site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2337 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 11, 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.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Cultural critic Nathan Rabin once had a column at The A.V. Club called "My World of Flops", in which he reviewed films, TV shows, albums etc. which are famous for being huge commercial and/or critical disasters. Since departing The A.V. Club, he's kept the series up under the same name at his personal website.

Today, I came across his MWoF entry for the animated sitcom The Goode Family (which I haven't seen) by Mike Judge, which ran for one season in 2009. As I understand it, The Goode Family is a satirical show which mocks the neuroses and hypocrisies of American progressives, as epitomised by the eponymous family. In analysing why the show was much less successful than Judge's other animated TV shows (King of the Hill, Beavis and Butthead), Rabin suggests that part of the reason might be that the show was satirising a cultural trend which had crested long ago, and hence came off as dated and irrelevant:

Judge generally has a genius for timing. Beavis And Butt-head and Idiocracy indelibly captured the dumbass spirit of the age, but The Goode Family sometimes feels like a period piece from the early days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, when fevered debate over identity politics swept campuses all over the land, white folks’ minds were opened to the reality of racism by a little film called Malcolm X, and the rise of Afrocentric rappers like Brand Nubian and X Clan somehow made white college kids think it was okay to dress up like members of Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Of course, liberalism hasn’t gone away... but the heyday of what was popularly if irritatingly known as “political correctness” seemed to have come and gone by the time PCU was released in 1994.

So while earnest folks continue to listen to NPR and shop at Whole Foods and do corny things like try to save the environment by reducing their carbon footprints, the show nevertheless often seems to be spoofing a very specific variety of tree-hugging, touchy-feely, oppressively sensitive progressive that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Indeed, some of the show’s stereotypes feel mothballed and anachronistic, like a snooty art critic who delights in mocking the tastes of the hoi polloi and a quiveringly sensitive aggregation of girly men who gather at a drum circle.

This article, of course, was written in 2013. A year later, the Great Awokening would begin in earnest, and "political correctness" (now rebranded as "wokeness" or "social justice politics") would be back at the forefront of American consciousness with a vengeance. It seems incredible to think that, barely ten years ago, prominent left-leaning cultural critics would be denying the claim that "oppressively sensitive progressives" even existed, never mind their being a worthwhile target of satire or ridicule. This was, of course, years before "trigger warning", "snowflake" and similar terms had entered common parlance.

This leads to an interesting question. If The Goode Family failed because it was satirising or mocking a cultural moment which had long since passed - if that cultural moment subsequently makes a striking resurgence, does that mean The Goode Family was actually ahead of its time?

It was of its time and Judge saw it clearly - hormones watching ABC or wherever probably ‘pffffft’ it away as stale without much thought.

Back in the day, I'm sure we assumed that AI agents would gather funds by good old fashioned hacking, mercantile exchange of goods and services, blackmail and bargaining.

That was very 2006. Today's AI agents get money by receiving crypto airdrops of GOATSE memecoins that they shill on twitter:

Full story: https://x.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1846220545542529329 (normally not the most reliable source, but repligate assures us he's basically accurate on the facts and repligate is an expert on schizo AI backrooms stuff)

It (Terminal of Truths) didn't even do any of the coding, just marketing. This shitcoin has an ostensible market cap around $260 million USD right now, though the vast majority is locked up as usual in Solana/memecoins and so the 'real liquidity marketcap' is about $3 M.

https://pump.fun/CzLSujWBLFsSjncfkh59rUFqvafWcY5tzedWJSuypump

https://goatchan.xyz/

https://x.com/AndyAyrey

Truth Terminal has ~$300,000 of GOAT in its wallet and is on its way to being the first AI agent millionaire

Anyway I am disappointed that my net worth is lower than an AI made 5 months ago. In principle, any of us could've done this. All it did was shitpost on twitter hard enough! It didn't even need to have a pretty face like hawk tuah girl. There's a general consensus that these bots are literally subhuman, I think we underestimate their present capabilities. Charisma alone gets you a long way, even if it's schizo shoggoth charisma.

We’re all doomed

But not cuz AI is smarter than us, but because we can’t match its retardative powers

If only you knew how bad things are.

Was playing around with chatgpt. Got it to write an article about "Say goodbye to Say goodbye to [thing]"

I was crunching it into smaller sizes, and then getting it to be more insulting. It started adding ads between sections at one point. The ads were funny, I asked for more ads. It delivered:

“Tired of being tired? Try UltraSleep Pills – because apparently, eight hours just isn’t enough anymore.”

“Want to lose weight without trying? MiracleShred—because working out is hard, and this bottle promises to do it for you.”

“BrainBoost+ – Turn those foggy thoughts into slightly less foggy ones. Results may vary, but hey, you clicked, didn’t you?”

“Improve focus instantly with ConcentrationMax—for when reading past the first paragraph feels like climbing a mountain.”

“Feeling sluggish? InstantEnergy Gummies—because chugging coffee is so last year.”

“Procrastinator’s Fixer – A pill that probably won’t make you more productive, but it’s worth a shot, right?”

“No time for the gym? AbFlex 5000 – Get ripped while binge-watching Netflix. Science says it’s impossible, but the ad says otherwise!”

“Want to skip the effort and just look smart? Try InstantIQ Glasses—because it’s all about appearances anyway.”

“MiracleFocus Supplements – Stop forgetting why you walked into the room... most of the time.”

“PenultimatePenisPills – Say goodbye to disappointment with this one easy trick.”

Wait. Which penis pills do I have to take after the penultimate ones? Is the product name supposed to be a cliffhanger? Is it just preparation for the ultimate penis pills? Should I be looking for antepenultimate penis pills before using those? I have so many questions about a product that doesn't exist.

If you take them, your dick will fall off. You will then have to get a neopenis grafted on, and will be so traumatised from the experience you'll never take a penis pill again. Thus, the penis you were born with was the second-last (or penultimate) penis you'll have ever had.

I'm afraid they just did it for the alliteration. There's nothing beyond. You have reached the apex of penis enlargement.

I assumed the "pen" was short for "penis."

Starship Troopers Extermination came out of early access.

There is cross play with consoles.

A galactic war that everyone is a part of.

A new ice map.

It's been hella fun playing with a group of other players that have organized into a military structure.

Discord.gg/1stmi

I'm a corporal and usually I'm in charge of a squad.

There have been some growing pains and problems with the game, but from my experience in alpha I'm pretty confident they'll get ironed out.

I'm super interested in this. There's a lot of complaining about bugs on the steam reviews. Valid?

I'm confident things will get patched out eventually but wanted your thoughts.

I have a good computer.

There are a lot of minor bugs.

Some of them are even silly, like a problem where the melee weapon became affixed as a bayonet to all weapons, the Engineer class has a shovel melee weapon. The engineer whipping out their sidearm pistol has a shovel attached to the front that lengthens the weapon by about 80%.

There are major bugs. Matches being broken and kicking you out. Crashes to desktop in the middle of a match. Social settings being broken and making cross play difficult. Etc.

Overall I am having a lot of fun. And it doesn't feel like dribbles of fun that im constantly seeking out while being blue balled by bugs constantly. I can consistently get two hours of good experience for every game breaking type bug I encounter.

That kind of bug experience is just not acceptable for a lot of steam users. I don't really blame them for that opinion. Its just not my opinion.

You'd have to ask yourself how much you are bothered by problems in a game. If you feel you are easy going and might laugh off minor issues, and easily get past major issues then I'd say the game is great for you. If major bugs infuriate you, then definitely skip this game.

