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PaperclipPerfector  10hr ago (text post)   361 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 17, 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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Military remote viewer who not only discovered that aliens have bases here on earth that are used as repair centers for UFOs, but also discovered (via remote viewing) an entire planet of Bigfoot-like creatures. The Bigfoots are being harvested as slave labor by a more advanced alien race. This is important stuff.

Big if true.

The Bigfoots are being harvested as slave labor by a more advanced alien race.

Bad news for the future of robotics.

How is the Canadian forest fire smoke affecting you?

I feel like I'm in my own personal version of silent hill right now. The sun is almost fully obscured.

I lived in Montana for a few years, smoke doesn't affect me until you reach the point where the smoke is thick enough that the sun is no longer a disc.

There's some smoke in the air near DC but the whole thing seems like the typical weather overreaction that's common here.

Dodged it, I live in northern Virginia. But currently finishing up a week at the beach down in the Carolinas.

The local pool board I'm on had a discussion about closing, they ultimately decided to close for guard and patron safety.

I've never seen it this bad where I am. Usually its just a haze that knocks 10-20٪ off my solar panel efficiency. Today it smells like burnt rubber and the smog reminds me of my visit to Beijing. And this is down in the far exurbs of the DC metro area.

What do you do to keep your airways safe?

First time?

Buy an air filter, if you still can. Otherwise, DIY one. You might need one for every occupied room depending on your house size and how well air mixes in your house. If you don't have filtration, indoor air quality will eventually equilibrate with the outdoors.

At this point we'd probably need to anex Canada and genocide the "natives".

I'm staying the hell inside.

I was first! 1 minute ahead of you. :D

Haha, quite.

Video Game Thread

Playing anything fun?

I'm playing Deus Ex. I've cleared out Liberty Island without killing anyone. Lots of baton, electric prod, pepper spray (surprisingly useful), and tranq dart usage. Fun, but time consuming way to play. I even had to take a few bullets in the process of keeping these wretches remain alive. I think I covered everything worth doing. Picked up all the weapon mods, used the account info for the ATM instead of hacking it (more credits this way), rescued Herman, etc.

The NSF commander has some good points about the plutocracy strengthening the governments and corporations while weakening the individuals.

My kid got me into Warframe.

Been meaning to check it out for a decade now and hey it’s pretty good!

I played free for 30 hours then spent 20$ when they were having a 50% sale and got some cool cosmetics and another Warframe - have four of them unlocked so far.

I’m @65 hours over several weeks and it’s still fun - hour to 1.5 hour sessions a few times a week with a few 3-4 hour long ones.

I’ll clear out the star chart and do some end game stuff and call it a day - I’ll probably spend another 20-40$ on it.

Scratches an itch.

Still playing EU5, mostly. Pity I'm too old and busy to make a proper mod for it, like I did for CK2. Which came out... in 2012. Yeah, I was definitely younger back then.

How are you finding it? I'm away from my desktop right now, so havn't been able to try the latest patch.

It's still rough. They have fixed the most fun exploits like -100% proximity cost and -100% diploannexation cost, but it's still full of more boring exploits like expelling everyone into your capital city, infinite trade arbitrage and battles ending in stackwipes 95% of the time.

Yes! I was going to start a similar thread. I’m not much of a gamer. Was a Nintendo kid growing up in the 90s. Played games in the early 2000s - mainly sports games. Have some older consoles but largely very behind on gaming and never had a gaming PC. Was playing Skyrim on an old laptop but now have upgraded to a true gaming PC. First, I’ve modded the hell out of Skyrim to make the world feel more alive. Also trying my hand at Baldur’s Gate 3. Any recommendations? I’m open to pretty much all genres.

Play Oblivion Remastered if you like Elder Scrolls. It looks great. So does Cyberpunk 2077 with Path Tracing. The new Indiana Jones looks pretty amazing with PT too.

You don't even need path tracing for Cyberpunk to look absolutely beautiful. My graphics card can't really handle it, but can do the ray tracing setting fine, and when playing the game I would frequently stop just to admire how pretty it is.

Isn't Oblivion Remastered considered an extremely-low-effort port, abandoned by the developers with most of the bugs left unfixed?

What. No. It's one of the best remasters I've ever seen. It's not a bad 'port' to PC either.

Yes it runs like crap on potato PCs and yes there are some bugs, but I considered it to be almost as good as you could hope for in a remaster.

abandoned by the developers with most of the bugs left unfixed?

Thus perfectly replicating the experience of the original for modern gamers.

/s I've never played either. Previous discussion here.

Fun, but time consuming way to play.

This was my issue with the Deus Ex games in general. They really seem to want you to play stealth, and it's fun, but it just kills the pacing.

