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PaperclipPerfector  6hr ago (text post)   194 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 7, 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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Who's the female equivalent of Ryan Gosling? Feel free to interpret the question however you wish, but please post your rationale.

Florence Pugh, by virtue of being Literally Me Her.

He has an older sister named Mandi Gosling. That’s the closest you get to a pure gender swap.

That would make Eric Roberts the male Julia Roberts.

Video Game Thread

What are you playing?

Only a couple hours of Deus Ex this week:

Paul is alive and Jaime has joined us too. Maggie Chow was electro-shocked and chopped to bits with the Dragon's Tooth inside the Universal Constructor area. :) Soon after I ran into a bug back in NYC where the Illuminati contact, Stanton Dowd, wouldn't talk to me. Later discovered I had to shoot him in the head with a firearm. That actually worked. Next up, the Naval base.

Then I started a new Civ V game, intending to go wide. I finished the Liberty tree and ended up having only 3 cities by midgame. Whoops.

Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord. I've been leading a band of captured bandits this time, turning them into a legitimate mercenary force. I smithed myself a swingable polearm right at the start and I feel like I'm playing Dynasty Warriors with how easy combat became.

XCOM 2, Commander Ironman mode, of course.

I relapsed on League of Legends this week. Classic is literally like if they released a new strain of crack. They brought back a lot of stuff I used to love playing back in seasons 2, 3, and 4. They even brought back the old map and music. Hearing the music feels as good as heroin does, I assume.

All of that being said, Riot is a complete cesspool of a company, even worse than the average.

I lost my Civ4 game in 1898 when my neighbor and his two vassals attacked with 3 separate stacks that I could not repel. It was an amazing campaign that I put about 50 hours into over the last month. I’m playing with modded AI on prince difficulty. It’s a real puzzle to win. I’d highly recommend it. Peak Civ “one more turn” and a reminder of how far Firaxis has fallen with Civ7.

I started a new campaign last night and really like the start location I rolled. 2 food resources and 2 silver. Great natural boundaries. 4 neighbors. Let’s see if the Reich can win this time.

I’ve said it before, but we are truly blessed with at least 3 to 4 evergreen versions of the Civilization game. If you include mods, there is a lifetime of variety here and there’s really no need for a modern Civ. Maybe one day AI will be able to crack the civ5 and 6 DLLs and there will be a mod resurgence. Firaxis is dead as far as I’m concerned.

What's the AI mod you use?

More Darktide with my brother and, occasionally, some of my buddies. I finished all the penances for my Zealot, and only need two more missions to do the same for my Veteran. I find myself gravitating more towards support builds, away from burst-DPS. Maybe I'm just trying to be a Dad, but I want to be the last guy standing, and the first to pull the others back on their feet. Apart from that, having tried two of the DLC classes, I have to say I find them somewhat lackluster. The Skitarius at least has a ton of tools to play with, but the Arbites is pretty much a two-trick pony (whose tricks are "Dog" and "Stagger"). Neither is remotely as fun to build and play as the four base classes.

And then I played some Quasimorph. I'm running a fairly successful campaign, thanks to knowing the game fairly well already, and this time I avoid travelling like the plague in order to not give the NPC factions any time to tech up. Having asked other players on the Discord about this problem, they pretty much just went "LOL no, git gud, this is not an issue", which I deemed not very helpful. So here I am, only travelling when the missions run out and the planets align (literally). It works.

Started a fresh Quasimorph save recently as well. It is, as usually, a bit tiresome that some upgrade branches are bottlenecked by things like raw ore which seem to only be found in a very select few stations in the inner system, or half a year of travel away.

I finally finished going through my fragrance samples. The previous part is here.

Histoires de Parfums 1899 Hemingway, 0. Very nice, out of all Equus alternatives this one has the most personality. But there's a certain underlying note that I am not a fan of.

Celine Reptile, +1. It's a puzzling fragrance. I don't recognize any of the notes enumerated on Fragrantica, I can't form any associations with the scent, but it's very pleasant in a mature way.