Company of Heroes 2- arguably top 5 games of all time, IMO - required you to restart the game every 2-3 matches or else you'd get a crash from a memory leak. Matches were sometimes an hour long, and down to the wire when they'd blow up. They didn't patch it for 6 years I think and I still played a ton.

So, hopefully I'll be able to join you guys for a game here.

I'm curious, why do you hold CoH2 in such esteem? Me and my friend group used to play both CoH1 and 2, but the main reason we switched was just that 2 had higher player numbers at the time (which is typical for newer games). At least it wasn't worse in gameplay, but imo it also wasn't better, either.

COH 2 took a long time to get good. I played it since beta. In comparison, I showed up very late and very unskilled to COH 1. I understand many of those players held 2 in disdain, as an "arcade" game.

The QoL features in 2 (fence jumping, ribbon) and tactical depth (True sight) were huge. The addition of 4v4 was a major amount of fun. I know it's a controversial opinion, but coldtech games offered another level of differentiation even if the competitive scene rejected them. The lower TTK made things frantic and faster, and I appreciated the depth of different abilities.

There was a lot that didn't work. Bulletins were lame; commanders were a downgrade, etc.

I've played 3 a bit now and think it's more like 1. I enjoy the performance and visual enhancements quite a bit, along with the addition of verticality. However, I'm pretty bad at it, and my regular playgroup for CoH 2 was shattered when the guy who bugged us all to play regularly committed suicide, so I don't know if I'll get any better.

A lack of major bugs would be unfaithful to the source material.

How does it compare to Helldivers 2?

I like STE more, but that is going to be personal preference.

Helldivers is 4 people. Most of the STE matches are 16 (but they also have a single player campaign, and a 4 player game mode)

Lines of sight are much further in STE. Bug corpses can pile up.

Awesome stuff! Dang I would play with you today but my voice is toast I've been kinda sick.

Might hop on later or tmrw and just not talk much if you're playing.

Culinary Class Wars on Netflix might be the most fun, if unfair, cooking show I've seen in a long time, and the most nefariously commercial.

Brief synopsis: 20 well known chefs ("white spoons") compete against 80 lesser known chefs ("black spoons") for a USD220K prize. The black spoons are no slouches, largely being restauranteurs themselves with their own successful businesses, but the white spoons are multiyear winners of michelin stars or international awards. The cooking challenges get weird, and something in the Korean editing gets the slow and fast moments right, with surprisingly competent emotional hits. One round in particular, the Infinite Tofu Hell, is honestly the absolute best cooking challenge I've ever seen, in concept and in execution.

The show optimizes for visual flair, dramatic setpiece reveals and novel challenges. Its not mechanically fair, and certain challenges seem introduced to maintain dramatic tension.

In particular, there is a survival challenge, where after an elimination round the losers do a cooking challenge to get advanced regardless. In this round, the contestants must make a dish out of convenience store food. One dish in particular stood out to a ridiculous degree, and makes this Netflix cooking show go from 'fun distraction' to 'mr burns money'.

See, it is inevitable that competent chefs get good bookings at their restaurants following a cooking show blowup. Half these contestants definitely are there just to boost social media, with the USD220K prize pool secondary to yearlong full covers. There are already secondary markets for reservations at the restaurants for the higher profile chefs, with scalpers for their restaurants.

But the real genius is in the convenience store round, moreso than Netflix. Netflix made a deal with a convenience store chain featured to sell dishes created by chefs featured on the show. That's already a good enough gimmick, and certainly will be profitable given the positive reception of the show, and the overall quality of Korean (and Asian in general) convenience store products.

The nefarious genius comes from the manufacturer of the convenience challenge winner ingredients. The convenience store in the show is genericized, but the products used are not. Because the key ingredients used by the winner were in-house products manufactured from the a different conglomerate, the conglomerate made a collaboration with that chef specifically to sell that winning dish as a product in their own convenience stores.

Sales of the ingredients used for that dish alone spiked more than 30% in the week the chef made that dish, and preorders for his creation sold out in 20 minutes.

It is a fun enough show, but this is the one example of a media hype cycle translating into likely significant financial benefits to the contestants, and even Netflix itself. I strongly suspect other producers will eye this show and its subsequent impact closely.

They have a challenge called "Squid Game," right?

Is the editing standard Korean style TV editing, with every "ooooohhhhh" reaction repeated five times over? There's some entertaining stuff coming out of Korean "unscripted" media but I utterly despise their presentation style. Even similar shows from other East Asian countries never seem to do it as obnoxiously.

Yeah, that is present. It is extremely irritating, and you can tell when it is going to lead to an irritating cliffhanger.

However, nothing is as irritating as either Chinese style bullet comments where social media comments fly across the screen as the most irritating chyrons ever, or the canned laughters/splashes that infest East Asian variety shows from 1980 to 2080. Shifting away from that is a hallmark of producers who worked in the west, and that alone makes up for the cultural destruction the west imposed on the world with the simon wellfication of snarky bitches being hosts for 2 decades,

Oddly enough, the visual clutter from bullet comments and splashes has never quite bothered me. I find the repeated "oooohhh"s a unique kind of grating to the point I'll actively avoid any unscripted Korean media. I do agree though that shifting away from these sorts of editing styles as a whole would be a net positive for me, even if at the cost of some of the core content.

It is a good show. Also I can't believe my man Napoli Matifa (sp) deadass made tiramisu from convenience store items. That was true genius. Haven't been able to watch the final episode yet, but I'm really looking forward to it.

My one major complaint was the restaurant challenge. That was complete bullshit. It was ostensibly supposed to test their business acumen, but they didn't give the contestants any sort of market research info (like an actual business would have), and they judged them purely on gross revenue, not profit. On top of that it was totally unfair that they made the fourth team like they did. They should've had some advantage to compensate for the fact that they started several hours late, and had fewer people, but they didn't get anything! Give them a couple sous chefs or something for goodness' sake, to even out the playing field. I really hated that challenge.

Korean shows arent optimized for fairness. Physical 100 is fucking insanely unfair, but its just really fun. Similarly I think the restaurant challenge was also poorly designed but showcased different thinkings among the chefs. I think there was an element of 'too many chefs will end up fighting' but cultural deference to leadership stopped egos getting in the way. I cannot help but contrast this with US reality TV where insane bickering is the norm.

I think the restaurant challenge ended up being much closer than it had any right to be, and the diners were more the star of that episode than the chefs. I loved the sight of a giant black man just steadily wolfing down plate after plate of food while the korean diners all gave their commentary and insight on the food. Man knew what he was here for, and he just gave it his all.

I think there was an element of 'too many chefs will end up fighting' but cultural deference to leadership stopped egos getting in the way.

I feel like that also had to do with everyone seeing what a disaster it was in the class team challenge, when the one white spoon team wasted a ton of time because egos got in the way.

Alright i have an extremely low stakes bone to pick!

So I live in southern Canada, and like many people we got Northern Lights the other night. Except - our northern lights consisted of a greyish haze basically. Yeah you could see something, it was cool! But it wasn't colorful.

Then, when you took a picture with your phone, that monochrome grey turns into a brilliant symphony of color, perfect for social media! But, it's basically a lie - I assume AI upscaling of some kind. And now I'm seeing all these photos from the US/Mexico Border, other southern states, of these brilliant reds and greens and I'm like, is everybody comfortable just lying like this? Surely they didn't actually see any color IRL, right? Did anybody actually see real colors outside of the phone AI upscaling, in any areas of the continental USA?

