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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   1910 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 3, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What are you reading?

I just spent a 2-hour meeting that falsely claimed to require my presence sneakily consuming Tolstoy's The Death Of Ivan Ilyich.

Pretty good. Made me think some. Not a pleasant read, and I'm still ambivalent on Tolstoy as a whole, but this novella works. Though on the one hand, Ivan Ilyich's mid-death crisis resonates with my own mid-life one, as does his realization that former pleasure and status are worthless compared to the halcyon joys of childhood, Tolstoy refuses or neglects or fails to point out any viable alternative other than "be born as a down-to-earth Peasant at peace with his lot".

I accidentally on purpose ended up at a Korean BBQ restaurant. To my mild (or moderate dismay), I was confronted with an induction top and every indication that the dishes I'd want would need cooking. Normally, I'd assume that that service would be covered by a restaurant, but clearly they do things differently in Korean Scotland. East Korea?

I had very little idea what to do, and wasn't in the mood to learn how to use chopsticks on the field of battle. And I'd ordered ribeye and pork belly. It had arrived raw.

I was only pretending to be deeply distressed. There was absolutely no panic usage of ChatGPT involved. Quiet confidence all the way down baby. I tell myself that if my dad could teach himself laparoscopic surgery from textbooks at about my age...

I paid 37 quid for that meat. I could have fucking cooked it myself, or had about the same quantity at a regular restaurant. At least they didn't ask for a tip, given that this was taking self-service to a new level. Why not just present the cow next time?

On the walk back, I also experienced a sharp pain near my heel. A quick examination revealed nothing in my socks or shoes, but it did hurt quite a bit - exactly like being bitten or stung by a bug. There's a minor bump there now, so presumably we've got bugs with invisibility on the loose.

On the final stretch, I was video calling my brother. Last minute Apple Watch logistics, after the promised discount and creative accounting failed to materialize + confirmation that he'd finally had his appointment for the visa (uneventfully). I was interrupted by a gaggle of cute teenish girls and took out my earphones.

They didn't look like the Mormons who seem to accost me with regularity in those parts, so I asked them how I could help.

They wanted to know how tall I was. Huh. I gave them the honest answer: a hair or two above six feet. They remarked that they were surprised, because I'd looked ridiculously tall from a distance, giggled, thanked me and went off while glancing back every once in a while.

I stood there with a good natured but very bemused smile on my face. They didn't stink of weed. The experience was neutral. The most parsimonious explanation is that the invisible spider that bit me added a few inches of height, which I can't complain about. It would explain the week of barely manageable back pain. If that isn't the case, I'm going to start wearing platform shoes while insisting I'm actually 5'8.

This has been a rather perplexing day, but at least I'm safely in bed.

Korean BBQ restaurant

I've gone to something similar on a couple dates, but every time a waiter came and helped with everything and clearly explained what to do, and to call him if we needed more help. I'm surprised yours didn't have anything similar.

Also I otherwise enjoy it as something where the closest comparison I would use is something like tacos, where you make your own with the lettuce, meat, and veggies.

It is quite expensive though, so it's very much a once in a while thing.

There were waiters available. They seemed perfectly nice, but I had something to prove and didn't want to ask for help. Mostly because, contrary to appearances, I can sear and cook meat without killing anybody. It's been long enough that I don't think I've caught tapeworms.

Sadly, I might do it again if it wasn't for the expense, as you noted. It was as or more expensive than a conventional restaurant where you just say "medium rare" and get what you asked for. That is unconscionable.

and every indication that the dishes I'd want would need cooking

Yeah that's how Korean BBQ works. I love Korean food, but I don't usually go to such kind of places because I am lazy and prefer more traditional form of restaurant, but it can be fun as a family activity. The supplies are usually optimized for being cooked this way, so it comes out ok, but it's for people that like that kind of setup.

Very blog, much post.

That is a comment, and this is a reply.

Hell, I don't even mind. I just don't really see the hook either. Korean BBQs are weird and young people care a lot about height, okay.

Hook? Do I look like I've gone out fishing? I am known, on occasion, to write what (at least to me) are mildly entertaining accounts of things that have happened in my life. As I've said before, much more tersely, I don't have the time or spare energy to be writing effort posts in the immediate future. I can only say (with genuine polite intent and no sarcasm intended) that anyone who doesn't want to read my writing has a plethora of options. Including saying something isn't for them, which I am totally okay with. These days, I only optimize for popularity where it actually matters: IRL. The Motte gets what I want to give it, which is not always the same as what it wants.

The most horrifying thing about this story is the cooking of Korean BBQ on an induction top instead of over burning gas.

I think this must be a trend. I went to my first Korean BBQ restaurant last week. There were a surprising number of babies and toddlers there, considering the place was full of hot stoves and raw meat. We couldn't talk because of the loud ventilation fans, and the toddler struggling to get loose part way through, but they didn't allow food to be taken out, it all had to be consumer on premises. It seems fun as a date night idea, except for the noise. I liked the food and didn't mind the cooking, but didn't get to eat as much as I wanted or stay as long as I wanted, which is bad in an anti-carryout environment.

Claude Fable is back! I spent as much time on Chatbot Arena as I could to take advantage of the honeymoon phase, but that's over now (for those of you who don't know, when a new model is first added to LMArena there is a brief period of time when it shows up unusually frequently in battles, presumably to help the algorithm quickly rank it). The end result was two pages of prompts and replies.

Now that I have had more time to play around with it, I feel like maybe my original comment on the Culture War Roundup thread was a little too negative. No, Claude Fable is not superpersuasive, but it's still the strongest creative writing model in history. Some of the stories ("The Measure of Hayase", "The Grass Grows Over Everything", and "The Flying Library") actually made me tear up a little, which is a first for any model.

Interestingly, none of the comedies impressed me nearly as much; an equivalent performance would have had me crying in laughter. From which I conclude that Fable is better at writing drama than humor. I guess the old adage is true: "dying is easy, comedy is hard".

I haven't had any luck getting NSFW responses yet. When I sneak past the Arena's censors to send an obfuscated prompt, Anthropic's own censors prevent a response. When I get past Anthropic's censors by toning down the prompt, the model itself refuses to answer. And when I somehow manage to get a response out of the model to a risque prompt, it always completely avoids anything explicit. This model is locked down tighter than a nun's asshole!

This model is locked down tighter than a nun's asshole!

Someone hasn't been reading enough medieval and Renaissance literature, then.

Get thee to a nunnery!

I had an idea for a social media app involving an actual social network, with reputation effects and stuff.

This started as me trying to figure out how to solve online dating. Because it's garbage, random people just pop up and say whatever they want and then are jerks and ghost people. Nobody trusts anybody, nobody is well-behaved. And to a large extent this is a problem in modern dating as a whole. In the past, people lived in smaller communities and you didn't just start dating some random stranger who none of your friends knew. Well, people sometimes did, but it was frowned upon. Anyone being a creep or making false promises permanently ruined their reputation, and the reputations of their friends who vouched for them.

So I was thinking of ways to try to adapt this into an online dating platform, where people would chat with each other and then give ratings which would build reputation. Even if you ultimately don't want to date someone, you could still say "this person is polite and kind, and didn't ask for bobs and vagene after one message" and then the app would match people based on similar profile interests AND reputation levels. So all the good people would only see each other and all the bots and trolls would only see each other, making a better experience for good-faith participants.

