site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1802 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 2, 2023

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.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I watched The Wizard of Oz in its entirety for the first time recently, and the main body of the film being a dream sequence totally breaks it.

So the moral is that rather than running away to a fantasy world where your dog, your only friend in the world, will be by your side for everything that happens, and where you'll also make new friends, you should instead stay home, where your only friend is your dog and the local government has ordered that your dog be euthanized.

Look, the stuff about how Dorothy's friends were already smart/caring/brave and were just beset by a lack of confidence was really good. I loved that! But it's not a real moral, because those friends weren't real. Dorothy's subconscious made them up. The point of that stuff is how it informs the real world part of the story. And it doesn't, really.

And yeah, I know that the dream stuff wasn't in the book, but I think it was added to the movie during the initial screenwriting phase, not as reshoots. So it should've felt more connected.

I heard about some drama where an absolute madman appropriated institutional-grade compute from his university to produce 8 TB of degenerate Stable Diffusion pornography of 'very young adult women and co-workers'. This was then discovered: https://rdrama.net/post/175413/didnt-realize-stable-diffusion-has-a

Normally I hate the obnoxious rdrama user interface but there is something very novel and unique about seeing someone post this:

THAT'S A POST-DOC IN OUR DEPARTMENT THAT I USED AS THE BASE MODEL HERE. HOPEFULLY NO ONE NOTICES.

*picture of clothed Asian girl semi-immersed in mystery mud as part of the genre of 'Victorian girls drowning in quicksand' genre of fetish originally made to entertain some weirdo on /b/ *

TRANS LIVES MATTER

or

TECHNICALLY THE PROMPT USED WAS "VERY YOUNG ADULT WOMAN".

What does "very young adult woman" even mean? 18.00001?

Maybe OP could use the "what is a woman" defense and say that it's a bigoted question to ask

All the while random confetti and doges and some near-naked black guy are moving across the screen. The clownishness of the UI and content and reactions from the users all fit together. This might not even be real but it's still amusing.

For a less obnoxious link, there's a /g/ thread about it: https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/93835165

Outstanding. Those threads were funnier than I expected.

Like some in the rdrama and 4chan threads, my initial reaction was “please be real.”

I wasn’t aware that rdrama had picked up using “frick” like Sage Northcutt, but I approve.

Slight spoilers for the currently airing Oshi no Ko, which by the way I recommend. Here's a video where someone took a song from an anime and fine-tuned a voice-cloning ML model on the voice of a character who could be imagined to not enjoy performing that particular song in the context of the story. (The case for that in this particular case is a bit weak, but don't let it get in the way of appreciating the general idea.)

The creator really leans into that interpretation: the title is given in English as "I FORCED [character] to Sing the Opening Song" (this translates the JP version adequately), and the video preview is him holding up a physical microphone to an LCD screen with a still of that character tearfully looking at a notepad with her mouth open.

So we've created a light version of the torture sim of Roko's Basilisk, if only for your anime waifu. Just imagine the potential for NTR material.

Just watched The Machine in theaters. Really loved it. It was funny, a bit gorry, cool action scenes, over the top ridiculous, and had a bit of real emotion. The most disappointing thing about it was that me and my friend were the only ones in the whole theater (except for one teen couple that kept going in and out of the theater to possibly hookup).

I've been thinking about making a toy.

Is there a set of 3 shapes (circle, square, and triangle) that can only fit through a slightly larger hole (say 1mm) on each side while still being close to the same size. In other words that no shape can be inscribed in anything except a similar shape 1mm larger in every dimension?

I'd like to avoid this if possible.

Yeah, you can do it with circle of diameter 25mm, equilateral triangle with base of 25mm, square of side length 20 for example.

Much appreciated! Now I'll see what other shapes I can use with those and keep all of them from fitting within each other.

I have sometimes tried to interest my children in puzzles like that, but to no avail. They’ll go find a piece of gravel or a stick to play with instead, and ignore it entirely. But based on there being so many puzzles for children, I suppose some children must be willing to use them?

I also do not like puzzles, so maybe there’s something heritable there.

Anybody sleep in a hammock? I always wanted to give it a go, and pulled the trigger on a hammock stand deal I couldn't pass up. Now I'm just waiting for the hammock itself to arrive, right in time for the hot summer nights.

Hammock.. stand ?

That's kind of defeating the entire purpose of a hammock, it being a portable bed you can place anywhere if you have 2 fixed points..

A hammock stand is a good idea if you don't have conveniently placed trees in your yard you can attach the hammock to.

I do this when I'm too lazy to make my bed.

It's OK. You lose a lot of heat out the bottom compared to a mattress, so if you find yourself overheating in that way you'll like it, but there's also not very much support for your head (and it'll be held at a different angle- this might help or hurt an apnea problem if you have one) and if you need to actually curl up around something to sleep it's going to feel weird.

Other than that, there's not much else to say about it- you're not going to fall out, you can put comforters over yourself, pillows are as useful as they usually are, etc.

The Mexican ones made of (many) cotton strings are pretty good -- I slept in one for a week once and it was fine/nice.

They are very stretchy, so sleeping more perpendicular works well.