The Northern Lights just aren't very bright as we're seeing them right now. Also you probably live in a city and are suffering from haze & light pollution, which makes it tough.

I'm out of town, pretty far south and can see them not bad at the moment if I go outside and let my eyes adjust for five minutes first -- but they are quite dim compared to what I've seen during actual Northern winters.

ROV is correct that the reason phone pictures turn out more impressive is camera settings -- mostly exposure time is what I'd crank if I wanted a nice picture with a manual camera, but iphones are probably cranking the iso as he says. But if you go someplace really dark you can probably see them better.

I am lucky to live in a small city with a relatively decent dark sky (can see multiple constellations on a given night), but it's still not ideal for sure

Not AI, and not upscaling. Whenever we look at something in real time, what we can see is limited by how much light can get to our retinas and hence to our brains. We can control this a little bit, through dilation of pupils, but the effect is limited. Similarly, we can't make our brains more light-sensitive than they already are, as we're optimized for normal daytime viewing. A camera doesn't have this limitation. SLRs can use aperture and shutter speed to make things more or less visible than they are in the real world, but phones aren't sophisticated enough for this. What phones (and SLRs as well) can do is make the digital sensor more sensitive by cranking up the ISO settings. Most photographers try to shoot with low ISO settings because cranking these will result in digital noise, but people shooting with their phones aren't this picky. If you're shooting at night, most automatic settings will crank the ISO to something most amateur photographers would consider ungodly. While this does have some effect on image quality, it also means that the camera can see more than your eyes can. The same effect could be achieved on color film by taking a long exposure, though this may cause star trails or other (potentially) unwanted artifacts. Most (all?) of those cool space photos of nebulae and other deep field objects aren't anything you'd be able to see with the naked eye, but are achieved by letting a lot of light in, using software to stack photos, and other camera tricks. This isn't to say that you're being lied to by "enhancements"; everything you're seeing is actually there, our visual systems just aren't equipped to see it in real time.

The film analog of ISO is actually ISO. Films come with different sizes of silver halide crystal grains. Bigger grains collect light faster and are therefore more sensitive, at the cost of having your photo be grainier. The biological analog would be if we could increase the size of our rods and cones at will to gather more light per cell.

Same here, my husband was grumbling that his iPhone got a better look at the lights than he did.

For me it was a very faint red in person but a very dynamic show in photos. This is also just typical of iphone photos at night which more or less never show what I want them to in the dark. I assume there's settings I can fiddle with to make it correct but I've never bothered.

I don't think it's AI upscaling so much as what the phone does to try to make things visible in low light. When I try to take a picture of the moon it comes out screwy as well.

We had a tiny coding project at work last week, and one part of it kind of struck me.

My coworker's half of the project was to show the user a simple form where they would input two lines text and click the "submit" button. It would then write that info to a text file and launch my half.

My half of the project took that data, stuffed it into the middle of some XML, then launched the newly-created file.

Try to guess the spoiler. My coworker's half was eighty thousand times (160 MB vs. 2 kB) as large as mine. Is there an equivalent to "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away" for harddrive space?

Not judging, just curious: Why was this a two-man project?

I'm not actually a programmer, and learning how to work with Windows to build a UI would be a long and annoying process relative to delegating it. On the other hand, I had already set up a script for more complex control of the laser, so creating a stripped down version was easy.

The project took me about three hours between writing my part, delegating the other, and testing them both together.

.NET?

I think so, but I wasn't involved in that half beyond providing the specs and testing it.

Yeah 160mb is insane, I've seen very few apps that large. Front-end frameworks can be nasty.

The default settings for almost any .NET Core gui (WinForm or WPF) app will give you ~120mb+ files, and a mess of them. Bundling almost the whole runtime into each deployment is supposed to avoid the pain of a separate runtime installation, but it's a messy tradeoff either way.

There's an 'app trimming' config that tries to reduce bloat a bit. It's kinda annoying and doesn't do a great job even in the best-case scenarios, though.. Unfortunately, one of the better arguments for sticking with .NET Framework, especially if considering mass deployment -- if you can get away with .NET Framework 4.x- or earlier features, Win10 and Win11 have it included by default and still leave (admittedly bulkier-than-necessary) <10MB executable.

If you're just deploying to Windows machines, it's genuinely not hard to use newer .NET versions to produce that <10MB GUI binaries most of the time:

  • If you know your deployment runtime (for .NET Desktop, win-x86, win-x64, or win-arm64), in modern versions of .NET you can just dotnet publish -r <runtime> and it skips the default runtime bloat. Of course, you now have to deploy the right binary to your user, but this isn't hard in 2024 - Windows on ARM is basically a fantasy, W11 doesn't even have an x86 version any more, and W10 is going out of support next year (whether you like it or not - RIP).
  • You don't have to bundle the runtime with your application. For the minor annoyance of adding some extra code to your installer bundle to download and execute the runtime installer when the runtime is absent, you can convincingly gaslight your users into thinking your application is just the tiny binary, and the runtime library is just some weird Windows thing that came along for the ride. And this is basically what you had to do with Visual C++ Runtimes, so it's not like the users haven't been doing this for years...

I guess if you're optimizing for binary size, you're never gonna beat Microsoft bundling the .NET Framework binaries directly into every Windows distribution for you. But if you can, come join us in the future! I uplifted a .NET Framework 4.5 application to .NET 8.0 Desktop with about 10 lines of inconsequential code changes and some project file hackery, then attached new pieces to the project using abstract static interfaces and generic math only available in .NET 7 or greater, and added a few lines of code to a bundled installer to download the runtime from Microsoft. It all just works, it's about 20% faster on the critical path, my binary size went from 1MB to about 1.5MB, and it took me a day instead of a month to add the new feature I needed. It's great.

I won't claim there's no reason to use .NET Framework any more (particularly if you committed crimes against humanity with AppDomains), but the happy path for most new GUI development in C# targeting Windows should point you squarely at .NET Desktop on the most modern version of .NET LTS (the even-numbered ones). It's infinitely more tolerable than the other garbage desktop front-end frameworks excreted and subsequently rug-pulled a year or two later by Microsoft in the last few years (UWP, MAUI, WinUI x where {x ∈ N, x < ∞}), it's not a website and some WASM in a trenchcoat (Blazor, ElectronNET), and you still get all the WPF goodness (and WinForms, if you really want it).

Ah, I stand corrected then. Last time I tried was early in the .NET Core 5 days, and turning off everything but x86_64 and using aggressive trimming still left >30MB deployments for some of the common projects I was working with at the time. They were admittedly weird in ways I can see the linker panicking about, but they weren't that weird. Will have to try it out again.

It all just works, it's about 20% faster on the critical path, my binary size went from 1MB to about 1.5MB, and it took me a day instead of a month to add the new feature I needed. It's great.

Yeah, if you're doing anything even moderately performance-, security-, or complexity-dependent, Desktop or Core make a lot more sense. It's mostly light apps like the 'write data from interface to text file' or your standard CRUD that a lot of the bennies just aren't going to come up.

((And I'll admit I've abused the fuck out of AppDomain.UnhandledException, given how hard it is to get error reports with actual details from Microsoft.))

It's infinitely more tolerable than the other garbage desktop front-end frameworks excreted and subsequently rug-pulled a year or two later by Microsoft in the last few years (UWP, MAUI, WinUI x where {x ∈ N, x < ∞}), it's not a website and some WASM in a trenchcoat (Blazor, ElectronNET), and you still get all the WPF goodness (and WinForms, if you really want it).