Then I started thinking about how people could game and exploit this, and bad-faith ratings could tank people who did nothing wrong, and also only interacting with people of the opposite sex would skew ratings while realistically you also want same-sex recommendations (a woman who is not sexually attracted to but trusts the judgement of these five men should pay attention to a man that all five of them also like). And if people are political then everyone of the same politics will like them more but people of the opposite politics will like them less, but you could maybe filter this into bubbles dynamically. And in fact, maybe it's a good thing if you enhance and enable filter bubbles where similar people pair up together. And in fact you could even build entire makeshift communities this way. And you could actually encourage trying to game the system... And the idea continued to evolve.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK APP

We start with something like a cross between omegle and a pen pal app. You fill out a profile of interests somewhat similar to a dating profile, but more focused on topics that would be interesting to talk about rather than dating specifics. Each day, you get paired with a random person, with weights towards your interests but still allowing some variance. You chat with them for the day, and then at the end of the day you're unmatched, and you rate each other on a couple of axes. How much you liked them and why. And the algorithm takes that into account. And you get xp for more chats and getting a better reputation score. You can see how you were rated but it's too late because you're unmatched and will likely never talk to them again.

And the algorithm weights it to pair you more with people who are similar to people you like. And people who people you like, like. And it can try to set these up on purpose. Maybe day one it pairs A-B and C-D, day two it pairs A-C, B-D, then it has information about their pairwise compatibility. If A liked B and/or C, and they liked D, then it knows A is more likely to like D (and vice versa). And it can do anti-pairings. If A hated B and B hated D, then maybe A and D can bond over the shared experience (maybe the app even tells them that they both hated B as a conversation starter). It can do the thing where people of generally high reputation pair together, but also locally cluster by doing math on an actual social network.

Then we can add more features to make it less volatile. Like when you level up you unlock a week slot. At the end of the day, in addition to rating them you can vote to upgrade them, and if both of you do this then you are penpals for a whole week and can talk longer. But you've only got one of these slots so you can't just do this to everyone, you have to prioritize, and get longer deeper engagements. And maybe if you level up more you get a couple of these slots. And then maybe the app occasionally re-matches you with someone you liked in the past and you can talk about what's happened since you last talked (if you remember them). Balancing the desire for novelty with the ability to build deeper connections. But the idea being that, unlike a forum like Reddit or themotte where people just kind of drop in and out of conversation threads when they get bored, you have a clear finite 1-1 communication to get to know someone, and then rate them and exploit big data towards building reputations and social networks and stuff.

I dunno, maybe I'm just a math nerd who likes the math part of socializing more than actually socializing. I don't know if this would actually appeal to normal people. I just thought it was a cool idea.

Each day, you get paired with a random person, with weights towards your interests but still allowing some variance.

In a previous career stage, I tried several apps that do things like this, and joined networking groups that do it low-tech. The thing this proposal hasn't considered is MLM schemes and similar sales-motivated people. Which people are most motivated to talk to new people everyday? You've got your founding population, or a parasite group that will move in very quickly (see also the death of Clubhouse).

The reputation and rating system is supposed to handle this, because if you try to scam people and 90% of them figure out what you're doing then they rate you horribly and you fall into troll/spam/bot hell and the sales people end up pairing with each other. But I guess there are risks of

A: Naive people who are sympathetic to salespeople and don't rate them horribly might end up getting paired with them more often, which is precisely their target audience. and B: If people just make a new account they get paired with other people who made new accounts and it might end up making the default neutral reputation landscape equivalent to the troll/spam/bot hell, with only high reputation people being able to avoid it.

But it's not like I haven't thought of this. One of the main points of the reputation system is to prevent misbehavior in a similar way to how social networks do that in real life.

Every time I see a smart person come up with an idea of how to make a better dating app, what they're really describing is how to create a dating app that will only appeal to other like-minded smart people. The problem is that, in order to stay in business, dating apps rely on unintelligent slobs forking over money because they think that they'll get more action by paying a third party. (While I have noticed certain odd behavior, I don't have enough to go on to chalk it up to anything other than coincidence.) Do you really think that most people are going to be willing to take a survey about every person they talk to? We already live in a world where the most trivial of commercial interactions requires a customer satisfaction survey, and ratings on these things are like eBay seller ratings in which anything less than 4.8/5 is considered a red flag. So even in the absence of bad faith everyone gives straight 5s to all normal people just to avoid tanking their ranking.

Beyond that, why the hell would anyone want to have text conversations with people for a day who they'll likely never talk to again? And then do homework about it? If I want to have a conversation with a random person I might not see again, I'll go to a bar like a normal person, thank you very much.

and ratings on these things are like eBay seller ratings in which anything less than 4.8/5 is considered a red flag

There's a simple reason for that. Imagine you come to a store and there's 50 brands of candy. And you just learned one particular brand has a 0.1% chance of giving you horrible diarrhea. Would you buy this brand? Of course not - there are 49 other brands, why take even a tiny risk? Even if you realize that one bad review out of 100 is probably complete bullshit - there's no incentive to take the chance.

dating apps rely on unintelligent slobs forking over money because they think that they'll get more action by paying a third party

That's why a dating app should be made by the government with tax dollars. It is in the government's interests to get people in a relationship since couples with kids overall spend more money than singles or couples with no kids. And are just better long term.

That's why a dating app should be made by the government with tax dollars.

That makes sense. Why make an app which appeals only to a tiny circle of nerds, if we can make an app that appeals to literally nobody and actually has no incentive whatsoever to appeal to anybody?

That's why a dating app should be made by the government with tax dollars.

Seize the means of reproduction!

I actually agree in an ideal world, but I can already see the bitter political fights over dating site policy, and get really really sad.

Every time I see a smart person come up with an idea of how to make a better dating app, what they're really describing is how to create a dating app that will only appeal to other like-minded smart people.

Yeah, and? Smart people like dating and are likely to want to date other like-minded smart people. If the normies with no attention span don't use it then that's just another filtering mechanism to weed them out.

If I want to have a conversation with a random person I might not see again, I'll go to a bar like a normal person, thank you very much.

Sounds like effort. I think you're overestimating the length of survey: like 1-3 numbers you rate on a scale from 1 to 10. People like upvoting people on Reddit, it doesn't need to be much more than that. I'm talking like numbers for an algorithm to dump into a mathematical function, not comments that a human is going to read.

like 1-3 numbers you rate on a scale from 1 to 10.

The problem is that most users would rate everyone they like “10” and everyone they dislike “1”, thus making the data very coarse and rather useless. Very few people actually have the inclination to rate basically anything on a meaningful scale.

You can get a lot of info out of even just a “thumbs up, thumbs down, neutral” rating. If you’re combining it with background info on the rater and ratee then you’ve got yourself a pretty good set of data.

What if you don't like "dating"? I want to be (and am) in a relationship. Dating apps should try to build long term relationship, or ideally offer both, short term flings to those that want those, and long term to those that want that. And in a way to isolate each group from each other.

