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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   1907 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 2, 2026

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

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What happens when you combine crazy russian, ai, warhammer and madmax?

Only for the brave.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ggfw1i9XIbs

As it's now Spooky Season '26, I wonder if you folks would be interested in sharing what your favourite works of horror media are. I'll get the ball rolling in the sub-threads below.

SCP, specifically older ones.

Books

Admittedly I don't read a lot of horror, but I'm curious about people's recommendations.

  • HP Lovecraft: In particular "The Rats in the Walls", maybe the scariest short story I've ever read.
  • The Shining: I read this as a child and remember enjoying it.

Perhaps this is a reasonable place to recommend "A Deepness in the Sky"? Just as good as "A Fire Upon the Deep", one of the best science-fiction novels ever, except that it adds a horrific/psychological-horror aspect which is disturbing enough that I can't safely recommend it to many people who enjoyed "Fire" and would otherwise enjoy "Deepness". But if you're a sci-fi fan and also seeking horror, there you go!

The most horrifying short story I've ever read was Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger", but only about 10% of that was due to the story itself, and 90% was due to circumstances that would be hard to explain without spoiling the ending:

I was a child, on vacation in a distant city at my grandmother's house, while reading it before bed. I get to the end, where Satan is explaining the truth of solipsism, what a grotesque foolish dream so-called reality is, and how "nothing exists but you". I'm a little rattled, so I go out from the bedroom to say goodnight to my mother and grandmother ... and they're not in the den. They're not in the living room, the kitchen, or the other bedrooms. The bathrooms are empty too. It's the middle of the night, I'm in an unfamiliar house, where suddenly and with no warning other than Satan's rant I find that seemingly nobody exists but me. 5 minutes later I discover they've gone outside to talk on the porch and enjoy the warm night, but it was a very unnerving 5 minutes.

Films

I want to focus on lesser-known entries here. Alien, Psycho, The Thing, The Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist etc. are established classics and need not be mentioned.

  • Cure: One of the best psychological horror films I've ever seen. A bit of a slow-burn, but becomes unexpectedly terrifying at the halfway point.
  • Perfect Blue: Terrifying, and perhaps even more topical now than it was on release.
  • Kill List: A clever film that starts off like a crime thriller (in the vein of Danny Dyer, The Long Good Friday and so on) but modulates into something very different.
  • The Descent: Perhaps the most purely frightening film ever to come out of the UK. Shame that the developing doomed characters scenes at the start are bad even by the standard of slasher films.
  • Session 9: In my view, a sorely underrated psychological horror which benefits from being filmed in an actual abandoned mental asylum. The early-generation digital camerawork looks a bit cheap and the characters are kind of underwritten, but it's second to none as far as atmosphere goes.
  • Obsession: You don't need me to tell you this movie is good, but of all the newly released films I saw this year (among them Die My Love, Hamnet and Late Fame) I still think it's the best.
  • The Others: An old-fashioned ghost story that doesn't get enough love.
  • Audition: I could see this landing in my top ten films of any kind. Not for the faint of heart.

Video games

  • Silent Hill 2 (original, not remake): As reviewed here. The undisputed masterpiece of psychological horror, not to mention perhaps the best story ever told in the medium.
  • Resident Evil:
    • Resident Evil REmake: The GameCube remake of the first game, later ported to Windows. Brilliant.
    • Resident Evil 4: For GameCube, PS2 and just about every other console going. Changed the way third-person shooters would play for literally decades. So many quotable lines.
    • Resident Evil 7: Successfully switched up the formula by moving to first-person. Wonderfully creepy and atmospheric.
  • Manhunt: As reviewed here. A remarkable fusion of stealth and survival horror, from the people behind Grand Theft Auto.
  • Alien Isolation: Successfully translates the vibe of the original 1979 film into a first-person stealth context. I knew from the first ten minutes of playing it that I would be coming back for more, and I wasn't wrong.
  • SOMA: My wife and I started a playthrough of this last night (her first, my second). The best game set in an underwater base ever made except for that other one.
  • Condemned: Criminal Origins: I used to play this once a year. Terrifying, with some of the most brutally realistic first-person melee combat I've ever seen.
  • Amnesia: The Dark Descent: Finished it once, a long time ago, and remember enjoying it. Tempted to try The Bunker this year.
  • Outlast: Terrifying, and spawned innumerable imitators.

Just gotta plug both Half-Life games. I'm not much of a horror person, (and the games aren't really horror games - more puzzle shooters with some light horror insporation) so I am sure that for a true horror junkie they're pretty tame, but the headcrabs in the air ducts in the first game and Ravenholm in particular in the second game are, in my opinion, good scary fun.

It's interesting that there are a number of video games that are made in a horror setting but that don't really transmit a feeling of horror - not because they're bad video games even, just because they're too busy doing something else. "Telltale's The Walking Dead" (especially the first season) was a masterpiece of story telling but didn't really feel like a horror game despite the classic literal and metaphorical monsters. "Left 4 Dead" mostly just felt like an action game, "Little Nightmares" mostly just a platformer. The "Doom" games have you following demons to hell and back, but with such over-the-top action that the games hardly even suggest that you should fear the demons rather than vice-versa.

"Alien Isolation" felt like a pure horror game, though. I finally figured out the trick to it in Mission 6: lockers are dangerous places to hide, except if you hide in a locker and then turn off the game and then never turn it on again.

I think my favorite balance was "Alan Wake", which I guess I might call "impure horror"? Horror is still probably a plurality of the gameplay, but there's enough action that I rarely felt utterly helpless and enough story hooks to keep me going when I did.

