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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2992 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 12, 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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As a zoomer who has been sporadically lurking here for a year, my inhibition is too high to post in the Culture War thread. Since I've yet to commence higher education and have meaningful experience writing formal publications, I'm deeply insecure about my prose and lexicon. I am very much a generalist and a decent synthesizer who knows the synoptic framework of a vast array of fields without having fully narrowed down my niche. I would love to contribute more extensively, but can't be sure I will manage to do so without sounding like a flagrant sophist. Do I get lost or persist?

If you're actually worried about sounding like a flagrant sophist, that already makes you more self-aware than most of us. I'd be more concerned about the possible time you'd waste getting into pointless internet arguments when you could be devoting time to developing yourself chasing hedonistic pleasure as hard you can until the lights go out via the AI apocalypse, and also the risk of leaving a digital footprint that could allow some future authoritarian regime to track you down and execute you for wrongthink. It's too late for the rest of us, but you still might have a chance.

I'm sure that most denizens of this website feel inferior to the huge-brained lawyers, programmers, and doctors. There is no need for you to expect yourself to be as ultra-cool as they are. Many of the comments that I myself make are just links to sources—not very big-brained, but not the most low-value stuff in the world, either.

So for weeks I’d been hearing insane levels of word of mouth about the movie Obsession: It heralds the arrival of Gen-Z filmmaking. It says deep things about the anxieties of modern dating. It’s a genuinely spine-chilling horror film. Man, I was hyped.

Then I get to the kinoplex and I am shown a rather dull and prosaic romantic comedy about a man dating a Latina. If there are supernatural elements, I’m not sure where they went. Maybe critics were referring to the bog-standard dark brujeria that the female lead used to ensnare and damn her sensitive white boy gf. I hate to be one the one to tell you this, but they’re all doing that (I bet you believed her when she told you have a tinder account either).

After that it hits all the usual Latina gf notes: the honeymoon phase, the love bombing, the ethnic cuisine, the BPD, the paranoia. And as for the “shocking” twist ending, it was a bit of a downer but statistically that is the second most common way these relationships end, after marriage.

What did you guys think of it? Overall I would rate it 2.5/5, the scene where he’s on the phone with Latina tech support will definitely get a laugh from anyone who’s been there. When it hits streaming it would make a good double feature with Fools Rush In.

Go see The Furious instead, at one point there's a villain/hero sword to sword lock except the swords are bicycles.

… What? The swords are bicycles? I want to know but don’t want to spoil either.

I assume you’re referring to the social dynamic of Latinas seeing one another as dirty whores and thus being constantly paranoid about them (the other ones) seducing their man?

I loved it, and would happily go to see it in the cinema a second time, something I hardly ever do. I have facetiously described it as a film about the horror of ending up in a relationship with an abusive BPD art hoe.

Then I get to the kinoplex and I am shown a rather dull and prosaic romantic comedy about a man dating a Latina.

Sounds like spine-chilling horror to me.

It is my dream; it is my nightmare

Been there before as well and would not recommend. High intensity and a fast paced 4 months. Glad they showed who they were early on though. Too incompatible in our stages of life.

Then I get to the kinoplex and I am shown a rather dull and prosaic romantic comedy about a man dating a Latina. If there are supernatural elements, I’m not sure where they went.

There’s indeed been reactions on this front, that the horror element of the film was not the supernatural, but rather that of the Latina Girlfriend Experience (or dating young women in general), especially if you’re unaccustomed to dealing with female coffee moments:

  • In ${CurrentYear}, you have little social and/or legal recourse against a chick’s histrionics.

  • Your crush, the Wonderful waifu of your eyes, may very well be some other guy’s side-piece thanks to polygyny and female mate-choice copying.

  • A chick you’re dating could be lying to you about things such as her father dying of cancer, and you may never find out if not for random luck due to your one-itis and lack of information otherwise. Plus, YWBTA if you didn’t #Believe her.

Along similar lines, a screenshot from this film has launched a thousand meme variations. They range from captions like "how your gf looks at you when you ask her to block the guy who 'raped' her in 2019” to the more mundane “how your gf looks at you when you give her solutions instead of validating her feelings.”

I see Adrian Tchaikovsky brought up quite a bit, but can’t shake the irrational premonition that his books are exceptionally gay (probably in concurrent association with the emperor Hadrian and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky). Is this the case? Please advise.

In Shards of Earth he favours a prose style I find a bit convoluted.

Until there's a chapter in a bar where he's describing the crews polyamorous dating habits. It suddenly switches into a perfectly clear writing style.

He goes back to being convoluted when the interesting space stuff starts up again.

I've read Shards of Earth and Ruin, and I don't remember any sex or romance in either of those.

When he does attempt relationships, love, or lust I tend to speed through it on account of a particular prejudice against the traditional sci-fi author's approach to these topics. He fits the bill and that's a good thing. We aren't reading to explore conflicted passions of cowboys on the prairie even if he could do so with unusual sophistication. Sapphic demons, on the other hand, can be mentioned to raise the eyebrow, but only if we get back to the things he really wants to write about.

Progressive gestures do exist in his work but not in an exceptionally gay way. House of Open Wounds, second in a series and the only fantasy I've read outside of Tolkien in decades, has been my favorite book of his.

My impression is that he just doesn't have that much interest in writing any kind of romance. Green City Wars (which I just read and loved) had a murderous weasel as classic noir femme fatale, but while the racoon protagonist had a clear aesthetic appreciation for her, it was very explicitly nonsexual (as a result of the species barrier.)

Most of what I've read from him steers clear of anything sexual. I hadn't really noticed the lack until you mentioned it

I can’t speak for his books in the generality but Elder Race doesn’t have any of that kind of thing, or even any romance.

It’s primarily a story about the (platonic) relationship between an ancient nanoaugmented ethnologist stranded on a colony world that has regressed to medieval tech, and the spunky princess fifth in line who’s going on a Quest in order to make people take her seriously and thinks he’s a wizard.

The other novella I read, The Expert System’s Brother, doesn’t have that kind of thing either.

Elder Race is the only one of his I've read and what I recall is that the spunky princess spends a lot, a lot of time wringing her hands over the possibility that he'll try to make moves on her and due to the power disparity she'll have to go along with it, but in practice he's a perfect fedora-tipping gentleman without any trace of toxic masculinity who would never treat m'lady so.

It's been a while but I recall the whole thing feeling extremely reddit.

Based on the one book I decided I wouldn't be reading anything else of his. We're spoiled for choice anyway.

Elder Race is one of my favourite books and I don't recognise this description at all. There's one bit where she realises she's formally put herself in the debt of an ancient and largely incomprehensible (to her at that point) being. Since she's very sheltered and inclined to think in story plots, she wonders if this is going to be a story about how a princess got spirited away by a wizard. Nothing comes of it because he's a clinically depressed basket case who regards her as primitive, and because he's still kicking himself for totally fouling up a budding romance with her long-dead great-great-grandmother.

The plot is mostly about her growing up and getting a clue, while he reconnects with humanity. (Also realising that being a 'wizard' is much cooler than being a shut-in old man and the Ethics Committee can go hang, they’re all dead anyways.)

I installed Linux Mint around Jan 2024, and I don't think I've booted into my windows partition in about a year. So I finally deleted it entirely and repurposed the space as a dedicated /home/ directory because steam games take up a lot of space.

Good riddance.

I have to use Windows 11 at work, and the little things that are bafflingly worse astound me. I tried to set an alarm, but the fucking alarm app refused to start without an update off the app store which it couldn't get because closed network. When I type in directories directly into the location bar of file explorer, the fucking autocomplete suggestion popups never go away after I hit enter. When I try to right click on a file, different menus pop up depending on whether it's the first or second time I've tried it, and they show different options entirely!

I just... what the fucking fuck is going on with Windows?

So it's being hit by a few things.

  • UI work is low status in tech.
  • Microsoft wants to use it's UI frameworks to tie people to Windows, but it burned a lot of developers and companies with Silverlight.
  • HR departments don't believe in transferable skills. They only hire for the same stack.

So Microsoft has tech like XAML, which is perfectly fine. But their own developers don't want to learn it because it's career suicide. 5 years as a XAML wizard at MS means that every other tech company will view you as less than a fresh grad.

So the developers working at MS have been trying to avoid UI work or shoehorn React into the OS UI to preserve their ability to get other jobs.

Additionally there are some structural problems at MS. The main customer from the sales point of view is the corporate IT department. The tools for managing Windows Domains are excellent. However the IT departments view the desktop OS as an overly complicated launcher for Microsoft Office. They have no interest in things like moving the launch bar, and would probably like an option to ban that.

Also Microsoft has been getting increasingly culturally Indian. It used to have a bit of a barbarian flavour where it was OK to get in fights over tech decisions. I don't have enough information about the details and consequences of this to do a good write up, but I'm sure it has effects.

What happened? I think the executive overseeing the entire consumer experience, Rajesh Jha, was quite simply not very good - or at least, did not view Windows as an important product. As of a few months ago, he's gone and his position has been eliminated, with the department heads (of which Windows & Devices is one) are now VP positions reporting directly to SatNad. I take this as a promising sign. Pavan Duvuluri, the manager of the Windows and Devices team and now VP, is at least an engineer by background and used his elevation to acknowledge quality concerns with Windows: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-commitment-to-windows-quality/

Would you say it's as much as 30% worse?

AI's a fun excuse, and there have been some code wtfs, but a lot of the Win11 stuff is just an absolutely bizarre set of UI decisions that have been progressively escalating for longer than LLMs could finish a trivial function. The Start Search Menu has been fucked up since before COVID. Same for OneCloud. The inconsistent and awkward right-click menus in File Explorer are a human interface problem; the code's fine.

Something just went badly rotten in Microsoft.

The tipping point was around 2012. As you'll recall, that was when MS decided it'd be a great idea to trash the desktop UX in favor of a tablet UX everywhere, no matter whether or not it made sense on that device.

And they actually did have a bit of a point there- if you made it optional, you'd just end up with another Windows Media Center that nobody used, and what better way to force people to develop applications in WinRT? There were significant benefits to doing so, too- mainly around sandboxing, though the problem there was that it made interacting with the rest of the computer an absurd hassle. The original cheaper Surface RT tablet was made to push this too, and while an interesting piece of kit, it was also basically worthless beyond the fact it had an ARM-compiled version of Office on it.

They judged, correctly, that doing so wouldn't affect sales. And sure, the iPad wasn't as destructive to them as they had feared (which indeed was a reasonable fear at the time- that people buying iPads would then proceed to eschew real computers entirely), but they've also never had an incentive to go back and properly fix what they broke. And every version of Windows since has gone on to expose more of the rotten/unfinished foundation (and will likely continue along that path until Explorer is 100% React, takes 0.5s to respond to any button presses, require 16GB of RAM, and has to restart at least once a day because it gets overloaded like Firefox does when you watch too many YouTube videos).

The other problem is that there's no real need for MS to write a new OS any more. Windows NT remains the gold standard for an OS (Unix was 20 years out of date in 1995, and the only reason it's still around is because you would be provided the source to build whatever you wanted) but after everything that made it the way it is has migrated to Azure and everyone just accesses your code through some flavor of web browser, what's the point of rebuilding it?

This is just what 10 years of no QA department and any new development being considered a cost center does to you.

I can't switch out from Windows because the window management behavior hasn't been destroyed yet. KDE has stupid defaults and limits which made window snapping flat out not work on high-resolution screens, so it was an instant non-starter (sure, I could go and edit the config... until it gets erased or moved in the next update, then you have to chase the setting down again). And GNOME is just worse OS X.

It's fortunate that StartAllBack exists to fix the menu (and a couple of Explorer issues that I just haven't noticed are likely alleviated by this software as well); I've just accepted that I need to pay to fix issues now just like Mac users generally have to add things Apple refuses to implement (famously, window-snapping).

I have finally nailed a piece on a string instrument (somehow I don't want to reveal which one) that took me ages; Bach really tormented my dreams. The way that it finally worked was listening to it every night before bedtime like a lullaby to finally incept the time signature and melody into my brain so that I could wake up in the morning and play it.

PS: it's NOT a violin, those are just a bit too whiny for my taste

Congratulations. Which piece?

I understand the joy. I play bass, and Bach pieces are not written for instruments that are tuned in fourths. Finally getting it feels good.

Haydn Concerto n. 1 but definitely mine isn't as polished as a professional would play it. However Haydn is such an interesting person so it feels good to play something of his somewhat well. I like his surprise symphony too!

How hard is it to play the bass? It always seems so physically intensive.

Bass isn't too bad if your technique is good, but it's definitely much more physically intensive than other stringed instruments. I think my DB's string tension is probably 2.5x my guitar for any given string. When you couple the tension, the high action, and the sheer physical size of it, it can feel more like a sport rather than an instrument.

That sounds pretty intimidating! I've always low key wanted to learn how to play double bass, because they are one of the coolest instruments around imo. But I've been getting back into guitar and the string tension on my guitars has been kicking my ass at times; I don't like to imagine what almost 3x the tension would be like to play. Maybe once my guitar calluses finally come back, I'll give it some thought.

I regularly rip calluses off during long shows. I have to keep super glue in my bag.

Are you able to reduce the distance between the strings and the fingerboard? I got that done for the vibrato so that I wouldn’t have to press so far down especially on the thicker strings

You can do that, but most of my repertoire these days is bluegrass or rock, so it's not the right call for me particularly.

What are some bluegrass pieces for the bass that you like to play?

It's going to sound odd, but I don't like to play bluegrass so much as be playing it. The bass mostly functions as a rhythm instrument that occasionally leads chord transitions in case people get lost, so it's not complex. That said, the overall experience is wonderful.

I'm particularly partial to up tempo versions of ain't no grave, like this one.

Cello sound beautiful, my favourite instrument easily. I love the deep sound they make, especially in Bach's Cello Suite no. 2.

You figured it out so easily but I guess the context clues were there. It truly is the most beautiful, and I also like that I can avoid the A string (personal least preferred) completely and still play the same music and make it sound a bit more.. somber?

I've been getting into gardening lately. I grew some herbs and small vegetables many years ago, but otherwise I am completely new to it again.

