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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3061 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 17, 2025

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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What do you cook in your air fryer other than fries and chicken? If you have one, of course.

Sausages and bacon.

What'đ the difference between an air fryer and the forced recirculation mode on an electric oven?

A blow dryer and a ceiling fan.

In theory, nothing.

In practice, you'd be hard-put to get an entire oven as windy as the inside of a good air fryer. You don't have to scale the fan power by their respective volumes, but maybe the area?

Crabsticks.

Buy those cheap frozen surimi crabsticks, and spool them out. Unroll them into a single sheet, then tear apart into 1/4 to 1/3 inch strips.

Take the entire mass of gloopy reconstituted fish, throw in about 1 tablespoon of oil per 4 sticks used, and just toss it till its all evenly ish coated.

Air fry at about 350F for about 12-20 minutes, opening the basket every 3-4 minutes to toss the mass around and keep it from sticking together.

You'll end up with crabstick chips. Toss them with a final splash of oil while hot, then add on any seasoning mix, sans salt. Garlic powder and pepper work great.

Just tossing the crabsticks in whole or rough chopped also works, just that it becomes more like a dumpling-ish appetizer than an addictive tv snack.

Eggs. 130 °C, 12 mins produces perfectly nice, somewhat soft eggs. Better than boiling water, especially for large batches.

And 12 at 190°c for hard boiled. When I'm making ceasar salad I like to do 6 minutes, then throw my bacon in as well (but keep them separated - I put my eggs in a ceramic ramekin) and put it on for another 6.

Oh, that's nice.

Roasted vegetables:

  • a couple cups of chopped vegetables (frozen or fresh)
  • a splash of balsamic vinegar
  • some spices
  • a tablespoonish of vegetable oil

Mix all ingredients, air fry until it looks about right.

Lazy quesadillas (Note: needs toaster-oven style airfryer, not a basket-style one):

  • tortilla
  • cheese
  • etc. (cooked chicken? Salsa? taco meat? hot sauce?)

Put ingredients in the tortilla, fold in half, airfry until heated/melted through and toasted on the outside.

Salmon, brussel sprouts, sliced squash, baby carrots, seasoned broccoli…

They are good for anything you want to reheat that will get soggy in the microwave. If there is oil in the surface layer of the food you'll get more of a frying affect. Otherwise it ends up as more of a dry bake.

Related question, how do chips turn out? I love crinkle-cuts with a cheap steak, but getting real sick of deepfrying them in a pot. Trying to decide on a proper deep fryer vs air fryer.

The fries are not 100% identical to the deep-fried ones, of course, but they are close enough that I quite enjoy them.

I don't have a lot of air-fryer experience, but a "real" (home) deepfryer is much easier to maintain than usually represented. Mine cost something like fifty bucks decades ago, and I just change the oil when it gets dark and stick it in the pantry when not in use.

(@2rafa's approach does sound more delicious, but "chop potatoes into french-fry shaped objects and throw in fryer" also happens to be about the laziest/fastest way to make pretty good fries -- I do have some tricks to crisp them up more, but for regular family meals the results from my (simple) approach are pretty damn good. One easy thing that helps (originating with Kenji Lopez I think) is to pull the basket when the fries are about half done, then give them a second plunge to finish just before serving. The (small) oil reservoir has heated back up again by then, and you get a nice crisp product without having to faff about par-boiling etc)

I guess it depends on how often you deep fry and change the oil but I can't imagine it's good for all that oil to be oxidizing like that. Also disposing of large amounts of oil is a pain.

I can see when it oxidizes, because it changes colour -- sitting in the pantry unused the effect is minimal. (probably because only the very top is exposed to air)

It needs changing about once a month in my use pattern (fries a few times a week, other stuff if I feel like it) -- I burn the old oil in the fire, but I imagine you could take it to the hazardous waste drop-off like used motor oil if you don't want to do that. Dropping off a gallon of oil once a month-ish seems pretty easy?

I burn the old oil in the fire

What do you mean by this?

I pour it on some wood and light it on fire. It's free BTUs, and carbon neutral!

Same, I just slosh it over the kindling when I'm feeling lazy. Instant blaze.

Doesn't that smoke like hell?

Not really, once the fire gets hot. Kind of like how a diesel/kerosene heater will smoke a little when you first fire it, but not once it gets going.

Anyways I have a chimney for that -- but I also use it as fire-starter for marginal bonfires outside, and it's not smokier than just wood.

Disagree with the others. Air fryer fries are unacceptable and never reach appropriate crispness. If you want crispy potatoes that aren’t deep fried, either cube them (into small cubes) and pan fry them until crispy or boil, smash and then roast in the oven after brushing with oil or ideally duck/goose fat (which you preheated in the over for at least 10 minutes) for 40 minutes, taking them out every ten to brush with oil again.

A good way to deep fry with limited mess is to quickly cut shoestring fries with a mandoline, blanch in oil, then deep fry in a relatively conservative layer of oil at the bottom of a deep pot, to limit spray.

I air fry my fries and I'm happy with the result. 200 degC, thick cut fries, after 13min shaking them around a lot, then 7 minutes wait time, shake and now wait to taste. I like 13:7:7 but it depends on the exact fries and amount.

Air Fryers work, and seemingly make less of a mess.

I'm no gourmet though, so ignore my opinion if you actually know what you're doing.

The biggest difference is that regular fries are about 14% fat by weight and air-fried ones are practically zero.

You can always reintroduce the fat via a good dip. Mayo mixed with literally anything is a great time for fries.

Less fat is the whole point!

Instructions unclear, whole air fryer is filled with lard now.

Unironically thats another great snack. Get pork fat - like the actual solid cleaned caul fat from the butcher, not spreadable lard - wet then dry render as much oil out of the fat. Then take the remaining fat, which should still be inconsistently squishy because of some fat cells that would not have ruptured while cooking, and air fry at around 320f to 350f. The remaining oil will be expelled from the fat, leaving crispy tastiness behind.

You can then take the expelled oil and rub veg in it to not waste it. And airfry it. Mmm tasty.

Steaks, sandwiches, brussels spouts, bread, egg rolls, an assortment of frozen appetizers — the list goes on.

Sandwiches? Tell me more.

I use it to toast bread when making sandwiches and hot sandwiches if I saved a portion as leftovers.

I'll admit right away that I'm late to the party - the Motte, SSC and the subculture around all of it seems to have pretty much died down and I'm not sure where to find everyone other than Twitter, which I refuse to use. But I think I want to catch up with all of the stuff that happened and was important to you all at the time. I'm aware of multiple SSC best-of compilations, but what about the others? Don't we have some legacy other than Scott?

So, to the survivors, I have two questions:

  • What do you think are the best articles/arguments/comments/posts of the past decade?
  • What's the book/article/comment that attracted you to the community in the first place?

Substack is alive and well, and there are a whole number of good posters in adjacent topics, some of which used to be prolific posters on themotte (hwfo,kulak) but most, as expected, are from other places. The problem is that themotte is starting to outlive its usefulness - twitter is better for low effort posts and a pretty open platform nowadays, substack is similarly open but better suited for quality content, and the overton window has shifted so much that Scott is now effectively writing about the things he more-or-less banned us for. Though I'm still a bit salty he isn't apologizing or at least referencing to themotte about it in retrospect, overall I'm much more happy about it.

Themotte, in contrast, has always been more a medium-effort discussion platform that discussed high-effort content as opposed to generate it. Which is just a bit of awkward spot to be in.

Also, since nobody has mentioned it, you should definitely take a look at thelastpsychiatrist/Alone/Edward Teach. He was a significant influence on Scott, and roughly stopped posting (2014) at the time when Scott blew up (incidentally, this was also shortly after I became familiar with Scott). He's definitely more on the esoteric side than the rationalist side, though.

I think the general Rationalist subculture still plenty sizeable. Maybe not at its peak size, but certainly not a dead online community. Commenting on astral codex ten and participating on the SSC are still fun uses of time imo.

My personal favourite non-Scott blog is putanumonit.com, I recommend looking through his archive/best of page. I got into the community through the fiction, Unsong was how I found Scott, and HPMOR was what really cemented my membership in rationality.

I was originally drawn to the SSC community by Scott's Moloch article, which I came across at a time in my life when I was struggling to put a name on the concept.

I'd consider the following incredible and some of the most important internet writings of the last decade:

Handwaving Freakoutery's work on Memespace Egregores - similar to the concept of Moloch, this also put a name to an incredibly powerful force I found difficult to name. I actually think this explains almost the entire modern internet.

John Fawkes: The Incentive Problem at the heart of the American Justice System - I have struggled for the longest time to wrap my head around how bad the system in America is, because there seem like so many low hanging easy fixes. This laid it out for me in clear terms how the incentives in place actively work against any such improvements.

What do you find so appealing about the egregore framework? I found it…unhelpful. Like it didn’t add anything.

The Maajid Nawaz post is probably the most valuable, although the rest of it is also worth reading.

The vast majority of people believe there are people who are making things worse, and want to name them. Name, shame, and destroy them, to either stop whatever processes the bad people are using to make things worse, or to fix it for good. This is the primary mode of most tribal thinking, as well as unfortunately, a lot of modern politics. However, the concept of the memespace egregore explains the uselessness of this mode. It's greater than any individual, or organization, and also explains how individuals and organizations that don't coordinate at all can still end up spouting exactly the same bylines and using the same marching orders.

In the run up to the Vietnam war, it worked like the diagram on the left. Arguably it worked that way in the run up to the Iraq war as well. But those were both before the internet came to fully dominate our lives, before the media business model shifted to match, before the echo chambers tightened into groupthink neural networks that propagated virtual brain waves in the form of memes, and before the groupthink entities deep in the media bubbles began to use the postmodernist reality construction framework to not only propagate themselves but update themselves on the fly to become more inherently viral.

...

A distributed agenda by an egregore would look like a coordinated agenda to a conspiracy theorist.

...

[on Qanon] If they wrote something that the echo chamber didn’t like, then it wouldn’t go viral.

This is much more insidious than a shadowy cabal or even the newer and more accurate concept of the Cathedral. From an understanding of memespace egregores and what they are, as well as how they update, comes the realization that they cannot be successfully fought or resisted with outdated tactics. It also explains the difficulty people have in defining specifics around the egregore - it's definitionally optimized for what's viral, therefore anything specific is a weakness.

Solzhenitsyn knew the the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. But I don't think even he could have foreseen that the quest for clout, for maximizing eyeballs, engagement and ad revenue in a world that communicates at lightspeed would have instead ended up making us all victims of a network that maximizes good and evil for attention and routinely chums the water on the other side of that line to prove that there are sharks.

There's an argument to be made that corporations are already shitty AIs, which makes sense to me on some level and bodes ill for whatever AI research ends up deploying. I think understanding that everyone is subject to information silos and social pressures to enact the behaviors promulgated by a memespace egregore, at scale, allows us to better model them and their communities. It also helps us identify in what ways we ourselves are captured by the egregore. In memespace, arguments and evidence don't matter as much as what's viral. The two don't always coincide.

Or hey, you could just say it's a fancy way of saying how everything sucks now thanks to the rank cowardice of literally everyone driven by perverse incentives and malicious social networks that are too useful to turn off.

The sequences on LessWrong are probably also probably fairly big.

(Do be aware, though, that Eliezer definitely isn't infallible.)

What's the book/article/comment that attracted you to the community in the first place?

Well there's no way of talking about any of this without bringing up Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. People either love it or hate it but it is truly one of the stories of all time.

It's less core, but Unsong is also quite an experience.

Sorry, I missed something. Why is MoR associated with SSC? I vaguely know something about LessWrong being the 'less racist' offshoot of the SSC culture war discussions, and Yudowsky is associated with LessWrong for (reasons???), but I don't know how that leads into MoR being a culture war flashpoint or even signpost.

Ranger has the details.

I just want to add that HPMoR is how I ended up in this orbit. Not sure about the exact jump, but it involved Worm, the general concept of rational fiction, and Eliezer’s other stories. At some point someone must have linked to a Scottpost.

It has to precede Rabbit Hole or Unsong, because I know I was insufferable in 2014.

In the beginning, there was Robin Hanson's Overcoming Bias. Yud started Less Wrong as an offshoot of that. Scott posted there and was a big fan of Yud. Yud brought his ideas greater prominence with Methods of Rationality. Scott later branched away with SSC. At about that time there were a bunch of people on lesswrong dumping Yud's Enlightenment/rationality/AI-alarmism ethos for neo-reaction. That was basically the origin of the culture war thread, one of Scott's earliest big posts was about an anti-neoreactionary FAQ, that's where conventional politics came into play. Then of course there was 2016 and lots of people got more political...

So MoR is a sibling or uncle of SSC.

Hi all, this is SteveK on a new account, thanks to not having my password saved except on a phone that is now enjoying a pacific ocean vacation.
Remember to back up your passwords, and always take your oldest phone boating.

If there's a password reset thing that doesn't require having done the email signup and doesn't take admin effort, please let me know and I'll go back to the old one.

keepass and syncthing are your friends if you are with android.

Welcome back, unless you’re an impersonator :P

Sorry about your phone. I lost my favourite glasses a similar way once.

My dad lost his prescription glasses crabbing once. Next time we pulled the pot a crab had carried them inside. We gave the guy a fish head and let him go for his trouble.

I am glad the crab was rewarded and released.

"Is it immoral to eat the helpful crab?" seems like a good morals/values question a la Haidt.

The other day I was thinking why 80s music was so much better than modern music and then it hit me: It's the saxophone solos!

What are some of your favorite songs with epic sax solos?

I'll start with Girl Meets Boy - Waiting For A Star To Fall (solo at 3:07) and Gerry Rafferty - Baker Street (solo first at 0:24 and then repeats at other times).

Edit: No need to limit suggestions to the 80s. Epic sax is epic sax!

I don’t think you’re ready.

Blue Giant - First Note.

"Midnight City", M83.

Hot take but sax is bad. Trumpets and trombones are just better.

Brass master race.

Brassterace.

Ah, you're referring to the Bad Saxophone Solo (BSS). I stayed up much later than I should trying to find this incredibly on-point article posted to a now defunct file sharing site back in 2002. I'm posting it here not only for the enjoyment of everyone on the site, but so I can find it without searching the depths of the Internet Archive and its dead links. It goes to show how much hip musical tastes have changed in the past 25 years, and is a bit of a time capsule (it would be unthinkable now for a serious critic or music fan to shit on Hall & Oates, but back then they were punching bags). Enjoy:

Amongst the many horrible things to emerge from the cultural swamp of the 1980s (Reaganomics, crack, leg-warmers, the Coreys Haim and Feldman, Winger), there is nothing in the world of Rock music worse than the Bad Saxophone Solo. Unremittingly phony and invariably devoid of any shred of real emotion or creative expression, this sonic assault on all that is worthwhile is more destructive and more widespread than one could imagine in their most horrific nightmare.

Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of the Bad Saxophone Solo (BSS) is its origins. By all accounts, no matter when it was first laid to wax, all BSS seem directly evolved from Kenny G.'s 1986 smooth-jazz hit "Songbird." So awful that it seems to exist outside of time, this incomprehensible morass of suck is ground zero for all Bad Saxophone Solos ever. Spreading the BSS from Smooth Jazz throughout the world of popular music, "Songbird"'s evil is so pervasive that not even the collective din of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Roland Kirk, Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson, and Lester Young all simultaneously spinning in their graves non-stop since its inception can drown out its malignant influence.

The BSS' powers are truly formidable: after but a few seconds of its aural assault, a cheesy-but-catchy pretentious prog-pop tune like Supertramp's "The Logical Song" is rendered so muzacky and faux-funky as to make the theme from Night Court seem like a vintage George Clinton production. The Bad Saxophone Solo has even been known to crop up within the confines of otherwise decent songs. In the middle of a relatively quality tune like the Pogues' "Summer in Siam," the schlocky BSS is like a fire hydrant at a dog-show - a piss-soaked novelty distracting all attention away from the true talent and refinement therein.

But, let's back up. What exactly is the BSS? The Bad Saxophone solo is an insidious but elusive blight. On the wings of some Joe Cool sunglasses-wearing, bandana-ed jackass's overly emotive stage gesticulations it alternately glides or skronks and wails it's way into your brain. Before long you're staring vacuously into space, tuning out not just it but the entire world around you, because the truly Bad Saxophone Solo is literally mind-numbing. Which song contained its gut-wrenching sound? And how exactly did its pseudo-bluesy/soulful melodic interpolation go? You don't know, because, like elevator music (even the worst of which is a preferable alternative), a Bad Saxophone Solo convinces the brain on an essentially primal level that sensory stimulus is a bad thing. In order to avoid the BSS (along with some of its multi-media counterparts like the Bad Hotel Painting and the Local Car Dealership Commercial) the brain attempts to ignore it and in the process closes itself off to the world around it.

Alas, the world, and unfortunately the BSS, is still there, and upon recovery blame must be placed in order for any true healing to begin. Some culprits are obvious. The music of Glenn Frey is a good place to start. Often, as one begins to surface out of the depths of a Bad Saxophone Solo-induced stupor, vague memories of the drab tones of this former Eagle's laughably idiotic music will linger. Was it "The Heat Is On" that so dulled your senses, or could it have been the pummel-your-forehead-repeatedly-against-a-spackled-concrete-wall tones of that soft-rock atrocity "You Belong To the City?" You don't know, and that's the point. Like an aural lobotomy, the very nature of the Bad Saxophone Solo prevents its victim from remembering its exact source. What's more, prior knowledge of the stopped-up commode that is Frey's musical canon may not be enough to help the victim sort out what just happened. Even an experienced BSS victim is subject to the confusion and chaos that follows a severe attack, often mistaking the music of Frey for other sources (such as serial-BSS conveyors like Huey Lewis and the News or Hall and Oates).

The experience can be excruciating. A typical Bad Saxophone Solo experience finds the victim awakening - like a sorority-girl the morning after a Rohypnol-enhanced date-rape - groggy and disoriented but acutely aware that they've been fucked and that it was a far from pleasurable experience. Drooling uncontrollably and just steps away from catatonia, the unlucky listener will, for example, catch the last few endlessly repeated chords of the George Thorogood blues-rock abortion that is "Bad to the Bone." Many victims are unable to believe that this song could actually get any worse, but indeed, its atrociously soulless and completely forgettable Bad Saxophone Solo makes it so.

The question remains: why would the Bad Saxophone Solo do this? What is it goal? The answer may be revealed deep within the lyrics of one particularly saccharine and nauseous BSS carrier. To the casual observer, Wham!'s "Careless Whisper" might be dismissed as the lonely musings of two men, one struggling with the desire to thwart anonymity and the other struggling to stop getting caught having anonymous homosexual sex in public bathrooms. But "Careless Whisper" is so much more than that. It is actually both a purveyor of the BSS and an unintentional post-modern treatise on the plight of the Bad Saxophone Solo victim. The "whisper" at issue here is not just, as would at first seem the case, the hushed words of a gossiping lover. The "whisper" is in fact the bleating, faux-soothing tones of a particularly bland Bad Saxophone Solo. "No, I'm never gonna dance again…" reveals "Careless Whisper"'s narrator, unveiling the ultimate harrowing result of the BSS. The BSS to prevent (often with great success) its victim from any further enjoyment of music. Ever. Especially music that contains saxophones. The ugly truth is that, for the BSS victim, "guilty feet have got no rhythm."

There is no known cure for the Bad Saxophone Solo, and no band or musical style is safe from its cancerous grasp. Great bands like Pink Floyd, David Bowie, and, yes, even the Rolling Stones have bowed to its hokey will. It is inescapable. Even if one were to explicitly avoid elevators, dentist chairs and movie soundtracks, the BSS would still creep up unannounced on Classic Rock radio - perhaps even in an overblown "life on the road" Bob Seger ballad. Worse yet, though the frequency of the BSS has diminished since the onset of the 90s (3d Wave Ska Revival non-withstanding), it is quickly being replaced by an even more deadly variant: the dreaded Rock and Roll Scratch-DJ Turntable Solo (RRSDJTS). For the love of God, please, beware.

-Robert Whiteman

It’s funny, but it starts from the premise that the “BSS” is “B” without really describing why.

You just had to be there. There's nothing bad about sax solos per se, but by 1992 they had gone out of style and were a reminder of the 80s, which wasn't held in high esteem. Sax solos in pop records were ersatz soul. In R&B records they had worn out their welcome. But mostly it was just an ick factor involving anything associated with the 80s. The article isn't meant to be taken too seriously.

Would it be fair to call them the "rap interludes" of their time?

Man, we have definitely gone too far in the other direction, but Gen-Xers are truly an insufferable generation.

The Night Court theme is asked the question of "how can you possibly give an appropriate introduction to such an awesome show", and yet manages to answer with a confident "don't worry, I got this".

This is a very recent one, but Louis Cole - Life. He's one of my favourite modern jazz fusion artists, and the sax solo towards the second half of the song is absolutely tremendous. The underlying chord progression moves very quickly and isn't a particularly easy pattern to improvise over, yet the sax player almost seems to glide around all these constant key changes. Another great, albeit discordant, version of this from the same album is Bitches.

Oh, also, here's one actually from the 80s - JAGATARA's album The Naked King has some killer sax solos on it. Some good examples from there are the songs Hadaka No Osama (the sax solo in this one goes on forever, just wait for it) and Misaki De Matsuwa.

Also much of what Colin Stetson makes is achieved only with saxophone, so it's technically 100% sax solo, though his output is quite ritualistic, soundtracky and meditative and almost certainly not what you're looking for. It is beautiful music though; it's almost religious in quality.

"Money," by Pink Floyd has an epic tenor sax solo by a session pro in the song's primary 7/4 meter, preceding the more epic guitar solo in the easier to play 12/8. "Doctor Wu," by Steely Dan famously featured jazz-great alto saxophonist Phil Woods. (Also, jazz-great Wayne Shorter on "Aja," but that song's a bit pretentious.) And any Joni Mitchell song with Wayne Shorter.

Money is great, but I prefer the sax segment from Us And Them, around 5:20ish.

Lily Was Here was literally 50% sax.

I think this proves sax is only appropriate in moderation.

The Band - Makes No Difference

At the risk of being satirical, can I nominate this?

You also can’t go wrong with Take Five or the Pink Panther theme song. Of course, none of these are from the ’80s.

At the risk of being satirical, can I nominate this?

I'm slightly disappointed you didn't link to the 10 hours version.

Careless Whisper

On the topic of music, does anyone know of any good blogs/videos aimed at laymen that explains why current pop music sounds the way it does?

I just happened into this youtube video from Justin Hawkins (of The Darkness fame) where he goes over a research paper (I believe this one) that gives three (apparently) fairly well researched factors for at least a part of that. The factors are decreased harmonic complexity, lack of timbral variation and lack of dynamics. I'm not qualified to really comment on harmonic complexity but the lack of timbral variation and (complete) lack of dynamics are some of main reasons I listen to very litte music made after the mid 90s. It's not an accident that after that started the era of Digital Audio Workstations and ubiquituous multiband compressors & brickwall limiter use.

Wings of Pegasus has made lots of videos where he analyzes and shows by example how autotune overuse is now the norm, with even reissues from classic singers being autotuned "because that's what you're supposed to do". This definitely affects the way music sounds now.

Billy Hume tackled the question of copy pasting and quantization in modern recordings in a pretty decent video. Yet another factor that makes everything samey sounding.

I'm tempted to write a "this is why modern music sucks" post but I suspect I'd just be shouted down by people who claim it's all because "You just listen to the music that you liked in my formative years!" (plot twist: I only found the majority of the music I like nowadays when I was in my late 20s or older, when it had already been out of style for decades).

Another Day by Dream Theater

Gunship is one of the bands bringing this back (that a music ignorant normie like me knows about). Tim Cappello's solo in Dark All Day was great.

Also recommend The Midnight, in the same vein.

Obviously the big ones that immediately come to mind are “Rio” by Duran Duran, “Who Can It Be Now” by Men At Work, “What You Need” by INXS (they’ve got a number of great saxophone parts, played by the great Kirk Pengilly) and “Born To Run” by Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band (another band with a great full-time saxophonist, Clarence Clemons, who also has a great saxophone solo on his duet with Jackson Browne, “You’re A Friend Of Mine”).

EDIT: I read your post as specifically asking for 80’s songs with saxophone solos. A modern pop song with a great sax solo would be “Ancient History” by Marianas Trench. (Although TBH I think this is actually a synth mimicking a saxophone.)

Cultural imperialism in one image.

I see myself in this. I grew up saying "pop" and never thought twice about it until I went to college. There, I met "soda" sayers who planted the first seeds of doubt.

After college, I moved to Seattle. It was still pop country back then, but in the merge of a cultural transition. It's firmly a part of Sodastan now. Worse, I am now myself a soda-sayer. I cringe a little when people say pop.

I'll admit to a rebellious instinct. Fuck the soda-sayers. Sometimes, I just want to let loose with a hard "pop" in the best upper Minnesota accent I can muster. "You guys want some POP?" But that would be mere playacting, not authentic self-expression. I'm no longer street. I've been corrupted.

Is this what it feels like to be elite human capital?

Gatsby 1: I’ll have a pop!

Gatsby 2: I’ll have a cola!

Gatsby 3: I’ll have a soda!

Gatsby 4: I’ll have a carbonated beverage!

Gatsby’s nightmare: I’ll have a glass of water.

Some older relatives of mine say soda-pop, which I always found endearing. I could never tell if that was because they grew up near the boundary line or if it was used nationwide as a compromise term back when soda and pop-sayers were more equal in number (as part of some anti-coke alliance, I suppose).

The gradual Californiazation (Californication?) of young Americans' accents is sad to observe. The only college-educated zoomers I hear with distinct regional pronunciations are from New York City, the deep deep South, and a few pockets of the upper midwest.

How do you feel about the Aussie term for it - soft drink? I love it, it's so different to the usual Australian slang, where who cares what it is just take the first syllable, ignore everything else and slap a vowel on the end. D'ya wanna have a barbie for breakie? Nah, me and Kev are gonna take the tinnie out when he gets back from the bottle-o, I'll just have a cuppa and throw some stubbies in the esky." But then you get to carbonated beverages and suddenly it's euphemism city! Soda is starting to make some in roads here though, although despite coming from old soda country, I don't like it. Stick with soft drink Australia! Or if you really have to use something else go with the other Australian slang for it, albeit much less common - fizzy/lolly water.

In Japan the word ジュース or juice means anything not tea, coffee, or booze. So yeah, any fizzy drink (boom!) It's annoying.

I grew up saying Coke because Coke was what we drank. My relatives--good, country people--used to say "Co-cola."

My kids are now picking up some Australian slang thanks to bluey. "Stuffy" for stuffed animal sticks out the most to me. I now can't remember what I called them as a kid, but it wasn't stuffy.

If you're a fellow burgerclap you probably called them "stuffed animals" or else just [name of animal/character]. I don't know of any other generic name. Some time in the early 2000s(?) I started hearing people say "plushie" but that always sounded like some cutesy/marketing bullshit to me, not a normal word you'd use when l, say, talking to your parents.

I thought "plushie" specifically referred to stuffed toys with a particular outer fabric.

lolly water

I didn't think that kind of product would be carbonated; I'd expect it to taste rather flat.

It's a bit of a catch all for any water based sweet drink, I've heard people refer to cordial that way too and I assume that's where it comes from - cordial used to be really popular in Australia. But yeah that was years ago, these days lolly water is mostly used to refer to soda in that traditional Aussie joke format of belittling something so you can laugh at the person who gets upset at your belittling.

“D'ya wanna have a fizzy?” sounds properly Australian to this Limey’s ears.

Nice, plus the added benefit of the Kiwis usually following the Aussies means I'd get to also enjoy hearing large Maoris saying "D'yuh wunna huv uh fuzzy bruh?" to each other.

I remember people used to call them fizzy drinks when/where I was a kid.

I can understand using the term "soda" and "coke" is of course obvious but "pop"? Seriously? What kind of idiot thought about that term?

The earliest known usage of "pop" is from 1812; in a letter to his wife, poet Robert Southey says the drink is "called pop because pop goes the cork when it is drawn, & pop you would go off too if you drank too much of it." The two words were later combined into "soda pop" in 1863

Presumably somebody who noticed that it has bubbles in it, and bubbles pop.

I come from soda country, but we're Coke people. Most moved from Coke land to soda country during the depression.

I love petty liguistic wars.

My personal favourite is the French one over what you call a pastry with chocolate in it.

My flag is firmly planted on Care-uh-mel hill. Death to all Car-mull-ites (excluding the Discalced and their brethren).

I salute your flag! Although I do enjoy it when the shoe wearing carmullites draw out the r so it sounds like the a is there, they're just not saying it.

Fun article. I always thought chocolatine was a brand of hot chocolate.

Pop is a verb. It means things. People use it to talk about non-beverages, creating potential collisions in language usage. While collisions in language happen all the time and are manageable, it's still a point against.

Coke is a horrible term to use, because Coke is a specific beverage. Use of brands for generics, like saying "Kleenex" for tissues only works when those things are interchangeable. If you ask someone for a Kleenex and they bring you a Puffs tissue you can just use that instead. You might not even notice. If you ask someone for a Coke and they bring you a Sprite you're in for a rude surprise

Soda is clearly the superior choice. The only collision is for things like Soda Water, which is just carbonated water that they use in soda, or sodium compounds in chemistry (which the majority of people don't talk about).

You have been Culturally Imperialized, by the correct and dominant Empire. You are welcome.

Direct quote from an in-law, western North Carolina, circa 2005: “what kinda coke y’all want? Sprite?”

Pop is also a noun.

I come from soda country, but I'm ok with pop or even soda pop. The only clearly wrong choice here is to call everything "Coke", for the reasons you articulate so well.

The real regional thing I grew up with is that back home, we call the things you drink water from in public "bubblers". My understanding is that Bubbler was the brand name of the first such drinking devices, and it stuck. Similarly (though less common as it got supplanted before it could stick), people will sometimes call ATMs a "TYME machine" because that was the first ATM that popped up in our area and they were ubiquitous for a while.

Coke is a horrible term to use, because Coke is a specific beverage.

Tell this to my wife, who says "pepsi-cola" instead.

... as the generic term for a fizzy drink? If so, that's wonderfully contrarian.

You are pissing on the cultural heritage of 100 million people!

I didn't do it, I swear! I smelled like that when I found it.

Anyone have a video game or a movie or a book or anything else like that that you want to get into, but you just can't every time you try?

For me it's Red Dead Redemption 2. I just can't get through the winter prologue. It has idiosyncratic controls that I can't remember and the fucking lasso just doesn't work after I rebind 200 different buttons to adjust the controls to ESDF. And there's no quicksave, so every time I watch people enjoy the open stage of RDR2 it wants me to replay a long enough segment before I even can try and fail to lasso a dude again. I guess I should just mod the game to skip it and try again.

I got filtered by the swordfighting in KCD several times so still haven't finished it. I'm pretty good with shooters and various nerdy math-based RPG systems but this is hard.

Bows aren't strong enough in the game so the shooter approach doesn't work.

Opening games with a boring tutorial and giant infodump is unfortunately very common. I think it is so common because reviewers and people who paid full price will give it at least five hours before they decide they don't like it. Crippling you character for the intro is also weirdly common. RDR2 had you wading through snow slowly, MGSV had you limping around a hospital.

I don't really understand where it comes from. I think the art directors are trying to be "cinematic" while not grasping that movies don't make you hold up for ten minutes while the intro credits play.

Any game My boys play some in the PS5 and sometimes I think "That would be fun to play." I used to play WoW probably oh 15 years or so ago until I realized it was making my wife hate me. Also I believe suddenly pandas became part of gameplay and that really brought me out of it. These days I don't have the time to devote to a proper game where you learn kits and builds and lore and all that. Sometimes we all play Catan but not really since COVID, when had many game nights.

Every game today has a skill tree, a detailed crafting system that requires you to gather rocks and twigs, a room/house/town/level design system, cosmetic DLC, online multiplayer with a parallel PvP meta, a perk system, premium currency, an achievement system, an unskippable 45 minute tutorial with forced cutscenes, and more. I wish more games picked one or two things and did them very well. I try out maybe a dozen new games each year now, and I turn them off in the first 5 minutes if any of the above crap is shoved into my face to distract me from doing whatever the game's box/title said I would be doing.

It would be nice to sit down and enjoy a AAA game for a couple of days without feeling like it was trying to surgically attach itself to me. I quite liked Helldivers: the equipment tree is a premium currency hellscape but it gets straight to the gameplay loop and the loop is fun.

Every game today has a

This really isn't close to true, unless all you play are AAA games.

You're right, I'm mostly just shaking my cane and telling AAA games to get off my lawn.

I still haven't touched the factorio expansion since the week I bought it. Partly having so many other projects, partly just... Don't feel that into going through all the scripted content.

..scripted content? What scripted content?

A lot of the extra content feels like being led by the nose to a specific workflow, whereas the original game was much more open. Compare all the options for handling ore vs being railroaded into one method for promethium harvesting

Prometheum is only a very tiny part of the game, really a taste of a somewhat different mechanic. Literally, you only ever see it after you get the "well done, you've beaten the game" screen.

The game isn't any less or any more open than the original Factorio.

I'd tentatively disagree with that.

I recently dipped my toes into the expansion (thanks to @Cjet for gifting it to me for a multiplayer campaign that I never really managed to join; I still feel bad about it!) and came away with the impression that its content is indeed less open-ended than what one would expect from the base game. The space layer and each of the new planets offer intentionally self-contained puzzles that each have fairly specific solutions and don't really interact a lot with each other. You can try to do it in a more interconnected fashion, but that seems more like a self-imposed challenge and doesn't seem to have any practical justification.

Or maybe the base game was never as open as I thought. Or maybe I was just led into completely incorrect expectations by the Space Exploration mod.

The mod is definitely simpler than SE, but in essence doesn't seem really dissimilar to SE, no?

I disagree thoroughly, with the caveat that I am no expert player.

SE encourages complex logistical networks between planets, and space platforms can fulfill a variety of purposes. Exploiting different planets is a matter of strategy and economics, all the time. SA encourages you to ship nothing but science, and space platforms are either just trains with one extra step, or straight-up infinite resource printers, and you only need to figure them out once to then produce them infinitely. Exploiting different planets just means solving four different puzzles, but again you only need to solve them once and it's very straightforward and that's it.

Calling SA a simpler version of SE would be much like calling four brisk 30-minute walks along a well-paved paths a simpler version of a triathlon.

SA does have more varied environments, mechanics and more interesting sights to see, and it is more polished, but it's not challenging, not complex, and its constituent parts are barely connected to each other.

...Okay, maybe partly. But every planet has several resources that need shipping around. Just to get the last science pack requires shipping something from every planet but Nauvis, .

but it's not challenging,

It seems essentially the same. SE just has more and more and more of it. More recipes, more etc. But it's repeating the same problem solving loop over and over. I played SE some but the only really, really challenging part was putting together combinators to automatically load the rockets. And I think I'd figure it now since I put together a logistic network / item chest balancer.

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Are you playing kb/m? You should go on nexus mods and grab a chapter 2 save, it puts you where the game finally opens up.

Anyway some of my favourite games were originally like that. I bounced off breath of the wild half a dozen times on wii u, and it's in no way the kind of game my friend group plays usually, but I intuitively knew there was something in it for me, I just couldn't see it yet. So when it came out on switch I gave it another shot (with gyro controls turned off) and now I like that game so much I went through the painfully obtuse process of nodding second wind into my switch copy. I sent so many fledging hunters to die to the blood starved beast in Bloodborne I probably outpaced the population of yarnham, every time I'd read about the influences or design choices I'd try again only to reach the BSB (or one time father gascione, I was so proud of myself for a day) and rage quit fifteen deaths in. Now I know Yarnham inside and out and have become a true frombro. Morimens is a recent opposite example - it's got gacha elements, chatgpt translated English and it's a card based roguelite, it should be the last thing in the world for me to play, but I'm completely hooked on it.

I definitely have books like that though. I've read the first part of House of Leaves at least a dozen times over the years, I can't go further. This will probably get me crucified, but I will never find out how frodo deals with that ring he has, since I can't finish either the books or the movies (I loved the silmarillion though).

I had the same experience with RDR2 for what it's worth. I chalk some of that to being excessively immersive to the point that I wished I could just get around and do things easier.

Hmm.. Definitely EVE Online. I'd much rather read stories about the game than play it. Debatable Factorio, because I feel like I'd need to be on stimulants to enjoy it.

I've recently been playing Arma Reforger, and it's this close to being too boring and slow for me. In Arma 3, I have the majority of my 3500 hours in the Zeus mode, where I'm managing a mission for anywhere from a handful to dozens of players, and there's always something to do. Setting up the next objective, micromanaging AI, listening to the players chat. It beats driving for half an hour or standing on guard for ages not to see anything, which is both a realistic depiction of warfare, but also boring (I do my best to have my players not end up there).

The map in Reforger feels too large even for 128 players, it's less restrictive than something like Squad, where the game mode channels you into lanes (even if you are technically free to faff around anywhere). The spawn points can easily be tens of minutes from the action, and God help you if you forget where you parked the car. I still play Reforger because I enjoy the novelty of an Arma game that doesn't look like it was made in 2013 and also runs way better, but sadly the Zeus/Game Master mode is atrociously half-baked. Bohemia learned nothing from the mods that made Zeusing in Arma 3 a million times more fun and useful.