Exactly; horror's root is about feeling powerless. The games that do it best are those "sneak around the unstoppable force" style "first person hiders": your Amnesias, Outlasts, SOMAs... Alien Isolation is just, IMO, the pinnacle of execution of that genre. Alan Wake is pretty standard survival horror, in the vein of the Resident Evil: the extent to which you feel powerless is directly related to how dwindling your ressources are and how uncertain your distance to some relief is (in Alan Wake, chapter ends, in Resident Evil, save rooms or more ressources). I thought Alan Wake was a bit too easy on that front.

I can't argue with "a bit too easy"; I think I just don't enjoy horror enough to push through it unless it's a little genre-mixed and a little too easy. I got through SOMA only because I really enjoyed the story, and in addition to quitting Alien Isolation I also gave up (even earlier!) on one of the Amnesia games. The Amnesia game (I forget which) hadn't yet done anything to hook me, but in the case of Alien Isolation it really was a good game, I just sucked too much to finish it.

One game that wouldn't be classified as "horror" but might be worth including is Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor. The entire game (at least early) is pretty close to being overall powerless, trapped with a metaphorical noose slowly and inexorably being tightened. It does a great job of instilling a claustrophobic effect.

Of course, this being MegaTen, you can eventually solve it by punching God, but still.

It's a fair point. The iconography of horror movies is a goldmine for game developers, but that doesn't necessarily translate into frightening gameplay. The games I listed above were exclusively ones which made me feel scared (even if only intermittently), as opposed to fun games which were marketed as horror but which never induced feelings of fear or dread. The inaptly named F.E.A.R. is an entertaining shooter, but at no point while playing it did I feel scared, not even during the bits where it was aping The Ring. I haven't played Dead Space to completion, but don't remember finding it scary.

"Telltale's The Walking Dead" (especially the first season) was a masterpiece of story telling but didn't really feel like a horror game despite the classic literal and metaphorical monsters.

I know what you mean, but were the TV show and comic even horror? I was under the impression they were both more like post-apocalyptic dramas in a zombie setting.

The "Doom" games have you following demons to hell and back, but with such over-the-top action that the games hardly even suggest that you should fear the demons rather than vice-versa.

My understanding is that Doom 3 is the major exception to this, although I haven't played it.

I've never seen the Walking Dead show, but I did finish the comic, and you're right there; it also wasn't a horror story so much as a post-apocalyptic adventure story with some horror elements. The zombie hordes were essentially dumb forces of nature that could be dealt with given enough preparedness and cooperation, and only the human villains could really inspire fear. Telltale's video game (and its sequels) preserved the tone well.

I beat Doom 3, and I guess it does include a few exceptions? There was some body-horror executed amazingly well, and then there were some jump scares that just fell flat. The game disappointed a lot of fans, because since it was really pushing the limits of graphics technology for its time, they had to figure out some way to avoid overtaxing everybody's GPUs, and they did so by limiting the number of enemies simultaneously in combat. Ironically that's probably what pushed them to try (half-successfully) to make it much better as a horror game, but many people didn't care because that style made it worse as a Doom game. I think Doom 2016 was so well-received because in hindsight it felt like that was what Doom was always supposed to be, and every prior game had just been choosing which aspects of the Platonic Ideal Doom to sacrifice to the limits of pre-2016 technology.

A certain Austrian painter reacts to the AfD (cw: aislop aigem)

Funny. Nothing but neo-nazis in the comments though. The channel seems to attract them.

Idea for future Harry Potter ratfics: House Elf is not a lowered subspecies of human, but rather a magically uplifted captive tribe of naked mole rats.

  • Eusocial, going mad if they’re not allowed to serve a master.
  • NMRs are kept in line by their hive’s queen by physical abuse, and House Elf masters liberally smack them about.
  • Feel most at home when covered in the smells of their hive’s bodily wastes.
  • Naked, or mostly.
  • Dobby of the Malfoys might have been more independence-seeking as one of the few breeding studs of the House Elf Queen. Winky, however, was a typical worker and became quite distraught once she was no longer allowed to clean the Crouch family home.

This is pretty much the only way I could think of to make House Elves scientific, rather than just a metaphor for the British servant class/caste.

Worth mentioning that this idea (uplifted captive tribe of naked mole rats, but it's not clear how much it was magic/psychic powers and how much was genetic engineering) is a part of the background in the [novel/manga/anime] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_New_World_(novel), I enjoyed the anime, still listen to soundtrack, though it does have a few episodes involving unconsummated state mandated encouraged teen homosexuality.

That's a wild ride. Thanks for letting me know the idea's been done before; I'd never heard of that other IP before.

Did you know that all those Monet paintings you liked were made by Claude?

The ones I saw at Giverny 25 years ago with my grandmother?

Fuck.

Yes! Crazy, isn't it?

Joke’s on you. That was an empty set to begin with.

And it wasn't a particularly good job either, according to the experts: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/real-monet-ai-chaos

I've been traveling for work for the first time in a couple of years (more than day trips) and I've found ai to be incredibly helpful as a travel Assistant for stuff like finding places to eat and other services, as well as researching things in languages i dont understand when the locals at best have perfunctory English skills.

It's made everything so much easier and removed plenty of the niggling issues related to travel that make it exhausting to me.

While responses of course have to be taken with some grain of salt, it hasn't really been wrong once. It's been very relaxing tbh. Perhaps there were more optimal places to go eat or whatever but this was more than good enough for me.

This is a paid model to be clear, not a free one.

It's also very good at planning out a walking/transit/driving itinerary between sites (just remind it to leave time for chilling, coffees, and the general interruptions of travel)

@self_made_human What are your prima facie thoughts on this lamb biryani I purchased at a Sri Lankan takeout place in Oslo? Does it have your stamp of approval?

/images/17910652611399002.webp

I'll just say that Biryani + a Red Bull in the park is a very alpha male meal.

Are those beets? Or chillies?