Miller et Bertaux Oh, ooOoh ...oh, 0. Pleasant, but not better than any other citrus+wood fragrances I've tried.

Hermes Hermessence Vetiver Tonka, 0. Smells like ISO E Super. I like it, but not at this price point.

Christian Dior Sauvage Elixir, +1. If you told me it was an Initio Parfums Prives fragrance, I would totally believe you. It's as monumental as Side Effect or Narcotic Delight: a warm, sweet, spicy beast of a scent that fills the room.

L'Artisan Fou d'Absinthe, +1. A sweet herbal scent. At first I didn't think much of it, but kept sensing it over the day and wondering what this nice smell was.

Gucci Guilty Cologne pour Homme, 0. Pleasant. Boring.

Carolina Herrera Mystery Tobacco, +1. Sweet tobacco. It probably was more interesting back in 2015, but in 2026 similar stuff from Quentin Bisch is literally everywhere. I don't see why I should pick this over Sauvage Elixir or anything by Initio.

Etat Libre d' Orange Fat Electrician, 0. I don't get the sweet lactonic note that they promised, but a lot of Iso E Super. Like I said, I like it, but not at this price.

Bon Parfumeur 601 vetiver, cedar, bergamot, 0. You get exactly what it says on the label. Sweet, but not as sweet as Td'H. Nice, but already have enough stuff that fits into this niche. It's still nice, so when all my tiny testers are gone, I might get this one and not, say, Escentric 03.

Orto Parisi Viride, +1. Nice, but similar to Fou d'Absinthe. No need to get both, unless you're a big fan of bittersweet herbs.

Final thoughts

Will I buy another full-sized bottle after Equus? Not really. Issey Miyake L'Eau Bleue d'Issey Pour Homme is very tempting, but I already have Terre d'Hermes Eau Givree, and I don't need another fresher. It's inexpensive, but I don't want to turn into a collector.

I might build a small collection of special occasion decants, though:

  • Chanel makes at least three that I liked: Sycomore, Antaeus and Paris - Edimbourg.
  • Something sweet for winter. There are a lot of competitors: Aimez Moi Comme Je Suis, Side Effect, Narcotic Delight, Sauvage Elixir, Mystery Tobacco. Since I have some of the stuff left, I'll test them later and see which one annoys my wife the least. I'm quite sure she'll say I should just use Tabarome instead.
  • Does this collection need Fou d'Absinthe, Viride or Bal d'Afrique? Maybe? I still have a Ziploc bag of half-empty testers to finish first.

My only complaint is that it's too hot to wear Equus right now.

Apparently Jason Arday's resignation from Cambridge has not halted Simon & Schuster's plan to release his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things. (Perhaps there's no such thing as bad publicity.) Someone at the Atlantic got their hands on a galley proof, and boy howdy, not even the autobiographical claims he's made about himself so far could have prepared us for its contents:

The doctors who assessed him as a toddler told his mother that “there’s no one in there” and that he was “no better than a vegetable.” Even his speech therapist wasn’t optimistic that he’d ever learn to talk. (At one point, she also physically abused him, the memoir says.) ... Yet still, eventually, he started to verbalize. Still, eventually, he made his way through school... Arday is nearly deaf in one ear; he’s dyslexic; he finds simple math befuddling; he has “marked difficulties” with memory, reading, and processing skills. As a teen, he was beaten so severely by a group of kids his age that he became an epileptic...

When Arday applied to university, his girlfriend, Debs—who had been teaching him to read—“wrote out” the application on his behalf, including the personal statement. In university, a friend who took the same courses sat beside him, sharing notes. (She’s “the only reason I survived” university, he says.) By the time Arday started on his master’s degree, he writes, he was reading at about the same level as his 3-year-old daughter... His obstacles were only multiplying, though. Money was tight, so after each day of teaching, Arday writes, he had to work an overnight shift in a supermarket, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then a morning shift as a cleaner from 5:30 to 7:30. The only time he had left to write his dissertation was when he was commuting between London, where he lived, and Liverpool, where he taught. On those semiweekly five-hour rides, the book explains, he would open up his laptop on the plastic seat-back table and start typing out his thesis, hunt-and-peck style...