I'd say RDR2 is worth sticking with. The snow section isn't very long dude. 90 minutes or so? The controls and obligatory walking through base camp etc is a pain, but overall I really enjoyed my time in that world. Hunting and fishing with those great graphics almost felt like a nature experience. :P

I thought I wanted to play Ghost of Tsushima. It has released on PC and I've got it installed. But something about these mass-market, third person, action-rpg, open world games that 'play it safe' (politically and creatively) and make you spend 50-100 hours grinding through the game makes me anticipate that I'll be filled with ennui while playing them. I don't know if GoT is as guilty of all this as, say, Horizon or the like...

It's way less guilty than the horizon games, although you have brought up an interesting point - I wonder if I found got more palatable because despite the playing it safe (the most obvious example being the fact that your partner Yuna is very obviously not Japanese or attractive, but it's littered with other indignities) the overall story is a fundamentally conservative one about the value of protecting your home from foreign invaders even when it comes at a terrible price.

But add in unskippable cutscenes and it's almost impossible to recommend you stick with it. I mean, if you could appreciate the pacing of rdr2 you can probably get into it - I spent a lot of time in that game just walking around playing the flute for people and things - but you have to keep playing the story at some point and then you'll get another slap in the face.

As reminded by some other discussion here, Outer Wilds. It should be satisfying, but I can't get past the boredom of the initial stage into actively solving the mysteries. In a similar vein, Pathologic 2. The original left an incredible impression on me, but I can't muster the willpower to dive into this one.

For a non-game example, Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Sounds like a show I'd really enjoy, but each time I think about its runtime, I flinch.

Sounds like a show I'd really enjoy, but each time I think about its runtime, I flinch.

To quote the incoming vice-president of the United States: do it one bite at a time. It's definitely more of a young guy's anime, though.

LoGH is amazing once you get past the poor pilot.

By "Pilot" you mean the first episode, or the movie with roughly the same plot, because I found the latter rather enjoyable.

The first episode. The portrayal of the first battle is ridiculous and at odds with the rest of the show, iirc.

Really? I thought the first season held up fairly well compared to the end, where the author was desperately scouring Chinese history for ways to keep the fights interesting (black holes, space tides, fuck it, armies crossing energy rivers and crashing into space walls!!!).
Given the scifi bullshit about low detection ranges and signalling, the concept of catching encircling forces on the march was pretty good. Especially because it helped introduce us to the problems of both the alliance and imperial militaries; one full of glory hounds trying to reenact past victories, and the other basically halfassing the war by using it to play internal politics.

I would never play the Pathologic games but I'd certainly watch Mandalore review them for hours. They can get wild.

At that point in 2020 where toilet paper and staple crops disappeared from the shelves all I could think was the moment in Pathologic where the period from Day 1 to Day 2 had inflation of 1000%.

Same, I hear the way everyone talks about it and feel like I'm missing out on one of the great gaming experiences but.....I can't.

Faust, it is just dense and I have no shame in admitting that I get lost everytime I pick it up.

War and Peace. All those French phrases aggravate me. I already have to lean on a dictionary for Russian literature, and I have too much ego to pick up a translated copy.

The Tolstoy.ru ebooks usually footnote the French phrases with translations.

Anyone here familiar with charcuterie boards? My dad has his birthday today and my ma wants to make one for the first time since no one in India eats this sorta food. I bought some gouda, crackers, nuts, olives and other widely available things like salamis to add to my board. Not much in terms of cold cuts or cheeses is widely available here plus those who drink don't drink wine at all given how bad wine locally made here is which means people don't pair it with food the way euros do. I am also helping her make some curry, hummus and toum. Cooking takes up a lot of time, wont like to do it again.

But back to boards, are there food or beverages you guys pair together regularly? The most complex I ever got was irish cream I made alongside crackers.

Edit - here's a photo of the board I made, had it with sparkling wine.

This is one of the absolutely bizarre and incomprehensible customs people have.

This meme pretty much sums it up for me.

You did a great job!

You can google some "official rules" but given your location that has no culture for this I have two thoughts.

  1. A big chunk of this is aesthetics. If it photographs well you did your job (and personally I think yours does, but it is subjective!). Nerdy optimizers aside most people are just going to take a photo, share it on social media, and then devour the thing.

  2. Use what's available. Don't use low quality salami because that's all you have. It's pretty common to use some fruit and a jam or something. But you aren't going to have access to Harry and David pears so don't try.

In America most of the time we use more of a variety of cheese and crackers but again use what you got. I have no idea if you can find an Italian specialty store in India that has some real cured meats but if you can that is the way.

Thanks! I had with sparkling wine, India has little to no meats to offer, cold cuts are even harder to sort so I had to make do with salamis of various flavors, cheeses not so much but I wanted to do a good job instead of whining about it. The guests at my dad's birthday really liked it too. Honey, cheese, meat, and something briney like olives go really well together. I never thought I would add honey to a snack with salami.

There are no Italian meats here, I do wonder how good the original french one tastes given it originated there.

Yeah you made do with what you had which was wise, but next time you are in a country where you can get a real one do so!

Cold cuts have a surprisingly high quality ceiling, and cheese is something that can taste incredibly different depending on what you got.

Champagne or dry sparkling wine is the most general pairing with charcuterie boards, as they tend to go well with a large variety of cold meats, cheeses, nuts etc and are conducive to a cocktailing environment in which people arr constantly nibbling.

Belgian beer is also a good way to go, and if you want to feel fancy they often come in larger bottles. Dubbels, Tripels, Quads, strong golden ales are very good for this type of thing. Brands like Duvel, Unibroue, La Choufe, Gulden Draak are all reliable choices.

Also dry, still Rosè wine made in a Provençal style is a pretty fun pairing and is light and easy.

For non alcoholic just making a tonic water bar with ice and a wide variety of freah fruit slices that are cut to size to easily put in a tall glass with ice and tonic would be fun, people can make their own like tonic spritzer style drinks. Plus there are a load of different styles of tonic waters nowadays to choose from so you could have a variety in an ice bucket.

Basically all of the above are good pairing for the ‘generic’ charcuterie board of sliced charcuterie, hard & soft cheeses, olives, nuts, dried fruit, crackers of all types, etc etc etc

I had mine with some sparkling wine that had some gold flakes in it, two glasses, not a lot though I do feel a little elated now. I need to move out asap so that I can do this more often.

Anyone here familair with charcuterie boards?

Yes. You don't put cheese on a charcuterie board.

Don't ever serve me charcuterie without cheese.

What, why, is meat, cheese, crackers, fruit preserves, some dips and nuts not how it works?

It's a board of assorted meats.

The European mind cannot comprehend cheese in a charcuterie board:

It features a selection of preserved foods, especially cured meats or pâtés, as well as cheeses and crackers or bread. In Europe 'charcuterie' refers to cold meats (e.g. salami, ham etc.) and the term 'charcuterie board' would not be widely used for a board with cheese, fruit and a small amount of meat as is the case in North America.

Can we just give the Europeans this one and go back to calling it a meat and cheese tray/platter? Simple, descriptive, unpretentious, and less French. What’s not to love?

Agree if the French give up "royale with cheese".

Right, and I also insist that an entrée is something eaten before the main course.

What are you talking about? Literally every charcuterie board I've seen has had cheese on it.

I think that’s a bit pedantic, most people nowadays use the phrase to describe a large spread on a wooden board which includes meats and cheeses, but also olives / crackers / nuts with various sauces and dips like honey and mustard.

It’s a whole genre at this point.

Yeah, beyond just the aesthetics, adding all that stuff in different combinations makes it taste pretty good. I used whipped honey.

The PirateSoftware drama was entertaining and I think tells us something about prosociality: the same ego that can lead someone to rise to the top can make them bad at cooperation and detrimental to a group as a whole. I mean, his ego literally prevented him from saving lives or amending his behavior. In hardcore WoW at least.

I love that the drama just keeps evolving when dedicated internet autists keep digging new stuff - it seems now that he faked the outer wilds and animal farm blind playthough (looked up the puzzle solutions beforehand)

Do you have a link to people discussing and/or providing evidence on outer wilds? Because I definitely found it weird how he kept abandoning trails and ignoring leads but stumbling onto important locations anyway, but at the time chalked it up to some combination of luck and intelligence.

Specifically for Outer Wilds there are a multiple examples in the reddit thread

For ex:

When I watched his Outer Wilds playthrough I was disappointed because he solved some of the puzzles in that game insanely quickly. I assumed he was really good at solving puzzles. One thing that was suss was the he figured out the Quantum moon puzzle with none of the prerequisite quantum knowledge that the game teaches you. And another thing stuck out to me, it was on Giants Deep in the Tower of Quantum Trials. One puzzles took him a loong time to figure out which stood out as strange considering how fast he solved other puzzles.

I'm not saying he faked it or not, but it stood out to me as weird.

Or

he obviously looked stuff up on his phone.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KCJ2-35v-48&ab_channel=PirateSoftware

4:03:10 - begins puzzle and doesn't make any progress.

4:12:30 - grabs his phone and looks at it for awhile.

4:14:30 - announces "I'm going back there, I wanna solve that." (lol)

I don't know this guy or anything about this "drama" around him. But spoiling the puzzles of Outer Wilds for yourself, and bypassing the games organic sense of discovery, is really a shame. If this is true, this guy, apparently a big gamer, deprived himself of one of the greatest pure gaming experiences of the last decade, all for some nerd clout. Lame as hell.

From Asmon's breakdown video, it looked like Thor did nothing wrong, and the accusations to the contrary were groundless. They messed up the engagement, the raid leader called "run", Thor ran, then the leader tried to un-call "run" while the tank screwed up his positioning and pulled an additional pack. I know little of WoW, but from the analysis, it looked like Thor more or less played it straight, while the people accusing him bore the large majority of the responsibility for the clown-show resulting.

I think the more realistic take is basically Thor displayed bare minimum competence and saved himself. Which is fine, unlike the other people involved he didn't actually cause the problem. But if he'd utilized the tools in his class perfectly, he probably could have saved them with crowd control. People expect a lot from him because he's spent a great deal of time playing and working on WoW and think he should have played not merely well, but optimally, given the reputation.

Or, for example there are few clips of him boldly proclaiming his proficiency and just making himself look like a massive hypocrite

Here is why I take freeze talent

"Some of the best moment in the dungeon...."

From what I can tell, Asmon’s take is the sole outlier among the big streamers. Pirate’s fault isn’t that he bore a disproportionate amount of the blame for the raid breakdown — that goes to whoever accidentally pulled the mob(s). His fault is more complex. Whenever a “run” command is called, the players whose class have utility in obstructing mobs are supposed to use their abilities to do so, and then continue to run. Pirate did not do this. He played unskillfully. Yet even this isn’t the fault. He told the group that he lacked mana when he had enough to use a spell, and even hovered his mouse over the “mana gem” but refused to click it so as to pretend he didn’t have mana. Yet even this isn’t his fault. His fault is that after making these errors, he refused to give a trivial “my bad, I panicked and ran”. It’s perfectly acceptable to play poorly in WoW provided that you apologize for your mishap. His worst technical mishap wasn’t pushing the wrong button but doing something called “roaching” where you save yourself to help the group; this technical mishap is also forgivable. His unforgivable sin is being unrepentant in his error and showing some sociopathy in concealing how he could help the group. The other players confessed their errors.

It’s like a relic of the old Internet Hate Machine, all because someone failed to give a sincere apology.

Your analysis seems to match up with the Onlyfangs guild leader's breakdown, which I've just been sampling. Most interesting, and a neat toy example of politics at play. Now I'm wondering if streamer solidarity is why Asmon gave such a positive take.

I read this site and often have a tentative familiarity with the topic at the beginning of a set of comments, then get to the point slowly, as I keep reading, where I am just seeing words, stories and events that seem to have occurred somewhere outside my ken, like big events that everybody dreamed the same night except me. Odd, isn't it, really, in the end, these forums--like listening to people behind you on a bus.

Some background: KnowYourMeme

Piratesoftware, a prominent streamer, participated in a World of Warcraft Hardcore raid that went bad and resulted in two of his guild-mates getting their characters perma-killed. People blamed him running away without supporting the other players for the bad result, and the internet commenced to arguing over whether he could have done something different that would have resulted in the two making it out alive, or whether he did nothing wrong. Prominent streamer Asmongold (notably a veteran WoW player himself) did a hour-plus video breakdown, and his assessment was that Piratesoftware bore no significant responsibility for the bad outcome, as all the serious mistakes were made by others.

This has been your entirely useless information for the day.

I didn’t know WoW had permadeath. Ironically this sounds a lot like the kind of discourse that goes on in military circles after a special forces raid goes particularly bad.

It doesn't normally. It's some weird optional mode they added to classic WoW.

My impression is that its new as of only a year ago.

In the continuation of Elon Musk PoE2 journey, he went on a xitter feud with Asmongold, one of the streamers who posted expose videos about it. I think that answers the question on whether Musk actually cared about being the best at the game, or simply got a boosted account for expediency.

The community notes on his posts are hilarious. The take I saw recently is the Elon wants to be "King of the Nerd", and with his eggshell-thin ego he really can't take being called out by people nerdier or smarter than him.

Incredible that being a nerd has enough cachet that the richest man in the world wants to be one, but apparently not enough for him to remember the "well, ackshually" part of the stereotype.

https://open.substack.com/pub/samharris/p/the-trouble-with-elon?r=4gi50d

Somewhat related.

Elon Musk apparently owes 1M USD to some charity based on a very silly bet, from Elon's side, made with Sam Harris about the covid pandemic. A braindead move from Musk's side and he started hating Harris instead of admitting he was wrong.

He can't stand to be made to look stupid.

A braindead move from Musk's side and he started hating Harris instead of admitting he was wrong.

You sure he didn't hate him before ? Harris is not well liked for very valid reasons. Welshing on a bet that's, for him, trivial makes Musk look really bad though.

If true, even more disappointing than the PoE bullshit.

There's no reason to think the bet wasn't decisive/relevant. He had regular contact with Harris for years before that and ghosted him immediately and completely when it came time to admit defeat.

I can definitely believe that Elon would make the bet and then renege.

That said, Harris is himself an icky creature at times. Particularly, he advocated tactical lying to help prevent Trump getting elected. Understandable? Maybe, except that Harris is also the author of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lying_(Harris_book)

Lying is a 2011 long-form essay book by American author and neuroscience expert Sam Harris. Harris argues that we can radically simplify our lives and improve society by merely telling the truth in situations where others often lie.

Harris has a Trump sized blind spot that makes him beclown himself regularly. Trump is living rent free in his head, ruining the quality of his content. And, more importantly, why should we listen to someone who admits to tactically lying to us?

Particularly, he advocated tactical lying to help prevent Trump getting elected.

Is that really true? From the linked post:

Not only have I never advocated lying to defeat Trump (despite what that misleading clip from the Triggernometry podcast might suggest to naive viewers), I’ve taken great pains to defend Trump from the most damaging lie ever told about him. Elon knows this, because we communicated about the offending clip when it first appeared on Twitter/X.

What is the evidence here?

I just love going for these source hunts that you assign me!

https://x.com/Brian_Kennedy/status/1878561046362791991

Sam Harris said that burying the Hunter Biden laptop was a left-wing conspiracy to deny Trump the presidency and that it was absolutely warranted.

Maybe we can charitably say that Harris wasn't advocating lying, only hiding information. But the Biden laptop story was also (falsely) called "right wing propaganda" by the media. Harris gets destroyed in this interview and he doesn't have really any defense.

I wish that clip actually went on. I'm going to search for the entire interview. It's true Harris looks bad here, but he's not wrong about Trump necessarily, he's wrong about everything else. In other words, he isn't wrong that Trump has a laundry list of obvious cashgrabs and scams--which should give anyone pause --he's wrong that he and the big brains should do any and everything to impede Trump's election. He also doesn't seem, when he says "but that's not conspiracy," to realize that he is perfectly describing conspiracy.

Yeah, not a good look. Some claim that the context makes a difference but none of them explain how and I don't want to go further into the sam Harris cinematic universe so I'm going to call this one confirmed.

It's believable, and reflects badly on Musk if true.

Which makes it a little awkward when Harris has to interrupt his 'trust me bro' with 'oh, and that Triggernometry episode that keeps getting thrown around tots is being misportrayed, don't believe your lying eyes'. I don't follow Harris, so maybe his interpretation was right, or that speech was a one-off and he's spent the last four years trying to bend over backwards to admit that he was wrong then. But it makes a surprise reveal of a three-and-a-half-year-old need a little more proof than 'it's believable, and reflects badly on Musk if true'.

((And that Harris can't make it through a substack piece of this short length without dumb asides like the Gaetz comparison, leaves me skeptical that he is trying to bend over backwards.))

He has a track record of lying about things and the fact that people took his claims about playing games seriously is just hilarious. He will double down on it. Musk never cared about being good, his gameplay looked not far off from somene who is fairly new to the game, it is the same as Dan Bilzerian who allegedly won hundreds of millions playing poker whilst looking like a noob about it when compared to actual pros, not even the high level ones.

Yeah this never seemed like anything other than trolling on Musk's part. I didn't read the original tweets where he showed off his gaming level, but it seemed obviously ridiculous. Of course he is not one of the best players in a world at a game that takes dozens or hundreds of hours of play to reach that level.

What is supposed to be the punchline of that trolling? Pretending to be retarded?

Since when was trolling supposed to have a punchline? The point of trolling is to make people upset.

Faking social cred is an easy way to make people upset.

Imagine a famous person claiming to know a language really well. They then "prove" it by clearly reading a script and making some basic pronunciation errors. They deny any attempts for native speakers to have a conversation with them. The community of those language speakers would probably end up really upset with that famous person. Other people would mostly just feel confused "seemed like they were speaking the language fine, why would they fake it?"

People seem to forget that Elon is sometimes entertained by people being pissed off at him.

If you have never felt the desire to troll on the Internet then you are a better person than me. He just takes it to a new level with a billionaire's regard for cash and reputation.

Trolling is about annoying people you don’t like or, at best, feel neutral about (see umad memes, /pol/‘s famous trolls, the /int/ amerimutt meme, leftists calling Vance weird, calling political opponents incels, even stuff like Colbert, although that’s more parody than trolling). But the people Elon is ‘trolling’ in this theory are his actual fans who watch him on Twitch etc, young right-leaning men who like Tesla and SpaceX.

Trolling can target anyone. I've certainly trolled people id call friends.

but did they feed you?

Seems like you're giving him too much credit. What is the way to distinguish between such trolling and genuinely being retarded in this "he is only pretending" scenario?

I've seen trolls on the internet, the payoff in their case is obvious - they spark great wailing and gnashing of teeth, but they themselves don't risk anything. Either they're a nobody so they don't have any reputation to lose from someone genuinely believing they're retarded, or they have a group of people behind them who are "in" on the joke.

In this case, there are plenty of people who already have an answer to "why would he lie" (the ones who believe he's an insecure loser who got carried by his money), while the ones who are laughing with him, not at him, are conspicuously absent. The best defense I've seen is "why do you care so much about him cheating, you're so weird, and anyway unlike you losers he doesn't have the time to play games".

I'm not sure there is an easy way to distinguish. I'm not 100% wedded to the trolling narrative. It just seems way more likely for Elon than the "insecure" narrative.

I've known quite a few and briefly been a guy that sleeps around. I've been a teenager pumped full of testosterone (naturally via puberty).

There is a confidence that these things grant you that is sort of the polar opposite of insecurity. These people and myself were way more likely to be obnoxious overconfident assholes for no good reason than they were to think "do people not like me?"

We kinda select against this personality type/mood here on themotte. We don't tolerate the trolling, and then these types are also likely to get in dick measuring contests with the mods once we demonstrate the tiniest amount of power over them.

Not all trolling attempts are going to land. Just like a lack of people laughing doesn't mean something was not intended as a joke.

Lastly people seem to be interpreting this as me defending him or giving him credit. I don't think very highly of testosterone addled aggressive males. I think they are high variance individuals. They are going to jail for violence, or they are going to have lots of sex and possibly get lots of money in risky ventures.

As I mentioned this was almost sort of me. I was having sex with different women, I was doing drugs, and I was blowing off my boring job. But going down that road meant screwing over some of my real friends, hurting many or most of the women I was sleeping with, and generally disregarding the people around me.

These are not good people. They never make for good friends, just for good stories.

There is a confidence that these things grant you that is sort of the polar opposite of insecurity.

I just don’t think it’s true that men who are socially and sexually successful can’t be insecure. There are tons of famous actors, musicians, political figures and so on who are obsessed with their image, stalk fan pages, get extremely upset about anonymous criticism on social media, let it get to them.

A lot of people with a lot of money are constantly worried about losing it, question whether they could make it themselves, or make it again. I think famous and successful people often have this kind of feeling. Whether you want to call it insecurity is a matter of opinion, I guess, but I do think Musk cares about his image, even though he doesn’t know how to improve it because he fired / didn’t listen to his PR, unlike Zuckerberg who seems to do what they tell him to.

Ya that's a thing too. I just know what that trolling instinct feels like, and I know what insecurity feels like. And Elon just pattern matches with trolling much better right now.

This is not trolling at all, he is not Elon Hyde who hides behind layers of irony, is his twitter addiction which is itself a full-time job given how active he is an effort at trolling people?

Asmongold made a joke that he is either lying about his gaming or he is lying about running 6 firms, what makes people uncomfortable about this info is that if he is this willing to lie about something as pointless as video games, the things he must lie about in his businesses must exist, you don't just lie about trivial things and then develop morals around what matters.

I don't see why it's not trolling. And to your second paragraph, yes. I'm not an Elon fanboy, he seems like a clearly flawed individual. The take I've seen that best explains him is that he has been taking lots of testosterone.

I don't see why it's not trolling.

It's the plain reading of the situation. Frankly, if you introduce T boosting into this, it looks even more like genuine ego trips rather than faking it for the lulz.

Framing it as trolling implies that one is "falling for it" by reacting as expected, but I don't see what I'd be falling for. Read plainly, Elon gave the Gamers (tm) a free shot to make him look like a clown, they've taken it, he then continued by having a spat with Asmongold on twitter... does he really need the extra views, compared to the rep damage he's taking?

The take I've seen that best explains him is that he has been taking lots of testosterone.

Him and Jeff Bezos represent the flirting vs harassment meme pretty well, going from very nerdy looking to far more imposing. Not accusing you of being a fanboy, his public image means more money for his firms at the very least, I do not think he is trolling at all, if he were it would have been funny. Pretending to be a world champion at chess and then playing like you only crammed some openings is not funny which is how his stituation looks like.


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