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PaperclipPerfector  29d ago (text post)   2259 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 11, 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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Inspiring controversy on Reddit today is an extremely long-winded comic, "I Don't Like My Boyfriend". Each of its 12 panels was posted as a separate image, so here are some consolidated renditions for your convenience.

In this comic, a woman contemplates how she doesn't like her boyfriend (who is drawn as a short, fat Chudjak). She finds him boring and annoying. However, he is smitten with her, and she has never had any friends, let alone romantic partners, other than him. She wonders whether she is just an unlikeable person, and should be more grateful for having hooked a person with such low standards. The general opinion of commenters seems to be hatred for the woman.

This actually matches my personal experience with attempts at friendship (1 2) somewhat well! I eventually couldn't tolerate my pseudo-friends any longer and kicked them all to the curb, and the commenters seem to think that the woman depicted in the comic should do the same with her romantic partner.

Do you have any thoughts on this topic?

I appreciate your usual output of strange court cases.

I eventually couldn't tolerate my pseudo-friends any longer and kicked them all to the curb

Well what was the issue? They didn't want to fill out your forms or they didn't want to send you a form to fill back?
I think a friend is just somebody who is willing to give you a little piece of their day in exchange for the simple pleasure of spending time with you.
You can be friends with different kinds of people in different ways. Maybe there's somebody who you only talk about sports with, or anime, or strange court cases.
If you already thoroughly know somebody, how are they going to surprise you, how are they going to teach you anything? Making them fill out a form to give you the information you care about is in a way spoiling the fun out of the friendship. Ideally this is somebody you can be sincere with and you can be humble with, you are not worrying over the way you are phrasing your thoughts not to sound dumb or offensive, in a way one would rewrite a paragraph to avoid modding on themotte.

If the spreadsheet-filling game is a core friendship need for you, I'd suggest frequenting fans of map-coloring or 'productivity' games like factorio, I assume they'd be more likely to be into spreadsheets.

Well, what was the issue?

I hated myself more and more for continuing to interact with them in a close, friendly manner despite disliking them. (See my flair.)

They didn't want to fill out your forms or they didn't want to send you a form to fill back?

Making them fill out a form

spreadsheet-filling game

I think you've misunderstood what I said. The participants in my pseudo-friendships didn't send forms full of questions back and forth. Rather, we sent each other questions and answers via Facebook messages, perhaps one to five at a time. The spreadsheet was only a tool to ensure that both parties participated more or less equally, rather than allowing (or forcing) one person to spam a zillion questions.

While I was not necessarily implying that you were literally making people fill forms, sending questions back and forth is loosely similar, considering that that is not how people usually communicate.
Consider how people go to a therapist for talk therapy, not 'answering questions' therapy, which could potentially be a more effective way of systematically diagnosing and treating mental illness.

The ideal conversation for me is that they tell me something sincere, that matters to them, that strikes my interest and for which I can find an interesting aspect to ask about. Then they can fill in some details, and perhaps I have some kind of related experience I can bring up that could be of interest to them. If they don't respond in a way that indicate that they have interest in what I'm bringing up, then we can stay silent, or go back to the previous topic with a different angle, or try something else.

Reading some of your questions, I don't really know where the conversation possibly could go from there.

Do you have a preference for the texture of facial tissues when you use them to wipe your nose?

Are we trying to find out if I have some kind of touch sensitivity? Unless you're a genetics researcher looking for people with a specific phenotypic trait to sample, I don't get what's the point of this question.

Why did you dislike the people you attempted friendship with?
You clearly have a social side considering your communications here, but you have standards I don't understand and you're not satisfied with what you're getting.

Reading some of your questions, I don't really know where the conversation possibly could go from there.

Do you have a preference for the texture of facial tissues when you use them to wipe your nose?

Are we trying to find out if I have some kind of touch sensitivity?

That particular question actually was asked by the other party (Pseudo-Friend Six), not by me. (I'm referring back to the original spreadsheet in saying this, as I did not copy from the spreadsheet to the Pastebin text file the identity of who asked each question. Remember that approximately half of the questions in that text file were asked by each party.)

Why did you dislike the people you attempted friendship with?

It's been more than a decade since all my pseudo-friendships were terminated, so it's hard to remember specifics. But in general: In the long term, there always end up being far more reasons to dislike (or at least distrust) a person than to like him.

Example reasons to dislike a person:

  • Is religious

  • Uses "they" as a singular pronoun for a person of unknown gender

  • Uses line breaks rather than paragraphs for no good reason, on a platform that differentiates between them (e. g., Markdown or raw HTML, not email or BBcode)

  • Places a hyphen between a number and its associated noun for no good reason (e. g., "after 10-years of imprisonment" rather than "after 10 years of imprisonment"; note that "a 10-year term of imprisonment" is fine)

  • Has authoritarian political views

And of course anybody who disagrees with you at all, even on something as minor as favorite food or preferred HVAC temperature, must be distrusted at least a little.

Example reasons to dislike a person

Religion and political views makes sense to me. I know a certain kind of libertarian/classical liberal type likes to pride themselves on it not mattering to them ("As long as they are respectful, I could be friends with a neo-Nazi and a woke progressive") - but it's harder to relate to someone when you have a different map of objective reality, and it's harder to feel comfortable around them when they hold moral intuitions you disagree with.

As for the other examples...

Uses "they" as a singular pronoun for a person of unknown gender

Uses line breaks rather than paragraphs for no good reason, on a platform that differentiates between them (e. g., Markdown or raw HTML, not email or BBcode)

Places a hyphen between a number and its associated noun for no good reason (e. g., "after 10-years of imprisonment" rather than "after 10 years of imprisonment"; note that "a 10-year term of imprisonment" is fine)


Seriously?

Not saying your overall conclusion about friendship not being for you is wrong (from my own experiences, I weakly suspect long-term platonic friendship is a bad use of time, as a general human truth), but I don't think non-standard/non-canonical speech / writing (and similar trivialities) has anything to do with it.

I find it hard to believe you are being serious here

Every person who has been reading professionally-edited books for a decade or two should have absorbed normal formatting conventions. Every person who has been using the Internet for a decade or two should understand why using paragraphs rather than line breaks is important (semantic markup—HTML = meaning and CSS = presentation; writing good HTML creates the proper affordances/hooks for CSS stylesheets and screen-reading programs to latch onto). Every person who is sane should understand that avoiding misnumbering people is more important than avoiding misgendering people.

Maybe most people find that disagreements on these topics merit only distrust, rather than dislike. But, after seeing hundreds of authors on ArchiveOfOurOwn and RoyalRoad use line breaks as improper substitutes for paragraphs (and use paragraphs with nonbreaking spaces as an improper method of increasing paragraph spacing), and after seeing dozens of appeals judges use hyphens in wacky ways, I have reached the limits of my patience.

Speaking of hyphens, using a hyphen to join an adverb to an adjective ("professionally-edited") is incorrect. See e.g., Chicago Manual of Style 5.93 ("A two-word phrasal adjective that begins with an adverb ending in -ly is not hyphenated").

I have not yet come to a firm conclusion regarding whether I agree with this particular rule. But I do appreciate your drawing attention to it.