Definitely agreed there. For simple GUI applications, the .NET ecosystem as a whole is just incredibly convenient. Even looking at competitors outside of Microsoft, it's vastly more convenient than trying to fight with JavaFX or Swing for almost every case excepting where absolutely need (reliable) Linux support (and I'd be tempted to say fuck it and try mono even there), it's a lot more robust that using JS and pretending your web browser is a reliable application, and the less said about QT the better.

It's not .NET problem per se, modern .NET can trim the assembly very well. Sounds like they used some GUI framework that is a browser in disguise, like Electron.

Incidentally, you can use Electron.NET with .NET Core and get the "best" of both worlds. The .NET portion is tiny, but the electron portion is basically guaranteed to be over 100MB, full of front-end razor template/css hell, oodles of extra javascript to do all the things that aren't natively supported correctly, squeeze your entire UI update logic through a SignalR straw, and an infinite menagerie of implementation bugs and issues. But it'll run on just about anything, including a browser. And the ASP.NET side is pleasant to work with.

Things have been kinda shit lately. 4 year old daughter got diagnosed with Lyme Disease and then Alpha Gal Syndrome, which has really sucked. The Lyme got knocked out (hopefully) with 30 days of amoxicillin. The Alpha Gal is basically permanent, although there is this kind of woo-woo acupuncture treatment which supposedly works. If it were just me, I'd be stubborn and refuse to try some bullshit I think is fake. But kids change you, and you're willing to do anything to help them, so we may end up trying it. Who knows.

So to cheer everyone up we got a dog. Happiest I've seen my daughter or my wife in a hot minute. Just a sweet 5/6 month old rescue from a shelter. It was a bit of an impulsive decision, but the wife has been really longing for a dog for a while. So we were at the humane society visiting this one dog, and she seemed really sweet and got along well with our daughter. So I told my wife lets just get her before someone else does. $25 and some paperwork later, we came home with a dog. Some sort of lab or shepherd mix?

Picking my daughter up from school today, and she's so excited she's telling anyone and everyone about the new dog she just got. Spent the last 2 hours I've been working in my home office just drawing and coloring next to the dog's crate. They can't get enough of each other. Cutest damned thing I've ever seen. Highly recommend it.

This oral immunotherapy drug seems to work, based on a 100% success rate in an early clinical trial. It's probably some years away from general availability, but it might be something to look forward to.

There's also a desensitization protocol using only beef and beef extract described here. Seems like DIY might be viable.

The Alpha Gal is basically permanent, although there is this kind of woo-woo acupuncture treatment which supposedly works.

I've seen reports of people getting rid of it by eating tiny amounts of the offending substance, working up from miligrams to normalcy.

That's really rough luck. You and your daughter have my family's sympathy and prayers. Hope the adjustment isn't too painful.

Sorry to hear about Alpha Gal, but look at the bright side of life: at least it's not something like soy, shellfish or nut allergy, which are a pain in the ass to manage.

She can still eat poultry and fish, right? That's still a lot of recipes for you to enjoy together.

Acupuncture works by placebo effect. If you tell her convincingly that you believe it will work, it just might.

Acupuncture(sticking small needles in people) also works on a simple biochemical level by triggering certain repair responses, which can be beneficial for some (auto-)immune diseases . It's just that acupuncture(the traditional theory) is bunk.

Stuff like microneedling seems to have some effect (both for skin damage and thinning hair) but I don’t know that that’s really in the same realm as acupuncture of any kind.

Rough. On the bright side, nominative determinism may have a silver lining for your Alpha Gal.

Alternative medicine may sound crazy, but that sort of thing has worked for me. There is obviously a lot of crap out there, but don't take the Western medical model as God's own truth. If you keep trying many things can be healed that our medical views say can't be.

I'm sorry to hear about your daughter.

Also, dogs are amazing. I love dogs. Great choice.

That's some super bad luck on Alpha-gal syndrome. I remember my boss and the company owner talking about a tick bite that makes you allergic to red meat, and they both agreed that life would not be worth living if that happened. I disagree, I like chicken a lot and surely there are other meats that can be eaten and even an older adult would eventually adjust, but I honestly didn't even know it was a real disease that happened to real people. I'm sorry to hear that.

Yeah, its been an adjustment. We already ate lots of fish and chicken because thats ehat my wife likes and she does the shopping and cooking. Whats harder are all the animal byproducts in everything. Its basically forced us to vegan stuff when it comes to prepackaged foods.

She doesnt go into shock thankfully. Presents more as IBS and stomach pains. At first she barely noticed her diet changed, but lately shes been asking about missing beef which breaks our hearts.

The Alpha Gal is basically permanent, although there is this kind of woo-woo acupuncture treatment which supposedly works. If it were just me, I'd be stubborn and refuse to try some bullshit I think is fake. But kids change you, and you're willing to do anything to help them, so we may end up trying it. Who knows.

There is a massive rabbit hole you can go down with "chronic Lyme disease". Don't do it. I know it's hard because you want to do everything you can for your daughter, but seriously, resist. Nothing but scammers who want to bleed you dry of all your money.

Also dude you're going off about UAPs downthread but talking shit about alternative health rabbit holes up here? Come on.

Yeah I figured someone would bring that up.

I think I've been pretty open and consistent on my stance on UAPs whenever someone asks. I want them to be real, but I ultimately don't think the probability of them being real is very high. It's not something I would bet money on. Thankfully it costs me nothing to refresh /r/UFOs every once in a while to check the latest news.

If someone told me that they were about to drop $1k on New Paradigm Institute's online UFO classes (which is something that you can really do with real money!) because they thought that it would give them the inside scoop, I would tell them that that's obviously a scam and they should not do that.

If someone wants to just try some acupuncture or homeopathy method at home I don't actually have a problem with that. I'm not the thought police. But alternative medicine is filled with scammers who prey on emotionally vulnerable people for financial gain, so anyone charging money for alternative treatments deserves extremely strict scrutiny.

I agree with extremely strict scrutiny, I guess I would just say don't discourage people entirely. There are genuinely good practitioners lurking out there.

It's not just alternative health though. I'd say 95% of legitimate therapists are total shit and may even make things worse for their patients.

It's a similar ratio for alternative health.

If someone wants to just try some acupuncture or homeopathy method at home

Acupuncture is a little different from homeopathy in that there's a plausible mechanism in terms of stimulating nerves or whatnot -- the Asian Woo (Wu?) wrapped around it seems shitty and I haven't tried it myself, but certainly people I know have said it helps with various things. People who are into homeopathy on the other hand just seem to be sick all the time -- for which they need more homeopathy!

Disagree it's all scammers. Many chronic diseases are much more complicated than we take at face value. I have personally overcome chronic issues I've been told repeatedly by dozens of doctors were permanent.

It's difficult but can be done.

People might be interested in a longpost about overcoming those chronic issues?

Hmm I have made many a long post on here. Wish I had a quick reference to share.

Seems plausible that it's all scammers for some chronic diseases but not others.

The way I see the mechanism is basically stored emotional trauma "causes" almost all chronic disease/illness so. I disagree.

That’s not a “mechanism”. What would be the actual mechanism behind this proposed effect?

Idk what you mean by mechanism but there are all sorts of ones proposed.

Read "The Body Keeps the Score"

So what solution do you propose, then? Just therapy of some sort? Honestly asking in a non-snark manner, as I know two people with chronic illness who also (I thought coincidentally) have significant amounts of stored emotional trauma.

Yoga is also good, or the Feldenkrais method or Alexander technique if people have bad chronic pain. Getting back into feeling the body is often a big part of all this.

