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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2436 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 2, 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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In recent months I've developed something of an obsession with the JFK assassination, but precisely the opposite of how vanishing down a conspiracy rabbit hole usually goes: the more I read about it, the fewer doubts I have that the Warren Commission got it right and Oswald acted alone, and the more convinced I become that the various conspiracy theories advanced are a load of hot air. It's like the mirror image of an infohazard.

As part of this obsession, I recently watched Oliver Stone's film JFK for the first time. As entertainment, it's a very impressive piece of work: a masterpiece of editing, and quite possibly the only film I've seen exceeding three hours which is consistently engaging throughout and whose pacing never flags (the director's cut is 205 minutes and feels like half that, while I was bored out of my mind for the last hour of Oppenheimer despite it being only 180). Including one Randian* monologue in excess of fifteen minutes that never feels boring in your film would be an astonishing achievement in its own right; JFK somehow gets away with two.

But even what little I knew of the facts of the case made me uncomfortably aware that Stone was being extremely economical with the truth, if not including outright fabrications. I watched it for the second time with my girlfriend the other night, and paused it several times to point out one or other detail I knew to be false. I also don't feel the least bit uncomfortable describing it as an aggressively homophobic film: even moreso than Cruising, which gay activists actually tried to shut down while it was in production. (How strange that such an outspoken lefty as Stone wrote and/or directed the most homophobic and the most racist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Express_(film)) films produced in the Hollywood mainstream that I've seen.)

This morning I discovered this gem of a website from 2001 which exhaustively catalogues over a hundred distortions or fabrications in Stone's film (I'm about halfway through it now). The introduction clarifies the nature of the project:

Stone will not be criticized for adding a fictional female Assistant District Attorney to Garrison's staff (an inconsequential nod to 1990s-era sensibilities); or for having the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy occur on the eve of the Clay Shaw trial, when it actually occurred half a year before the trial began (an immaterial distortion for dramatic reasons).

Decisions such as these fall well within the bounds of artistic license. They are not material to the "case" Oliver Stone is arguing; they do not reflect upon the validity of Stone's theories or the guilt or innocence of his suspects. Such techniques as the rearranging of events, the collapsing of time, and the creation of composite characters are not invalid in and of themselves. When utilized solely in the service of telling the story and enhancing its dramatic possibilities, such techniques are perfectly legitimate.

It is when, intentionally or otherwise, such devices serve to mislead the viewer and distort the true nature of events that objection must be taken. That is what this article does.

If you've seen JFK and were at all taken in by any of the factual claims it makes, it's well worth making your way through this list to learn how thoroughly Stone misled the American public. One of the most interesting things I've learned from the website is that JFK was enormously controversial at the time of release, not just among people who accept the orthodox narrative of who killed Kennedy, but even among other JFK truthers. For example, Mark Lane (no stranger to controversy himself, and involved in the writing of the film Executive Action, which likewise alleges a "triangulation of crossfire" planned by the deep state and military-industrial complex), was horrified about how tastelessly the film defamed Clay Shaw (long since dead and unable to defend himself).

*In the sense of duration and tone, not content.

Any thoughts on the “secret service agent accidentally delivered the kill shot” theory? It’s the most interesting one I’ve recently heard.

The evidence that JFK was killed by Oswald's third shot seems so persuasive that I find it very hard to imagine another theory could be more so, but if you have a link that elucidates the Secret Service theory I'd love to read about it.

I love low-res, movement-based, high skill-ceiling PvP games. Something about them is so cozy.

I bet the gamer with the most global audience in the world is this CODM player with the tag br0ken. The poorest parts of the world have phones now, but maybe not a computer for Fortnite or League. Going through his comments is a trip: Brazil, Mexico, Philippines, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, Fiji, Sweden…

The og of that genre is CounterStrike 1.6.... It will never be topped.

I am currently looking at a vending machine that serves chocolate bars called "nut & go". How stingy do you have to be not to have a single person in your marketing department that speaks modern English?

Among the people who catch the double entendre, how many would A) be dissuaded by it vs. B) have it stick in their mind in a neutral or humorous way.

I'm guessing B is more common.

Semi-related: gas station chain Kum & Go is finally rebranding.

Rebranding to Ejaculate & Evacuate?

I am disappointed they didn't have a loyalty program for frequent customers called Kum Guzzlers.

There’s a regional burger chain in the US called In-N-Out (with bible verses printed on their cups and wrappers, so the double entendre is probably not intentional).

Maybe the bar is only part of the transaction and you just missed out on the vending machine experience of a lifetime.

I can easily imagine a marketing guy suggesting it deliberately, to make hip young customers feel like buying this candy is mildly naughty and transgressive.

"Nut" is uncommon slang. Not surprising ESLs, if that is the situation for the marketing team, didn't catch it.

I don't think "nut" is uncommon. It's been in use for at least 15 years. For example, "Bust a Nut" was the name of the energy bar Alpa Chino made that commercial for in Tropic Thunder, which released in 2008. It's not exactly the same usage, but the association is definitely there.

I would not say that "nut" is at all uncommon, but maybe I just hang around degens.

I received 2 red notifications from the bell icon in the upper right, but when I click on them I get no new messages in my inbox or response history. I can't figure out what these notifications are for. Can anyone tell me?

We were rummaging around in the system that tells people about QCs and stuff, and accidentally unleashed a backlog. Millions of Chinese peasants perished in the ensuing mudslides and famines.

(They’re for older notifications.)

Same happened to me, I just clicked “mark all read”

Me too.

IIRC, someone deleted their comment between you loading the page (and seeing the bell) and you loading the next page (and seeing the inbox). EDIT: Nope, see above

"J.D. Vance" or "JD Vance"? We all know about preferred pronouns, but should a person be able to pick his preferred punctuation? The Wall Street Journal discusses the issue.

See also "Donald Trump, Jr.", vs. "Donald Trump Jr.".

According to most standards, yes. Famously a few music artists would deliberately choose something different and unintuitive including capitalization to see if the outlet cared or not.

Just call him by his Christian name: James David Vance Bowman.

Technically his Christian name is James Donald Bowman.

I'd love to see him get trolled on the debate stage about that.

See also Alberta Premier Marlaina Smith bans kids from going by their preferred name:

“Demanding everyone around you call you by a new name one day out of the blue is not a viable option,” said Marlaina Smith, who goes by Danielle.

“We have to respect the given and family names our ancestors carried for generations,” added Premier Kolodnicki.

As an aside, it's interesting how trying to dictate your own nickname is widely considered cringe, whether it be for laymen or celebrities.

See for example, Kevin Durant getting mocked for going with "The Servant" instead of fan nicknames such as "Durantula" or "the Slim Reaper." Of course, online NBA fans quickly turned this into "The Serpent" for him ssslithering into Golden State by way of The Hardest Road. I wonder if there's a large segment of children and teens out there who legitimately think his nickname was "The Serpent" all along.

Vance had to choose his own identity when the institution of patriarchy broke down in his family and failed to give him one. I don’t think it’s cringe, given his life story as portrayed in Hillbilly Elegy.

I can think of two other circumstances treated somewhat seriously by society, beyond legal name changes and brides taking their husbands’ names.

A story trope I heard about, growing up as a GenX kid in America, was how generic Noble Savages would rename themselves following their Trial Of Manhood. I have never heard nor researched this tradition’s provenance in any particular tribe or people, but it was played straight in the Star Trek TOS novel Uhura’s Song.

Then I discovered the Internet and chose a handle or two. This one dates back to finding out My Little Pony had the answers for my autism-based lack of relational instincts.

I don't understand MLP stuff, it is my extreme outgroup, like furries. Is it just being weird for the sake of being weird? Especially strange given the sexualization of kids cartoon ponies.

It’s not for the sake of being weird, it’s in spite of.

