birb_cromble
5m ago
Probably just browsing HN. It was on the front page recently.
birb_cromble
6m ago
The fundamental problem with horror is that it's a great example of Sturgeon's law - 90% of it is crap.
There is definitely good horror out there - however, a large part of its appeal for people is that it lets them examine and process scary and uncomfortable concepts through a filter of fantasy. If it's a topic that's doesn't personally scare you enough to engage, or too scary/uncomfortable for you to maintain that separation, it's not going to resonate.
There's also the problem that Torture Porn is really cheap to produce and it's absolutely flooding the market with shit, but that's a problem with the market and not the genre.
If you can tell me some examples of movies you've liked or disliked, and why, I can suggest some options if you're interested.
popocatepetl
10m ago
Can someone help me understand horror as a genre?
Sure.
either it's jumpscares with loud music suddenly which would startle pretty much everyone
The appeal of these is (a) date night with your girlfriend/boyfriend, since it's a good excuse cozy up, (b) a quick endorphin hit, like going on a rollercoaster (c) as a social bravery game, usually by young boys, where a group tries to see who will crack and get ripped by their bros.
So, social lubricant.
a slow burn of building anxiety with no payoff or just really gross stuff
The appeal of ugliness in horror, or cosmic and existential horror, is that it stirs the sense of beauty by remotion. Silent Hill 2 and 3 are games I remember not because they were scary or fun (in fact playing them could often be tedious) but because they evoked a deep longing for meaning, sympathy for suffering, and a desire for catharsis.
Recommended video from the Distributist. The framing is political but IIRC he discusses well the psychological hole filled by disturbing horror.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
12m ago
Almost all products sold at my grocery store are labelled in both metric and imperial. A quick search suggests this has been federal law since 1992, with a few exceptions.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
14m ago
It doesn't really help the "switch to metric" argument that unit conversions are typically done by computer these days anyway. The marginal cost of doing calculations in "harder" units isn't worth it because the calculations aren't really the hard part any more. Consumer products are pretty universally labelled with both, but the imperial units are round numbers: the box in front of me here is "16 oz (1 lb) 454 g".
Raw material stock sizes are probably a more difficult transition at this point: changing to size of the "2x4" (1.5 x 3.5 inches, naturally) would impact pretty much all construction heavily with seemingly little upside.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
16m ago
seem to earn more money and seem to be more sexually desirable.
Is this not confounded/proxy by higher T?
georgioz
27m ago
and (the textbook example) shouting "fire" in a crowded theater
This one always sounded very weak to me, mostly because what if there actually is a fire in a crowded theater? Apparently even the sentence itself is incorrect compared to the original which also included the word falsely. It is also interesting to see, that the same argument was used in 1919 against somebody protesting draft service in WW1 under enforcement of Espionage Act and his anti-draft speech likened to falsely crying fire.
Not exactly a stellar argument either historically or even on its face.
FairestWorld
29m ago
Can someone help me understand horror as a genre? I really don't see the appeal of it. I categorize it in 3 types, either it's jumpscares with loud music suddenly which would startle pretty much everyone, a slow burn of building anxiety with no payoff or just really gross stuff, neither which make any sense as to why someone finds appealing. What do you like about it? Is my categorization off, or maybe missing some angle? Am I just incapable of enjoying, in the sense of that ssc post how some people don't have that "coming as one" stadium/church/large gathering sense?
gattsuru
32m ago
There's also just a massive amount of equipment, material, hardware, and even facilities designed around imperial units, sometimes practically irreplaceable. Switching over to metric, even solely for new projects, isn't just or even mostly a matter of getting people to use new units on drawings.
HereAndGone
32m ago
I think it's a big step from "want a girlfriend, can't find one" to "have a boyfriend who is going to transition to female". One of these things is not like the other. If I want to cook chicken for dinner but there's none in the fridge, I'll cook something else. I won't go "You know, I think I'll drink some petrol instead, it's all fuel, right?"
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
33m ago
Isn't Erika Kirk supposed to be the replacement for Charlie Kirk?
HereAndGone
40m ago
The seeds of something interesting are there, but it does need a lot more development.