Hmm I basically suggest exploring with an open mind various alternative healing modalities. Ones which focus on the felt sense like Focusing are often good, or body scans or somatic meditation.

Ideally finding a therapist or healer who is good at this sort of work, but again it can be a hassle. Took me a long time and wading through a lot of bullshit to find people who could help me, but it was worth it.

So you think that stored emotional trauma causes, say, leukemia? Or cystic fibrosis?

Hmm, good question. I would say they exacerbate it. I think that these diseases often come from or at least are made worse by massive emotional trauma. You can fill in the word "stress" which effects these things.

Not all though. My claim was too strong.

This court opinion provides a very interesting summary of what liability a department of transportation has (at least in Pennsylvania) when a motorist is injured by a falling (not fallen) tree or tree branch.

  • Snyder v. Harmon (1989): Adjacent to a state highway, outside the DOT's right of way, there is a deep mining pit. After getting into a crash on the highway, four motorists walk off of the highway, fall into the pit, and suffer severe injuries. Is the DOT liable for failing to install lighting, barriers, or guide rail in front of the pit? No, because the pit was not on DOT property, which is required by the state law that waives the default sovereign immunity in certain situations.

  • Patton v. PennDOT (1996): Adjacent to a state highway, inside the DOT's right of way, there is a tree. A branch falls from the tree and kills a motorist. Is the DOT liable for failing to trim the branch? Yes, because the tree was on DOT property.

  • Marker v. PennDOT (1996): Adjacent to a state highway, outside the DOT's right of way, there is a steep upward slope. A tree growing in the slope uproots itself, falls off of the slope, and kills a motorist. Is the DOT liable for building a highway underneath a steep slope? No, because neither the tree nor the slope was on DOT property.

  • Clark v. PennDOT (2008): Adjacent to a state highway, outside the DOT's right of way, there is a tree. A branch of the tree overhangs the road. The tree—not just the branch, but the entire tree—falls onto the road, and a motorist is severely injured by the trunk. Is the DOT liable for failing to cut down the tree, especially when (1) the DOT's maintenance manual says that trees like this should be investigated and (2) the DOT was specifically informed of the branch by a concerned local before the injury? No, because the tree was not on DOT property. The existence of an overhanging branch is not relevant to this determination, since the motorist was injured by the trunk, not by the branch.

  • Schmidt v. PennDOT (2024—the PDF linked above): Adjacent to a state highway, outside the DOT's right of way, there is a tree. A branch of the tree overhangs the road. The branch falls and kills a motorist. Is the DOT liable for failing to trim the branch? No, because the tree was not on DOT property. Under longstanding principles of property law, if a branch overhangs DOT property, then the DOT does gain the right to trim the branch, but does not gain actual ownership of the branch, so the injury was not caused by a dangerous condition of DOT property.

[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]

Some nice developments this week ahead of the hearings scheduled for November 17th.

  • Sitting Congressman Matt Gaetz said in a recent interview "The CIA has a program around craft recovery. It's not a question anymore. And so, that's probably where I would start, the craft recovery, and the biologics that have been taken from those craft". In decades past, this probably would have been sufficient enough by itself to be considered disclosure. But unfortunately, we're in a scenario where only certain government officials have become outspoken about their belief in UFOs, while the top brass at the DoD remains reticent. The smoking gun evidence / Big Announcement remains elusive.

  • A FOIA request has brought to light a heavily redacted briefing on UAPs given to NASA by the DoD's UAP Task Force. The briefing acknowledges that the UAPTF collected multiple reports of UAP sightings and that "over half" of these reports were validated by "multiple sensors", but the items in the list of "Potential Explanations" are redacted, as well as almost all of the included photographs (but for some reason they chose not to redact a photograph of a giant glowing green triangle).

A common criticism of the UAP disclosure movement is that their belief in aliens is fundamentally unfalsifiable and there's no reason for their demands to ever cease. They won't be satisfied that the military's not hiding anything until they've declassified every last document in their position. And I agree that this is a possible failure mode, which is why it's important to focus on concrete, actionable items rather than generalized demands for transparency. There are many classified documents regarding UAPs that we know, for a fact, to exist. Their existence, and the fact that they explicitly deal with UAPs, is not in question - we just don't know their exact contents. This includes the aforementioned NASA briefing, the photograph and other materials that Gaetz was shown at Eglin AFB, the multiple SCIF briefings that Congressmen have been given over the past year on UAPs, etc. Advocating for the full declassification of these materials is a reasonable goal, while also being limited in scope.

Until the alien is shown (in person, in a traveling exhibition, where I can maybe touch it or at least see it being touched), there is no reason to believe and every reason to disbelieve. That even the DoD and/or congress have people autistic/schizo/gullible enough to believe the US government (and NOBODY else) has been secretly keeping little green men on ice for 50 years is unsurprising. That otherwise smart people here might believe it is sad.

It just seems very unbelievable that beings that master energies enough to make to Earth from where-ever they came - and it can't be close because we'd notice them somehow already - get here, leave no footprint except some weird artifacts in US govt secret storage and then never show up again in any way. You mean if you look at human exploration, it's not really how it worked, is it? If somebody found some new land, soon tenfold of people would show up, then twentyfold, then hundredfold. Even if the original explorer died without relaying any message, soon somebody would follow their path, and then another somebody, and so on. I could find only two situations compatible with government holding any alien artifacts - a) aliens are very rare and very very far away, and they are essentially launching expendable exploratory probes (biorobots maybe?) at random directions, and one of the random directions intersected Earth but by some malfunction failed to call back so this direction is considered empty for the next N thousands of years until the next random probe arrives; and b) our vicinity is somehow marked in Common Galactese as "exclusion area, do not approach!" - either because we are under-developed, or too weird, or too dangerous, or any other reason - and would remain so basically until the aliens decide otherwise or we develop independent means of discovering them.

The situation even worse for the scenario where they show up, but only as vague images in blurry photos. I mean, a civilization which uses energies several orders of magnitude stronger than we do, dances around among us, and we notice nothing? It's like ants not noticing somebody trying to build a residential neighborhood on top of their ant pile. I think they'd notice pretty soon. They might not understand what is going on but they'd notice.

A variation: They did indeed signal back, but light-speed delay means that the signal itself, nevermind any follow-up-action, will not arrive for a very long time yet.

I'd expect anybody who mastered FTL travel also master FTL messaging. Though indeed it's not a given (I think Bujold universe had FTL travel but no FTL messaging, leading to passing messages with couriers). Without FTL, there's no point to even bother to send probes out.

Ah, sorry, I didn't realize FTL was implied but assumed that the aliens had slow-boated to Earth.

I want the reverse. I want aliens to dump a pastebin on a discord server and insist they are alien enthusiasts themselves trying to disprove skeptics on their home planet, with a 30 year timelag. I want them to here repeatedly over several generations and demand more exotic examples of human uniqueness because their own skeptics refuse to believe in the concept of extraterrestrial life.

Honestly I’d be much more inclined to believe if physicists could explain how FTL or even near light travel is possible without an entire planet’s worth of mass for fuel. And NASA or SETI finding signals of intelligent beings. Or you know those huge space telescopes, it’s going to make me interested if they find evidence of life and especially intelligent life in space.

I’ve never heard the History Channel Alien guy explain why JWT or Hubble never found an inhabited planet.

What do physicists or astronomers know about space? They can't even tell us the basic configuration of 95% of the universe's mass-energy, it's 'dark' to us.