More comments

Every person who has been using the Internet for a decade or two should understand why using paragraphs rather than line breaks is important (semantic markup—HTML = meaning and CSS = presentation; writing good HTML creates the proper affordances/hooks for CSS stylesheets and screen-reading programs to latch onto).

What do you mean by line breaks? Are you talking about hitting Enter (which your posts seem to be using in duplicate as paragraph separation, the TTBOMK standard internet practice), or more-special formatting?

@FlyOnTheWall, singular "they" irritates me too (as in, if someone requests to be referred to as "they", I will point-blank refuse). Probably an autism thing.

The BBCode markup language used by most forum software (XenForo, phpBB, etc.) does not create paragraphs, and instead renders everything with line breaks, as you describe. The same is true for imageboard software and WYSIWYG email software. But that is bad formatting. In contrast, the Markdown markup language used by Reddit and by this website enables proper paragraphs to be typed.

Wikipedia:

A paragraph is a self-contained unit of discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. Though not required by the orthographic conventions of any language with a writing system, paragraphs are a conventional means of organizing extended segments of prose.

The stanza in poetry is analogous with the paragraph in prose: related thoughts are grouped into units.

The standard formatting for paragraphs in print is a horizontal space (indent) at the start of the first line, though default CSS on the Internet instead uses a vertical space between paragraphs (like stanzas in print).

A newline is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. A newline is used to signify the end of a line of text and the start of a new one.

The individual lines in a poetic stanza are not separate paragraphs. Rather, they are lines within a paragraph, intentionally created with line breaks rather than being generated automatically by the text-layout algorithm.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

That's two stanzas/paragraphs, each composed of four lines that were created by inserting three line breaks. This is completely different in meaning from eight separate stanzas/paragraphs, or from eight separate lines in a single stanza/paragraph.

HTML specification:

The p element represents a paragraph.

A paragraph, in HTML terms, is not a logical concept, but a structural one.

The br element represents a line break.

CommonMark specification:

A sequence of non-blank lines that cannot be interpreted as other kinds of blocks forms a paragraph.

A line ending (not in a code span or HTML tag) that is preceded by two or more spaces and does not occur at the end of a block is parsed as a hard line break (rendered in HTML as a <br /> tag).

Every person who has been reading professionally-edited books for a decade or two should have absorbed normal formatting conventions

I have not absorbed normal formatting conventions, and I don't think anyone I know online/irl has either.

Every person who has been using the Internet for a decade or two should understand why using paragraphs rather than line breaks is important (semantic markup—HTML = meaning and CSS = presentation; writing good HTML creates the proper affordances/hooks for CSS stylesheets and screen-reading programs to latch onto).

Again, I did not know this, and I'd be surprised if anyone I know irl/online knew that either. When I write text on a computer, sometimes I want to make a vertical space, and I just do the first thing that works to make that space (here, I do use paragraphs instead of line-breaks, but that's because paragraphs happened to be the first tool that worked)

Every person who is sane should understand that avoiding misnumbering people is more important than avoiding misgendering people.

I cannot remember a time where I was unsure about the number of people "they" referred to in a conversation. In pretty much every case the "they" is initially going to be introduced as something which is clearly singular but of unknown gender (friend, cousin, teacher, student, etc)

Maybe most people find that disagreements on these topics merit only distrust, rather than dislike

I'm saying it merits nothing, except maybe a piece of fun trivia about the difference between line breaks and paragraphs.

I have reached the limits of my patience.

If this is really the reaction you have to formatting/grammar quirks, then I guess you just have an extremely unusual set of sensibilities. So fair enough.

Has authoritarian political views

I find it amusing that you'd have such criteria when 2 or 3 of your other criteria sound like something a grammar-nazi would care about. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I suppose you can find some grammar-appreciative people to be friends with, perhaps in the editing or copy proofing world?
I used to be more mindful of language rules myself.
Now there are language mistakes that I like. How my daughter says 'bloopy' instead of 'bluey' and calls her brother by the second half of his name. How endearing! Perhaps if you care to not be so hung up on what most people consider trivial language mistakes, taking up a foreign language would help?
When you are the one desperately trying to express yourself in a foreign language, begging native speakers not to immediately switch to English or ignore you, perhaps you will feel more inclined to be magnanimous toward others' mistakes?

Is religious

What's the problem with that? We all hold some beliefs we can't justify from the ground up. I've never seen Antarctica, I have to believe that it exists if anybody talks about it.

And of course anybody who disagrees with you at all, even on something as minor as favorite food or preferred HVAC temperature, must be distrusted at least a little.

Distrusted in what sense?
Do I trust that they will keep the AC at the exact 'right' temperature when I'm not around and they have control of the thermostat? Perhaps not, but why 'dislike' them for that?
I think it's important to respect that other people's preferences might be as arbitrary/determined as mine, and I shouldn't dislike them for that. Unless we're talking about extreme levels of causing discomfort to others.

We all hold some beliefs we can't justify from the ground up. I've never seen Antarctica, I have to believe that it exists if anybody talks about it.

Me neither, but unlike for typical religious claims, we have:

  • Satellite images (use Google Maps in globe + satellite mode and look at Antarctica)
  • Various photos taken in Antarctica (e.g. of polar bears Edit: penguins - I actually checked this time)
  • Claiming that a specific part of the surface of the earth has land on it is less far-fetched than saying there is some kind of heaven/nirvana/elysium/etc transcending the physical world (living) humans can experience.

Well that would require me to believe in satellites and photography (aren't these devices stealing your soul anyway?). It could be AI-generated for all I know.

This is not as odd as it sounds. There is a significant portion of the educated Western population who claims that God sometimes gets confused and puts a soul in the wrong body. This is something they teach children in many parts of the West.
'Don't sacrifice children because an angel told you not to' is not that odd of a belief, by comparison, imo.
But that's from growing up in a civilization that was deeply imbued with Christian values. Somebody who grew up in a Mayan city might be fine with Clancy-style late-term abortion.

Well that would require me to believe in satellites and photography

Yes it does, and that is reasonable. I guess you're gesturing towards the argument of "if we are willing to believe sources like photographs, then why not also believe the Bible/Church too?".

My acceptance of videos/photographs as evidence is something I'm willing to generally apply (even to stuff that I don't like) - but I don't think stuff being written down is similarly strong evidence (and I don't think you do either, since you probably don't believe in the Quran)

(aren't these devices stealing your soul anyway?)

No I don't believe in souls. And I'm pretty sure that even Christians, who believe in souls, don't think cameras steal them.

It could be AI-generated for all I know.

Good point, I think eventually photos/videos will become untrustworthy, maybe they are already untrustworthy. But I remember seeing photos of Antarctica years ago, before realistic AI image generation was a thing.

There is a significant portion of the educated Western population who claims that God sometimes gets confused and puts a soul in the wrong body. This is something they teach children in many parts of the West.

I assume you are referring to transgenderism? That's really not what most adherents believe (speaking as someone who was firmly pro-trans, and who is still broadly sympathetic to it) - given that most of us are atheists.

Some liberal detractors of transgenderism liken it to a religion by arguing a gender identity is functionally identical to a soul because lots of pro-trans people struggle to define what "womanhood" means explicitly.

But it can be done: a "trans woman" is a man who wishes to be a woman, and one's "gender identity" is just the gender/sex they wish they were (and then we redefine gender/man/woman/mother/father/etc to match gender identity instead of sex, and discourage mentions of sex) - no appeals to the metaphysical, just the phenomena of human beings having desires.

