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PaperclipPerfector  8hr ago (text post)   349 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 23, 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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Prior to our migration from Reddit, @naraburns posted a review of The Cult of Smart, Freddie deBoer's non-fiction book about the shortcomings of mass education. I keep coming back to it, it was a really perceptive deconstruction of his arguments.

Naraburns is a fantastic communicator, and we’re all impoverished to any extent that he is not posting more.

I'm glad it continues to serve you! I put a lot of thought into it.

Can I ask whether something prompted this callback? It's a pretty CW review so maybe this is not the right thread for discussing it on those terms. But as an educator I think (or hope!) that some aspects of education do belong in "Friday Fun."

Nothing in particular, just that I found it so entertaining to read that I kept coming back to it – there are a lot of great zingers in there. I'm happy to delete this comment if it's not appropriate for this thread.

I don't think there's any problem with leaving it as is--plus it has already generated some perfectly acceptable meta discussion. I just thought I had better lampshade the fact that this is the Fun Thread before anyone else decided to make any substantive commentary on what I wrote! (And I probably wouldn't have mentioned it at all if we hadn't had some recent boundary-testing of the Fun Thread.)

Probably my favorite post I've ever written was my Junebug Review. There are a lot of movies I would like to give similar treatment, but I happened to have the time and the inclination to write that one, and it just came together so well.

So I'm impressed with your ability to continue writing at your Substack. You don't have a lot of posts, but you continue writing them; it seems like most of the Substacks I see fizzle in less than a year. Sometimes I think I should blog, but... insert excuses here, I suppose. I find this kind of writing easier to do in a forum than from my own platform, for whatever reason.

So I'm impressed with your ability to continue writing at your Substack.

There are honestly periods where it feels like pulling teeth, and I end up just digging out a comment I posted here and polishing it up a bit. One of my new year's resolutions was to write a new post every two weeks, and while the average interval between posts is 13 days there have been several weeks where I fell behind schedule. I don't know if I'll keep up this pace in the new year, I haven't grown my audience as much as I was hoping to.

Probably my favorite post I've ever written was my Junebug Review.

Not having seen it, is it worth seeing unspoiled?

I can’t believe it’s been 4 years since the migration already.

Reddit is so broken, "load more comments" stopped working for me logged in. Probably because they are trying to block logged-out browsing again (and failing, anyways), but it's another reason we're better off separate.

It is rage-inducing trying to use reddit on my phone. If I stay in the browser, it wants to kick me to the app. But the app is trash for search, and won't open properly to the thing I've searched for via hyperlinks in my browser... I hate "apps," and I increasingly hate reddit. The enshittification is real.

I hate "apps,"

The problem isn't apps. Reddit had an amazing app called Apollo at one point, but it was made by a solo dude with no affiliation to the Reddit company, so... naturally, rather than adopt his app as their own or hire him, they harassed him off the board so that their steaming pile of shit wouldn't have to compete with anything good.

Yeah, the site has already lasted longer than the subreddit (3.5 years), which lasted (a lot) longer than the containment thread on the SSC subreddit (~2 years, I think?). One of these days I'm going to find a sufficiently nerdy hydrologist who is willing to help me understand whether this metaphor is any good, but I've started thinking of internet communities as islands of sediment in a branching river... the same forces that build us up also tear us down, and moving off of reddit slowed our "deposits" but also slowed our "erosion," in many ways.

Four years is nuts. I was here when we moved! I can't believe it. Go us, I suppose!

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