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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   2300 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 26, 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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Anyone been watching the videos of Europeans coming to America and being surprised at how nice it is?

My girlfriend's been telling me about them. What are you hearing?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PBagmhUrsVE?is=Vz1jY87-UpPGgjjw

People like ranch, BBQ, national parks, the friendliness, etc

It's so on the nose and makes me feel so good that my default position is that a lot of it is astroturfed bullshit. But:

  • I react like that to excellent food when I have it in other countries
  • I genuinely think that our food culture is undersung, and pretty much every euro I know who has actually visited here says it's way better than they expected
  • Nobody is being brought to the ghetto or the middle of nowhere for these WC games, there's already some good filtering in what they're actually seeing and experiencing

I'm not sure I'd believe it if I hadn't guided multiple Euro friends around and watched them react in the exact same way. "I vould like to see ze Val-Mart and ze Buck-ees!"

Their expectations are probably low for the food because America basically exports it's cheapest food culture.

I did watch a specific couple, a bearded/ripped dude and hot blonde. They look like a hot young American couple. But sound British. Didn't feel very astroturfed, and a lot of their reactions were more informational. With a minority being glowing praise, but little criticism.

I don't necessarily think it's all astro-turfed but there are very strong incentives to create this type of content, regardless of how genuine the feelings are, because natives wherever you go love it when foreigners praise their nation. Influencers know this.

There is a whole cottage industry of foreign influencers making videos about how fantastic it is in Sweden and seemingly most of their viewers aren't people from their home countries but Swedes, and Sweden is a tiny source for views.

I think it's less about the incentives to create this content, but more about the incentives to signal boost it. If 1000 people make genuine and authentic content, then the 1% most positive is going to make Americans happy and they'll all comment/like/subscribe and then the algorithms spread it so that's what gets seen. You'll see 10 really positive videos and 0 lackluster, unimpressed, and disappointed ones.

Yeah, that is what creates the incentive feedback loop to make positive content.

Yes, that too. Both contribute, but I think the majority of the effect we're seeing is the first order effect of the selection bias itself more than the second order creation that you're describing.

Some Observations From a 2500 Mile Road Trip

I spent a large part of June on the American Interstate.

I decided to take an "open ended" summer vacation. What I mean by that is that I got in my Truck and drove with generally a city in mind, but with no reservations already booked or itineraries planned. I'd get to the target city or, in a few cases, decided on the fly to keep truckin' to a different city, and then book a Motel/Cheap Hotel instantly on my phone. Think "Holiday Inn Express" grade of places. Clean enough, with AC, locks on the doors that work, 24 hour person at front desk. Nothing fancy in the rooms, but they did have coffee makers.

I'd spend between one and three nights in a given city and then move on.

Here are some assorted notes on the moving on part - the driving.

  1. Drive between 150 - 200 miles at a time, then take a 10 minute break. If you do this, you can do 600 miles per day without feeling road weary. My longest day - where I was intentionally trying to set my own record - I hit 803. That was a lot and I wouldn't do it again. Trying to do a marathon push of 5+ hours behind the wheel, in my experience, creates a negative compounding tiredness.
  2. Big breakfast, snack and starve during the day. I started each day with truly epic breakfasts at the classics spots - Denny's, Waffle House, iHop. I'd leave with large ToGo cups of coffee. I was peppy and alert. Then, for the rest of the driving day, I'd eat some variety of trail mix and drink water. This kept my energy level smooth and consistent and I never got drowsy behind the wheel. I can do a bunch of caffeine in the morning but, after lunch, sodas or coffee get me feeling over-stimulated for some reason. The jitters make the drive more difficult. Dinners were only after I had checked into a hotel and were more modest the breakfast.
  3. (Staying On food) the reality really is grim for truckers. There can be lots of highway between even small cities, and its populated by gas stations and fast food outposts. The really is a dearth of semi-healthy food options. It took a lot of discipline for me not to eat a burger or hotdog each day, and I was driving without deadlines or within the context of a "job." It is easy to see how someone working under stress is going to default to the most convenient option.
  4. I don't think chronic speeding gets you to your destination faster. The naive argument of "It's speed / distance!" doesn't hold up for a number of reasons. First, once you're at 80 mph+, your effective miles per gallon plummets because of the energy needs to overcome air resistance at that speed. Depending on tank size, this can result in an extra fuel stop or two. If you aren't practicing your NASCAR team refueling process and, instead, using the bathroom, buying snacks etc. then these pit stops negate any time saved from speeding. More systemically, my observation was that traffic really does exist in "waves" even on the loneliest of highways. You may be able to speed at 80+ for some time but, eventually, you'll just run into a dozen or so cars / trucks moving in a rough "pack" closer to the speed limit. If you find something like an RV or a heavy load truck, it can be in the right lane doing below the speed limit and cause a jam up around it. You then have to fight your way through this "pack" before getting back up to speed. Much like the pit stops, this sucks back any time gains earned while speeding. Thus, my strategy was to be captain cruise control - speed limit plus 5 mph. People could pass me on the right as much as they wanted. When I passed people, I'd get back in the right lane ASAP.
  5. Silence >>>>> Podcasts > Musics. Driving without any podcast / music in the Truck was the easiest mileage I did, and I felt the best after. Still, eventually I did get a feeling of antsy-ness that would get cured with a podcast. Music I left for in town driving because I have a tendency to start hitting the skip button a lot trying to search for a "perfect" song.
  6. Drivers are truly insanely dangerous. The overestimation of ability is breathtaking. Constant tailgating and lane weaving at 70+ mph. A human simply doesn't have enough basic reaction speed to adjust on the fly at those speeds. Add in the fact that bad drivers seem to always be somewhat distracted. Death machines, each of them. I saw multiple cases of people clearly watching something on their phones while driving. One woman I passed was eating with a plastic fork and knife out of a Styrofoam food container she had balanced on the neck behind the steering while, obscuring her own dashboard. Another guy was tailgating an 18-wheeler, perhaps four feet from the truck's rear bumper, while laying on his horn. I have no idea what his intent was. According to Wikipedia motor-vehicle deaths are, if I'm reading correctly, the 2nd most common cause of accidental death in the US, behind "poisoning." As much as a car enthusiast as I am, I am beginning to think that driver training should be far, far more involved and thorough than at present, and that loss of license for repeated infractions (speeding, recklessness etc.) should be more common.

What about destination patterns? Did you enjoy any of the random cities a bit more or less than you thought?

Your music point is heard. I incur some non-trivial costs for playlist creation and maintenance, but over the past decade or so I've built up a critical mass of 1-8 hour playlist collateral I can safely just hit "Play" on in shuffle mode and fit the bill. I think it's worth doing so for a couple of your favorite artists and genres to start at least.

(I should probably turn this into a longer effortpost. We'll see)

The homogenization of America is real. Several of my destinations we're B/C tier cities. As an example; Huntsville, Alabama.

These cities are NOT in decline or blight the way the canonical Gary, Indiana or East St. Louis are. In fact, many of them have experience real population and median income growth over the last decade. Visiting them in rapid succession, however, placed in obvious relief that there is a "book" for modern small city / large down development.

Easily 50% of my conversations with locals went like this:

Me: "What's a good neighborhood for a night out? Dinner, drinks" Them: "Oh, you've GOT to go to the historic district! It's so cool. Tons of great restaurants. Go to [Insert single first name like Jimmy's or Silvia's or Tom's] they the best burger! And there's also like three really good breweries there to."

Everywhere has the best burger. There are always three to a dozen breweries "that let it dogs! and have a great trivia night!." After a few of these same places, I developed a mental formula that involved number of coffee shops with young women outside of them around lunch, number of hand-chalked signs with puns on them, and if a place had a co-working spot with a name like "the railyard" or "brick factory." If yes to all of these - congrats, you're in the "hip, revitalized" part of town.

I'm being a little flippant as this isn't a real culture war issue (or thread). But I do bemoan, to some extent, that regional variety does seem to have slipped meaningfully. I can remember growing up with a friend who had been born in Pittsburgh. He was too young to have absorbed that city, but his parents were deep "Yinzers." In our teenage years, the Dad told us drinking stories about Pittsburgh that seemed like combat to my young ears. I've since been to Pittsburgh and though you can see shadows of the "tough Iron worker" culture, it has no teeth.

Another part of me, however, kind of appreciates this. Plainly stated, more small cities are safe, workable, and viable destinations for relocation for people who want to move. Using Huntsville as an example, if you weren't from there up through the early 2000s, could you ever actually fit in after a move? Or would Alabama Southern Society culture suffocate you? If you moved to, I don't know, Buffalo NY in the 1990s and picked the wrong street, would your car get stolen? While homogenization makes places look the same, it also makes them function the same to an extent. In a nation as large and diverse (diversity is our strength!) as the US, an expectation of similar overall capability as you travel is probably a feature, not a bug.

It's funny you pick on Huntsville, I have a cluster of friends there, and you're right that it's the same as other places. The good news is this was never as suffocating, culturally, as a place like Mobile or (god forbid) Montgomery.

I agree with your thesis completely. But what could be meaningfully regionally different for each city?

  • Food: This is an obvious one, but the great food in each city is easily replicable in others. I can get great Phillies where I live, and even a passable Po-Boy, and BBQ joints generally cover the whole spectrum now.
  • Bars: America has great beer, but it's trivial for a brewery to cover 4-5 major styles and do them fairly well. The differences end up being how nice the bartenders are and the decor.
  • Activities: People generally like hiking, biking, and sitting near the water or up high to hang out. They go to sports games.