'Don't sacrifice children because an angel told you not to' is not that odd of a belief, by comparison, imo.

As I explained above, transgenderism boils down to the mundane claim that sometimes men want to be women, and vice-versa. I am almost certain that angels don't exist now, and never existed in the past - because I've never seen an angel, seen photographs of an angel, or heard any other convincing evidence they aren't made-up.

Don't sacrifice children ... But that's from growing up in a civilization that was deeply imbued with Christian values. Somebody who grew up in a Mayan city might be fine with Clancy-style late-term abortion.

Sounds like you're gesturing towards the fact that atheism has no objective morality, which is a good point that I think a lot of atheists don't address. Without a God, there is just people's subjective moral preferences - "sacrificing children" (i.e. killing them for no good reason) feels immoral to me, and to many others. But if someone felt otherwise, I can't actually prove they are wrong by pointing to a line in the Bible, and they wouldn't even be "wrong", they'd just have a different taste to me (and that would be horrifying to me)

And it might even be true that humans need a God to maintain a stable society long-term. But none of that has anything to do with whether God, angels, etc exist in the first place.

Clancy-style late-term abortion

Also, nice try, but I see what you did there: the pro-Clancy defence is that she was mentally unwell so it wasn't her fault. People who believe in abortion don't believe the fetus counts as human, so it's okay to kill it with full awareness of what you are doing.

More comments

Various photos taken in Antarctica (e.g. of polar bears)

>Antarctica

>polar bears

Hmm…

There were polar bears in Antarctica until the elder things ate them all.

Has authoritarian political views

I find it amusing that you'd have such criteria when two or three of your other criteria sound like something a grammar Nazi would care about.

Is religious

What's the problem with that? We all hold some beliefs we can't justify from the ground up. I've never seen Antarctica, but I have to believe that it exists if anybody talks about it.

People who make things worse for everybody else:

  • Those who deny the validity of scientific investigation (including supply and demand)

  • Those who don't bother to avoid ambiguity (i. e., foisting onto others the burden of reconstructing their intended meaning) in communication

And of course anybody who disagrees with you at all, even on something as minor as favorite food or preferred HVAC temperature, must be distrusted at least a little.

Distrusted in what sense?

For Alfred to assume that his random classmate/coworker/whatever Beatrice agrees with him on everything is charitable, but naive. Inevitably, if Alfred interacts with Beatrice, he will learn that she disagrees with him on minor topics—perhaps a few, perhaps a zillion.

If Beatrice disagrees with Alfred on a zillion minor topics, those minor disagreements are not in themselves sufficient cause for Alfred to dislike Beatrice. However, those minor disagreements do indicate an underlying difference between Alfred and Beatrice, and should lead Alfred to assume that Beatrice probably disagrees with Alfred on a zillion major topics as well—i. e., to distrust Beatrice. Even if those major topics are not known to Alfred, it is well-advised for him to assume that, if he bothers to learn more about Beatrice, then he eventually will come to learn her opinions on those major topics, and to dislike her. Familiarity breeds contempt.

I gotta say that this has been a fascinating thread looking into your psyche.

Kudos to @disparagus_impact for sussing it out. I don't think I would have gone this deep.

I somewhat agree that familiarity leads to finding disagreement which leads to some distrust.

I'm libertarian and atheist, if I believe anything about polling I'm bound to have major disagreements with just about everyone. I never wanted to limit my friendship and dating circles so heavily though. I take friendships and relationships as a journey for me and another to discovering the maximum amount of common ground agreements.

By the time someone knows about my most contentious beliefs I want them to know a dozen other things that paint me in a positive and agreeable light. This is also a minor way of spreading my beliefs. The human mind is very social. If someone knows a bunch of cool and friendly x-itarians their opinion of x-itarianism is likely to go up. Conversely if they only know a bunch of grumps and assholes their opinion will go down.

Those who deny the validity of scientific investigation (including supply and demand)

Well there's all kind of scientific investigation. Is scientific investigation the highest course of action no matter what? Should we be scientifically investigating something right now instead of having a conversation?

Those who don't bother to avoid ambiguity

There's a trade-off between avoiding ambiguity and time. Users of this website are obsessed with avoiding ambiguity but it makes every discussion longer to read / longer to respond to.

Even if those major topics are not known to Alfred, it is well-advised for him to assume that, if he bothers to learn more about Beatrice, then he eventually will come to learn her opinions on those major topics, and to dislike her.

The implication being that if you get to know somebody you will inevitably end up disliking them. While I don't think that is necessarily true, if you do believe that to be true, why do you want to speedrun that inevitability by throwing lists of questions at them?
You should enjoy not knowing them that well for as long as you can.
Also if you stopped constantly inquiring about various topics you would be less likely to form an opinion that would lead you to dislike somebody over it. ie touch grass

Aren’t you the one who said he was suddenly and puzzlingly depressed?

Your social environment appears to be painstakingly curated to cultivate depression. Maybe I’m misremembering your level of confusion. It could be you wish to keep starving yourself socially while beating back the predictable physiological effects. I wish you luck. We probably wouldn’t get along.

Previous discussion

The pseudo-friendships were terminated in the 2015–2016 period (shortly before I graduated from college). I did not begin to suffer from depression until 2022. And the "physiological effects" of forcing yourself to associate with people whom you have grown to strongly dislike cannot be ignored.

The spreadsheet was only a tool to ensure that both parties participated more or less equally

Throughout my life I have answered "Who has done more?" arguments in personal relationships -- my own and others -- with what I have thought was sage advice: if you're going to count, you need to count. Sometimes it makes sense to count, though even household chores runs into tricky division of labor problems that require agreed upon values. So normally the point of this quip is to impress upon a person the futility of trying to balance the ledger, sometimes after years of transactions not previously understood as such, or to demonstrate that negotiating the values is so tedious as to be absurd. It has worked for me, as it is almost always more constructive to find a mutually acceptable arrangement for the future and attempt to address cause for perceived unfairness in other ways.

You, sir, sound quite willing to count. I kneel.

I wonder if the chudjak bf has an engineering degree. Recently I learned that the "not asking personal questions" thing is a stereotype about engineers.

Ah yes, "engineers."

I don't know what you're trying to say here.

Sorry, I thought you were speaking euphemistically and answered somewhat elliptically.

My point was that sometimes there may be some overlap between people using the term "engineer" and a more clinical ASD-type terminology. For example, consider the case of someone who:

  • Has a preference for highly systematized thinking
  • Has poor conversational reciprocity
  • Experiences high cognitive load from focusing on specific social responses, leading to missed social context
  • Has unusually specific interests
  • Has a low tolerance for ambiguity

It might be socially acceptable to say, "That person is very engineer-brained." An alternate explanation might be: "I'm no psychologist, but I'm not ruling out level one ASD."

Epistemic status of the following: I'm no psychologist; illustrative only.

More generally, there's probably a group common in engineering that has some combination of high intelligence and ASD-like cognition. This combo would allow highly adaptive compensation, specifically through systematized, internalized social cues and intellectually derived rules. This might suppress clinically significant impairment, but might not constitute a separate type of cognitive cluster.