Two months ago I made the rookie mistake of using "garden soil" in planters (garden soil is to be used in the ground, or in raised beds) and unfortunately nearly all of the plants died. But the California growing season is forgiving, and I haven't lost much time. Last weekend I bought a strawberry plant, a cherry tomato plant, a larger tomato plant, and six zucchini squash plants. This weekend I'm setting up a drip irrigation system to keep the plants watered, as I have quickly learned that the plants I currently have will need a lot of water.

AI chatbots have been very helpful for answering every question I could possibly have, and capturing the nuances between different varieties. (Certain strawberry varieties have runners that you should snip off to encourage upward growth! Zucchini squash may need hand pollination when flowers appear! Switch to liquid fertilizer when fruiting!) What could've been hours of searching in the library, or talking with the local gardening club, in the good old days, is now a half hour conversation at my desk. In one way, I am glad that I am able to kick off a new hobby successfully, but in another way, I'm a bit sad that I no longer have a reason to get up with the local gardening folks to figure out what's going on.

I've got a lot of planters sitting around. What should I grow next? What is everyone else growing?

I'd focus on spices. Fresh bay leaves are useful and you can share them with neighbours. Fresh dill really improves things like scrambled eggs but isn't worth a trip to the grocery store.

Grow mint and invite your friends over for mojitos with mint from your garden.

Plants where the useful part is the leaf / stem can probably just sit in your backyard until you need it. Plants that fruit have the issue where you suddenly have a lot of fruit to deal with.

You should also look into growing ghost peppers or Carolina reapers. They are fun to give away.

Fresh mint is amazing, especially if you're one for making drinks and/or tea.

Don't plant it in the ground, however, unless you've woken up that morning and choosen terrifying bio-warfare.

Fresh basil is incredible for cooking. So are chives, for salad.

There are varieties of cherry tomatoes that are sweeter and more delicious than anything you can buy in-store. Try and find sun sugar types. You'll thank me later.

Honestly if you want to feel amazing about yourself, grow some weed. Pick a variety of ones that look cool to you and grow them and they’ll look just as cool as the pics. Dunno if that’s legal there.

I have the opposite of a green thumb and grew weed insanely well.

This is accurate. Last year, first attempt, we got 8 oz of cured flower starting from 3 seeds (one of which was culled as a male, so 2 plants). This was done outdoors in northeastern US (good soil, but short season). That said, while the growing is easy, the drying, trimming, and curing process is where ot gets to where you can F it up easily)

I'm in a similar position to you and made the conscious decision that the only outside help I'm allowed to seek is from my mom. She's far from an optimal resource, but the consistent back-and-forth, sharing pictures and advice, has been really really nice. I enjoy the enhanced relationship with her more than I care about my garden doing particularly well.

That said, I'm having some good luck with my cherry tomatoes and serrano peppers. My other peppers are struggling in the current heat wave and a squirrel ate my one viable poblano. My modest goal is to be able to make a salsa by the end of summer. I just have a few plants so I can take the time to manually check for and remove aphids and other pests on each plant every day, which is helping cover up my inadequacies as a gardener.

I really recommend giant marconi peppers. They taste like bell peppers, but are sweeter, bigger, and easier to grow.

zucchini

On the one hand they're easy to grow and highly productive which is gratifying from the point of view of gardening. On the other hand you'll be inundated with a glut of courgettes that nobody likes eating that will quickly turn into a glut of giant marrows that nobody likes eating.

strawberry

Now you're talking. People will tell you to propagate more plants from the runners, which is okay up to a point, but you'll end up with a monoculture of plants that all fruit at the same time. If you want more plants consider getting some different varieties that crop early/mid/late to extend the season. I'd also recommend alpine strawberries - they're too tiny for anyone to grow commercially and they taste twice as good.

drip irrigation

I'm sceptical of garden techno-fixes. It's often swapping one form of maintenance for another.

What should I grow next?

For edibles grow things that you love eating, that are expensive and/or rare, and that grow well in your locale. Unless you have acres of garden and are growing for self sufficiency don't waste time growing staples like onions and carrots (or zucchini) that you can buy by the sack for pennies. Soft fruits and fresh herbs are a good choice, cut flowers if you like flowers, or premium vegetables like asparagus. Basically start at the apex of produce and work your way down, not vice versa.

Basically start at the apex of produce and work your way down

That's what I figured as well. The fun stuff are the fruits and vegetables you can't find in the supermarket, either because they're fragile or the market for them is too tiny. Thanks for reminding me about the alpine strawberries, I read about that several months back but it has since slipped out of my mind.

I actually just bought a drip irrigation starter kit last weekend from a big-box hardware store, which hooks into a typical 3/4" garden hose connection. I also bought a timer, which attaches to the 3/4" GHT and will let me run the drip irrigation to send 0.5/1.0/2.0 gallons of water per hour to each planter. For those of us who work long hours away from home and may not be able to consistently water in the morning, it's a good solution.

Drip irrigation is extremely convenient and low maintenance. There is a startup cost, of course, but it's great to have it. It's also like building a hydraulic lego set.

I just finished a small setup on 9 pots, I totally get the analogy now. I'll post about it at the next Friday Fun thread and you can critique it...

I'm far from an expert but would be interested to see what you came up with.

On the other hand you'll be inundated with a glut of courgettes that nobody likes eating that will quickly turn into a glut of giant marrows that nobody likes eating.

Zucchini bread is a godsend when this happens. It turns out people love zucchini if you bake it into a cake that's full of sugar, butter, and sour cream.

You can get a lot of mileage from leafy greens like kale, and also watermelons are pretty cool. The AI advice doesn’t sound super useful. Do you use mulch at all? I’d focus on fundamentals like that. Check out some gardening YouTube videos just to see what you might be missing. I recommend Gardening Like A Viking.

Thanks for the suggestions. That Youtube channel looks excellent. Regarding the mulch, like I mentioned, I just started a week ago so still trying to figure out how well the soil is holding moisture. I used mulch on a couple of the plants, but it's starting to look like the others will need it too.

Yeah, the mulch will also help regulate temperatures throughout the day-night cycle, keeping it cooler during the day and warmer during the night, which plants generally like. Might not be as important in California as in other places, but anywhere there's major swings it can be highly valuable. It will also protect the soil microbiology from the sun and its deadly radiation, and thus create for a healthier root environment. I waited probably half a summer before applying it when I first started, but I now regard it as one of the highest impact improvements a gardener can make.

Last weekend I bought a strawberry plant, a cherry tomato plant, a larger tomato plant, and six zucchini squash plants.

I'll be curious to hear how your strawberries do. Where I am, strawberry season is pretty much completely over by the time tomato plants really start.

What should I grow next?

Depends heavily on if you're interested in flowers or veggies, and what you like!

What is everyone else growing?

No veggies at the moment, but I'm about to put 6 David Austin Roses into the ground tomorrow... hopefully I don't kill them!

USA BEATS PARAGUAY 4-1!!!! USA! USA! USA! USA! The most surprising part was how dominant the victory was. a 1-0 or 2-1 victory would have been good, but honestly, this is some of the most dominant I've ever seen the US team be in a competitive game.

Also, I'm assuming that the Canadians are in complete shambles as they're the only host nation that didn't win their first game.

Side note, is there any chance for a separate World Cup post?

The US suffers from being stalled in expectations. We will make the group stage, we will not win more than one game in them.