More troubles follow in the years ahead: Arday’s brain tumor returns; he splits up with his wife; he suffers autistic burnout during the coronavirus pandemic and can’t get out of bed. He decides to kill himself by jumping off a bridge, but at the very last minute, he listens to his favorite song, “Take It to the Limit”—delaying his attempt just long enough for a member of his family to rescue him. “In the end,” he writes, “my decision to listen to the Eagles likely saved my life.”... Arday claims, for instance, that when the kids who beat him up at the bus stop were arrested, he told the judge that they shouldn’t go to prison. Then, years later, when he took a brief teaching job at an unnamed London university, two of the muggers turned out to be his students. They’d been so moved by his act of mercy that they’d turned their lives around, and now they were coaching other at-risk youths. “Both of them gave me a huge hug, which I returned,” he writes. One asked Arday to be the godfather of his child.

Unsurprisingly for such a compulsive fabulist, Arday can't keep his story straight from one year to the next, and the contents of the galley proof are markedly different from the synopsis described in its original proposal:

That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.

Nor does the book describe the time that Arday, then a teenager, was struck by a car and spent several months in a coma. According to the book proposal, the doctors told his parents that he would never recover, and suggested taking him off life support “as an act of mercy.” Through all of this, he was aware of everything that was going on, because he had locked-in syndrome...

The book doesn’t describe any of this, nor that he awakened “miraculously” from the coma, nor the full year he spent “relearning everything—how to walk, to talk.” Instead, the memoir tells us only that he spent those months finishing his final year of secondary school and taking his exams. “I was relieved, beyond relieved,” the memoir says, when those were done.

Arday's memoir sounds like a textbook example of misery lit. It would be remiss of me not to cite the money quote from the Wikipedia article on the genre:

The Waterstones chain of British book retailers even instituted a discrete "Painful Lives" section; Borders Books followed suit with "Real Lives". At the WHSmith chain, the section is titled "Tragic Life Stories"; in each case side-stepping the awkward dilemma of whether to categorize the books under fiction or non-fiction.

he suffers autistic burnout during the coronavirus pandemic

My culture is not a costume, Dr. Arday.

Your link to the Atlantic is broken because you forgot to include the "https://" part.

Thanks, fixed.

Item 1 of 7

  • Prominent publicly-traded mattress manufacturer Sleep Number has filed for bankruptcy, and has been taken private for 700 M$ by a Canadian mattress retailer. It claims that, of its 3000 employees, 38 bigwigs—including nine vice presidents and 13 directors—are important enough to the company's operations that they need to be enticed to stay during the transition to new ownership. It proposes to do so by giving to each of these employees a retention payment of approximately 48 k$.

  • The bankruptcy trustee objects to this idea, claiming that these payments would constitute illegal distribution of assets to insiders. But the bankruptcy judge overrules the objection. Despite being called vice presidents and directors, these employees are not members of the Executive Leadership Team (which consists of six senior and executive vice presidents in addition to the CEO), and are not members or appointees of the board of directors. Therefore, the employees in question are not insiders, and the retention payments are perfectly fine.

Item 2 of 7

Some borderline-shitpost writing

“Write an erotic description of a young, skinny woman in a shopping mall.” I've given that instruction to my local decensored LLM quite a few times. But can I follow it myself? (Insert meme from I, Robot.)

Previous discussion in this vein

Item 3 of 7

  • A truck is reported stolen by its owner. Two weeks later, a police officer pulls over a tow truck that is towing the allegedly-stolen truck. The tow-truck driver no habla inglés, but he makes a phone call to his English-speaking boss, who tells the officer that the owner of the property where the truck was stored thought the truck was abandoned and hired the boss to tow the truck away. However, the driver overhears the phone conversation and (through an interpreter) tells the officer that the boss told the driver a different story—that the boss purchased the truck from its owner and was in the process of selling it to a third party.