Generations X and Y grew up watching quality fantasy adventure comedy ensemble cartoon shows, often from Disney with the exception of Sonic the Hedgehog: Adventures of the Gummi Bears, Duck Tales, Darkwing Duck, Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers, Tale Spin, Goof Troop, The Mighty Ducks, and more. The fandoms of these shows endure because of the care taken with the storytelling and the high production quality. (They also tended to be incubators of furries.)

In 2010, such shows had basically gone extinct. There was the oddball Adventure Time and the “combining robot” adventure show Sym-Bionic Titan, and little else. Then The Hub channel from Hasbro debuted with My Little Pony, and fans of shows like Tale Spin or Sonic the Hedgehog recognized a return to the classic form: a quality fantasy adventure comedy ensemble cartoon show. It was not just fun, it was meaty in how enjoyable it was. Storytelling was back. It was written so parents could watch with their kids and not be secretly wishing to turn it off.

The basic premise is that a top student (nerdy, autism-coded) in an elite prep school gets sent by her mentor to a small Midwestern town to make friends with the local small business women who are vendors for the mentor’s big event: a farmer, an animal caretaker/trainer, a party planner, a dressmaker, and a crop-duster/cloud-seeder who dreams of flying with the national airshow team. They rescue the mentor when her estranged sister kidnaps her. The mentor assigns the student to learn sociology there in the town with her new friends.

Except they’re all technicolor horses (unicorns, pegasi, and “earth ponies”) in a quasi-feudal fantasy realm, the mentor is the princess alicorn (winged unicorn) who raises the sun each day, and 1/3 of the population has reality-warping magic.

And both GenX and the Millennials adored it.

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I spent a fair bit of time in groups ostensibly proximal to the horse show, and never understood the appeal either. Despite absorbing large chunks of the fandom osmotically. Once I started directly interacting with people that had been into it (thanks, VRChat) did I start to see it as part of a broader constellation of "moe shit." If someone was into K-On!, Azumanga Daioh or Dragon Maid, there was a much higher than average chance they had also been into MLP at some point. I don't get moe either. The only useful observation I can provide is that it seems like you either get it, or you don't.

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It never even began for people who go by their middle name.

What about when you're quoting someone who says "Jay Dee Vance"?

You say "James David Bowman."

“Full Metal Alchemist!”

J[ames] D[avid] Vance

I have the mother of all woodworking post cooking, but I'm waiting until all the finish on the final pieces cure and get rubbed out so I can get a really beautiful final shot. Maybe a preview, but 'till then...

I got enormously distracted from the 6th Land&Sea book. The series remains aggressively mediocre. Action that got monotonous 3 books ago, characters it's profoundly difficult to care about at all, and the plot in this one seemed particularly listless despite the synopsis seeming like it should be full of potential. The 5th book, Ratchet's Run was actually closer to good than just mediocre, and I thought the author was hitting his stride with the source material. I keep waiting for it to get good because I'm just embittered towards Catalyst Game Labs and what they've chosen to do to the Battletech community, but I still need a giant stompy robot fix. It may just be a fools errand. Culture is dead and nothing worth enjoying will ever be produced again.

Looking for something else to read, I picked up Huck Finn off the shelf, my wife having unceremoniously left it on my bookshelf after thrifting it, her bookshelf being full. Had to read the first paragraph a few times before my brain finally code switched into Huck Finn's vernacular, but it kicked in eventually. I will say, I was not exactly expecting the profuse use of the word "nigger" that gets dropped every few pages. I knew it was in the book, I'd heard about it. I just didn't expect so much of it. Or for it to be as dark as it is, with his alcoholic father trying to kill him inside the first 40 pages. Still, I'm enjoying it, and I can see why it's an American classic.

I read the first Stackpole X-Wing novel at the beach and thought “yeah, I can see why this guy wrote for Battletech too.” Good stuff. But I haven’t found anything modern that tries to hit the same notes.

I don't know what it is. There is just this style of plucky masculine heroic adventure that is just dead. Even the people today attempting to write it just can't fully jettison the baggage of current year and give us the good stuff. Reading Robert E Howard's Conan lately, and Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter more recently, it's just so clear. That brand of story where the main character, a man, stands obviously head and shoulder above all his peers, masters new lands and cultures, and wins the adoration of all the women around him, it just really struggles these days. Even the people attempting to write it have some sort of latent inhibitions on going full, well I want to say chauvinist because I can't think of any other word. And maybe that's part of the problem of current year. Depicting that sort of unambiguous excellence just can't escape modern pejorative descriptors.

90% of Isekai is exactly this, though. For a while it's fun, but doesn't it get boring fast?

I don't think it's that readers are bored of it, it's that writers are. It's been done before. Writers, good writers anyway, are setting out to create something. Burroughs and Howard already exist, so the only things you get like them are either twists in some way or they're thinly veiled fanfiction.

I'm largely out of the anime loop, although I did watch more Baki lately, and have been pecking at Vinland Saga.

From what very little I've seen of Isekai, the protagonist is usually a loser until he ends up in another world. These are less stories of excellence and more stories of lowering the difficulty setting on life.

There are isekais (in particular the Russian brand) where the protagonist is a more classic masculine archetype (special forces, talented engineer, talented engineer with special forces background etc). Still, it is peculiar that people today rely on this plot device to such an extent to put the excelling protagonist into a setting that he can dominate. It seems that the modern world has been disillusioned of great men. Both in the moral sense and in the extent people believe a great man can make an impact.

This finally explains to me why Patrick Rothfuss hasn't finished The Kingkiller Chronicle. (The first two books definitely exhibit the "chauvanism" you're describing, but book 2 of the trilogy was published in 2011 and there's no signs of book 3 ever coming.)

I recently went on a road trip from Halifax to Boston. I thought an outsider's perspective might be interesting. I've been to the US many times, but haven't been in five years and noticed a few things that I hadn't before, and some older impressions were reinforced. In general, the US is really quite different than Canada in many ways, and you notice it the second you cross the border, starting with the accents.

The first thing I noticed crossing the border into Maine (after the border guard's heavy eastern New England accent) was that the US is clearly a richer country. Almost every car looks new and the houses are in good condition. I didn't see any old run down cars or houses that needed to be painted. I realize this might be because of the particular area of the US I visited, since my train ride from Montreal to New York City six years ago left a very different impression. Upstate New York has a lot of shabby looking buildings.

The second and even more striking difference was the amazing condition of the roads. I hardly encountered a pothole and the ones I did were tiny. In Canada, many of the roads are covered in them, some of them being several years old, even in heavily trafficked areas. In New England, almost all the roads look freshly paved.

The driving habits are very different, even than Quebec, where drivers are a bit crazy. New England drivers are universally quite selfish and aggressive. They never ever let you in if you're trying to change lanes. Even if it seems like you have plenty of time and give them warning, they won't so much as let off the accelerator a little bit to help you out. They often don't even stop for pedestrians even if it means running a red light very late. But they're fairly predictable and even though they all go way over the speed limit, they mostly drive around the same speed and don't do anything too stupid. They don't tailgate as badly as Montrealers or Torontonians do. And they don't honk.

By the way, I like the use of toll roads, but it's a bit ridiculous how many times in Maine you have to come to a complete stop from 70 mph just to pay a human being $1 and then get back up to speed again. How much gas does that use? How much is that person paid?

The next striking thing is the obesity. Nova Scotians are fat, but there seem to be a higher number of Americans who are at an absolutely shocking level of obesity that I've rarely seen in Canada. And there are a lot more really fat young people.

In general, there seems to be a wider distribution of human capital in the US. There are a lot more thin, good looking, highly energetic people, but there are also a lot more who seem to be doing really badly. I saw a beggar who was missing an arm! The homeless people seem more like truly desperate people. There is also more variation in other dimensions. I don't know how to describe it other than to say they have unusual physiognomies, and there are more strange characters doing odd things.