If you look at a Tier 1 city, I see better execution on some of these fronts, but that's it. There's a barcade, an escape room, and a go-kart track if you're down to trade money for an experience.

If I wanted to make a mark on a city to make it meaningfully different, I'd really struggle to come up with how. I feel like the only vector you really have is through jobs or maybe hosting a unique regular event. Maybe geography or architecture, but the latter gets more and more expensive to do so in a differentiated way every day....

Thanks for your observations! I planned for the end of august my first real roadtrip as a driver and with my wife, so your insights are relevant and interesting.

Personally I enjoy travelling but dislike driving. I used to enjoy driving but my reaction speed is getting worse so it's more of a dangerous activity than an adventurous one.

2500 miles of driving sounds like a punishment to me, I'd rather lay down on the floor and sleep.

book a Motel/Cheap Hotel instantly on my phone. Think "Holiday Inn Express" grade of places. Clean enough

Any tips for sussing out hotels without knowing the area? I have stumbled into some horribly seedy hotels lately that all have cheerful 4+ average ratings on every website. It makes me really hate the entire yelp/google maps/whatever system as a whole.

(Staying On food) the reality really is grim for truckers

Have thought about this a lot lately. Idk if it's true in the entire country but at least I can always count on Panda Express and Chipotle in most places I've been for a relatively healthy relatively cheap meal. You're playing Russian roulette with a lot of other places imo and I just don't like regular tier fast food (so expensive now and really unsatiating)

Download all of the booking apps from the major chains; IHG and Hilton come to mind.

If the hotel is on the app, it's been through a recent refurb so that it can deal with mobile bookings. For many of the Hilton group hotels, they have full check-in on your phone so you don't have to go to the front desk. Your phone is your room key.

If they've been through that refurb, the hotels themselves are going to be fine. The other guests, however, are always a gamble.

I have the advantage of being a rather tall and scary looking white dude, so my "fuck-with-able" coefficient is very low.

I think you must be one of those visiting Europeans because, as a US native, a five hour drive is entirely unremarkable. I do more than that twice per week though with stops at job sites.

When I think of a 'push' I'm thinking of the SF Bay Area to Seattle in one go, or at least Bay Area to LA or San Diego. I've also driven across this great land of ours, probably 12+ hours of driving per day, though took a winding route so as to see some of the sights and it still ended up taking five or six days.

Silence >>>>> Podcasts > Musics

Audiobooks are the only things that keep me sane. Currently blowing through Aubrey/Maturin at a most prodigious rate. But after living this way for... fifteen years? I have something like 600 Audible titles and enough material at this point that I could easily go the rest of my life just re-listening to what I already have.

The really is a dearth of semi-healthy food options

I'm a believer in bringing at least a mini ice chest with good things in it.

I don't think chronic speeding gets you to your destination faster. The naive argument of "It's speed / distance!" doesn't hold up for a number of reasons. First, once you're at 80 mph+, your effective miles per gallon plummets because of the energy needs to overcome air resistance at that speed.

This is definitely underappreciated, and it gets much worse when instead of filling up a tank you're charging a tesla.

motor-vehicle deaths are, if I'm reading correctly, the 2nd most common cause of accidental death in the US, behind "poisoning."

Kinda weird. I've known of countless people who died in car accidents and none who died of poisoning. Wonder if it's a regional thing? Maybe a social filter bubble? Anyway I'd expect medical malpractice to be number one by far, though maybe for some reason that doesn't count as 'accidental'.

Drivers are truly insanely dangerous. The overestimation of ability is breathtaking.

And they vote!

I've known of countless people who died in car accidents and none who died of poisoning. Wonder if it's a regional thing? Maybe a social filter bubble?

Would "poisoning" potentially include accidental drug overdoses?

It seems so.

I guess you are stopping places so there is no need to do a lot of mileage but I don’t consider 800 miles in a day as a lot. I just had a friend leave Florida for Detroit to see family and he started at 3 am to avoid traffic.

Only a few western states would have a need for 800+ days when your not actually relocating etc.

I don’t consider 800 miles in a day as a lot.

Cool. What is a lot then?

Here's my math:

A heuristic for hourly all-in speed is about 60 mph. This takes into account stops for fuel, rest etc. You're doing 75 or so on the highway, but there's traffic etc.

12 hours would be 720 miles. 13 would be 780. 14 would be ... you get the idea.

I just would not consider it heroic. Especially on interstate highways where going 80 is realistic. 16 hours getting close to 80 for long distance travel.

y, and then book a Motel/Cheap Hotel instantly on my phone. Think "Holiday Inn Express" grade of places. Clean enough,

Just be careful of bed bugs.

Any reliable way to determine if they are present upon walking into a room?

I'd google it and try and see what tricks you can do, I think you can look at the underside of a mattress but with the way my travel habits work out it's not something I actively think about so I'm not the best source.

I would definitely use some of the other tricks in terms of things like where to put your bag and stuff, lower level hotels are much more likely to have the problem and taking it home suuuuccckkkksss.

I envy your ability to enjoy driving on long road trips. Most of my long road tripping strategies are just on avoiding annoyances.

I think speeding might only be worth it to avoid getting stuck at long lights on a short drive. I regularly have to take 10-20 minute trips around town. Some of the longer light cycles are five minutes. There might be two or three of these lights on the drive, so making both at the end of the red cycle rather than the beginning might cut your trip time in half. It's also a bunch of luck and if the lights are properly synced up you really just need to go the speed limit (however this makes getting behind a slow driver extra frustrating).

On long trips I like to avoid the packs as much as possible. The larger the speed difference between the passing and cruising lanes the faster the pack will clear. I like to avoid being the cause of the pack cuz I don't like cars being around me. I agree with you that they are dangerous as hell. So if I'm in cruising lane at 5 over the speed limit. And someone is just limping along passing me, I'll drop my speed to five below the limit and it will usually break up the pack, or at least allow it to get around me

For food and staying awake I've noticed that spicy snacks seem best for me as an emergency "stay awake" snack. Caffeine doesn't do much for me. I can have 200ml of caffeine and still fall asleep an hour later.

For entertainment we have an in car video system for the kids in the back, or we will pull out tablets that we only give them for road trips. I have a playlist of music I like. If I go with silence for too long I go a bit stir crazy and get too focused on things outside the car. I usually try and put together a list of topics to talk about with my wife.

We have 750 mile trip and 360 mile trip coming up this summer. The 750 one we will split up into two days with a hotel stop between. With the young kids we have there are so many more breaks and bathroom stops. Eating at mildly interesting places is more fun, since the kids will be entertained by the smallest of things.

Yep, the whole calculus changes with kids, and you have to be much more intentional and disciplined about meals, bathroom breaks, and finding ways to keep them occupied.

I didn't enjoy road tripping before kids either.

It makes some things easier. Looking back on it I don't think I took enough long breaks as an adult on road trips. I could go three hours without any stops, and maybe 6-8 hours with only minor stops. But stopping every 1 or 2 hours just makes the whole driving part far less exhausting. And ya it adds a lot of overall time to the trip. But getting where we are going an hour or two later barely matters in the long-run.

Our kids also legitimately enjoy some of the places we have stopped. Like our first visit to a buccees out in Tennessee. They took pictures with the mascot, ate some really good sandwiches, looked through the thousands of souvenir things they sold, got excited about the bathrooms, bought a buccees shirt, and then took pictures outside next to the buccees statue. They talked about that part of the trip for about half a year afterwards.

Had we been planning the trip I don't think we would have allotted an hour of time to visit a glorified and super sized gas station. But I'm happy we went.

buccees

Every company in the world needs to be researching whatever the hell is the secret sauce for buccees, even my completely zero whimsy elderly father loves that place.

A little over a year ago I posted about ChatGPT's voice mode, which was, at the time, not much more than text-to-speech grafted onto the chat interface. A few weeks later I posted about a startup doing some impressive language processing, but its capabilities were limited to a 5-minute demo call and some snippets they were showcasing on their website. A few weeks ago I found out that Gemini rolled out a voice mode, which leans on the power of the Gemini LLM combined with a very decent voice synthesis model. At time of writing it is freely available in the Gemini app.

I haven't done much more than a few minute-long conversations but I foresee myself using it more in the future. Would be an excellent companion for long road trips. The only things holding me back are the privacy implications, as Google is now going to have a pretty decent collection of my recent voice data. I asked it how it does voice synthesis/transcription, and it sounds like they do all the processing off-device (i.e. they take your microphone audio, analyze/transcribe it in the cloud, and generate an audio response back) rather than using on-device text-to-speech.

You guys should try it out and report back.

Gemini's voice chat has been out for a while (a few months at least) and I will use it occasionally. The other day I drove to a random historic town and didn't feel like reading so I just pulled it up to ask it about the town I was in and specific things I'm interested in (asking about the architecture and for unusual facts and so on.) It did an ok job but was a bit repetitive and didn't have a super deep understanding of the town. I wanted to keep talking to it but I got back into my car and when it went to the car's speakers, it would begin to talk and then apparently hear itself and immediately stop talking, and then just loop that over and over. I hope they fix that soon.

When they first came out with it I would use it to practice German and then Spanish and then Japanese all in the same conversation so that was fun. It was pretty good at telling me mistakes I made in a constructive way.