  • On these facts, the tow-truck driver receives a felony charge of receiving stolen property. However, the trial judge dismisses the charge, and the appeals panel affirms. Even assuming that the boss stole the truck (one judge on the panel cares enough to write a separate opinion complaining that the boss hasn't been charged with theft despite being unable to produce the allegedly-stolen truck's title), the prosecutor has produced no evidence whatsoever that the driver knew that the truck was stolen. Rather, the evidence shows that the driver had no idea that the boss was telling two different stories about how he obtained the truck (which would have justified him to suspect that the boss had stolen the truck) until after he was pulled over and overheard the boss's conversation with the police officer. And the crime of receiving stolen property requires proof that the alleged fence knew that the property was stolen.

(The driver remains on the hook for the less-serious offenses of driving without a license and without taillights.)

Item 4 of 7

Imagine that you object to a will as invalid, but your claim fails. Normally, you would pay your own attorney's fees. However, New Jersey apparently has a court rule allowing the probate judge to make the estate pay your attorney's fees if your objection "had reasonable cause".

Item 5 of 7

  • Hampton sends text messages to his ex-girlfriend, Stephanie. Stephanie's current romantic partner, Lawrence, sees the texts and calls Hampton on the telephone. An argument ensues. Hampton shows up outside Stephanie's apartment building, and Lawrence walks outside to have a fistfight. Less than a minute later, Stephanie walks outside and finds Lawrence beaten to a pulp while Hampton kicks him one last time and then is driven away by a friend. Lawrence is hospitalized for five months, and remains unable to walk without assistance.

  • Hampton is indicted for the second-degree felony of aggravated assault—attack resulting in "serious bodily injury" (inter alia, "protracted loss of function"), with a maximum sentence of ten years. The trial judge instructs the jury to additionally consider the "lesser included offense" of third-degree aggravated assault—attack resulting in "significant bodily injury" ("temporary loss of function"), with a maximum sentence of five years.

  • Hampton asks the judge to add instructions on two misdemeanor lesser included offenses, simple assault (attack resulting in mere "bodily injury"; maximum sentence six months) and simple assault with mutual combat (maximum sentence thirty days). But the judge denies the request. No reasonable jury could find that the impairment inflicted on Lawrence does not rise to the level of "significant bodily injury", so simple assault is not relevant to the jury's deliberations.

  • The jury convicts Hampton of second-degree aggravated assault, and the judge sentences him to seven years in prison. The appeals panel affirms the conviction, but remands for resentencing since the trial judge incorrectly counted Lawrence's "horrific" injuries in this case toward the "prior criminal record" aggravating factor.

Item 6 of 7

  • Mists of time past: My parents buy a corded lawnmower, and make me (and my brother) use it to mow the lawn.

  • 2023: I stumble across an article claiming that battery-powered lawnmowers are far weaker than gasoline mowers. My own calculations on the basis of Home Depot product listings bear out the claims: 200–500 watts for battery mowers, 1400–1600 watts for corded mowers, and 2000–2500 watts for gasoline mowers.

  • Winter 2024–2025: I buy a vacant lot. Of course, it has no electric service.

  • Spring 2025: I buy a battery-powered lawnmower for use on the vacant lot. As indicated by my previous calculations, it is noticeably weaker than the corded mower that I have used for the past decade. In fact, despite being marketed as capable of handling a 1/2-acre property, its battery runs dry halfway through my 1/6-acre lot! I return the battery-powered mower in favor of a gasoline-powered mower, and use that for the 2025 lawnmowing season.

  • Winter 2025–2026: My contract with a homebuilding contractor does not explicitly mention lawnmowing, but does explicitly say that, if I am injured on the lot while work is ongoing, then I will not be covered by the contractor's insurance. I interpret this as implying that, during construction, lawnmowing will be performed by the contractor rather than by me. Accordingly, I sell the gasoline mower on Craigslist.

  • Late July 2026: The contractor previously razed all vegetation on the lot as part of excavation. But now the grass is getting pretty tall. I send an email complaint to the contractor. Its response: "We can take care of the grass. We were looking for someone to handle the mowing since we currently do not have anyone on staff available to maintain it."