Those huge space telescopes clearly aren't so great on a cosmic scale, we're missing so much. It's not even in the realm of unknown unknowns, it's known unknowns.

If we don't have a clue on the universe's basic composition, then we don't have the standing to rule out FTL travel. Our physics simply is not developed enough.

Try to set aside the question of aliens for a second and look at it this way.

The Pentagon gave a briefing to NASA on UFOs. This briefing included lots of pictures. They're telling us we're not allowed to see the pictures. So my question is... why? If they're not hiding anything then why not just let us see for ourselves? Yes they might just all turn out to be Chinese weather balloons made of swamp gas, certainly. But I still want to see and judge for myself. Why would anyone not want to?

I don't buy the "national security" excuse. The world's not going to implode just because we got pictures of an advanced spy drone. (Not that I get the impression that that's what this briefing was about in the first place. The fact that these photographs were in a briefing entitled "UFOs" instead of something more pedestrian is pretty odd!)

So my question is... why? If they're not hiding anything then why not just let us see for ourselves?

I don't know the specific briefing or photos you're referring to, but I'd assume it's because footage taken by military aircraft/etc. can reveal military capabilities or activity and is thus classified by default. You don't want to give away information about the capabilities of your cameras, for example. Meanwhile the footage which has been declassified is consistent with alternative explanations such as glare from a distant jet.

I don't know the specific briefing or photos you're referring to

The one I linked in the second bullet point in the OP.

footage taken by military aircraft/etc. can reveal military capabilities or activity and is thus classified by default

They chose to reveal some photos and not others, which leads me to believe that the content of the photos is one of the determining factors.

Okay, the images on page 9 of the briefing are from the declassified Tic Tac video, the ones on page 12 are from the declassified Gimbal video, and the one on page 13 is from the declassified Pyramid video released in 2021. So they censored every image that hasn't been specifically declassified and released previously. Note that 4 videos including Gimbal were leaked before being declassified, so it doesn't seem like they're cherrypicking the least convincing videos to release.

If you follow those links there's plausible non-alien explanations for each of those videos. For example, in the Pyramid one (the only one I hadn't seen before), the shapes are because of the bokeh effect on an out-of-focus light combined with the triangular shape of the aperture (which the Navy already knew when they talked about it in the Congressional hearing). However only one of the triangles was an actual plane/drone, the rest were clearly stars belonging to the constellation Sagitta. The flashing of the non-star also matches the timing of a plane's collision lights, and the USS Russell was directly under a flight path at the time. Which seems like a good reminder for anyone who puts a lot of weight on evidence just because the government is taking it seriously. Their job is to fight wars, not figure out all the weird-looking things that might seem alien-like, and classified information is going to be viewed by a lot less people than information released to the public. Naval Intelligence isn't nessesarily going to be very good at things like "checking if the UFO drone swarm happens to be the exact shape of a constellation plus one actual plane".

So they censored every image that hasn’t been specifically declassified or released previously

But that just moves the question back a step. Why did those specific images make their way to declassification and not others? No way to know until we actually see all the redacted images.

This isn’t an unfalsifiable “we haven’t seen aliens yet, but it could be that they’re out there and we just haven’t found them, so let’s keep looking”. This is, there’s a box right in front of us labeled “UFOs”, and I want to see what’s in the box.

there’s plausible non-alien explanations for each of those

Sure, I don’t disagree. But that has no effect on the fact that I want to see the rest of the unredacted document.

But that just moves the question back a step. Why did those specific images make their way to declassification and not others? No way to know until we actually see all the redacted images.

Well...

Note that 4 videos including Gimbal were leaked before being declassified, so it doesn't seem like they're cherrypicking the least convincing videos to release.

It wasn't clear what the "4 videos" was supposed to be referring to. If all the pics in what I linked were leaked before they were declassified then my bad, I was wrong.

More comments

The reason why anyone should be sceptical of secret aliens is that there is no reason for them to be hidden.

If aliens had landed in Nevada in 1950, we would know about them. This is because the explanation that UFO fans have for secrecy (muh Cold War, muh secret ailyun technology) is bullshit, because any plausible theory of secret alien landings almost certainly involves the likelihood of them landing in Russia and probably China too, not to mention plenty of non-aligned countries without highly capable security states, thus rendering any fantasy advantage of speshul technology useless.

There is no evidence of [intelligent] aliens (…having visited earth in living memory).

I mostly agree with your viewpoint, but the alien enthusiasts have a simple explanation for the visitation pattern: nuclear weapons.

This would also explain ongoing secrecy about Aliens. If the Aliens have any degree of control over nuclear arsenals, then part of the illusion of world powers is shattered.

I do think we have had unusually good luck in that nuclear weapons have been used exactly twice in a real conflict and then never again.

I'm not sure, what nuclear weapons are meant to explain?

Why only visit certain countries?

Why only be in contact with certain governments?

Why only now and not earlier?

OK got it but how do they explain it? I mean, ok, they did not contact us because we didn't have nukes, and now they contacted us because we do have nukes. But why? Why nukes are so important? Civilization that can travel interstellar distances should have stuff that is to our nukes like our nukes are to a bronze spear.

They offer quite a few reasons:

  1. If the Aliens are benevolent then nukes are the first time humans really have the chance to extinct ourselves.
  2. If the Aliens care about habitable worlds we could mess up one of their gardens.
  3. Nukes might be more noticeablr to casual observers.
  4. Maybe there are threshold technologies required for joining some galactic community, and nukes is a threshold.

Nukes are unique enough.

More comments

Human secrecy is easy to understand. That just makes sense to me. Panic, lie about it, now you can’t come clean because you’d have to admit you lied, etc.

Explaining why the aliens themselves would keep themselves a secret is a lot harder. Specifically, why would they hover in this grey zone, where it’s just ambiguous enough that people could believe or not believe. If they wanted to fully hide themselves then they could, and if they just didn’t care at all then they could come down and make it obvious, so why hang out in the grey zone? I don’t think I’ve ever heard a good explanation for this one.

But I’m not interested in UFOs because I think it’s all that likely or even all that plausible. I’m interested because it’s really weird that the government has a whole box of papers labeled “UFOS AND WEIRD ALIEN SHIT - DO NOT TOUCH”, and obviously such a collection of files invites suspicion.

Suppose you're a scientist in charge of establishing relatively orderly and constructive contact with a tribe of buttflap-clad cannibal natives, deep in some godforsaken jungle, who have never seen an outsider before. How do you go about it?

Do you hover over their village in a helicopter while they shit themselves, then jump out to say hello on day one? No way, they're either going to start throwing spears at you or bow down and declare you their god.

Maybe instead you start coming and going on the fringes, observing, letting their hunting parties catch sight of you from a distance. You peek down on them from far above, and if you see them burning you in effigy maybe you hold off on trying to introduce yourself for the moment.

Basically I'm imagining a machine intelligence a million years past singularity going "pspsps" at us like we're a cat because, while we're nothing compared to them, we're way more interesting than all the uninhabited space they usually see. Shitty movies about aliens trying to steal our oceans and fuck our women are the equivalent of buttflap natives building mock helicopters out of bamboo and ritually setting them on fire.

So just keep buzzing their little fighter jets and going "pspsps" at them. Don't even think of landing on the White House lawn and saying hello until they can all at least admit to one another that they see you. What's an extra century or so to you at this point?