The people are oddly very friendly but somehow without ever smiling or adopting a friendly demeanour. It's almost disturbing how little people smile unless you're their customer, in which case they're extremely extraverted. Everyone walks around with a frown, and we had many encounters with New Englanders who expressed some friendly words that seemed sincere, but without smiling or adopting a happy tone of voice.

The other thing I noticed how is how white New England is. Canada's enormous population of recent immigrants from India (which seems to be about half the population in my neighbourhood) is noticeably absent.

In general, it was a good experience. The food is excellent. Americans have a lot of energy, and many girls in Boston are quite attractive, despite the reputation. Maine is beautiful and Boston is an interesting city, but a bit boring given its size. The traffic is a mess and the subway is really slow. There doesn't seem to be much nightlife.

The US really feels like a rich country. I know there has been some divergence between our two countries in the last few years, and coming from the poorest province, it is noticeable. I should note that the people from my home province are known for their friendliness and for being very laid back, even lazy. The US feels like a much more exciting country with more opportunity, but the people seem inordinately unhappy given their material success. The Uber drivers I've talked to and on this and other trips seem unreasonably negative about their situation - complaining about how much they work - given they've escaped from much poorer countries (Sudan and Haiti).

A friend of mine moved to Boston from Philadelphia and the boredom and lack of nightlife was his only real complaint.

He calls Boston “The City that never Sleeps.”.

Indeed us Americans don’t grasp how rich we are, even the relatively poor among us when compared to the rest of the world. My European coworkers are noticeably poorer and have much less wealth than our US-based employees, working the exact same job and sometimes even lower-ranked. To them, a 100k euro salary is “living like a king” even though it really isn’t and that salary is just about middle class in America these days.

It’s actually odd to me how little their 100k goes in their countries. The average salary is way below, closer to 30-40k, maybe 50k. And yet they still don’t seem to meaningfully be able to stay ahead of the curve and create wealth. It strikes me that a lot of this is due to the tremendous amount of old people that are living high on the hog with generous government assistance (and the required taxes), or maybe just tons of competition for prime European real estate with global capital? I can’t seem to find a definitive answer, it’s odd to me that if you’re making 3x the average salary you’re not able to put a lot away in wealth. That should persist even after taxes, which really are not much worse than VHCOL cities in the US these days.

Yeah, 100k euros would be a very high salary here. I don't know many people earning that much, especially not in Nova Scotia. Despite that, our cost of living and our taxes are very high. To earn that much, you'd have to either be a specialist in medicine, one of the more highly paid university professors, or a very successful lawyer. In other parts of the country, the salaries are a bit higher and you can also make a lot in the trades.

One reason it's hard to get ahead is probably that the economy is set up to favour old people. It's a problem here and it's probably worse in Europe. The population in my city is exploding and rents are insane. But there has been an emergency rent cap since Covid and so people with new leases are paying way more than people who have lived in their apartments since before covid. So a huge share of your salary goes towards rent and income taxes.

Something else I noticed in Boston when I was Bumble was that so many young women around 30 years old had fancy titles and seemed to have really good careers. I think old people here don't like to give people opportunities, or maybe they just don't exist. Most young people leave after they graduate.

The problem isn't demand for real estate, it's the limitations on the supply which are unnecessary and should be disposed of.

The issues with housing exist with or without competition from international capital. The issue is the combination lack of construction with massive credit expansion.

This has mostly benefited older people but that wealth is now starting to trickle down so it's more looking like big city house owning natives Vs everyone else division where the former have been handed an immense pile of wealth the last 30 years or so for no reason at all. Unless you're part of the housing owning class it's incredibly hard to compensate with a high salary (especially given the compressed wage distribution) but if you are, even a low salary is enough to live very well on.

I have noticed this as well. It is literally crazy! If you have a normal USA wage you're a king in Spain.

I haven't been to Boston in years. I used to take the Amtrak there from DC once a year for PAX East, and it was extremely depressing. Passing through Baltimore, all you see are the ruins of brownstones as far as the eye can see. At some point, I think north of New York, it's more ruins along a bunch of eroded shoreline that comes almost up to the rail tracks. A few mostly abandoned and hollowed out downtowns (and this was pre COVID) at various Amtrak stops along the way in small and dying towns. Then finally you get to Boston, and it's pretty nice. I do remember seeing a bit of nightlife along the street I took back to my hotel from the convention center. Lots of pretty girls in itty bitty dresses in near freezing temperatures. At one point I took a shortcut down a side street and ended up near some strip clubs while a hobo began accosting us for a light and then money. Then they followed us for 3 blocks ranting and raving while we tried to ignore him and avoid eye contact.

At one point we did the whole "Freedom Tour" I think it was called, where you visit a bunch of famous Bostonian's houses from the Revolutionary period and walk up the Bunker Hill monument. That was fun. It was also fun visiting the Sam Adams Brewery, and trying everything they cook up. Highly recommend it.

The areas we went to, including Boston had a lot of tourists, which might have skewed things. There were lots of licence plates from all over New England, plus Quebec, New York, and a surprising number from Texas. And lots of racks and trailers. Maine obviously benefits enormously from being so close to the Northeastern US, otherwise I think its economy would be a lot more like ours. Every trip I've made to New England has been short and I hope to be able to explore more in the future. Everything is very expensive though.

Apparently, brothels are legal in (most of) Australia—and they are, not equivalent to the paltry brothels of rural Nevada, but a real competitive market. In theory they aren't permitted to advertise, but in practice enforcement is lax, and the establishments think nothing of touting their zillions of jade-like beauties online.

I didn’t expect almost every single girl to be Asian. I guess it’s just not something Australians do much and Eastern Europe is too far away.

AFAIK in Western European countries where prostitution is legal (and many where it isn’t) native women in sex work typically run their own accounts or work through an agency rather than a ‘traditional’ pimp. Also, Australia is one of the richest countries in the world, it’s possible that the locals are just outcompeted by these immigrant women to the point that other than a few Instagram escort types it’s not really a viable business vs getting a ‘regular’ service / low skill / etc job.

It helps being a big, rich island.

I did a deep dive into Germany's handling of prostitution once. Specifically, the legendary Pasha brothel. The crux of the issue is that it becomes really, really hard to differentiate between actually self-motivated legal prostitution and coerced human trafficking without getting into constant surveillance of the prostitutes themselves. It would be impossible in the U.S. with our privacy laws.

As I remember it, German cops would come into the Pasha brothel from time to time and check on all of the compliance features (paperwork, record keeping, and STI screening etc.) Then, they'd ask each girl a series of questions along the lines of "are you here of your own accord and do you want to keep doing this?" The problem is that a scared girl being trafficked from eastern europe has no problem lying to the German cops, but a big problem telling the truth, missing a check-in with her pimp, and possibly risking not only her physical safety, but potentially repercussions to her family back home. It's that last part that kept a lot of girls from telling the cops the truth and then hoping for some level of state protection.

Cross-border arbitrage of prostitution laws give up the real situation - which is human trafficking. Australia can manage this much better because of its island status and, therefore, the upfront cost of trafficking in prostitutes is so much higher that it dissuades the activity. I also think that the Wild West situation of prostitution in the global neighborhood - Thailand etc. - creates some interesting market dynamics.

I'm anti-prostitution (legal or otherwise) but also acknowledge its impossible to eradicate without, as mentioned before, something like omni-surveilance. Still, I don't buy into the argument of harm-reduction. Exploitation of the person and the physical body is bad all the way around and I don't think you can make something immoral "diet-immoral" with some extra bureaucracy behind it.

I do take a silver lining comfort in the fact that places like Australia, Canada, and some European countries create those weird legal situations where it's illegal to buy/solicit/advertise even if its close to never enforced (I feel like that's the situation in France?). It's still a clear signal that, "hey, this isn't a great thing to do."

I think Australia did pretty well with legalisation. Tax the industry, regulate it, mandate regular STI screening. Eliminate pimps and get girls off the streets to reduce human trafficking. Pragmatic.

