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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2005 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 12, 2024

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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Anyone know of a list of words by their population-level familiarity? For instance, % Americans who know what a rollercoaster is, a snowshoe, a thermos.

@self_made_human had a great idea. The paper from which those two lists (words many women, but few men know, and vice versa), also compares words specific to the UK and to the US. Databases which you are after are available as the "supplementary material" on the page of the paper and at https://osf.io/g4xrt/.

Can someone explain why this paper is not hot garbage?

It looks like their methodology was the following:

  • Give people a set with some words and some nonwords
  • Ask them, for each, to say if they know it or not
  • Give them a "score" as feedback based on ("known" words) - (falsely "known" nonwords)
  • ...Otherwise throw out any calibration information from people claiming to "know" nonwords, and just assume that they actually know every word they say they know?

Behold my shocked Pikachu face that they found an absurdly unrealistically high number of people who "know" really obscure words. (Just look at that histogram!) No, I do not believe for one second that 55% of men know the word "aileron" or even that 58% know what "azimuth" means. This is not measuring how many people know a word -- neither in the sense that they could give a definition, nor even in the sense that they could vaguely gesture at the correct meaning. It is, at most, a measure of how likely people are to guess that something might be a word, which is a totally different thing!

Well, unless I am completely misreading the paper, anyway. Anyone want to point out where my assessment above is wrong?

That list is hilarious. The male words seem to be mostly technical (thermistor, teraflop), scientific (boson, piezoelectricity) or relating to fighting (howitzer, bushido). Also, the inclusion of katana, bushido and yakuza makes us look like a bunch of weebs.

Meanwhile, the female list seems to be almost entirely relating to fabric and clothing. Of the female list, the only ones I can say I knew a specific definition for were kohl and doula. The rest I could vaguely recognise as relating to fabric or can see the etymology without knowing the English meaning (voile - veil, boucle - buckle). Half the words seem to be French loanwords.

Apparently a pessary is some kind of gynocological medical device and not something religious or funereal, as I would have guessed.

I am reminded of this classic:

So I was feeling pretty good about equality. Then I decided to calculate the ‘most masculine’ and ‘most feminine’ colors. I was looking for the color names most disproportionately popular among each group; that is, the names that the most women came up with compared to the fewest men (or vice versa).

Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among women:

  • Dusty Teal
  • Blush Pink
  • Dusty Lavender
  • Butter Yellow
  • Dusky Rose

Okay, pretty flowery, certainly. Kind of an incense-bomb-set-off-in-a-Bed-Bath-&-Beyond vibe. Well, let’s take a look at the other list.

Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men:

  • Penis
  • Gay
  • WTF
  • Dunno
  • Baige

I … that’s not my typo in #5—the only actual color in the list really is a misspelling of “beige”. And keep in mind, this is based on the number of unique people who answered the color, not the number of times they typed it. This isn’t just the effect of a couple spammers. In fact, this is after the spamfilter.

I weep for my gender.

Kohl seems likely to be picking up on women recognizing the name of the store not the black powder that I had to look up.

It's makeup, and while more associated with old or non-western forms of makeup (often containing lead) a quick search finds some modern eyeliner using it as a label as well. It was one of the few I recognized on the female side when I first saw it (along with taffeta and jacquard) due to its use in fantasy fiction. I think more would recognize it from makeup or the history of makeup rather than from the name of the department store.

words specific to the UK and to the US

What do they call dodgems in the US, then?

Bumper cars

Neat.

Apparently the least known word is stotinka, the cent-analogue for the lev (the currency of Bulgaria). The first one I knew was the tenth least known, witenagemot. Helps to have played Crusader Kings I guess.

I guess that's where Rowling conjured up the Wizengamot from.

I want people to know that it's possible to make fandom.com more readable than an average website. It just takes uBlock Origin and a couple dozen custom filters.

The closest I can think of is that chart that compares words overwhelmingly known only by one of the two sexes. If the dataset for that was known, I'd presume you could kinda use it for the same purpose for the general population.

So, funny story. Took my family to the beach a week or two ago, got nice and sunburnt, played with my kid in the waves a ton, had a great time. On the way back my wife wants to visit a friend along the way and catch up. Lucky for me, next door to the coffee shop they chose, is a used games store. Like, a nice one, with tons of Nintendo games at a reasonable price. Actual NES shit too, it's back catalog doesn't end at the Xbox 360. So I ended up splurging on a Retron 1 HD. It was only $40, and it has HDMI as well as composite out.

You see, I have two cases of old NES games from my childhood, but I had no system to play them on. Now normally I would have researched the living fuck out of this decision, but it was a snap decision while I was bored, so that happened after the fact.