One thing bugging me about the dragon show and perhaps the biggest thing in the whole series that makes no sense is how did the Targaryen’s remain in charge for 129 years between the last dragon and Robert’s Rebellion. They didn’t heavily intermarry or have a lot of people related to them. They were basically aliens who lost their special ability. I would expect them to last like 6 months without dragons.

Are there any historical parallels? The Europeans to the new world were few for a time but maintained better technology and most likely 10-15 IQ points higher intelligence. The show gives no indication targs were smarter.

I mean that’s a triviality compared to the Starks ruling Winterfell unbroken for 8,000 years!!

Timescales don’t make any sense in Westeros. The only helpful explanation is that the multiyear winter cycles basically frustrate change momentum and society is stuck in a particular local minimum of social technology it can’t escape. Basically can’t risk major upheavals without risking the entire continent plunging into famine on a hair trigger. Armies become thus much less willing to mobilize, lords don’t go along with destabilizing plots etc.

In this scenario, aegons Conquest, the Dance, Robert’s rebellion, and the Wo5K are extreme aberrations against otherwise bias toward extremely careful stability

Unfortunately, this isn’t actually played out at all in the books or shows, and the actual limitations of preparing for and surviving long winters is just ignored. Winter doesn’t even seem to exist on House of the Dragon.

True on the Starks especially with how martial Westeros seems to be. You aren’t holding power for 8,000 years with the amount of military power in Westeros.

I recently stumbled across this blog which touches on a lot of this in detail: https://acoup.blog/2019/06/12/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-iii/ The author's conclusions are that the economic system in Westeros doesn't make any sense at all, but I'd say that is forgivable (who cares if King's landing has to support 500k hungry mouths or only 80k, just adjust the numbers), unlike the larger sin of misunderstanding how politics and kingdoms operated in a medievalish setting.

you are a king who has suddenly come into a lot of land, probably by bloody conquest. You need to extract revenue from that land in order to pay for the armies you used to conquer it, but you don’t have a pile of literate bureaucrats to collect those taxes and no easy way to get some. By handing out that land to your military retainers as fiefs (they become your vassals), you can solve a bunch of problems at once...First, you pay off your military retainers for their service...Second, by extracting certain promises (called ‘homage’) from them, you ensure that they will continue to fight for you. And third, you are partitioning your land into...chunks small enough to be administered directly

castles, something Westeros has in abundance. Castles – in the absence of castle-breaking cannon – shift power downward in this system, because they allow vassals to effectively resist their lieges. That may not manifest in open rebellion so much as a refusal to go on campaign or supply troops

Tywin Lannister wants his army, he only gets it if House Falwell, and Ferren and Foote and Clegane choose to come out and fight for him. If Tywin wants to administer the countryside, change a law, count his subjects, impose new taxes – he can only do these things if the houses under him follow through

What is unusual here is how frequently key characters deviate from the norms these societies need to function – Westerosi nobles are stunningly treacherous for people who rely on systems based in trust for survival. In a system which runs on trust and reputation, elites tend to value trust and reputation

The problem here comes in the later seasons and how they re-contextualize all of this concern. That problem has a name, and it is Cersei. Cersei breaks all of these rules...And yet it doesn’t matter. The Lannister bannermen in the penultimate episode mount the walls to fight a doomed battle for her anyway. Not only is that behavior inexplicable, it hardly seems possible. Who, after all, is raising and leading these men? Who is coordinating supplies and grain shipments to the capital? Remember, the reason for this distributed system of political leadership is that the central state does not have the administrative apparatus to raise armies or feed cities on its own – it has to outsource that to vassals.

One thing those articles never engage with is Westeros' seasonal weirdness; summers last a long-ass time and outside of the North winter doesn't seem that bad, that changes a lot of assumptions about agriculture. Everything in Westeros is on a larger scale and has that classic fantasy "thousands of years" timescale for its civilizations. The seven kingdoms have history that goes back further than the roman empire; when Europe was full of dudes who painted themselves blue, they were building castles n shit. That's a lot of time spent in the steel age, even with fantasy medieval stasis in effect. I can believe they have better metallurgy/materials technology and architectural knowledge than the IRL middle ages did, and we as readers don't hear about it because none of our viewpoint characters are architects.

I think the best parallel is the successor states to the Mongolian Empire in established areas of complex civilizations in China and Persia, where the skills of being steppe conquerors long eroded but the dynasty persisted for longer.

Did the common people know the dragons were extinct in Game of Thrones until long after it happened?

I'm pretty sure it wasn't a secret, the death of any dragon is a big event, the critters are famous and the targs show them off as part of pageantry.

Apparently as time went on, the dragons got stunted and deformed and unimpressive until the last one hatched was the size of a dog.

Unless you lived in the one city that had all the dragons until the war, you would probably never see a dragon in your entire life. There were like 10 and Westeros is the size of the Americas, north and south.

The king/royal family would do royal processions every few years, touring the kingdoms and bringing the dragons with them to show off. During the targaryan golden age, if you lived in anywhere slightly significant, like Maidenpool or wherever, you probably saw a dragon once, that time the royal processions came through when you were 5.

They had been ruling for 130 years prior to the Dance of Dragons, the civil war that killed off most of the dragons. That creates a lot of institutional inertia. Also the seven kingdoms were called that for a reason - they weren't exactly inclined to cooperate to kick a Targaryen off the throne, if it meant elevating their rival next door.

After the Dance of Dragons there was a pretty long period of regencies and conflicts, where it sounds like the different kingdoms were effectively fighting over who would rule by proxy. It really was a downward trend from there, until Robert's Rebellion ended the dynasty.

Well they have a good shot at 'divine right to rule', as good as any theocracy or real monarchy at least? Institutional legitimacy?

They seem to have won a series of rebellions and only got overthrown because of exceptional madness in their ranks.

https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/First_Blackfyre_Rebellion

Just because everyone hates the current regime doesn’t mean they’re going to agree on a replacement, especially since Westeros wasn’t even one country when the Targaryens arrived. Robert getting personally slighted by Aegon and going on a suicidal revenge spree finally created a scheming point for everyone to rally around. Many such cases in real history.

I think auto-correct corrected away "Schelling point". But yeah, in the context of Westeros, they kind of have scheming points where all the back stabbers gather together to betray each other.

It wasn't uncommon for elective monarchies in Europe, for example, to pick foreign nobles as their King - better to have someone from outside the existing system who is not party to any of the various internecine squabbles come in and rule you, rather than risk somebody from the other camp gets in.

a scheming point

I assume you meant Schelling Point, but Scheming Point works just as well!

The Ptolemids seem like the closest parallel. They managed about 300 years before the Romans knocked them over and IIRC kept it, ah, in the family, so to speak.

It seems to me that for all Martin's talk about what is Aragon's tax policy, he really didn't think very hard about the details of his world building. See the size of the kingdom, the height of the wall (the show halfed the book's described size and he thought it was too tall upon seeing it) and many others.

I suspect he liked William the Conqueror so stuck him in without including all the details that allowed William to actually secure authority.

It wasn't even a lot of talk, it was a cheap throwaway line. I don't see any reason to think Martin was ever any deeper on setting stuff. AP Euro hammered the acronym PERSIA into my brain. Politics, Economics, Religion, Social, Intellectual, Artistic. How deep did he go into any of that for Westeros? He basically just did neat, fun crap at comic book depth, while having pretty solid characterization and a couple centuries of ancestries.

Tolkein at least was explicitly doing Mythos. What's Martin's excuse?

I haven't read the relevant books but I get the distinct impression that Tolkien definitely took the time to hammer out a lot of the PERSIA stuff, too.

I think he did think a lot about world building but there were either areas he forgot to tie up or couldn’t think of a way to tie things up. It’s not uncommon to have sci-fi to have holes that can not be completed.

Best I can come up with is the Targs without dragons would need to be rather poor. Where all the other houses would fight for the targs if another house tried to be king because the funds siphoned off by the royals was small and a new King would likely try and find ways to boost his income.

But overall 30 maybe 100 Targaryen blood people aren’t ruling a land without dragons. The British could rule India I assume because trade was very profitable for elites. The US ruled Afghanistan mostly with bribes (pre-invasion per capita income was $500/post invasion $1k). Not entirely sure how Britain was in with the Chinese but I’ve heard Heroin is a lot of fun. The Spanish actually fucked a lot the Aztec ruling class creating an elite and I assume had better weapons, money, and there was some religious prophecy. US, Argentina, and Australia didn’t have population centers. Ukraine is in this endless war because Poland got rich and is like 12x Ukrainian per capita income. Assad still had like 15% of the population his ethnicity pre-war and richer backers. The Jews who some say rule the world probably have average IQ a standard deviation above average and invented nukes and AI. Non of these seem to apply to what the Targs had when dragons died.

It seems to me that for all Martin's talk about what is Aragon's tax policy, he really didn't think very hard about the details of his world building.

If JRRT was economics nerd instead of linguistic one, the trilogy would definitely have 50 page appendix about Sauron's tax policy and full org chart of Mordor internal revenue service. Be careful what you wish for.

I'd find that pretty interesting, because I am an economics nerd.

Are there any novels with economics appendices?

ACKS (the Adventurer Conqueror King System) has a 12-page economics appendix, but it's a tabletop RPG, not a novel.