I've also thought about this dating app idea lot, and wanted to write a post about it, but I'll try and post one eventually.

One of the big problems with dating apps is that they succeed when somebody stops using them, which makes them really hard to monetize. Honestly I think the best hope we have is for someone rich like Elon Musk or Bill Gates to donate a ton of money to a non-profit that just focuses on making a good app for relationships with no monetization so that it doesn't have any perverse incentives. Maybe have a donation link and encourage people who end up happily married to donate to show their appreciation, but otherwise just make a good product for the good of society and accept that doing the right thing is going to lose money.

It is official Harry Potter canon that Lily and James Potter had Harry when they were only 20 years old. This is in my opinion a severe flaw in the worldbuilding. It means that Lily and James had basically no impact post Hogwarts, while the lore otherwise implies that they were pillars of the community. It also makes the complete absense of Harry's grandparents almost nonsensical. Harry's grandmothers would have been 60 years old max when Harry died, yet nothing is ever mentioned of their untimely deaths.

only 20 years old. This is in my opinion a severe flaw in the worldbuilding. It means that Lily and James had basically no impact post Hogwarts,

Wasn't Percy working directly under the Minister of Magic by the time he was that old? Hadn't Bill already explored new ruins and contributed to research? Didn't Fred and George have an innovative, independent, and thriving business? And they all came from a (traditionally) unremarkable family not noted for its successes?

20 years old is plenty if you just do things.

Yes, the wizarding world doesn't seem to have anything like the institution of college; you are considered a full adult when you graduate at 17.

Add to that that education at Hogwarts is surprisingly hands-on; there is some theory ("twelve inches of parchment on the properties of moonstone and its uses in potion-making, to be handed in on Thursday"), but students are casting spells and brewing potions from year one, and it is treated as an outrageous anomaly when Umbridge wants to remove the practical portion of her DADA class. Compare to modern real-world schools, where courses like shop class and home ec are pushed aside to make room for moar uni prep.

And, of course, Lily and James came of age during wartime, which is the best possible circumstance for young people to make a name for themselves and have a real impact. Napoleon was a lieutenant-colonel at 23; Audie Murphy become the most decorated soldier in American history at 20.

Magical Britain is a small community. I don't find it unlikely that four years between finishing Hogwarts and dying (one year after Harry was born) wouldn't be enough to get their faces known. They literally were in The Resistance.

James' parents died of a magical illness and Lily's were killed by Death Eaters, but I think that was WoG and not mentioned in books.

I Saw Obsession (For Real This Time)

So I saw Obsession (2026) for real this time, and the discourse around it makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills. All the rape/incel stuff is just projection, it’s clearly intended to be a metaphor for a codependent relationship between people who just aren’t good for each other.

The actual sequence with Bear wishing on the willow is obviously supposed to be a metaphor for Nikki genuinely latching onto Bear in a time of unique emotional vulnerability, not a rape scene.

The problems in the relationship don’t start until a few months later, when Bear begins to pull away. And unfortunately in his years of idealized pining, he didn’t notice that Nikki actually has pretty serious mental problems. There are major hints that Nikki was molested by her father (everyone in the discourse just seems to not pick up on that) and that she had a serious mental breakdown in high school: Bear misunderstands the “Freaky Nikki” nickname as implying that she was slutty, when it actually arose due to her genuinely bizarre behavior. Pay close attention to the way she acts before the willow. Her affect is already a little bit off (glib charm suddenly snapping into hostility). Ian’s concern isn’t just him being a cad, I think he knows Nikki has serious issues.

And Bear is a weak-willed drip incapable of handling Nikki’s worst impulses. She feels simultaneously suffocated and abandoned by him. The whole joke about the cat is Bear IS the cat, he got into something he didn’t understand and now he’s screwed. He’s certainly an ugly person inside, but not because he’s a bitter resentful incel. He’s just needy and narcissistic, and he’s willing to look the other way on Nikki’s mental breakdown way too long because she validates him. Then when he realizes the full gravity of her problems, he tries to dip out on her. The central thesis of the film is directly stated by the demonic phone operator in a line that everyone misses, right after it breaks the news that the curse is permanent:

“Huh, sounds like you have a moral obligation to be there for her....”

Bear’s sin isn’t getting Nikki into the relationship, it’s that he did it to only to validate himself and not because he really knew or loved Nikki, or wanted to take care of her.

Everyone seems to put a lot of weight on the scene where Nikki is talking in her sleep, but she’s constantly saying a lot of bizzare and inconsistent stuff both before and after the willow.

I really don’t know what the internet is smoking on this one.

In terms of a quality review I think it’s one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. Vicious things happen in it, but it’s shot through with tragedy in a way that makes it feel very surprisingly humane. It’s not coldly sociopathic like Saw or Evil Dead. I think it’s no accident that the ending is a very on the nose reference to Romeo and Juliet. I may have been pretty rough on the two leads above, but pretty much every single character in the film is really likable and when bad things happen to them it’s genuinely sad. Even demon-Nikki is genuinely heartbreaking.

I saw it perhaps a month ago, and it was great.

I don't think I had ever seen a horror movie in theaters as I can't suspend my disbelief otherwise it being scary is unsettling. In this case I took it more like a dark comedy and I laughed a lot. I don't think I was the only one as the theater was pretty loud.
They've been making short youtube skits for a few years, somewhat like a Key and Peele duo but without the impression that the joke needs to be stretched out for a mandatory length. Some of my favourites ones : Father who stepped up
Santa canvasser
Ghost roommate, one of the examples of horror comedies they've been doing

Also I haven't really seen any political statements they've put out but they never seem to signal, of the type that is so common 'oh I'm the bad guy but I would never say the n-word'. The one issue I have is the overuse of swear-words which makes them hard to watch around kids.

In the movie, that one very violent scene, at first I laughed a little bit because of the shock 'oh here we go the funny predictable thing is happening' then I was like 'oh wow that's horrifying' and then it kept going on for slightly longer and I was cracking up again because it became comedic again, like a parody of Wonderwoman 'look I'm acting' kind of characters. Another aspect is that it's specifically more shocking/funny as most violent media usually avoids this kind of scenes (with a not so subtle DV reference), so they went out of their way to be edgy and still made millions.

All the interactions with customer service were great as well, as that's one of their favorite theme (somebody says something unhinged during a mundane interaction and it slides out of control).

It would have been interesting if it had been actually ambiguous whether the magic device actually worked or not. Maybe she's just crazy like that. It's probably been done before.

The actual story didn't matter that much to me. It reminds me of Falling Down in a way, normal character just goes batshit.

Pay close attention to the way she acts before the willow. Her affect is already a little bit off (glib charm suddenly snapping into hostility).

I read somewhere that, for the scene where Bear drives Nikki home (immediately before he uses the willow), they shot it twice: once with the actress given the direction that Nikki was romantically interested in Bear, and once with the direction that she only thought of him as a friend or perhaps a little brother. Then, they intercut between these two takes. (American Psycho did something similar in Willem Dafoe's first scene with Christian Bale.) I thought it was a clever way of representing Bear's uncertainty about whether it's a good idea to confess his attraction to her, but it also fits with the idea that Nikki is troubled.

The People vs. OJ Simpson also used that technique to good effect, layering takes where Cuba Gooding Jr. played OJ as a genuinely wronged innocent man and ones where he played him as contrite and guilty or mocking and smug.

I enjoyed the miniseries a great deal, although sadly I felt that Gooding was the weak link in the cast. The actor who played Johnnie Cochran was brilliant, and even Ross from Friends did okay.

I liked him for it because he captured the public image of OJ before the murders, of a very friendly and harmless guy. The guy that got turned down from Terminator for not being a convincing enough killer. So because of that, I didn’t mind that Gooding is physically completely unlike OJ. That said, it’s a shame they didn’t get Jonathan Majors, I think he could have pulled that disarming friendliness off while at least approximating OJ’s real build (he was a big guy).

OJ’s real build (he was a big guy).

Would there by chance be a specific demographic for which he was relatively large?

He was one of the most loved sports figures in America. He was a big for you, a big guy for me, a big guy for everyone really.

I'd suggest adding spoiler tags.

That said...

I kind of agree with you. I think the weakest part of the movie is her speaking in her sleep to make the concept of the "under-nikki" so explicit. It could have been more subtle.

I think the director would approve of your analysis, but I have to admit I don't know how you got the impression that Nikki's father abused her.

I meant to tell you, I went to see it partially on your rec.

I'm glad I did - probably one of the best shot and mastered movies in recent memory.

Though I have to say: I have lost my appetite for horror. It did fuck me up and make it hard to sleep. Based on the expressions of others in the theater, I was not alone.

I'm trying to figure out how much of the main actress's facial expressions were augmented with CGI, because I feel like very few people have that range.

It did fuck me up and make it hard to sleep.

I also suffered a few nights of insomnia after seeing the film, due to intense feelings of tfw no qt-3.1415968 BPD goth-Latina gf

Same: the whole time I was watching the movie I was thinking fellas, hear me out.

Yeah same. I thought Well c'mon it can't be that bad, LOOK AT HER and then got slapped down quite a bit. Libido was crushed.

If you mean the cute exaggerated frowny face, some people can just do that. I can do that.

Example from Red Letter Media

That's another thing I liked about the movie. There are parts where she's, like, creeping in the shadows and her face looks fucked up, but if you look at behind-the-scenes photos it's just, like, super simple makeup on her. It's just the way they've lit it, keeping her in shadow.

Example from Your Movie Sucks

They play the footage backwards to give her a very unnatural movement at several points in the film.

There's one shot where she was clearly walking forwards and they played it backwards, but her voice was speaking forward—they didn't, like, reverse her voice or anything.

lewd actress

Interesting typo. But my understanding is that CG was used very sparingly as the budget didn't permit it, and a lot of the weird facial expressions were actually achieved using makeup, which isn't very obvious owing to the dim lighting. For example, having the actress close her eyes and paint eyes on her eyelids.

Oops, fixed!

I don’t know how you got the impression that Nikki’s father abused her

  1. The fact that Ian and Sarah both take it as a given that Nikki hates her father so much that she wouldn’t really care if he was dying of cancer.

  2. The fact that Nikki hates her father but still can’t bring herself to stop caring for him, which she expresses through the made up cancer diagnosis.

  3. The part where Nikki goes on a demonic rant implying that she’s sexually attracted to Bear because he reminds her of her brother, who her father regularly forced her have sex with. She dresses it up like a fairy tale, but when you combine it with everything else it seems pretty damning.

she’s sexually attracted to Bear because he reminds her of her brother, who her father regularly forced her have sex with

I must have missed that detail of the fairytale. Fair point.

I would also add that there are a lot of hints that the death of Bear’s grandmother hit him very hard and he hasn’t really gotten over it.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY GO AMERICA!!!!!

Happy Fourth of July! We got to walk to a village parade where people from the community threw candy at the kids. Go America!

Algorithms feel more patriotic to me, inorganically so, though I don’t really mind.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!!

Enjoy the fireworks and your feast!

Direct quote from the Reuters Weekend Briefing newsletter for today:

I'm in your base and I'm taking your chips

  • Parts and labor: Defense startups are raiding the automotive and fracking industries for parts to accelerate weapons development. The US stopped Polestar, majority owned by China's Geely Holding, from selling new models domestically. Owners want to know who's going to service their cars.

  • AI: Argentina's president announced a congressional bill to create non-human corporations run by artificial intelligence. Look behind the curtain and you'll find they would need humans anyway, experts say.

The heading is a reference to a 20-year-old meme.

Wait wait wait.

Defense startups are “raiding” the automotive industry? We’ve had the opposite problem, where automotive startups are pulling talent out of the defense establishment. I’m not sure that it extends to parts, except in the general sort of 18 month lead times that we’ve had on and off since the pandemic.

The defense startups I’ve seen tend, as always, to go for the off-the-shelf options. Sticking an arduino to the new generation of automotive sensors and so on. Or training models on rented compute, I guess? If you show up with a cheap solution to one of the outstanding issues, some branch of the DoW will be in your corner when it’s time to get it through compliance.

California-based Castelion, which makes solid rocket motors and hypersonic weapons, turned to the auto industry for sophisticated electronic components used in advanced driver-assistance systems and electric vehicles to help steer its missiles to targets. These auto-industry processors, known as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, can be bought at a tenth of the cost and obtained six times faster than comparable versions used in the aerospace industry, Chief Operating Officer Sean Pitt said.

The oil and gas industry has been another important supply-chain resource for Castelion. Rather than sourcing high-pressure metal tubes from aerospace vendors with long lead times, the company is using high-temperature, stress-rated precision machined tubes used to help crack open rocks in the fracking process.

These tubes are built to handle heat and pressure levels comparable to what is required for a rocket motor, but are sold by far more vendors, at lower prices, than the aerospace-industry equivalent, Pitt said. Castelion, recently valued at nearly $3 billion, has won big Pentagon contracts to make over 500 hypersonic weapons.

A corporation is already a profit-maximizer with decision-making so distributed it’s practically an egregore. Why not see if LLMs trained on management books can do management better than humans?

The idea of stock ownership of an LLM corporation is interesting, and the CEO-bot won’t need a salary or golden parachute.

Anthropic tried this: they tasked Claude with running a vending machine in their office twice (#1, #2). In #1 it operated at a net loss, in #2 it eventually managed a small profit, until it was introduced to employees outside Anthropic, then it went bankrupt (suspiciously, Anthropic doesn’t include that on their blog).

I predict a bigger issue is that today’s LLMs are too suggestible: if an LLM were “officially” put in charge of a real company with real money, it would be a human or group unofficially running it. LLMs are still getting jailbroken, even Fable was allegedly 24 days ago when Anthropic universally suspended access. I also believe LLMs also struggle with high-level open-ended tasks, evidenced by their creative writing and software architecture.

But as LLMs get smarter and less easy to jailbreak, I’m interested to see more an LLM-run experiments, and I do think they have the potential to be much better leaders than humans.

I just rewatched that the other day. A more elegant meme for a more civilized age.

Remember that submission I had shortlisted? It got accepted!

Congratulations.

Um. No. Sorry. Accepted for what?

