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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2229 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 11, 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.

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There is a Twitter account called "Trump history" and it's somehow the funniest thing on the internet I've seen in a while. It's like a historical trivia account, except every post alleges Trump's role in every conceivable historical event, backing it up by an AI-generated illustration.

There's something hilarious in the idea of Trump as a fixture of human civilization, guiding and guarding mankind through millennia.

Truly the man-emperor of mankind.

You should link it—for some reason, google thinks I want to know about the Trump Twitter ban, or archives of his tweets, rather than this parody account.

https://twitter.com/Trump_History45/

This is the most hilarious thing I've seen this month

Interesting video on Near-Death Experiences and what they might tell us about the afterlife.

It's basically a summary of the book "Why An Afterlife Obviously Exists" by Swedish philosopher Jens Amberts. It makes the case that:

  • Almost everyone who has an NDE comes to believe in an afterlife
  • There are no psychological/sociological predictors of who has an NDE, so they are a random sample of the population
  • 10s of millions of people have had them
  • They're skewed by age ofc, but even children who've had these experiences describe them in similar terms

The go-to physicalist explanation for why these happen is a release of DMT in the brain at the moment of death, which I'm sure the author is aware of. I haven't read the book yet but I'd be curious to know how he compares these experiences to DMT trips. Given the sheer number of people who've had NDEs there must be a few thousand who have also tried DMT, would love to read their thoughts comparing them. Of course, even if they did claim there were substantial differences, we could say that other chemicals are involved in different doses and these are all just a particular flavor of psychedelic trip. Still, seems like a topic worthy of more research.

Spinning people in centrifuges until they black out is useful for the US Air Force. Also inadvertently causes "out of body" experiences more typically associated with near death experiences. From this entirely mechanical process. Depriving blood to the brain by purely mechanical means produces all the hallmarks of NDEs.

So NDEs are just the feeling of lack of blood to the brain Google used to return articles written by Air Force officers about this. Now it's damned LinkedIn post.

How can anything grapple with:

  • Subjective experience is rooted in the physical state of the brain (children who get kicked in the head by a horse become less intelligent, drugs, alcohol, the guy who had a steel bar go through his head and had his personality change completely)
  • Therefore, if the brain is destroyed, subjective experience ends

Even if 100% of the population believes an afterlife exists, or would if they had a 'sufficiently deep NDE' (I sense a no-true-scotsman), it doesn't necessarily follow that an afterlife exists. Reals > feels. You can do all kinds of funny things with drugs and magnets. Somebody used an MRI machine to induce religious experiences, another where they weakened faith in God. There was a headline about how disabling parts of people's brains made them more accepting of immigrants.

You're basically contrasting materialism with the spiritual and dismissing the spiritual out of hand. Or at least suggesting that the doors of perception, as it were, are not the road to spirituality (or to authentic spirituality). That empirical experiences cannot be trusted to verify the transcendent. Yes?

That empirical experiences cannot be trusted to verify the transcendent.

If God sends forth thousands of angels to scour the world in fire and sword, then I will definitely accept Christian doctrine. People having weird dreams near the point of death is not on that level. Should we also trust in witch-doctors, seances, ghosts and such? They can produce subjective experiences, yet not much more than that. Just throwing one's net into an ocean of beliefs won't help truth-finding.

In my mind, to be scientifically useful, more than one person needs to be able to observe the same phenomenon. I can see the flaming angel, so can you. We can take a photo of it, observe the heat from the blade setting off the fire alarm. But feelings? We can't observe them outside MRI machines and even then it's not very helpful.

What can we observe of the afterlife? Literally nothing, just feelings from people who, by definition, aren't in it! There's no objective records, no second-order effects either. At least UFOs show up on radar from time to time.

I am not making any sort of suggestion as to what you should believe or what criteria you should apply to verifying or holding that belief, I was just trying to get a handle on your point of view as to what we need to classify something as acceptably believable. I'm still not sure I have it.

skewed by age ofc

I'm curious--why does this seem obvious? I don't know which I'd expect to be more likely--children for being more credulous, or adults for familiarity with cultural expectations. Or more visual experiences on which to draw, et cetera.