Not originally, but classical regency romances now need massive appendices explaining the social and economic structure of vanished world of early 19th century Britain, world as strange and foreign to 21st century as Shire or Gondor.

Reading the Regency

How accurate is that guide? I'm surprised that the author doesn't try to build up their own cred in the foreword, unless I missed it, although she does seem to cite her sources in the comments.

Ugly custom house update

DateInvoicePayment (k$)(% of contract price)
2025-03-05Design commitment2—
2025-07-24Contract signing2210
2026-03-02Commencement of work3315
2026-03-18Completion of groundwork and foundation3315
2026-04-01Completion of framing, roofing, windows, and doors4420
2026-04-08Completion of rough plumbing, electrical, and HVAC4420
2026-04-24Change order for replacement of torn-up govt. sidewalk2—
2026-06-23Completion of interior finishes3315
2026-07-06?Final completion and walkthrough115

Photographs:

In theory, under the draft zoning code that I mentioned two weeks ago, I could add a 428-ft2, 0-bedroom ADU (accessory dwelling unit) in the backyard of the 858-ft2, two-bedroom primary house. But in practice (1) renting out a property to someone sounds like a major hassle, and (2) I don't have the money.

Why that kind of vinyl floor tile, just for looks? Hopefully you are aware that while durable, it also requires occasional specialized maintenance? VCT actually requires more maintenance overall, not less, despite its use in hospitals and schools, at least if you want it to stay nice visually.

I didn't put too much thought into the specific material. My cursory opinion was based largely on this Home Depot webpage:

Vinyl flooring is extremely durable and cost-effective. It’s made from plastic, usually consisting of acrylic, PVC and similar polymers. It's a budget-friendly option for homeowners who want luxurious style and commercial-grade durability. Vinyl flooring is available in planks, sheets or tiles. Since it is scratch- and stain-resistant and waterproof, vinyl flooring is both functional and stylish.

Accordingly, my email to the contractor on this topic included the following passage:

To memorialize what was discussed [on the telephone]:

  • Finishes are low-end—e. g., vinyl flooring, vinyl siding, and MDF(?) cabinets

On that basis, the contractor picked "vinyl composition tile".

I see that the manufacturer's maintenance instructions mention "floor polish" and "floor cleaner", which I certainly have no plans to use. And this other webpage says:

[VCT] was the first widely popular form of vinyl flooring, but it is now much less popular than sheet vinyl or luxury vinyl. VCT generally requires surface polishing to protect its porous surface, and thus it is not as low-maintenance as sheet vinyl, which requires only routine sweeping and mopping.

The prevalence of many seams between tiles means this floor will not be as moisture-resistant as sheet vinyl. Water seeping through the seams can cause the base layer to loosen. High maintenance costs can cause the lifetime cost of a VCT installation to exceed that of other forms of vinyl flooring.

So this may have been a mistake on my part. Time will tell.

It’s not all that bad if you don’t mind it looking a bit more matte over time. Just have the installer wax it really well the first time and it should still be fine.

~220K for custom construction? That actually sounds really cheap, are you in a LCOL area?

The city closest to the construction site is Scranton–Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Just wanted to share a funny culture war adjacent Red Letter Media moment from a few weeks ago. https://youtube.com/watch?v=0TKH8-FOgbY&t=855

"coming on the the the tail end of the me too movement. You do not want to have a cartoon show where a man yells, 'I have the power.'"

But it is also interesting to remember that, yeah, we were in a time a decade ago where this shit was controversial, having a show about He Man without having an minority spotlight take on it would have been controversial. And now, it's kinda not anymore. Not that I think it's gone for good, I'm sure woke will come back in force within the next decade and a half.

minority spotlight

Man-At-Arms was played by Idris Elba. Another instance of Ginger erasure.

I took the kids to see it, we enjoyed it. Good summer fare.

Woke 2, same great taste, now with extra Palestinian flavor!

I’ve become a (possibly very bad) scalper.

Console prices are shooting up. Microsoft just increased the Series X/S’s price by like $150 across the board. Sony increased the PlayStation’s price by a similar amount recently.

There’s chatter that retailers are struggling to get stock for the anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI boom, which is going to sell a ton of consoles to people who never upgraded from last gen because they had no need to (I looked this up, and the *first current-gen-only Call of Duty is this year; the first current gen only EAFC game is also this year).

I had an Xbox for a while, but it broke, and I had a PS5 but it was lost / possibly stolen in an apartment move. GTA6 isn’t on PC, so I need one of them. So I went to a physical store about an hour ago with a minor (like 10%) discount on the window price for PS5s and I thought, on a whim, that I’d buy out the 4 other units and keep them all in a box until November, then sell them.

I will report back with my win or loss.

GTA6 isn’t on PC

Console players are getting the beta version, and the PC version, a year later, will be the real release.

With some luck, by the time the PC version comes out, generative AI tools will be such that hobbyist modders can mod in the type of content from the older games that's almost sure to be missing in this one, including actual AAA-level cutscenes with voice acting.

I can’t help but watch the conventional wisdom on GTA6 and shake my head.

  • GTA6 will sell more than any other game in history
  • Rockstar can charge whatever they want and people will pay it
  • There is the huge crowd of casuals who only play GTA and they’re all going to buy it
  • We won’t have enough PS5s to meet the demand
  • There are millions of people ready to spend $700 to play gta
  • The most hyped game off all time.

This reminds me of the 2016 “Hilary will win” crowd. People just repeating conventional wisdom and confusing that for analysis

In your case, it’s probably not a bad move given your points on COD and FC.

But as far as GTA goes, I fully expect it to not meet expectations for impact on gaming or sales. 13 years since its last release is more than enough for it to be out of the general zeitgeist. All of the original creators are long gone. Rockstar announced they’ve excised the juvenile and frat house humor. And it was in peak development during the years where developer trends were at their worst - and we are now fully seeing the ramifications of those trends.

I just don’t think it’s culturally relevant to anyone under 20 years old. I played my first Grand Theft Auto as a PC CD-ROM demo from PC Gamer (I think). I played the hell out of that game with WinAmp in the background and Sublime MP3s playing music. GTA3 was every bit of the revelation people say. And there was continuity for nearly 20 years between Grand Theft Auto and GTAV. 6 will just not hit that same way. For a lot of reasons.

Just my opinion though. I can’t wait to see what happens.

Aside from the preorders point, I'm pretty sure that GTA5 is still constantly showing up in top sales charts even today, more than a decade since the original release.

It doesn't even need to be good - and it won't be, given Rockstar haven't made anything good since San Andreas - because all the kids play GTA online, and they just need a good sandbox, more up to date sandbox to play in.

Are all the kids playing GTA online? Maybe. I don’t have info either way. I hear about kids playing fortnight all the time. I can’t say I hear kids talking GTA.

My impression of GTA online is that it’s a bunch of old millennials playing RP, the urban community, and third worlders.

People are talking like GTA is going to do historic numbers. Fortnight numbers. I just don’t see it. From what I hear a million concurrent would be way below expectations. I think it could do a million and be on par with other big games this year. I don’t think it’s doing 50 million sales week 1. Certainly not with the urban community and third world as your workhorse to get some alpha over a normal big launch.

In regards to current gaming trends I can safely say that all of my predictions are wrong recently.

I thought RE9 is most mediocre game in the series and even worse than RE8, yet even after two months since release everyone keeps telling me that it's masterpiece 10/10. Mediocre location that very heavily borrows from RE2 two-wings police station but smaller and almost no back-tracking, with puzzles that can be solved in the same room, and dumbed-down crafting mechanic that gives mountain of resources is apparently enough to "wow" the players so they can say "this is the best RE evaaaah!!!".

Pragmata is even worse, since that game has no adequate enemies, just victims waiting in line for you to complete this weird mini-game that feels completely unnecessary.

Which just gives me an idea that current gaming market is just vibes and marketing. GTA6 will break records.

Recently I was speaking to a friend about this and his interpretation of current games can be summarized as such:

Because contrary to what most people say, the common player does not want good combat. They want the illusion of good combat. Snapy moves, fast pace, easy controls, flashy, and short. They want easy wins but with the game pretending it wasn't easy. Dopamine without investment of time.

That's why we went from "slow but tactical" combat to "everyone is a DPS" combat to "just do your rotation" combat to "you only have 4 buttons, they all invoke a cutscene" combat.

I agree RE9 is overrated but most mediocre game in the series is a hell of a stretch. Resident Evil Resistance, Operation Raccoon City, Umbrella Corps and Zero exist, and Code Veronica is actually desperately in need of a remake if you've replayed it at all recently.

Anon, it’s already crossed 4 billion gross revenue from pre-orders alone.

I read this earlier and said, “hmm. Maybe I’m wrong”.

Then I got curious because I had not seen this news that pre order revenue was released. I looked into it. It looks like a bunch of people repeating information they heard in a big game of telephone. The original source is some dude posting info he found in an investment bank (piper sandler) research note that said something to the effect of “46 million pre sale units sold or $3bn rev would not be surprising.”

I’m not familiar with piper sander, but in not a banker (though I do work somewhat related to m&a). But I think it’s uncontroversial to say that these sort of research notes are mere an analysts informed speculation. And they’re usually motivated by something other than “reporting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”.

I remain skeptical.

FWIW, Kalshi is showing about 20% chance that Take Two announces more than 5 million preorders before July 4. There's the factor of the odds that Rockstar announces this before July 4 that's multiplied by the odds that they get that many preorders, so it's hard to figure out what the odds of the actual preorder count being that are. But I'd personally bet against it being 50 million as of today.