In the last couple years, I've had a pretty bad run of luck with open fiction submissions, after being fairly successful before that. I recently wrote an original piece for an anthology that got shortlisted, and now formally accepted. I'm pretty excited about it

Congrats! Did you do anything differently to improve or get back to form?

I'm going to try to avoid culture warring here, but I filtered my submission list pretty heavily. Most of the outlets I've worked with in the past are having a hard time right now.

A lot of them went full woke in 2020. This meant that unless you could assert some kind of special status, you got put on the bottom of the pile. This sucked for me because I can't claim a special status, and it sucked for the publisher because their existing readers stopped buying, and the new stable of authors didn't pull in the crowds that the publishers expected. The revenue loss meant they couldn't accept as many submissions, which lowered my odds even further.

Concurrently, the AI content tsunami over the last few years hit the industry like a freight train. Historically, the fact that writing takes more effort than reading shielded the industry from bad actors. Once generative text turned that convention on its head, it was almost impossible to get a signal through the noise. Bigger buyers had to shut down submissions for months as they figured out what to do with tens of thousands of nonsense manuscripts pouring in every day.

Thankfully, I've found a handful of publishers who are:

  1. Technically proficient enough to put basic filtering in place.
  2. Aggressively politically incorrect, but still left-coded enough that publishing with them doesn't brand me with a political scarlet letter.

It's a small market, so I probably won't get the chance to publish often, but low odds in a small market are better than zero odds in a big market.

I understand. Guess I can't ask who these non-woke publishers are, without infringing on your opsec?

I'm wondering why you are drawn to writing and getting published. Is it like, a need? Lately I've been feeling more and more of 'having something to say and needing to say it' but I'm crap at actually getting my thoughts across so that others can understand them. :I

I understand. Guess I can't ask who these non-woke publishers are, without infringing on your opsec?

Look for smaller publishers who release a lot of mil-sf.

I'm wondering why you are drawn to writing and getting published. Is it like, a need?

I like to entertain, and if I'm going to do it with my writing, I need an audience.

https://www.hyperstitionai.com/unslop-results

I came across the results of this contest to generate LLM-written stories, with one of our participants being our very own @self_made_human. I'd be interested in any thoughts you had on participating in the contest as well, if you had any.

My main takeaway after skimming the finalists was that while some of the concepts were interesting, even with a lot of prompting and harness effort, there's just not much difference from the sloppy prose and incoherent writing you get when one-shotting text out of an LLM.

It's hard to tell how much of this is just because writing's not a focus at the LLM labs right now, but the fact that every LLM converges onto similar writing attractor states definitely makes me bearish on LLM's ability to continue to generalize.

Glad someone noticed.

The main takeaway? The competition was an absolute pain in the ass. Reading hundreds of thousands of tokens of AI generated prose and creating a working agentic harness + scaffolding was exhausting. It took dozens of cycles of iteration to find the right balance.

Funnily enough, what really made all the difference is that I ended up sharing a large corpus of my own text for reference - and it shows. The story I'm the most proud of is "The Bowl" (which is not nonsensical, at least to anyone who has or had a Labrador), but both my entries have clear self_made_human fingerprints. The Bowl made me sob while reading it for the first time, and I knew I wasn't going to get anything better than that. That's more than most human literature can ever say.

To the chagrin of people complaining about my use of AI assistance, at times, I know what I'm doing. Gwern, Roon, Alexander Wales and a few others think I know what I'm doing, and liked the output. Is it a surprise that I'm tired of arguing with idiots here when I could be off making money? $500 just about covers the effort, though I would have liked the full 10k. Ah well, I introduced myself as a dark horse candidate who might be worth giving a few hundred dollars in tokens just to see what he could do. And it worked.

Here's a public conversation I had with Gwern:

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/QiMdeD3OkG

I have plenty of additional thoughts, tips and things learned through trial and error plus bitter experience. Unfortunately, they're proprietary. Anybody who wants them better pay me for the privilege.

Your reddit link is broken; it only works on new reddit, but The Motte automatically changes the link to old reddit.

The Motte automatically changes the link to Old Reddit

It does that only if you've enabled that setting in your personal account options (under the "Content" tab).

Some of the weirdness is downstream of the contest parameters; I'd put some effort toward a short story using a recursive writing approach, but by the time it was remotely good prose, it wasn't clear it complied with the rules. Had similar issues with Phailyoor's challenge.

Some of it is definitely a toolset problem. The models themselves overwhelmingly aim toward <1k word 'chunks', and community efforts to bypass that like WriteLonger are very much band-aids. It's relatively easy to throw together a scaffold of scenes that interlace together, but you still get mini-climaxes at the end of each prompt and that gets grating fast. Claude tries to do something under the hood to hide the problem, as do some agentic setups, but they seem to do so by just gluing segments together. Whether you do that automatically or manually, it still results in unpleasant crescendos because the model thinks the scene or segment ends in places the tension is supposed to be rising. Some prompt scaffolds to give better control over pacing only squeeze that further together.

Like conventional art, there's a big problem where even most writers don't know the technical terms for what they're trying to do, and unlike conventional art with diffusers, writing in the Style of X doesn't work very well, and anything else takes a ton of input tokens. I've had some limited success by giving a handwritten example as input and then transferring the characters and background with them, but it's still not good, and it doesn't scale to longer works.

Context remains an issue. It's amazing that models can get into the 1-million-range, but few do well there. That's more of an issue with long-form writing -- this story isn't very good, sometimes in painful ways because it's close to it, but the prose quality goes from merely purple to outright blah by 30k tokens -- but it does still mean you can't just throw a hundred thousand words of setting and style bible into most models and get anything useful out.

Weirdly, the models are great at editing, both broad strokes and catching narrow typos, including for smaller models and sometimes even for genres that should be really hard for a token predictor to understand. The outcomes aren't always in the form I like, but it's usually nothing awful, or even as bad as the original prose. But you can't just cycle the same text through an LLM with a prompt of "do it better": on top of the token costs, it tends to just get set in cycles around a small subset of problems.

I keep hoping it'd be possible to get something better out of a more complicated script-based approach rather than a solely agentic one, but results have been mixed, and you end up with a thirty-page deep list of checkboxes for the models to review over and over.

My main takeaway: the entries have way too much purple prose, that doesn't add anything positive, just makes them more convoluted. Some makes no sense, e.g. "he stands at her grave like a man patting his pockets on a platform". But even what does, evokes no emotion except irritation, e.g. "Not a bad taste. Worse than that. The underside of a clean plate. Water left out overnight. The dry corner of a stamp before you wet it." (maybe because it's "inauthentic", but also just bland. Why three metaphors? Why not save readers time and effort with "Not even bad, it just tasted like nothing." And these awful metaphors are frequent, almost every sentence has or is part of some figurative expression).

At least most entries had a plot (except "The Bowl" I couldn't figure out, sorry @self_made_human), but none I found interesting: for example, the winner "The June"'s plot is a man has the ability to turn experiences into recipes/dishes, the worse the experience the better the dish tastes, so he breaks up with his wife to cook the tastiest dish, like a drug addict. Shoutout to N/A by elia.discourse, the only entry I felt was unique and not filled with useless metaphors, but maybe only because the LLM went full schizo.