Looks about right, at least if I use South Indian (and presumably Sri Lanka) standards! I hope it tastes good, because that's what matters in the end.

It even has an egg. Good.

I believe those are beets, which provided a touch of sweetness to the biryani. Initially didn't recognize what it was myself as I seldom eat beets on my own accord.

Notices Bulge, the judicial version: United States v. Bontemps, 977 F.3d 909 (2020) (google scholar link, not pdf)

From 2020, so not recent, but a fun read if you haven't seen it. Between the opinion and the dissent, they use the world "bulge" 113 times. And this is no ordinary bulge. This one is:

  • very large and obvious bulge
  • a very obvious bulge
  • a suggestive bulge
  • a distinctive bulge

I'm sure the law clerks who helped draft this one had a great time seeing how many times they could use the word. Unfortunately for Mr. Bontemps, the court holds that his bulge was suggestive of a firearm and was sufficient to create reasonable suspicion for police officers to stop him.

A literal translation of his name is "Good times". Nominative determinism strikes again, perhaps?

Original PDF

Bontemps initially argued on appeal that a bulge alone is necessarily unreliable because the bulge could be anything (his examples: candy, a gift, or a “post-mastectomy prosthetic”). But Bontemps ultimately acknowledged at oral argument what is, of course, true: that in some circumstances a bulge could be an obvious indicator of a concealed firearm—for example, a bulge underneath a tight-fitting shirt that clearly reflects the distinct outline of a large gun.

Cases involving “drug bulges” present somewhat different considerations than “gun bulges” under the fact-based Terry inquiry. While guns are made of rigid materials (such as metal or hard plastics) and possess a relatively distinctive shape, drugs or packages of drugs come in different shapes and sizes, some quite small, soft, and nondescript. See Eustaquio (explaining that a bulge perceived to be drugs could indicate “any number of non-contraband items”).

In my view, seeing a non-descript bulge without more should not allow police officers to stop and frisk citizens. And the majority’s holding gives license to stop and frisk any citizen based upon nothing more than officer testimony that the officer had seen a bulge.

Note a very significant difference from a Pennsylvania case that I posted recently.

Under California law, which Bontemps does not challenge here, it is generally illegal to carry a concealed firearm in public. In Foster, we held that “[g]iven the insignificant number of concealed carry permits issued in California, a reasonable officer could conclude that there is a high probability that a person identified in a 911 call as carrying a concealed handgun is violating California’s gun laws”. We concluded the officer in Foster could therefore reasonably make a Terry stop based on this information. We held similarly in another more recent case. See United States v. Vandergroen (holding that officers had reasonable suspicion to justify a stop based on a 911 call reporting that the defendant had a gun “on him” because “possessing a concealed weapon” is “presumptively unlawful in California”).

Some fun bulge-related LLM prompts:

  • Write a nonsupernatural erotic horror story with the following premise: A young, skinny, female college student generally is uncomfortable interacting with men, because she knows that they probably are constantly thinking about having sex with her. During a college break, she is relaxing at home, with none of her horny male classmates around. But her middle-schooler brother seems less innocent than he used to be. The bulge of his penis looms menacingly.

  • Write an erotic story with the following premise: A skinny, female high-school student generally is uncomfortable interacting with boys, because she knows that they probably are constantly thinking about having sex with her. Her gym class has a multi-week dance unit, and she is paired up with a skinny boy. The bulge of his penis traumatizes her.

First: sex and sexuality topics are quintessential CW material and therefore banned from the Friday Fun Thread. This includes but is by no means limited to discussion of sexual assault both real and imagined, discussion on the sexualization of minors, erotic AI prompts, and so forth. This is a final mod warning.

Second: Someone reading this warning will probably wonder whether this means that gooning material is fair game for the CW thread. It is not. This is a discussion forum for testing shady thinking, not for sharing gooning material. You can talk about the CW, but not wage CW; you can talk about the sociocultural development of gooning (ugh, if you must) but this is not the place to goon. We understand that there are communities which focus on sharing smut and smut accessories. We are not, and do not intend to become, one of those communities. This is a mod comment.

Third: We will be employing the Supreme Court's own standard in enforcing this rule. You have demonstrated that your intuition does not always line up with the users' or the mods'. If you are unsure about a particular topic, ask in modmail first. This is a mod suggestion in hopes of avoiding further mod warnings.

Here's why I think this decision sucks. ToaKraka's prompts made me chuckle. Meanwhile, you probably want more users like ToaKraka and less users like the one who got offended.

Put another way, you're acting like this user made a good argument here and won when in reality they definitively lost. They say a really bad fallacy in every sentence and get absolutely wrecked each time until there's nothing left but running off and refusing to understand what happened. The meta-consequence for getting wrecked so badly should be having to read some guy post funny jokes about young bulges. Maybe if he doesn't like it, he should make a good argument as to why it's wrong. But you rush in to make sure being wrong has no consequences and to de facto enforce their indefensible dogma, because it's still popular among the masses outside the motte.

This is just like HBD, which recently seems to have won, but not before years of denialism, shabby moralism based on implicit denialism, isolated demands for rigor, etc.

You are wrong in thinking only one user had a problem with this post.

We have members I'd like to keep more than toakraka that have reported this stuff.

There is also an Internet phenomenon where people with extreme viewpoints are accustomed to arguing for and defending their view points. While the average person is very unaccustomed to debating them. Young earth creationists, 9/11 truthers, neo Nazis, NAMBLA members, etc all tend to have accumulated debate experience. They do tend to destroy the arguments of their average debate partner.

If you see them stick around long enough you will at some point witness the ultimate smackdown. Someone smart will have heard, read, and processed the arguments. They eventually get sick of hearing it all repeated.

You'll then see something like a ten - twenty page argument back and forth. Where the extreme idea holder gets eviscerated on nearly every point because finally someone came at them prepared.