I finally played the Deus Ex prequels a couple years ago, after rage-quitting the first long ago when I hit the "we subcontracted our boss fights and forgot to mention stealth options" debacle. With that fixed, they're pretty good. Not as good as the original IMHO, even if you take the ancient graphics of the original into account, but they had most of the same philosophical/semi-open-world "feel" of the original, which is more than I could ever say for the sequel.

(YMMV - I may have been the only one looking forward to the planned "They really turned those 1999 graphics into 2003 graphics" Deus Ex Remastered so much that I'd have paid $30 for what looked like a high-end fan mod)

As long as I'm replying:

Last month I finished Subnautica. IMHO there's no replay value here, because overall there are better mechanics elsewhere in the survival+base-builder genre, but the story and exploration makes a single playthrough more fun than the same number of hours spent in any such competitor I've tried.

A few months ago I played through the 2015 King's Quest. Not as good as KQ6, and probably not as much better than most of the series as you'd expect from a decades-newer game, but it wasn't disappointing. A bit of a stumble on the second chapter but a surprisingly sophisticated combination of nostalgia and maturity overall.

I contrast this to Return to Monkey Island, which I played through last year, which was trying to accomplish the same combination but utterly failed to stick the landing. The most positive thing I can say was that it wasn't as long a game as these others, so there's only 10 hours of my life I regret not spending on something else.

In between those I finished Spider-Man Remastered. For adults IMHO it's not as good as the best of the Assassin's Creed series, but it's more fun than most of that series, and on top of that it was child-friendly enough to let my kids play too.

Playing Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, which I last played over a decade ago. Very much a product of its time. You rather get the impression that the Danish writers lacked confidence in their ability to write convincing Anglophone tough-guy dialogue, and compensated by just having every character (and I mean every character) curse a lot. The voice actors do what they can with the material they're given, but the results are... not entirely convincing. Comparisons to Michael Mann are unavoidable, with setpieces clearly modelled on Collateral and Heat (for most of the game Kane carries a black bag on his back much like those De Niro, Sizemore and Kilmer wore during the bank heist, and Lynch sans glasses even looks a bit like Waingro). Sound mixing is atrocious, with gunfire sounding weak and tinny and dialogue sometimes inaudible (and not, I think, as an artistic choice). When Spec Ops: The Line came out, its gameplay was so poorly received that some people suspected it might even have been made bad on purpose, but it's a mechanical masterpiece compared to this game: how on earth do you design a cover-based shooter without a dedicated "get into cover" button? Tonally, it actually has a lot in common with Spec Ops, with everything constantly going wrong for the protagonists no matter what they do. I've heard some people interpreted the game as sort of a deconstruction of Grand Theft Auto, and that makes a certain amount of sense: the decision to populate most levels with numerous civilians who will inevitably get caught in the crossfire certainly didn't happen by accident. Gritty, sloppy fun, for all its faults.

During and after playing through Spec Ops The Line, I did suspect that the mediocre drudgery of the gameplay served a meta storytelling purpose.

It certainly gelled with the tone of the story, but the developers have made it abundantly clear that they set out to design a game with fun gameplay. The resulting monotonous drudgery, it seems, was just a happy accident.

Empires of the Undergrowth - pleasant surprise, very interesting RTS. Ant colonies as factions, underground layer for nests, surface layer for resources to contest, and perhaps invade other nests. Neat campaign framing - gene stealer ant colony in lab setting as overarching story, isolated missions between main story chapters, stylized as microdocumentaries, varied ant species in scenarios highlighting their tactics, dynamics, food sources (with narrator guiding you along, in character). Main story is more light hearted, with fun voice acting (first 60 seconds here give a good impression). The slightly indirect control over the ants can be a little annoying, but ant respawns are cheap, losses expected. Challenging, "Hard" mission difficulty is really is exactly that. Highly recommended, a lot of fun.

It's also currently a steal at 70% off.

Item 1 of 5

In 2023, California enacted a law allowing (city and county governments to allow) ADUs (accessory dwelling units) to be converted into condominiums that can be bought and sold separate from the lot's principal dwelling. According to the legislators:

The statewide median home price is nearly 800,000 dollars. At that price, only 17 percent of households can afford to purchase the median-priced single-family home. This figure is less than half of the national average, and less than half of the rate at the start of the pandemic.…

…The average size of a single-family home in California is 1860 square feet. By comparison, the average size of an ADU in California is less than one-third of that, at 615 square feet. Presuming a commensurate reduction in price, the purchase of an ADU would be affordable to lower-income households.

According to a news report, the municipality of San Jose now has become the site of the first actual sale of an ADU condominium under this law—750 ft2 of house according to the Zillow page and 2000 ft2 of land (plus a long driveway easement) according to the tax map, for 530 k$. (The property as a whole (principal dwelling plus ADU) is assessed by the county govt. at 715.4 k$ (494.6 for the land and 220.8 for the improvements).)