For an alternate (if somewhat dated) perspective, consider Greg Egan's 1998 novella, Oceanic.

I just meant the sample is disproportionately older people

The issue I’ve always had about NDEs having anything to really tell us about what happens when we die is just how culturally specific they tend to be. (https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2017/01/NDE76-Japanese-and-western-JNDS.pdf) just for a quick example. Japanese people tend to see the light, but not interpret it as a being, westerners see cities of light, Japanese see flower gardens. Westerners have life reviews where fewer Japanese do. As an objective experience, this simply should not be, an experience of reality might be interpreted differently, but it should be a similar experience.

The case he makes is that there is significant overlap. A Christian might see Jesus as a spirit guide, a Hindu might see Shiva, but there’s still a sense of the other reality being eternal and more real than this one.

If anything, it being so subjective points to it being less real than the one we live in.

A Christian might see Jesus as a spirit guide, a Hindu might see Shiva

But, isn't that exactly the hallmark of a subjective phenomenon based on hallucination/misremembering/wishful thinking/etc, rather than an objective phenomenon based in reality? The most parsimonious explanation when confronted with mutually contradictory reports of the same phenomenon is that someone (or everyone) is simply mistaken.

It's analogous to how you have a lot of wildly contradictory reports of UFO encounters, with people reporting different physical appearances of the aliens themselves, different appearances of the craft (which suspiciously seem to evolve along with American aesthetic preferences, from the Cold War-era flying saucers to the modern Apple-inspired cubes and spheres), so some believers try to explain the contradictions away by saying "well, maybe they aren't really aliens, maybe these are spiritual entities that are manifested by the collective unconscious, so they take whatever form a particular observer is expecting", and it's like, yeah maybe that's the case... or there could just be no UFOs to begin with. That theory also resolves all the contradictions, in a much more parsimonious manner.

That being said. Someone close to me did have an NDE, and he still swears by it decades later. He described it as "perfection", beyond the most perfect bliss you could ever imagine, of a totally different ontological kind from anything that you could ever experience in this reality. Frequently when he retells the story, he reminds me "I've done a lot of drugs. I know what drugs feel like. This was no drug."

I do believe that, even if these states of consciousness are nothing more than the result of brain chemistry, they're clearly very exceptional states that merit further investigation.

That being said. Someone close to me did have an NDE, and he still swears by it decades later. He described it as "perfection", beyond the most perfect bliss you could ever imagine, of a totally different ontological kind from anything that you could ever experience in this reality. Frequently when he retells the story, he reminds me "I've done a lot of drugs. I know what drugs feel like. This was no drug."

I do believe that, even if these states of consciousness are nothing more than the result of brain chemistry, they're clearly very exceptional states that merit further investigation.

I've had an NDE but I can't disentangle the profound sense of bliss from also being pumped up full of pain killers by the doctors at the hospital.

If some race of people lived for 200 years, would their civilization progress faster or slower relative to the control civilization? Assume no cross-contamination of ideas and comparable periods of youth and senescence (no struldbrugs)

On one hand, their rulers would grow increasingly conservative with age, projecting their influence far into the future. Imagine the Founding Fathers sticking around for the civil war and WWI, explaining what exactly their intent was when they wrote this or that amendment.

On the other hand, imagine one of the brilliant scientists that had an outsized impact on the world. Borlaug, Pasteur, von Neuman, etc. Now give them 120 more years to live. This won't just quadruple their output: now they can collaborate with a much larger cohort of scientists. Building dream teams like the Manhattan project will be much easier.

On the gripping hand, all these long-lived people are going to have sex, validating the worst predictions Malthus had regarding carrying capacity. Who has time for science, unless it's the science of waging war against your neighbors before they do the same to you? Would a civilization like this hit a worse local optimum and be passed by the shorter-lived one, stuck with the sharpest and deadliest stone or copper tools in existence?

On the other gripping hand, elephants and parrots haven't outbred all other birds and mammals. Perhaps the longer-lived people would have evolved into extreme K-strategists even before their discovery of fire or tools?

Whenever the topic of human longevity comes up I always think of things like physical maturity, emotional maturity, the general weight of life experiences accruing over time, memory, and the relative speed of physical decrepitude and cognitive decline.