Special Dragon Tendon 抓龙筋 & Prostate Massage

I'm almost afraid to ask where the special dragon tendon is.

In your penis, obviously.

Last I checked they were available online. [NSFW, obviously.]

If you have to ask, you can't afford it

It is now Saturday morning here, but inspired by @clo , @AsTheDominoesFall , and @hydroacetylene I decided to go for it and try making gumbo again last night, Friday evening.

Usually I am what is in Japan called a "kitchen drinker" and imbibe a nice glass of red or a beer or whatever I can get my grubby hands on while chopping my celery, but this time I settled for this. I only recommend it for the hard-core who do not care what they are pouring down their gullet as long as it seems remotely related to beer (I was in that category as I made the gumbo).

I started, as one does, with a roux of flour and oil. It started like this.. I may have had the heat up too high (it was on the small burner as low as it would go) but I got distracted and the roux burned and I had to scrap it. Undaunted I began again. The new roux looked like this when I considered putting in the trinity which in my case also contained garlic, but I avoided the temptation, mainly because my gumbo is never dark enough. I kept stirring. It eventually looked like this..

You may notice the portion is small. That is for two reasons. 1) I was not sure of success. 2) I am enculturated thoroughly to Japan and thus I think small when it comes to portion sizes. I held off until the roux was darker, ultimately like this though it was darker in reality than this photo shows.

Too much going on for me to take photos of other phases, but I added sausage (unfortunately this means the small, ubiquitous and not that tasty Japanese ソーセージ, shrimp, laurel leaf, and all this..

What I did not add is Tabasco, as although I like Tabasco it makes everything taste like itself. I ate a smallish portion over rice with the actual dinner. It wasn't bad though I expect both the users mentioned above and probably I can do better in the future.

Advice welcome.

You can go a bit darker if you're gutsy - I now use the heat-your-oil-until-spitting-hot and then dump in flour speed method instead of the slow one, although there's no difference except a saving of time. Add trinity to roux when the roux is dark enough, it'll hiss and sizzle and bring down the temp so let that go for a bit BEFORE adding garlic (garlic can burn quite easily).

Spring for the good stock, you can get some good chicken stock that isn't garbage at reasonable prices these days. Tabasco is slightly worthwhile as a finishing agent for the slight acid kick that really livens up the dish, you can use any other hot sauce with a vinegary component. Spices, you can use some prepackaged cajun stuff if you're cheap but it's just garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, cayenne, thyme and oregano in various ratios. Salt and pepper are musts.

I tend to keep my land and my sea a bit separate, for seafood based gumbo I add a can of crushed tomatoes. For chicken and sausage I dump in some amber ale before adding the rest of my stock. If you're lazy look out for the cooked food aisle at supermarkets, premade discount rotisserie chicken or turkey wings work a treat. I've occasionally used even the packaged smoked duck breasts you can get at Japanese or Asian supermarkets after trimming the skin a bit.

You will get a grease slick after long cooking, skim it if you want but don't skim all of it. If you're truly frugal you can save what you skim off for some other cooking, it's delicious and will work in other savory dishes fine. One thing I used to do is use some of it to stir-fry my okra a bit before adding.

Pour a dark beer into the roux when it's done and before you add the trinity. Stir it all together and add stock(I'm sure Japan has at least good fish stock) into a gravy before adding water. That's the stage where I would drop in bay leaves, dried cayenne peppers, salt and pepper, chicken and sausage(shrimp goes later), etc.

Just looking at the gumbo I'd guess it didn't simmer quite long enough, but it certainly looks like you got something reasonably authentic.

Wouldn't doing it in this order get in the way of getting any caramelization/Maillard reaction in the vegetables, which you'd generally want to offset the bitter flavours?

I have made gumbo fairly successfully several times by following this guy's recipe. Getting the right kind of coarse and dense sausage is probably difficult in Japan, but there should be good chicken stock?

My grandparents never caramelized the vegetables in their gumbo, the long cooking times broke them down. And usually they used roux from a can and mixed it with some stock/water/beer before adding the veggies anyways, although I make my own roux and do roux-beer-enough stock to keep from burning-vegetables-rest of the stock-protein and seasonings.

Thank you! Yes I was expecting a comment on simmer time. I was on the clock and served it far too early. Still there is still a cup or two left for today so maybe I'll cook it down a bit more.

Euros of The Motte, what could be more fun than effecting real life change? You should sign this ballot initiative in the hopes that less live service games get killed by publishers that don't care once they drop support. (And get all your friends, family, and acquaintances to sign it too.)

If that's not fun enough, I guess this can be a thread where you can list your favorite MMOs or other live service games. I know @self_made_human likes Tarkov, very rational because it might be the best and most unique of its kind. Once there was a game called Fallen Earth that was pretty cool, but I think it died ages ago. I also used to play Lord of the Rings Online a lot, but I'd rather drive around the map in a car than actually play the game. There should be another initiative to just release the maps so that someone can port them to Unity or something and do whatever the hell they want with them.

A game developer has delivered an interesting rebuttal video.

Why shouldn't we have the right to the server binaries so we can keep playing these games?

Are you going to allow monetization of these servers or not?

If we don't allow monetization - Who would be the party that enforces non-monetization of that server?

If it's the government I feel like we're making an insane amount of red tape.

If it's the original company then this doesn't work if they shut down.

If we don't allow monetization - Who is going to pay for the hosting if the servers cannot be monetized?

If they cannot be monetized then these servers will also eventually shut down due to cost.

We don't up preserving games like this we just shift their death down the road.

If we do allow monetization - This leads to a really weird attack potential if people can monetize the servers.

  • You make an awesome game that has a small community.
  • I want to monetize that game and run my own servers.
  • I create a shitload of bots and constant exploits to erode the game and your business.
  • Your business closes and now I can monetize your work without anyone stopping me.

This isn't unlikely as we've seen mass attacks such as with TF2.

We actually see echoes of this in the mobile market already as well.

The only defense right now is DMCA or other takedown measures.

Devs legitimately have very little protections as-is and this would erode that further.

This creates an incentive for abuse where the abuser is protected as they are within their legal right to operate said "abandoned" games servers.

@cjet79

Looks like Ross saw it and responded, but it got deleted somehow. https://x.com/accursedfarms/status/1820776020074512657

cjet raised some pretty good points if you ask me -- third party dependencies could really trip things up. And then you never know what the legislators really are going to pass. They don't understand technology in pretty much any circumstance, so that could easily go badly. But monetization doesn't strike me as a real big concern. What do companies do already for, say, Club Penguin Rewritten, or private WoW or Runescape server? I would lean towards not allowing monetization (or rather, allowing companies to set rules for private servers beyond you-can't-have-private-servers), but also, the companies shut the servers down themselves. I can't really feel too bad for them if they see someone making money on a product they killed on purpose. As for who pays for it, that's up to the consumers. If it dies, that's on them; they can resurrect it later, anyway, if the software is out there. You don't need a huge server infrastructure to run single player Tarkov. You just launch a server locally and connect to it. Probably going to be more complicated for a lot of games, but it isn't always.

Moreover, if devs see themselves getting screwed by the EU for releasing games that they kill later, maybe they'll be a little more careful about making games and then killing them for no reason. The Crew is a great example. There is absolutely no good reason that that game is dead right now, since it had no online capabilities to speak of if I'm not mistaken, except to check that you have the game legitimately. If you know from the outset that this legislation requires you to have a game that functions after a decade, you will write the software differently. Maybe you'll whip together some single player mode. Maybe you'll write it to be more server agnostic. Mostly it's AAA companies that sell live service games and MMOs. They can think of something. Or they can stop making games they will kill. Or stop selling in the EU.

Serious question: does Europe understand that regulations have costs?

I swear they come up with new consumer protection or worker protection laws all the time that make me think "I'm not sure those tradeoffs sound remotely worth it".

Here my immediate thought is: that is really going to discourage releasing MMO type games in Europe.

Sure I get that digital lockouts are annoying and this will likely work to prevent those (I generally choose to never buy those games in the first place).

But what is the cost of keeping all types of games running and in a playable state? Does that playable state require ongoing updates based on operating system or hardware changes? Does that playable state require servers that host large Gameworld to be permanently online? What happens if there is a severe outage with servers, are Euro regulators gonna start prosecuting if a game is offline for too long?

Lot of uncertainty, plus Europe tends to set fines at ruinously expensive levels. Usually millions of dollars or percentages of global revenue, whichever is higher.

Serious question: does Europe understand that regulations have costs?

European Union treats regulation like great adventure rather than necessary evil.

plus Europe tends to set fines at ruinously expensive levels

This one makes sense if you want regulation to be enforced. Alternatives are fining Microsoft less than they earn in one second.

You misunderstand. Because Europe doesn’t have or want a significant domestic tech industry, it’s just another tax on foreign companies doing business in Europe. As such, the average European won’t perceive themselves as negatively affected, because “what are they going to do, stop doing business in Europe?”

For indie games, ya absolutely they'll stop doing business once a few of them get burned.

I think it’s just a question of regulations not having had serious consequences for most people (in Europe and elsewhere).

Fortunately, though, the Americans don’t seem to be too fond of Euro-taxes, so as long as you don’t set foot in Europe or open non-Swiss bank accounts…

Most regulations don't have obvious effects. But the cumulative effects are glaring. The living standards in Europe are lower than most US states. They have a permanent unemployment rate that is about double the US. European citizens that manage to move to the US can immediately get large increases in their effective base salaries. In addition to enjoying lower tax rates.

Most regulations don't have obvious effects. But the cumulative effects are glaring. The living standards in Europe are lower than most US states. They have a permanent unemployment rate that is about double the US. European citizens that manage to move to the US can immediately get large increases in their effective base salaries. In addition to enjoying lower tax rates.

note that (over)regulation is not the only thing causing such results

I would bet on over regulation being most of the cause of the unemployment rates. General over regulation for many decades slowing down their economy to make them overall poorer. And a generous welfare state for the high taxes.

"most" is likely overstating things unless you count taxes as part of regulations. There are also other reasons.

40% for regulation, 30% for taxes, 30% for literally everything else is likely still giving too much credit for regulation.

More comments

Ah, I forgot to link the associated movement, Stop Killing Games started by Ross Scott of Freeman's Mind fame. The campaign isn't about forcing companies to continue running MMOs forever. It's about forcing them to release the server software for users to run themselves, or some other patch of their choosing that lets users continue playing the game instead of just unceremoniously killing the game. Forcing them to run it forever would be pretty short sighted. As for the specific details, I don't know that anyone knows what that's going to be, because I don't know that it's up to the citizens what the actual regulation passed will be, if there is any. But frankly these are not big asks. I doubt it will do much against the MMO industry.

Also, since this is a campaign being pushed by an American in basically any venue he can get, I don't think you can say this is a case of Europe not understanding regulations have costs.

I generally agree with the effort to preserve games. If you also agree I think you should do the following things:

  1. Buy games from companies with a reputation for preserving or releasing games. Bethesda open sources their games after some amount of decades.
  2. Don't buy games from companies that have a reputation for locking them or destroying them after some period. Review bomb any games that get locked.
  3. Go on patreon or other crowdfunding sites to pay money towards people that preserve games.

The thing is I strongly doubt legislation is going to get them what they want.

There are a few paths this goes down:

It immediately starts too harsh and too broad. Gaming market in Europe is generally destroyed except for the largest games. No one else can afford the compliance or lawyers for what is already a hard market to serve (non-english translations for small player base). It never gets fixed because gamers aren't a strong enough political entity, and mostly it just enshitified the market, so it screws over niche gamers in niche markets. And everyone else thinks it worked and any attempt to reverse it will be an uphill battle.

It starts too narrowly. The rules are easily dodged. This could be like some exception written for MMOs and then every game puts in a dumb feature that allows them to be an MMO by whatever standards the law has laid out.

It stays too narrow and continues to do nothing or it gets expanded into the first scenario.

At no point do I think the EU will be "too lenient". They'll use their regular fee structure which is % of global revenue or instantly crippling payments for a small business. Not that the size of the punishment for small businesses will ever matter. The legal hassle alone won't be worth it.

I'm also surprised from a programmer/coding perspective. Surely this guy must know what it's like messing with old code? Maybe I'm super ignorant or an absolutely shitty coder. But I'd say it's almost an order of magnitude harder to write code that can work in two decades then it is to just write code that works for two years.

I'm also pretty certain that any games with live services and large companies might be a mess of dependencies on external proprietary 3rd parties. Say a game company works with a hosting company for the online aspects of their game. The hosting company does a bunch of optimizations for the game company as both a service and lock in effect with that game company. The game is nearly unplayable without these improvements from the hosting company.

I basically see most programs that work for ten years as minor miracles. I'd compare them to buildings, but that they age way faster. A ten year old software program that does a significant amount is like a large fifty year old building. Probably with similar maintenance costs. The parts are no longer standard. The people that built it have long moved on. No one would build it the same way if they started today. And while the structure is still sturdy and fine, all the piping and internals that move stuff around is really starting to show it's age. If it wasn't built to last this long then its probably getting to the point where you could tear it all down and build it from scratch for cheaper.

If you aren't a programmer you are probably rolling your eyes and thinking "how does software wear out faster than copper piping". And I'm shouting "it's the demons!" with a crazed look in my eyes, cuz I don't fuckin know how it happens. Better people than me have written about how programming sucks.

The people at valve are top level geniuses in their field and they've written stuff that is still chugging along as some of the best modding software 20 years later. Maybe this petitioner got their start on valve related stuff, so my best explanation for him is that he is super spoiled. But if you wrote the perfect law that basically said "be like valve" it would still basically destroy the gaming industry, because no one can meet that standard. (Unless the valve devs released some super amazing software to make it easier for everyone, and they probably would if it meant saving Steam).

Sorry that rant got way longer than expected, also typed it on my phone, so it might have more spelling and grammar mistakes.

And I'm shouting "it's the demons!" with a crazed look in my eyes, cuz I don't fuckin know how it happens.

I shout "it's the demons!" all the time because that's the traditional example of how it happens.

A coworker writes code with Undefined Behavior. I point out that the C or C++ standard says the compiler is now allowed to let their executable do anything, including make demons fly out their nose. They point out that their code passed a couple tests. I point out that the nasal demons are actually still a best case scenario, because "anything" also includes "passing tests selectively or temporarily".

The worst case scenario is also a typical scenario: the UB works at first, but then in a couple months or years someone uses a different CPU type, or a linker goes to a different object file first, or a compiler gets a more aggressive optimizer, or an updated library leaves the heap in a different state, or a different thread starts winning races, etc. and then the code starts obviously breaking, out in the wild, where if we're lucky it is now crashing and making users scream at us or if we're unlucky it is just producing silently corrupted results, and where in either case the original concern has long been forgotten and the debugging will have to rediscover it from scratch.

And one might read that and smugly think "so don't use C/C++", but they're actually much better about UB than most dependencies. UB in C++ is "you wrote code clearly described as UB in a 300 page standards doc", but in most libraries it's "the API and the scraps of documentation said you needed to do 'X' but the developer really meant you needed 'W,X,Z' and if you did 'W,X,Y' instead you'll start breaking after the update next July, which you can't avoid because it's the only bugfix for a corner case your users started hitting in May"!

(I try to explain this without getting a crazed look in my eyes; success rates vary.)

As an example, I'd point to City of Heroes as kinda a best-case scenario: an employee of the studio operators for an MMO leaked pretty much everything (source code, development tools, even player data!), the code ended up being relatively drag-and-drop for standard off-the-shelf desktop machines (modulo a pretty steep RAM cost even by the standards of 2020), and the dependency list wasn't that bad while the paid dependencies were scaling up their free versions rapidly.

((And, bluntly, NCSoft pissed off almost every single person at Paragon Studios, in ways that they were quite willing to hurt NCSoft for so long as they couldn't get sued over it.))

But it still had people working on it had to do a ton of tweaking work, either to get it to run even moderately stably without dedicated staff, to update the client to handle arbitrary server addresses, and a decent amount of other black magic that SCORE wasn't talking about publicly. And it is a best-case scenario, without much in the way of middleware, jealously protected internal code for other competing products, or obnoxious infrastructure asks. If rather than free(ish) MS-SQLExpress it'd been some weird solidDB bullshit, or if the instances required some goofy mess of microservices as a minisharding behavior? What if some code dependency had license that couldn't be passed to users or resold?

By contrast, take Glitch. Not only were its assets in a much more complicated state given the development of the game, it depended on Adobe Flash. Some of it was open-sourced, surprisingly, but even before the death of Flash and ActionScript it wasn't anywhere near usable; now, much if it's barely useful. Even had every single part of the game leaked, it'd be a significant project to convert. ((And then OddGiants moved to Unity, right before the license rework.))

In practice, this puts really strong pressures toward either leaving MMOs in maintenance mode forever, breaking them off into other companies that go completely can't-punish-us bankrupt, or not releasing anything but what their investors are absolutely sure will be a forever hit. Maybe that's worth it, or there are ways to reduce these pressures by careful framing of the regulation.

But I'm not optimistic, and too many responses just feel like kicking the can down the road under the assumption someone will fix them, or make them not count.

I had close to zero knowledge of game preservation efforts, but what you describe is exactly what I would expect given my history in software.

Buy games from companies with a reputation for preserving or releasing games. Bethesda open sources their games after some amount of decades.

Huh? What games did they open source?

Search engines suck nowadays. Can't find source. Chatgpt agrees with me that they've released source code for TES 2, 3, and 4. I think they do so after they drop all support for the game.

If TES3 refers to OpenMW, that's not Bethesda opensourcing their game, that's a bunch if fanatics rewriting the game from scratch, after reverse-engineering the game's data files. If the other TES games have their own FOSS versions, I expect them to have come about the same way, rather than being released by Bethesda.

Big studios releasing their code happens, but is very rare.

Ya I got a few things mixed up. Bethesda released Arena and TES 2 as freeware, and I must have mixed that up with hearing about the open source projects for Morrowind and Oblivion.

Serious question: does Europe understand that regulations have costs?

No, it does not.

Any alternate hypothesis has less explanation power.

Yes, government is bad. But, as I understand it, Accursed Farms does not want to force the publisher to maintain the servers forever. Rather, he wants to force the publisher to make it possible for players to set up their own servers after the publisher's servers are shut down.

Quote from the petition:

An increasing number of publishers are selling videogames that are required to connect through the internet to the game publisher, or "phone home" to function. While this is not a problem in itself, when support ends for these types of games, very often publishers simply sever the connection necessary for the game to function, proceed to destroy all working copies of the game, and implement extensive measures to prevent the customer from repairing the game in any way.

"Repairing the game" includes setting up non-publisher-controlled servers.

I have generally two brains when thinking about policy. One is my libertarian brain that does indeed say "government is bad". But the other is my economics degree brain that mostly screams about tradeoffs, and tells my libertarian brain that some forms of "government bad" are worth it for the product they provide.

My libertarian brain is mostly not concerned with places where I don't live. In fact, if they have an awful government it can serve as an example of what not to do where I live.

My economics brain is still bothered though.

The existence of regulation can create tradeoffs but there is also sets of tradeoffs within regulations.

The rules can be clearly written and fail to cover all edge cases. Or the rules can be vaguely written and operate on vibes and feels at a court level.

Large entities mostly don't go for vibes. It rightfully scares the crap out of everyone, cuz outside of small communities vibes are not very legible.

So they've got to get super detailed legislation written by bureaucrats in Brussels that will somehow appropriately understand different game type and business models. And then craft a set of tradeoffs in the legislation that make the specific practice they don't like unprofitable.

It's a tight needle to thread. And my previous experience with EU legislation doesn't make me hopeful. They've added a minor annoyance to literally every website I visit with those annoying cookie popups. They've had like a decade to correct that ... and yet I still get the stupid popups.

And cookie tracking on websites is way simpler than any individual game preservation effort.

Given what happened with the EU cookie warning law, I feel like signing this would be one of those 'be careful what you wish for' things.

Can't meaningfully sign, since not a Euro, but good luck. The collapse of online-dependent software has a lot of legal stuff that makes it understandable, but it's absolutely wrecked a lot of archivist spheres, and in many cases even when stuff leaks, it's still impossible to go home again.

I've not followed it much, but Fallen Earth's apparently still online somehow, though the servers and maintainers have been replaced a few times and spent a few years dead. Was an interesting idea when it came out, but trying to straddle survival gaming on one side and the time-gates of Runecrafts on the other was more compelling as a sell than it was to play in early release.

((I'm still amazed that Tabula Rasa is the deadest MMO I've ever played, given some of the absolute stinkers, but given the circumstances, maybe that's not that much of a surprise. And Glitch and Skysaga only avoid giving Tabula Rasa a run for its money only because of weird fan projects that aren't likely to go anywhere productive anytime soon.))

Cries in Brexit

Now Tarkov, that's a game I can both recommend and also strongly advise people stay clear of. It's such a mixed bag, the highs are incredible, but damn, the devs can stoop low. Talking abandoning the megatransaction P2W "all future DLCs included" $150 version (that I own) in favor of a new $250 version that pinkie promises to provide all the DLC this time, while being so P2W it goes from annoying to farcical. Sadly none of the alternatives are quite as hard core, though I'm still harboring hopes in Gray Zone Warfare and Arena Breakout.

Someone, somewhere, will make a solid gritty extraction shooter, who knows, it might be the next Arma mod. And my sleep cycle is going to suffer for it.

Besides, the Tarkov devs are assholes who do their best to do fraudulent takedowns of content featuring an entirely legal mod for their game that lets you enjoy it in singleplayer, to piss on the digital preservation parade.

I will leave for Chiang Mai this Monday instead of last Sunday since my co-founder fell sick. I am still a ball of anxiety and feel that I am room temperature IQ, but it is what it is. I will carry some books and watch PCB design lectures on the flight.

My Sunday was spent in Delhi. One of my relative’s wives has stage 4 cancer, and it was heartbreaking to see her condition and how her family felt. The economic impacts are very severe too. I was there for about 10 hours, spent some time in the hospital, and then with a friend.

Recently, I saw some videos on the YouTube channel Academy of Ideas. I want to try a meditation retreat or live alone without social interactions or texting, as Carl Jung did for a few days in Bollingen Tower. Being on screens and constantly communicating with people is very draining. I mostly use social media for sex and fear of missing out, but I honestly think I would find a retreat fun.

On a positive note, I read a post by Scott Alexander about ADHD. It turns out my issues are real, and many find help in methamphetamines, with Desoxyn being the name of the pill.

I also watched the fights last weekend. Allen and Aspinall are great talents.

Vipassana has 'pay it forward' 'free' 10 day meditation retreats around the world. I've been on a couple in my life and found them very rewarding. You basically vow to follow Buddhist precepts for the retreat including: Vow of silence, no eye contact, vegan diet, harm no-one (try not to step on ants etc), and living to a regimented schedule of meditation, eating, sleeping. I found it very rewarding and definitely noticed how the modern lifestyle impacts you after resetting myself back to lifestyle homeostasis.

Yeah, I feel better today. I should start meditating daily. Dont think I can for a retreat for the next few months but this si something I would love!

It turns out my issues are real, and many find help in methamphetamines, with Desoxyn being the name of the pill.

You're shit outta luck. Methylphenidate, modafinil, atomoxetine and clonidine are the only stimulants for ADHD available in India. I've used several, and only methylphenidate worked (while still feeling terrible). Thankfully the UK does have desoxyn, and I look forward to trying it.

Yeah lol. Regardless I will do my best to recover asap, be super productive and do well in my startup. Every day I wish to move to the US even more lol.

People of the Motte, I am engaged to be married. AMA I guess. Reaching this state was a surprisingly long journey - I'll be 35 on wedding day. I have been dating off and on since I was 18, and at that time I never would have imagined that I'd still be playing the game 15+ years later. Glad to be finally be checking out, hopefully for good.

I can't help but wonder how checking Culture War Roundup threads every day for the last 10 or so years, may have contributed to my ultimate change from rootless, callow 20-something to homeowning family-seeker. This was previously a classic path that people tended to follow, but relatively few of my peers ended up following it. I often wonder if being a SSCer/Mottizen has actually been a good thing for me, or whether I'd have been better off never knowing about the things we discuss here. Nevertheless, though you do not know me, there are many of you to whom I'd send a wedding invitation if I thought we had room for it; and indeed it will be an interesting culture war occasion to observe, as many blue tribe + red tribe friends and family will meet for the first time. But of course on the day, I'm going to really try not to think of it in those terms lol.

Anyway, as far as Friday Fun: my fiancée and I have been doing jigsaw puzzles lately, while listening to the "oldies" station on AM radio. I think for many people, if you see this activity on a list of activities to do, your eyes may pass right over it - it seems so boring that it doesn't merit serious consideration. But seriously, it's actually really satisfying when you get the whole border put together, or when you get on a roll with a big section of the puzzle. Are jigsaw puzzles what they call "lindy"? In any case, I realized there must be a reason why they continue to sell jigsaw puzzles in every Target, Wal-Mart, Meijer, Big Lots etc. in America. Consider giving it a try if you want to do something easy and analog for a while, as a nice little break from technological recreation.

How did you meet? How have your expectations for a partner changed over the years and across relationships? Do you have any regrets that you learned from or might be generalizable?

How did you meet?

She started a Meetup.com group dedicated to following the local baseball team. I went to the first meeting, and she and I got along right away. We started talking outside the Meetups, and after a few weeks I asked her if she wanted to go to the baseball team's Hall of Fame with me. From there we just kept doing stuff together; when I "asked her out" it wasn't really a big transition in our lifestyle by that point.

How have your expectations for a partner changed over the years and across relationships?

Let me share something which is kind of embarrassing now, but to which I bet many men can relate. When I was in my teens and early 20s, I actually described my dating behavior to my male friends as a "quest to gain XP." That is to say: the only criteria I set in those days was 1.) looks okay 2.) is willing to date me. This is a daft way of living your life, to be honest. I certainly did date many kinds of women: a schoolteacher, a college professor, a pediatrician, a hairdresser, etc., etc.

In hindsight, I know that I was just doing this for validation. I was a very ugly, awkward kid until I finished puberty, and it took me an extremely long time to develop inner confidence. As a result, I was dating without actually assessing my partners for any kind of suitability for long-term relationships. I just wanted physical affection, and to be continually told I great I was. I did get those things, and unsurprisingly, it did not make my life any better, and left me wondering what the point of it all was. Meanwhile, I created all kinds of false expectations in my girlfriends, which would inevitably be disappointed after I had wasted much of their time.

It was in 2020 that I had this realization fully, and at that time I stopped dating entirely; I realized that I needed to make a decision about what I was trying to accomplish, and to stop causing unnecessary pain to other people. So I concluded that I did want to get married, I did want to start a family, and that I needed to focus on cultivating the characteristics in myself that would lead to success in these endeavors, and to find a partner who had them as well: emotional stability, the capacity to love strongly, honesty, high time preference, and so on.

I repent greatly of the way I handled dating in the past. It simply added to the amount of misery in the world. I wish I had known better.

Do you have any regrets that you learned from or might be generalizable?

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” - Sun Tzu In the past I learned tactics about dating - about how to be charming, about how to make people like you, etc. I had no strategy: I had no goal, and so there was no way the relationships could go anywhere. It feels like a big waste of time, and while one might say, "You learned something and so it wasn't time wasted," I am cognizant of the fact that by being married at 35 instead of 25, it's 10 less years I can enjoy married life.

If I had had a plan to begin with - I did date some excellent women with whom I might have built excellent lives. Those opportunities are now gone. I love my fiancée, but people should be aware of the "secretary problem." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

It's fine to date for fun. I don't have an issue with doing that. I would recommend anyone who is young, though, to start thinking about the big picture of their life as soon as they can conceive of it. I do, honestly, wish I had done that.

Congratulations! Must be exciting.

As to the AMA:

Are the two of you planning on having children (and if so, do you have to worry much about having time)?

What's one thing you especially appreciate about your fiancée?

I mildly dislike puzzles (I think?) because if one's in progress I'll do it compulsively instead of the other things I'd like to do. The ratio of impulse to do it vs fun had is too high.

It is simultaneously exciting and exhausting. I am excited to finally give up bachelordom, and I am excited about my fiancee; the main thing I worry about there is that any time we spend together feels too short, and so it could have the effect of making my entire life feel much shorter than it otherwise would have.

Are the two of you planning on having children (and if so, do you have to worry much about having time)?

We are, and I do worry a bit. On wedding day, I'll be 35 and she'll be 31. She and I both lament to some degree that we didn't meet earlier in our lives; and I do think that if I had my whole life to live over again, I'd have certainly preferred to get married much younger than I actually am doing. I just didn't know any better - I nearly learned it all too late. So she and I both have the attitude of: we'll take what we can get, and be grateful for it. Ironically, from a culture war perspective, the issue of the "fertility crisis" is perhaps my biggest pet issue - I even wrote essays about it college, a long time ago now. I wish I could raise 8 children, but to some extent I'm paying for the folly of my youth, I guess - perhaps every one less child I can have, is punishment for one heart I broke or something, lol.

If we can get to three I'll be ecstatic. Frankly if we even get to one, I'll be ecstatic; I take nothing for granted in this.

What's one thing you especially appreciate about your fiancée?

Ayn Rand would not approve, I know, but she is remarkably selfless. The wellbeing of her inner circle of family is her first priority, and this is apparent in everything she says and does. I have known lots of people who say things like this, but very few who actually act accordingly. I think she'd probably be too clumsy or slow on the draw to actually take a bullet for me, but I think she really would try.

She is also an optimist to almost a Pollyanna extreme. It can be a bit frustrating at times, but in general it's a great complement to my occasionally Nybbler-esque cynicism.

Puzzles

I do know what you mean. Lately that's been me and the Chess.com app, lol. I spent so much of a beautiful day yesterday, trying to get one more win. At least with the puzzle I have going right now, I know I'm supposed to wait until she and I do it together.

Well, I'm delighted for you!

Congratulations!

Congrats!

I was reflecting a bit on how amazing marrying well is to your quality of life last night. We had dinner with a fellow parenting couple - the husband is an excellent friend, a commiserate nerd and hobby-sharer, and is one of the few people aligned with me politically. Extremely intelligent, wouldn't be out of place here. His Wife is a kind, funny person. Great mom, extremely easy to talk to. The whole night was really fun. They're in overall a marriage id consider happier than average.

And yet my wife and I had to vent a bit afterwards at the cracks we can see in their relationship. He's just far too stubborn and snappy, a bit too annoyed at "irrationality" or mistakes. They've been together so long that the kindness-as-default standard isn't there, even if they work effectively as a team to manage their life.

I'm only ~10 years in but that single component is something I can see his wife be a little wistful for. It's something I dread losing so much I can't even imagine it.

I hope you're as hyped about marrying your spouse as I was to marry mine, and that the wedding ends up feeling like those very different people are still, broadly, "each other's people". It's a blast.

FWIW my marriage is almost 30 and we have had some stages where we were less than loving towards each other. Fortunately they have been short lived and we're mutually committed to making the relationship work. But everyone has bad moments and forgiveness is a gift to be given generously to those we love. Don't judge yourselves too harshly if you ever find yourself in one of those picky-pokey stages.

Congratulations. I got engaged a few months ago. It’s weird, I knew it was going to happen for a long time (and almost exactly when), but it felt like a big thing nonetheless.

Congratulations to you as well, lest this comment slips through. Maybe others were already aware, but I was not.

I think it’s the first time I’ve mentioned it, but thank you for the kind word(s).

I missed the original comment, +1 on the congrats!

By far the weirdest thing to me when I proposed to my wife was how nerve wracking it was. We both kinda knew it was coming, I was pretty damn sure she would say yes, but it still was very scary even so. Weird how that works.

Congratulations.

I can't help but wonder how checking Culture War Roundup threads every day for the last 10 or so years, may have contributed to my ultimate change from rootless, callow 20-something to homeowning family-seeker.

What are some of the best things you've learned from reading those threads for 10+ years?

It's hard for me to compose an answer to that, because it's been such a constant part of my life for so long now. I can barely remember all the things I used to not know. (Additionally - it's hard for me to compose an answer, because I never have acted on my ambition to "lurk less + post moar" as an aid to getting better at argumentative writing. I guess it's still not too late.)

Here is my best answer, I guess. I discovered the SSC-sphere around 2013. I had just dropped out of a political science Ph.D program - I realized that, basically, trying to write and publish academic papers was miserable to me and I did not want to spend any more of my life doing it. Anyway, even with that pretty high level of education, I still believed such things as:

  • "Christians believe in a magical being because they are deluded."
  • "Republicans want to restrict abortion access because they hate women."
  • "The NSA wants to read all of our e-mails because they are evil."

I could give an unlimited number of other examples like that; and I was certainly 100% within the left-liberal bubble at that time, so the examples would be biased in that direction. Basically, exposure to the SSC-sphere enabled me to build a theory of mind for all kinds of groups and beliefs. Over the years, people in the Motte etc. have spent a tremendous amount of time and energy trying to understand what people really believe and why.

This is a continuous, lifelong process; I'm certain that I still have wrong ideas about lots of people's beliefs. And, my biases have shifted in the opposite direction, but they definitely still exist. But I just didn't think about it at all before - I believed what the people around me believed, and I didn't think about it. Now... at least I think about it, I guess. I no longer think "x believe that because they're idiots" or whatever. I try to understand how people arrive at their conclusions, because even if I oppose them, I still have to live with these people; and having some understanding makes it feel better, or if I want to act against them, I can do it more effectively.

Looking through your history, it looks like you're now Christian. What was the process in that case?

Since you asked, I will tell you. I hope this is not too boring.

Well - I was raised by atheist parents. They weren't vocal about that; I don't think it was even something they decided. They just don't believe anything, and never think about religion. So I was raised with very little exposure to Christianity or any other faith, and I certainly had no developed system of morality, the purpose of life, etc. "Do nice things to other people" and "pursue your happiness" was all I had.

I am a pretty gregarious person; over the course of my life, I met and got to know all kinds of different people from many different backgrounds. In my early 20s, I met two people (in separate places and circumstances - they never knew each other), a man and a woman, who were sincere Christians. Call them A + K I guess. They were open and accessible about it, and would let it be known generally that their faith guided them and drove them in all that they did; they would give thanks to God for anything that they had, and seek solace from God when anything bad happened. Ultimately they would pass out from my life, though I kept in touch with them to some degree; looking back, later, I realized that they were probably the two best people that I ever knew. They both married good partners and built extremely happy lives centered around their family. As people, both of them were intelligent, creative, principled, thoughtful... and just altogether enjoyable to be around as few other people I've known have ever been.

Anyway. After I left that Ph.D program, I cohabitated with a girlfriend, in a terrible apartment which was all we could afford. It was infested with fleas, and water came in through the ceiling often. Having never understood the concepts of networking, internships, etc., I was no more prepared to find work than any man on the street, and so I had a job doing data entry; she was working at a Publix grocery store and going to film school. We were very miserable together. Though we believed we loved each other, we were each dominated in our own way by our insecurities and knowledge of our mediocrity. Furthermore - we had no conception of a future, of what we wanted out of life. I believed I would become a famous novelist, she believed she would become a great filmmaker; this was delusion. We knew absolutely nothing about what is really involved in accomplishing such things. Ultimately: this relationship broke down. We moved back in with our respective parents, since neither of us could carry the lease.

I felt a profound sense that all of my efforts in life were dissipated into nothingness. I failed at everything I tried. I had no money, no prospects; I had even gained like 25 pounds from eating too much "party mix" from big plastic tubs. (That part is not really relevant but I still think about it sometimes.) I considered what successful people I had known had done, and how that differed from how I had lived my own life. I remembered A + K, who were living lives I thought better than my own in every way. Previously, I had thought the claims of Christianity vaguely ridiculous, as that was what my peers believed; at this time, I humbled myself, and began to look into it with a more open mind, for I reasoned that, if nothing else, the people I knew who believed these things and acted accordingly were far happier than I was.

That's the part of the story that actually matters, I guess. The process of becoming a Christian is maybe not as interesting. I started reading a Bible; as I moved around the country during the next few years, I went to various churches, and spent time with pastors and small groups, hearing what they claimed and evaluating if it was something I could accept. Where occasionally some aspects seemed impossible, I concluded that far, far better and wise people than me had accepted them, and I would hold my doubt and wait for full understanding to come at a later time, or never if that's how it turned out. Once I settled in what I think be my permanent geographical area, I formally took membership in a church. I believe as sincerely as I can, and where I do this poorly, I pray to do it better. I do not know if this was, ultimately, a valid, logical, or sensible way of doing things; but it is a true story, and I can also say that my life is better in every single aspect than that of the 24-year-old me who had to move back in with his parents. (Of course, some of that also results from a number of steps I took, also rooted in increased maturity and life experience, that eventually resulted in material prosperity; but that's a story for another time.)

I'm doing the exact opposite of something fun- last minute packing for my move to Scotland.

If anyone has any ideas for things I can/should pick up within about 36 hours, I'd love to hear them. Preferably options that don't take much too much volume, it turns out you need an awful lot of clothing when you're permanently shifting countries.

Any information about foods you really like that might be hard to find in your new home (a list of restaurants to try or recipes or grocery stores that can get the spices and ingredients needed) that's the thing I miss most after moving cross country where very different immigrants groups settled the food of one ethnicity is in both places but no one from the new place grew up eating it so it's very very different here.

If there's one thing the UK isn't short of, it's Indian food haha. There's a cheap and cheerful curry place right down the road from my rental.

My culinary talents are.. questionable, so the dishes I'll dearly miss like biryani are outside what my skill allows. The majority of the condiments and spices we take for granted are readily available at supermarkets, or can be tracked down at specialty stores, and from what I've seen, the breadth and quality of products puts what we have at home to shame.

As many small things that remind you of your old home, your family and your friends as possible. They are the only things you won't be able to buy.

That's good advice, but I struggle to think of anything that fits the bill :(

I'm not kidding, I've never been a sentimental person and my family not one for gift giving, so barring the pictures I have backed up, there's nothing I can take with me. Maybe a big award I'd won almost a decade back, but that's big enough to need it's own seat on a flight.

Print and frame the pictures when you get to Scotland, then. They will make your place look more lived-in and a picture is a good reminder to call your mom.

Hmm.. That's a great idea! I'll see if I have time to drop by a print shop and get some made quick. Thank you, it wouldn't have occurred to me.

Canvas frameless pictures are some of my favorite:

  1. The colors pop
  2. They are light and easy to hang
  3. They are relatively cheap

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