Item 2 of 5

  • A paraplegic is a “tester” of accessibility under the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act): he visits, and then sues, businesses that fail to measure up to the ADA's requirements (the ADAAG, ADA Accessibility Guidelines). His latest target (he testifies that it's his 83rd) is a strip mall. He alleges: (1) Of the property's two accessible parking spaces, one is immediately adjacent to a driveway, with no access aisle for safety; (2) of the property's several curb ramps, one is too steep; (3) the sidewalk in front of the businesses is not sufficiently flat, making it difficult for a wheelchair user to open a business's door without rolling backward into the parking lot; and (4) a different curb ramp often is blocked by parked cars.

  • The paraplegic demands that several changes be made. The trial judge rejects most of them (removal of bollards in the sidewalk, addition of two more accessible parking spaces, reduction of parking-lot slope, etc.): they are not “readily achievable” within the meaning of the ADA, as they would drive out tenants (by exacerbating the property's existing parking shortage), jeopardize the property's grandfathered status under the municipal code (it has only 88 parking spaces rather than the required 104), expose the company to liability (businesses have been sued for not having bollards), etc. The company implements one demanded change voluntarily before the case is even over, moving the accessible parking space without an access aisle to a safer location (right next to the other accessible parking space, so that they share an access aisle). The judge finds that the company must accede to one more demand: changing the too-steep curb ramp from perpendicular (protruding from the sidewalk into the access aisle) to parallel (taking a 3-foot-deep chunk out of the 8.5-foot-deep sidewalk in front of the businesses).

  • The company moves for a new trial, complaining that a parallel curb ramp (1) would be too expensive and too difficult to get permits for and (2) itself would violate the ADA, but the trial judge rejects these arguments. (1) The company has presented insufficient evidence of the expense of the modification or the difficulty of getting permits. (2) The company's expert misread the ADAAG! He looked at the bathroom guidelines, under which door swings cannot encroach into required clear areas. But the sidewalk guidelines have no such provision, so the parallel curb ramp is fine. (The judge's opinion includes helpful diagrams.)

Item 3 of 5

Australian airline Qantas has announced plans for non-stop Sydney–London and Sydney–New York flights, using an Airbus A350 variant specially designed for long range. If these flights enter operation (expected for London in October 2027 and for New York at a later date not yet announced), they will surpass Singapore Airlines' Singapore–New York and Singapore–Newark flights (which use an older variant of the same Airbus plane) as the longest commercial flights in the world.

According to Google Flights, the current non-stop Singapore–New York flight reduces travel duration from 24–21 hours (with a stop in Manila, Hong Kong, San Francisco, etc.) to 19 hours, but boosts price from 1000 dollars to 1500 dollars. These Qantas flights presumably will involve a similar money-for-time trade-off.

Official marketing materials on the topic from Qantas are available on this page. See also the Wikipedia page on the longest non-stop commercial flights.

Item 4 of 5

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

Item 5 of 5

New J⁎rsey is the only state in the US that forbids motorists from pumping their own gasoline. Legislative attempts to eliminate this ban regularly die in committee.

Surveys consistently show that New J⁎rseyans actually like this state of affairs. According to the latest one, a whopping 64 percent of NJ residents want to keep gasoline pumps full-service-only. This support holds across all population segments surveyed.

SegmentSupport (%)
Affiliation: Democratic71
Affiliation: Republican62
Affiliation: Independent58
Age: 18–3068
Age: 31–4466
Age: 45–6464
Age: 65–∞61
Gender: Woman74
Gender: Man56

New J⁎rsey is the only state in the US that forbids motorists from pumping their own gasoline. Legislative attempts to eliminate this ban regularly die in committee.

Wait, Oregon changed their laws? I had no idea. Apparently it's been 3 years.

My guy, can you please explain to me what you find consistently entertaining about underage sex and abuse related litigation?

The censored opinion for today is extremely tame—just a 17-year-old's allegation that her 19-year-old ex-boyfriend distributed their sex video without authorization. I find it quite hilarious that the entire controversy hinged on whether a locker-room joke made to the plaintiff's brother ("Yo, did you see the video of your sister?") was a sly reference to a video that the joker had actually seen (as the trial judge thought) or just a genuine joke that coincidentally happened to land on a sensitive topic (as the appeals panel thought).

It's less about any particular instance and more about the pattern.

A generic locker-room joke's leading to a restraining order is funny. Repeatedly impregnating your girlfriend's underage daughters (including while out on zero-dollar bail) is funny. Accidentally fingering your daughter because she replaced your wife in the marital bed in the middle of the night is funny. I don't know what else to tell you.

Perhaps you have not sufficiently <del>desensitized</del><ins>refined</ins> your sensibilities by reading thousands of pieces of (predominantly non-loli) hentai manga and erotic literature.

This is the fun thread so we should quickly move past this but I would delicately suggest some consideration for the fact that some things are broadly funny or fun, some things are niche, some things fail to land, and some things would be considered the blackest of humors or outright horrifying (especially when in real life instead of fiction).

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