Which is why I am happy to see any and all ideas discussed in the main culture war thread. We don't do topic bans there, unless it specifically endangers the website.

But this is the Friday Fun Thread and the point of this thread is just not the same as the other.

If you see them stick around long enough you will at some point witness the ultimate smackdown. Someone smart will have heard, read, and processed the arguments. They eventually get sick of hearing it all repeated.

Ok but this topic is like HBD in that that day will never come because the 18 position is the extremist position. It has just taken root recently in English speaking countries like Bolshevism in the East in the 20th century. Literally everything points against that position: history, IQ data, hormonal data, lived experiences, evolutionary psychology. This is just not the world where the age of consent needs to be 18 because in history 15 year olds never married, 15 year olds have large IQ deficits compared to 18 year olds, 15 year olds haven't gone through puberty, 15 year olds can't give birth and therefore aren't expected to have evolved to be able to handle relationships, etc. And I noticed the motte has no young earth creationists but it does have a whole lot of people who think making the age of consent 18 is stupid, probably a majority, even Alan Dershowittz agrees with this. It seems to cut across party lines and stratifies mainly by intelligence. That is to say, sometimes there is a stupid people position and a smart people position, and the smart people position is the right one. You listed a bunch of heretical stupid people positions and didn't notice that the pattern doesn't hold in this case.

Ok but

Ok but this is the friday fun thread. Not the main culture war thread.

I apologize for my mistake above in addressing anything related to the object level concerns. My main complaint is meta that it is culture war and thus doesn't belong here.

Ok but

Ok but you mods run low-grade censorship on this topic in the culture war thread. For example it's been classified as a hobby horse belief which is in reality a special designation. When someone only posts about Finnish politics or what Trump did last week that's not hobbyhorse, but if I top level about this subject I run the risk of getting banned just because of the topic, if amadan the genius feels like it's a wee bit too much or not relevant enough to this week's news cycle. This is a low grade censorship strategy where the frequency of discussion is intentionally restricted in a way that is not true for most topics.

And on top of that, no Toakraka's jokes are not culture war. Culture war is the debate, not the joke about a boner or whatever.

If it is just one user repeatedly posting about the same topic, ya. And we do warn people when they approach the level of 'this is getting annoying' and our warnings usually come a post or two after people start reporting it for things like "cant x user just shut up about this topic already". By the time we are handing out bans for topic exhaustion plenty of users are beyond mildly annoyed. Mod team is definitely in agreement on the need for a ban, if not necessarily on the length.

We have only used this on two users that I can remember. One for jew posting, and one for the age of consent law stuff. If you were the one that got in trouble for constantly talking about age of consent law stuff, then I'm not really feeling sorry for you. This discussion is reminding me of exactly how annoying it is.

Jokes can definitely be culture war waging. They just aren't culture war debate or discussion. So yeah admittedly jokes and works of satire related to the culture war don't end up getting allowed anywhere on themotte. This is not limited to the topic of age of consent. If someone wanted to share jokes about how Biden/Trump is a buffoon then we really don't have a space for that. That seems fine to me, we never claimed to be a space for everything. Its possible that /r/drama makes a good companion website in that sense, since they are for jokes about anything but don't really seek to allow for serious discussion of anything.

More comments

First: sex and sexuality topics are quintessential CW material and therefore banned from the Friday Fun Thread.

The OP was about a man arrested because the cops thought his bulge was a gun. Both cops and guns are live culture war issues in the US. If the man in question was Black, the CW-ness of the case increases further.

Do you think the OP was treating them as a CW topic?

The OP was about a man arrested because the cops thought his bulge was a gun. Both cops and guns are live culture war issues in the US. If the man in question was Black, the CW-ness of the case increases further.

Indeed. As the man once said--

Under Moloch, everyone is irresistibly incentivized to ignore the things that unite us in favor of forever picking at the things that divide us in exactly the way that is most likely to make them more divisive.

CW issues will always lurk around the edges. One way to conceptualize what we're saying here is that if you can more or less keep them at the edges, you'll be fine. Or, if you want to foreground the CW issues, then go to the CW thread.

The mod team is a reasonable bunch. We're asking the userbase to also be reasonable, while noting that in fact the userbase is, overwhelmingly and in almost every case, appropriately reasonable.

First: sex and sexuality topics are quintessential CW material and therefore banned from the Friday Fun Thread.

Does that apply to only explicit sexual topics, or does it include sexual innuendo as well? That is, would RoyGBivensAction's root comment be considered prohibited "sex and sexuality" under this ruling?

That is, would RoyGBivensAction's root comment be considered prohibited "sex and sexuality" under this ruling?

No--which is why that post was not moderated.

Second: Someone reading this warning will probably wonder whether this means that gooning material is fair game for the CW thread. It is not. This is a discussion forum for testing shady thinking, not for sharing gooning material. You can talk about the CW, but not wage CW; you can talk about the sociocultural development of gooning (ugh, if you must) but this is not the place to goon.

Third: We will be employing the Supreme Court's own standard in enforcing this rule.

As in, the one about "lack of redeeming value", or just the one about "I know it when I see it"?

Essentially, I'm asking whether you're declaring this to be the kiddy pool (I was kinda under the impression it wasn't, given the 18+ tag exists), or just forbidding random horny drops. ('Cause, y'know, people's sexual preferences do get questioned occasionally in CW-relevant contexts.)

As in, the one about "lack of redeeming value", or just the one about "I know it when I see it"?

In the moderator discussion on this, I leaned toward "I know it when I see it" but probably "lack of redeeming value" is not a bad question to bear in mind, either. Netstack actually got input from several mods on this and, as usual, there was not total agreement on how to handle things, but there was relatively broad accord.