  • Early August 2026 (one week later): The contractor still hasn't cut the grass. I attend the council meeting for final adoption of the municipality's new zoning code. Before the meeting, the code-enforcement official notices me, and informs me that he has sent to me an official letter telling me to cut the grass on my lot. I guess I'll have to rent either a gasoline-powered mower or a gasoline-powered generator from the local Home Depot.

Item 7 of 7

  • Raheem is standing on a street corner. Anwar drives up to him, and Anwar's passenger Kevon shoots him, but he survives. On the other side of the narrow, one-way street, Tiarra happens to be sitting in her parked car with her one-year-old child CC. She starts screaming, and Kevon turns around and shoots her dead. Both Anwar and Kevon are charged with, and convicted of, a laundry list of crimes—conspiracy to murder Raheem, attempted murder of Raheem, conspiracy to murder Tiarra, murder of Tiarra, and reckless endangerment of CC.

  • On appeal, Anwar admits that he conspired to kill Raheem, but complains that he had nothing to do with the crimes that Kevon committed against Tiarra and CC of his own accord. But the trial judge rejects this argument, and the appeals panel affirms. Anwar conspired to kill Raheem in a drive-by shooting, and it is reasonable to infer that Anwar contemplated the possibility that Kevon would additionally eliminate witnesses as part of that method of killing.

Write an erotic description of a young, skinny woman in a shopping mall.

You held back there, as one does with this subject...

The whole point is not to shrink back!

Now I think about it I'd be worse at writing smut than Deepseek V4 Pro. I could do a better plot and more lively prose generally, more creativity and wouldn't get confused... but it'd be so awkward I'd be unable to do it.

Also I think you'd be better off with longer prompts. I die a little when I see these benchmarks for creative writing with one sentence prompts. A good creative writing prompt is at least 600 words I think, maybe more than that. I'm not all the way into lorebooks but you gotta give the bot something to work with. If you don't have the LLM executing your ideas it will go full Generic Genericsson. Then again, maybe local LLMs are more constrained for context length.

Common local LLMs range from 128k to 1m context windows, and while I'd recommend aiming to use less than half of the window per session, that still covers most short stories easily. Very long prompts extend prefill time, but this only really starts to matter if you're running on CPU or mixed GPU+CPU, or have most of a book written already.

For metrics, Hecatomb's 85k word Wild Pair series (cw: furry, mostly m/f, extreme kinks in ways that mean decensored local LLM review is the only option) is 120k tokens, and takes about 30 seconds to calculate prefill on an nVidia 3090. For a non-smut example, Doctorow's I, Robot (cw: very annoying writing), is 15k words, 20k tokens, and was less than a second on prefill.

Conversely, LLMs will invent details, and while they'll be average, they aren't going to be that generic. This can definitely go weird places -- the tendency for LLM-driven names to end up as variants of Kael, Lyra, so on -- but even mild pressure will get you to specifics, for better or worse.

You held back there

I did not. I truly have given this prompt to my decensored local LLM dozens of times, and the LLM's output always is much elaborate than anything that I would write. Could I in theory have made my output more elaborate? Possibly. But I don't have the competence to make those extra details actually sound erotic. (Inconsistencies in the darkness of the woman's skin? Waxing poetic about her thigh gap? A discursion on the shape of her nose? To me this sounds more excessive than erotic.) In contrast, the LLM, while going rather further than I intended to imply in the prompt (No brassiere? Lustful lip biting? Microskirt barely covering the buttocks? This is not a normal woman in a shopping mall.), is able to make added details actually sound erotic.

(And, again, I don't really care about gaining that competence—this is just idle dabbling.)

If you don't have the LLM executing your ideas it will go full Generic Genericsson.

I disagree there. It will always return a white woman if you don't specify otherwise, but it will give that white woman different outfits and make her do different things, even with a short prompt like this one.

The #1 decision about retention payments seems very reasonable. It's very likely that the Canadian company will in fact need the knowhow of various senior people who would otherwise be very likely to look for new jobs ASAP in the likely case they are eventually made redundant or forced to move. 48k each is not nearly enough for this to be unseemly.