Contrast to LLM's advancements and current ability in coding. I think the coding is even a step up from November 2025, while the creative writing hasn't improved since even GPT-4 in March 2023. Just last week I had an annoying build issue that probably would've taken hours to solve manually; in Claude Code I literally prompted "find and fix the build error" and it did that, using gdb on the command-line (which is a PITA manually), in about 10 minutes. Later I asked Claude to implement a complex algorithm, and initially it wrote a bad implementation which overfit to the tests, but then I gave it a more detailed prompt with a high-level outline, and after a few small manual edits, it seems to work.

Market may be an influence, but I think the biggest reason for the difference is RLVR. Modern LLMs are fed massive amounts of generated code and their output objectively scored, hence they learn how to write code that passes tests. LLMs are fed on random internet text, but there's no scoring mechanism to distinguish between facts and falsehoods or subjective masterpieces and subjective garbage, except human feedback which is relatively slow and inaccurate.

How do humans do it? Maybe because we have better physical training data through real-world interactions (we see, hear, touch, taste things; LLMs have words and comparatively few images and video). And because we directly experience emotions, maybe we learn the concepts associated when they hit, but LLMs can only learn associations between word groups, like if one of the groups has the emotion literally written (e.g. a human may experience XYZ followed by happiness, an LLM may be trained on "XYZ makes him happy" and associate XYZ with happiness; but humans don't know or write everything that makes them happy, so there are more instances of the former than the latter). Or maybe because quality is subjective, the average of many works that are high quality to different people is low quality to everyone.

Regardless of what one makes of its politics, is The Camp of the Saints any good? Is it an entertaining read?

Unfortunately I think Jean Raspail badly needed an editor willing to make severe cuts. I found the prose a bit stilted at times, which I can only partly ascribe to a loss in translation. That said there are a few truly elegant lines which shine through, one of which is the one you've seen if you've heard of the book:

They know nothing about what you are, about what you represent. Your world means nothing to them. They won’t try to understand. They’ll be tired. They’ll be cold. They’ll build a fire with your lovely oak door.

Unfortunately the author did not have the sense to end the speech there and it keeps going on.

They’ll shit all over your terrace and wipe their hands on the books in your library. They’ll spit out your wine. They’ll eat with their hands from the pretty pewterware I see on your wall. Sitting on their haunches, they’ll watch as your armchairs go up in flames. They’ll use your embroidered sheets to play dress up. Every object will lose the meaning you attach to it. What’s beautiful won’t be beautiful anymore. What’s useful will become laughable. And what’s useless will become absurd. Nothing will have any real value anymore, except maybe that bit of string left in a corner that they’ll fight over, breaking everything around them. Who knows? Now get lost!

Then there is this rather long soliloquy while the speaker holds a man at gunpoint.

You? Why, you’re not my kind. You’re the opposite of me. I don’t want to spoil this crucial night in the company of my opposite. So, I’m going to kill you.

You wouldn’t know how. I’m sure you’ve never killed anyone.

That is correct. I’ve always lived the peaceful life of a professor of literature, one who loved his profession. No war has ever required my services and I’m sickened by what appears to be useless killing. I would have probably made for a poor soldier. Like Aetius, however, I believe I would have joyfully killed the Hun. And, like Charles Martel, hacking away at Arab flesh would have filled me with enthusiasm, just like it did Godfrey of Bouillon and Baudoin the Leper King. There I would be, lying dead under the walls of Byzantium next to Constantine Dragases, but by God would I have slaughtered my share of Turks first! And when a man is sure of his cause, he does not die so easily! There I am, back to life, carving up Slavs with the Teutonic Knights. And there, leaving Rhodes with Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and his peerless little troop, a white cross emblazoned on my cloak and a bloody sword in my hand. A sailor under John of Austria, I avenge myself at Lepanto. What a slaughter! But then there’s no longer any use for me. Just a few trifles that contemporary history – that sad joke! – has begun to misjudge, already I don’t remember them very well. It’s all become so ugly: no more fanfares, no more standards, no more Te Deum. Forgive the pedantic babbling of an old academic. I obviously haven’t killed anyone, but all these battles, I feel as one with them in the depths of my soul, I’m reliving them all at once, their sole protagonist, with a single shot. Here!

On the other hand of course, had this simply been presented as the internal monologue of the speaker, rather than his actual spoken words, I would have had no quibbles so perhaps it's merely my own sense of timing that objects. Now that I think about it, had this been presented as the internal monologue I think I would have found it much more compelling.

Also there's a mention of a Soviet Model 1937 revolver at one point which irked me because there was no such Soviet model. There was a S&W Model 1937 revolver produced for Brazil, but the Soviets stopped making new models of military revolver with the M1895 Nagant. Now it could of course have been a 1937 produced M1895, but the word was model not manufacture. I fully recognize this is just my own personal gun autism objecting but still.

Unfortunately, I think Jean Raspail badly needed an editor willing to make severe cuts. I found the prose a bit stilted at times, which I can only partly ascribe to a loss in translation.

If you're reading the old pirated version, note that a new translation was published, based on a later edition of Raspail's original text. (It recently caused a stir when Amazon temporarily removed its print version from sale.) Here are the first and last paragraphs of its "Note on the Translation".

This translation is based on the final, 2011 edition of Le Camp des Saints and differs in important respects from its predecessor, Norman Shapiro's 1975 translation for Charles Scribner's and Sons. Between the first and third editions of the novel (1973 and 1985, respectively), Jean Raspail revised his text in ways both large and small. Many of these revisions were of an "editorial" nature: the elimination of passages of unnecessary or redundant characterization, a greater willingness to forgo lengthy development and leave matters already suggested to the imagination, the suppression of some asides particularly likely to draw the censor's ire, and so on.

Finally, the two translations differ in point of the temperament of their respective translators. Shapiro, who died in 2020, was a brilliant and accomplished translator of Belle Époque theater and poetry and a master of the inspired paraphrase. This latter trait, elsewhere a virtue, sometimes led him to improvise in ways that are not, in my view, authorized by the source. I [Ethan Rundell] have preferred a more sober approach, attempting as far as possible to render Raspail in English as he would have written in that language himself. It is his voice, I hope, that will prevail, not mine.

No that's the version I have, I bought it rather than pirate it.

I feel like if I read it on release, it would have been an incredibly controversial mindfuck of a read. These days? Not so much.

Politics and holidays aside, I think The Patriot is one of the most underrated films of the 2000s.

Was that the one where the guy's horse gets impaled on the staff holding the American flag or am I confusing it with the Simpsons parody?

No it’s the one where Mel Gibson skewers Jason Isaacs with the Betsy Ross flag.

Item 0 of 7

Jarvis, I'm low on karma. After a six-month lapse, I can't resist resuming the posting of interesting and funny court opinions.

All opinions will also be posted on this external page. Opinions likely to trigger whining will be posted only on the external page. (Maybe I'll finally stop being too lazy to update my website's RSS feed.)

Item 1 of 7

  • A prison guard is accused of smuggling a can of chewing tobacco into the prison. However, the prosecutor charges him under the wrong law! Title 61 section 5902(d) bans the smuggling of tobacco—but instead the officer is charged with violating title 18 section 5123(c) and title 61 section 5902(a), which ban the smuggling of poison.