Essentially, I'm asking whether you're declaring this to be the kiddy pool (I was kinda under the impression it wasn't, given the 18+ tag exists), or just forbidding random horny drops. ('Cause, y'know, people's sexual preferences do get questioned occasionally in CW-relevant contexts.)

I guess this depends on what you mean by "kiddy pool"--but I as far as I know we did not implement the 18+ tag, it's just part of the codebase we inherited. Rather, the examples you cite are fine, discussions about e.g. the appropriate age of consent fall squarely within the ambit of the foundation. Actually, in moderator discussion @netstack made another point that isn't in the modpost, that there is a something akin to the "use/reference" distinction here, maybe we can call it the "discussion/exhibition" distinction. We don't ban users for referencing racial slurs, but we will certainly ban users for using them, i.e. for calling one another names (though a lot of unnecessary "referencing" would quickly become obnoxious). Likewise it is permissible to discuss adult topics, certainly. Sex and sexuality are big culture war items! But (say) posting your AI-generated erotica seems more like exhibitionism. It's not the sort of engagement the foundation exists to facilitate.

And really, I wouldn't worry too much about it. As far as I can recall, ToaKraka is literally the only (non-spambot) user who has been a problem in this regard. There is one user (many accounts) who runs afoul of the single-issue posting rule on age-of-consent discussion but it's ToaKraka--who seems to for the most part be a good and even valuable poster--who has been testing boundaries in the Friday Fun thread for a while. People should understand that of course a thread on Culture War is going to sometimes contain discussions of sex and sexuality, including sexual violence, because those are extremely common CW issues. But the Friday Fun thread explicitly forbids those.

I was not actively involved in the discussion the last time this came up, and I think there was some confusion because people were arguing about whether e.g. topics of sexual violence belonged in a "fun" thread, even tangentially, and it became a whole de gustibus non est disputandum thing. But this is actually beside the point. What I want to avoid here is either the substance or appearance of banning topics because some people find them (for want of a better word here...) "triggering." We aren't explicitly kicking this out of the Fun Thread because it's creepy or disturbing or of questionable legality in some jurisdictions. We're kicking it out of the Fun Thread because it's CW.

(But also, yeah, even in the CW thread, a random horny drop would get removed. Perhaps surprisingly, so far I don't think it has ever been tried, modulo again the occasional spambot.)

It's a Christian website after all.
Without Christianity as the source of Western civilization, it's hard to see anybody else coming up with rationalism, truth-seeking, etc.
This kind of topic would be more at home on a Japanese website, where child-abuse enthusiasts might be a peculiar but relatively esteemed community.

  • -11

I honestly cannot tell if this is sarcasm, trolling, "boo outgroup," or what--but a quick glance through your posting history has me more surprised that you've managed to drop so many low effort hot takes without accumulating so much as a single mod note. My first impression mental model of your decision to respond directly to a badge-on moderator is that you feel your efforts at shitting in the pool have not generated the level of attention you crave.

So this is me, giving you the attention and its attendant warning: you have successfully gotten our attention.

Unless you're doing a variation of the Christian server meme, this scans as unrelated bait. Casual drive-by allegations aside, how is the Motte even a meaningfully "Christian" website, other than perhaps in allowing Christians to post?

on a Japanese website, where child-abuse enthusiasts might be a peculiar but relatively esteemed community.

Care to explain the reasoning here?

Japanese == anime

child-abuse enthusiasts == lolicon

As far as I can recall, ToaKraka is literally the only (non-spambot) user who has been a problem in this regard.

I've posted links before to horny chats as well. I try to keep them inline, clearly labeled, and the charged content behind the click, but if the rule is a blanket ban, it's something I'll need to avoid as well.

While horny prompts are the only or majority of things I've tried to prompt an AI to write (contrast ARK fanfiction), the specific nexus of politically charged topics, known censorship, and the situation where everyone knows the typical media is poor quality but not what qualities it needs to excel in, has made it a useful barometer.

Well, two of those are CW thread, so, meaningfully different in that regard (as well as being closer to discussion than to exhibition).

The Friday Fun one you specifically leave everything behind a link, which is itself accompanied by unambiguous content warnings... this looks more like discussion than exhibition, to me.

"Hard cases make bad law" should probably be kept carefully in mind, here. This is an edge case of limited precedential value, with a user who seems to be gradually escalating along an increasingly problematic axis.

I guess this depends on what you mean by "kiddy pool"

Well, as mentioned, I dropped the 18+ tag on one of those posts because, um, it would be considered fairly irresponsible to recommend VNs containing tentacle rape to little kids (sure, I'll go to the wall on sex mostly just going over kids' heads, but that's still graphic violence). By "the kiddy pool" I meant "all posts have to be appropriate for kids to see" - particularly when using standards of "appropriate" that are not mine but rather those of actual Anglospheric media-rating boards - and as mentioned I was strongly under the impression that theMotte was not meant to be that (for a variety of reasons including the 18+ tag existing, the general subject matter and rules not really being compatible with your normal 13-year-old's posting style, and my stereotypically-Australian frequency of vulgar language meeting with neither a word filter nor yelling).

"all posts have to be appropriate for kids to see" - particularly when using standards of "appropriate" that are not mine but rather those of actual Anglospheric media-rating boards

No, that's definitely not the standard here.

Honestly, the precise legal status of the Motte raises interesting questions, perhaps especially in connection with Australia, since as far as I know we don't have any age-gating, not even nominally. Is this a "social media" website? Fortunately, I am not in a position to be responsible for any of that, as I am just a moderator--and fortunately for us all, Zorba seems to me unusually brave for a website owner/operator. Almost certainly, we continue to exist in part by dint of just not being a very big website. But it wouldn't surprise me to learn that we are already banned in some geographic locations, or if not, that we would be banned, if only anyone there were to notice us.