If you talk about regular Earth scientists, then a reasonable way would be sending a person or two in a single boat to land on the beach, or just walk up to them on foot, let be observed and leave some easily recognizable usable things for them. Then if they pick it up, see what they do, maybe leave some more. Maybe they would bring some of their own to do a trade (even monkeys trade, it's basically built in). Once some trust is established, attempt personal contact. One may wear some analogue of a flack jacket, and in case things go really south have some snipers not too far but out of sight. But usually if initial contact was established the chance it will lead to immediate attack on contact in person is very low - if they were reluctant to contact, they'd just ignore your initial attempts.

Silent trade worked like that between peoples for a long time in history.

They might not care either way. If they only talk to or visit the people with control of the nukes, then the secret is secure that way.

Ok. But I specifically said that there was no need to get into general considerations about whether aliens exist or not. All I said was that I think the government should release certain classified photographs that they have, for some reason, of their own accord, decided to label as “UFOs” (UAP just being the new PC euphemism for UFO). This is a request that is specific, actionable, concrete, and limited in scope.

I've now been deep into bicycling as a hobby for 3 years. It's not the first time I've been very into being on two wheels by any means. As a kid, I was blessed with an extremely hilly course in my "residential golfing community" that had light enough traffic to allow me to often knock out two laps of the 18 holes in the dead of summer. In college, I used a bike to finish my nightly classroom IT maintenance routes twice as fast as my walking coworkers. I credit it with first getting a promotion, then the ability to watch movies in the huge amphitheater projectors on the clock and still finish on time.

But after my transfer to another school, my ride got stolen. It broke my heart a little bit. I got into cars and didn't have a bike again for the next 7 years. In hindsight, one of my bigger regrets.

The past couple of weeks have fascinated me with the real limits and consequences of equipment selection. When re-entering the hobby as an adult with disposable income, the first thing that struck me is how obsessed the sport is with hyper-specialization and gear fetishism. My first few rides were in a T-shirt and shorts, with a crappy water bottle on an incorrectly sized machine. I swore to myself I would never stoop to certain levels of nerd-dom and then caved on every item, sequentially:

  • Padded shorts/Chamois
  • Special chain oil
  • An aftermarket saddle
  • Specialized tires
  • A second bike/Drop Bars
  • Heart Rate monitor
  • Butt Cream
  • Cycling Jerseys

The list goes on. Anyway, Bike #1 was (is?) a "Dual Sport". It tried to sit in the very middle of what a bike can do, with unopinionated tires, a crappy and gruesomely heavy front fork, no rear suspension, and flat bars. I appreciated its ability to roll on pavement and still hop a curb without complaining, but it definitely felt like a compromise everywhere.

I then purchased a carbon fiber gravel bike. This is a controversial product segment - as the definition of what it means happens to be very squirrely and marketer-driven. To me, it's a suspension-free road bike with room for bigger tires and, ideally, a generous gearing range (with an emphasis on the low end). Effectively, this destroyed Bike 1's utility on pavement, urban exploration, and gravel.

Therefore, I started shifting Bike 1 to be more of a mountain bike. The crappy stock wheels that broke spokes under my fat ass were replaced with superior ones and wrapped in beefier, knobby tires. I added racks and attachment points to create a hideous bikepacking rig that's gone through multiple sub-evolutions, and tacked on a trailer hitch to tug my kids around town.

Then, a few weeks ago, I got an itch to try and see how much my handling capabilities had evolved. The irony of the gravel bike is that there's also a school of thought suggesting they should be able to do what modern MTBs do - if only you're good enough! I happen to live closely to some excellent trails, so I dropped the pressure on my tubeless tires and hopped over some singletrack.

In my second lap, I was rewarded with a catastrophic blowout on fresh tires. I rolled down a gulley with rocks at the bottom and the thinner rubber folded under the pressure of ~200 pounds of meat without any fork to back it up.

My initial reaction was to be pissed off. This machine was mostly made of space-age carbon fiber, from the frame to the wheels. It cost plenty of money, and I'd gotten top-tier rubber and was still only on a Blue trail segment. This bike was still supposed to be for adventuring into the unknown, and it's survived multiple 100-mile trips over ugly gravel and fire roads. What gives?

I started reflecting on this year journey of gradually specializing, tweaking, and making parts of my equipment suite more purpose-driven. There have been real benefits that I can track statistically, thanks to Strava, not to mention how much joy I get out of this type of locomotion. Maybe I'm not so much a victim of marketing jargon - instead, I need to have more realistic expectations when taking my sleek and stiff rocket into the mountains and expecting it to perform.

Anyway, another reason I took the thing out there at all was that I was getting an upgraded fork for Bike 1. I took it out this week, and holy shit was it different. Even with such an upgrade counting as lipstick on a pig, it felt like I was floating over everything. I'll be heading out to the nearby trails a ton more than I did before.

But under no circumstances will I ever get a dedicated Road bike.

I also got into bicycling around 3 years ago, it was the middle of Covid and I was looking for a versatile outdoor hobby and bicycling fit the bill very well. I was occasionally riding an old steel-frame road bike I had since college, but the bicycles you can get these days with some disposable income blew it completely out of the water. I ended up getting a gravel bike (aluminum frame, carbon fork) and it feels like going from your parents' old hatchback to a sports car. It makes a lot of sense for those of us who only have the space for one or two bikes and aren't that interested in going on rougher terrain. I carry around a compact hand pump, so I can ride on pavement to the trailhead, drop the pressure, ride on the trails, and pump back up when I want to ride home. I also have a set of Crankbrothers doubleshot pedals, which has clips on one side and flat on the other, so I can wear whichever pair of shoes makes sense for where I'm going.

At some point, I would like to own and use a proper mountain bike with suspension, but that will have to be a future endeavor.

What are your plans for Halloween? Going to party or trick or treating with kids?

What are your favorite things about this season?

We'll probably hit a trunk-or-treat or two before going trick-or-treating either in our own neighborhood or in a friend's. The various local schools and churches that do trunk-or-treats have realized they get better turnout if they schedule them before Halloween, so kids can do both.

I appreciate that the colder weather is killing my tomato plants so I can stop canning so much tomato sauce lol.

wait what is trunk-or-treat? never heard of this

A bunch of people get together in a parking lot and have candy in the trunks of their cars, and the kids go from car to car to get candy. I think it's kinda lame personally, but I can imagine kids enjoying the sheer efficiency of getting candy in that way.

A bunch of families will set up cars with various candy handouts from the trunk, usually in a moderately sized unused parking lot (eg church) or near some event space. Usually some sort of decoration around each participating car, though I’ve seen some nearly at the level of lower end convention booths.

It’s more popular in rural areas or where there are messy traffic spots between suburban subdivisions, since conventional house-to-house trick or treating can be kinda hard for younger kids there. But it’s sometimes done for weather reasons, too.

Gonna be giving out candy. My neighborhood is full of kids. Something I've noticed: they hardly ever remember to say "trick or treat" these days. Halloween has fallen.

A bunch of woo-woo amateur sluts I know are throwing a rager at their shared house.

They're early 30s, not married, and one bag of potato chips way from popping the buttons on their skinny jeans.

It'll be like shooting fish in a barrel.

(The above isn't actually what I'm doing for Halloween, but it is 100% accurately representative of how a lot of single Men perceive this Holiday.)

Never go for the girls slathered in makeup, they're too conscious of their makeup running or they'll look like melting clowns. The freakiest are the cosplayers, especially if they have multiple outside layers. They're assured to be wearing less underneath as a result.

I pitched this idea to a female friend: Find two other friends and you three can be the Powerpop Girls, a play on the Powerpuff Girls: Chappell Roan (Blossom), Sabrina Carpenter (Bubbles), and Charlie XCX (Buttercup).