With respect to clustering, if you do a clustering analysis on what you might term natural kinds, for example from fMRI, genotype, or other biomarkers, or from clinical agreement on severity levels, you may actually find significantly better silhouetting within the "group," specifically on bimodal projections such as verbal versus non-verbal. If you extract the cluster from latent space that is most highly associated with ASD, I expect the most stable cluster is likely to contain both members who are clinically diagnosed with ASD and other people. That is, members who are not dysfunctional by clinical standards but have similar cognitive habits. The members who do have "dysfunction" may not be a pure representation of their natural kind in the state of nature, but rather an interaction between the environment and the natural kind. The non-pathological members of that group might be those with:

  • Unusually high capacity for explicit system-building
  • Learned social rules
  • Selected into an occupation with explicit norms
  • A peer group that is tolerant of unusual communication
  • A profession that grants enough autonomy to structure their environment

And they would not appear dysfunctional, but may belong to the same latent cluster as ASD. So they are "level 0": no apparent support needs. But like the other support levels, this is a function of the current environment, not latent cognition.

So much for "serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics".

The general opinion of commenters seems to be hatred for the woman.

Perhaps. I thought this was just surface-level analysis of the average marriage, or what loveless relationships/marriages ultimately devolve into.

There's a mismatch between can't and won't, too; is it just a complete lack of mental horsepower/effort (incuriousness), or something else? And while a lack of mental horsepower is concerning for a long-term relationship- both in the sense that you're going to be more alone than he will, and that it'll make those promises more difficult to depend on (in the sense that if he's not smart/paying that much attention he'll be outcompeted by others, which by extension means you will be outcompeted as well)- the Fiddler on the Roof-type marriage as means seems like it's actually the average human experience. (19th and 20th century drinking culture is another data point.)

Maybe that's actually the scary part, when there really is nothing more, that this is all there is and all you can expect out of life. I guess that's why people buy dogs and kids and say it saved their marriages- if only because it exposes a new facet of whoever it's with, but because at that point the relationship has shifted to means rather than end.

I've come to that point with a few people in my life: that this is all it's ever going to be, and they're never going to be any different. Sure, there are some barriers to communication, but the flip-side is the Copenhagen ethics problem where, if I don't have a better idea, then I feel that complaining about it is just more a one-sided vent than anything else.

The more interesting ones are those you can build on/up, which I think is what normal people call "getting along well". Especially if they build you up; those ones are keepers.

But the difference is that I'm not interested in resenting any one of them for this; they're not enemies that need to be destroyed. I'm not sure why I should (and I'm sure that doing this would kill the friendship even deader than just constantly complaining about things). Sure, there's limits on time and resources (and obviously you're more interested in some of them for reasons that have to do with sex), but that's true for everything else.

Maybe that is more sociopathic than anything else, I dunno- I guess you could call that being a giant slut "vers" of sorts, since I tend to search/select what (as far as I can tell) people are expecting as part of the way I get to know them. Of course, that also leads to some problems, where time is treated as ante just to see if the build-up will occur, which also results in me not quite behaving the way anyone really expects.

(Which makes actually being appropriately attractive/dominant on my own something I have to actively remember to do- as I understand it, this is more common in women than men, which is something that makes accepting... certain friends' claims unusually difficult. I only know better than everyone else once I know it's actually helpful or important to do so and tend to hedge harder than I should- probably sub-optimal, but so's the alternative.)

The advice is as old as writing: people change, just don't assume they'll change in the direction you want.

If the comic writer cannot accept her chud boyfriend they way he is, she shouldn't wait for him to become more to her liking. She should look inwards, not outwards: can she remould herself to like him more?

some random thoughts:

  1. in a friendship, there needs to some sort of see-saw of the status. (status games like mentioned in Impro - Keith Johnstone). in this comic, the boyfriend is "lowering" himself by all the moves like paying for everything, will take care of her, you are in my dream, never mean. But that is a permanent lowered side of him and she is always high. In general, higher status is a good thing, but not when it is permanently done.
  2. in a deep friendship (or love relationship), the most important point becomes: shared register. matching of interests. recognition. "i see you", and "i see you too". In this comic, the GF feels (correctly) that he doesn't see her actually. there is no common register for them, nothing shared, nothing discussed together, no to and fro exchanges. whatever she says, he never sees that, ignores that (error of commission or omission), which is why she feels so bad. but because he is doing lot of other status lowering (and hers higher) things, that whole discrepancy lands in the way of "am i the wrong one, am i spoiled".

Zhuangzi story: A bird of sea landed in Lu. The king was ecstatic. He put the bird in the royal palace, gave a 15 course feast in its honour, played the best classical songs for it, and best wines. The bird was sad, refuses to eat, and then dies in 3 days. Moral: the king never saw the bird as it was or what it needed. no recognition. he did what he considered the best (from his POV). the GF is the bird here.

Same for you probably. without a common register (even if it is some sort of 700 questions), you don't feel an acquaintance as "true"-friend. you don't feel "seen". and that correctly dissatisfies you.

She should break up. She’s displaying poor judgement and communication, and telling her that is OK (though unlikely to communicate it to her); but I don’t think shaming her is productive, because the alternative is her keeping these feelings to herself and maintaining a broken relationship.

On the surface she’s insulting her boyfriend, but the “insult” is poor judgement and self-contradictory, so logically it shouldn’t be taken seriously. Emotionally it’s not so easy, unfortunately; but again, if you were the boyfriend and care about her, wouldn’t you rather her admit this than keep it to herself?

Ah. That's a common enough story.

General advice for the men reading: taking interest in and engaging with the interests and activities of your female partners is important. If you can't generate it organically, then you better learn to fake it.

I can hear the objection already. Faking it is dishonest, she will see through it, and being caught faking is worse than never having tried. I half agree, in the sense that "fake" is probably the wrong word. What I actually mean is something closer to "build a habit."

Look at a person who sets a weekly reminder to call his mother. I wouldn't say he loves her less than the person who simply remembers on his own. The reminder is what love looks like in a brain that is bad at remembering things. The effort is the thing being measured, and is not much worse for being intentionally generated.

I've seen this before - a lot of women will become deeply dissatisfied if you're not doing this. You can be well off, handsome, good in bed, etc etc, but they'll feel that something is missing.

The gap gets filled by small things. Remembering a birthday without being reminded. Asking how her friend's surgery went. Flowers on a Tuesday for no reason, except that she appreciates flowers. Remarking on the fact that she got a haircut. None of these is individually important, which is precisely why they work as a signal. The only reason to do something that does not matter is that you were thinking about the person it does not matter to.

I've gotten better at all of that, with time and intentional effort. I've had exes complain I sometimes appeared checked out, or that I didn't get them flowers. Once that was done and dusted, I set about improving. I'm buying a bouquet today.

That is not to say that the stereotypically male side of a relationship isn't important: being a provider, making her feel safe, taking care of things. These all matter greatly. They are necessary, but in many cases, might not be sufficient.

  • A person has been convicted of "sexual battery". He is on the sex-offender list, and is required to register his "place of employment" with the county sheriff's office. His employer is a janitorial service: every day he shows up at a central location and is transported by the company to an assigned jobsite. He registers the central location as his place of employment.

