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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2804 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 18, 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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Notes on Europe (Dublin, Northern Ireland, Marseille, Paris, Edinburgh). I was recently in Europe for two weeks, mostly in Marseille. It was my first time in six years and my first time in these particular countries. The most notable thing is how thin everyone was. I rarely saw a fat person. The contrast with the US is incredibly stark.

Dublin and Marseille are very dirty with lots of garbage everywhere. Marseille in particular has a lot of garbage and grafitti. Belfast is much cleaner than Dublin. Paris is very clean. So is Edinburgh, though I was there only very briefly.

Most things in all these places are very expensive. Gas is double what it is in Canada. Food in restaurants is extremely expensive, especially in Dublin and Edinburgh. Hostels were surprisingly cheap, but regular hotels were very expensive.

Scottish people are really nice, even (maybe especially?) airport staff. Irish bus drivers are some of the rudest people I've ever met.

With the exception of Paris, I found the transit systems in all these places hard to figure out.

French restaurants are staffed very inefficiently, with a lot of staff just standing around doing nothing much of the time. This is in stark contrast with Canadian restaurant staff who always seem to be rushing, probably busier than is optimal since it's always hard to get the bill.

The price being the price in restaurants and stores was really nice. I loved not having to worry about the sales tax and the tip and usually not having to round $x.99 up to $(x+1).

The Irish countryside with its huge green hills is incredibly beautiful. I've never seen so many cows in my life.

Marseille is chaotic. Cars are parked all over the sidewalk. The level of disregard for the rules of the road was almost third world. Mopeds are very popular. The streets are narrow. France, in general, is really bad at signage. They somehow manage to screw up basics like arrows pointing where you need to go.

In Marseille, a lot of people just sit around on the front steps of buildings they don't live in. They didn't look homeless. Lots of French people sit around in cafés with cigarettes in the most stereotypically French pose imaginable.

The local Marseillaise accent is very strange, though many people didn't have it. People were quicker to assume I didn't speak French than in Quebec, but not likely to deal with this by switching to English. They usually didn't speak English unless they were in a very touristy area, in which case their English was often excellent.

The majority of the population in Marseille seemed to be North African or Middle Eastern.

There were some nice places to hike or swim just outside the city, but most of the beaches were not very nice. They were small and crowded with pieces of wood and seaweed everywhere.

People in Europe are much better dressed than in Canada, especially Parisian women. I found it notable that it rained in Paris and almost every single person was carrying an umbrella (which they don't seem to know how to avoid whacking people in the face with). I'm from a rainy place where most people don't bother with them.

Unfortunately, lip injections are very popular with British women. Don't they know how awful they look?

People seem to love drinking in Dublin. The area around Temple Bar is crazy on a Saturday night. The bars were packed, the streets were full of people, and unlike back home, most people are visibly drunk. There were a lot of signs in the city informing you where alcohol wasn't allowed. There were a lot of methheads in Dublin walking around like zombies in the middle of the day.

Finally, I suspect the Irish wouldn't like to hear this, but Ireland seemed very British to me. It felt like I was on a BBC TV show. I haven't been to England, but I got the impression Ireland and the UK are much more similar to each other than either is to any other anglophone country (though I've only been to Canada and the US), at least on the surface.

There is a lot more I could say, but I think that's it for the less expected observations.

P.S. Since I was on dating apps the whole time, maybe I should comment on that. I usually get a lot of good matches at first when I go to a new place. This was very much the case in Dublin and Paris where I matched a lot of beautiful women right away. I had a much harder time in Marseille, and Edinburgh just doesn't seem to have very many good looking women, though I did eventually match some beautiful women in all these places.

I love uncensored travelogues like this. Just random observations, like who is getting abnormal amounts of cosmetic procedures, who is engaging in petty theft by not tapping on when boarding public transport. I made that last one up, but you get my meaning. Otherwise you get boring Youtube clips that focus on politically correct, sanitised observations.

Finally, I suspect the Irish wouldn't like to hear this, but Ireland seemed very British to me. It felt like I was on a BBC TV show. I haven't been to England, but I got the impression Ireland and the UK are much more similar to each other than either is to any other anglophone country (though I've only been to Canada and the US), at least on the surface.

This was also my impression of the country when I've visited it (both Dublin and Belfast. I was too polite to mention it to my Irish (often very republican) hosts, mostly. However, it's very hard to encounter, say, the two faucets and not immediately think "Oh, so English".

Trolling street protesters is good fun. Walking up the street and the Revolutionary Communist Party have set up a stand. One of the members calls out to me and my girlfriend, "hey guys, are you interested in communism?"

I shout back "absolutely not!" without breaking stride. Even he laughed at that.

A few hours later we go to McDonald's. When we're leaving, a bunch of pro-Palestine protesters wearing ghoulish costumes have congregated outside, shaming all the people who enter or exit in light of McDonald's support for Israel (?). One of them calls out to us "you don't have to do this again!" I replied "but I will!"

It's fascinating what's happened with McDonald's over this war. The only pro-Israel action was that the dude who owned all their franchises in Israel decided to give free meals to the IDF, of his own accord with no involvement from corporate HQ, and in fact corporate leadership took pains to distance McDonald's as a whole from this guy's actions, but nonetheless Muslims around the world became convinced that McDonald's supports Israel and should be boycotted, to the point where McDonald's franchises in Arab countries suffered substantial loss of business. Corporate HQ even decided it was worth buying all the Israeli restaurants from the aforementioned Israeli franchisee in hopes of restoring their reputation among Muslims, and apparently that happened in April of this year, but if you're still seeing protestors outside a McDonald's in October I guess that didn't work out as well as they hoped.

It calls to mind this post I saw on reddit a while ago.

Damn, is that really all they did? That's so silly.

I'm guessing there are a lot of people who really don't understand how the franchising business model works and don't really get how much autonomy individual franchise owners are afforded.

This is why they win. Someone who is aggressive and unreasonable is far more intimidating than a reasonable person, and gets a lot more of what they want. That goes double for a group, and triple when most modern structures of (corporate) governance are carefully designed to dilute responsibility as much as possible.

corporate leadership took pains to distance McDonald's as a whole from this guy's actions .... Corporate HQ even decided it was worth buying all the Israeli restaurants from the aforementioned Israeli franchisee in hopes of restoring their reputation among Muslims

What would being reasonable have got Muslims? If they'd sent a letter to corporate about how one francise owner was behaving badly, or boycotted that one store, it would have been completely ignored. As it is, they have the board practically on its knees. The applicability of this to political struggles closer to home is left as an exercise for the reader.

There’s even more comedy when it comes to Starbucks.

Some of them can be quite funny. A bearded guy, niqabi wife in to, had some kind of breakdown on the street in front of me yesterday and started shouting at random shoppers. “FORTY THREE THOUSAND DEAD AND YOU’RE SHOPPING”, he screamed several times, as if concern for Gaza should make buying clothes or groceries impossible, then his wife tapped him on the arm and he recomposed himself.

In your case the protestors may well have been communists. We have them too, but they hold their rallies relatively infrequently. It’s more Muslim people who have PDS.

I just spent my Saturday doing a winery tour out in the countryside with close friends.

I'm an introvert, but sometimes I really appreciate extroverts dragging me out into the right environment. We actually managed to fit 5 adults into a sedan to get out there (to avoid drink driving). There was just the right amount of degenerate day drinking, which was kind of ok because two among us had Summer dresses.

I think there might be something to 'touching grass'.

I suspect that the whole Introvert/Extrovert thing basically doesn't exist. It seems to me that pretty much everyone wants to be social and around other people sometimes and quiet and alone at other times. There's some variation on exactly how much of each and at what intensity any person wants, but virtually nobody is at the extremes suggested by the Introvert/Extrovert framing.

There does seem to be more variation in desire to plan and organize events. Relatively few people seem to have the desire or inclination to create a plan, even a really simple and vague one like, let's all meet at a bar at roughly some particular time, and invite a bunch of people to it. But at least those relative few seem to be really into it, so it's good to have them around. Many others seem to be happy to show up to an event that somebody else organized, but have little interest in organizing things themselves.

Since it's one of the Big 5 personality factors, extroversion has been studied a moderate amount. One version I was looking at a while back broke it down into assertiveness (what you're mostly talking about) and enthusiasm (I was looking into it because I attended an Evangelical youth group, where enthusiasm was heavily valued, and I just couldn't muster it). So I suppose not exactly the same as the way some people use it, but still mappable to something like social energy.

Am I correct in recalling that it varies along a bell curve? (Not bimodally?)

That’s what I remember. I think all the OCEAN traits are bell curve, they give results by percentile.

Opposite experience for me. Seems obvious who are extroverts and introverts around me. People who sit in the middle seem more rare than the ones that exist at the extremes of the spectrum.

I model the Introvert-Extrovert distinction as those who like to form relatively few connections, but the connections they do form are strong and last a long time, vs. those who like to form many loose and 'weak' connections, and is constantly severing some and forming new ones based on various criteria.

And thus, where do they put their efforts? Introverts put effort into trying to maintain their existing friendships, extroverts put efforts into forming more, more, more and, almost by definition, can only devote small amounts of efforts to any given relationship (although they may have some they focus on more!).

So the result is that once the introvert has formed a decent number of strong connections, the thought of spending MORE effort on finding more relationships just doesn't make sense, to the extent it will take effort away from their existing relationships. And to the extrovert, being stuck with the same handful of people and unable to find new connections might seem unbearable.

Maybe its about novelty-seeking vs. preference for the familiar.

And thus, the thought of going to a party with tons of strangers might make the introvert miserable, while it would excite the extrovert.

Maybe, but have you ever met any actual people who would meet those definitions?

I don't think I've ever met or known anyone who I know to be extroverted by that definition. Though to be fair, maybe it would be hard to know because by definition such a person would be very difficult to get to know well enough to know that they're actually doing that. But then who are the people who actually know for sure that someone they know is behaving like that?

I like theory-crafting as much as the next possibly vaguely autistic Mottizan, but I've also gotten somewhat self-conscious about the tendency to build imaginary castles that aren't demonstrated to correspond to actual people or real-world situations.

I don't think I've ever met or known anyone who I know to be extroverted by that definition.

I knew a guy who would talk to someone in a foreign country for perhaps five minutes and subsequently say that they "made a friend". On the other hand, I could count my friends on one hand.

Maybe, but have you ever met any actual people who would meet those definitions?

I mean, me, I'm an introvert. I have like a dozen or so 'close' friends that I keep in consistent contact with. I can expend extra effort to connect with new people but rarely see the need.

Meanwhile, I know some people who can enter any social situation and instantly ingratiate themselves to most other guests, even if they've never met. But they only ever spend like one hour at a given party because they've got other obligations, other people to meet, dontcha know.

So you rarely ever 'get to know' those sorts because they're only there as long as they're there, they don't put much effort into followup.

My model is more like, most people have a modest number of close friends (who may or may not be family). Everyone has widely varying levels of skill and inclination when it comes to starting and maintaining conversations with people and moving brief connections towards actual friendships.

Myself, I maintain maybe like a dozen or so pretty close friendships and another few dozen somewhat more distant friends who I know and see semi-regularly but don't actually get together with that often for various reasons. I am usually pretty good at going to a bar or party where I know nobody or only a couple of people and talking to a bunch of people. Most of the time, I forget about whoever I was talking to not too long after. Moving those brief conversations towards actual friendships is considerably harder, at least to me. Maybe some people are better at that part, I don't know. People I consider actual friends tend to come from situations where you tend to be around the same few people regularly without either side explicitly planning to get together with those specific people, like by being regulars at a bar or working together or being members of some kind of club or other regular group activity.

Perhaps that behavior looks to other people at that sort of event like what you've described as an extrovert. But they don't know that I actually only maintain those few dozen closer friendships with people I've known for years. I'm inclined to believe that most people we see acting like that are doing the same thing. So am I Introverted or Extroverted? I don't know, so I don't find the distinction very meaningful. Maybe those other people you see who appear to be doing that are just having a little fun their way and actually do have their own dozen or so really close friends.

So in my book, you're not actually Introverted, just normal.

I am usually pretty good at going to a bar or party where I know nobody or only a couple of people and talking to a bunch of people.

You are typical-minding if you think this describes everyone. This is basically a nightmare scenario for me, and I am actually overall reasonably well adjusted (no, seriously, guys).

You sound like most extroverts I encounter. One of the most common aspects of extroverts is that they tend to not believe or accept that introverts exist.

Every introvert knows what they are and how they are different than extroverts. It takes them only the barest amount of observational skill.

There is a manifestation of physical discomfort in social situations. The closest comparison I can think of: imagine knowing that you stink from BO or poop, or your teeth are gross. Then further imagine you are stuck in close proximity to a person you are attracted to but barely know. I think most people's desire in this situation is an intense desire to leave and be unseen. You might even fear that other people are noticing or discussing your grossness. Nearby laughter can spike paranoia rather than joy.

That is what it can feel like when an introvert has overextended and stayed in a social situation past their leave time.

And when that is how nights tend to end even if you have fun for the first few hours it's not really something you look forward to. And eventually you either discover the magic of alcohol which I believe can switch people from introverts to extroverts, or you stop going to social events.

I know that that particular behavior (willingness to start conversations with very weakly connected people or total strangers) is very abnormal and most would consider it extroversion. However, most other people I know seem to be much further towards "extroversion" in other ways than I am, yet seem to me to be strangely unwilling to do that.

For example, most other people I know tend to have what I call more words than me. They seem to have much greater capability to extend conversations indefinitely, to just keep on talking and talking and talking. I was never very good at this. Usually any conversations I start tend to peter out fairly quickly unless the other person is actively interested in maintaining it and puts in effort towards that.

I also desire to spend substantial amounts of time basically quiet and alone, doing something like reading or watching movies and videos on the internet. Some other people I know seem to be much more active, constantly up and about doing things.

So then am I introverted or extroverted? How about all those other people I know with different combinations of traits? Beats me. That's why I find the whole thing not very useful, to the point of saying it basically doesn't exist, and might even be actively harmful in some cases. I think that what people normally think of as those traits are actually a cluster of dozens of personality characteristics that aren't necessarily related to each other at all, and several of them are closer to being skills that can be learned or moods and emotions that someone may feel more of or less of at any particular time for any number of reasons than fundamental traits that cannot be changed.

I cannot really know or claim to speak for what any particular person thinks and feels. But I do think that quite a few people who are self-proclaimed Introverts are actually just psyching themselves out. Perhaps when they were young, they did not yet know how to conduct themselves in social settings or had false beliefs about what other people were thinking of them. Perhaps they were convinced of an ideology that they were Introverts, that this was not a temporary feeling or mood or lack of a skill that can be learned, but instead made it part of their identity and chose to revel in it. What if it's not actually a fundamental unalterable trait? What if such a person decided to believe instead that they could learn how to socialize and how to at least sometimes get themselves into a mood to take pleasure from it? I say this not to condescend to you or any other particular person, but because it's exactly what I did myself.

Driving a car was initially pretty scary. But I learned to do it and got comfortable with it eventually. I certainly wasn't always any good at any sort of socialization. I'm far from perfect or any kind of expert at it even now, but I have managed to get somewhat better and more comfortable with it, at least sometimes.

You are extroverted, some people you know are more extroverted than you.

Those people you talk to that suck at maintaining conversations ... probably introverts.

I think your argument proves too much. It sounds like it could be used to disprove any internal assessments.

More comments

I mean, what makes me say I'm introverted is my strong, strong preference to just hang out with people I know. It took me a lot of work to get to the point where I could just go out and socialize with people I don't have a pre-existing connection with. There's no level on which it comes 'natural' to me and thus it feels very effortful. In the past this might have been attributable to social anxiety but nowadays even in social settings where I feel comfortable I don't feel much urge to engage with strangers much.

Indeed, it often feels like I have to just view it all as a 'networking opportunity' where I might offchance meet somebody who has a useful skill or career who I can loop in with some other person I happen to know in hopes of leading to some mutual gain or maybe some business being returned down the road.

In short, I know that being TOO introverted is an impediment to one's career advancement and social standing, so I can force myself to do it, but I do not enjoy it for its own sake.

Seems a pretty bold claim to state to a self-described introvert that introverts don't exist.

The fact that a trait exists on a spectrum doesn't mean that the words we use to describe the ends of the spectrum 'don't exist'. Someone who feels social nine times out of ten is different in a meaningful way from someone who feels social one time out of ten. Why shouldn't we have words to describe them?

I'm not sure what framing you have in your head, but I know people personally who, if I were to not describe them as extroverted would require a deliberate lie on my part.

I think it's accurate in that the words are generally used in a sense of declaring people to be at the extreme ends of the spectrum, when probably under 1% of the population is really that far in either direction. Words like "shy" and "gregarious" are in my opinion more useful as the way they are used seems to describe a moderate tendency more than an absolute or extreme case.

Maybe OP doesn't agree, but they described themselves as an Introvert and then described enjoying an activity that a person meeting the strict definition of an Introvert would not enjoy.

Interesting, I would say that gregarious and shy are both much stronger words than introverted or extroverted.

I think the modal introvert is

1.) high activation energy (in the chemistry sense) for social environments

2.) totally fine with familiar people; utterly exhausted by strangers and loose acquaintances

The popular use of "introvert" seems to be "people who are categorically averse to social interaction" but in my experience such people are quite rare (insert sampling bias disclaimer here).

I know right.

Raise your hand if you've heard 'You're not an introvert' after you've told them, just because you aren't socially awkward.

Social introvert energy is something I think a certain type of extrovert will mine for. They just can't leave you alone.

This, as well as a lot of the argument in this thread, can be explained simply by realizing that many people mistakenly confuse “introversion” with “social anxiety” (which typically goes along with awkwardness).

They aren’t the same. Though they can occur together, and often do, especially as emotional stability and extraversion are positively correlated.

This is the great utility of alcohol. It is supposed to be used to increase friendship in a peaceful setting. It should be had in the morning or afternoon so it doesn’t affect sleep. People who claim that alcohol is bad for the brain haven’t understood its optimal use case, where the cognitive benefits more than compensate for the minor damage. Poor social bonding causes greater cognitive damage than moderate drinking, and communities without bonds cause cognitive damage through its secondary effects on the polis. Hypothetically, if you were to go on runs with friends and then celebrate at the end with drinking, this would be better for your health than running without drinking, because by drinking you increase the likelihood that you will continue to run, and vastly increase the social bonds which have secondary health consequences over time (and also increase your likelihood of running). Sadly I can’t drink as it only makes me sick and anxious for some reason, but I’ll always defend its legitimate uses. Better drinking advice: never go to a bar, never drink alone, only drink in celebratory bonding social settings with benevolent peers.

Aside: a place not far from me has taken advantage of our state’s lax rules about wine tastings. You don’t need an expensive liquor license for wine tasting. They give you all the tasting cups at once, along with a large glass that you can pour the small cups into. Behold: a liquor license for the clever, without costing 350k.

only drink in celebratory bonding social settings with benevolent peers.

This should be carved into stone.

Vidya

Factorio expansion releases next Monday. Hell ya. I think I still have the posts saved from last time of people that are interested in a playthrough. If anyone else is interested let me know here. I'll set up a server for joint play. You can add me on steam: cjet799

I've been having fun in the discord.gg/1stmi playing starship troopers extermination. I'm a corporal, which usually just means I'm expected to step up into squad lead positions, and I'm capable of shadowing someone who is trying out for a squad lead position. Next step is getting a platoon lead certification and then I'll be in charge of running 16 person ops. But also in charge of more paperwork and making sure people behave in a discord chat.

I did encounter my first recalcitrant trooper this past week. They were uninterested in taking orders, or only followed about half of what I said. At the end of the match I pulled them aside and just had a quick chat "hey man, if you don't want to follow orders that's fine, but there isn't much point being in this group if that's the case" he gave a bit of an apology and said he was tired. He seemed better the next day.

I've been balls deep in Mechwarrior 5 Clans. It's a bit rough around the edges. I don't think the meta is as balanced as MW5 Mercs got after 6 DLC or whatever it was. Also I'm not really sure they captured the raw supremacist attitude of Smoke Jaguar. It's still pretty amazing though. A peerless revisit of MW2's rough timeline.

I recently 100%ed Witchfire. Nice game. Excellent quality. Far higher than many non-early-access titles. Looking forward to the updates.

Ran another quick campaign on Battle Brothers. Always a nice game to return to. Just feels weird how quickly the endgame arrives, and that you're supposed to retire the campaign that early.

Tinkered around a little with Space Engineers. The game is showing its age and is full of infuriating limitations, but overall I still find myself having some modest fun.

I recently finished the single-player campaign to Titanfall 2. I enjoyed it, 7/10.

I'm a long-time fan of Titanfall 1, and found the campaign of Tf2 to be...okay? Playable, certainly. But fairly boring compared to the multiplayer.

It's been a long time but I enjoyed that so much, I'd have given it way more than that.

DM'd

Scott's piece on the Dark Ages really touched a nerve. Even seven years later on Twitter, various people in the rat-adjacent and Silicon Valley spaces pass around charts about how the Dark Ages, were, in fact, extremely real and spectacular dark.

But let's not forget the piece that started it all: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/

As for me, I am going to die on any hill, it's that the Dark Ages were dark. If Kamala wrote that into her platform, I'd vote for her. It's that serious.

I was recently chatting with Claude to get a better sense of the course of European architecture after the Romans. As early as the 11th century you start to see beauty in buildings again (st Mark's basilica in Venice, Ely cathedral, San Miniato al Monte), but before that it's truly depressing except in Muslim Spain (the great mosque of Cordoba was built in 785 and expanded in the 10th century, the great mosque of kairouan). It's not all bad (the monastery of Santa maria de Ripoll is decent if not masterful) but it really does seem like the 11th century was a turning point. Basically Christendom was building tremendously dreary stuff until the Romanesque style came about.

US Election Bold Predictions Thread

Give me your hot takes about the results of the upcoming US Elections. These should be BOLD, don't just follow the prediction markets or the odds, and probably not about who wins the electoral college since the current best guess is that it's anyone's guess who wins. I should preface all this that on the POTUS front, I'm expecting a narrow Trump win, with a very low confidence in that prediction.

For me:

-- Trump is going to lose North Carolina badly, significantly underperforming his polling numbers. The very best recent results for Mark Robinson have him down by ten points after the Nude Africa, "I'm a black Nazi," "I write erotica about my sister in law pissing on me" scandal. Most of his staff has abandoned him. Reverse coat-tails normally don't work out, but Robinson's complete lack of any campaign infrastructure is a different animal than just being disliked. The Robinson campaign won't be doing any of the GOTV work that you'd expect from a gubernatorial campaign. I expect Robinson to do better, thanks to Trump, than his poll numbers indicate, he's probably not going to lose by 20 points. But I expect Trump to do a couple points worse than his averages, thanks to Robinson.

-- Deadlocked Senate. I don't know how, but I expect the Dems to pull out one upset in a red-leaning seat. They've overperformed in statewide elections since Dobbs, and I just think they'll pull one out somewhere. Trump is harmed less by abortion than virtually every other R candidate, because a lot of people who like him just don't believe he's pro-life. R senate candidates are getting crushed on the issue. R candidates for competitive seats like McCormick are trying to swing back towards pro-life, but it's not going to work, it's just going to make them look weak and unreliable.

Kamala is declared the winner of the election. Trump disputes it, and several states refuse to certify. It goes to SCOTUS who declare a contested election. Trump wins the by state vote in congress. Lots of protesting.

Harris wins most swing states and the election, but someone like Abbott picks up the "vote manipulation" story and unlike four years ago manages to organize an effective campaign to gather enough evidence of borderline legal actions to not certify the votes from these states. The whole thing goes to court, and the congress chooses the president.

The very best recent results for Mark Robinson have him down by ten points after the Nude Africa, "I'm a black Nazi," "I write erotica about my sister in law pissing on me" scandal.

...Say what?

Man, one of the things I hate about American presidential politics is how it sucks up so much attention that lose track of other, more interesting political stories. This is the first time I'm hearing about this! He sounds like uncle ruckus

I think it got reported less largely because A) It was pretty much immediately headshot fatal so no horserace to cover, B) the worst parts are actually so bad they're impossible to report in normal news outlets.

@FiveHourMarathon

I haven't seen anyone consider how the set of candidates on ballot in Nevada favors the democrats. Of course, Nevada is among the bluest of the swing states anyway, and the least relevant state, but that's a relevant factor in its outcome, I think.

Neither side is willing to accept a loss, leading to civil war and the collapse of the republic.

He said hot takes. That's lukewarm at best.

Maybe then I can buy a house.

You will be able to just move into a mansion of someone who will have been executed for treason, you'll just have to join the side that will ultimately win and survive.

Already priced in.

I think Trump wins narrowly, low confidence.

One thing that he has against him is his fragile coalition. Although he is ahead in all 7 swing states (projecting for 312 electoral votes), his lead in each swing states is razor thin.

After those 7 states, there is no 8th state which is really in play. Virginia comes closest, but Harris is up by a whopping 6.4 points. That's actually less than Trump's lead in Texas (5.7 points).

So Trump could, just, squeak through, but this coalition is brittle. Texas is just one amnesty away from being flipped Blue forever like California was in the 1980s.

Is Republicans take even the house a bold take?

I think they will, personally, though I'm not sure what the protections are.

If the Senate is a deadlock and trump underperforms that much in NC, I don't think the Republicans will take the house.

Typographical and English errors in judicial opinions can be somewhat funny to read—or, alternatively, somewhat worrying.

Police also discovered a .9-millimeter Glock 19 handgun in an alley near the scene.… An individual reported someone running by his yard discarding a .9-millimeter Springfield XD handgun.

Suspecting Bartoleska may be intoxicated, Bodine requested she drive into a nearby parking lot.… The community-caretaking concern transitioned into a reasonable and articulable suspicion Bartoleska may be driving while intoxicated.

Conflating fractional-inch and metric nomenclatures, I guess?

Movies

I recently saw a bunch of movies and recommend every single one of them. I will start off with the Oslo trilogy by Joachim Trier. It consists of three excellent movies, all set in Oslo. Triers movies are Norwegian, the dailouges are terse, heavy emphasis on visuals, everyday slice of life action. All the movies show depth of emotions, even in the little things that we feel. I recommend watching all of them IMO, even better if you watch them with a girl you like.

The worst person in the world (2021)

This is a movie girls would like quite a bit since it is the only that has a female protagonist. Becoming 30, not having a fixed career path, and feeling unsure about yourself, the themes here are very well laid out.

  • Oslo, 31st August (2011)

This is the most emotionally taxing movie that I have seen in recent times. Set in the duration just one day, this movie breaks your heart, it broke my heart because I am currently in a downward spiral myself, not as bad as drugs like the protagonist but still pretty bad. Watch it, if you only watch one movie from the list, watch this one.

  • Reprise (2006)

Trainspotting but with literature instead of drugs but set in norway. My favorite in terms of the joy I got out of it. It is a great slice of life coming of age movie. I love transporting, I saw it on the final day of my 10th grade exams, march 10th, 2016, that was the last time I was truly worry-free since hardcore cram schools begin in 11th. I loved the movie a lot and Reprise is similar as in its themes revolve around male friendships.

  • Magnolia (1999)

fun watch, ensemble cast, Tom Cruise is amazing in there though like everyone else in the world, they make pickup artists look like caricatures but otoh, most pickup artists and most people who watch them especially back then were not cool people to be around. The themes in it are far more varied, the casting is brilliant.

  • Dunkirk (2019)

The only World War 2 movie I would consider rewatching. It depicts the events of just one day, set about the extraction of soldiers stuck in Dunkirk France. Chris Nolan is an amazing director, this is his only war movie. I was surprised when Quentin Tarantino rated it so highly since I had not seen it, I get what he meant now.

  • The Hustler (1961)

This is based on a novel of the same name, the novel was recommend by Todd Valentine, one of the worlds best dating coach, someone who played soccer, poker, chess at decently high levels. Cool watch, first black and white I have ever seen.

  • Color of money (1986)

Sequel to The Hustler, with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise now being the hotheaded pool prodigy who is hustling people. It is directed very well and gives a decent send off to the arc that began in The Hustler.

  • Deadpool and Wolverine (2024)

All movies cannot be good after, a movie that you have to be 18 to watch, 15 if you wanna enjoy it and 30 if you want ti understand all the pop culture references, can skip if you want to in all honesty. I liked the cameos somewhat, so Chris Evans as the Human Torch with this thick Boston accent or Channing Tatum as Gambit with this over-the-top Cajun accent.

I will halt my movie-watching spree now since I know way too many people who just watch movies all day. After a while the sloth sets in, it happened to me too so I will try to watch less. Ideally, I will keep reading and meditating more alongside taking actions. Still here are some movies I want to watch or rewatch

Once upon a time in Hollywood - Brad Pitts body language is something I want to embody, that is the main reason for rewatching it, I saw in theatres 5 years ago, great movie

Boogie Nights, Fight Club and maybe a few more, I have not seen boogie nights so yeah.

Piggybacking for some of my recent watches.

American Fiction - A victim of its maketing. It is 95% upper class dramedy with 5% race farce, but the race farce was all that was advertised. I really enjoyed it, but I quite enjoy Jeffrey Wright’s understated acting style generally. I barely recognized Adam Brody. I initially thought Issa Rae was meant to be the foil, but they both made her more relatable and a blatantly worse human as the story progressed. I enjoyed it, but it is slow and frustrating often. Qualified recommendation.

Promising Young Woman - Bo Burnham steals the show and Carey Mulligan is excellent, but this is MeToo passion play scripting. All men are monsters and anything done to them is justified. The finale has her fraudulently gaining access to a private party via blackmail, chaining a man to a bed and preparing to mutilate him with a scalpel. The movie ends with him being arrested after killing her, but the movie’s internal logic would suggest that he will get away with it because it was a clear case of self defense. Dumb pretending to be smart. Do not recommend.

Boy Kills World - needed a tighter script. The gimmick of using H Jon Benjamin to provide the protagonist’s internal dialogue wears out quickly, and the action was pretty uninspired. Do not recommend.

Haywire - Gina Carano playing Jason Bourne, but not a wimp. The action scenes are well done - Gina’s time fighting MMA clearly shows and it looks like she could hold her own against her male opponents. The story is pretty weak and Carano doesn’t have a lot of range other than glowering. Wild to me that Steven Soderbergh directed this - it feels so sterile and devoid of human characters for one of his movies. Qualified recommendation.

Confirming on American Fiction. The race farce kinda drives the plot, but the point of the movie is not that, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

I, too, liked American fiction.

Promising young Woman was an interesting watch for me. It was recommended by a tattooed, arts major stripper in Montreal. She told me that I looked like Bo Burnham in broken english, and gave me her number, presumably to discuss it afterwards.

I smoked weed and watched the movie and like it until I entered a paranoid spiral: had this woman suggested the film as a 4-D chess, long range insult? Did she believe I was the same type of person as Bo's character? Maybe.

But yeah great movie.

The only World War 2 movie I would consider rewatching

Have you seen Saving Private Ryan? When I watched Dunkirk all I could think was that it was Nolan directing a PG-13 Ryan knockoff.

TBH there are only like three good scenes in the whole movie. The D-Day scene gives the impression that the film is going to be a gritty, morally-grey story about how war is a pointless, hellish slaughter. However, it quickly pivots to an all-too-typical morality play of good guys vs. faceless evil Germans. The only part of the film that humanizes the Germans in any way - the arc with Steamboat Willie - ends up being a story of how treating a Nazi mercifully was a blunder with horrible consequences.

I think the film squanders an opportunity to tell a genuinely interesting story about how the war was a ghoulishly unnecessary waste of millions of the best young men that the West had to offer. However, that is clearly not the story Spielberg wanted to tell; nor, frankly, is it a story America would have wanted to hear, so I can’t blame Spielberg any more than I would have blamed any other director.

Everyone says "the first half-hour is incredible, then it becomes corny patriotic schlock". I disagree: I think the film does an admirable job of sustaining the intensity of its opening throughout the subsequent battle scenes, which are almost as gripping and jarring as those in the opening, and which set the tone for how action films would look, sound and feel for decades afterwards.

I think the film squanders an opportunity to tell a genuinely interesting story about how the war was a ghoulishly unnecessary waste of millions of the best young men that the West had to offer.

On the contrary, I think the film did tell this story. Consider the conversation between Miller and Horvath in the church, in which Miller says that throughout his military career, he was able to rationally justify all the lives lost under his command with the reasoning that more lives have been saved as a result. But for this particular mission, he cannot employ that reasoning: many men must die to save the life of one, and the only way the sacrifice will be worth it is if Ryan "invent[s] a longer-lasting lightbulb or something". Ryan's closing dialogue indicates that he's spent more or less his entire adult life burdened with the knowledge that he's only alive because several men gave their lives to save his, as a public relations mission, and wondering if he has done enough with his time on earth to warrant the sacrifice. Spielberg himself openly stated that Miller's mission cannot be justified on moral grounds. If that doesn't say something about the absurdity and arbitrariness of war, I don't know what does. It may not be Joseph Heller but it's a far more disquieting and confrontational message than the movie is generally credited with. (Not to mention the fact that the film's viewpoint character for the back half is a coward who allows his squadmate to die because he's paralysed by terror, and who is clearly intended to represent how the typical audience member would behave in such a situation.)

Spielberg himself openly stated that Miller's mission cannot be justified on moral grounds. If that doesn't say something about the absurdity and arbitrariness of war, I don't know what does.

Yes, Spielberg acknowledges that at least some of the American lives lost during the war were thrown away for cynical and arbitrary reasons, and that this is unspeakably tragic.

What he is unwilling to acknowledge is that the deaths of those German boys were also equally tragic and unnecessary.

I’m not willing to call the film “corny patriotic schlock”. It is an incredibly masterful film, and I agree with you that the battle scenes are thrillingly intense. However, you’re also correct that the film influenced battle scenes that came after it, and I don’t think this influence is wholly positive. Throughout the film, the Germans are almost universally treated as faceless foes, who die bloodlessly and instantaneously when shot. In contrast, American casualties writhe in pain, spurt blood everywhere, and cry for their mothers. It’s very affecting and humanizing, but it’s never applied to the Germans. There’s a YouTuber who does great analysis of this aspect of the film. The Germans can be mowed down without inspiring sympathy, because they are just villainous mooks.

This is not an anti-war film, and certainly not an anti-WWII film. It’s just an acknowledgement of how utterly horrible the sacrifices were that American soldiers needed to make in order to save the world from an unambiguously evil force of insane, feral monsters vaguely resembling human beings. It doesn’t ask you to stop and wonder whether the German soldiers felt the same way, let alone whether they would be correct in thinking so.

I just don't think the film is anywhere near as one-sided or morally black-and-white as you're making out. The German sniper in the clock tower has the opportunity to shoot Caparzo, but refrains from doing so until Caparzo returns the little French girl to her parents, presumably for fear of her getting hit in the crossfire. After killing Mellish in a vicious hand-to-hand mêlée, the unnamed German soldier can't bring himself to kill the cowering, snivelling Upham who clearly poses no threat. Perhaps we aren't strictly invited to sympathise with Steamboat Willie when he's pathetically sobbing and begging for his life, but I think we are at least invited to understand Upham's reluctance to kill a POW in cold blood. If Miller's squad had executed him, it would have been just one of several war crimes the Rangers are depicted committing: I don't think the audience is expected to cheer at their decision to shoot surrendering Czech conscripts at Omaha, or needlessly prolonging the deaths of several German soldiers by allowing them to burn to death rather than quickly finishing them off.

Of course the American soldiers are our viewpoint characters and we are intended to sympathise with them (because, duh, the Allies just were more sympathetic than the Germans), but I don't think the film can honestly be said to depict the German soldiers as a formless mass of interchangeable faceless monsters, nor the American soldiers as stalwart, wholly morally upstanding heroes who never put a foot wrong.

I have, in saving private ryan, the cinematic scenes are in the beginning whereas in this one, they are spread throughout. For me that makes this more rewatachable, that too is a great movie, worth rewatching so good point.

I will narrow my reading focus down, trying to just read and having 20 books open is not very fun for a green new reader like me. I will read Petersons 12 rules for life and post a review of it. I will read more stuff similar to what he writes, what was recommended to me by you guys, The Now Habit I mean, stuff that will help me understand my issues and have some actionable advice I can implement.

Besides movies, I had just been chilling, I unfortunately started surfing the internet a little bit since I was free but it just makes me angry as opposed to reading which makes you feel better. Like most weekends when its not hot, there will be polo matches being played in my city.

My family gets season invites to polo matches here. The current his highness of my city plays for the national team and since hs grandfather himself played it quite a bit, the polo season here is far better than anywhere else in India. The matches are barely one hour and after that we all proceed for high tea. I go to these matches since they give me an excuse to leave my house. There is not much to be done here. The sport is scary, you fall from horses and can get trampled over. I would love to play it a little bit once I am not broke lol.

My parents also took a weekend away from my house and I am super happy about that. They are in Bikaner, my dad was invited to the all India political science conference or something. My ma likes travelling like most women would but because of property disputes, we have super distant relatives illegally squatting in a portion of our house (besides the fort, I fucking hate India man). My dad is a total couch potato so this is their first trip alone in years that too came about because of the large conference. Not related to me but does make me happy that they went out.

I will narrow my reading focus down, trying to just read and having 20 books open is not very fun for a green new reader like me.

Nobody should try to read 20 books at once, lol. That's way too much. Gotta focus them down one at a time, imo

Eh, I've not infrequently had, like, seven at once—having books in several different genres or styles to switch between as your mood changes can be good. Twenty is a ton, though.

Unrelated but I love your username. I was thinking the other day that Vanilla Sky might have one of the best licensed soundtracks of any Hollywood movie, it's up there with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in terms of how many cool artists it introduced me to. Case in point.

It's got an amazing soundtrack. I uploaded photos of a vanilla sky I saw in chiang mai and the uploaded Instagram photo has the song from sigur ros in the movie that is played at the end.

Cameron Diaz also has a song there lol.

If you haven't seen it yet: Scott's AI Art Turing Test. See if you can guess which pictures are AI and which are human.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, the quiz won’t automatically tell you your score at the end, so if you want to know your score, you’ll have to write down your answers and manually compare them with Scott’s answer key.

Spoilers below where I discuss some of the answers, don't look until you've done the test yourself:

I did pretty terrible! I said they were almost all AI, which was definitely not correct. I got the impression after the first few that Scott might have been pulling a trick and he made them all AI to see how people would react. I did continue to analyze each individual image though, and I did feel that there was a legitimate case for almost all of them being AI. The three that I said were human - Tropical Garden, Creepy Skull, and Flailing Limbs - did indeed turn out to be human, so that's good. If I'm going to err, that's how I would prefer to be calibrated. I was pleased to find out that the best painting in the set, Saint In Mountains, was human. But oddly I couldn't find that exact version of the painting anywhere else on the internet using Google image search. Scott's version looks like it had a color/contrast filter applied to it compared to the version on Wikipedia (search for "Saint Anthony Abbot Tempted by a Heap of Gold") and every other version I could find. Scott acknowledged that he cropped some of the photos, but he didn't say anything about adjusting contrast or making any other edits. If he did make any edits like that, or if he simply picked a more uncommon version of the painting, then that could definitely bias the results. Part of what tipped me towards saying that Saint In Mountains was AI was the way that the thick black section at the bottom of the cloak looked unnatural. If I had seen the Wikipedia version, where the detailing on the fabric is more visible, I would have been more likely to identify it as human.

It's hard to check my answers because I don't remember most of the names, but the one I was most confident was human was human and the one I was most confident was AI was AI. I agreed with you on which painting was best.

I'm pretty sure I recognized a few of the paintings too.

EDIT: I got 33/49. He seems to have forgotten one of them in the answer key.

Wish I would have read your edit. I'm not going back through that again.

I got 31. I screwed up initially and I got the earlier ones the wrong way round, but later ones I was broadly correct on. Mostly, my exposure to AI art has been coomers shitting up imageboards I browse or clickbait YouTube thumbnails, so my primary reasoning was ultra plasticity, objects or people being in the centre of the image, random splotches that don't make much sense when you start to think about them.

The anime girls were all extremely easy to guess (minus the first one because it looks like her left arm is longer than it really should be). Digital art is honestly quite hard to tell apart from AI art, which makes sense because most of the source material comes from digital art, itself very sloppy and plastic. If you do abstract, landscapes or digital art your days are probably numbered.

When I was doing this, I realised that almost nobody is using AI to make corporate art. This makes me think things.

I got 34 out of 50. I figured out most of the human-created ones, but a few of the AI ones fooled me. The human ones that I mislabeled AI had some weird features that I'm still not sure why a human would paint.

I was pretty deep into image generation at one point and got the following wrong

  • Fancy Car, pretty obvious in hindsight but when I was looking at it I convinced myself that the headlights and wing mirror had some weird distortions.
  • Rainbow Girl, the way the artist chose to render the hair on the right side of the image is frankly bizarre and I thought the ear was a bit odd.
  • Giant Ship, decided it was AI at a glance based on the subject matter and rendering style. Very obviously CG/photobash if you know that frontier models still struggle with ship rigging and other similar linear patterns.
  • Still Life, didn't notice any obvious tells
  • Paris Scene, thought I recognised this. Even knowing it's AI there aren't many things I can point to as obvious tells.
  • Pretty Lake
  • Colourful Town, wrote this off as AI because I couldn't make sense of the composition

Many correct guesses were with very low confidence. Stylised landscapes and certain outdoor scenes may as well be a coinflip.

I think I got about 80% right. I'm a bit miffed that Riverside Cafe, which I quite liked (even though it looked like hotel-grade art), turned out to be AI.

I basically marked all hyper-detailed or overly colorful paintings as AI (with the exception of the first ship, because it was right next to the other ship, so I scrolled back and saw that it all made sense).

The oil paintings I tried to classify based on their composition and perspective.

The abstract paintings were the hardest, since I had to resort to thinking about the emotions of the artist. Surprisingly, I got all of them right.

The anime girls were the easiest, because the AI-generated one had that face. It's like there's one AI model in existence for drawing anime girls, and everyone uses it. It's like Lobsters typeface, once you've seen it, you start to notice it everywhere.

P.S. @ZorbaTHut, aren't spoilers supposed to be inline?

The key to the mother and child picture is that the child is missing the halo, and any depiction of a regular saint would be more differentiating from Mary

I'd say that I did pretty well, maybe around 80% accurate from eyeballing the results.

The ones that really tripped me up were the abstract paintings (and the ones 'intentionally' made by humans can often look like an explosion in the paint factory in the first place) and some works in an older style. There was a human painting in the last 8 that had really fucked up hands and feet on the dozens of characters, so that threw me for a loop.

Of course with each passing day, it gets harder and harder to tell, and Flux is absolutely solid, though I haven't had the luck of using it yet.

The ones that really tripped me up were the abstract paintings

Yes, those are a coinflip at this point. Occasionally there are still tells though, like with Bright Jumble Woman, if you zoom in on the eyes you'll see artifacting that is very characteristic of AI so I was confident on that one. But with something like Purple Squares, there's no way of knowing.

I'm pretty sure that the test specifically asked us to avoid zooming in haha.

But I was also looking out for artifacts. A lot of smaller details lack symmetry and become squiggly in a nonhuman way. Also random blotches and spots that don't make much sense.

Can we see the answers without being a subscriber?

The answer key is the first comment on the post

Is it just me or is the upvote button broken? If I click on an upvote, the color won't change, so I can't tell if it has been upvoted.

I use the CSS provided from this post from John_Doe_Fletcher:

https://www.themotte.org/post/1076/smallscale-question-sunday-for-july-14/231158?context=8#context

.active.arrow-up::before {
    color: #bd2130;
}

.active.arrow-down::before {
    color: #0062cc;
}

Personally, I always click once on the upvote button (turning it to a pale blue color that's barely distinguishable from the default gray) and then once on the comment itself (turning the upvote button from barely-visible pale blue to very-visible dark blue).

It works and the color does change for me. But it is very faint and hard to see.

Very confusing after my phone goes to grayscale in the evening.

Prediction: "Generation Z" and "Zoomer" will be given a false entomology of "person who used Zoom to attend school during the COVID 19 pandemic" within the next couple decades.

That is actually hilarious.

Unfortunately that seems likely. On a related note, it reminds me what a nonsensical and uninspired term "Generation X" is. It gives you no hint about the peculiarities about that group whatsoever, unlike the terms Boomer and Millennial, and supposedly it didn't even stick, relatively speaking. I looked up the Wikipedia entry on it and it turns out that the term in its multiple original manifestations didn't even carry the definition it does today, which gives us even less of a reason to actually use it.

Latchkey kid, on the other hand, is I think a brilliant and practical term for members of the same generation, it neatly sums up the essence of their lifestyle. It's kind of lame that no such phrase was invented for a) Millennials b) their children.

I'm partial to the Oregon Trail generation, for those of us who played Oregon Trail in school, which ends up being sort of midway between X and Millennials. It also emphasizes that we grew up with tech but still remember when tech was new.

Not a good idea, I think. If you start speaking of the Oregon Trail generation to me, I'll immediately think if 19th Century pioneers.

I actually encountered a friend of mine confusing this a couple of years ago. He had never heard the term before, and when I explained to him the generation it was a label for, he commented how stupid it was to make the label based on a video chat app. I had to inform him that the term came predated 2020 and came from a combination of "Generation Z" and "boomer."

That would really bug me.

I think you're right. Hell, I thought that until I read your post. Then I remembered that 'OK Boomer' was a meme several years before the pandemic.

I assume that Zoomer was just meant as a portmanteau of Boomer and Gen Z (which itself was based on the letter convention that started with Gen X).

False entomology is identifying as a caterpillar (soon to be a butterfly) when you're actually just a worm.

[Alex Jones voice]

“They’re turning the frickin’ bugs trans!”

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