Say there were in fact a race that had a lifespan of 200 years. One would have to factor in--how long would it take to wean a child ? How long childhood itself? Adolescence? How long until the brain reached its peak, or maturity, or whatever we understand to be top, not-getting-that-much-better-than-this? Would sexual maturity, or fertility for women, be the same as for us, we who live to around 70? Peak physical strength, would it just develop slower and last longer? Would diseases like their equivalent of cancer take longer to kill them?

And what of cognition? My memory is sometimes very good, particularly long term. I can tell you exactly what you said that one time, can accurately quote movie lines from films I've seen once, I can tell you about how thick into the book and where roughly in the page Fermina Daza has her moment of revulsion against Florentino Ariza. But how long will this annoying ability last? How long would it last for them?

Accidents would presumably still happen, meaning deaths by accident would still also occur, culling a certain number and with that culling leaving mourners behind. At my age one of the main reflections I have on my life is how many people I have known and, yes, loved, are no longer in it, because they're in the grave.

Wanting to live forever I often think is a dream of the young, who are still this side of the inevitable losses and life experiences that come to us all. Tolkien had his characters refer to death as "The Gift of Men" (humans).

There is the idea in OPs post that conservatism comes with age, naturally, and certainly that seems intuitive. Arguably so does wisdom, at least up until it doesn't. I think the question is interesting , but the temptation to make it too simple is a danger.

I believe it's been shown before that scientists, artists etcetera reach peak productivity in their 'prime', which is to say 25-40 years old, and if they continue to be productive beyond that are generally less innovative or groundbreaking. One thing I noted during Oppenheimer was how young the Alamos set was. Is this a matter of age, or is it a matter of most people only really being able to generate one or two great ideas?

Imagine if the human lifespan was just 30 years. Does anyone think that would be better for human progress? Is it really plausible that three score and ten is the optimal lifespan for civilizational progress?

On the gripping hand, all these long-lived people are going to have sex, validating the worst predictions Malthus had regarding carrying capacity.

I don't think that years of fertility is the binding constraint on number of kids.

I could go so many ways with this. On the one hand, it may cause civilization to progress slower. Even now, with all the dying boomers, and their deathgrips on the levers of power, the US seems utterly incapable of meeting the challenges it faces. Their beliefs, and what they think the world is, is just too ossified in their minds. Give them another 100 years, and I can't fathom the hell of stagnation and decline we'd be in. And it's arguable this has been an increasingly severe problem the last 30 years.

I'm just not sure allowing the old blood of a civilization to further fester, stagnate, and stand in the way of the youth is beneficial. I think such a civilization would trend even harder towards some sort of stagnation, like an uncontacted African tribe.

Saw this song shared a few times on Twitter/X yesterday. I don't normally go for country music but this was good. Talented fellow, and I hope his career takes off.

Oliver Anthony - Rich Men North Of Richmond

Richmond

I like it. I think I'd prefer it more if it were a little less explicitly political though. More 'rich elites telling the working man what to think' and less 'boo fat welfare moms'. The Epstein island line already feels dated.

The guy has a great voice though, and 'living in the new world, with an old soul' is a great line.

I lucked into some more old computer hardware recently. Saw a guy selling a Phenom II X4 and an Athlon X2, both with motherboard and ram for $20. Went to go pick it up, and he decided he didn't need the money after all. Threw in a PCIe Geforce 6600, and some random network cards too.

Lately I decommissioned my AM2/Athlon X2 machine because the motherboard needed recapping. I'd long been thinking of building a rig targeting 2008+, or about where my Athlon 64/Geforce 7800 starts to tap out, and that Phenom II system seems like a good platform. Grabbed a Geforce 470 GTX local, and now I'm just waiting on the PSU to finally arrive here. Because I don't trust used PSUs.

Both guys asked me what I even do with these old parts, and when I told them games, they were incredibly curious. One guy seemed a little older than me? It gets hard to tell approaching middle age because some people take care of themselves, and others age really poorly. But one of them was practically a kid, in his early 20's maybe, selling old parts his step dad didn't need anymore. When I mentioned I used old CRT monitors, he just gave me a blank stare. Had never even heard of them.

I've been thinking about the games I own which are good candidates for this Phenom II system. The problem I keep running into is that even most physical versions of games in that era have online activation requirements. Bioshock won't even install anymore. Most EA games like Spore, The Sims 3 or Dead Space have online activation which may or may not work any longer. The physical version of Call of Duty 4 has a form of disc based DRM that won't work on any version of Windows after Vista SP1. My disc for Rage is just a Steam key and install package. GOG has a lot of these games with the DRM stripped out, god bless them. But it's frustrating that even the disc I own will no longer work.

What's worse, you look at the Gamerankings for 2007-2017 or so, and for the few years I really exhaustively checked, only half the top 10 games could be played on an offline, era appropriate system. The rest were either MMOs or have online activation requirements which may or may not still be able to phone home. I mean, just looking at 2010, StarCraft II, World of WarCraft: Cataclysm, Civilization V, Borderlands: The Secret Armory of General Knoxx and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, to this day, have online DRM. Bioshock 2 would be playable only because GOG later released a DRM free version. Still playable today would be Mass Effect 2 (maybe), Super Meat Boy, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (maybe) and Monkey Island 2: Special Edition.

2011 was even worse with Portal 2, Skyrim, Total War: Shogun 2, FIFA 12, Battlefield 3 and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood all have online DRM to this day. Only Limbo had none. GOG freed Batman: Arkham City and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Contemporary 2011 versions of Minecraft I'm unsure about.

I guess what I'm getting at is that pirates are doing the lords work.

One of my favorite things about this hardware era was AMD was crushing Intel, and we were finally stepping into games taking advantage of multiple cores.

I remember one of the worst decisions I made when building my own PCs was landing on a single-core FX-57 instead of the dual-core alternative. This was the same period of time that I'd be running a game, yes, but also Xfire or other utilities, and I recall that as time went on my extremely expensive processor fell further and further behind compared to my gaming buddies' dual core rigs.

It resided in a glaring blue LED NZXT Case, well-warmed by a blistering X1900XT. 2 years of mowing lawns went up in flames, and I sold the behemoth by 2010 to someone for $500 after that.

If you haven't included F.E.A.R. on the list of things to try - though it predates 08 by 3 years - it still holds up as an excellent gaming experience. Amazingly.

FEAR is definitely on my to do list. Although right now I'm striving to beat at least Warcraft II's orc campaign.

As a fellow fan of archiving and hater of DRM, if you aren't restricted to PC versions, several of the DRM'd games were also released on consoles sometimes even with physical versions complete on the storage medium.

Skyrim and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit are both complete on a Switch cart and are emulatable as N Switch roms, offline. Minecraft was released on the PS Vita, a system hacked wide open but with an emulator worse than those for the N Switch.

Contemporary 2011 versions of Minecraft I'm unsure about.

There's a pretty sizable community of Golden Age Minecraft players, and while it varies when that age actually falls depending on who you talk to (Rotarycraft and Thaumcraft fans usually say r1.7!), most of the reddit community tends to emphasize b1.7.3 (June 2011) or r1.2.5 (April 2012) are two of the most common ones. AtLauncher does recent stuff and legacy versions pretty well, but there are also legacy-specific installers. Zontargs was pretty heavily into it, if he's still floating around.

Ah, 1.7.2. The moment I finally bought the game instead of just playing the browser demo with my siblings.

Please excuse me while I shoot up some of this nostalgia.

Well, I'm unsure not about it being playable, I know it is. It's whether it's playable offline on a legacy system. I forget when Minecraft strongly implemented an account requirement, and furthermore, what account has changed since 2011. First it was a Minecraft account, then a Mojang account, then a Microsoft account. Will a modern launcher that authenticates with the correct account work on 2010 hardware and Vista?

Ah, that's fair. The big problem is usually less than authentication side, and more fighting with finding the right Java version. Go too early and you don't have TLS 1.2+ support, go too late and it'll do a version check during Java install and be a pain in the ass (or worse, depend on SSE instructions you may no longer have). But people have done it!

Newer Minecraft versions (1.17+) require more recent versions of Java that have stricter version checks; there are some workarounds but they're incredibly inelegant. But I don't think that's what you're trying to do.