  • The service assigns him to work at a children's camp in a different county. After several weeks of being transported to that location every day, he is charged with the felony of failing to update his registered workplace. He argues that (1) the law is unconstitutionally vague, and (2) it defies common sense for the law to require him to update his registered place of employment every time his employer changes his jobsite. But the trial judge rejects his arguments, and he pleads no contest and is sentenced to three years of probation. The appeals panel and the state supreme court affirm.

Originally published in year 1727, recently uploaded to Project Gutenberg:

The BENEFIT of FARTING EXPLAIN'D:
OR, THE FUNDAMENT-all CAUSE of the Distempers incident to the Fair Sex Inquir'd into:
Proving à Posteriori most of the Disordures in-tail'd on them are owing to Flatulencies not seasonably vented.
Wrote in Spanish, by Don Fart-in hando Puff-indorst Professor of Bumbast in the University of Craccow.
AND Translated into English at the Request and for the Use of the Lady Damp-Fart, of Her-fart-shire.
The Thirteenth Edition, with Additions, revis'd by a College of Phyzz-icians, and approved by several Ladies of Quality.
To which is added, a Certificate of its Virtues, from the Court of the Princess ARSEMINI.
Together with some Verses on a Lady's Fart, in the Philippic strain.
ALSO a Meditation on T——d, wrote in a Place of EASE.

(It appears that "T——d" stands for "Turd".)

  • 1967: A railroad company acquires a railroad line, including a tunnel. (I can't figure out the tunnel's exact location, but it's somewhere in this rectangle.)

  • 2000–2001: The company asks the federal STB (Surface Transportation Board) for permission to abandon service on the line. The STB grants permission.

  • 2001–2002: The company asks the state PUC (Public Utility Commission) for permission to "abolish" 29 rail crossings, including the tunnel. However, the PUC grants permission to abolish only 27 crossings. The two remaining crossings, including the tunnel, cannot be abolished because negotiations between the company and the state DOT (Dept. of Transportation) for "final disposition" are ongoing.

  • 2002, later: Despite lacking the PUC's permission, the company sells to a third party a large property that contains the tunnel.

  • 2012: The PUC erroneously assumes that all 29 crossings have been abolished by now, and closes the case.

  • 2019–2025: The PUC opens a new investigation of the tunnel, which has fallen into disrepair. It finds that the company cannot weasel out of responsibility just because it sold the tunnel (without govt. permission) back in 2002. It assigns to the company 2.8 M$ of repair costs, as well as future maintenance costs.

  • 2026: The appeals panel affirms.

Weird anecdote:

>Be me
>Visit 85-year-old grandfather
>He complains that he hasn't been feeling very motivated to do stuff lately
>Ramble at him regarding how designing code-compliant houses and subdivisions is a fun retirement hobby
>He mentions that his uncle gave him two vacant lots in Florida a while ago (he lives in New J⁎rsey), but he doesn't want to give them to anybody else because the property tax would be a burden
>Look up the county property records later
>Somebody (presumably grandfather's uncle) bought the lots for 4 k$ in 1977, and gave them to grandfather for free in 1984
>For each lot, assessed value is 30 k$, and "burdensome" property tax is 300 dollars per year
>This fogey has been letting perfectly good land sit overgrown, 900 miles away from him, for literally 40 years without either building something on it or selling it
>MFW
>Send him an email explaining that the lots are buildable under the municipality's zoning code (minimum house size 1200 ft2—example design is attached), but I would just sell them since they're so far away

good land sit overgrown

I assume since gramps hasn't been getting constant notices about the lawn being overgrown, they are not in an incorporated area?

lots are buildable

Like based off of minimum size and setbacks, or did you also check the hydrology? Selling someone an unseen ½-acre (20 Qb) parcel of Florida swamp is a tale as old as time.

I would just sell them

fun retirement hobby

Since you are retired and associated with New J⁎rsey, aren't you constitutionally required to snowbird, even if you hardly go outside of your climate-controlled shack?

I assume since gramps hasn't been getting constant notices about the lawn being overgrown, they are not in an incorporated area?

They are in a municipality. They're filled with trees, not just bushes, so I guess they've been promoted from "unkempt lawn" to "random patch of forest".

Like based off of minimum size and setbacks, or did you also check the hydrology?

They are surrounded by houses, and do not appear to be in a federally-designated flood zone or a state-designated wetland.

Since you are retired and associated with New J⁎rsey, aren't you constitutionally required to snowbird, even if you hardly go outside of your climate-controlled shack?

(1) If I had known about these properties prior to buying land in Pennsylvania, I might have considered purchasing one (though I'm not a big fan of living in Hurricane Land). But I definitely am not rich enough to own two houses.

(2) Infuriatingly, my climate-controlled shack STILL is not complete, as the electric company needs to upgrade the transformer on the nearest utility pole before it can provide service. It's now two months past the "tentative completion date" in the contract.

If I had known about these properties prior to buying land in Pennsylvania, I might have considered purchasing one (though I'm not a big fan of living in Hurricane Land). But I definitely am not rich enough to own two houses.

"Florida real-estate developer" seems like a great intersection with your retirement hobby tho?

I don't have a college certificate on the topic. But, as I understand it, the business of single-family-residential real-estate development consists of several different paths.

(1) Buy a medium-sized lot; subdivide it into a few small lots; and (a) sell the small lots to people who want to build custom houses, or (b) collaborate with a homebuilder to build on the small lots "speculative" houses that you'll sell to people who want to buy new houses.

(2) Buy a large lot; subdivide it into many small lots, plus drainage features and new roads; give the new roads to the municipality; give the drainage features to a homeowners' association; and (a) sell the small lots to people who want to build custom houses, or (b) collaborate with a homebuilder to build on the small lots "speculative" houses that you'll sell to people who want to buy new houses (getting a bulk discount with the homebuilder either way).

Regarding options 1b and 2b, people tend to dislike my house designs. Regarding all four options, I do not have access to a small loan of one million dollars.

Nah, you can totally buy a single lot and contract the building (on spec) with reasonable margins -- my wife did it for quite a few years. You just need enough seed for the bank to write you the construction loan, and a real estate market that isn't actively dropping. (I think Florida is mostly OK ATM?)

In your case I would definitely include an architect in the budget (or just buy some blueprints from Jenish or something) -- it's not so much that your designs are terrible, it's just that they are pretty specific to your tastes. This will make your house hard to sell, but I'm pretty sure you could build one that isn't.

Nah, you can totally buy a single lot and contract the building (on spec) with reasonable margins—my wife did it for quite a few years.

This doesn't make sense to me, though.

  • I can see why a consumer would want to take advantage of the economies of scale inherent in buying a speculative house in a large subdivision.

  • And I can see why a consumer would want to avoid the hassle of buying a medium-sized lot, subdividing out just the small piece that he wants to build on, and selling the rest of the lot back into the market.

  • But why would a consumer buy a developer's random spec house with no economies of scale and no subdivision, when he can just get a construction loan that converts into a mortgage all by himself? My own experience shows that getting a custom house built involves some hassle, but it isn't that much hassle (so far, at least), and it must be far outweighed by the comfort of having designed precisely to your preferences the home that you will inhabit for the next several decades.

But why would a consumer buy a developer's random spec house with no economies of scale and no subdivision, when he can just get a construction loan that converts into a mortgage all by himself?

Most people are afraid of it, and/or aren't competent to get it done themselves -- seems to me that you kind of like it (in a pig-wrestling way) and are certainly competent.

As you say it's not that much work; seems like a feasible hobby is all I'm saying.

General contractor margins tend to be in the 30%+ range for custom work (custom work is a PITA; I personally would want more!) -- if you come off as a pro doing a spec house and say "just get these plans done" they will build it for a lot less; the difference is your margin.

Check out Zillow on existing houses and go get a quote I guess?

a small loan of one million dollars.

Almost $10MM now, using CPI adjustment.

people tend to dislike my house designs

Assuming you could solve the "small" problem of how capital-intensive this is, there's probably some class of people looking for custom houses where they have an off-the-shelf plan requiring modification / site-specific edits or something in mind and need someone to make plans and stamp them. I don't recall if you are/were a Civil PE, but I assume it would not be an automatic transfer to Gatorland SE anyway. Though I think their structural engineering recognition program is supposedly less onerous than some other states, excepting the hurricane/wind-loading note you already made. The prospective clients would presumably also be expecting you to handle most of the project management stuff too. But this is all starting to look like real work and not a retirement hobby at that point.

I don't recall whether you are/were a Civil PE

I technically am eligible to take the exam and obtain a professional engineer's license, but while I was employed I saw no reason to go through the process, since my employer offered no incentive for it. Previous discussion

(It was hilarious to see all the best employees constantly leaving for private employment in part due to this reason. Compare this recent announcement of special bonuses, and even special positions, for licensed employees at NYSDOT.)

If he plays his cards right, maybe he can secure the Republican nomination in twenty years?

I have seen Florida subdivisions built around drainage (alligator storage) systems about the size of a lot. It’s a possibility.

According to the federal and state GIS maps, the nearest flood zone is 900 feet away, and the nearest wetland is 1000 feet away.

2019–2025: The PUC opens a new investigation of the tunnel, which has fallen into disrepair. It finds that the company cannot weasel out of responsibility just because it sold the tunnel (without govt. permission) back in 2002. It assigns to the company 2.8 M$ of repair costs, as well as future maintenance costs.

Why does it matter if a disused tunnel is in disrepair?

This fogey has been letting perfectly good land sit overgrown, 900 miles away from him, for literally 40 years without either building something on it or selling it

How much do you think the land is worth?

Why does it matter if a disused tunnel is in disrepair?

The opinion indicates that the tunnel's failure is causing subsidence in a roadway above it.

How much do you think the land is worth?

As I said above, each of the two lots is assessed by the county govt. at 30 k$. Zillow does not have Zestimates for them, but does show that many comparable lots within a few hundred feet have recently sold for 30–40 k$.

Finally, a fitting companion to Ben Franklin’s Letter to the Royal Academy.

This map shows the location of the tunnel under Route 268. It is a very short tunnel.

Sex offender case is interesting. I am not sure how burdensome registering is, but my first instinct was that it's pretty unfair to have to register where you are when that changes daily. If anyone should be managing the sex offender registration for an employee that works in various places, it should be the cleaning service or the criminal-employee NGO that's facilitating the work. And either of those entities shouldn't be sending sex offenders to clean up children's camps.

For those curious, the sexual battery charge was probably a plea deal from raping 2 kids under 10: https://sanduskyregister.com/news/31340/man-accused-of-raping-2-children-arrested/

OpenAI is name-mogging Anthropic.

It wasn't too long ago that the reverse was true. With OpenAI you had models like "text-davinci-003", "GPT-4o mini" and "o1-preview". And their flagship product, ChatGPT, was created by accident with an accidental name as well.

Meanwhile with Anthropic, you had "Opus", "Sonnet", and "Haiku", fun and illustrative words to demonstrate the sizes of the different models. They obviously missed an opportunity to create a porn-centric "Limerick" model, but we can't really fault them for that. Anthropic's nominative dominance peaked earlier this year with the release of "Mythos", a model which was so powerful they had to hold it back for testing, not because of lack of compute, never that, but because of the extreme danger such a powerful, nay Mythical, model might pose to humanity. Sadly, you didn't get to use Mythos. Instead you got a version called Fable, which is like a bedtime story for children. Don't act out though, because if you say the naughty words, you get downgraded to Opus, which is now considered trash.

OpenAI meanwhile got its mojo back with its 5.6 models, named "Luna", "Terra", and "Sol" model. Okay, obviously they are stealing Anthropic's small, normal, big convention but this naming scheme has legs. That was demonstrated when they released GPT-6 "Astra". Now that's a frickin' cool name.

Rumor is the next version will be called "Aeon", which is a step backward in my book, but they've got some potential big guns to release in the future. GPT 7 – "Nova". GPT 7.1 - "Supernova". They're unlikely to use "Galaxy" due to the Samsung connection, but your own personal bot swarm might be GPT 7.2 - "Constellation". All of this sets the stage for the final hurrah GPT 8 - "Light Cone".

Anthropic's IPO is on the rocks. What can they do to reclaim nominative dominance?

Sorry, but Astra isn't a good name. It just means "star". We've got Sol already.

Having any non-Sol star within your grasp is obviously cooler than just Sol.

I hate to over-explain, but the luna/terra/sol name ladder is not in order of how easy it is to grasp.

Suppose we go by size - Sol is on the medium-small side as stars go.

And how big is "star" as far as stars go?

We’ve got Sol already.

If it ever asks you to authenticate.

Astra is a cool name but it does create the risk of #asstra when they nerf it.

>OpenAI
>Models aren't open

>Anthropic

>Wants to end the human era on Earth

>X AI
>does nothing

Well, I guess this checks out at least

I'mma let you finish, but Misstral / Mistrial has the most useless AI product of all time.

a model which was so powerful they had to hold it back for testing, not because of lack of compute, never that, but because of the extreme danger such a powerful, nay Mythical, model might pose to humanity.

Good call from them. Look at what happened with the Fable "jailbreak" and subsequent ban by the US government.

Rumor is the next version will be called "Aeon", which is a step backward in my book

To be followed by the Demiurge model? I'm not sure I like where this is heading.

They need to name a model "Black Hole" just before they start defaulting on their contracts and are unable to meet their financial obligations.

The week in AI fun:

Give me suggestions about mocking name for ai doomerists - in the line of branch covidians and trustafarians. To hint that they are religious cult mostly

Some of the better suggestions:

Doominicans

Singularitarians

Yudkowskites

Yuddites

LessWrongians

Effective Apocalyptists

Pdoominicans

Doomish

Personally my favorite is Yuddites

If AI is going to rule us all and into darkness bind us, I do hope that it will be from OpenAI or China. There are at least hints of humor in their model.

This is probably a little too Culture War-y for Friday, but I am literally begging the people who are in support of AI to start actually trying to sell their AI future, especially if they want the public to get on board. I would caution that perhaps finding a new name to call the Anti-AI in order to demean them further is not a good strategy toward that aim. I'd suggest laying out an AI future that people would actually want (90%+ unemployment with the potential for Terminator live-action remake does not seem to be it), laying out the path that we will have to take to get there, and annunciating how we will avoid the threat of nuclear holocaust beyond "Just trust us bro".

It would also be against the rules.

The AI doomerist crowd is what happens when you roll all Int build with wisdom as a dump stat. Marina from the Marina and the diamonds fame has more of said dump stat than that community combined - "I'm not afraid of God, I am afraid of man". AGI should be the worst of your worry with AI. Worry about the authoritarians regimes ruling forever. Almost any (wannabe) dictator on this planet has enough territory and they are not really expansionist. But we are already here - even if anthropic stops AI development today - the stazis of the world would not. And the problem is of course not AI but the innate human tendency every regime to evolve into absolutism in the end. AI killing us all and then moving to rule the galaxy is the better option than forever oppression.

My doomed r fear is less about some weird AI wakes up and decides to kill us and more “people who want to do bad things can do those bad things much better with AGI at their side.” Human evil and ambition are boundless. Give a guy who wants to conquer the world for the Flying Speghetti Monster an AGI with an IQ in the hundred thousand range and it’s kind of over.

Yuddites is probably the most practical, but I think I prefer the Doomish (and like the Amish, it should always have "the" in front).

Doomish doesn't sound specific enough ("doomer" was one of the early "-oomer" memes). I am sympathetic to Yud's arguments and think Yuddites is very apt.

Heaven's gAIte?

Assuming we don't all die in the process (IMO unlikely, but not ruled out), I look forward to explaining our assumption to our new overlords that they'd go all murder robot on us. Ripley wasn't wrong to say "nuke it from orbit", but I'd expect bringing thermonuclear warheads to a First Contact event would be poor form.

20 years ago it would have been Terminatards, but I find that in poor taste. How about Chudkowskys?

This might fit better on sunday, but it's not sunday, and the topic is mostly for fun anyway, so here it goes. Who here generates images/comics with AI? What are you using/recommending?

I'm currently trying to generate a small comic book. The idea is, every time we watch a movie or series together and my daughter sees someone do something that would be a bad idea IRL, she says that's dumb, and she would just stay home and eat cookies (or whatever else is appropriate for the situation; In another movie, she basically just said she wouldn't save the princess, bc she got into the mess through her own stupidity).

So as a gift, maybe for christmas or birthday, I thought about making a short picture book titled "[daughter] doesn't go adventuring", where on every side there is a different well-known story, with my daughter as the main char, and she just refuses about everything in a blunt, matter-of-fact way. There's gotta be some small twist somewhere I'm not sure about yet though, otherwise it's going to be to boring.

But unfortunately I'm hitting a roadblock much earlier. Namely, the (chatgpt for now) AI is extremely trigger-happy to block pic gen for popular movies and the like in anything even just approaching the original artstyle. It only seems to work for the super-generic AI style that I don't want to use. I'm currently trying some workarounds, but it's tedious and seems to involve first starting with an original image and then progressively moving that into the desired direction with very specific prompts like "crisp inked outlines", "flatter color palette" and "simplified background".

Also, even after modification, it's recognizably AI drawn, but that is fine by me for now.

Guidance for generating images with uncensored/decensored AI models is available in the "Local Diffusion General" and "Stable Diffusion General" threads on 4chan's technology board. (I haven't personally tried it.)

I'd like to stick with non-local models at first, since it's otherwise very convenient. It really feels like working with a personal artist. But yeah, that's an option for the future.

To clarify, the /sdg/ thread provides links to uncensored non-local services.

This might fit better on sunday, but it's not sunday, and the topic is mostly for fun anyway, so here it goes. Who here generates images/comics with AI? What are you using/recommending?

I'm currently trying to generate a small comic book. The idea is, every time we watch a movie or series together and my daughter sees someone do something that would be a bad idea IRL, she says that's dumb, and she would just stay home and eat cookies (or whatever else is appropriate for the situation; In another movie, she basically just said she wouldn't save the princess, bc she got into the mess through her own stupidity).

So as a gift, maybe for christmas or birthday, I thought about making a short picture book titled "[daughter] doesn't go adventuring", where on every side there is a different well-known story, with my daughter as the main char, and she just refuses about everything in a blunt, matter-of-fact way. There's gotta be some small twist somewhere I'm not sure about yet though, otherwise it's going to be to boring.

But unfortunately I'm hitting a roadblock much earlier. Namely, the (chatgpt for now) AI is extremely trigger-happy to block pic gen for popular movies and the like in anything even just approaching the original artstyle. It only seems to work for the super-generic AI style that I don't want to use. I'm currently trying some workarounds, but it's tedious and seems to involve first starting with an original image and then progressively moving that into the desired direction with very specific prompts like "crisp inked outlines", "flatter color palette" and "simplified background".

Also, even after modification, it's recognizably AI drawn, but that is fine by me for now.

Try Fooocus. With Pony and the right LoRA, you can insert any character or copy any style you want. Find LoRAs on Civitai.

I hired a human artist for a similar project once. It might be worth looking into, depending on the art style that you want and the size of the project. For simple projects, it can be cheaper, faster, and easier than you might think.

I find that it's helpful to attach a reference image and ask it to copy the art style closely, on ChatGPT or Gemini. Much more effective than verbally describing the style. You can use multiple different references, in case you don't want it to crib too closely.

I mostly stopped using AI to generate humorous images after they finally fixed the "generate a cartoon sponge character" loophole.

Seaart.ai gives zero fucks about IP. It's free for about 10 images a day.

/images/1789142942365896.webp

KISS is fun, right? Everyone likes KISS.

Okay, maybe not, but I think they get way too much crap. Their '74-'77 material has the classic 70s dual guitar sound and is generally fun. Sure, they rapidly descended into rock star excess and became horrible parodies of themselves, but the early stuff has plenty of highlights.

Some videos from The Midnight Special in July 1975:

  1. Deuce. Simmons almost rolls his ankle in his giant boots around 0:07 but recovers, so it's okay to laugh at the almost-disaster.

  2. She. Note Frehley ripping some two-handed tapping during his solo.

  3. Black Diamond. Simmons carefully moving the mic out of the way around 3:25 cracks me up.

hmmmm, the SS part of their band logo looks like the nazi SS thing.

They were Jewish but I’m not sure it was intentional, actually I googled it and apparently there was some controversy.

I just read a Chuck Klosterman novel with some of his articles and one of them was about KISS and how they’re his favorite band - which I remember him talking about before but forgot and it blew my mind.

So I listened to some off the non hit albums and yea, pretty good !

Kiss is unironically one of the best disco bands in history.

More "Friday" than "Fun", but my fault for not thinking to ask last Sunday:

What's the best short (ideally 10-30min) video documentary/summary of the events of 9/11? I ran across the Tom-Hanks-narrated "Boatlift" and showed my kids a few nights ago, and that was excellent but covers only a small part of the story.

Not exactly what you’re asking, but I’d probably just show them news clips from that day. The shocking plane accident (maybe terrorism?), the second plane hitting the building, Bush being informed of the attack, the Pentagon being hit, confusion around the fourth plane, Bush’s speech, members of Congress returning to the Capitol and spontaneously singing “God bless America,” reactions from the UN and other countries, and so on. Give them something of the feel of the event as it was happening. You can probably fill in details about al-Qaeda, the Taliban, etc., on your own.

Give them something of the feel of the event as it was happening.

I've been considering this. https://x.com/25YearsAgoLive (mirror) seems to cover (and re-enact) the level of confusion in a way that doesn't get reflected as well by documentaries written in hindsight.

