of his work as a kid and not surprisingly was receptive to libertarianism when I came across it more formally later in life. Looking back, he did seem to consider space as a new frontier where freedom was maximised.

On Monday evening I finished The Matriarch. Not the sort of thing I'd usually read, and the narrative was a bit digressive and all over the place, but I found it engaging enough to read it to the end. Interesting, 7/10. Curiously, my edition states it was first published in the fifties, but it's primarily set in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Given that it's a family drama following several generations of European Jews, I interpreted it in a wistful light, with the author looking back from a post-WWII perspective on a more optimistic era in which Jewish integration among European Gentiles seemed a live possibility. But consulting the author's Wikipedia page, it seems it was actually published in the mid-twenties, and that made me sad: it was written by a woman who had no idea how bad things were going to get for Jews.

The same day, my copy of INCEL by Arx-Han arrived in the post. It was unusually warm and sunny on Monday, so after work I spent a few hours sitting in the park reading. By Wednesday evening I'd finished the book, and I have thoughts.

I first encountered Arx-Han when I stumbled across his Substack, specifically an article called "The problem with modern fiction is that most writers lack artistic courage". In the article, he argued that the current generation of Anglophone novelists are cowardly, systematically refusing to articulate uncomfortable truths that might land them in hot water on social media. Specifically, he took Tony Tulathimutte to task for pulling his punches throughout his second book, Rejection. I was under the impression he was setting himself up in opposition to Tulathimutte: "unlike Tony, I'm telling it like it is, saying the things the establishment doesn't want to hear, so much so that I had to go the self-publishing route because no traditional publisher can handle the truth!" This unavoidably coloured my expectations of INCEL going into it. Reading the post again, I'm surprised to find that I'd remembered it incorrectly, and he openly cops to being even more of a coward than Tulathimutte.

And he's right. If INCEL was meant to be a more daring and honest take on similar subject matter as that tackled by Tulathimutte, it must be judged a failure.

Tulathimutte's "The Feminist" was a brave story, presenting an incel character as sympathetic, three-dimensional and capable of articulating his worldview in detail. The most daring thing about it was how viciously and relentlessly it skewered the stock piece of advice inevitably offered to sexually frustrated men by feminist women: "if you can't get laid, it means you don't Respecc Wimmen enough". Sure, Tulathimutte lost his nerve at the end by having his protagonist jump off the slippery slope, but up until that point you'd be hard pressed to find a better example this century of a fiction writer arguing that some sexually frustrated men really do have legitimate grievances and aren't just entitled manchildren. Braver still was Tony writing the story in such a way that it could easily be taken as (semi-)autobiographical, with its unnamed, bookish protagonist who's implied to be a Thai-American (so of course when it came time to republish the story as part of Rejection, Tony lost his nerve and retconned the character into being a white guy named Craig). But in its original incarnation, "The Feminist" was genuinely daring.

(See also Will, one of the four protagonists of Tulathimutte's debut Private Citizens who is Thai-American and a perverted pornsick loser, and probably the least sympathetic of the four. Again, that takes a certain amount of guts.)

Now compare the unnamed protagonist of INCEL. Unlike Arx-Han, he's a white American, and in his internal monologues constantly rants about his superior genetic heritage relative to people of other ethnic backgrounds. Very little attempt is made to make him seem like a real person, and he's more of a one-dimensional caricature. Essentially no effort is made to make the reader sympathise with him: per the laboured, obligatory allusions to Fight Club and American Psycho, we know from the outset we are reading a novel from the perspective of a fundamentally unlikeable character. (Aside from Tulathimutte's oeuvre, the work it most reminded me of was, for some reason, the Maniac remake starring Elijah Wood.) The novel's ostensible premise ("if I can't get laid by my 23rd birthday, I'm going to commit suicide by cop PoC: locate the biggest black guy I can find, and call him The Gamer Word until he beats me to death") is underdeveloped to the point of feeling like anti-woke clickbait: if Arx-Han had included a countdown at the beginning of each chapter, the device might have had more impact. I can only assume he included this device to lend a sense of narrative momentum to what would otherwise have consisted of a series of largely self-contained vignettes. At no point in the novel did I seriously believe it was going to end with the protagonist's death, and sure enough, the ending is so meek and milquetoast that I felt cheated. The protagonist gets called out on his bullshit by his sister, the sole voice of reason in his life. By treating her as a person and not just a number on a scale from 1-10 who can be manipulated with a flowchart of responses, he finally succeeds in fucking a hot white girl, even if he blows his load too soon. He realises sex isn't all it's cracked up to be and losing his virginity won't magically solve all of his problems. He learns that women aren't all whores, and even attractive women face serious obstacles in their lives. Early on, the protagonist's attempts to approach women consist of him recycling dialogue from (in his opinion) trite romcoms like (500) Days of Summer, but his own character development arc is so pat and conventional that it wouldn't take a lot of tweaking for it to feel entirely at home in a film of that ilk. As Christopher Orr might put it, this novel doesn't even have the conviction of its own malice.

I don't know what Arx-Han would consider a brave and daring artistic statement, but I have a hard time imagining it would amount to "incels are a bunch of privileged, entitled white manbabies who can't get laid because of their reactionary politics and because they think of women as sex objects rather than people. The solution to their problems is to stop being racist and Be More Empathetic". No one in the West would get in trouble for claiming as much. The reason Arx-Han self-published INCEL isn't because it was too daring and subversive for a traditional publisher to touch: this is the work of an aspiring provocateur. Even leaving aside its punch-pulling, this compulsively readable and not particularly long book (less than 300 pages in the edition I read) is crying out for an editor. One chapter of cringe comedy wherein the protagonist cold approaches a girl in public and makes a fool of himself is plenty; by my count, there are at least four. One might have thought such a devotee of Chuck Palahniuk would have internalised the value of economy.

I dunno. I expected more. Even when Arx-Han admitted to being less brave than Tulathimutte, I thought maybe he was being self-deprecating, or holding himself to an unreasonably high standard ("I was brave, but not brave enough"). But he was right on the money: he's less brave than Tulathimutte, less willing to step on progressive pieties, and not as funny, and less concise, and his characters aren't as believable. The poor man's Tulathimutte, alas.

Started on the third book in the Neapolitan quartet.

Personally, I still think INCEL felt more "real" than The Feminist, just because The Incel is using real arguments you see on the internet, whereas The Feminist hides it under cutesy satire ("narrow shoulders"), and even though the ending isn't satisfying, it's both true and also within the very same incel discourse the book is dealing with (whereas The Feminist is, as the title would suggest, much less about actual incels and much more an intra-feminism argument). ARX-HAN's cowardice is in wrapping things up with a neat bow, but he did tie a neat bow.

What I thought was the weakest part of INCEL is that the protagonist is the least interesting part of the book. He's basically just there narrating what more interesting characters are doing. Felt pretty clear to me that ARX-HAN wanted to write a book about the guy's jacked misanthropic Korean friend and some of the other cast members, but hung it all on the protagonist because that gave it a consistent voice/theme/etc.

Even if you’re cribbing notes off the Internet forums that incels use, you still need to craft a character that is more than just a collection of ripped quotes.

Writing personal growth and change is a big challenge for a lot of modern indie authors. Some of them, like ARX-HAN and Jordan Castro, just... don't really do it. Others try too hard, like Madeline Cash's Earth Angel (her short stories are very good). I was impressed by Juan Ecchi's Dryback and Justin Lee's A Prisoner's Cinema, in that respect, and you can also 100% write stories that don't need it, like Andrew Edwards' Crowbar, if what the characters are doing is interesting enough. Probably the hardest thing to pull off is DFW's "the hero of non-action"; I think the only book in this category I've seen do that really well is John King Spezio's Something of the Springtime.

In your experience what percentage of "[more/better] communication" as a diagnosis or remedy in a social context is an effective or appropriate one? I think it's uncommon these days.

  • Perceived or real problem occurs
  • Something Must Be Done
  • That something, it is decided by problem seers, problem makers, or decision makers must be more communication. If we communicated more we'd be able to avoid perceived or real problems such as this.

One common example of this phenomena goes something like above. If you're still not picking up what I'm laying down consider the following:

  • The powers that be fuck up, or an individual does, and the people below them are impacted and/or angry. An unstated social negotiation occurs where the people either realize there was a failure in communication, or they are manipulated into accepting more communication as a fix from the powers that be.

"Bob, next time we will communicate fuck ups changes to you in advance which will prevent these types of future fuck ups problems that impact you."*

  • Game developer/Coca-Cola releases unpopular patch/drink, gamers/consumers riot, demands are put forth, reversals are made, and the developer/Coca-Cola issues a press release agreeing that more communication should have been done.

More Communication the platitude, tool, and HR seminar is a lie. In contexts where More Communication is a social lubricant, language to demand conciliatory notions or more respect from the powers that be, why can't we just ask for that? Who decided we should wrap "communication" into such things? Stakes vary between context, but the mechanics of communication are important. Most people are shit at communicating, and even those who hold an unusually innovative communication super power are still shit at communicating with someone competent. We shouldn't be muddying that precise failure up with population level memes.

"Shut the hell up, Bob. We can circle back to this fuck up problem until the cows come home, but are you really going to disagree with moving forward with More Communication?"

Napoleon didn't deploy the More Communication meme after the Battle of Aspern-Essling, did he? Maybe he did. Even so, I maintain that More Communication is too overloaded and watered down. A meme that can mean an apology is in order, the radio failed and no one sent a runner, management sucks, or no one is going to be holding the bag for the latest fuck up-- this must be a warcrime against autists. Whoever made the Communications B.A. what it is has a lot to answer for at the Hague.

I think a lot of the “more/better” thing is that it is often stuff that’s easy to recommend, has few explicit costs, and provides an easy way to avoid blame. TBH it’s a cop out, and really if someone isn’t communicating a concept properly, you can always ask. And second, because the answer is talking about the problem instead of figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it, no accountability happens and thus nothing changes.

There's a genuine tendency to use it as an excuse, in the same way that postmortems sometimes devolve into 'our systems weren't sufficiently hardened against threats'. And there's a worse tendency to use it as a handwave, where genuine disagreements are just thrown away as insufficiently explaining or incompletely persuading people of The One Truth -- this latter option is both common to HR and to a certain browbeating political speaker.

But there is a steelman where a frustrating number of system failures occur despite the information existing, and even being recorded, but not being available or visible to the people who need it. The aviation contexts are the best-known: you get someone helping out and being interrupted half-way through and a few screws get left unturned and then everybody's dead, or where a big gradient in pilot experience leaves a first officer unwilling to challenge a pilot even if there's something clearly wrong. It pops up at smaller scales and dumber directions nonetheless. I've spent three hours in a meeting trying to figure out who owned a specific firewall, and the problem was that half of the people in the meeting didn't think we were even trying to identify the owner, but instead trying to go through the process assuming someone else owned it and they were being consulted about security ramifications. That is a thing that happens, pretty often.

But you can't just motion around More Communication if it also means just assuming people will just agree with you if you shout at them more.

I work with a lot of process engineers and technical program managers. In many ways they are interpreters between the the computer touchers and the MBAs, lawyers, accountants etc. Also work in documentation for customer facing products and services. Poor communication causes the majority of the problems I'm encountering at work right now. Our comms team seemed like one of the most obvious places to replace people with AI. We aren't entirely sure how to do that yet, but they've already fired the people in anticipation. In the meantime software updates continue to roll out on time with zero communication to the users and no mechanism for feedback or problem reporting. In my experience many of our software developers and other tech ICs are more than happy to work hard and long on important projects, but they will have 0 communication with anyone outside their team: exectutives, HR, legal, customers, end users etc. if they can get away with it. They'll document but are generally terrible at writing for any audience other than fellow developers. I think "more communication" as a phrase is almost meaningless though. Its too vague. The volume of communications is not a slider or dial where turning it to the right makes things better. Good comms are clear, timely, digestable to their audience, and surfaced with a forcefulness related to their importance, ie critical comms should be almost impossible for the intended audience to miss.

It might technically be the correct diagnosis but I've never been in a situation where more communication has been the solution.

The issue is almost invariably that management refuses to listen to complaints about some issue and then when shit hits the fan they hit back with the genius solution of "we need to communicate more". No, you need to actually listen more but you won't do that because the time horizon of the thing in question becoming an acute problem is too long for you to risk meaningful personal consequences. You can just move on to a different role/employer and let things implode behind you.

I've seen this both from the perspective one one of the people that is being ignored and as a consultant coming in to make sure it doesn't happen again (it will happen again).

Whenever "we need to communicate more/better" comes up I'm reminded of the final scene in burn after reading.

"We need to communicate better" is the kind of shit you trot out when no-one wants to accept accountability. It's a form of managerial corruption where everyone agrees to look away so that no-one risks getting blamed for the issue at hand or similar things in the future. It's organisational rot in the form of a conspiracy of mutual ignorance and diffused responsibility.

"More Communication" is sometimes code for something one level deeper.

  • The product has to match the end-user's use cases.
  • The project has to use land in a non-disruptive way
  • The limitations have to be understood and planned around (by those impacted, not the creators)

But it can also be used as an object-level good:

  • Evidence of consent has to be gathered
  • Blame has to be shifted
  • People have to be pacified

There's a huge gap between more communication as a means of creating/spreading knowledge and more communication as an end in itself. The phrase "More Communication" is almost always code for the latter in my experience.

I could be an outlier but I thought I learned a decent thing or two from the communication class I took in college, years ago. None of it still strongly translated into direct applicability that I could detect at work or in my personal life, but I did find it useful to apply elsewhere.

One thing I’ve noticed about the Bay Area is because of its population size, density, competitiveness, the quick and hurried nature of things, people here tend to communicate in a fast and concise, “give me only the cliff notes” version of everything. Some of this makes sense, other times it makes me very frustrated dealing with them.

When I walk into a drug store and need to ask the pharmacist about something or I look at the back of the package of an allergy medication, I don’t want to have to have a Ph.D in biochemistry to evaluate your product to know whether it’s going to help with my illness or not. I’m completely happy to hand it off to the marketing department to speak the language of ordinary people and tell me why their product is valuable to address the symptoms I’m experiencing.

On the other hand when someone tries hitting me up to get my opinion on something and they keep cutting me off or telling me I’m over explaining things, they’ll then spend the next half an hour asking 45 follow up questions, like hitting a stoplight after every 2 seconds before hitting the gas again when if you simply shut up and let me finish for 2 damn minutes, maybe, just maybe… all your questions may end up getting addressed without you ever having to ask. Yes, I don’t like it when people drone on anymore than anyone else does, but so few people here have ever perfected the skill of listening, it can be very difficult at times. A lot of times I don’t even bother for that reason.

I’ve also detested those academics who say things like “if you can’t explain it in 5 seconds to a 5 year old, you don’t understand it.” Homie. There are concepts I haven’t been able to understand for my entire life. Same for you. And with so much of human interaction today being trained off social media feeds, I can’t even imagine how agonizing it must be to ask people to read a single page in a book.

I think choosing what and which communication to complete a task is more useful than an academic understanding. As a basic concept for people who would have never considered it as such it's probably good to cram it into the heads of all undergrads.

Bay Area... they’ll then spend the next half an hour asking 45 follow up questions,

Follow-up questions as a KPI for active listening seems perfectly suited for the Bay Area. I wonder if this is an effect of moving away from lectures across education, or if it is more so an annoying compulsion because everyone asks AI or Google anything at any time. Who needs to listen to people with knowledge?

RE: Friday reference. I became concerned after learning they are making another. The new setting is in a gentrified neighborhood which could be funny, or it could be the old, out of touch leads are incapable of making a crass (B)lack comedy without the weight of heavy handed social commentary. One can hope it's only marketing.

I’ve also detested those academics who say things like “if you can’t explain it in 5 seconds to a 5 year old, you don’t understand it.” Homie. There are concepts I haven’t been able to understand for my entire life. Same for you.

If you feel like being mean, ask them: "How long did your education take? That long, huh. Did your professors not understand the material, or are you worse at understanding things than a five-year-old?"

At best, a 5-second summary is a label that well-rounded individuals can use to find what you're talking about. At worse, it's a semantic stopsign that gets them to stop asking questions and fake understanding. It doesn't have enough information to explain anything with any complexity.

What's the worst-sounding foreign accent in English? Right now I think it's Mandarin, but I am open to suggestions.

The worst accents in English are all Anglophone but for non-Anglophone maybe Brazilian.

I feel bad for my relatives now 😭. Curious: what makes it such a bad accent?

It's hard to describe. It's the verbal equivalent of a double pendulum.

Singapore is grating especially because, if you watch old clips, the Chinese elite spoke with a much more English inflection / style until about 40 years ago; Singlish is a relatively recent invention.

I dislike the “international school” accent that wealthy Europeans have speaking English. They think it makes them far superior to their poorer countrymen who speak with more identifiable accents but I disagree - it melds aspects of standard American with a kind of almost Dutch twang. Give me a Tcherman any day. It’s an uncanny valley American. There are a few who cross it and are completely stealth Europeans who sound fully American, but far fewer pass than think they do.

There is a certain charm to Indians when they use bizarre words or antiquated expressions. As far as native accents go, Australians have an annoying attitude tied to their strenuously feigned nonchalance but the accent can be entertaining. The New Zealand accent has a nice melancholy to it. I dislike the Upper Midwest accent for reasons I struggle to describe, but it just has a kind of Winnie the Pooh fakeness to it. I love all the accents of the British Isles (although some, like Birmingham/Midlands, make me laugh because it seems almost comically depressed, a kind of eeyore accent if we’re continuing that analogy). The deep Toronto / Tronno accent is annoying.

I like Singapore English. All the phonetic mergers (FLEECE–KIT, PALM-STRUT, FOOT-GOOSE, LOT-THOUGHT and TRAP-DRESS) make it sound damn weird, but strangely European. Took me an embarrassingly long time to answer if I like pock, though.

Singlish is a relatively recent invention.

PMC Singaporeans can code-switch between Standard Singapore English (which is British English with a few Malay loanwords, and worryingly many uncles) and Singlish, and speak SSE with a broadly similar accent to other people whose first language is Mandarin. (The same is true of PMC Brits whose native tongue is one of the barely-comprehensible regional dialects like Geordie or Scouse).

My understanding is that Singlish is what happens if you take 90-105 IQ Hokkien-speakers and educate them bilingually in English and Mandarin, neither of which their parents speak.

90-105 IQ Hokkien-speakers and educate them bilingually in English and Mandarin

What distinguishes Singapore English from other organic expressions of english as second language is in fact the multiculturalism in the population. Because everyone ended up thinking in their native tongue first before speaking in english there is a corresponding emphasis placement in the register and enunciation. However since an indian and a chinese have different emphasis points they both become information points for the other party to internalize and consider this is what english SHOULD sound like, and variation ends up being flattened. Maybe a similar case exists for penn/iowa/ohio/illinois accent convergence.

As an example, look at how Chin Han who played Lau in The Dark Knight speaks https://youtube.com/watch?v=os2EZeGlw7k&pp=ygUKYmF0bWFuIGxhdQ%3D%3D

versus a Singaporean Indian politician https://youtube.com/watch?v=JsXdBMV5zkY&pp=ygUHdGhhcm1uYQ%3D%3D

The tonal exaggerations and musicality of either mainland or subcontinent are absent. Chin Hans entire career was basically due to the golden period when there was a need for Chinese actors that didn't sound retarded or american when speaking english. Benedict Wong occupies that role now but he suppresses his British accent heavily.

Finally, SINGLISH is distinctly different from Singapore Accented English. Singlish is perversely abstract in its grammatical rules and expressive flexibility. Elite Singaporeans code switch as identity markers as mentioned, but also just to fuck with white people when funny.

Sure, and I mean there are degrees of Singlish. By Singlish accent I mean more “fluent English” (as in your former example), with few loanwords, but a very pronounced accent. It’s not about grammar. You have as I was saying above that type of very well educated upper middle (or indeed upper) class English person who speaks fluent French with the most hideous pronunciation because they simply don’t care to put on a French accent when speaking French.

PMC Brits whose native tongue is a strong regional working class dialect (is there another kind? I guess the posh Edinburgh accent still sounds a little Scottish) probably used to hide it, although less often now (they don’t in government or media, I suspect some still do in finance and corporate law). Still I respect them for having accomplished something far more impressive than being just another upper middle class striver.

I find strong Scandinavian accents irritating in their dullness and weirdly Indian rhythm. Though I will say that many Scandinavian people speak really good english without much accent at all so I don't mind those speakers. Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian are pretty languages to my ear.

French and European Spanish speakers are also a bit monotonous to me, the German accent is fine but their speech patterns are usually too pedantic for my tastes

Certain overly nasal midwestern accents are irritating to me and east coast accents sound aggressive and unpleasant. AAVE can be charming but is grating in my internal monologue.

I find strong Scandinavian accents irritating in their dullness and weirdly Indian rhythm.

Are you implying this is not top tier pronunciation? How dare you?!

Perhaps there should be a separate category for the funniest English accents.

There is already a Wikipedia article.

Indian and it’s not even close. Like nails on a chalkboard.

Hard agree on indian. Chinese and especially honkies have weird tonal registers that make their inflections and cadence off, but indians combine tonal misalignment with loudness. Not even getting into the unnecessary and overconfident usage of big words as well as the the psychological association of indian accent with scammy scumfucks.

Are we talking like Apu stereotyped or an educated Indian professor or a street vendor in New Delhi who speaks certain phrases?

Probably outsourced tech support.

Does Boston accent ('Bahstahn') count as foreign? It's not in England. They did the whole tea-into-the-bay thing to solidify that position.

It has only one vowel (æ?)

French or Dominican-English.

The French have the thing where there is zero effort at accent, even among French who are absolutely fluent in grammatically perfect English. To be fair, there is a certain kind of Englishman who is exactly the same in French.

If everybody thinks your accent is one of the sexiest on the planet, I can see why there isn't much incentive to change it.

You just made me realize that I have literally never heard a French person (or other native Romance language speaker, for that matter. The germanics' native pronunciation gives them a leg up and the Asians actually try) even attempt to pronounce my simple, white bread American name correctly, despite them presumably hearing it constantly in American media their whole lives. Which makes me wonder why I, as an American, bother putting so much effort into shit like that. Nobody else seems to be extending the courtesy back to us except for the Asians, who ironically probably have the hardest time actually making the appropriate mouth sounds.

pronounce my simple, white bread American name correctly, despite them presumably hearing it constantly in American media their whole lives

I think you might be overestimating the importance of hearing specific but rarely used words when it comes to pronouncing them. When your native language lacks specific syllables, it can be quite difficult to incorporate them without practise. This isn't particularly helped by English basically having zero logic when it comes to knowing how to pronounce a word you aren't familiar with.

I have an Irish friend whose surname I'm completely unable to pronounce correctly even after hearing it plenty of times. The syllables that a native speaker hears don't map 1:1 to the syllables that I hear (or even know) and no amount of listening is going to help with that. And then there's things like V vs W and names like Vicky vs Vicki which I hear as exactly the same but apparently consistently mispronounced (even after the person tried to teach me how!).

Indian accents from a guy. The musicality is so annoying. It's fine for women.

I don't mind listening to Indian women speak English with heavy accents, but I must admit I can't say the same of Indian men. (Apologies to @self_made_human.)

That being said, if I may be permitted to stretch the definition of "foreign" a bit, Multicultural London English (that mish-mash of Pakistani, Afro-Carribean, Arabic and Indian accents and slang spoken by urban youths throughout the Yookay) is verbal sewage. "Wha' you lookin' at bruv? I wiw fucking kiw you bruv! Watch yourself, innit." Give me a thousand "don'd dell me whad do do"s over that. Unlike the former case, there's no gendered element to it: I honestly don't think I could bring myself to have sex with an otherwise attractive woman who spoke with this accent.

My read was that MLE was largely restricted to north-east London. In my bit of south-east London accents assimilate to Estuary, or occasionally to RP among upwardly-mobile privately-educated 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants. Old-school "sarf-east London" is going the same way as Cockney for the same reasons.

Are there any studies from linguists what makes the Indian accent so hard on the ears? Btw - I expect this to change in generation or two - everyone is immersed in english media now from birth, so more kids learn english simultaneously with their maternal one.

Honestly, I do think that's basically cultural prejudice. Coupled with perhaps an unusual amount of time spent with other ESL speakers.

I've known Russian professors etc. who were basically incomprehensible, the Indians have no monopoly on that. Rather that than chavvy London accents.

100% I've never had to translate a Russian accent over a shit quality phone line, while most of my formative experiences with Indian accents were telemarketers and frustrating interactions with IT/customer service. Whenever I had incomprehensible professors in college I'd just skip the lectures, and I grew up in Southern California so Hispanic accents always just sounded normal to me. Indian is the only foreign accent I consistently interact with under almost exclusively unpleasant circumstances I have no means of avoiding. We'd probably all hate Italian accents if Italy was where all the call centers were located.

100% I've never had to translate a Russian accent over a shit quality phone line,

It's not much more comprehensible in a lecture theatre.

Are we talking about Russians who live in Russia or ones who've spent some time living in the west?

I know a fair few Russians and can't say I've ever had any problems at all understanding their accent. Occasionally challenges with their English knowledge but nothing related to pronunciation.

Yeah, but I could always skip the lectures and get by spending that time in the library and relying on the TA. And since I wasn't STEM, most of my professors were home grown American communists who unfortunately were quite articulate.

I find listening to Slavs or people from post-Soviet countries speaking English quite endearing. "Why you have to be mad? Is only game!"

The flat cyrilic intonations make russian speakers incredibly easy to listen to compared to tonally variant nordic sinic and indic languages. Slavic ASMR is practically digital melatonin for my sleep cycle, but maybe the lack of comprehension helps.

It is not about comprehension. Heavy Indian accent speakers are way easier to understand than some other.

Heavy Indian accent speakers are way easier to understand than some other.

That... really hasn't been my experience. At a previous job much of the IT was outsourced to India and we always dreaded having to speak with them because it was complete crapshoot whether we could understand anything they said. We had no such problems with the ones who'd moved to Europe nor with any of the native Europeans.

French speakers from gulf of africa are on the top of my list.

I knew a very nice Japanese girl with impeccable middle-class credentials. She spoke Japanese with a pleasant Tokyo accent (which the Japanese equivalent to RP these days) and she spoke English impeccably... except that she'd been to university in Plymouth and had picked up an incredibly gutter accent and speech patterns that she seemed to be completely unaware of. It was incredibly disorienting.

I don't have an Indian accent. Quite the opposite. I get asked, almost every day, where I'm from. By people talking to me in person too, mind you.

So far, people have told me I sound American, Canadian, Dutch, German and god knows what else. The standard consensus seems to be from exactly wherever they're not, so Americans wonder if I'm Canadian/European, and Europeans wonder if I'm from the other side of the pond.

In fact, this happens so frequently I have a whole canned speech ready. Surprisingly LLMs can usually still tell I'm probably Indian from pure audio logs, last time I tried was with Gemini 2.5 Pro. I sound very slightly Scottish when very inebriated, but I avoid picking up another accent since at that point nobody would understand me.

Funny and very recent story: I had a date with my Emotional Support Lesbian yesterday. I took her to the shady gay pub that's my usual haunt. The other Lesbian at the counter (much worse at the emotional support bit) could understand precisely what I was saying, and couldn't understand the white woman with the upperclass British accent. Well, she admits that she sounds like a "posh Tory cunt", and that is all the proof I need.

For what it's worth, I hate Indian accents too, they grate on my ears, and I mostly grew up there. I do agree Roadmen sound atrocious, and I'd walk into traffic if I see them on the streets.

Holland and New Zealand tends to give the most ‘neutral but not local’ English accent, so I'm surprised those arent the top two guesses by a million.

I find Philippino accents incredibly grating, far worse than Indian, for what it’s worth- although to flatter our Indian readers, I will say Pakistani accents tend to be worse than standard Indian.

I don't think there enough Kiwies around for people to pattern match to that one.

what is this new zealand you speak of. The maps dont show any such country.

The map is not the territory, and I believe there's some acknowledging being done about it.

I don't have an Indian accent.

"It pays ten thousand!"

I'd do it for $9,999, just Indian like that.

The next indian guy in line will do it for 9998 and then the first guy will counteroffer and next thing you know the ad agency finds a guy on fiver to just do the read

I get asked, almost every day, where I'm from. By people talking to me in person too, mind you.

So far, people have told me I sound American, Canadian, Dutch, German and god knows what else. The standard consensus seems to be from exactly wherever they're not, so Americans wonder if I'm Canadian/European, and Europeans wonder if I'm from the other side of the pond.

... are you me? In my case, it's the result of years of speech therapy when I was young.

No, I don't think I'm you. Too handsome for that, and given the username, possibly less German or Dutch?

I didn't get any speech therapy. I give the speeches and the therapy. I just learned to speak English while in the States and it stuck and morphed into something so neutral it's remarkable.

Huh, that's interesting.

Apologies to @ self_made_human.

He has mentioned that he actually does not have an Indian accent.

Korean is the hardest for me to understand.

Have been to South Korea a handful of times, they learn American english there, everyone around 35 or so and younger speaks really good english in my experience. Older people may not know it at all though. I'm surprised you find Koreans hard to understand.

For spoken English accents in general, top three worst sounding to me would be (in order):

  1. AAVE
  2. Chinese
  3. Indian

Where, for example, I’m undecided between Mandarin and Cantonese being worse.

(1) Is a goshdarned furriner authorized to judge such nuances in the first place?

(2) My memory of exactly how annoying accented English is fades as my distance from my immigrant-filled workplace increases. But it is my impression that any language-based variation is drowned out by proficiency-based variation. I can say that 80-percent-intelligible Indian*-accented English < 90-percent-intelligible Cantonese-accented or Vietnamese-accented English < 100-percent-intelligible Sri Lankan*–accented English. But that doesn't give any information regarding the languages.

*Yes, I know these aren't languages, but I don't know the actual native language of the speaker.

Inspired by a comment:

If all of someone's favorite historical leaders could sit in the same room together without a fistfight eventually breaking out, I don't want to know them.

Can you make an AI to make a decent joke that starts with "Sulla, Napoleon, and Lee Kuan Yew walk into a bar"? I couldn't, at best it rehashed stereotypes.

(How many bits of information about me is this combination?)

Does anyone else experience a sense of loss after finishing a great book?

I always feel a sort of melancholy emptiness after finishing a really great novel, like I just wished a close friend farewell on a long journey. Which I find is actually a very useful mood to be in for quiet contemplation, so I like to stew in it while I think about the book for a couple of days before snapping myself out of it and finding something else to occupy my brain.

Yeah same! And I agree I try not to pick up a new fiction book or anything too fast. It's nice to reminisce about the good times.

When I was a child reading novels I did. Now I mostly feel accomplished. There's a lot of comfort in knowing I could read most books again and get more out of them.

Absolutely. I try to think of my children reading it in the future and it cheers me up a bit. But primarily a sense of accomplishment.

The Book of Revelation. I still recoil at 22:18:

“If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book.”

Man, someone predicted and hated fanfiction.

I've kept reading to my kids before bed, long past the ages when it would help their reading skills or sleep schedule or anything, in part because I've discovered that their commentary recaptures for me the magic of reading something for the first time.

They say you can truly enjoy great books twice: once for mystery and then once for dramatic irony. I figured out how to sneak in a third pass.

I finished the Aubrey Maturin series about a month ago. Afterwards I got about halfway through Midshipman Hornblower before putting it down in depression. I haven't been able to pick up a fiction book since.

I'll start a new job in Aarhus, Denmark soon. Any tips regarding etiquette, cultural habits, and/or other things that trip foreigners not familiar with Scandinavian culture?

Grundfos?

Is that a tip, or is it a threat?

A guess. Turns out they're not even in Aarhus.

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