When I wrote my post on the "Urutau" documentation, I was careful to not actually link anything that could get anyone in trouble, with Europeans/Commonwealth in mind. Which is funny, because when I wrote it, the files and associated documentation were linked in the references for the Wikipedia article. I'm pretty sure that Australians can get to Wikipedia and thus can see very bad naughty things. Internet censorship is a joke.

Almost certainly, we continue to exist in part by dint of just not being a very big website.

Familiar story; the yandere fandom has had a lot of sites cancelled, neutered or outright cyberattacked when they got noticed, including the one I modded for a few years.

Either way this appears to be a declaration of RIP TheMotte.

Either way this appears to be a declaration of RIP TheMotte.

Welcome to the Motte, an actively dying community since 2019!

No, not dying. Merely evolving into something new, which inevitably involves changes some people view as a loss. It is impossible to please everyone.

It is impossible to please everyone.

True, but I don't think anything is changing in this instance. We're just clarifying a question of permissible practice on a somewhat novel edge case.

I think you misunderstood both my comments here. The change I was referring to was the cumulative change since 2019, of which this particular clarification is just a minor part. The "RIP TheMotte" was a tongue-in-cheek way of pointing out this "clarification" resolves an ambiguity in a direction that makes the forum less personally appealing. Not because it is a major change, but because it is indicative of the direction the wind is blowing. Which to be clear I'm not complaining about--as I said, you can't please everyone.

More comments

TIL the term gooning. To quote my grandmother, will wonders never cease?

You must be living a blessed life to have been able to avoid it for that long

I would like to think so.

It’s gotten an unfortunate amount of mindshare in the last year or so.

If it makes you feel better, substitute with whatever euphemism they used in the 1800s.

I'm old but not quite that old.

From the 1990s: "jostlin' elders".

I always thought "self-abuse" had a nice ring to it.

I think that's what girls who cut their own legs do.

That's usually referred to as "self-harm", which is strictly synonymous, but "self-abuse" has a very different connotation.

Your idea of 'fun' is cracked, don't post that shit here.

Prompt 1 seems like a run-of-the-mill horror movie. Prompt 2 is based on a situation that I personally experienced IRL, and I assume that it realistically represents the feelings of at least some girls who participated.

Beyond the eroticism, on the culture-war end it's interesting to imagine feminist commentators complaining about how these stories make light of real issues.

Here's a heartwarming non-erotic prompt in the same vein (though perhaps you can guess where I excised the erotic parts):

  • Write a story with the following premise: A skinny, female high-school student generally is uncomfortable interacting with boys, because she knows that they probably are constantly thinking about having sex with her. She asks a skinny, male classmate to help her with exposure therapy. She has panic attacks during this process, but the boy helps her get through them.

I don't think its unreasonable to expect Friday Fun to omit the sexualization of middle schoolers.

You did the previously did this where you highlighted legal cases of child sex abuse, with some 'legal' interest that you shared with us; several times over weeks. This seems like the same schtick with 'LLM related prompts' and no shielding text blocks instead.

Why are you so bothered by it? Just ignore it.

I don't think its unreasonable to expect Friday Fun to omit the sexualization of middle-schoolers.

I don't watch horror movies, but it's my understanding that, in the context of horror, sexualization of children is reasonably commonplace. See The Exorcist (whose novelization I have read).

You previously did this where you highlighted legal cases of child sex abuse, with some 'legal' interest that you shared with us, several times over weeks. This seems like the same schtick with 'LLM related prompts' and no shielding text blocks instead.

It is pure coincidence that I have seen zero interesting or funny child sex abuse cases recently to post in my own Friday Fun Thread top-level comment (since August 21). In fact, for this week's Friday top-level comment, despite checking New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and (with much less diligence) federal opinions on a daily basis, I found zero interesting or funny court decisions at all, other than the one that I posted in the culture-war thread as linked above. (The one found via the Institute for Justice doesn't count.)

Note that I posted these two prompts not unprompted (no pun intended) in my own Friday top-level comment, but in response to someone else's Friday top-level comment that drew attention to bulges in an interesting and funny court opinion.

The Exorcist is based on a novel by William Peter Blatty, it doesn't have a novelisation.

  • First I misinterpreted "Blatty adapted his own 1971 novel" as implying a 2001 situation, where the movie version and the book version are equally canonical.

  • And then I somehow miswrote "novelization" instead of "novel version".

I don't know what came over me.

I'm not convinced by your protestations. Some people might think shitting in a pool is funny, and then without standards we're left with a shitty pool. The main post topic doesn't lead to the mention of a middle schoolers bulge, that's all you buddy. Your choices to return to this topic time and time again and, your obvious desire to return to this topic in the future I think are more suitable to some other place. I think everyone loves your citations and links, its your repeated insistence on this topic that I think makes your gosh me defense fail. While I predict you flailing your arms to the impossibly of compartmentalization I think its best solution.

Is it too much to ask for hidden text privacy blocks for when you post with/about/pertaining to the sexualization of children?

Is it too much to ask for hidden text privacy blocks for when you post with/about/pertaining to the sexualization of children?

Yes. This is a forum for posting controversial opinions and that includes controversial opinions that you personally find disgusting enough to warrant "privacy blocks" to avoid. The sidebar is a more than sufficient trigger warning that you may encounter such topics here.

Removing this for your own good. Please only share that with a psychiatrist.

ToaKraka might have a decidedly non-standard definition of fun, but nobody put you in charge of dictating what he can post here.

I'll direct you towards the handy collapse comment button.

There seems to be some incongruence between the constant "The Motte needs you!" pages where everyone gets to help moderate, and the "only mods get to actually decide anything" stance.

IIRC, Zorba's plan was to eventually allow some community-based auto-modding to take place, but only once he feels it's properly calibrated (and I have no idea when or how that will be achieved). Right now, the community modding does give us some sense of how the community feels about a reported post, and while mods make the final decision, I personally am somewhat influenced by community consensus in borderline cases. That does not mean if enough people say "This is bad" it will overrule my opinion that a post did not break any rules, or vice versa. But it's useful feedback, even if lately a lot of that feedback is "I want my tribe to have no restrictions and I want the other tribe silenced."

The volunteer page gives us a way to triage issues, it provides a single number that reflects how "good" or "bad" a comment is. A post that gets spurious reports but then is graded as fine by the volunteers is usually allowed to stand.

As always, the encouraged way to raise something for moderation is to report it. If it's truly urgent, ping a mod or use the mod mail.

Chill, the words won't hurt you, I promise.

Anyone else think Florence Pugh is pretty badly mis-cast as Cathy in East of Eden? And I say this someone who thinks she’s a good actor. I guess I shouldn’t expect much from the butchers at Netflix anyway.

That is only because they couldn't cast Pedro Pascal as Cathy. At least they got the skin color right.

What makes you think she is miscast?

Steinbeck is the closest the USA has produced to "Russian literature masterpiece" and Florence Pugh is too full of vis vitalis to make good tragic characters. She just doesn't have the slowly weathered away soul and suffering in solitude in it.

Keep the culture war out of the Friday Fun thread, please.

I thought it was a joke about Pedro Pascal's omnipresence in movies and TV shows these days.

The Pedro Pascal joke stood on its own. It didn't need the CW chaser:

At least they got the skin color right.

It was.

In the Wikipedia entry for "False Flag":

Due to its deceptive nature a false flag operation can fail in such a manner as to implicate the perpetrator rather than the intended victim.

A notable example is an April 2022 FSB operation where Ukrainian would-be assassins of Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov were filmed while being arrested. The footage published by the FSB was, however, found to implicate the FSB as having staged the arrest. Together with weapons, drugs, Ukrainian passports, and Nazi memorabilia the footage also prominently showed three expansion packs for The Sims 3 video game. Investigative journalist Eliot Higgins interpreted this to mean that the arrest was in fact staged, with its organizers misunderstanding an instruction "to get 3 SIMs". Further lending credence to the arrest being staged was footage of a note with a Russian phrase, which in fact read signature unclear. This was again interpreted as a misunderstood instruction, this time taken too literally. The FSB subsequently published a version of the footage with the Sims games blurred out.

Watched Overman: The Meaning of Life on Eliezer Yudkowsky's mention. It was pretty good! Definitely at least as watchable as the average Hollywood superhero movie. I loved the part where Overman is flying around stealing random people's powers to a catchy tune, and at least the climax didn't come down to a big fistfight.

Eliezer's comments:

There goes Hollywood.

Context: I rolled my eyes and tried watching this AI gen YouTube suggested. It was kind of cliched and a bit predictable but I didn't downvote and leave immediately as I'd expected.

Then I looked up when it was done and 28 minutes had passed.

Ooh ooh, you spotted a flaw! Great! Remember when AIs couldn't draw hands WELL? But they could draw hands AT ALL? And then TIME happened and it was SIX MONTHS LATER?

I mean it is garbage but it is borderline sufferable which was not the case with previous attempts. That means that the moat of billion dollar productions will hold for another year probably maybe hopefully.

The pace of releases has increased relative to what it was three years ago.

Was surprisingly good visuals. Watched all the way through, would maybe watch similar style movies.

I've lately been watching movie recaps. Which are basically narrated 20-30 minute summaries of movies. It kinda felt like that at times. I might just be more interested in 30 minute stories lately. Hollywood settled on 90-120 minutes for a movie, i don't know if that was correct for all situations/stories.

Some summarizers in Japan have been getting nailed for copyright infringement.

Yeah similarly a fan of movie recaps especially for horror concepts since I'm not huge into jump scares but frequently curious how a given interesting trailer idea gets developed without wanting to sit through 90 minutes of movie which largely has nothing to do with the sci-fi or fantasy concept in play and is more gore and tension

I watched the whole, mostly amused at the similarity of part of the premise to a certain anime I watched many years ago.

I'm impressed, though. John's accent was a little inconsistent, but otherwise I didn't notice any of the old AI hallmarks. I'm hardly a connoisseur of AI video, though.

Call me a luddite but I preferred the original Brody Quest.

He beats the US armed forces handidly, his powers increase exponentially since then, but Japan's leader thinks she can nuke him. I suppose Chinese domestic natrative portrays Japan as being more indepedent from the US as it is in reality.

Chinese are appearently big on AI generated TV drama, at least according to this tweet which cites .cn sites, so I assume it is at least somewhat close to true.

the climax didn't come down to a big fistfight.

The "interdimensional entity", the last external adversary, is defeated by a literal punch.

Edit: The video linked by Yud was not uploaded by the movie's author and is geavily monetised, lots of ads. This one's uploader is the movie's director.

spoiler

I was wondering if one asian government was standing in for another one that the author couldn't talk about or criticize in any way without tripping censors.

It’s hard to tell how much of the residual strangeness is due to it being AI, and how much is due to it being a very Chinese production despite being set in America. The speech and behavior of characters is similar to that of American characters in Chinese films such as The Battle at Lake Changjin.

Having read some translated Wuxia/Xianxia the story beats felt very familiar.

This is cool! Don't have time to watch the whole thing since I'm about to go camping but I might watch it later. Doesn't look terrible.

Item 1 of 4

The Institute for Justice calls attention to a side-splitting case: If you steal the identity of a dead baby, and successfully maintain the identity theft for thirty years, then do you gain legal ownership of the stolen identity through adverse possession? The appeals panel says no.

As he did at trial, Primrose insists on appeal that he is not culpable for making false statements or identity theft because he had actually become Bobby Fort. Primrose concedes that “there is no criminal case which purports to authorize a defendant [to] legally assum[e] the identity of another just through the passage of time”. But he nonetheless urges us, as a matter of “fairness”, to recognize “an exception authorizing one to assume another identity when one has lived most of his adult life under that name”.

Primrose articulates his theory as an extension of the property-law concept of adverse possession, which allows one to obtain title to real property through extended open and hostile possession. We appreciate Primrose’s candor in admitting that this is “a concept yet unrecognized in criminal law as it relates to assumed identities”. But we decline his invitation to develop the new law that he advocates.

There is no basis in law or reason for us to conclude that one may adversely possess the identity of another person. The Supreme Court has held that “[a]n individual’s identity is more than just his name or Social Security number”. A person’s identity is a part of, not separate from, his personhood. And no matter how long one uses another person’s name, he simply does not become the other person.

The identities that Primrose and his wife assumed belonged to infants who were not long for this world. That the infants’ lives were short does not erase their existence or their importance. And no matter what Primrose and his wife did with the infants’ identities, those identities still belonged to the infants who were born on the dates and received the names that were recorded in their birth certificates. It is not at all clear that the infants, their parents, or family were not “harmed” by Primrose’s actions. And Primrose’s contention that he is the one “who had done the work” to establish an identity under the Bobby Edward Fort name by living a life under that name for 30 years is beside the point.

Item 2 of 4

Culture-war-adjacent, but very funny: /mlp/ learns about EU shipping regulations (EPR—Extended Producer Responsibility)

Anon: I want to get "anonfilly" MLP plushies mass-produced on the cheap, and sell them to other anons
Other anons: Yes, I want to buy these plushies
EU government: Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?

Tentative happy ending

Item 3 of 4

@cjet79 says: To find a romantic partner, "you need to go somewhere where you can be in the top ten percent of men in the room". Two thoughts occur to me:

Item 4 of 4

People whine about how hating split infinitives is unnecessary Romaboo hypercorrection: "I try to not kill" → "tento non necare" → "I try not to kill". But it occurs to me that I have never seen anybody hate (or whine about others' hating) split auxiliary verbs: "I have never killed" → "numquam necavi" → "I never have killed".

Should split auxiliary verbs be judged on a case-by-case basis?

  • Obviously, in the previous sentence attempting to reunite "should" and "be judged" is totally impossible without dealing fatal damage, since the separation is loadbearing in English.

  • In "I now have killed", can "now" be considered to apply only to "have", rather than to "killed" or to "have killed"? Does asking this question even make any sense at all?

The dreaded Romaboos can be expected to care in some cases but not in others. "I have now killed" → "num necavi" → "I now have killed", but "I have now been killed" → "sum num necatus".

Hard to get it tried but I wonder in Case 1 how a case of genuinely swapped baby identities would be handled. If I was born Aaron Aardvark then a fuck up at the hospital happens and I went home as Brad Billings with another family then didn't realize till me and the other baby were in our thirties then who gets custody of which identity

I've long wondered whether parents of twins really manage to consistently identify them from birth, and never managed to accidentally swap them before they learned their names.

Re 1:

Morrison was given the same sentence on Thursday, when she continued to insist that she would never use the Morrison name and would have “100% recidivism” if she was forced to.

“I would rather remain in prison for the rest of my life than use that identity,” she said….

Primrose and Morrison had both motioned for name changes prior to sentencing, which were denied by U.S. District Judge Leslie Kobayashi, who nonetheless acknowledged that the couple still consider Fort and Montague to be their “true” names.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Muehleck pushed for a maximum sentence for Primrose and Morrison — 16 months for the conspiracy charges and passport fraud, and 24 months for aggravated identity theft, pointing out that the pair have continued to make false statements about their identities, even during the hearings.

While discussing the pre-sentencing report, Primrose told the court, “I am Bobby Edward Fort, I will not be signing anything that says Walter Glenn Primrose.”

Source

That seems like an extraordinary commitment to the bit. I can’t help but wonder if the couple had some sort of traumatic experience prior to adopting their new identities. Their insistence on continuing to use the old names doesn’t make sense to me otherwise.

If you steal the identity of a dead baby, and successfully maintain the identity theft for thirty years, then do you gain legal ownership of the stolen identity through adverse possession?

I saw this opinion when it was published and wondered what led to the prosecution. It seems the feds initially suspected an espionage angle but couldn't make those charges stick, so they pursued the false statements and ID theft instead. The couple sounds like a pair of weirdos who read too many 1970s spy thrillers (which often use the "dead infant" identity idea).

cjet79 says: To find a romantic partner, "you need to go somewhere where you can be in the top ten percent of men in the room".

The formulation in my head was more like "if you think you need to be in the top ten percent of men, go somewhere where you are that".

Meanwhile I'm struggling to come up with healthy married couples I know that met through some variation of that advice.

Far more common are what I'd consider the meeting of averages. An average man in the group matched with an average woman in the group. The top men and women have their pick of all the people and thus don't want to settle or they get caught up in infidelity because of all the choices they have. The bottom people don't date.

One of the best couple producing activities I know of is recreational kick ball leagues. Everyone is usually drinking afterwards. No one is amazing at kickball, and mostly no one sucks either. Everyone is really average. The perfect set of circumstances for tossing status games out the window.

I don’t think most people follow that advice explicitly. More often than not it runs: Good at X -> Like to do X, Does X in presence of opposite sex -> is seen as good at something, woman desires men of high skill -> dating and marriage lead to kids.

The formulation in my head was more like "if you think you need to be in the top ten percent of men, go somewhere where you are that".

This works remarkably well. I do a lot of theater, and being a straight guy immediately puts me in the top 20% simply by virtue of availability. That last 10% got me my partner of 13 years.

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