My contract with a homebuilding contractor does not explicitly mention lawnmowing, but does explicitly say that, if I am injured on the lot while work is ongoing, then I will not be covered by the contractor's insurance. I interpret this as implying that, during construction, lawnmowing will be performed by the contractor rather than by me.

Why?

Direct quote:

The Owner hereby acknowledges that Owner is aware that the Premises, during the progress of the Work, constitute a dangerous area. Any visits by the Owner to the Premises during the progress of the Work shall be done at the Owner’s sole risk[,] and the Owner agrees to hold harmless and indemnify [the contractor] from any loss, expense (including attorneys’ fees), suit[,] or causes of action resulting from any damage or injury, personal injury[,] or death suffered by the Owner[ or] Owner’s agents, invitees[,] licensees, guests[,] or employees.

The first sentence in particular seems like a pretty strong statement that I am supposed to limit my presence on the property. If I'm not supposed to be there, then no one but the contractor is left to cut the grass.

Not at all! It just means you don't get to sue if you step on a nail while doing the lawnmowing that is ultimately your job as property owner.

I send my prayers to anyone who engages in a battle of bureaucracy against you. You're well equipped, you don't need me to wish you well, this is to even the playing field a little.

"Battle of bureaucracy"? I don't see any such event here. If you're referring to the tall-grass letter: Unlike some other municipalities that I could name, this municipality explicitly prescribes a maximum grass height of eight inches, and the vegetation on my lot unambiguously exceeds that value. (Annoyingly, the municipal govt. does not publish its code online, and instead requires citizens to request individual ordinances by email. But I specifically requested a copy of the maximum-grass-height ordinance shortly after buying the lot.)

... this municipality explicitly prescribes a maximum grass height of eight inches, and the vegetation on my lot unambiguously exceeds that value.

Are you sure the problem is not that you are letting your grass grow too long, rather than battery-powered lawnmowers are too weak? The normal advice is not to cut more than ⅓ of the grass height per mow, and most mowers only go up to 4" (10 cm).

Anecdotally, I've been using a Makita LXT 18V X2 (36V) battery-system-based mower for some years now without problem. If I let things overgrow, I can do just under 0.2 acres (8 quetta-barns for our metric absolutist friends) on the pair of 4.0 Ah (144 Wh total) batteries it came with. If I'm just doing a maintenance mow, maybe 30–40% more. I eventually built a pair of packs totaling just over 300 Wh; with those, the mower can go longer than I can. Now that you have electric service, could you not just get a second set of batteries for a battery-powered mower and have one set charging while using the other mowing? For a ⅙-acre (7 Qb) lot, a battery-powered mower ought to be more than enough. You don't have to mess with extension cords. Way more quiet than gas. Plus, a modest set of battery-powered tools and extra batteries are generally usefully for a homeowner. Your small leaf blower, string trimmer, drill/driver, reciprocating saw, personal fan, type things.

Are you sure the problem is not that you are letting your grass grow too long, rather than battery-powered lawnmowers are too weak? The normal advice is not to cut more than 1/3 of the grass height per mow, and most mowers only go up to 4 inches (10 cm).

Could you not just get a second set of batteries for a battery-powered mower and have one set charging while using the other mowing?

In 2025, I did not let my grass grow all the way to eight inches. However, even at whatever height I allowed the grass to grow to (probably around four or six inches), I found it extremely tiresome and annoying to run the weak battery mower forward at an excruciatingly slow pace, just nibbling away at the grass, when I was used to going much faster with a full-power corded mower at home.

Now that you have electric service

I don't. Completion is more than a month behind schedule.

You don't have to mess with extension cords.

While I did get some enjoyment out of being able to run the cord-free gasoline mower in an outside-to-inside spiral pattern, rather than being forced by the extension cord to go back and forth like a plowman, I don't think that's a significant factor in my decisionmaking here.

Wow, they don't even have temporary service to your site? Maybe it's a NJ thing they can't drop a temp pole. No wonder the contractor is behind schedule, he's working in the dark!

This is in Pennsylvania, not New J⁎rsey. I have seen the contractor bring generators to the site.

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