You couldn't get me to build a retro pc or play old games on it for love and money, I'd wager because when I was a kid, I had no choice in the matter, being stuck with a frankly ancient pc till my late teens, so instead of nostalgia it provokes more of a sense of impotent rage at all the good games I simply couldn't play at the time.

If I had a dollar for every game I saved up to buy with my literal 20 cents a day of pocket money (which I saved by skipping lunch) and I ended up being unable to run on my system because they were too demanding or needed an online activation, I'd be able to buy them all again on GOG.

It wasn't that terrible when I was a kid in the 90's. Especially the early 90's. Basically right up until Quake came out, system requirements, and what was considered playable, were fairly loose. Doom could play on just about anything, although a 486 was best. Which to put in perspective, you could get in 1993 and still be playing games reasonably well in 1996. Plus the DOS VGA era has a massive catalog of quality games you could almost never exhaust.

After Quake all bets were off. The race for 3D from 1997 to 2000 obsoleted computers so damned fast. A P233 MMX from 1997 could barely run a 3D game by the end of 1998. The first generation of 4MB Voodoo or Nvidia cards from 1997 were only barely supported by most games in that same timespan. It was fucking terrible.

DARPA has announced a small business grant for ways to capture the next spy balloon. What's everyone's best Rube Goldberg balloon capture system? Mine is rockets with heavy bola payloads. Get enough of them attached to the payload that the balloon's density is low enough to gently descend.

Seems like the easiest way would be to use another balloon. Just float it up there, hook on, and then drag it down.

All those years of playing balloon fight could payoff off big time for someone. Related to this, I get a chuckle whenever something reminds me of the old Far Side strip jesting at video games becoming a career only for them to kind of become one.

Talk about your Baldur's Gate 3 characters!

I'm playing a Way of the Open Hand monk. Reached level 4 and picked Athlete as the feat. His armor class is pretty crazy - 19. Due to getting Dexterity up to 18 and using gloves that give +2 AC to unarmored characters.

I'm going to play him as a good person mostly, an enlightened monk who mainly uses non-deadly means. That's why he's equipped with a quarterstaff instead of a slightly more damaging sharp weapon. :)

I don't have the game, but my brother swears by it. He's built a barbarian who makes vigorous use of the new jumping rules. So he can leap 10 meters to wallop a caster or archer. The next action, he can pick it up and hurl it at other enemies. He once escaped a prison cell by wrestling a jailor and suplexing him behind the bars. Perhaps it's not supposed to work that way, but I like it.

Dwarf Male Tempest Cleric, somewhere in the LG/NG/LN range (though certainly not a pacifist, especially against the traditional enemies of dwarves and clerics), up to level 6 so far.

The emphasis on verticality has made for some very fun thunderwaves, and spirit guardians + spiritual weapon remains excellent even after the changes to both spells.

I think that is a really interesting component of the game as well. Makes all of the movement abilities like psionic jump and mist walk feel rewarding and fun. I also quickly regretted not picking up feather fall thinking there would likely be no opportunity to use it.

Dwarves! My next playthrough might be with a pint sized person. Maybe a LOTR-inspired Halfling.

What's the relation between thunder attacks and verticality? Enemies get pushed off ledges?

I just respecced Shadowheart to be a tempest cleric, but haven't had a chance to test out her thunder spells yet. I'm hoping she won't get hit by her own lightning magic, hah. I've put her in heavy armor.

One thing disappointed me a little about the verticality in this game. Even if you push an enemy to get them to fall 10 meters and land on their back, they only take ~2 hp damage. It should scale upward much more than that IMO.

Based on the recent community update they did, the only thing less popular than the short folk (halflings, gnomes, dwarves) were Githyanki, so absolutely give em' some love.

Yup, thunderwave shoves then if they fail the save. Really easily to avoid hitting hit by your own stuff as a Cleric, unless you go light cleric you don't have anything with quite the radius of a fireball to worry about.

Yeah, the normal damage isn't great, but lots of instakill things you can shove them into. Otherwise mostly nice to make their ranged have disadvantage or force their melee to run back up.