I'll have a camping hammock hung up on my balcony during the summer months. I wouldn't want to spend a whole night in one but it's extremely nice for a nap on the weekends, or after dinner in the evening light during the long days. Also a prime reading spot. The trick is hanging it with just the right curvature so that you're cradled but not have it so taught that it becomes awkward and sort of traps you inside.

I've napped in one, it's my favorite place to be on Celebrity's large ships.

I've never tried it overnight personally.

I did research it as a camping option at some point. Some of the advice I saw was to sleep diagonally across hammock, if it's appropriately shaped. I don't know if it applies if your hammock has spreaders. I guess it's supposed to reduce the effective curvature of the hang, mitigating the banana back issue people sometimes have with hammocks. Let us know how it goes.

Reddit is beginning to truly shoot itself in the foot. A new policy of charging for API calls of $12,000 for 50 million calls is going to kill 3rd-party developers who have developed lightweight apps that are superior to Reddits own awful app. Reddit is Fun is the app I've used for practically a decade, and Reddit itself has become one of the most important depositories for human knowledge online - how many of us have resorted to "product + reddit" or "problem + reddit" as a method of locating and finding specified information?

All of this seems to be to push reddit towards an IPO and to increase revenues (Especially for a company which has never made money), but I have a feeling their push for revenues will come at the cost of community it has been able to foster. Why reddit even wants to be a profitable company is beyond me - why not just become a nonprofit?

Anyways, I think this will cause a ton of people to leave reddit, or at least cause a lot of grumbling and virtue signaling about going to leave reddit. I haven't used Facebook significantly since the 2016 election, maybe people will flock back there.

I know when the 3rd party apps die (I wonder if that includes RES) I'll probably no longer go on reddit myself.

but I have a feeling their push for revenues will come at the cost of community it has been able to foster

If this contextless, scale-less graph is in any way representative of the situation, maybe not. The problem with this graph is that long-form comments are what makes up the backbone of why people come to the site, but most people are already using New Reddit for that and, even though it's absolute garbage in terms of user experience, is clearly the accepted solution.

And the website isn't itself changing; so while they might actually kill Old Reddit because that's what's getting scraped once they destroy the API (for load reasons, obviously- it doesn't even need JavaScript to work), most people don't even know it exists. So perhaps it's a gamble (or they're not paying attention) that the people using Old Reddit don't have an outsized contribution to the content other users are consuming on iOS.

Why reddit even wants to be a profitable company is beyond me - why not just become a nonprofit?

(Reddit is, de facto a non-profit company.)

Because that course of action is inconsistent with Bay Area values. So is formally acknowledging the uncomfortable truth that investors continue to fund the site because it pushes a particular political agenda, for that matter.

I'll probably no longer go on reddit myself

I'm going to 4chan. Sure, that means conversations are ephemeral and unsearchable, but the same thing is mostly true for Reddit and completely true for IRC Discord.

I have RedditIsFun, but never used it on mobile much myself. I guess I won't at all after this API charging thing goes out. I'm more into desktop, using old.reddit.com. If they ever turn that off, then I'll probably be gone for good.

So is formally acknowledging the uncomfortable truth that investors continue to fund the site because it pushes a particular political agenda, for that matter.

I look at the list of investors into Reddit, and I don't see the list being particularly woke. Reddit moderation does push a political angle, but what evidence do we have this is done because of the investor pressure?

Allegory and the Book of Jonah [Part 1]

Some scholars say that the Book of Jonah was composed in the 700s BC, and others claim a Hellenistic composition as late as 170 BC, but in fact both camps are wrong because the Book of Jonah is timeless.

It begins with Jonah, Son of Amittai, which can be etymologized to “Dove, Son of (my) Truth”. Foreshadowing alert. Doves in the Ancient World were used by sailors to seek out land. In Genesis, Noah releases a dove which comes back with an olive leaf in its mouth, thus confirming the presence of land — a salvation from the chaos of the waters and the consequences of God’s judgment.

Jonah is told by God to go to Ninevah (literally told to arise; rise up), the largest city in the world at one point and possessing a great history. Its cuneiform name I will leave as an exercise to the reader ( 𒀏 ). Ninevah was founded by Ashur, the grandchild of Noah. Ashur is the ancestor (in symbolic Biblical terms) of the Assyrians, and because history repeats itself, Israel and Assyrians were not on the best of terms. Jonah was commanded to go to an enemy city (!) and warn them against God’s impending judgment because of their wickedness. God wanted this city not condemned, but saved, and he chose as his emissary our old friend Jonah. And so Jonah arises, he rises to the occasion so to speak, he sets on his journey to… dip it. Jonah says (and I’m transliterating), fuck that shit are you kidding me. He goes in the complete opposite way.

In fact, and we are only on the third sentence, Jonah is said to flee to Tarshish through the port of Joppa. Pliny wrote regarding Joppa that it has antediluvian roots, that is, “before the flood”. Strabo writes that it was in Joppa that Andromeda encountered a whale, which attacked her because her mother claimed Andromeda was more beautiful than the nymphs of the sea. [These nymphs were the Nereids, the etymology of which means “true”, and were said to reveal the mysteries of Dionysus and Persephone. These mysteries involved a death and rebirth cycle and a celebration of wine in gratitude for God’s gift to wine]. The etymology of Joppa is “beautiful”. A Roman military general stationed in Judea in the early first century BC was said by Josephus to have brought the bones of the monster which attacked Andromeda from Joppa to Rome. Perhaps dinosaur or whale bones? But in any case this shows the resounding significance of this motif. This is a story that sounds out in the depths of the human spirit. The Old Man and the Sea, Moby Dick — these two leviathans of literature emerge from the same waters as Jonah.

Continuing on. Joppa was the main port for Jerusalem, at one point the only port for entry or exit for foreign vessels to Judea. And so Jonah goes from Jerusalem’s exitway to Tarshish. The etymology of Tarshish is convoluted. Some claim it is simply “sea coast”, perhaps by synecdoche. Historians identify it with an opulent and industrious Spanish city. We read in the Old Testament, “every three years came the ships of Tarshish bringing gold and silver, ivory, and apes and peacocks.” And we also read, by a prophet, “the Day of the LORD of Hosts will come against all the proud and lofty, against all that is exalted — it will be humbled — against every ship of Tarshish. So the pride of man will be brought low, and the loftiness of men will be humbled.” And so whatever Tarshish means, it means something convoluted involving wealth and opulence from far away, and perhaps this convolution is to a greater meaning.

The Book reads that Jonah paid with his wages to leave from the port city of the city of God — old Jappa by Jerusalem — to board a ship he came across traveling to an opulent city of riches, Tarshish, away from the old and important yet adversarial city of Ninevah. Ninevah is not Jonah’s city! He doesn’t belong there! Ninevah is illustrious, ancient, far away and unwelcoming. Jonah would much rather hang out in comforting splendid Tarshish. The word used to board ships is “descend”. He descended to sail to Tarshish. And in fact, this is in juxtaposition to how God describes the sinfulness of Ninevah — their wickedness “rose up to my face”. Man’s actions are oft poeticized as incense that rises up to the sense by God. Jonah was told to rise up to the occasion of the Lord’s duties, but he descended instead to a city of riches far away from where he is supposed to go.

And so concludes the first three sentences of the Book of Jonah. Will do more next week if anyone is interested.

Art:

Required listening:

  • A song about a whale.

  • Loosely adjacent Weezer song. “The choo-choo train left right on time | A ticket costs only your mind | The driver said, "Hey man, we go all the way” | Of course we were willing to pay”.

And so whatever Tarshish means, it means something convoluted involving wealth and opulence from far away, and perhaps this convolution is to a greater meaning.

Tarshish was a son of Javan, who is understood as descended from the Aryan figure Japheth. The meaning of Tarshish would indicate a city settled by Japhetites, and therefore Jonah fleeing the Jewish God's "presence" to an Aryan city.

I think the interesting part of Jonah is the part where he gets mad and God for killing the vine God previously caused to grow. So looking forward to later in this series.

Also, if we're listening to whale songs, we should include this on the list. Mr Scruff only gets to be in car ads otherwise.

I’m a proud member of the banned from Reddit anti-trans group. I actually didn’t know how much Reddit was censor before. My time on Reddit is probably not that much longer.

You should post a bit about it on the CW thread, I'm surprised there are any trans-skeptical groups left.

I thought they've been banned like 1-2 years ago.

Gender Critical? Detrans?

Culture warry, not really a Friday Fun Thread topic.

Fair but wasn’t sure what was allowed on different groups where I could just pure culture war

It’s fun for me to bash reddit

Here you go.

I'm definitely not a mod here, so take whatever I say lightly, but I would suggest that this forum isn't wholesale 'anti-trans' (if that means 'against all transpeople') if only because one of the operating principles here is that no one member can speak for the whole. To say nothing of the fact that there are members here who are transgender.

Nor are we particularly full of hate, though you'll find a lot of criticism of reddit, it's true.

But as I said, I am not a mod.

Difference is “moderators” I didn’t know before Reddit was punishing wrong think and motte needed a new friend place.

So, Succession recently had its finale. Thoughts? Did it stick the landing?

Yes. Yes they did. I thought the show should have gone on. I don’t like the decisions people made for themselves. But for a story they stuck the ending and had meaningful story arcs.

For real life shiv should have never given up the family company. But that made everyone have a story arc that made sense.

Do we have spoiler tags on this site btw?

But, barring that, I more or less agree, it's good tragedy in that it all seems almost inevitable after the fact. Kendall especially.

The funniest I think has to be Connor. I love how Armstrong just came back and rugpulled the thin sliver of hope for the people who constantly memed about Connor. Despite the briefly, middlingly positive* interaction at the wedding, of course Willa would enjoy her alone time.

* Might as well be the series' tagline

Yeah. I can never remember if it’s double pipes, >!the Reddit thing!<, or double tilde

It’s HBO. The one brand who use to and maybe still does represent people in the way they are. And the way they talk I think is how modern rich people talk. I’m sort of getting evicted from a 1.5 condo but the owner/good friend I don’t ask if you are driving me to the airport I asked are you pushing me on the plane.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats