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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2365 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 29, 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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My NY present for myself has just arrived. I've bought a vertical mouse, Logitech Lift, and getting used to it will take some time, I can already tell. My usual way of using mice is cranking up the DPI and the pointer speed to the max and moving the mouse around with just my fingertips. Now I can move the cursor this way only up or down the screen, but moving it left or right requires much more of my hand than I'm used to. Clicking, again, is quite unusual. You have to "pinch" your mouse between your index or middle finger and your thumb, or your cursor will move. Or to press the button at an angle, "into the table". Time to test how bad I am with it in a FPS game.

How are you finding it? Is this just like the trackball fad all over again?

It's fucking infuriating and is already listed on the local craigslist equivalent. I'm back to my emergency backup mouse, Logitech M90, which is a bit too big for my grip (Microsoft mouse 3600 was much better).

Could you have just returned it instead of listing it for sale secondhand? Just curious.

Russian law of return of things that work is quite restrictive.

Thanks for this. I can nope out early.

Plastics is cheap. I think they should have made mice which could be used as both horizontal and vertical

If you've heard about that controversy of Polish Hackers finding that a series of trains had DRM that would shut down any train serviced at a rival companies service yard, they did a CCC talk.

It seems pretty blatant as presented.

If anyone is subsribed to Freddie DeBoers substack, would you be able to share this article with me https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/2023-year-in-culture-email-title&publication_id=295937&post_id=140143736-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=26yoth

I would dish out 5 dollars, but I don't FDB all that much.

Richard Hanania recently had a podcast with Russian Libertarian Michail Svetov if anyone wants to listen.

"Talk with Richard Hanania about the American Imperialism in the age of Woke, the state of Pax Americana, triumph of identity politics, ideology in US foreign policy and the great political realignment."

I've been reading a lot lately. Largely because I'm taking two weeks off from work, and I don't just want to be reading on my phone all the time in front of my daughter. Yay paper books.

Read the first of Blaine Lee Pardoe's Land&Sea series. I think it's specifically typeset as Land&Sea and not Land & Sea or Land and Sea. Go figure. I thought I'd give it a try after Catalyst Game Labs did him dirty, and he was one of the last active Battletech authors I still enjoyed. Victor Milan having died, and Michael Stackpole, Robert Thurston and William H Keith having moved on, rarely to return.

It's OK. His schtick worked better in a more alien setting of Battletech. In a near future Earth, his characters just don't act like people I'd expect on this Earth to act. It's also front loaded with like 8 character introductions, with about 10 pages each, back to back to back (to back to back to back to back to back). With little in the way of overall plot happening, and none of the characters nor the world being interesting enough to carry it. That said, by the time I finished it, I immediately ordered the sequel. So I suppose it redeemed itself by the end.

Then I read Vermis II. I didn't enjoy it as much as Vermis, which was almost entirely world building in the format of a Nintendo Power style game guide for an CRPG that never actually existed. The sequel actually has a main character of sorts, which made it a far more ordinary, if still unorthodox in it's presentation, graphic novel of sorts. More akin to a hint guide, like for Pool of Radiance, that is written in character as a PC's journal. Still, it lacked many of the made up random encounter tables, primitive maps, or character stats that the original had, and fired my imagination far less.

Having finished that, and not wanting to read Berserk in front of my child, nor the last volume of The Cimmerian, I plucked Manifold: Space off my bookshelf. It had been sitting there since probably 2007 unread. There is actually a funny story about this one. In the 90's I read this magazine called Science Fiction Age, and several of the stories it published were quite memorable to me. Among them was this "Saddlepoint" series. I forgot all the details over the years, and at one point began executing some google-fu as best I was able to piece the fragments I did remember into something actionable. Anyways, I eventually found out the author of those stories was Stephen Baxter and ordered three of his books. Manifold: Time, Manifold: Origin and Manifold: Space. I read Space last, and as it turns out, it's actually the novelization of those short stories I remember.

It's fucking wild, and takes place from the "future" of 2020, written in 2000, and extends until about 8000 AD I think? It gets fuzzy towards the end. I actually had no idea it would cover that much ground. It starts with Humanity discovering alien activity in the asteroid belt, and going out to meet them. I expected that meeting to be the climax of the story, 2001: A Space Odyssey style. Instead it's about the first 50 pages, and after that it's off to the races. Very high concept, and frankly rather depressing seeing humanity's imagined ups and downs over about 6000 years. The narrative pops in every few hundred years. Sometimes the things that happened during the last narrative chunk mattered. Sometimes the implacable march of time and entropy wiped them away. I have about 40 pages left and I highly recommend it. I miss when speculative fiction was this straight forward, instead of shoving current year nonsense into very nook and cranny.

I didn't enjoy it as much as Vermis, which was almost entirely world building in the format of a Nintendo Power style game guide for an CRPG that never actually existed

I was going to claim that nobody would read something written like that, but evidently you are haha.

God knows I would love to dump my undirected worldbuilding, but I had to take pains to gussy it up as a novel. I suppose if you're famous-lite with an existing audience, you can get away with it.

I have no idea who the artist for Vermis is. A buddy of mine turned me onto the first one, and it hit all the right notes for me. Dark, retro, a unique horror-Nintendo-vaporwave art style. I have no idea how he found out about it, but he floats though all sorts of TTRPG communities I only hear about when they fuck up.

Summoning up the faux anger...

Why didn't you post about Vermis when my wife was pestering me for Christmas present ideas?!?

Bookmarked for when Hollow Press gets back to the office.

Ah.. It's got pretty pictures in it. That's pretty much a pre-requisite for general worldbuilding/lore dumps to be taken seriously, at least in /r/Worldbuilding.

Well, I sprinkle plenty of AI generated illustrations into mine, though that's more because I think the very idea that I can afford to do so on a budget of $0 is cool enough as is, not to mention the tech.

Where do you do free ai image gen nowadays?

Bing/Copilot image generation does it, with weekly limits. You can get around it by asking the Copilot chat to make them for you, just tell it to make an image according to your prompt. No limits on that, yet!

A little project I want to do this year is try cooking an "Acherburger", that is, a meal that breaks the most kosher laws possible. There's some discussion about doing that online, but it's mostly low-effort stuff like "bacon-wrapped shrimp" etc. Lame! One can do so much more.

Here's the initial plan:

For the meat patty, combine as many treyf animals as I can. The supermarket in my city has a whole bunch, e.g. rabbit, kangaroo, alligator, even bear. I'd put a little of a bunch of them in, with the bulk being pork just so It doesn't taste too weird. Animal blood is forbidden as well; so I add a little bit of that too.

Onto this we'll add cheese, of course.

For frying, one can use suet instead of oil/butter, as that's forbidden.

Produce must be tithed before consumption, and you can't eat fruit during the first three years after planting. Outside of Israel, this isn't necessary unless you know for certain that it is the case; luckily I have a relative with a lime tree I know isn't that old, so I can add lime to the sauce and break that commandment.

Produce that may contain insects must be checked, or it is not kosher. Thus we don't do that for the lettuce, deliberately closing our eyes before putting some on the burger.

We'll eat it during the passover sabbath, so the fresh bread we'll buy is Chametz, Pat Akum, and Chadash (and of course the entire preparation of the meal is forbidden due to the sabbath). Naturally none of our utensils will be kashered either.

For the drink, we'll have wine. I have a bottle of Château Musar 2015. In addition to it being not kosher, 2015 was a Sabbath year in Israel, and since the wine is from Lebanon which counts as "Eretz Yisrael", it's not allowed. We'll also make it yayin nesech by pouring a little bit of it out in dedication to Baal. Before drinking it, I'll take a Nazirite vow to abstain from alcohol just to deliberately violate it.

The one rule I have some problem with breaking is Kil'ayim, that is "the planting of certain mixtures of seeds, grafting, the mixing of plants in vineyards [...]". This applies to Israeli produce only, and buying anything like that to make sure the seed were mixed during planting seems difficult. Sure, I can get spice mixes grown in Palestine in my local spice shop, but how can I be sure it actually broke any rule when it was grown?

Anything else I've forgotten about?

How can you forget about boiling a goat in its mother's milk? Do that and include the meat in your burger.

That's the cheese/meat combo; the rule is significantly broader than the plain reading. To be fair I could in theory do the cumbersome version, but then I'd have to get goat meat and milk that I know for sure belongs to the mother, and that'd probably be too difficult.

Come on, we're trying to make a burger here, not get deleted by Uriel.

Shape the patty into a calf (bonus points if it contains veal) and color it golden with turmeric, then worship it.

Well, as far as breaking the laws of Judaism more generally, the only things you can't do to save a life are:

  1. Adultery
  2. Homosexuality
  3. Incest
  4. Zoophilia
  5. Debatably, interfaith marriage
  6. Murder

So, get married to your (assuming straight) sister, then fuck your brother and his dog while worshipping Allah, then kill all of the above - while, of course, eating the burger.

I feel like the burger idea itself (not my version thereof) is actually pretty emphatically Jewish, at least reform/reconstructionist. There's the oft sermonafied story of Jacob wrestling with angels, as a parable for the value of questioning beliefs.

Debatably, interfaith marriage

Numbers 12

Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife, for he had married a Cushite.

If marrying a foreign Ethiopian is good enough for Moses, it's good enough for me.

But then the complainers correctly pointing out inconsistent rules were punished. So maybe the real lesson is "don't challenge the hypocrisy of your leadership, God really doesn't like that".

But I choose to interpret this as "marrying out-of-the-faith foreigners rocks, so long as you are in charge".

That'd be forbidden, but it doesn't have anything to do with the actual food specifically so I don't consider stuff like that.

Also Allah, being the/a monotheistic god, is less bad than paganism! E.g. if an idol worshipper touches kosher wine it needs to be destroyed so it doesn't benefit anybody; not so if a Muslims does.

It's kind of fun, in a mean-spirited, "early 00s atheist" sort of way.

You could probably break Kil'ayim by adding fruit from some sort of fruit salad tree? Apricot marmalade from an apricot/plum graft, for example. I think citrus is all the same species, so no lime shenanigans. French-fried pomatoes should also count.

Ah, it wasn't intended to be mean-spirited at all – mostly as a fun puzzle due to how complicated the laws are, and that it seems nobody has tried to do it before. Kashrut only applies to actual Jews anyway, so I figure if my intentions aren't bad it's not an issue.

The problem with grafted fruit is that I'd need to find one nearby, and since I gotta do it just before Easter it's very likely not going to be in season! Although now after reading more about it on the Wikipedia article it seems that it's just the act of growing such food that's prohibited, eating it is fine: "Diverse seed-plantings or vegetables that grew together in violation of the biblical command are permitted to be eaten", so I guess I can skip that after all.

Kashrut only applies to actual Jews anyway, so I figure if my intentions aren't bad it's not an issue.

No, the kosher laws which run afoul of the 7 Noachide laws- such as dedicating your meal to Baal- apply to everyone. It’s the Mitzvot that only apply to actual Jews.

Quite right, apologies for forgetting that. I haven't yet decided on whether to post about it whenever I've finished, but if so I'd probably mention the Baal thing without actually performing it. Another good reason is that it would also be the least kosher meal that'd nevertheless be permitted to eat if it would save one's life, and involving idolatry would mess that up.

What’s your favorite history podcast/YouTube channel? I’ve tried Dan Carlin but honestly just don’t like him for some reason.

Obviously looking for well sourced high quality content, as well as someone who isn’t super left biased.

What's your take on Sam O'Nella or Max Miller?

Never heard of em.

The Rest Is History podcast is really excellent, wide-ranging and not super ideological

I've enjoyed Extra History. They're mostly good, though to be taken with a grain of salt on anything too close to the culture way.

Kings and generals is amazing: https://youtube.com/@KingsandGenerals

Has very long and in depth videos about a lot of the major battles in history. No political bias, just a retelling of what happened, when, told in such a way to be entertaining and fun. You can put on a video, watch it for 2 hours and come out more knowledgeable on the other end.

Lately, I've been listening to the "Unauthorized History of the Pacific War" podcast, which is about the Pacific Theater of World War 2. I especially like the episodes that have Jon Parshall on as a guest (he's the author of "Shattered Sword", about the Battle of Midway)

I really like Robin Pierson's The History of Byzantium podcast. It's very well researched and he interviews academics who study Byzantium and even has a few episodes where he goes through a recent academic paper to cover current developments in the field. It's not dry at all though, Robin is a good story teller. Like many podcasts I think he's gotten stronger as he's gone a long, so if you want a taste of it to decide if it's for you I recommend starting with the episodes on the Fourth Crusade (numbers 259 & 260). If you enjoy those then you can go back and start from the beginning.

The Age of Napoleon is another good one. It covers the French Revolution at a high level but the focus is on what Napoleon personally saw and did so it would be helpful (but not necessary) to read a few wiki articles if you aren't already familiar with the time period. If you want a preview his episode on the life of Admiral Nelson is self contained and very good. When talking about the different factions he usually just describes their views without endorsing or condemning them, on either the left or the right.

Martyrmade, for sure. Listen to his Israel-Palestine series or "God's Socialist" about Jim Jones.

I like Fall of Civilizations. It's really well produced, but fairly slow to update.

I found this recently and quite like it. I didn't previously know that the medieval warm period enabled some societies to exist, and the end of the medieval warm period ended them.

When Diplomacy Fails: episodes, website (which has kind of suffered during Zach's Ph.D. quest).

Jeffrey the Librarian does a lot of interesting stuff on the early United States/Thirteen Colonies.

I also really liked Epic History TV’s hour long episodes on Napoleon’s campaigns.

Congratulations to @self_made_human, @raggedy_anthem, and @netstack who were elevated to adminhood this week.

Why wasn't there an official announcement of this?

A doctor in a white coat walks in holding a clipboard. He reviews it for a few seconds flipping between pages.

I'm afraid I have some bad news @self_made_human, @raggedy_anthem, and @netstack. You were elevated to adminhood. It looks terminal.

Oh shit, the janny virus claims new victims...

Good thing I'm vaxxmaxxed against it...

Huh? What adminhood? They're blocked by you.(So am I)

Hmm. They blocked me too, as I see when giving a joke reply just now.

Why mass block posters? What impoverished empty version of the Motte do they inhabit?

Same (in fact, I think he's the only person who I know has blocked me).

That said, you can see that they're admins here.

Blocking admins doesn't actually do anything, for what I hope are understandable reasons.

I would hope even Reddit doesn't just let a user vanish from the scrutiny of the mods, but I genuinely don't know if that's the case. That would be suboptimal, to say the least.

How did they choose the new mods? I know in the past there was some complicated system.

Multiple rounds of selection.

In the initial round, a bunch of users who the mods considered trustworthy and generally representative of the forum were selected, mainly going off AAQC count and other things, and then asked to nominate the next set of voters, who would go on to nominate the final set, who were then to nominate the people who they wanted to see as mods. I have genuinely lost track of whether there were 2 or 3 preliminary rounds before the final vote.

At that point, the candidates were asked if they were willing to take on the responsibility, and quite a few demurred. The remainder were finally vetted by the existing admins, and the results came out a few days ago.

As you can imagine, this took a while. I think a few intermediate steps could be taken out of the picture, because the people nominated in the second step were almost all the same people who showed up for the final vote, but at least it brought in new faces who hadn't been chosen by the mods at the start.

@ZorbaTHut based it off the election of the Doge in Venice. It seemed to work well enough last time, and if it ain't broke and also happens to be mildly exciting, don't fix it!

Votes were submitted in private to him, but there was no barrier to people declaring or discussing their choices, in a channel made for them. A surprising lack of acrimony, and I don't recall anyone being uncouth enough to nominate themselves, though I'm not sure if that was expressly ruled out.

You couldn’t nominate yourself or a currently banned poster and were limited to 4 nominees were the instructions I got in the third(final) round.

Noooo! If any of them unveil a new substack in the next month I’ll be sick.

I enjoy these users’ comments, so I will be sad if they fall off the activity mod-cliff and we only ever see them again with mod hats.

Looks shiftily at plans for a Substack, somewhere, somewhen

Well, I have enough on my plate as it is with exams coming up, though the Ritalin does make me procrasturbate more than I ought to, usually manifesting in Motteposting.

Is raggedy anthem already gone?

The mod curse is real.

It was personal reasons, I won't go more into it.

Sad

Netstack was the only person I ever felt compelled to block on this site. In one of his replies to a post about the over-representation of Jews I made a while ago he launched into an odd ad hominem tirade —

Look at yourself. Trawling lists to tally up your racial quotas. Wringing your hands over the tragic underrepresentation of your preferred demographic. So determined to believe that skin color (or however you can most favorably slice the boundaries) determines moral worth and political value. Behold the Übermensch! You are giving an object lesson in why identity politics suck. You are recreating the field of grievance studies. I have no doubt that you could give me a dozen reasons why the stereotypically progressive position is foolish and immoral, so why are you wasting your time recreating it? Have some self-respect.

I hope his admin privileges are double or triple checked by others because it would not appear to me that his judgment is objective on certain contentious subjects. Congrats to others though.

Oh, I remember that. I felt proud of my phrasing at the time; in hindsight, it was more about the feeling of righteous indignation. I definitely got carried away, and I’m sorry for making personal attacks.

"You are arguing in a way that you would not accept from others, and seems objectively bad" seems like an entirely fair criticism.

Somewhat on-topic: check your PMs. :V

Actually, that the argument was bad isn’t the problem. (Judaism is not skin-deep but an ideology and culture, yet Net’s reply instead talked about “skin color”. And my own conclusion was “White Americans are so underrepresented [yet] they are the ones who face the most ruthless black propaganda against their demographic”, ergo the charge of hypocrisy makes no sense.) The problem is instead in the clearly emotional outburst by Net; telling someone to “have some self respect” or saying “behold the ubermensch” displayed an inability to handle the discussion maturely.

I've said this many times in defense of different mods: mods should be allowed to have fun and play full contact.

Nothing in the quoted statement, despite it being excepted by an unfriendly interlocutor, strikes me as out of bounds. It's not an ad hominem, it's an ethos argument.

Thanks! I'll do my best to dust the place as needed haha

Congrats!

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