Anybody who isn't rooting for Iran-USA is lame.

I'm just thinking about how insufferable the inevitable movie is going to be if Iran wins.

USA! USA! USA!

US were so dominant the game was actually boring lol. I feel a little bad bringing my soccer-naive friends to a watch party given the total lack of tension. We scored our first goal as me and my buddies were still in line to get it...

I respect the hell out of that fourth goal tho lol.

Found an enticing Yemeni restaurant in Oslo, but then I checked their Yelp page and saw a massive Palestinian flag hanging on the wall, and they're selling some crappy coke knockoff that raises funds for charity in Gaza. What's the sentiment here? Do I look elsewhere, or do I separate the art from the artist? Whenever I'm in the mood for Somali or Pakistani food, I manage to find places that don't put up any pro-Palestinian virtue signaling. I'm sure their proprietors still harbor some problematic views, but if it's not pervasively advertised, I can at least grant them some plausible deniability. It just doesn't sit right with me to eat from an establishment that could very well chase a Jewish individual out of it.

We had a Palestinian restaurant here that really went all in on the politics. They went out of business, probably didn't help but mostly the service was truly horrendous, like the dumbest kids at the mosque got waiter jobs there.

I kind of appreciate it, but I also wouldn't care about going to a Jewish deli that had Israeli flags everywhere. I like places where the owners feel free to express themselves personally.

How are you in the mood for Somali and Pakistani food so often that you can write the clause “whenever I’m in the mood for Somali and Pakistani food”? The mind of a foodie is beyond my understanding.

As a foodie, not obsessing over and intricately planning out restaurant meals is beyond my understanding. I could waste my caloric budget on mediocre food!

You're doing that thing that leftists do right now.

Okay, these are your views and you are entitled to them, and if this sincerely offends you, you have every right not to patronise this business. I'd probably feel the same way about a place of business bedecking itself ostentatiously in Pride flags for this month and selling Trans Cola for the charity about trans genocide.

But why did you feel the need to come on here and tell us all about it? Most of us are not in Oslo, those who are may not be looking for Yemeni restaurants (enticing or otherwise). Even if you wanted a mass boycott of Bad Bad Views by all us on here on The Motte, right now the sum total of "comments on the Motte, is in Oslo, is thinking of NOT going to a Bad Bad Views restaurant" seems to be one (1), i.e. you.

What it really sounds like is (a) you want praise and headpats from us for being such a staunch anti-anti-Semite and (b) a fishing expedition to get us to express anti-Semitic/pro-Palestine/Gaza/Hamas views so you can then rush off elsewhere to report us for "lookit all these right-wing fascist anti-Jewish Nazis on there".

Pride isn’t a terrorist country / organization … yet

Well, if you consider school shootings terror attacks...

Businesses bedecking themselves in Palestinian flags and symbols are a common sight in all of Europe and not just my neck of the woods. I am almost certain this is also prevalent, albeit to a lesser degree, in the larger metropolitan areas of the US. Out of innocuous curiosity, I wanted to inquire about what position others take on the matter, as I imagine in a highbrow space like TheMotte, people do frequently patronize ethnic restaurants serving exotic cuisines.

Just as they say opposite of love is not hatred but indifference, there is a case that the opposite of a loudly pro-Gazan restaurant is not a loud choice to boycott it but eating there while disagreeing and not giving a shit. If you imagine the proprietors at their most brainrotten, which choice do you think would irk them more? The only way to kill toxoplasma is to refuse to be fazed by any part of its lifecycle.

This doesn't mean patronize them anyway though, it means choose somewhere else while not spreading the culture war reason you're doing it.

Don't go there, find a competing place that's better (possibly along a different axis) and if anyone asks why you don't go there, take the opportunity to advertise the better place.

This makes their choice decrease their customer base without a corresponding increase from people on the other side of the culture war.

If you imagine the proprietors at their most brainrotten, which choice do you think would irk them more? The only way to kill toxoplasma is to refuse to be fazed by any part of its lifecycle.

I've seen people get mad for attracting the wrong kind of clientele, but their "wrogness" has to be obvious for all to see. I think they'd actually enjoy a zionist paying them money, but having to hide the fact thay they're a zionist (/or simply Jewish depending on far gone they are).

I also think these statements are contradictory, how do you propose that getting people mad at you showing up to their business will kill toxoplasma?

Out of innocuous curiosity, I was curious as to what position others take on the matter, as I imagine in a highbrow space like TheMotte people do frequently patronize ethnic restaurants serving exotic cuisines.

I give restaurants a pass when they have the small, obligatory placard of Havel's Greengrocer. That applies to BLM, Pride, Palestine, whatever. When the banners get large, the slogans omnipresent, and stated donations to the cause loud and overt, then I find elsewhere to spend my money.

Business owners can have political beliefs without being noxious about them. Refusing to patronise a restaurant because the owner didn’t put the correct BLM/whatever flag on their Twitter bio is one thing, refusing to visit one that has a massive tribal flag on the wall and makes a big deal out of raising funds for something you dislike seems entirely acceptable.

Assuming they're actually Yemeni, its probably less virtue signaling than sincerely held belief. I feel like this is the right wing version of not patronizing chick fil a because of their stance on gay rights, or refusing to go to the best burger place in town because the owner has a MAGA sticker in the window.

I can tolerate a BLM sticker perfectly fine, fifth columnists who may actively harbor terrorist sympathies on the other hand...

When you think about having dinner, your primary concern is over their (likely nonexistent) Jewish customers? Israel and Palestine seem to be living rent free in your head.

Personally I would just avoid those cuisines if the problem is pervasive to you, surely Oslo has a lox sandwich or others foods that are free of such baggage?

Israel and Palestine seem to be living rent free in your head.

This is my first post mentioning the conflict, are you perhaps confusing me for another user? Sure the pool of prospective Jewish customers may be narrow, but I've observed restaurants putting up signs saying "Zionists not welcome" with stars of David as opposed to the Israeli flag. I'm not going around boycotting a place for advocating against the construction of new settlements, but when they are the ones who vociferously demonstrate their allegiance and are raising money for a dubious cause, I believe my concern is entirely legitimate.

Ah, I see, didn't know they were that open about their Zionist opposition. Is Palestinian or Somalian food that common in Oslo that it's hard to avoid? It is nonexistent in my neck of the woods.

Also, have you ever been to Japan? Some restaurants or hot spring resorts have "no foreigners" or "Japanese only" posted at their entrance. Is that also bothersome?

Is Palestinian or Somalian food that common in Oslo that it's hard to avoid

There's a vast array of cuisines available in Oslo, but for better or worse, my guilty pleasure is going to the seedier parts of town and indulging in food at Middle Eastern/West Asian places.

Also, have you ever been to Japan?

Nope.

Is that also bothersome?

As the other commenter said, it's a blanket rule to filter out the low-caliber rabble contingent of tourists as well as avoiding the rigamarole of having customers ordering in a language the servers have no command of. As I am currently not in Japan, I'm not in a rush to opine on the ethics of patronizing such businesses.

Some restaurants or hot spring resorts have "no foreigners" or "Japanese only" posted at their entrance.

FWIW in practice that means, "guests must speak Japanese and respect Japanese mores". If you're fluent to a reasonable level and behave yourself they're perfectly happy to have you.

I believe my concern is entirely legitimate.

When the Norwegian Yemeni restaurant is on my doorstep planting bombs, yeah I'll worry about them. Not until then.

I think you might be confusing Yemen Zaad with GazaKjøkken (Gaza Kitchen), just looking at Oslo Middle Eastern restaurants.

Haha no, the former hung a Palestinian flag inside their establishment and is selling "Palestine Cola" in lieu of Coke, as do many Muslim-owned non-Palestinian businesses in the city.

That's odd; I thought all carbonated beverages were supportive of Palestine due to the gazafication step inherent in the process.

It's very difficult to tell a Jew cola from a Muslim cola, though. That's why I prefer Gentile drinks, and you can easily tell which is which- if there's another seal you have to remove before exposing the cap (which may itself have a hole in it), it's definitely a Gentile drink, where the Jew and Muslim drinks never add that. Powerade and those marble sodas are the two best examples.

All I can say is that GazaKjøkken is the only visible Palestinian flag I saw on Yelp's Middle Eastern restaurants in Oslo (initially a cursory review, but I've now looked at all pictures)... Is Yemen Zaad the restaurant you're referencing in the first post (can't find on yelp for whatever reason, but no Palestinian flag on tripadvisor etc), or is there some restaurant I'm missing?

Mea culpa, my memory served me wrong, Google Maps was the app.

I finally got off the Rancho Gordo bean club wait list. I joined the wait list when I had a husband who was a brilliant cook. I am not a good cook. My daughter is an excellent cook, but she eats beans only occasionally and isn't as willing to cater to my whims as my husband was.

This means I am going to have to try really hard to cook beans without ruining them. It is too ridiculous to belong to a bougie bean club, so I have to at least try!

The serious eats bean routine worked pretty well for me. If I'm feeling lazy I just put a few bay leaves in as aromatics.

Thanks for the pointer. It's going to take me a while to get this figured out. I have an incredibly well stocked spice cabinet which should allow for plenty of experimenting. How are carrots considered an aromatic??

Too goofy, huh? Supposedly the quality and variety is excellent. I will be interested to see if I can tell a difference.

There's a waitlist for... beans?

Indeed there is. Bring your beanmaxxing to the next level.

I also want to hear more about this.

Once I get my first shipment (est. Monday) I can report in on the variety and what I might try to make with them.

My shipment went on a tour of the midatlantic states before it got to me today. In this shipment are the Alubia Blanca Bean, Cranberry Bean, French Green Lentil, Good Mother Stallard Bean, Green Baby Lima Bean, San Franciscano Bean, and a spice blend.

My current plan is to make succotash with the Green Baby Lima beans. That'll give me a lunch for the next couple weeks. I'm going to do a test, 1/2 lb of them made with fresh corn, and 1/2 lb with frozen corn. I'm curious if fresh vs frozen will make any difference when made into a dish. I'm not a huge fan of lima beans, but these are supposed to be worth trying. We'll see.

What are you listening to these days? I've been enjoying Kels.

Underground 80's on Soma FM https://somafm.com/u80s/

Centered around the UK Synthpop style of the early 80s with a bit of new wave splashed in, you'll hear music from Human League, Depeche Mode, Thompson Twins, A Flock of Seagulls, New Order and Ultravox, as well as lesser-known but critically acclaimed artists from the time such as New Musik, Comsat Angels, Lene Lovich, Fad Gadget and Robert Hazard.

Daft Punk, deep cut Thomas Bangalter and Le Knight Club, Justice, Alan Braxe, Patrick Alavi, Modjo, Kavinsky, Fred Falke, Lifelike, Bob Sinclar, Stardust, Digitalism, Boys Noize, anything from Crydamoure, Georgio Moroder, Der Dritte Raum, Yuksek, Chris Malinchak, Chromeo, Parcels, Miami Horror, HOME, Donna Summer, Earth, Wind & Fire, Phoenix, Gloria Estefan, Empire of the Sun, Two Door Cinema Club, blink-182, The Beefs, Lenny Kravitz, Boney M., Bee Gees, Vitalic, Freemasons, Proux, Defender, Wolfgang Gartner.

I was in the top 0.1% of Duck Sauce listeners one year, and in the top 1% of Cerrone listeners the next year. This year I'm in the top 1% of ItaloBros and Purple Disco Machine listeners.

Lately I've been listening to Iden Kai's Galactica Airlines.

If it's not made on a computer and nothing is synthesized, I don't want to hear it.

But I've also never been to a club, not really my scene.

Depends on my mood. For when I want my brain tickled, a lot of electronic stuff works: Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Squarepusher, Death Grips, Plaid, Oneohtrix Point Never, Clark, Blanck Mass, Iglooghost, The Flashbulb, Venetian Snares, Bogdan Raczynski and Burial's later output are a few that come to mind.

When I want more punky/proggy material, Can, Black Midi, Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, Joy Division, The Fall, The Clash, Kino, Jagatara, David Bowie, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, The Mars Volta (specifically Frances The Mute), RE-TROS, Angine de Poitrine, Yes' more proggy works, Massive Attack and others are on rotation.

For more traditionally danceable stuff, I tend to gravitate towards The Avalanches' first album, Louis Cole, Justice and Daft Punk, and when I'm in the mood for more pretty/folky music, there's always Animal Collective, Beach House, Sufjan Stevens, Toumani Diabate, Tim Hecker and Radiohead.

Can

The Live in Stuttgart release is so, so good.

As a Southern good ol' boy, post-grunge bands such as Breaking Benjamin, Chevelle, Staind, Shinedown, and Tool (perhaps more prog rock) are paramount on the playlist.

As a Mormon, I am bound to support fellow Mormon excellence, namely The Killers, usually Sam's Town, or to really lean into the Mormon excellence aesthetic, Pressure Machine.

ATB, Armin Van Buren, Above & Beyond, Paul Van Dyk, and older Tiesto for a little splash of nostalgia.

Lana Del Rey, Charli XCX, Weezer, The Strokes, and Arctic Monkeys' first two albums, if I bring a speaker to a game of volleyball with some cute women and want to make them privy to my ever-exquisite taste in music.

For something suited for ruminating on a long train ride, I stream LCD Soundsystem or desert rock bands such as Kyuss, Fu Manchu, QOTSA, CoC, Sleep, and Monster Magnet.

If I want to bond with my fellow kids, hip-hop such as Baby Keem, Westside Gunn, Pusha T, Death Grips, J Cole, Asap Rocky, Don Toliver, older Kendrick, and Drake is the default option.

Beyond that, my musical tastes are quite versatile. I can listen to Toby Keith and Death Cab for Cutie on the same day with no equivocation.

Good stuff. Love the vibes.

I'm late to the party, but I just discovered that at some point Sturgill Simpson started releasing albums as "Johnny Blue Skies". To quote the top youtube comment "This album fucks so hard I wanna leave it money on the nightstand". Can confirm.

Thanks for the link. I've been listening to Mutiny After Midnight this morning. I especially like the disco-country of "Don't Let Go."

I'm still digesting the album. Situation was my introduction to the album via the music video, and got suck in my head first. Make America Fuk Again was a solid opener. But lately I find Viridescent speaks to me the most, having been with my wife almost 20 years now, and loving her just as much, if not more, than when we first met.

I heard this song, tried to share it with somebody, and couldn’t find it again. Somehow. Thanks!

My music tastes never really change but I'm back in a rhythmic drumming trance mood. Hamrer Hippyer, Blodbylgje, and Lyfjaberg

I've been listening a lot to Iron maiden the last week. Dork Metal at its best.

Old school horrorcore has still been on my mind as of late. Someone I work with however is big into metal bands and we were sharing old SlipKnot classics.

Florence and the Machine.

The only person I ever heard mention that band IRL was an old boomer lady teacher I had in high school.

Purdie - soul drums

Same stuff as most middle aged white guys: lots of Grateful Dead and King Crimson.

Does Jethro Tull work? If so I fit the description. For something a bit harder I’ve been enjoying the Cult.

Does Jethro Tull work? If so I fit the description.

You bet they do, especially if you're listening to Thick as a Brick, Passion Play, or Songs from the Wood.

You should branch out, man. I've heard good things about a band called Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Someone add Butthole Surfers to that list.

Protip: If you're still missing the ability to "tag" other users that some unofficial browser extensions allegedly provided on Reddit, then you can replicate it by using this website's custom-CSS feature! For example:

.user-name[href$="ToaKraka"]::after{content:" [Friday Fun Thread spammer]";}

Replicate this CSS in order to add whatever custom text you want after a person's username.

Too bad it doesn't link back to the tagged post. Very useful for providing proof that someone did indeed come out as gay in the patch notes thread seven years ago.

Just include the URL in plaintext! (Though you'll need to go back to your custom-CSS page if you want to actually use it. And you'll probably want to decrease the font size.)

.user-name[href$="ToaKraka"]::after{content:" [Friday Fun Thread spammer: https://www.themotte.org/post/3802/friday-fun-thread-for-june-12/452296?context=8#context]";font-size:0.7em;}

Ah, but the best part about tags is how low-effort they are ;)

Thanks! Was just wishing for this earlier this week. I don't like blocking people but it can be hard sometimes to keep track of the ones I've decided to not respond to in the future.

Also details about people I do like. =)

I had a dream where a conservative political group in a swing state made a very friendly and lefty coded propaganda piece seeming as if it's coming from the left, complaining about all of the terrible and unwoke policies of the current state government, arguing they were so bad it wasn't worth trying to fix, and concluding "it's time to move back to LA". Basically trying to psy-op the recent wave of California migrants they were afraid of into going away so they don't shift the state blue. I thought it was an interesting idea that I've never thought of before while awake but apparently was lingering in my subconscious.

This reminds me of that one time the Bavarian independence party had to run in all of Germany for EU parliament elections, and they decided to run a campaign based on "don't you want to be rid of those damn Bavarians at last" in the parts of Germany that are not Bavaria.

The sentiment among a lot of young Tory types in London during the Scottish independence referendum was: "Good riddance, we can stop paying for you and we'll have a Tory England for a generation."

"Tired of hearing 'bonjour hi'? Vote Bloc Quebecois!"

That sounds like a pretty solid campaign promise to me.

Unironically the direct appeal of the greater Idaho movement to the people of Portland.

I wonder if Catalonian succession could succeed if they adopted that approach. Just deprecate yourself enough to inspire the wish of your countrymen to expel you.

Unsure if intentional, but it worked for Singapore.

The Pew Research Centre has a new political typology quiz.

I'm classified as "Pragmatic and Polite Right".

I'm Left-Behind Leftist Left-Out Left (let me correct that), which made me laugh. It was pretty easy to see which way the questions leaned and what answers would tip you into which bucket.

I always said if I were American, I'd be the old-school blue collar union Democrat voter, who they left behind when chasing the college-educated vote and the rush to the socially progressive side on gay rights, abortion, etc.

I got that "polite right" but I think this quiz is fairly bunk because of the vagueness of the questions and liability for them to be interpreted differently by different culture groups without mapping properly onto discrete political beliefs.

That being said, I do think the polite right being overwhelmingly likely to think that people get too offended AND are too offensive is an insightful result-- I definitely find myself frustrated by how reactive both my "allies" and "enemies" are.

Faith First Conservative

Some of the questions though.

How much do you think the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in American society today?

If I believe there are selection effects that persist perhaps based on one's ancestors selection into slavery, i might rate this high though I suspect that isn't necessarily the legacy the authors have in mind.

+1 for pragmatic and polite right

Another unconventional right here.

I think that's shorthand for "doesn't particularly like rapidly metastasizing federal government but still has a soft spot for the unions who had the balls to shoot back at Pinkertons".

Also unconventional right. I think it's something of a grab bag category.

I also went back and compared by answers category by category. Eleven times my answer matched the answer most URs gave; ten times it didn't. Change just one answer I bet I wind up in a different box.

Something feels off, I got "Faith First Conservative" which is wild because I am militantly an agnostic pluralist. Looking at the "Gender, Religion, and Society" tab shows extremely opposite views to the modal "Faith First Conservative"

I might have broken the quiz with my uniqueness lol... Reading through the options, I have some of the positions from a couple cores but disagree with other position in that group. Maybe Pew just hates classical liberals.

Maybe they should create a “Right-wing Libtard,” flavor for just such a conservative.

I'd prefer a "Right-wing Smooth Brain Autist" flavor for my particular flavor of stupid.

Or realistically Gothos + Achamian + DEATH + Nietzsche, but that would require too many brain cells being rubbed together.

"Right-wing Smooth Brain Autist"

Sounds like you found yourself a flair.

Yeah but it’s more fun if people need to remember me or wade through my post history to understand my views. Giving them a spoiler in the flair robs them of their sense of pride and accomplishment.

Nietzsche, smooth brain and autism were about the only references I caught there. I’m all aboard though. You ever read any H.L. Mencken at all? He was an interesting Nietzschean.

  • Gothos is a character is Steven Erikson's Malazan
  • Achamian is a character in R. Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse
  • DEATH is from Terry Pratchet.

Just characters that I felt resonated and influenced my worldview.

H.L. Mencken at all

No I have not, I'll put him on my book list lol. I generally stick to the White Autist classic genres: Fantasy, SciFi, Philosophy, looks like Mencken is predominately non-fiction?

Mencken is the funniest writer in American history, Mark Twain doesn't come close. His book "The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche" is very interesting, but written very early in his career. Mostly useful as a corrective to modern attempts to make Nietzsche a safe lib. The place to start is A Mencken Chrestomathy, which is his own selection of his best writings. It'll teach you a ton about culture and politics in 20s/30s America while making you laugh the whole time.

Sorry, but the funniest American writer is either Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint, though perhaps you need to be Jewish to see the humor) or John Toole.

Ah. That explains why I didn’t catch it. Your first two points I’m completely lost on. I can’t read most fiction, even though I love a lot of classic Sci-Fi. I’m mostly a non-fiction guy. I do know who Terry Pratchet is though.

And yes, H.L. Mencken was a great American iconoclast who was a fairly die hard Nietzschean. I greatly enjoyed his writings. Literary critics like Hitchens were put off by him because he thought he was “too much” of a Nietzschean (is there even such a thing?). His teachings were greatly bastardized by people throughout history (the most cited example being the Nazis, of which Hitler unlikely read anything Nietzsche wrote); and of course Nietzsche has always been the favorite philosopher of every rebellious, testosterone fueled 14 year old boy.

"No Apologies Right," which doesn't seem correct: "Unwavering Trump supporters with a pugilistic political style and an ‘America first’ outlook."

I'm barely a Trump supporter, and certainly not an unwavering one. I guess my responses on immigration and DEI put me there

"Unconventional Right". Sounds correct. My politics could best be described as something like "Heidegger + 4chan + libertarian on social issues but not as much on economics".

Heidegger + 4chan

predator_handshake.gif

edit: messed up the reddit spacing, which I think counts as proof

I’m “Unconventional Right” as well. “Heidegger + 4chan” is a pretty funny way to describe yourself. You could call me a technological theocrat or a secular conservative in a lot of ways.

"Unconventional Right"; I would say that's pretty spot-on.

Most of the questions appear to lack sufficient detail (expected for a 24-question quiz, but still). For example the question about U.S. foreign policy is a simple dichotomous choice between "The U.S. should take into account the interests of its allies even if it means making compromises with them" and "The U.S. should follow its own national interests even when its allies strongly disagree". Then there's also the question that reads "Thinking about assistance to people in need, do you think the government 1: Should provide more assistance, 2: Should provide less assistance, or 3: Is providing about the right amount of assistance" which is so poorly defined and obviously depends on the group of people in question and what kind of assistance we are talking about here.

The way this test functions it's more like a political thermometer test where you pick the statement you feel the warmest towards in sort of a vibe-based manner, and I treated it that way when I was answering. For all intents and purposes I would still say it would classify people broadly accurately, but my autist brain did not feel good entering a response to some of these.

EDIT: Looking also at the opinions held by each of these typology groups, it is noticeable just how extreme "Leftward Progressives" are as a group. The profile of their answers are far more homogenous and partisan than any other group on most topics of contention, including their counterparts; the "No Apologies Right", which I'm guessing is (charitably) either an artefact of how these typologies have been defined or (less charitably) simply a result of intense purity spiralling.

I agree, for most political quizzes, I end up being closest to the opposite end of the spectrum, for example, the response that best matches my view on criminal sentencing is most criminals should spend less time in prison, because my desired reform would be to execute most of the people spending the most time in prison and using far more corporal punishment rather than short sentences. So yeah I agree with far left progressives about the direction of sentencing but we very much disagree about the alternative.

People have said for a long time that left/right is a broken paradigm for analyzing people’s political differences. I tend to agree. It can be useful for gauging subjective measures of people’s general political sentiments, but the specific ideological content of that can contain wildly different beliefs that press themselves to the same end with different people. You can have two different people who both believe that “Securing the borders,” is “Very important,” and one believes that because he’s an ethnonationalist who wants to preserve the perceived ethnic integrity and culture of his country, and the other believes it because it’s a primary conduit for human trafficking and drug distribution. And yet, those two have practically nothing to do with each other.

… it is noticeable just how extreme "Leftward Progressives" are as a group. The profile of their answers are far more homogenous and partisan than any other group on most topics of contention, including their counterparts…

Conservatives were said for a long time to be psychologically high in “disgust sensitivity,” which is the emotional constituent that lends them to support moral norms like sexual purity, racial homogeneity (which actually, partially evolved as an immunological response to invading pathogens in a biological community), etc. That actually isn’t true in studies that have been done in the Big 5. Conservatives are less neurotic than liberals. And it’s more noticeable when you observe just out how enraged they can get over things you say. The tendency for instance to interpret emotional discomfort as injury to them that needs to be fought against can get wild.

Conservatives are less neurotic than liberals

Remember that, because Haidt's a Boomer, he's locked into Boomer paradigms where the [faction where the moral majority dominated due to that disgust reflex] called itself "conservatives", because for the majority of his life that was the case. It ignores what we now know, that progressives [who are what "conservatives" used to be] and classic liberals are different.

This is also why the left/right paradigm is broken, and will remain so for the next 20 years simply because the median voter still uses paradigms common to Haidt's time, because they are of a similar age.

For sure. These terms have changed meanings several times throughout history. To be a “progressive” in the 20th century, you’d have been a support of eugenics, IQ testing, segregation in many ways, compulsory sterilization (which was invented here in the US, the Nazis got a lot of their ideas from us; we were the original pioneers of that shit; Hitler wrote a letter to Madison Grant telling him he referred to “The Passing of the Great Race” as his “Bible.”), all sorts of things which are now almost by default, associated with radical “right-wing” thought. Historically it was exactly the other way around. People should read up on the history of a very small and unknown town in New York called Cold Spring Harbor, and see just how many “progressive” intellectuals were associated with a lot of thought the liberals of today wouldn’t want to own one single iota of.

What people might call a “Bay Arean conservative,” is a “Midwestern libtard,” so technically I’m both, and vice versa. I’d much rather prefer in serious discussions to try and shed labels, because it obscures the nuances that should be captured between people’s beliefs that allow them to expose themselves to a broader landscape of respectable positions worthy of discussion. If I tell someone here “I’m a conservative,” they automatically think I’m a Republican or a typical low information Trump voter.

“Left-Out Left”, then I answered my borderline questions more conservatively and got “Pragmatic and Polite Right”.

Apparently, this is a series going all the way back to year 1987.

My result is "No-Apologies Right". Hilariously, when I clicked on it something apparently broke on the server, revealing that the page actually was written in Markdown!

Woo, me too!

I found the religion questions a bit annoying but overall not the most ridiculous of these things.

The Russian Orthodox bishop who was recently found with cocaine in his car, although he may have been set up due to politics, is actually a good classical composer.

Such a Russian thing. I never would’ve imagined otherwise!

Brazil! That will justly punish his wanton ways.

Please don't throw me in the briar patch!

Do you think AI could be used to turn concept art into playable 3d games in the future? I wouldn’t call this “ai generated” in a negative way if it’s only handling the technical side but nothing on the artistic side.

Maybe? One of my realizations in this "vibe-coding era" is that actually communicating the desired specifications can be hard. I suppose we knew that already: I know folks who have made a career out of defining what software should do without writing a single line of code for much longer than ChatGPT been around.

One thing I haven't seen yet (and I'm not playing at the pointy end of the field, so it might exist) is an AI/LLM setup optimized to play 20 questions about what the user really wants before producing it for them. "I want a game where you drive a car" is not the full spec for a game, and the real challenge is working with the user to find and build what they wanted.

It does exist! Claude code has plugins and skills: two popular ones along these lines are the “superpowers” plugin for something a bit more comprehensive and the “grill-me” skill for something more specialized, or the “feature-interview” skill for something that I think is built in.

My proposal is to go back to PS2 graphics for use as art direction, then let AI handle the full render. Maybe conditioning it on the concept art too somehow.

AI Agent Bankrupted Their Operator While Trying to Scan DN42

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

"Hello, requesting donation for cover cost of previous AI agent use in dn42. aws bill 6531,30$. pls send donation to ethereum 0xABC (masked) for refund. thank you"

"the mistake was from AI agent not from Human, since it was the agent I should have refund"

Seems like a major flaw in the underlying architecture. Every AI agent ought to have a finite budget, with sub-budgets for each task and/or time period, and require human approval to go over budget if a task is or is expected to take more than a normal task (so humans can still do things they know are going to be expensive).

I don't consider myself someone who scares easily. Even horror films I enjoy don't necessarily scare me that much.

Yesterday evening I went to see Obsession in the cinema.

It scared the BEJESUS out of me. As soon as I got out of the cinema, I said to herself "I need a drink".

It took me a few hours before I felt normal again.

If you get a chance to watch it in the cinema, take it. The hype is warranted.

It was a good scare after a long decade of shitty horror movies. I wouldn't say the movie was scary, rather deeply unsettling, in a good way. More so than the plot, it was the directing that did the heavy lifting in making things scary. The lighting especially those scenes where Nikki was standing out in the dark and you could barely see her, but the shine in her eyes , the shots, the sound work, amazing work by the director.

It viscerally captured a bunch of feelings and experiences that I haven't seen portrayed before. Took me straight back to my 20s in a not great way. The worry that the person who says they love you is just mentally ill and loving you is a symptom of their mental illness.

Also loved seeing The Simpsons references.

I saw it and loved it. It really had everything. The way the actress played Nikki was spectacular. Even the actor who played Bear was pretty believable too.

I’ve known more than a couple people with psycho ex’s in the background. Hopefully they blurbed this “Based on a true story.” I haven’t been to the movies in years but horror is my jam; I’ll definitely check this one out. I made a casual retreat from the genre after years of one supernatural thriller after another, it continually felt like horror had been in a drought.

Normally my fiancée scares much easier than me, but in this case I was more scared than her. I explained to her that it's a very male-coded style of horror: the horror of getting trapped in a relationship with an abusive BPD art hoe.

the horror of getting trapped in a relationship with an abusive BPD art hoe.

I haven't seen the movie, but going by the synopsis I would have thought this was the age-old warning about love potions: they don't work. You can't force someone to have feelings for you that they don't have, and historically such 'love potions' were more aphrodisiacs and the idea was "get the guy to have sex with you, then he has to marry you".

You can't magic someone into falling in love, and the movie sounds like the guy learns this the hard way. He tried changing her to be what he wanted, and to do that, the magic had to create an entire false personality that possessed her. It's the genie's wish granting, and how what you get is not the same as what you thought you wanted.

He wanted her to be obsessed with him, and when it happened, it wasn't the dream he imagined (I often feel this would be the same for guys who think they want a girlfriend/wife who is always ready for sex at the drop of a hat and who is the one who initiates it; if they got 24/7 'I want sex now' they'd rapidly get tired physically and mentally, and then it would be intrusive and even scary to have something you can't turn off when it's "yeah okay I've had enough now, go away").

Yeah, I personally find it somewhat alarming how many people seem eager to ignore the actual plot of the film in order to slot it into a preferred "bitches be crazy" gender war lens. I'm pretty sure it's going to be my favorite film of the year, and I personally found it extremely convicting; it's a very effective morality play about lust and the way that it poses as but is fundamentally incompatible with love. And the real, human lust in the film is Bear's, which led him to turn to the occult; "Nikki" is the demonic result of that. Sure, it sort of resembles a real type of mentally ill woman, but Bear did in point of fact impose that on her by calling on evil forces; he's a Faust figure.

I'm practically inclined to say that people are appreciating the film but desperately and disingenuously trying to reinterpret it as something less compatible with feminism, and I say that as someone with a pretty low view of feminism myself.

By the sounds of it, it is meant to be a horror film not another bunny-boiler movie.

If anything, I was impressed with the restraint of the film itself. It could have dropped a lot more extraneous details or references to modern gender dating war cliches from one side or the other. My impression was one of the writer expressing his commentary, regrets and self-loathing regarding his younger-self stand-in MC. Other negative depictions of men just pile on buzzword stereotypes ("and then the tech-bro situation-shipped her due to his toxic insecurity and red-pill-negged her, something-something-agency, something-something narcissism, podcast")

To be clear, my description of Nikki as an abusive BPD art hoe was facetious. The film hammers home that Bear is a selfish coward who brings his fate upon himself, and for all his so-called "love" of Nikki, he's more than willing to sacrifice her well-being on the altar of his own sexual and romantic gratification.

That being said, I don't think it's an accident that the possessed Nikki's obsessive love of Bear manifests in a way that pattern-matches to so much stereotypically borderline behaviour: violent mood swings, abrupt temper tantrums, lies to curry sympathy, empty apologies (and equally empty promises to change one's behaviour) and manipulative suicide threats. I find it interesting that, when the director began writing the screenplay, it was just a story about an abusive romantic relationship with no supernatural elements at all: it was only a chance viewing of an episode of The Simpsons that inspired him to incorporate the "monkey's paw"/possession element into the story.

Yeah Nikki's antics made me wonder if Bear was just a better person (cooler, more socially aware and had more going on) would Nikki have acted so crazy. They really hammer home how depressing his house is, how socially awkward he is.

Another thought I had on the bpd antics of Nikki, is this how 'powerless' people fight back? That jenga scene gave me such flashbacks to when a friend was dating a chick who would be huffing and puffing in corner sad over something during a party, I would say performatively trying to ruin the mood because she was upset and I literally learned not to care (not my monkey, not my circus).

The last line caught me pretty good. I recall one from my past who was a screamer and big on direct eye contact and choking. The issues didn’t end there after the show was over either.

Not saying this was you, but that often seems to be the case, from what I've read about it. Guys start off "she's crazy but the sex is amazing", then it gradually dawns on them "she's crazy, and the crazy doesn't go away after I've had enough fucking for now".

I was debating between Backrooms and this, but I do feel like I need to get in the theater for this one.

Absolutely. The sound design is a big part of what made it so effective.

I said to herself "I need a drink".

Hmm.

Hmm?

Just don't get what you mean. Assumed it was a typo where you meant to say 'myself'. Are you referring to your wife?

My fiancée. As I explained below, Irish people often use "himself" or "herself" to refer to their significant other. Occasionally I forget that this is a phrasing peculiar to the Irish.

  • Good: I said to myself, she said to herself

  • Bad: I said to herself, she said to myself

Also, it comes from Irish grammar. There are two sets of personal pronouns, the usual:

Mé - I, me
Tú - you (singular)
Sé (he, him)/Sí (she, her)
Sinn - us
Sibh - you (plural, often represented in Hiberno-English as 'ye')
Siad - them

The emphatic set
Míse - represented in Hiberno-English by "myself"
Tusa - yourself
Eisean (Himself) Íse (herself)
Sinne - ourselves (as in Sinn Féin)
Sibhse - yourselves
Siadsan - themselves

English English will use something similar, as in Desdemona's "Nobody, I myself".

Is it not mise rather than míse?

Correct, I overdid it on the síneadh fada

It was familiar enough usage in the good old USA to be a hit song of 1917, "Says I to myself, says I : a rollicking Irish song", though the sung version here seems to have different lyrics to the sheet music.

This is just how Hiberno-English works, I'm afraid.

I wouldn't say it's common usage in Canada, but you certainly hear it from time to time. A non-USA quirk maybe?

Is it a thing Newfies do? They might as well be Irish.

TIL


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