Wouldn't Charli be Blossom (leader, most well known) and Chappell be Buttercup (rebellious dyke)

No. Keep things simple and go off hair color:

Red hair -> Chappell Roan/Blossom

Blonde hair -> Sabrina Carpenter/Bubbles

Black hair -> Charlie XCX/Buttercup

In terms of personality that makes sense, but in terms of appearance it’s immediately obvious who’s who.

Probably throw on a lazy cowboy/pirate outfit, get drunk, and hang out with some otherwise modest women dressed like strippers for the night

What are your favorite things about this season?

Iykyk

I think I might go as an Amish woman or something. I dunno.

Trunk or treat with the kids, boo at the zoo, visit the Day of the Dead memorials around Old Town Plaza. They say they put up 20,000 marigolds, it looks lovely. Apparently daughter’s going on a field trip where an Orchestra from Mexico will perform and talk about the music from Coco.

No Trick or Treat? Just trunk?

Possibly, but my neighborhood is kind of weird, everyone’s house is way behind their fence, so we would have to drive. There is a pretty good neighborhood haunted house only on Halloween, though.

It’s like tailgating, but for parents.

I've been pretty underwhelmed on the fun aspect of trunk or treat so far. Kids only having to walk 200 feet for 20,000 calories of corn syrup seems like the societal own-goal of the century.

Sometimes I worry I romanticized my childhood too much, but the experience of going door to door with your friends and collapsing, exhausted, to trade candy on the living room floor after such a long journey was consistently awesome. I don't see how this can really compete.

We were Evangelical homeschoolers when I was Trick-or-Treating age, and also didn't have any neighborhood friends, so I guess I don't have any trick or treat golden age to look back on.

My impression is that there's an ideal age range for real trick or treating, and that my kids (5, 2, and not eating solids yet) are a bit young still. I saw some kids doing it last year, I think three total, so it would be a bit of an adventure, people don't signal if they're giving treats or not. I haven't had a single kid try at my house in four years.

I 100% agree on your 2 year old, and I would be a long-range helicopter with the 5 year old. But I had my 3 year old do a turn of the cul-de-sac at least before he said he was too tired to continue. Por que no los dos?

There's a bit of a supply and demand spiral going on, too. People in great neighborhoods don't get enough kids (I got maybe 7 last year?) so don't bother answering the door or handing stuff out. Others don't understand the signal that if your light is on, it means you're giving out candy, which makes kids have to walk a ton to get to a couple doors etc....

If they are not giving treats, aren't you supposed to be a little juvenile delinquent and play a trick on them?

Theoretically, but I have not encountered that outside of movies

People criticize me for my negative view of cars but the fact that the majority of the middle class in the wealthiest country on earth never walk anywhere that isn’t from [parking lot] to [immediately adjacent building] is very unfortunate.

I'm a bit of a fast food addict, and watching people choose to get into a 30 (!) car deep drive thru line instead of hopping into a parking spot is insane. Even the journey from a parking lot is too much for the majority of people.

I wouldn't necessarily read too much into it. If I were going to make a culture war statement, it would be about saftyism, rather than willingness to walk, even with the two year old (though it's really annoying to walk with a tired two year old). The kids went on a two mile hike with us to find an ancient cliff ruin that we heard about from a stranger in a bar the other day. They can probably go trick or treating when they're old enough to take initiative about it.

Yeah, I had a similar experience. Shit was magical. I don’t know any current-year kids who don’t like it, either.

I have no plans. Halloween is a spook.

Seriously though, it feels like an import from America that exists purely to sell orange merchandise. Fake and gay.

+1

I absolutely hate Halloween. Reject Halloween, RETVRN to All Hallow's Day.

Wasn’t it all saints day? Do you celebrate it?

I thought "Hallow" basically means "Saint" / "Holy"?

Yeah, I do.

Maybe I was getting it confused with All Souls Day/Day of the Dead, which is more popular in my region.

"I want a civic ritual that will unite all of us"

"No, not like that!"

You can have it. I'm not American, and just want you to stop shoving it where it doesn't belong.

I also don't quite remember saying the above quote. I'm not one for "uniting all of us".

I sincerely doubt Americans are shoving Halloween into your country.

Where do you think it came from to my country? Mongolia?

The question isn't where it came from, but who's doing the shoving.

Well, it's not the Mongolians either.

Movies -

I will watch the hustler, a movie about pool it seems today. I go for polo matches here since my city, the largest in Rajasthan has a polo season and we get invited for all the games. It's not super stimulating but at least I get to go out of my house there.

Books -

I did start a bunch of new books, 12 rules for life, Arabian nights, sex god method and the Tyler digest alongside the power of now. I'll probably read 12 rules for life and then maybe switch to Arabian nights. I want to remove social media from my life as phone usage and surfing of any kind makes my adhd worse.

Sports -

No good fights this weekend in mma but bivol fights beterbiev, I think beterbiev knocks bivol out if you put a gun to my head but otoh bivol is really slick, so if he can avoid getting pressured and getting into exchanges he should not, he has a very clear path to victory. Still physicality is a very real thing in sports.

Miscellaneous -

Besides that it's Navratri (9 nights dedicated to the divine mother) and the final day would be Dussehra (tomorrow), when Lord Ram slayed Ravan in his home and started his journey back to his hometown after his 14 year exile. His return is what we call Diwali. Ramayana is an amazing read, I have the goldman's translation, can't recommend it enough.

I'm going to Pittsburgh this weekend, mostly for business though. What's the signature food, and where do I get it? Somebody tag the Pittsburgh guy!

Update: I'm in some place called Fiori's Pizzaria currently. This feels very Pittsburghy.

Update 2: I had an Italian hoagie. It was really very good.

May I ask how the hell you ended up in a pizza shop on a 4 lane highway in an interstitial zone between two unglamourous neighborhoods in the least touristy part of town? I've never been there but it's well-regarded, so I have to give you credit. Honestly, the only "signature" food we have that you can easily getis Pirmanti's, but that just seems like cheating. Honestly, I'm not much of a restaurant guy, but if you want that true grandma's basement Pittsburgh charm then Big Jim's in The Run is what you're looking for, though it doesn't have quite the same appeal since Guy Fieri went there. If you're looking for breakfast the typical tourist choice is Pamela's in the Strip, which is fine, but I'd recommend Johnny's in the West End since you obviously have a car, and there's no way you'd find this place on your own since it's on a road off of a highway onramp behind an industrial piping contractor. And if you're in the whole Brookline/Dormont area, be aware that almost every bar on West Liberty Ave. is an actual dive bar that has no appeal to people who think that dive bars have craft beer. Slap Shot's, Jamo's, the Apple Inn, Albert's, etc. are all filled with cigarette smoke and degenerates. I was once in the Brookline Pub a number of years back and the Sheriff showed up and dragged out half the customers on warrants.

Pretty sure it's pierogies, the Pittsburgh Pirates even have a squad of guys in pierogi outfits as their secondary mascot. Wait for the local guy to tell you where to get it, though.

Pierogies may be the signature food, but it's not something you can really order in a restaurant. The only place I can think of that had them was the Bloomfield Bridge Tavern, but that place closed a few years ago. I think Gooski's has them too, but that's more of a bar and not the kind of place I'd recommend someone goes expecting dinner. Pierogies are something your grandma makes on Fridays during Lent.

@Rov_Scam you’re being summoned.

Lmao, I thought there were a few of them.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats