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PaperclipPerfector  8hr ago (text post)   223 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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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 lick 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.

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.

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.

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.

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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