I'll just ask this here because you're higher level than me, though anyone is welcome to answer:

I started the game on explorer difficulty because I wanted to reduce the amount of loading saves and retrying fights I'd have to do. But after getting to level 4 I felt confident. Turned it up to balanced right before a fight. Lost 1/3 of my hp on each character because easy-mode gives a huge hp boost (in addition to better hit rolls) and balanced doesn't give anything like that. Got my ass kicked in the fight. Retried and took the high ground and succeeded. But one of my characters got downed twice, and I had to use many potions. One time Wyll got taken from full hp to 0 in a single attack. Dang.

This was the gnoll/Missing Shipment fight with quite a few enemies and a boss gnoll with really high hp. Is this supposed to be a particularly difficult fight or do I just suck at the game? :)

It's not an easy fight, but it isn't one of the ones that felt particularly difficult (I've run into about 3 really rough ones so far).

Glad you figured out the high ground, though, it makes a big difference in a lot of these fights. Positioning and getting the drop on enemies is essential. Also, there's 1 fight in the first zone that I would very much not advise until you hit level 5, so heads up if you run into a brick wall.

One thing that may help-

While Warlocks and Wizards do not normally have shield proficiency, humans in BG3 get it as a racial. Great idea to slap a shield on Wyll and Gale, 2 AC goes a long way.

Approx where is this really tough fight in the first zone?

I will definitely be more keen on gaining high ground and stealth opportunities from now on. :) And I've got hex on Wyll so I'll examine the toughest enemies, hex an ability, and then target that weakness with a spell or weapon action to gain Advantage.

I've got a shield on Gale. The +2 AC seems to remain even though I've got his ranged weapon active. On Wyll I'm using the flaming greatsword (pact bound), so I'll have to find a decent one handed weapon for him first. He definitely got hit harder than the others due to only having 14 AC.

I also noticed the importance of Initiative. When I respecced Shadowheart I put her dexterity at 10 because I wanted her in heavy armour which rules out any dex bonus to AC. But every enemy gets to act before her, lol.

Approx where is this really tough fight in the first zone?

The northwestern corner of the first map. Bit of a doozy.

Assuming that's the gith gang. They wiped the floor with my party. I loaded and succeeded with dialogue checks instead. Got over 300 xp, but it would have been fun to kill them and get their stuff too. Maybe next playthrough. :)

Edit: I don't like how enemies get 3 attacks per turn. If that's a feature for the rest of the game... I'll be sad.

Human Male Battlemaster Fighter for the first time around.

Not making much progress as I've had a busy week, but I've been playing a Paladin/Warlock. I'm at 1 level on Ancients Paladin and 2 of Warlock, itching to get the third Warlock level for pact of the blade. I'll take Warlock to 5 and then Paladin to 5 and then decide how to finish from there.

The character is a lot of fun because I'm pretty strong in both melee and ranged. Reasonably tanky, especially with the incredible Warlock spell buffs. And, killer at conversation from high charisma. It feels strong enough to be fun without being so strong as to be broken.

Sounds fun. I assume Paladin benefits from Charisma being the primary ability as well. I sometimes wish I had high Cha for some dialogues. Mine is at 10 lol. But I can use Wyll for some of those dice rolls. He's my Warlock. I picked Pact of the blade for him, so that I could use the flaming greatsword I got from the prologue by killing the devil creature who was fighting the mindflayer. Wyll is limited in terms of armor and weapon proficiencies, but the Pact gives proficiency for whatever weapon you use it on. :)

What race is your character? My monk is a Wood Elf, because they get extra movement.

I did the Seldarine drow, for reasons that currently escape me.

The Paladin and Warlock spells both benefit from charisma, and pact of the blade will make it my primary attack stat for physical attacks with the pact weapon. I also use the everburning blade from the nautilus, which is carrying me for melee attacks right now because my strength is only 10, and I need another level to take pact.

I've never played 5e before and honestly I find the multiclassing kind of clumsy (but I guess it always is). That said, the benefits of having a high charisma plate wearer who got to hit hard and do fun conversation stuff with intimidate and persuasion was too good to pass up.

I was disinclined to ever use Intimidation, but I'm warming to it after turning up the difficulty level, hehe. I started on easy, now I'm on balanced. Getting more rewards and avoiding some fights seems more important now.

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