Rockstar announced they’ve excised the juvenile and frat house humor.

Red Dead 2 excised this first (the first game still had a lot of it, as did Bully and to some extent even Max Payne 3) and it was much better for it.

I definitely wouldn't say the first RDR had a lot of juvenile humor, or even any that I can think of. Unlike GTA, RDR was never meant to be satire.

In your memory no, but I played it again a few months ago on the Switch and it did, most of the missions are actually classic GTA humor/goofiness, even if the ‘plot’ isn’t and there are moments of greater depth - although the same was true for GTAIV which people remember as a ‘serious story’ even though probably at least half was classic GTA.

Still, I think it’s true that 5 aged worse than any of them, and even at its release was very dumb. Vice City still has a lot of great jokes, gags, clever innuendo, and 4 is a great time capsule to 2006-2009 era New York City. I don’t remember the plot to 5 at all, it’s just a bunch of barely related dumb shit that involves a few heists and some funny moments. I remember the torture scene caused some controversy. I remember the choice at the end, I remember the guy from the 4 DLC getting killed.

I also played it a few months ago, so my memory is as fresh as yours is. I completely disagree that the game was full of GTA style goofiness.

To me, Armadillo is very goofy and Mexico has plenty of goofiness. Even Blackwater does although it’s toned down considerably. The last third of the game is played broadly straight. Stuff like the medicine man fraudster and a lot of the interactions with the factions in Mexico are pure GTA and played for laughs.

I'll give you West Dickens as a comic relief character (though in fairness RDR2 has those as well), but I can't for the life of me see how you would say anything else in Armadillo or Mexico is played for laughs. None of that stuff struck me as trying to be funny.

Yeah but RDR2 wants to be taken seriously as literature. I wouldn't expect that from GTA6 and if it's what they're doing it's a bad move.

That is also why RDR2 is a huge step down from the first. Rockstar lost sight of the fact that they are making a game, not a movie, and that games need to be fun to play. RDR2 had its moments but overall it was a real let down and I had to force myself to finish it.

My issues with RDR2 were: I didn't feel like slogging through the tutorial, I just wanted to do the open world stuff, and: I honestly didn't really care about any of the characters, so there was no emotional feeling to the story missions.

I expect that gamers will say it's overrated and be firmly overridden by the actual masses of players. Rockstar doesn't seem to have lost a step, have an absurd amount of money to work with and aren't afraid to take their time.

The normies who play few games except Madden and CoD are going to go wild.

Look into the amount of money GTA online has made, it's absurd and that's for an experience that doesn't seem interesting at all.

Do you really want to deal with second hand buyers just to make a small amount of money?

I sold a bunch of clothing on Vinted and eBay last year because I didn’t like the idea of some awful thrift store employee reselling it, and it went pretty well. One person was unhappy with their item, but to be fair to them I had probably not described its condition as well as I could have. Put it in a box (which I don’t need to even do this time, since I can reuse the boxes they’re shipping them to me in from the store), take it to the post office a three minute walk from my house, send it.

I think it’ll be fun is my thinking, I guess. Plus, if I’m right and scalpers go crazy with limited demand (and the crazy woke but also well informed users of Resetera seem to think there’s a big supply crunch) and these shoot up like GPUs and memory (which is really all they are) then I think the margin on each one could be big, and I might make $1000 for an hour’s work, and also feel good about my foresight, which is a far bigger prize.

If not, I can probably still sell them at close to cost.

Or you could sell it at cost or below, for no reason other than human charity, to someone deserving.

I'll never be a millionaire.

I sold a bunch of clothing on Vinted and eBay last year because I didn’t like the idea of some awful thrift store employee reselling it

What? Are they awful because they're scalpers (which you are too now) or are they awful because you wouldn't want someone else making money off of something you donated when you could make the money off it yourself, or are they awful because you see yourself superior in class to thrift store workers?

More the second, which is reasonable. When you donated to a thrift store traditionally, the expectation was that the profit from the sale at a modest price would go to some kind of charitable organization. Today, if you donate anything good, a thrift store employee will sell it to themselves for almost nothing, then sell it at a profit online. I have no problem doing a nice thing for charity, but that is no longer what that business is.

I both buy and sell from secondhand shops in Japan. They're sometimes amazing. I got a vintage Schott's leather jacket for like 50 bucks that would normally have cost upward of 200 bucks US, or possibly far more (new ones are considerably more). Various other clothing. My one rule is I never buy electronics secondhand (or underwear, though I've never seen secondhand underwear.) Selling they rip you off--they buy by weight, and if there is a brand label they pay slightly more, but still a pittance. I don't mind so much with clothing, it's better than throwing it out, and I can't be bothered to sell online myself with all the intricate Japanese rules and finicky online buyers.

They rip you off so badly. I got something like 300 yen for a barely used (admittedly somewhat dusty) and fully functional Tiger rice cooker that was 30,000 yen new. In general I made something like 2000 yen from all my home stuff + books, it barely covered my share of the car rental.

My friend made 20,000 at the same time from a figurine collection. I could have killed him.

One person was unhappy with their item, but to be fair to them I had probably not described its condition as well as I could have.

How did you handle the complaint?

Refunded it and they sent it back, was very civilized.

Fair enough. Low risk entry.

I didn't think of the possibility of just shipping them off, which I guess you can do at acceptable cost even though they're big boxes. That would make things less uncomfortable than meeting the cretins. Last time I tried that, I was handed obsolete bills (outdated by decades).

Yes I’d never do the Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace thing, too many petty thieves and hustlers out there, and a few people much worse than that.

Is London such a shithole that you run the risk of being robbed during a craigslist meet?

Probably not, but it still seems like a lot of effort.

I say the following in good humor: it’s probably a genetic impulse.

It’s the first time I’ve done it!

Soccer fans, something that has bugged me for years: how does soccer manage to combine low scoring with highly predictable outcomes?

In most similar sports, low scoring and low margin of victory correlate with unpredictability. But soccer is the most predictable sport in terms of finishes, very rarely have we seen real surprises at the top of the table or at the end of a major cup. It's the same few teams winning the big 5 leagues, the UCL, the world cup.

Across every other sport, one score games are so close to a coinflip in luck that much of analystics consists in softening or removing one score games from the data. In soccer a one score margin is completely normal, two scores is high, three a murder.

I think the substitution rule should have something to do with this too. Very few subs during the game and a shallow bench means if some players aren't performing well or if your strategy isn't working you are often just stuck with it. For single games or very short tournaments this creates quite high variance. But during a long season being a team with high quality replacements vs few reserve players make a serious difference. For a mid/low team the injury or low performance of one key player is often catastrophic while richer teams can keep functioning perfectly well.

I think it's because of the length of tournaments. Soccer has huge upset potential in single games, we've seen that already at the World Cup, but that variance gets evened out over the course of a campaign. Winning a competitive domestic league is a grueling slog, even though you do occasionally see a Leicester or an invincible Leverkusen (I'd dispute "most predictable sport", given some of the surprises we've seen, but maybe you have stats I don't). A knockout tournament also goes through a lot of rounds, including two-legged ties where you need to keep a lead across both matches and potentially extra time.

It's also worth noting that, for fans of most teams, the ones that aren't at the top of the money league, it's not really about the trophy, because seeing a trophy is a once-in-a-lifetime experience - it's about getting into Europe or avoiding relegation, or, for national teams, making it to the World Cup and getting into the knockouts.

the ones that aren't at the top of the money league, it's not really about the trophy,

As an American fan of the sport who is homeless and doesn't have this investment that's always fascinating to me. I follow the sports teams of my birth city through thick and thin, but I'm not happy if it is a down year (or cough cough decades). Soccer fans seem totally down win or lose. Getting the title isn't the thing. That's nice.

That's the beauty of Pro/Rel, everyone has a peer to look up to and a peer to look down on. The clubs that are in danger of relegation have near-peer clubs around them that are a league below them, so just by scoring enough draws to stay in the top flight (or 2nd etc) you've achieved superiority to someone. Where in America a last place team is just a last place team. This is helped in Europe by density, the biggest distance in the EPL is less than the distance between Philly and Pittsburgh, which are in-state rivals in the USA, so no one is ever really bereft of top flight football (which is why pro/rel wouldn't work in the USA). This is also why I support instituting a modified version of the Gold System for draft picks.

Yeah it doesn't work for America but by golly does it work well for England. I wish more Europeans got to experience and enjoy both models but in most countries Football has nearly all the mind share (which admittedly is a large part of how the whole thing works).

Obviously no-one's happy if the team sucks. The local football team I follow is going through a bad season (Finland plays summer leagues in football so the season is on right now) and no-one's happy about it, or some of the absolute shit games we've had to suffer through as supporters.

I think what the comment you're replying to meant that it's still interesting, since the battle is not only about winning but also avoiding relegation (or, if we're really lucky, winning the Finnish Cup and making it to Europe that way). The team's performance has improved but relegation is still not completely out of the question, so every game is still a part of a greater project to see whether we're completely out of the danger at some point.

I mean the amount of love that I see in Europeans for a local football team that sucks and always sucked is far higher than what Jets fans can put out.

Jets fans

Yes, but consider this: Jets fans are all deviants who get off on hating things they love.

I will have you know that only applies to 50% of the Jets fans I know. That's right 1 out of 2.