"The fire at the North Tower of the World Trade Center has spread, and the hole is certainly the size of a larger plane than a Cessna, as has been previously reported.

CNN Vice President of Finance Sean Murtaugh says that he saw a Boeing 747 fly “straight and deliberately” into the Tower, which would make this an unprecedentedly-disastrous and tragic accident."

Any of the Corbett report ones are the best. My personal favorite is follow the money but I think that’s a bit longer

What's your liability like if something goes wrong?

What does the app do?

An acquaintance is temporarily losing his band's bassist and has asked me to fill for several shows over the next two months. I said yes as a personal favor to him, and now I'm ass-deep in an entirely new repertoire which mostly consists of 1970s - 1980s rock and pop.

It's really interesting to see how musical composition has developed over the last 50 years.

Take Warren Zevon's "Splendid Isolation": it has a lot going on. The track contains harmonica, multi-voice vocals, guitar, bass, piano all in the same piece. Despite that, it feels noticeably more "open" than a lot of modern music. Rather than anchoring the song on guitar riffs, Zevon anchors it on a simple backbeat and a repetitive bass riff on the bottom end. Once he establishes the groove, he uses the harmonica and piano sparingly on the high end, but leaves a space in the sonic environment for vocals that's big enough to drive a truck through.

It's not a style you really see anymore. Like a a few other things, Phil Spector killed it.

That punchline was so good I suspect the rest of the post of being a setup!

I'm actually being earnest in the post. The evolution of music composition is something I find fascinating.

I'm also never going to pass up a tasteless joke, though.

It’s time for my annual listen of Cat System Corp’s News at 11. Looking at the comments, I am far from the only one. If you aren’t familiar, it’s a vaporwave album filled with clips of shows and news reports in the moments leading up to the attack, cutting off seconds before it is announced. The author has stated in an interview that the album is an attempt to suspend history in a moment, right before the peaceful days ended. It’s an interesting read and I recommend it if you’re interested in the subject. I find it especially fascinating since the artist is Dutch, yet the impact of 9/11 seems no less haunting for him.

I was very young when 9/11 happened. My memory of it is more a memory of my mother’s reaction; we were in the living room, and something on the tv had happened that had her distraught. I remember that very clearly. It wasn’t until I grew older that I really understood the event that would frame the rest of my childhood.

Another piece of media I revisit each year on this day is That episode of Lain that aired after 9/11. There’s something especially haunting about this one, something that captures the feeling of that time to me. It feels like falling leaves, the air growing colder, “visiting the doctor on a school day” as one commenter put it. I didn’t witness this as it was broadcast, but I can so easily imagine myself doing so; being a child and sitting in front of the tv as this strange cartoon broke the scheduled programming, not truly understanding the meaning behind the words scrolling across the screen. It’s almost pure simulacra on every level, but no less meaningful for me.

It’s been 25 years now, and as difficult to grasp as that is to me, I know it will be much more so for many of you here who were older when it happened. The world has changed so much, not just technologically, but in our attitudes as well. Sometimes, I will watch ground level footage on YouTube of when the towers fell, or footage of news stations covering the event. It is difficult to imagine us reacting the same way as a country should a similar event happen today, in a post Internet post irony poisoned culture war environment. Would that shock and anger express itself the same way? Would we just shrug and move on? Would we argue over whether it was a good thing or deserved?

I’m not sure. To all of you — do you have any rituals or traditions like this? Media you go back to, or ways of commemorating the tragedy to yourself? Those outside of America, do the events of 25 years ago hold significance to you at all, like they did for the Dutch artist behind News at 11?

I listened to this whole album twice a long time ago before I realized it was about 9/11.

Something I found pulled in alongside it by the algorithm: https://youtube.com/watch?v=egwd2FT1wJI

Wow, this is haunting. Great recommendation, thank you.

I mentioned this in one of the last AI culture war threads, but I've decided to use some of my vacation time to have Claude code a game for me. I went with tactical RPG (Final Fantasy Tactics inspired) for my genre.

I'm having a lot of fun with it. I'm focusing entirely on the game design part, so much so that I haven't even looked at the code. Will the code end up being a mess? Maybe. Will this game ever be finished? Probably not.

/images/17891648231560235.webp

Can Claude write a story for FFT minus the Lucavi Zodiac demons? The political intrigue and backstabbing was the best part of the plot to me, the fantasy demons were honestly a distraction.

I honestly don't know about Claude's writing skills. I will say that I've now learned that Opus 5 really is significantly worse than Fable 5.1 at coding a game. It makes a lot of mistakes that Fable doesn't.

Welcome to my TED Talk

If I was really good at this, I would structure my TED Talk in terms of my TED Talk, but I haven't prepared that far. I am speaking in favor of "the PowerPoint style" of communication, meaning a series of micro-episodes: small consumable chunks of digestible content, with a discernible start and finish, before rolling to the next chunk. While somewhat contemptible, acknowledged, I still find this style admirable in terms of effectiveness, particularly across wide swathes of humanity. The goal is not to teach or to learn, but to inspire; there is no serious knowledge transfer or epistemology happening here.

The Postal Service

The postal service is either a band or the mail carrier, who delivers my mail from point A (my house) to point B (the round file). Not exactly. The postal service is a conveyance along a series or network of posts. There is an inherent contradiction, in that posts do not move, by definition, yet that fact is essential to their nature at conveyance. One type of post is a stake in the ground (Latin: postis); the post we care about means a fixed place (Latin: positum), like a trading post or combat post or outpost. The premise of a postal service is that a message (or physical item) must be transported further than a normal human can travel in a day's time. Without a series of fixed posts (like huts or cabins or stables or inns or taverns), a messenger must forage, sleep, and defend their mission solo, vulnerable, and often defenseless, hungry, cold, wet, tired.

Horses changed the game in Persian and later Roman times, and they remained relevant through the Pony Express in USA frontier times. The implication is that a single messenger or rider would ride a horse to exhaustion until the next post, at which point the horse would rest, and either a new rider or the same exhausted rider would swap to a new, rested horse, and continue to the next post. This provided an astonishing messaging speed to those unaccustomed to the large amount of infrastructure necessary to sustain such an effort.

I tried to give an example of two angles or aspects of "the postal service" above, in the micro episodic format. If I were making an actual PowerPoint slide deck, for the first paragraph, I would have a single slide with mostly photos, 1-3. And a couple bullet points with key phrases.

THE POSTAL SERVICE

  • A post is a fixed place
  • The message is what moves
  • Relays turn distance into stages

Primary distinction: The post stays. The message travels.

THE HORSE

  • Horses have a limited useful range
  • Horses, unlike messages themselves, need to rest
  • Fresh horses reset the clock

Primary distinction: Replace the horse, not the journey.

Notice we have a series of distinctions. You have a lot of runway if you structure your talk or slide deck as a series of important distinctions. A messenger carries a message unlike a mother carries a fetus. Multiple messengers can speed the process. Is it series or parallel?

Lemony Snickets: A Series of Important Distinctions

  • Begin with something apparently obvious.
  • Separate two things usually conflated.
  • Show why the distinction matters.
  • Follow wherever the distinction leads.
  • Stop before exhausting the subject.

Just started getting into MTG Arena. Crafted a Vivi Ornitier brawl deck and she’s really fun to play with

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