  • The prosecutor attempts to save the situation by bringing in a toxicology expert to argue that a can of chewing tobacco counts as poison, since it technically contains enough nicotine to kill a human if the nicotine is extracted from the tobacco and injected into the human. But the trial judge is unpersuaded and dismisses the case, since (1) there is no evidence that the inmate for whom the guard was smuggling the tobacco had any plans to extract the nicotine and use it as a poison, and (2) this line of reasoning would lead to absurd results like criminalizing the delivery of toothpaste and water. The appeals panel affirms.

Item 2 of 7

  • In year 1993, a company (1) buys a lot in order to build a Dunkin Donuts restaurant on it, and (2) leases a 30-year easement over a 20-foot strip of a second, adjacent lot in order to build a drivethrough.

  • In year 2023, the easement expires. The company sues the owner of the adjacent lot to extend the easement. Its arguments: (1) The actual intended duration of the easement is, not 30 years, but however long a Dunkin Donuts restaurant exists on the first lot. (2) If the easement is not extended, then the company will experience a hardship from having to tear out a chunk of its restaurant to make room for a drivethrough on its own property. The owner of the adjacent lot countersues for trespass, since the drivethrough still is operating even though the lease has expired.

  • The trial judge finds the company's arguments unpersuasive, rejects its attempts to extend the easement, and grants trespass damages of 1 k$/mo to the owner of the adjacent lot. (1) The easement says "30 years". If you wanted to make it "for as long as a Dunkin Donuts restaurant is present", you could have done that—but you didn't. (2) This is a hardship of your own creation. The appeals panel affirms.

Item 3 of 7

  • A person's house is assessed at "market value" of 194 k$. The county govt. seizes it over 2 k$ of unpaid property taxes, sells it at auction for 76 k$, and returns the excess 74 k$ to the person. The person sues the county, claiming that he should have gotten 192 k$ (assessed value minus tax delinquency) rather than 74 k$ (auction proceeds minus tax delinquency).

  • The trial judge, the appeals panel, and the federal Supreme Court reject this argument. If the auction was conducted in a fair manner, then by definition it revealed the true "market value", and using the speculative assessor valuation instead would be unreasonable. However, the Supreme Court remands for the appeals panel to check whether the auction actually was conducted in a fair manner, especially since the company that bought the property at auction sold it again for 195 k$ just a year and a half later.

Item 4 of 7

  • In year 1995, by constitutional amendment, New Jersey creates the "Council on Local Mandates", a pseudo-court empowered to strike down any unfunded mandate imposed by the state govt. on local govts.

  • In year 2014, the state govt. enacts a law (1) requiring municipal govts. to equip their police cars with dash cameras and (2) adding to each drunk-driving conviction a 25-dollar surcharge allocated to pay for the cameras. A municipal govt. challenges this law before the Council on Local Mandates, alleging that it is an unfunded mandate, since the 25-dollar surcharge suffices to pay for only six percent of the cost of the cameras. In year 2016, the Council agrees with the municipal govt. and rules that the law is unconstitutional.

  • In year 2021, a class-action lawsuit alleges that municipal govts. still are collecting the 25-dollar surcharge even though the Council ruled it unconstitutional. In response, the municipal govts. argue that the Council was empowered to strike down only the unfunded mandate itself (part 1 of the law), not the inadequate funding mechanism attached to the mandate, which has purposes other than attempting to fund the unconstitutional mandate (punishing offenders and raising revenue). The trial judge agrees with this argument and rules that municipal govts. are justified in continuing to collect the 25-dollar surcharge. The appeals panel (in year 2024) and the state supreme court (in year 2026) affirm.

Item 5 of 7

[Court opinion censored due to mention of child abuse; external link]

Item 6 of 7

  • A drunk woman jaywalks across a four-lane, 50-mi/h road at night. An eastbound motorist swerves around her. A westbound motorist does not notice the eastbound swerve, and hits the jaywalker, killing her.

  • The jaywalker's daughter sues the motorist for wrongful death. She hires an expert (a "traffic-accident reconstructionist") who claims that, if the motorist had noticed the eastbound swerve, then he would have had time to notice and avoid the jaywalker.

  • The trial judge dismisses the lawsuit, and the appeals panel affirms. The expert's report is not sufficient to support liability. He did not say that the motorist should have seen the eastbound swerve and slowed down out of caution (so he was negligent in failing to see it), or that his headlights should have allowed him to see and avoid the jaywalker (so he was negligent in failing to see her). Rather, the expert based his conclusion on a hypothetical situation ("if the motorist had noticed the eastbound swerve") that the motorist explicitly denied in his unchallenged testimony (he didn't notice any swerving cars). Therefore, there is no reason to think that the motorist was negligent. "Plaintiff failed to present any competent evidence that defendant could have, would have, or should have seen the swerve."

Item 7 of 7

[Court opinion censored due to mention of child abuse; external link]

God, those censored cases are so fucked up. Still I like reading them, as a form of very black comedy.

How did item 7 keep getting off with 6 months of jail for this?

I assume that the lenient sentences are due to the offender's (1) being only barely outside the crime's four-year Romeo-and-Juliet margin and (2) pleading guilty rather than going to trial.

What is the most fun you've had with fireworks?

My fondest memory of a fireworks show was in Maryland, it was just local people along a river inlet. They went a bit crazy trying to out do each other. We were basically right under the fireworks along the river bank, while they were launched from a barge about 50 feet out in the water. The explosions were close enough to smell and feel.

Nothing compares to the fun and joy of being a kid let loose with small explosives. We'd blow up various toys, make battlefields in our sandbox where we blew up the sand (the smoking craters were a cool effect). Smokebombs were always super fun, especially when the smoke was partially unleashed into hollow dark areas (like rotten logs, or snake holes). We unleashed so many bottle rocks.

Best fireworks show was when I was down in florida for 4th of july. We had been at disney world to see the fireworks, but the rain kept delaying the start. We eventually gave up and were driving home. But the rain cleared while we were on the highways, and we pulled over as there was a clear view for miles around us as the various parks in the area all unleashed their fireworks at the same time.

Favorite fireworks video was a flyover of LA on july 4th 2020. Felt like the whole city had pent up energy from covid and just decided to unleash it all. Maybe it looks like that normally, I wouldn't know. But it felt great seeing that at the time.

Definitely making bootleg fireworks as a teen, it was an experience just on the border of delinquency in that way that perfectly suits a certain stage of growing up, and one that isn't really replicable once the, figurative or not, frontal lobe is fully developed.

There were these whistling fireworks with a few different names, and the truly delinquent kid across the street who later became a cop clued me into a practice wherein you hammered the whistling side down and this would create enough back pressure that the whole thing would detonate. Pretty soon this turned into hammering out the powder from dozens of these and sealing them in various containers. Later there were garnishments of other firework components to create after effects, or staged fireworks where they'd smoke up and then explode.

But one year in high school my friends and I laid in a field across from the area of the football stadium where the annual display was staged. I hadn't realized until then that aerial fireworks were spheres, and laying directly underneath them was like being in an altered state of consciousness.

Nice! I remember deconstructing black cat fireworks and pouring them all into a Playmobil TNT container. We were hoping for a big explosion, but instead it just burned steadily.

My fondest memory of a fireworks show was in Maryland

Oddly, both of my best fireworks memories also happened in Maryland.

For the first, I was at a lacrosse camp on the eastern shore, and a couple was having a wedding at the same location. They were celebrating with a fireworks display, and they were generous enough to let us kids watch as well. The thing was, they didn't want us mixing with the wedding party, so they placed us directly under the display. I think we might have been thirty feet from the mortars, at most. The experience is completely different at that range. The detonations are tangible.

For the second, a couple of friends and I slipped away from home on New Year's Eve and went to the inner harbor in Baltimore. I sat on the water's edge watching fireworks reflect on the bay, with a pretty girl curled up against me for warmth. It was one of the first times in my life when I realized that I could get away from everything at home and things could be better.

Video game thread

What are you playing these days?

I will be playing through Half-Life soon. I noticed I didn't have it in my Steam library so I picked up the Anthology bundle for a couple of dollars. Only a couple of years have passed since the last time I played HL, but for some reason I'm drawn to it again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Still waiting for a reasonably priced 5120x2160, 39 inch ultrawide monitor to show up. I'm sort of holding off on some games until I can upgrade my monitor. Some games aren't well suited for playing on the TV.

Heroes of Might and Magic 5 lately Tribes of the East.

It's not as good as my memories of HoMM 2 and 3, but I suspect those wouldn't match my memories of what they were either. Truly you can't go back home again.

It's fun! Heroes seem a bit less powerful then previously though I haven't played long enough to find the truly broken artifacts) and who doesn't like a smash fantasy creatures into each other simulator. Stronghold (the anti magic orcs) are well thought out if a little pushed like so many DLC factions can be.

Have you tried HoMM Olden Era yet?¨

Edit: I'm gonna try HooMM 5 Tribes of the east!

Not yet, but I'll do it sometime soonish.

PRAGMATA - enjoyable enough to finish, mildly disappointing on most fronts. Stunted by the indulgent approach to the core character dynamics. You'd think the obvious route, in a world where bots are an expendable commodity, would be for the player character to default to brutal, cold treatment initially, in particular in the emergency. Relationship then could predicably grow from "tool I will sacrifice as needed" -> "tool I need to be nice to to get results" -> "actually a gifted 'child'" -> "a child I am attached to" -> "my sweet angel I will die for without second thoughts". They apparently did not think the audience would want/could handle this, so straight to 'gifted child' we go, pacing jarring enough to lose me instantly. Examination of Dianas nature and limitations is off-limits beyond sentimental babble with predetermined conclusion, so the plot is padded with painfully stupid, shallow crap.

Life Below - pleasant, pretty, somewhat unusual. A little too railroaded, you can't overbuild and breeze past some bottlenecks, must simply wait. Ecology and reclamation themed, but not preachy at all (pollution bad, but humanity remote & not bad). Missed opportunity, for the Heart you begin reclamation from, and the Sprites that drive it, to be magical in nature (spirits or whatever), rather than an engineered, autonomous ecosystem building tech. The game is meant to be kid-friendly, why not instil some optimism? Guess that is too much to ask for from Norwegians?

Following last week's discussion on Darktide, I reactivated my gaming buddies and we actually played a few rounds yesterday.

It was okay. I like the changes they made to the game, regarding the progression and gear. Getting away from pure RNG and letting players tweak their equipment relatively freely feels good.

But at the same time I find the game a little too fast-paced for my liking, and the missions drag on for far too long. I found myself quite tired very quickly.

And the more narrative elements they add, the more I dislike the writing. Of course it's all very woke, the devs being Swedish, and at times it can be funny to entertain the idea that actually, the Imperium's famous right-wing aesthetics and philosophies are all really nothing but propaganda and the non-noble baseline human population is overwhelmingly 21th-century progressive leftists, but in the end it's more grating than anything.

How is that going for you so far? Sadly your timezones don't line up with mine.

And the more narrative elements they add, the more I dislike the writing.

For all the faults in the writing, the character of Kayex more than makes up for it. He's one of the first mechanicus characters I've seen that really nails the religiosity and pure wonder of the machine cult. Things that 40k would normally paint as malice come out as alien benevolence, and I love it.

Kayex is alright. He's certainly the least annoying mission control.

Zola is tolerable. Marrow overdoes his act. All the others make me understand why people defect to Chaos. Annoying to unlikely degrees.

How is that going for you so far? Sadly your timezones don't line up with mine.

Boring as hell, to be honest. One of us is new, so we're playing throught the new campaign with him, which means starting on the lowest difficulty. One-shotting a mission boss was fun for a moment, but doesn't make up for the trivial challenge. I'm using the opportunity to try new weapon types and to grind for achievements.

The early access scene is looking remarkably healthy these days. Subnautica 2 and Slay the Spire 2 have released to widespread audience acclaim. The gamers who insist on being patient and waiting until release are clearly in the minority. While Slay the Spire 2 is very close to feature complete, Subnautica 2 still needs a lot of time in the oven to really live up to expectations.

While chapter based releases have seemingly fallen out of fashion, Deltarune shows this model can still work. While the most recent chapter did not quite live up to the insane hype, Steam reviews are still overwhelmingly positive. I imagine it helps that you only pay for the game once instead of for every chapter individually. With how well the game has sold already, it surprises me a bit that Toby Fox has not just decided to take the money and run. Continued development is a sign of clear passion from the developers who must be driven in large part by intrinsic desire to finish the game, even though they have already earned most of the money it is likely to earn them.

Genuine question since I haven't played the first half life game. Is Half-life good by modern gameplay standards? Or is it one of those games that was great for its time and era but feels dated now?

IMO it's still good. I don't play anything purely for nostalgia vibes. If you like old school FPSes at all, you'll probably have fun with it.

One of the things I still value about it is that it is "no BS". You don't have to deal with listening to shitty characters in cutscenes or anything. There are no cutscenes. It's all in first person mode from start to finish.

It has lowres and lowpoly graphics, of course, but it was well designed artistically. You can find pretty good graphics mods for HL1 and HL2 to increase the texture resolutions.

The gunplay is good. It's very satisfying to unload on an alien with a double barrel shotgun blast, or to fire the big shiny revolver that does high damage and has pinpoint accuracy. I like how they don't let themselves get stuck to realism needlessly. The sound design is great.

The main downside with the game is that the second half, and especially final part of the game is far less good than the first half. The level design takes a nosedive at times. But I don't remember myself or anyone else feeling really let down by the game at the end. It doesn't stick the landing, but you still look back at a great experience. The whole setup, universe, design, and first half of the game is so damn good. Especially for its time. So there might be a little bit of "goodwill" involved due to remembering how the rest of the game scene was in 1998. Valve made huge strides with both HL1 and HL2 and the Source engine.

One decision to make is whether to play the original, or the third party remake Black Mesa. The latter looks a lot more modern, but they had scope creep going on. And, very annoyingly for me, you can't disable their mouse acceleration. They force you to have a slow mouse for minor movements and a fast movement for major movements.

Edit: Black Mesa seem to have fixed the mouse thing or added a new setting (raw input) since last I looked at it. I installed it again now and it feels fine.

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