I consider it a personal accomplishment knowing that many.

You can love something and still be disappointed in it, of course.

If all you saw was photos of the most passionate Browns and Jets supporters and you didn't live in the same country you'd probably have a skewed view of how much their ultras liked the team, though.

Soccer is predictable - most leagues have zero parity and zero financial parity (and I think this alone answers most of your question) and the same teams finish at the top every time. The predictable super teams make it to things like the Champion's League every time.

Yet.

Soccer is unpredictable - a lower ranked team can often draw (see this in the World Cup all the time) and sometimes even win. In some ways it is the most parity of ANY sport a lower ranked team, or a team from a lower ranked league can actually win.

If you ask gridiron football players they will tell you that an NFL team will beat the college football team 1000 times out of a 1000. A shit soccer team can catch someone sleeping, score a goal, and then hang on through teamwork and familiarity.

So in some ways I reject the premise - I think soccer outperforms most sports in variability, but the structural pressure of the game towards variation (driven as you note by its low scoring nature) is balanced by the complete lack of financial parity and the things that are downstream of that. Bayern is just that much bigger than everyone else in terms of talent acquisition, resources and so on. That counterbalances a lot of structural stuff.

The parity would completely change if they did 5 or 7 game playoff series. Yes you can catch someone sleeping but you won’t 7 times.

My gut says a pro soccer team would rarely lose in 1 match to a top level developmental team. But it may be more than American sports.

Notre Dame has lost to Navy which was sort of semi-pro versus completely amateur but it’s in a 1 in 40 event.

World Cup in many ways is like the first game of the year in football before teams develop chemistry and figure out strengths weakness and adapt. So that adds variability.

So I think a lot of the variance you describe would disappear over bigger samples and after teams have played more games together. Alabama might beat Jacksonville if Alabama was in mid season form versus Jacksonville playing essentially their first preseason game (a month of training camp).

  • Alabama might beat Jacksonville if Alabama was in mid season form versus Jacksonville playing essentially their first preseason game (a month of training camp).

Even absolutely legendary CFB teams will be lucky to have half their roster have meaningful NFL careers. Like I'm sure there's been times in the history of both sports where the absolutely hottest, best CFB roster might have been competitive with a particularly injury-depleted demoralized single game roster running out the QB5 and the backupbackupbackup OL but the gap between the worst healthy NFL team and the best healthy CFB team is still pretty gigantic.

I don't think you're rejecting the premise, that conflict is the premise. Why does all the structure of the sport lean toward variability, but the result toward predictability?

While I hear you on the financial aspects in regular season league play, it doesn't explain the world cup. We see very few upsets in the world cup knockout stages or UCL knockout stages, relative to the NFL playoffs or NBA playoffs, which are just single games. The draw creates an illusion of regular season parity, but disappears in elimination rounds.

And the finances don't explain all of it, expensive MLB or NBA or NFL don't dominate cheap ones in the same way game-to-game, though they show similar advantages over time.

Structurally the sport trends towards variability - most performance in a match doesn't show on the score line and the whole sport is hard to moneyball. You win by being dominant in performance and grinding away the whole game (in the way you see in true mismatches), you get lucky (and lucky holding it), or you pick at the margins by being slightly better.

The league table in the premier league is longitudinal and you really need longitudinal performance to tell what the best teams are, any given game is not helpful for the reasons above.

Except the Champion's League has regular final games as does the World Cup (as opposed to basketball style series) and it's usually a usual team who wins?

What gives?

Well superstar players don't matter as much. Individual player skill doesn't matter as much as chemistry and vibes. And context. Messi is in a retirement league, but he's killing it right now (but for how long?). Teams make runs see Leicester. Teams outperform by non-selfish play and playing in internal leagues with a lot of familiarity with each other (see: Iran). This makes it confusing.

Soccer is hard from an analytics perspective because of these harder to track metrics.

You can easily paint some of the discrepancy you are noticing as something like "okay this team doesn't really play together normally and later in the World Cup that absent chemistry is built by being together for a month." Or because the group stage (as opposed to knock out) rewards more conservative play, or because you can't tie in knock out and greater skill and more star players usually shows in extra time or penalties.

The lack of surprise and upset in the latter parts of the knockout doesn't nullify the fact that Spain was 2 or 3 in the rankings and drew with a team outside the top 50. If you tried that in American Football people might actually die. Basketball? Baseball? Total blow outs it's just not possible.

Soccer involves intangibles (moral, chemistry, "creativity") and skill as much as physical gifts. Large swathes of the big three American sports have been drilled down into pure athleticism, Aaron Donald's moves aren't nearly as important as the fact that he's a total freak. Obviously Messi has terrific intangibles and technical skills but physically he's much closer to a normal human being - absurd body control, spatial awareness, and reaction time is easier to overcome than me trying to block Donald at the line.

Circling back to American pro sports the ethos is really one of profit sharing through parity for the most part. The NFL really actually has parity - any given Sunday plays out. This is financially enforced. Bad ownership is legit what holds teams back not coaching, location, or the team itself. The MLB and NBA aren't as good but still do much better. This is by deliberate design and the structure has good parts and bad parts (for instance relegation doesn't make sense).

I don't know how much you know about the way salary caps work in the various sports but if you aren't familiar that's a big missing piece.

Anyway sorry I think this turned into a bunch of disconnected thoughts that had a minimal through-line.

Do I wake up when I need to number 2 or do I need to number 2 when I wake up? This important philosophical question hit me this morning. Does waking up turn on a lot of biological systems that leads me to the bathroom approximately 10 minutes after getting out of bed?

The latter. You have a semi-separate nervous system of sorts in your gut, called the enteric nervous system, which orchestrates the entire digestive process (including peristalsis) and has a sleep-wake cycle of its own regulated by your circadian rhythm. It's a large collection of neurons that's about as sizeable as a cat's brain, and can operate by itself if disconnected from the rest of your nervous system.

The real philosophical question is whether such a thing is independently conscious to some degree, but that line of questioning leads nowhere good.

If it’s conscious then it’s probably happy. Evolution seems to evolve organisms to be happy when they are doing their job well.

I believe the latter. Physiological arousal triggers a bunch of stuff, as does the first drinking/eating of the day.

Video game thread

What are you playing this week, and what games are you looking forward to in the remainder of 2026?

I played a bit of Moomintroll - Winter's Warmth lately. It's very wholesome.

Thinking of starting a playthrough of either a solid CRPG or a first person RPG like the Gothic 1 Remake.

Edit: Wait, Gothic 1 has no first person mode. Only 3rd person camera. :o

WARNO! I kinda hate the base game for being too arcady and competitive at times so I've been playing with either the CRMxWIF modpack or rebsfrago. Rebsfrago is soooo slow but pretty fun, and building artillery dominance can be fun. CRMxWIF is great but the roster is too limited and theres not too many neat things units can do, like SEAD or really nice artillery strikes. My micro is pretty shit but im having fun using long range weapons to snipe the backline, and my ai teammates do most of the real pushing. I'm starting to get a feel for what a good unit roster is (in both mods) but I just can't seem to get a combined arms push going, I'll be able to take the next copse of trees if I have all sorts of indirect support but I find it miles easier to just erode the enemy with long range fires, I'll get twice the kills, lose fewer units, and don't have to micro my frontline as much.

I'm looking forward to Star Wars Zero Company, which should come out later this year. People are thinking its like XCOM. Some in the know have compared it to Mass Effect, which would also please me, since I like RPGs too. Still, what I want the most is tactical complexity and turn-based squad combat. Unfortunately like most modern star wars games, I predict it will be trivially easy.

Oh, that one could be fun to try. The clone war setting isn't the most exciting though, imo.

There's another SW game coming soon that might be worth a look, the podracing game. SW Galactic Racer.

I have started yet another playthrough of Dark Souls 2. The impetus for this playthrough is stumbling across two mildly entertaining videos, one for the Heide Spear (my favorite weapon) and one for the Blue Knight's Halberd. I probably will just use spears again, but I may try out halberds.

I guess Dark Souls 2 officially should be counted as my favorite video game. I'm reluctant to say so, since even in the same genre Nioh obviously has cooler combat mechanics. But Nioh isn't very relaxing. In contrast, farming enemies in Heide's Tower of Flame, and wandering through other areas, are quite relaxing to do.

Been playing Nuclear Option...with my 4 (almost 5!) year old daughter. I'm sure she has no idea what's going on, but she enjoys shooting down planes and hearing the "Ding!" of a successful strike. Having to eject leads to discussions about the fate of the pilot. Incoming missiles make her jump and ask me whether she can shoot them down. She handles takeoffs and the shooty bits. And keeps reminding me to fly low to avoid RADAR. Even goes so far as to ask me IRL whether the planes overhead are flying low for the same reason. "No, they're going to the airport nearby." just doesn't sound exciting enough. And she tells her mother with great pride that we nailed a landing.

We've never made it to nuclear escalation yet, she usually gets too excited before then, so we agree to land the plane and let it take a break.

I played 80% of faith the unholy trinity. It's a 10/10 vibes game but a 6/10 gameplay game. I got interested in it because of these edits (https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mc9pML6Qamc https://youtube.com/watch?v=saxKlb_lkQE) based on the most excellent cutscenes. The vibes in the game are the best pixel horror I've ever seen, very faithful to an 8bit style. The gameplay is unfortunately faithful to the 8bit style. It has secret lore and secret endings, and a big part of the gameplay is finding shit in the environment to interact with. Which objects you can or can't interact with is obscure. That meant I ended up interacting with every object on the map, which got tedious. Would recommend buying and playing on sale, but not for the store price.

Recently played stalker 2 for a few hours. I had played it for 20 hours a year and a few months ago. Stalker was my favorite series, but when I played it first it felt like AAA slop. Now it feels like a true stalker game wearing the coat of AAA slop. The environment and gunplay feel good in a way they didn't before. Every main story event is still meh. Do you guys think I should restart my save to re-experience the game, I just met Scar . Side note I don't like scar's dialogue at all. He talks way too much for someone that was a silent protagonist in his own game. Funny enough, Strelok felt like he had the right amount of dialogue when he appeared in Call of Pripyat . Also any mod suggestions?

I played through Wanderstop, the "cozy game" from the writer of The Stanley Parable.

The gameplay's pretty fun, in a boring cozy-game kind of way, and the writing has a lot of good moments, but ultimately the overall story kind of failed to land with me. I'm not sure whether the four credited narrative consultants, including prominent "Gamers are dead" writer Leigh Alexander were a cause or a symptom of the narrative ultimately being a little confused and failing to resonate emotionally.

Just started Zero Parades, the follow-up (not sequel) to Disco Elysium, after the big ZA/UM bust-up. (Turns out incredible success explodes open all the cracks).

It's a spy story set in sort of a Cold War-ish, sort of Cuba-ish, setting where the lead character is a disgraced spy brought back into the field after being dustbinned in bureaucratic retirement because of an operation gone disastrously wrong. This is the chance for a comeback, but it starts off badly. Very badly, with the contact who is supposed to fill her in on the operation taken out. She then has to discover what the assignment is, what is going on, and who (out of a selection of enemies) is gunning for her.

The lefty politics are still there, but more toned down (so far as I've played, anyway). It's not the same as Disco Elysium right now, Harry was a unique character and from the start that game brought you along for the ride (also having Kim as partner makes a huge difference, comparing Disco and this game).

It's okay so far, I'm more wandering around discovering the world than getting stuck in to the investigation. I have to say, I've just encountered Dr. Gonza and he's incredible. Best character by a mile so far, "disgraced former doctor and probable mad scientist" doesn't even begin to describe him, and he is the most Disco character here so far.

I'll probably stick with the game, at least for a bit longer anyway, but Herschel (our spy) is no Harry. It's not a bad game, it just doesn't immediately grab you like Disco did (able to kill yourself just turning off a fan and ending the game before it begins? magic!)

I'm playing Zero Parades, too, and enjoying it a lot more than Esoteric Ebb. Portofiro is a great setting.

It is a good setting. I think I'm still getting used to the mechanics (only into the second day of gameplay so far) and right now I'm more interested in my little side-quests than the mysterious assignment (due to the lack of a clock ticking down or at least no indicator yet that I better start putting the pieces together before any one of the rival forces grab my backside).

The resemblances (visually and in game mechanics) to Disco maybe harm it a little, because I keep expecting "okay, this is where A will happen?" but nope. It's not a bad game, I definitely will give it a chance, but I think a lot of people were hoping for Disco 2, the further adventures of Harry and Kim, and what is going on back in Jamrock? Me as well, I have to admit.

I think a lot of people were hoping for Disco 2

Anyone who didn't live under a rock knew a direct sequel was not possible with all the drama surrounding the ZA/UM and the original DE creators.

"Drama" is mild to put it, but in the immediate aftermath of the smash hit, this was something at least some were hoping for. Then it all blew up.

ACNH. They seriously need to add some passive income systems in the next game, it is just so tedious digging up fossils and taking them to the museum all the time, and not the kind of tedious that is fun.

Also got through Once Upon a Katamari recently, I have always been a fan of the series. I am really grateful they decided to do an entirely new game, but it has some rough edges. The controls are pretty frustrating (pro tip: turning off rumble/vibration helps A LOT), the music is probably the worst in the series, and there aren't enough eternal levels. I do hope they keep making new Katamari games though.

ACNH = Animal Crossing New Horizons, for others who didn't know what that acronym meant.

Path of exile 2, grinding up enough divs for a decent rare adorned roll, 40%+, have about 3k that I'm continually cycling through buying temple of chaos fragments for 3.9 div and selling them for 4 div. jewel is hovering around 6k div at the moment. Grinding expedition with aldur's sagas, not sure if the sagas as worth it post patch honestly, very feast or famine.

I never got around to playing the Wolfenstein sequel, so grabbed it for the low price of £3 and started the game.

I remember there being a fair bit of culture war furore around this when it released, but based off my surface impressions I always thought it was just typical blown out of proportion bullshit, particularly given the febrile atmosphere at the time.

But starting it out and... maybe the chuds had a point. God this is a terrible opening. Awfully paced, with a ton of cutscenes before you do anything, and the most eye rolling, stupid scenes as evil backstory man berates your child self for being friends with a black girl and beats your mother for being a jew. And to be clear, this is not a wolfenstein nazi character, this is just your american father.

I replayed Doom 1 with the Unseen Evil mod, which makes it look like Doom 64. It added an impressive psychological depth to the techbase levels of E1, but I felt that the slow descent into Hell in the other episodes was marred by the subdued colours. You can't really tell that the pool of blood is a pool of blood, nor can you tell the flesh textures apart from rock. It did give E2 a somewhat interesting gothic feel, but you never felt the slowly increasing spiritual fear that it invoked in me the first time I beat it. For E3, only Mt. Erebus was creepy.

In the original, the high point (or the low, depending on how you look at it) was House of Pain, with the tortured humans which may have been a Mussolini reference- effective, because up till that point the tortured sprites made one fear that it would be your fate too, but now one sees it from the outside, as witnessing someone who might have deserved his fate. In the mod, it was quite dull.

They also altered the end text, which meant that the theme of apparently eternal suffering was lost. Though I consider the end of Doom 1 to be in a strange way a good ending; once you reach Earth, it poses a question: has your soul been tormented enough that you give up just when the proof that you're not dead (ie. your continued existence on Earth, rather than the afterlife) is right in front of to you? The entire game was about wondering what you did to deserve this. If you're alive, you still have a chance to turn back...

Great mod nevertheless. It might make Doom 2 interesting, if I ever get through it.

You clearly appreciate Doom at much deeper level than me. Playing old doom with obscure new mods. What is it about doom that is so evergreen? I only played the old dooms briefly as a kid. Never really played them to death or mastery. What’s the pitch?

I'm not into Doom enough to play mods or player-made levels in general, but Doom has definitely followed me around. Unseen Evil was a lucky find, because Doom 64 certainly has an interesting style.

As for the pitch, I think that in the old days people made a lot out of a little. Doom's aesthetic is exquisitely made once you look past the fast paced, gung-ho exterior, and ponder the mysteries of the UAC and the terror they discovered. Even the simple title screen music, paired with the cover art, has always brought to mind a feeling of moral horror.

But you have to be in the mood to look for things to appreciate. The first time that I really started paying attention was in E2. In the Deimos Lab, near the end after you step on a teleporter, you're confronted with a moving wall which shows faces of the damned. A little further, you see a pool of blood flowing from a gothic face in the wall. The implication, or so it seemed to me, was that Hell was as a place which converts souls into mere blood.

There's an underlying intensity that gets obscured by the now household nature of the name Doom, and probably the old moral panic that surrounded it has made people less attuned to the genuinely strange and frightening themes which saturate it. The Doom experience, at least of the original 3 episodes, is a slowly unfolding, prismatic vision of what Hell really means. Add to this the generally high quality of all its aspects (though the level design never gets as good as E1 again, and the last level was aptly named Dis[appointment]) and you have a game that matters.

Still on my second Cyberpunk playthrough. I did finally get mantis blades! They aren't necessarily any better than a katana or something, but they're fun, which is what matters. I am not yet an unstoppable death machine, but I'll get there. I figure I'll pick up sandevistan for time slow down, as well as more armor because right now it's pretty easy to get shot up in the thick of things (I'm playing on hard to get a bit more challenge, so stuff hurts).

I also started a new playthrough of Coral Island, because back when the game came out I wanted to romance this one character and she wasn't an option. But they just put out an update adding her as an option, so it's time for a new playthrough. Game is much improved from when it first came out, I have to say. I left a negative review back then because even though it was 1.0 the game was a buggy mess, but they seem to have fixed most of the bugs, as well as added some more content and QOL improvements.

Mina the Hollower, little by little.

Absolutely brilliant progression design and exploration. Lots of built in mods to drive the difficulty in either direction; I’m awful at it (bad reflexes, some Souls experience, next to none with platforming) and find the default difficulty just about on the border between frustration and joy.

Great game!

If you are struggling it's easy to make the game easier by gear hunting, the difficulty is very front loaded - once you have more options it's easy to break the game if you want to (without touching modifiers).

Yeah can't think of a Soulslike barring Sekiro (and even then you can cheese a lot of stuff) that doesn't have the difficulty fall off a ton once you get more options.

I’m 100 hours in to Trails of Cold Steel III with SoftBrilliants Difficulty Mod. Probably another 400 hours to go to finish Cold Steel IV.

One of my all time fav genres is turn based command battle in jrpg. People usually dunk on this gameplay as being retardedly simple and boring. The issue is that almost all developers fail to tune their difficulty high enough - often or requires a mod or romhack to fully shine.