Turns out the Retron 1 HD is actually a reverse engineered Nintendo on a Chip system, which is part of why it's so cheap. This is superior in some ways to ARM based emulation, but not as good as FPGA emulation. That said, it's got it where it counts, over composite it's input latency is identical to an NES. However it's HDMI scaler is trash and results in a terrible picture, poor colors, and I strongly suspect distorted sound. Because every Youtube video I've watched or listened to in action had color or audio discrepancies my version over composite connected to a CRT does not have, and they all use HDMI on a an HDTV. Supposedly it's also not compatible with a handful of games I never plan on playing, like Castlevania III and Battletoads.

Now I said I have this hooked up to a CRT, but that was an acquisition I only made on Monday. Found some hoarder lady on Facebook ditching a 20" CRT with a built in VCR and DVD player. It works perfectly, and it's been a wild trip to go back and play it all exactly as I remember.

I've only bothered with Super Mario Brothers to start with, because that was the first game I got when my grandmother bought me an NES back in 1987 or whenever it might have been. I actually can't remember the last time I put any serious effort in Super Mario Brothers. After playing a single session for three nights in a row, I was getting to world 5-3. I had largely forgotten most of the secrets I ever used to know, minus the warp pipe in level 1-2. I actually had forgotten there were water levels, or dark levels too!

Anyways, that's been a blast, highly recommend it.

Will you play Zelda?

I am biased but think that if you want a mildly old-school Zelda game without the crap, GBA's Minish Cap is excellent and sadly often forgotten

The original Zelda doesn't really hold up, IMO. There's way too much reliance on brute-force trial-and-error, made even more annoying by the one use per screen limitation of the blue candle and the fact that bombs are consumable.

On the other hand, Zelda II is underrated.

Zelda, well... I want to defend it, but you are probably right.

In it's defense, it comes from an older lineage of CRPG. Early Ultima's had a pretty narrow thread of clues you could get from talking to literally every NPC and writing down what they said for later. Might & Magic played similarly. Probably others. Then you start playing early JRPGs like Phantasy Star, Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, and they are pretty similar, in that it's not always obvious where to go next and what to do unless you talk to everyone and take notes. It wasn't until later those series got put on pretty strong rails.

In that way, many of the important secrets in Zelda have NPCs that will give you the clues. But not all of them. And brute forcing the rest with limited bombs or the once per screen candle is odious. Then again, when I was playing Zelda as a kid, my older cousins had already beat it and helped me find things. And they figured it out with their friends around the school lunch table. Maybe one of them had a Nintendo Power subscription.

I still love it. But I get it.

The original Zelda doesn't really hold up, IMO.

It honestly blows my mind that the game was released in that state.

I guess not all the games can be hits, and Nintendo cancelling that shitty romhack they thought was worthy of the title Super Mario Bros. 2 in favor of the reskinned Doki Doki Panic was ultimately the right move and a stronger suggestion that they didn't quite have the game design format 100% perfected, but it still blows my mind the game is functionally unbeatable without the relevant copy of Nintendo Power entering the picture somewhere.

NES games were quite expensive once you account for inflation. Making things hard and obscure was the only way to get 100 hours of gameplay out of 128kB of ROM.

A person who played Zelda when it was released, would be aware of technological limitations of consoles of the time. This meant that yes, if you gave someone just the NES and the game cart, they wouldn't find the game as good as SMB. But the additional material required to make it a 10/10 is only the game manual, enclosed with the purchase of the game, not guides standalone or in magazines.

Edit: This is the game manual, I feel it explain the game well enough so that the player, while required to put in more thought than if they were playing a modern game, doesn't have to blindly stumble around.

Does the manual show the places where the secrets-to-everyone are? (Edit: no, it doesn't.) My main problem with the game is the "burn the random bush that looks like every other random bush"-type things, which is something that other titles would fix with affordances like cracked walls, etc. Which is something I get is a technical limitation of the system, but then again, trying to make a game that depends on a system that can't display it properly is not exactly good design.

I guess I come more from the AVGN school of software design that demonstrates that if it's not reasonably discoverable without reading the documentation it's probably a net-negative for your game design if it's there, since it's now depending on something you thought was obvious in its balance, but nobody can access it, so you're stuck trying to work around it and your game is less fun as a consequence.

Which is something I get is a technical limitation of the system

I don't think so. The space requirements to add additional burnable bush and bombable wall sprites would have been negligible. But this would have trivialized the game's "puzzles," which consisted entirely of pushing every block, bombing every wall, and burning every bush. If the movable parts are labeled, there's nothing left.

Later games added more elaborate puzzles with multiple moving parts that could be solved without brute force, allowing them to label the moving parts without trivializing the game. I think that this probably could have been done on the NES with a 128 KB ROM, but I'm not sure.

To be clear, I did play the original Zelda a couple of years after it was released, and I liked it, but I was also eight years old and mildly autistic, so I didn't mind wasting hours systematically trying to burn every bush and bomb every exposed rock surface on the overworld. But in retrospect, that's just really bad design and not much fun compared to games that came out just a few years later.

I think that there was probably intended to be a social aspect to the exploration, where friends would get together, divvy up areas to search, and then share findings with each other. And we did do that a little, but not really systematically. But I lived in a semi-rural area and didn't have many friends who owned the game.

When I was a kid playing Zelda, or Mario, or most games for that matter, "beating" them never entered my mind. Mostly because I was terrible at games. So I used them more like a toy clockwork world I enjoyed exploring. I'm under the impression this isn't dissimilar from how a lot of small kids still play games, and now there are tons of open world games without any win conditions that kids especially love.

So all that said, whether Zelda was fair or not, or beatable out of the box without any outside information, didn't matter to me as a kid. I only wanted to explore the far corners of the map, to see if I could even survive that far. Or maybe I'd really go nuts in a dungeon I'd already beat trying to wring every last secret out of it, not for any power gaming aspect, but because the limited technical vocabulary of the game wasn't immediately obvious to me and I thought anything was possible. I remember being particularly excited when I'd stumble onto one of those stairwells that took you to the small sub dungeons that had a side view instead of a top down view. Something good was always in one of those.

I don't know if Nintendo knew any of these things when they made Zelda, or if they tried to make a massive game you were supposed to beat fairly and failed, and lucked into making a fun, primitive, open world game with win conditions you could mostly ignore.

I am sorry to have doubted you. That you are aware of the idea of playing games collaboratively, shows your age. Such games are rare today, but were common in the era of Japanese arcades. There and then games such as The Tower of Druaga or The Quest of Ki would have a notebook on the arcade machine, for each player to document their possible discoveries. An implemention of collaboration was notably implemented in much later Dark Souls in the form of messages players can leave for eachother.

No offense taken. I'm assuming that you were just misled by my youthful figure.

Asking the important questions.

Probably! I still have an old cart for it. I tested it to see if it still had saves and it did... maybe. Names were there, but I strongly suspect they forgot the actual progress. All had only 3 hearts. So I'll replace the battery I guess.

I have an upcoming multi-week sabbatical as part of one of my job benefits.

I am obsessed with bikepacking / touring, and am fairly experienced in the former. I'm also obsessed with accomplishing multiple things at a time. In particular, I love visiting Europe. I'm less interested in pushing boundaries the way most Bikepackers do by surviving through South America (friendly people but crappy food) or Africa (the same, but with less water and bike parts) or Magnolia (even less people and less bike parts).

After visiting the UK, I'm tempted to confine my trip to that island. No language barrier, Scotland is fucking amazing, and I'll have ample opportunity to stop at a hotel instead of a tent or swing by a distillery to relax. The only downside here is... I've been. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to escape my white-collar drudgery and family obligations for more than 4 days. It seems like a cop-out.

It will more likely be a collection of 1-2 other central/eastern European countries, using the train as a band-aid. I'd like to mix in 70% off-roading and 30% relaxation and tooling around urban centers. Good cycling infrastructure to support that is ++. I'm interested in Germany, Italy, and maybe dipping into the Czech Republic since I have people in each place.

The final and biggest challenge would be that I'm very comfortable being on my own for long periods of time and enjoy it. But having another person along for at least part of the journey would be an upgrade. Not many people can physically hang for the type of riding I want to do, and then fewer would be able to invest ~2 weeks of time to do it. At a minimum, I'd like to organize checkpoints where I'm meeting with someone I kinda know at a few locations.

Any opinions from the peanut gallery? Are any Euro mottziens open to grabbing a beer or training up to come along?

Definitely go for a trans-alp tour. One of the classics is Munich to Venice, but I'm more fond of the more western routes through Switzerland.

There are a number of Danube bike tours. I've heard positive 1st hand accounts.

Biking from Germany into Italy is an awesome trip if you're strong enough to pedal across the Alps. Even if you're not you can ride a train to the top of Europe and just coast downmountain. https://en.eurovelo.com/ev5

Or you can take route 7 and swing into Czechia: https://en.eurovelo.com/ev7

Mind you, there's little language barrier in Germany, as 40% of people speak some english, and these days if you buy a sim card you can get online translation too.

How doable is it to get a sim card in a foreign country? Can you get it over the counter?

I mean, yeah. It took 20 mins for my dad to buy an Italian SIM card when we went there on a vacation last time. You're gonna need photo ID like a passport, EU is strict that way.

Not sure how it is for Americans though, probably written about online.

Theoretically data roaming might not be a rip off. At least intra-EU roaming is now pretty affordable, it's no longer a scam. One of the few things EU is okay-ish at.

Okay, my St Peter's digital fast is over. I avoided you, Reddit and other useless websites, with YT remaining the only shameful exception.

I even did some actual reading. I think I asked you people once if there was a serious gender-swapped noir detective novel that wasn't a novella inside Hyperion for a project of mine that I will probably never even start, and got no real replies.

However, I don't remember how, but just before my digital fast I found Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture by Linda Mizejewski. That was what I was looking for: someone who has done all the legwork for me. I cracked open the epub and started reading.

I came out the other end with three things: a weird disgust at the level of girl-crush the author had on Clarissa Starling, a surprise that shouldn't have been one at the fact lesbian detective fiction exists, and a list of authors that I was going to check out.

Major caveat: my wife reads mystery stories with a fucking notepad, listing all clues and trying to solve the case before the writer gets to it. I think it's masochism, I look at the tropes and try to use my guts. If I guess right, then I pat myself on the back. If I don't, I don't care. So don't expect me to evaluate how good these novels are as mystery fiction.

Step one: Sara Paretsky and her novels Indemnity Only and Deadlock, with V.I. Warshawski as the PI

Good tropes:

  • asshole with a heart of gold
  • cheap dingy office
  • terrible personal grooming skills (clothing excepted)
  • love of whisky
  • checking out bars on a hunch
  • getting pistol-whipped
  • rescuing a gentleman in distress (I didn't expect the trope to be played so straight)
  • bodies piling up as the story progresses

Inverted tropes:

  • it's not always night and/or raining in Chicago
  • instead of the seedy underbelly it's always white-collar crime of the most white-collar sort and then someone freaks out and ends up with a dead body

Of all the authors, it's the one I might keep reading.

Step two: Sue Grafton and her novel A is for Alibi, with Kinsey Millhone as the PI

Good tropes:

  • not quite an asshole, more of a doggedly perseverant personality
  • a homme fatale, played so incredibly straight
  • bodies piling up as the story progresses

A town in Middle California is one of the most middle-class locations you can think of, not enough city to have an actual underbelly. I might try the B novel just in case, but it's not what I was looking for.

Step three: Marcia Muller and her novel Edwin of the Iron Shoes, with Sharon McCone as the PI

I dropped this novel after just one chapter, as Sharon was a company investigator, not a private one. That's why there were two Paretsky novels on my list.

Step four: Linda Barnes and her novel The Trouble of Fools, with Carlotta Carlyle as the PI

I haven't got to this one yet, but the blurbs look promising.

Step five: G.G. Fickling and their novel This Girl For Hire, with Honey West as the PI

That's definitely not noir, but maybe some sexploitation mystery fiction will help me too? Again, haven't gotten to it yet.

Only books I can think of are the 'Blood' series by Tanya Huff, who's also apparently a lesbian. Or at least married to a woman. It's kinda... noir-ish, maybe. Definitely not a sunny optimistic kind of novel. Protagonist is an up & coming successful detective, gets an incurable eye disease and is relegated to desk work only, so she quits and goes private. It's a urban fantasy, of the 'hidden world' subtype, where supernatural is very lightly present and not acknowledged by the authorities.

Funnily enough, there are some romance elements - e.g. the vampire who's a side character is a historical period romance novelist (easy gig if you lived thru it) , and later on in the series there's a hetero romance subplot.

My approach to my wife's thrillers has always been closer to yours. She's gotten laughing-annoyed enough at me guessing right through raw trope assumptions that I prefer to hold who I'm thinking in until she finishes.

Your genre requirements are pretty tight. A ton of these thrillers have women becoming investigators through necessity or interest instead of being a professional to kick things off. Have you dipped into the wider pool at all, or do you find it insufferable?

Like Gideon the prophet, I don't want to deal with a wide pool.

A recent patch for the video game Victoria 3 has added a mechanic for the creation of "power blocs" by countries that have achieved the rank of "major power". A power bloc can be focused on trade (customs union and open borders), hegemony (the British Empire), ideology (Austria's Metternich System), military (mutual defense), or religion.

In real life, we all know about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union. But did you know that there are many other international organizations of similar nature?

Et cetera.

There's also the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation., recently joined by Belarus. In what was meant to be a nod at NATO designs on Belarus, Chinese sent a couple of transport planes of soldiers to Belarus for a joint anti-terrorism exercise.. .

With One Belt One Road maybe China could supply an army in Europe via Russia. The world is getting smaller.

Trans-siberian railways has been in place for a 100 years. Russians could supply their far-eastern Manchuria offensive pretty handily.

Now there's even an additional track laid through Kazakhstan to Yekaterinburg, and trans-siberian railways has a parallel railway to it going a bit more north to it too..

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