The start actually reminded me of a Cordwainer Smith story, again about having humans in the loop and how that can go wrong in unexpected ways, The Dead Lady of Clown Town.
The headquarters of the People Programmer was at An-fang, and there the mistake happened:
A ruby trembled. Two tourmaline nets failed to rectify the laser beam. A diamond noted the error. Both the error and the correction went into the general computer.
The error assigned, on the general account of births for Fomalhaut III, the profession of "lay therapist, female, intuitive capacity for correction of human physiology with local resources." On some of the early ships they used to call these people witch-women, because they worked unaccountable cures. For pioneer parties, these lay therapists were invaluable; in settled post-Riesmannian societies, they became an awful nuisance. Sickness disappeared with good conditions, accidents dwindled down to nothing, medical work became institutional.
Who wants a witch, even a good witch, when a thousand-bed hospital is waiting with its staff eager for clinical experience ... and only seven out of its thousand beds filled with real people? (The remaining beds were filled with lifelike robots on which the staff could practice, lest they lose their morale. They could, of course, have worked on under-people—animals in the shape of human beings, who did the heavy and the weary work which remained as the caput mortuum of a really perfected economy—but it was against the law for animals, even when they were underpeople, to go to a human hospital. When underpeople got sick, the Instrumentality took care of them—in slaughter-houses. It was easier to breed new underpeople for the job than it was to repair sick ones. Furthermore, the tender, loving care of a hospital might give them ideas. Such as the idea that they were people. This would have been bad, from the prevailing point of view. Therefore the human hospitals remained almost empty while an underperson who sneezed four times or who vomited once was taken away, never to be ill again. The empty beds kept on with the robot patients, who went through endless repetitions of the human patterns of injury or disease.) This left no work for witches, bred and trained.
Yet the ruby had trembled; the program had indeed made a mistake; the birth-number for a "lay therapist, general, female, immediate use" had been ordered for Fomalhaut III.
Much later, when the story was all done down to its last historic detail, there was an investigation into the origins of Elaine. When the laser had trembled, both the original order and the correction were fed simultaneously into the machine. The machine recognized the contradiction and promptly referred both papers to the human supervisor, an actual man who had been working on the job for seven years.
He was studying music, and he was bored. He was so close to the end of his term that he was already counting the days to his own release. Meanwhile he was rearranging two popular songs. One was The Big Bamboo, a primitive piece which tried to evoke the original magic of man. The other was about a girl, Elaine, Elaine whom the song asked to refrain from giving pain to her loving swain. Neither of the songs was important; but between them they influenced history, first a little bit and then very much.
The musician had plenty of time to practice. He had not had to meet a real emergency in all his seven years. From time to time the machine made reports to him, but the musician just told the machine to correct its own errors, and it infallibly did so.
On the day that the accident of Elaine happened, he was trying to perfect his finger work on the guitar, a very old instrument believed to date from the pre-space period. He was playing The Big Bamboo for the hundredth time.
The machine announced its mistake with an initial musical chime. The supervisor had long since forgotten all the instructions which he had so worrisomely memorized seven long years ago. The alert did not really and truly matter, because the machine invariably corrected its own mistakes whether the supervisor was on duty or not.
The machine, not having its chime answered, moved into a second-stage alarm. From a loudspeaker set in the wall of the room, it shrieked in a high, clear human voice, the voice of some employee who had died thousands of years earlier:
"Alert, alert! Emergency. Correction needed. Correction needed!"
The answer was one which the machine had never heard before, old though it was. The musician's fingers ran madly, gladly over the guitar strings and he sang clearly, wildly back to the machine a message strange beyond any machine's belief:
Beat, heat the Big Bamboo!
Beat, beat, beat the Big Bamboo for me...!Hastily the machine set its memory banks and computers to work, looking for the code reference to "bamboo," trying to make that word fit the present context. There was no reference at all. The machine pestered the man some more.
"Instructions unclear. Instructions unclear. Please correct."
"Shut up," said the man.
"Cannot comply," stated the machine. "Please state and repeat, please state and repeat, please state and repeat."
"Do shut up," said the man, but he knew the machine would not obey this. Without thinking, he turned to his other tune and sang the first two lines twice over:
Elaine. Elaine, go cure the pain!
Elaine, Elaine, go cure the pain!Repetition had been inserted as a safeguard into the machine, on the assumption that no real man would repeat an error. The name "Elaine" was not correct number code, but the fourfold emphasis seemed to confirm the need for a "lay therapist, female." The machine itself noted that a genuine man had corrected the situation card presented as a matter of emergency.
"Accepted," said the machine.
This word, too late, jolted the supervisor away from his music.
"Accepted what?" he asked.
There was no answering voice. There was no sound at all except for the whisper of slightly-moistened warm air through the ventilators.
The supervisor looked out the window. He could see a little of the blood-black red color of the Peace Square of An-fang; beyond lay the ocean, endlessly beautiful and endlessly tedious.
The supervisor sighed hopefully. He was young. "Guess it doesn't matter," he thought, picking up his guitar.
(Thirty-seven years later, he found out that it did matter. The Lady Goroke herself, one of the chiefs of the Instrumentality, sent a subchief of the Instrumentality to find out who had caused D'joan. When the man found that the witch Elaine was the source of the trouble she sent him on to find out how Elaine had gotten into a well-ordered universe. The supervisor was found. He was still a musician. He remembered nothing of the story. He was hypnotized. He still remembered nothing. The sub-chief invoked an emergency and Police Drug Four ("clear memory") was administered to the musician. He immediately remembered the whole silly scene, but insisted that it did not matter. The case was referred to Lady Goroke, who instructed the authorities that the musician be told the whole horrible, beautiful story of D'joan at Fomalhaut—the very story which you are now being told—and he wept. He was not punished otherwise, but the Lady Goroke commanded that those memories be left in his mind for so long as he might live.)
quiet_NaN
43m ago
Most of Europe also did not switch entirely voluntarily. Probably the best thing Napoleon ever did. Too bad he never invaded England, though.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
51m ago
…bot post? (Sorry to be suspicious!)
oats_son
1hr ago
I agree with your point. I think using my father to make it was not very effective, though.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
I think the best bet would be California mandating metric. "If you want your products sold in CA, they have to state weights in kg and dimensions in meters. Gas stations are required to (also) display liters for fuel and hPa for tire pressure." Most manufacturers would probably print both imperial and SI units on their products.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
Cute 3d world browser game: https://messenger.abeto.co/
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
What you describe is a textbook example of an inadequate equilibrium.
Most people will only need a few formulas. A carpenter is going to encounter yards, foots and inches, but unless they are building a really long fence, they are unlikely to encounter miles.
Still, it does create friction, making everything slightly more complicated than it would have to be, otherwise.
Not that SI is perfect, either. The Faraday constant being 96kC/mol instead of 1C/mol is not very reasonable, and the Boltzmann constant should be one as well. If I were to design a system from the scratch today, I would anchor mass so that a mole is a nice round number, like 1e24. Still, SI is a valiant effort, at least, and making it so that the density of water is approximately one (or 1000, if you go for cubic meters) was a brilliant move for everyday usability.
As an European, I have happily never been subject to having to learn that there are 231 cubic inches in a US gallon. The closest I got to this was having to suffer through seven years of music education in school, which even in Europe used a terrible archaic notation which works well to represent C major which was then improperly extended in a way which would make even ISO 8859-* blush with shame. Exams had tasks like "transpose this melody to a different scale", which would be utterly trivial in any adequate system -- "add three to every integer on this list". In short, it was the equivalent of a math class deciding to teach multiplication with Roman numerals.
Personally, I found this to be a big turn-off. Reasonably smart kids will grasp the difference between things being complicated because they are intrinsically complicated (there is no way to make pi come out to be three in Euclidian geometry) and things being complicated because none of the practitioners could be arsed to make them less complicated. So if I had had a physics teacher who was a proponent of imperial units and expecting me to learn all the weird conversion factors decreed by Queen Anne or whomever, I would reasonably have concluded that physicists have no interest in describing the world in easy terms and instead use their cleverness to build pointless mind mazes for their own amusement.
Some murder cases create such intense media circuses that they inspire numerous fictionalised "true crime" depictions thereof, sometimes years or even decades later, with varying degrees of historical accuracy and queasy exploitation. There have been dozens of movies and TV shows made about Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson respectively; even less notorious killers like Aileen Wuornos has been the subject of two movies and numerous documentaries. Oftentimes, one of these films comes to be seen as the definitive account of the events in question: David Fincher's film Zodiac is widely considered the "canonical" film about its titular serial killer, despite being neither the first nor last such film.
This got me thinking about the most famous serial killer of all time, Jack the Ripper: a case which, like Zodiac, remains unsolved decades later. There have been dozens if not hundreds of attempts to depict the murders more-or-less historically accurately in feature films, along with further hundreds of fictional works inspired by the case (even one of the first films directed by no less than Alfred Hitchcock, released thirty-nine years after the actual case - the same interval as that between the Zodiac murders and Fincher's film). This got me wondering: is there a film which is to Jack the Ripper as Zodiac is to the Zodiac killer - a film with a scrupulous regard for historical accuracy comparable to Fincher's, which takes few if any gross historical liberties, and which scholars consider an accurate portrayal? (Right off the bat this would immediately exclude Alan Moore's From Hell or its film adaptation, which were never intended to be historically accurate; or any of the various fanfic works which depict the murder being investigated by Sherlock Holmes.)
More broadly, what are some of your favourite films or TV shows in this sub-genre of "historically accurate, non-exploitative true crime"? The other night I watched the film Harvest starring Caleb Landry Jones, who I recognised from supporting roles in Get Out and the Twin Peaks revival. (Harvest was interesting and gorgeous to look at, but ultimately rather dull, and its runtime felt unearned.) I went on Jones's Wikipedia page and found that he recently won a Best Actor award at Cannes for his starring turn in Nitram, a fictionalised portrayal of the infamous Port Arthur attack in 1996, the worst mass shooting in Australian history and which directly precipitated that country's gun buyback program which American gun control advocates often seek to model. Nitram's director Justin Kurzel previously directed Snowtown, a fictionalised account of a group of serial killers operating in the titular Australian town in the 1990s, which I've heard is an excellent but gruelling watch. If any of you have seen Nitram or Snowtown, are they worth checking out?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
Not the entire rest of the Internet, but certainly there are a lot of such places.
I do recall making a "don't shoot SCOTUS justices; the bus will explode if you shoot SCOTUS justices" post on an SJ forum when Dobbs got leaked and somebody tried to kill Kavanaugh (I'm not sure, but I suspect I refrained until then for "don't stuff peas up your nose" reasons).
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
I'm wondering because I've noticed a negative trend. I sometimes need more than two turns to plow through trash mobs.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2hr ago
This seems beside the point given that we are seemingly not talking about a case where a "foreign Olympian" was invited to the position because no qualified citizen was available. Rather, the employers either (charitably) thought he was in fact a qualified citizen, or (less charitably) thought that he should be considered one.
sohois
3hr ago
As substantialfrivolity says, the damage cap can be removed later, but honestly I'm wondering why you're concerned. In Act 1 and 2, none of the enemies aren't really tough enough that you need to break the damage cap to win easily. If I had any criticisms of the combat in the game, it's that a lot of mechanics seemed to be balanced around post game and new game+, such that you never need to learn or use them in the course of beating the game's story.
It depends on how you plan to ride it and where. Obviously.
With some caveats. If you are going offroad, get an MTB, of if you want to slam curbs. If you want to jump around like a bunny, get a BMX or a trials bike. If road cycling interests you, NOT only if you want to ride on roads exclusively, then get a road bike.
IMO hybrids are the best and I stick to them. They are fast enough on the roads, if you have to navigate a curb or two you'll be fine, offroad shortcuts too. I used to commute around 6-10 miles so a hybrid made the most sense given curbs, offroad, stairs, roads, etc. Nevertheless, I think hybrids are the most enjoyable aside from their practicality.
Also don't cheap out on tyres and brakes, you'll thank me later.
The first vendor sells traps that hang in midair, they're very good on flying enemies but I do resent having to keep refilling them.
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