On max hacked difficulty. Every single battle is a puzzle. An inexperienced player will probably wipe on the first 2 turns of any given fight. There is always a certain combination of builds and commands that can clear the fight, sometimes in an extremely elegant manner. Finding that sequence is the fun.

Another great series/run like this is Xenoblade 2 on Max Custom Difficulty. That game has DLC that gives you difficulty sliders. Put them all to max. I reckon most people will find the first boss 5 min into the game unwinnable. But it’s not.

When there are actual stakes in these fights, it’s quite fun. And makes the narrative shine.

Honestly, the only thing I've played for a while is online Scrabble, which I have become very good at for no particular reason. There is literally no practical use to knowing things like "what are all the admissible two letter words in the American Scrabble dictionary" and yet I continue.

Still playing, and enjoying, Cyberpunk 2077, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Do you know whether I can go straight into (or close to it) the Phantom Liberty expansion? I hear it's really good. I've yet to really play Cyberpunk, only put a few hours in.

Not exactly sure at what point you can do Phantom Liberty, but I wouldn't worry about it. The main game is solid enough and will give you a good introduction to the setting until PL content becomes available to you.

edit: nvm, was answered.

You can, but if you haven't really played before I recommend playing the beginning of the game.

How many hours approx is what you have in mind for 'beginning of the game'?

It's based on the progression of one of the main story quests. If you beeline just that stuff, I would guess somewhere between 10-15 hours. I looked it up and it's all of act 1, plus 8 missions in act 2. The reason I suggest starting the game normally is because IMO, act 1 is one of the strongest parts of the game and worth playing if you haven't before.

Darktide has a new DLC character, so I've been killing in the name of the machine God for the last couple of nights.

I've been wanting to give Darktide another go, but I can't quite get myself to. I'm badly out of practice, and I dread having to refamiliarize myself with the game's many semi-hidden mechanics. That, and the fact that it's not playable unless I set aside 30 minutes of uninterrupted gaming time, which I simply put do not have anymore. I used to be able to get those by playing with friends (so the wife would give me space, not wanting to interrupt social activities) and playing when the little one was asleep, but she sleeps less now, and I alienated my gaming buddies with my semi-tryhard attitude (they're more of the "get handed a win for showing up" type).

The Skitarius' long rifle looks really cool, as do his swords, but that's about all that appeals to me in the DLC, for which it seems too expensive. Darktide was always pretty much the only Warhammer game I actually liked, which was mostly down to the rejects suiting my sense of aesthetics - being, ultimately, regular guys using fairly profane weapons. The Skitarius is a little too close to the real warhammer look, to my taste - it reminds me too strongly of the rest of the setting, which I cannot stand.

That said, Darktide is IMO the single-best PVE CQC game in terms of mechanical and audiovisual refinement. Fluid, crunchy, and yes, that overused "visceral". IMO it only falls apart over extended play, when you notice that you can drop into the same combo pattern over and over, especially when fighting hordes, which is most of the time, making the long missions all ultimately repetitive, and the metaprogression is infamously unrewarding. Supposedly that has been improved though?

FWIW, I got all four of the original classes to level 30, and got most of the achievements for the Veteran and the Zealot. Used to play on the highest difficulty (that the game launched with, not the new challenge levels they added later) when alone, and somewhat lower with my friends. Naturally I am past my prime and would no longer be able to survive at those levels.

If any mottizens are willing to play Darktide around 20:00 GMT+1, let me know and allow me to pretend that we are friends, maybe I can make that work.

Did you dip out before or after the skill tree rework?

Which one? The later big ones? Before, I think.

When the game first released, you had maybe 3 talents you could pick, and you were allowed to pick one for about four tiers over 30 levels. Combined with no weapon customization, it was a pretty bland experience.

Eventually they gave each class one skill point per level, and a sprawling skill tree (not path of exile bad) that allowed you to customize your build. Two veterans can play completely differently now. You can also save builds and swap them between missions.

After that, they added weapon customization. You can level up weapons, as well as swap perks and blessings if you've earned enough "weapon XP*, either by playing missions or sacrificing weapons of the same type.

They've also added three new game modes: havoc, which is the "real" endgame, but really requires a four man group, mortis trials, which is a wave mode that has roguelike elements, and expeditions, which suck.

Oh, yeah, I remember now! Yeah, the old skill "trees" really were a sight to behold in terms of sheer simplicity.

I did play extensively with the actual trees, and customized my weapons to a limited degree, but I stopped before they added the weapon-specific XP progression.

My friends and I popped in briefly and tried the mortis trials, but were mostly bewildered and quit after two attempts. The other new modes I haven't touched yet.

Just had to point this out:

I looked through alternatives to my fav strategy game Civ V, and thought back to Humankind which I played for a bit a few years ago. The promo pic/logo is so on the nose. So woke. Ferocious white woman leading a male black doctor by the hand into the future. Female flintlock wielding revolutionary. Common.

Old World is the best Civ-like bar none. Very creative with its solutions to common civ gameplay issues and works well.

I didn't really like the interface visuals. Is there any way to change its font?

Do you play Vox Populi? I find it really is necessary and is the only civ game that is sufficiently difficult after 30 years of playing civ. I tried to get back into IV but struggled to find a good balanced difficulty. And relearning the systems wasn’t easy after being away so long.

All this is to say, i think modded civ is the only real alternative to civ.

I tried, and it was so buggy that campaigns wouldn't even start properly. Actually unplayable.

I played a few games in VP before tiring of it. It's too different. I don't like how they went full overhaul. Yes the AI is much better but that turns all the wars into real slogs, forever wars.

I use Lekmod now. It's different enough and balanced enough for my tastes, while sticking pretty close to what makes Civ V, Civ V. If I set the difficulty to Immortal, I can get a challenging experience without tearing my hair out.

It’s probably a me thing, but I just can’t get engaged with a video game at this point without tear your hair out difficulty.

Female flintlock wielding revolutionary.

At first glance I thought they're trying to go for WWII Italian Partisan (often portrayed as female, fair enough in my mind) by the outfit, but the badge on the hat is French colours, so I suppose it's the French Revolution?

Civ IV is the best Civ.

Does anyone know of a way to get Civ II on Windows 11?

MyAbandonware.org has the game available for download, though there are a host of issues actually running it in modern Windows. This thread at Civ Fanatics explains how to iron out the problems and achieve a playable game.

Have fun trying to conquer that one last Civ in the endgame!

Broke Take: Civ IV is the best civ game
Woke Take: Civ V + Vox Populi is the best civ game
Bespoke Take: Civ VII is the best civ game.

Fight me...

Civ IV has bad graphics and a doomstack problem, terrain is pretty much pointless. It requires little in the way of tactical knowledge. If I wanted to play something with randomly deep systems and a bad UX I'd play dwarf fortress. Most of the problems Civ V has also applies doubly to Civ 4.

Civ V needs a mod to make it playable. Enough said. Base game has huge problems with wonder-spamming and cities being pointlessly stacked much like Civ IV's armies. Later Civ's actually made city location and building placement meaningful beyond just "build it here for the resources it hits". The culture traditions are basic as hell and pretty much do have optimal choices leading to a massive reduction in build diversity.

"Civ VII is the best" is a nuclear hot take. I can only aspire to such heights of picking fights.

I just went and replayed Civ V this evening and it gave me a good perspective on all the things Civ 6 and Civ 7 have done better that I should be greatful for.

I think the towns and cities distinction is far more interesting than the cities only. The pointlessness of most luxury resources other than just box checking was improved upon. Weather and terrain effects were good. I think adjacency bonuses make for a more interesting settling dynamic around city planning and location, beyond the usual "find a 3 radius that doesn't overlap" or a strategic choke point. Culture is actually a bit more interesting, it's not just a collect resource-take bonus. I think 7 created the Culture Tree "tech" tree and separated it from the Science Tech Tree. I find that much more challenging, enjoyable and allows for greater complexity of play. It also helped the wonder spamming problem by splitting wonders. Actually having to place the wonders also helps not spamming them. This is getting long, but I could ramble on about how 6 and 7 are better than 5. (it's been awhile since I've played 4).

Oh, I agree that Civ 6 is better than 5 (though I still enjoy 5 and go back to it sometimes).. I just don't think Civ 7 is particularly good, let alone better than other Civ games. They made their main design objective for the game solving a problem I didn't agree was a problem (late game snowballing) using methods that I think aren't fun to play (era transitions and forced civ switching, though at least they dropped the latter). Pretty poor showing from Firaxis, IMO.

In Markdown, you have to add two space characters at the end of a line in order to create a line break.

Thanks bae.

I really wish that there was an easy way to change Civ 4 to 1upt (there is a mod I've seen, but I couldn't get it working on Linux so I'm not sure if it's good or not). It's so hard to go back to stacks of units, they're just so boring to play with. Otherwise yeah, Civ 4 is supreme.

Does the AI still carpet their territory with units on higher difficulties in 1upt? I found that as annoying, if not more annoying than the doomstack play in IV. At least it's easy to chew through a doomstack with a few sacrificial catapults or other units that do collateral damage.

Honestly not sure. I only play on King. Was going to move up to Emperor once I played all the leaders once, but that turned out to take me forever so I still haven't done it.

Pfft. Not gonna bite.

Civ wasn't what I wanted to bring attention to here, and I said 'my favorite' while you claim 'best.'

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