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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2551 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 21, 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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Several months ago I complained about how the word "empowering" has become completely drained of meaning by generations of overly broad application in any vaguely germane context.

I learned today (courtesy of a pretty good article by Freddie deBoer) that this is not a recent phenomenon, and The Onion was mocking it a full twenty years ago.

"Susan B. Anthony could never have imagined that female empowerment would one day come in bar form" is a real banger of a line. Man they had some good writers once.

Got married a few days ago, which was cool. Post your tips for a happy marriage.

Prop Joe had some thoughts

Congratulations, that's great! Best of wishes to you.

Communicate lots about money, and blend your finances as much as you possibly can. There is no "yours" and "mine" anymore, there is only "ours." You live in a tiny commune now, and it will succeed or fail based primarily on your joint commitment to its continued success.

Have sex frequently. What this means specifically depends a lot on the individuals involved, but roughly "more often than the lower-libido spouse prefers, but aim for at least 75% of the way from there toward what the higher-libido spouse prefers."

Have children, assuming you don't already.

Don't begrudge your spouse your labor. You're lucky to have someone to work with on the long term project that is now your family unit. Intelligent division of labor creates efficiencies that can do wonders for what each of you can accomplish (it doesn't take twice the time to do twice the laundry, or twice the prep time to cook for twice the mouths, e.g.). Leverage it together and enjoy the dividends together!

Have fun!

I've enjoyed reading everyone else's advice here, so I'll add in my own: It's your responsibility to manage your own parents (and protect your spouse from their inlaws).

In the extreme case: my parents traumatized my wife ~1 year into our marriage by getting into a yelling match over politics/religion. I had to tell them that they were out of line, and that I'd be cutting contact with them if they continued to behave that way.

Less extreme: my wife's relatives regularly give too much sugar/presents to our kids, and it's my wife's job to let them know when to stop.

Oh, and one more thing: go read the wifejak memes and don't be like them. Yes, it's just boomer humor adapted for millennials, but it's still directionally correct.

  • W: Hey, can you do X?
  • H: Sure, when the movie finishes in 15 minutes.
  • W: passively-aggressively starts doing X

Thankfully, I was able to explain to my wife that this is several times worse than saying "just pause your fucking movie and move your lazy ass".

I only really have two pieces of advice, from the man's POV, based on my own marriage and the marriages of the other men I know.

Thing number one is the constant battle against their wive's neuroticism. Iliza Shlesinger has this great bit about how driven she (and by the applause the got the women in her audience as well) is by neuroticism. Just the complete inability to sit still, and instead constantly fuck with thing and fuck with things and fuck with things. And only at the end of the day when she's so exhausted she can't possibly do anything at all, she gets 5 minutes of peace from her own brain before the oblivion of sleep overtakes her.

This is not a problem the typical man contends with. Your mileage may vary.

It's an older special she did this in, and in the context of the bit she's single. In the context of being married, myself and every man I know deals with their wife expecting them to do their neuroticism for them, because they are so tired of doing their own neuroticism all day. As a concrete example, I might call the doctor to set up an appointment for my daughter, and then write it on the calendar. My wife will get anxious that the calendar is wrong and want me to call the doctor's office to confirm that I wrote it down correctly. This excessive neuroticism is frustrating to me, and she refuses to make the call herself because she doesn't feel like it, but she can't act right until I do her neuroticism for her.

Side note for the husbands, never, ever say "Fine, I'll do your neuroticism for you". That was a mistake.

It has not helped that therapy speak has been popularized around these issues such that men are utilizing "weaponize incompetence" when they don't perform task to their wive's neurotic standards. It also has not helped that counselling services largely treat a wife's neuroticism as the highest possible priority in a relationship, and don't assess the reasonableness of it what so ever.

The second plague on husbands has been the popularization of "love languages". Suddenly every wife has decided that "acts of service" are her love language, which means her husband has to do everything she ask or he's not loving her properly. It's been one of the most effective mind viruses of entitlement I've ever seen, and it's swept through every marriage I'm aware of. Seems to have largely run it's course, but it was a thing about a year ago, and every man was run down and miserable under the relentless entitled demands for a solid 3-6 months before things came to a boil. Don't do that.

Why do you know my wife so well?

Anyways, I have grown thoroughly tired of the neuroticism, the entitlement and the learned helplessness. I have, for all practical purposes, exiled my wife to her parents' house during the work week because I didn't want to deal with her shit while also working (or failing to work, as that went with work-from-home). When she complains of some ache or ailment, I straight-up tell her that I don't care, don't want to hear about it, and will ignore it, and that it is hers to deal with. When she asks for acts of service, I do them if they're just harmless bits of luxury (make her a cup of tea, bring her high-quality ingredients to cook with instead of the cheap stuff, etc.) or just tell her to do it herself or else it won't be done if I genuinely don't want to do it, disagree with it or consider it her responsibility (drive out on an extra shopping trip because she wants a piece of cake, remove the trash from her room because she can't be assed to do it herself, make her calls for her, drive her to routine appointments that she could take the bus to). On weekends I no longer try to plan activities with her that invariably fall through because of her inability to commit to a plan and see it through; I straight-up skip the foreplay and assume that she will spend the entire weekend lying in bed and staring at her phone and probably cooking a meal at the small price of turning the kitchen into a blasted wasteland. Instead I plan the weekend around acitivities with our daughter, and ignore all my wife's inputs that goes along the lines of "she's too sick"/"don't be gone too long"/"that's dangerous". If the wife wants to come along, I tell her to stay at home because it's time to play and explore and have tiny adventures, not to complain that the sunlight / social anxiety is killing you and that the outdoors does not agree with your screen addiction and to try and derail the trip so it takes the shortest route to the nearest eatery and stops there. When now she tries to escalate her hypochondria and demands attention à la "I fear I'm dying!", I tell her to get it over with or call an ambulance because I'm not going to spend another night at the hospital just for her to be told she needs to exercise more and worry less. When she again fails to get our daughter to Kindergarten, I tell her to stop it with the excuses and do her damn job or else stop assuming responsibilities only to fail to carry them out. When I go to work, or to sleep, or outside with our daughter, or just don't feel like it, then I switch off my phone and let her ride out her panic attacks on her own. We considered moving closer to town so that she can take the bus and needn't get her driver's license, but I called it off when she refused to commit to actually taking that bus instead of being chauffeured around. When my wife says something, I refuse to believe it and tell her so, unless it either comes with convincing evidence or aligns with my perception, because her perception and thinking are dominated by fears and wishes and there is rarely an attempt to align on any shared "objective" reality.

Yes, I have gone full chauvinist. Straight-up "being a stay-at-home-mom is an important job and I will fire you if you don't do it". "You can be a feminist when you pull your own weight.". "Going to therapy is not a contribution to the family unless it actually improves something.". "Are you losing a sizable amount of blood? Is a bone broken? Can you still look at your phone? Then you're not dying and I don't care.". "Your appointments are yours to keep, don't expect me to make time for them.". "Yes I only work 40h a week and you are a housewife and mom 24/5. You work more hours than me. It's still an arrangement in your favor, because I would switch and you would not."

And so she divorced me and sued me and now I am a crying wreck, a shell of a man, misled by misogynist propaganda into playing by outmoded roles, tripped up by toxic social constructs, hated by my daughter...

Just kidding. We get along a lot better. The marriage may still fall apart in the long run, but while she will not outright admit it, I think she's actually a little glad to be forced to actually live up to at least the bare minimum of her responsibilities instead of just sliding ever-deeper into the patterns outlined in your post, and establishing at least the rudiments of a routine has been good for our daughter too, I think. Yes.jpg chad is actually a better role model than all the psychologists and bloggers and instagram content creators in the world.

The worst thing I ever did, by far and with no contest whatsoever, was to spend several years taking all that neuroticism seriously and doing it for her.

Not married and not planning to do so at the moment, but I have to enthusiastically third both your and WhiningCoil's sentiments despite not being a member of the married men club: No is the only correct response to this kind of ridiculous female neuroticism when it emerges. If you do not do this half of your life will be spent managing it, trying to work around it, attempting to placate it, and it is never over.

I have female family members like this, and while thankfully (for me) husbands/boyfriends are the first port of call for every issue, when there isn't one they sometimes fall back on virtually any stable male relative that's around to help manage it for them. I've had to deal with low levels of this in multiple points in my life, and I know guys who have succumbed to it in their relationships, and it's like every Victorian henpecked husband trope magnified by ten. It is not a good situation to find oneself in.

Do you love her or just do it for your daughter?

Yes and yes. I probably would have given up on the whole mess a while ago if it weren't for our daughter, but it's not like my wife, for all that I complain about her (and I do so with good reason), is entirely without merit.

The marriage may still fall apart in the long run

Sounds like it already has bro.

By normal standards I suppose so, but we are stubborn people.

That was a surprisingly uplifting read. Nobody's perfect, but my wife is not like yours or WC's. She's only slightly neurotic and doesn't cripple herself with needless worries. Time to go hug her.

Had a kid yet? It gets approximately 2.5 times worse after you have a kid.

interesting, I would say our marriage improved across the board by about 2.5 times after having a kid (if not more).

I mean, mine did too, but not along the neuroticism axis.

Yep, he turns 11 next week.

uplifting

Not the reaction I expected, but I'm glad for you.

Dang your first part describes my wife so perfectly well.

Congratulations! I assumed you were already married and I hope he realizes how lucky he is. No actionable advice from me, I'm afraid — I'm still going on first dates.

Maintaining relationship is work. Do it diligently. Don't be afraid to remind your partner you appreciate them (may be too early, but still never hurts), find a form of doing it that's compatible with their temperament.

Accept that you're both humans, eventually you'll screw up and have to ask for forgiveness, and your partner will screw up and need forgiveness from you. Accept that sometimes you'll piss each other off (maybe not, if you're super lucky but usually at least sometimes) and that's just life, and remind yourself why you are together. Communicate, even if sometimes it may take an effort and be hard to do.

Learn to give each other space when you need it. Some people need to be alone sometimes (yes, even alone from their loving partner) and that doesn't mean the love is gone. Many people need to have their own things in addition to "our things" - that's ok too. Supporting your partner in being them is much better than trying to change them.

Yes, agree with not keeping score - if you're in for the long run, keeping score is only going to make trouble. The only fair thing is what you both feel is fair, and that's something you need to find out by communicating. Don't feel you need to conform to any outside notions of what you relationship should look like.

Congrats 2rafa.

I agree with George and hydroacetylene. A couple from me:

Loving your husband is an action that you do. I'm not telling you what to feel for the length of your marriage—I'm telling you what to do: go home and love your husband.

My wife and I waited too long to start having kids, and we regret it.

Just casually got married? Nice one.

Uhh... don't get divorced?

Congratulations to you and your fortunate husband! I hope you had a great day and I hope you have many happy decades together in your future, that's awesome.

I won't offer any advice, because I still haven't figured out how to maintain a happy relationship, let alone a marriage. Do you plan on having kids?

Is he a lot like you or more of a normie?

As for advice, dont overthink it. Ive never seen one of our kind that applied too little theory to his relationships.

Aside from the internet werewolf terminology I agree. Ya'll were boyfriends and girlfriends before ya'll were spouses and before that ya'll were friends and before that ya'll were friendly acquittances and before that when God said let there be light ya'll were strangers trying to impress eachother. A marriage is just a continuation of the relationship with a different name now.

And here I was trying to find a tactful way to ask that lol

Pick a good wife.

Edit: Pick a good husband.

Congratulations! One thing which comes to mind is to not keep score. It's real tempting to do that, but once you start down the path of "I did the dishes the last 5 times, it's your turn" (or whatever) it breeds resentment. You will need to talk about things he does that bother you, but try to not let it start with "you always" type language.

Many happy years to the two of you!

Congratulations, the world needs more dramanauts!

The only advice I have, from my parents' and grandparents' lifelong marriages, is to accept that your husband is the person he is, even when you really wish he wasn't.

Congratulations! I hope the two of you have a long and happy marriage!

Make more Jews, please. We're running out.

Congratulations! My advice: Don't go to bed angry. If something is on your mind, talk it out.

Congratulations!

I'm 8ish months in. You're gonna have good times and rough times. Being married is different from living together. Tiny things will matter and start fights for no reason. Tiny things that don't matter will be celebrated and become wonderful things you share with each other. Make sure your bed is comfortable for the two of you. Don't keep socre.

Other than that, Hydro and Roystugnr have it right.

Men and women are different. This will likely result in a division of labor that is not fair. Score keeping about this will not help your marriage.

Have children, don’t be neurotic about it.

If he needs space it isn’t because he’s mad at you, it’s because he needs space.

Have children, don’t be neurotic about it.

2rafa, you don't need to have children if they don't work for you and your husband's lifestyle.

2rafa is a woman.

Have children. Fertile marriages give you something to collaborate on. It ties you together, forces you both to be responsible in your relationship even when you don't feel like it. And you won't always feel like it. Sometimes, you don't have to like it, you just have to do it. Children make sure there's a point to that, and you don't just let it slide. Besides, they make you happy. You need the joy in life. You need the randomness, the wonder, and the being-depended-on.

I don't think there's a way to collect objective data on whether having children makes a marriage better or worse- the selection effects overwhelm anything useful- but there's a sense of 'burning the bridges' in making a permanent commitment and there's a sense of connection to the ancestors, this sense of abandoning individualism to stick together by hook or by crook. You won't have a successful marriage by saying 'this far and no further', no, you have to firmly commit to making it work whatever the cost, and what better way than to have that which, by nature, you love more than yourself depending on it? By having children you become another iteration of the human condition, getting by how you can, the same as your forefathers and foremothers, part of the great engine of continuity because there is no other option even when you really don't want to, or you'd rather do something else. There's no I in team, and you're a team now. Not just when it works with your lifestyle.

Having children is a choice not a requirement.

Well, you can stipulate this, and I can do the opposite. I don't think it's marriage unless the couple is at least willing to try for children, and my church would back me up on that. A secure partnership for the generation and upbringing of children is at least one of the central aspects of marriage.

But people can call a legally-encumbered fling anything they want, I suppose.

Yes, it's the right choice, and not having them is the wrong one. Not having them is opting to become a casualty of your own bad decisions.

Not having them is fine, too. There are plenty of childless, married couples out there making it work.

I fear a critical factor for my own happy marriage might have been "dumb luck finding the right woman", which isn't very actionable. And most of what I've learned since then has been ways to avoid or fix specific problems and conflicts, not very general tips.

But I've saved and at least tried to live by a lot of broadly-applicable advice I've read from others:

"the work in every relationship should be split 60/40, with both people trying to be the one giving 60%"

"My mom asked an elderly couple who had been married for decades what their secret was. They said that they act as if being nice to each other is a competition."

"I see so many couples who act like "Well now that we're married, I don't have to deal with the stress of self-censoring, and can be as cranky, demanding, and sharp as I wanna be." Which seems to me exactly the wrong choice. If you're married to someone, you should treat that relationship like anything else you need to last a long time: with care."

"when asked how they managed to stay together 65 years, the woman replied, "we were born in a time when, if something was broke, you fixed it ... not throw it away.""

"Your mindset changes from "Is this going to work?" to "How do we make this work?" That's it. It's both a small change and a huge change at the same time."

"Successful marriage is predicted by a consistent pattern of irrationally optimistic assumptions. That is, each spouse tends to believe, in the face of common sense and even prior evidence, that his spouse means better than he says, has kinder thoughts than seems evident from his speech, et cetera. In short, a certain amount of mutual delusion seems necessary. Although it might not be fair to call it delusional, since it seems the spouses often rise to the expectations — expected to behave better than they initially meant, they rise to it."

"Marry the version of the person you see before you right now, exactly as they are today. I cannot tell you how often I've heard "Well, I thought after we got married, s/he would get a real job / finish school / take the lawn seriously / drink less / go out less / be less of a slob / learn to manage money / take career more seriously / want to have kids" or whatever. ... I am not saying people don't change with age and maturity. I am saying: a) the ways in which they will mature are entirely unpredictable, and b) marriage is not the thing that makes that happen."

Of course, that's just the stuff applicable after you choose a worthy partner. But from what I've read from you here, my guess is you didn't have any problem doing that wisely, with luck optional.

Congratulations!

I also suspect you aren't learning anything new from the advice above, rather that you posted your question because you decided that a tiny chance of missing a little useful advice would have been worse than a large chance of wasting a little time soliciting and reading redundant or unnecessary advice. If I've guessed right, kudos; that's exactly the right attitude to go in with!

Congratulations!!! Fantastic news.

To you, as the wife: Don't change, as much as possible, from the woman he married. Some change is inevitable, but he shouldn't look at you some day and think "Who the hell are you?" He probably still will.

Avoid becoming a complainer like you would avoid getting bubonic plague. You needn't be always positive all the time, but a nice rule is: The first thing you say to him on meeting after any time apart should be something positive. If he can depend on you for positivity, you will be worth to him more than Africa's ivory and Asia's gold. This is true even if you complain together about things.

Let him have his downtime, alone time, whatever he does to have that, and almost all men do. It's nothing personal.

Finally, and this isn't an exhaustive list but I'm in the bath and it's past midnight: When and if you do have kids, remember that he is not one of them

I wish you many healthy happy years together. Mazel Tov!

Avoid becoming a complainer like you would avoid getting bubonic plague.

Well, @2rafa, avoid becoming an unproductive complainer. Hopefully your spouse can be a good active listener without being a problem-solver, since that is a very useful skill when it's required, but it's not an easy one for many people. If there's a problem and we can't solve it then that's hard, and if there's a problem but we shouldn't solve it then that's utterly exasperating.

Being a productive complainer can bring some couples closer together, though. "Men love quests. Well not all men, but most men." If there's something reasonable he can do for you, and you make it clear what he should do, and you show proportional gratitude afterward, that's better than not asking it of him, not worse. This can require good communication in some cases: you can't grossly over or under emphasize how important something is to you, and he has to give you some feedback about problems of uncertain difficulty, otherwise "reasonable" and "proportional" can be too ill-defined. But hopefully you have or develop that level of communication anyway for a hundred other reasons.

The other time to not avoid complaint is when you have a serious problem that won't go away otherwise and that you can't just live with. For a tolerant person there might not be many of those, but if and when one comes up it's much better to complain as early as possible, when hopefully the problem and your level of upset (or in the worst case, resentment) about it hasn't had time to grow very much. If you try to bottle up negative emotions until you just have to let them out, then you end up trapped in a choice between revealing their full extent (which can come off as a blindsiding attack) or downplaying/"trickling" their full extent (which hurts communication, as well as making it less likely the problem will be resolved).

I agree with all of the above. My main issue is when complaining becomes a hobby, a pastime, a personality trait.

Congrats man, second marriage I've seen here, how'd you meet your wife, does she know about this place, do tell us what you can.

Congratulations! Concord and love, as we say here.

The biggest tip I have is picking your battles. Always ask yourself if having your way is more important than making your husband happy. Hint: it almost never is.

The other tip is having a common hobby and a hobby of your own. Both time together and time apart are important in a relationship.

Congratulations!

The simple advice is generally correct. Make sure to communicate. Keep the love alive. Make it a partnership.

Wow, congratulations!

Accepting that men and women are different was a big one for me. It's a lot easier to just live with the differences, than to try to convince your other half that they should do what you want them to do, with facts and logic.

What impression do you folks have of Nostr? Do you use it?

The first time I've heard of it I thought "cool", then I opened it and everything on the front page was about cryptocurrency and nothing else. Then I closed it and never came back to it again.

Opened it right now and it's like clockwork

/images/1740380590865612.webp

Haha. Yes, it does look like a bitcoin corner of the internet, for whatever reason.

The name rings a bell, but I never looked into it until now. At a glance it looks like their architecture isn't absolutely retarded, which is more than I can say for most decentralized SocMed alternatives.

Never heard of it, but it sounds like a hookup app for Catholics.

I don't know a single person using Nostr.

I had a very eventful night in one of the local pubs in my small Scottish town.

Highlights include finding out that my landlord and landladies are swingers, and that they're charging me about 3 times the market rate for the room I'm renting, the sum I pay would be the typical asking price for a whole house in these parts. For the former, I had no real inkling. For the latter, the price I paid seemed rather steep, and I was a bit confused when looking at flats in the nearby city for an upcoming move and noticing that they seemed to be less expensive than what I was paying.

Oh, a middle-aged lady propositioned me and wanted me to move into her house for the price of free. About 2 others also expressed outrage that I was being ripped off in this manner, and offered to take me in for less than half of what I was currently paying.

Hopefully I'll get around to writing a proper post about all of this, with an appropriate level of local color, but I'm still getting over the hangover and sheer surprise.

More info on the swinger thing please. How was this discovered?

Note: Swinging is far from my thing, but I do have some weird stories about others. You first.

A drunken lady asked me, someone who has a skin tone about half a dozen shades away from the average, was renting a place in the town.

I said yes, and went on to offer the names of my landlord and lady, expecting that they'd be recognized (it's a small town and everyone knows everyone). She seemed to take that negatively, and immediately told me I should move out. I told her that I'd lived there for 6 months already, without much issue, and that's when she revealed they were swingers (after getting another pint in her). Once she found out how much rent I was paying, that's when she began asking I pack up and move over while terminating my lease.

This came as a surprise to me! I'm a home body, I barely leave my room. If people, including unfamiliar men, came over to the property, I never pried and expected that they were friends or acquaintances visiting. I was never propositioned, and it's not really any skin off my back, though now I'm a bit miffed about the exorbitant rent.

The rent thing sounds dodgy, truly. I'm surprised it is only now becoming evident, and not when you were shopping around for places. As for swingers, from what little I know of the scene people go elsewhere for their dalliances, though there are "known" venues for meeting like minds. That could be the internet now, for all I know. The drunken lady also could have been full of more than just alcohol, so there's that. People love gossip even when it's unfounded.

I did hear more grisly details. My landlady is, as the locals would say, "a fit bird".

There's an upside down pineapple sculpture in the front yard, which I was informed was a form of advertisement. Apparently there's a cafe next to a park where she goes to pick people up. One of the pub regulars said that my landlord had once offered to bring him in and let him have a go if he so choosed.

Honestly, I don't know if I was naive or didn't know what to look for. It's not like I ever heard an orgy going on upstairs while I've been living here for half a year!

You didn't know about the pineapple?

Buddy, a few days back I'd have asked you if it was a SpongeBob thing.

The overall interior and exterior decor of the place is eccentric enough that it never stuck out to me.

now I'm a bit miffed about the exorbitant rent.

The Invisible Hand doesn't sleep.

I'm all for positive sum contracts made between consenting individuals! It wasn't breaking the bank, even if they were using my ignorance against me. But that's more on me than it is on them.

I was talking more about the lady in the pub -- now the tiller is steering away from the greedy landlord!

Heh. I guess she's one to take the free in Free Market quite literally.

Alternate history point of divergence- William Lloyd Garrison in 1839 agreed to a compromise keeping the American Anti-Slavery Society intact. The Liberty party is never formed; the lack of third party competition in the 1844 election allows Henry Clay to win New York, and the electoral college. The American turn against Texas annexation drives the republic of Texas into the arms of France and Britain, and drives a realignment of the slaveholding east against annexation and into alignment with the nationalist faction, which supports expansion to the Pacific, the defeat of Mexico militarily, and white settlement across the southwest. In this world, dispute between the Virginia militia and the Whig federal government over the treatment of captured Harper's Ferry raiders triggers the civil war, and with the US distracted France, Britain and the republic of Texas invade Mexico, theoretically over debt defaults but in reality over French and Texan territorial ambitions. The treaty of Versailles(1860) installs a French puppet government in Mexico and cedes vast northern territories to Texas, the entire Mexican cessation plus Baja California and an access corridor around the Colorado river.

The second Mexican empire doesn't go particularly well, but the US civil war dragged on and on, the Whig establishment proving less zealous about prosecuting the war than Lincoln, and Britain was able to use the relatively free new world hand to demand, and get, concessions. The republic of Texas agreed not to expand slavery to counties that didn't already have it, in exchange for Britain agreeing not to pressure it to abolish the practice east of the trinity, and to give Britain a set of pacific navy bases, most notably San Francisco, and in return Britain gave technical assistance and forced the post-French Mexican government to recognize the greatly expanded Texan borders- along with a few other breakaway republics in the far south. Eventually the US civil war ended with the final capture of the temporary confederate capital of Atlanta. The commodore Perry expedition never happened, obviously, but the British navy opened Japan for trade by force- and Japan successfully pulled a Meiji restoration in the aftermath.

British and sometimes French assistance led to Texas establishing immigration-driven colonies in the southwest- in this world Pheonix is a German speaking city and major rail hub for reaching the gulf of California- but the Deseret war over control of the old Spanish trail was the first conflict the republic prosecuted without favorable outside intervention, beginning in 1883 and ending by 1887. The republic of Deseret was forced to capitulate, but Texas lacked the ability to dominate the region as thoroughly as the USA had in our world, which is still stuck dealing with plains indians, not having a good transcontintental rail route. In this world mormons are an impoverished minority which does a lot of terrorism and organized crime, when you can tell the difference between the two, and still practices polygamy and- when they can get away with it- religious communism. Their lost boys make up a big chunk of the 21st century republic of Texas' cannon fodder, and Deseret is the poorest and worst managed subdivision in North America.

The republic of Texas abolishes slavery in 1910, with a final phaseout in the thirties. Today the black population is often discriminated against, but never officially- blacks in the army receive equal pay and promotions to equivalent whites. While known for oil, the 21st century republic of Texas' largest industries are arms, chemicals, and shipping, with oil and agriculture being relatively distant. Texas is a major power, but has a drastically lower population than the equivalent territories in our world- and different regions can be, and are, managed drastically differently, with enormously different levels of independence given to regional governments. The world is multipolar, with rather open vassalage relationships between impoverished third world countries and both middle and major powers. France, Britain, and Japan retain large parts of their old colonial empires. Militaries are far more influential than in our world, because major wars happen more regularly- while most of the major and middle powers are theoretically democracies, senior generals and admirals have far more influence over governments, and large economic interests have a much stronger hand negotiating with elected governments.

International commissions exist, but there is no such thing as a united nations. There is no undisputed most powerful country in the world; Japan has the largest navy and Russia has the largest army. The US is very rich but has limited Pacific influence, and peopling the west took far longer than in our world, with plains indian independence lasting into the 1890s in some cases and Mormon raiders preventing regular resupply across the northern Rockies into the 1920s. Oregon territory grew, though, after the highway links in the fifties.

Canada maintains closer ties to Britain than in our world; ditto Australia. How commonwealth foreign policy should be decided is a live issue in all three countries, although the CANZUK countries maintain their own domestic policies they share a currency. The Latin monetary union is alive and well, with franc-based currency the international standard- although it has dropped official bimetallism and the gold standard is more of a theoretical basis than a practical one. One of the bright spots in this world is Russia, which is more like a normal, although oppressive, developed country with a GDP per capita at Western European standards, albeit not the nicer parts of Western Europe. One of the dark spots is China, which was never decolonized, and large parts of which are as bad as sub-saharan Africa. The port cities ruled by Japan, Russia, Britain, Germany etc are fine, but the interior is ruled by warlords as often as by the government.

I'll be damned. I figured Napoleon III was too busy worrying about the Prussians to go after the colonies. That alone makes this more plausible.

Speaking of Prussia, what happened to Wilhelms I and II? Did Germany unify and end France's continental ambitions? Did we get any world wars?

I think those determine the fate of British and French colonies more than anything else. Depending on how the late 1800s go, you might even manage to dodge macro-scale communism, too.

Yes it’s an often unremarked upon hilarious factoid of history that Mexico briefly had a Hapsburg Emperor

I think German unification and something along the lines of WWI were bound to happen. I’d guess in this scenario, with a weak United States facing substantial backyard security commitments, means that the great-war-equivalent stays confined to Europe and doesn’t eradicate any of the major players. Some colonial retrenchment and a series of regional conflicts in the 30’s and 40’s are probably inevitable but a white peace turns Russia into a constitutional monarchy with democratic elements that are quickly subverted by the military and what oligarchs exist- the Russian revolution here is mostly nationalist revolts within the empire which are crushed after years of insurgency in some cases. In east Asia Japan picks off colonies held by minor powers, but the invasion of the Chinese interior is unsuccessful due to logistical distance, and the lack of American power in the pacific means imperial Japan faces mostly a commonwealth-Netherlands-France alliance which is not able to credibly threaten an invasion of the home islands- but can defend the colonies- and some major land defeats inside China by Russia and German-backed Chinese warlords successfully push Japan out of hegemonic domination of east Asia, but it’s unquestionably the biggest power in the pacific. In this world Mao is one of several unusually bad Chinese warlords in the rural interior; communism is more associated with ottoman and Austrian breakaway states. Germany, France, Russia, and Britain manage to retain their concessions in Chinese territory, but the minor powers like Portugal lose them to Japan. In Europe I think Austria and the Ottoman Empire were destined to lose territory, I’m guessing Bosnia at least and the ottomans being reduced to Turkey, Syria, parts of northern Iraq. Germany and France don’t go to war with each other- they’re actually loosely aligned in this period in support of European colonialism, with German backed Chinese being a major part of the Japan containment strategy for European empires and both attempting to prevent the declining Ottoman Empire from resulting in major land expansion by Russia.

This is a multipolar world with very high defense budgets, and the lesson from WWI for major powers was that complex alliance systems spiral into major wars. Countries, including major powers, regularly get into border kerfuffles, but mutual defense treaties are comparatively rare. I think a Russo-German war over the Baltics and Poland was inevitable, but there’s no invasion of Western Europe because there’s no Franco-German tensions and Britain is primarily concerned with its colonial empire in the pacific.

Sometimes I wonder whether our world is in the slow lane regarding technological growth, whether we really tapped all the resources we could.

What if eugenics really took off and there were breeding programs for geniuses like how China breeds tall basketball players? What about cloning? Or genetic engineering? Or encouraging high fertility amongst the most productive in society? Or just throwing more of our elite talent and capital into the sciences?

The 'overpopulation' meme hit us really hard.

Also, China was definitely in the slow lane in our timeline, right? How does it go much worse for them than our timeline? By virtue of size and demographics they're always supposed to be one of the strongest powers on earth. Only thing I can think of is Japan going in and wrecking them with gas and/or bioweapons while the Europeans are distracted.

In our world, the US had an anti-colonialism stance in the negotiations after the boxer rebellion. In this one, the USA is not a major power in the pacific, and China just gets carved up between colonial powers after Russia and Japan sack Beijing, even colonial powers for whom it makes no sense. Italy, Belgium, Austria, etc prove incapable of administering chunks of territory on the other side of the world and former concessions to the minor powers are the worst parts of China.

In our world nationalist China was a crap hole in the thirties. But in this one, it’s a patchwork, and the great powers still maintain concessions that keep the country from unifying, as well as controlling most of the urban areas.

Someone over at Amazon asked to copy Netflix’s Love, Death and Robots for their Secret Level show and did not change it up a bit so it doesn’t look like they copied. I’m not complaining because it’s pseudo-Love, Death and Robots season 4 and I eat that shit up like hot cakes, but when I was watching I was :O thinking “Sure hope nobody at Netflix watches this lol someone is gonna get mad.”

I can not recommend the Pac-Man short “Circle” enough though if only for the first watch experience. If it was a plane it coasted, started to descend, took a bit of a nose dive, releveled itself and then just turn around and flew out of the stratosphere. What a weird ass little short lmfao.

They have an unreal tournament episode too which I wish to watch as the game got axed from its pre alpha. Unreal Tournament 2003(?) was the first arena shooter I played, 6 year old me was amazed by it, I need to play unreal tournament 3 now that I think of it.

It's the tail-end of summer in Australia, and the weather in Sydney has cooled down significantly from the January highs. During this time of year, I start doing something I don't bother to attempt in the sweltering summer heat: I walk around my neighbourhood. This is something I do whenever I feel stuck or trapped in some way. Usually I do it at night, under the cover of darkness - hardly anybody is around at that time, and there's a refreshing crispness to the night air once the transition into the shoulder seasons begins.

In the daytime, walking in Sydney almost feels fatiguing to me, with the crowds and the harsh, direct sunlight. The city is another universe entirely once the sun goes down, after the streets empty out and the shops close. In fact, the shopfronts and offices look far more enticing to me when they're not trying to look inviting - instead of bustling supermarkets and convenience stores, there are darkened halls filled with rows and rows of vacant aisles, instead of offices there are these yawning chambers filled with desks and blacked-out computers, still lit, tantalisingly evocative in their emptiness. Often, I look through these big glass panes, wishing I could enter so I could sit silently in these dim rooms and hallways. Places like that evoke a deep longing and emptiness, and despite the fact that it's not a feeling people seem to seek out I can't help but be drawn to them sometimes.

Doing these walks at night is also a heightened experience, at least compared with walking during the day. I think part of the reason for this is because they're fairly unsettling, which doesn't sound desirable, but that discomfort is something that throws the whole experience into stark relief and helps clear the mind; the apprehension of immediate physical threat often shakes one out of that sense of mundanity and complacency that bleeds into everyday life. Fear of the dark has been imprinted into every single inch of our neural circuitry, and most of our hominid ancestors were certainly not apex predators; for much of our evolutionary history an isolated individual would have been easy pickings for sabre-toothed cats and Pachycrocuta hyenas. Even in an urban environment every single dark corner and rustle in the bushes triggers a fear response, and I find the heightened sensations almost addictive in a way.

Sometimes, the fear is caused by an actual threat. Statistically speaking my neighbourhood is relatively safe, but there are points where walking around at night has gotten dicey; probably the most unsettling experience I've had was a time when I ran into a group of people - one woman, two men - who seemed a little... off. As soon as they saw me, the woman walked right up to me, and began to ask me a barrage of questions. At first the questions were innocuous, she'd ask "Why are you out this late? What are you doing out here?", but they quickly escalated. Eventually I was being asked "What's in your bag? Do you have a gun in there?", all while the the two men were slowly advancing from the back. I turned around and began to walk away, and heard them following me. I felt almost giddy once I escaped into the safety of my apartment building.

There's a specific spot in my neighbourhood I stop at virtually every time I go on night walks. One of the apartment buildings near me has a recess which extends upwards for about twelve floors or so, and when you stand inside there and and look up, you can see towering walls of glass and concrete on all sides, all glowing with warm light. The sky, from here, seems almost as if it's receding into the distance; it's a small keyhole of blackness that looks impossibly distant from this vantage point. I wouldn't say it's a remotely good or even competent piece of architecture, the building is quite alienating, but I keep returning partially because it doesn't seem like something that should exist - it almost feels like a scene from a Gmod map transplanted straight into my neighbourhood. It doesn't feel like a real place.

These walks put me in strange moods. Sometimes I get the urge to follow in the footsteps of a Holden Ringer or Anton Nootenboom and walk in one direction, with just a backpack or trolley for my belongings, and only stopping to sleep or to rest. It would be so easy for me to walk west, and in a very short span of time, I'd exit my neighbourhood and cross into the suburbs. Eventually I'd leave the Sydney urban sprawl entirely, travel across the spectacular mountains and canyons and eucalypt forests of the Great Dividing Range, and enter the sprawling western plains. These lush farms would give way to cattle ranches, and the ground would slowly turn ruddy under my feet, red earth stretching far into the distance as storms gathered on the horizon. And I would keep walking, right into the charred centre of the continent, past dunes and mesas and large swaths of beautiful jump-up country, and when the towns eventually became too dispersed for me to feasibly travel them I'd divert my route southwards, to more populated areas of the country, until I could walk west again. I'd walk, and walk, and walk, until I wore myself out, until there was no more ground to cover, until I finally reached the sparkling shores of the Indian Ocean.

Often I think about - and romanticise - the lives of premodern merchants travelling the sea routes of the Maritime Silk Road. Unlike its overland counterpart, where merchants usually traded in a singular local area they specialised in and goods travelled the whole length of the Silk Road only by changing hands many times, a merchant travelling the Maritime Silk Road could travel a very long section of the trade route in one go. It connected societies as disparate as Persia, Java and China, and at its most northerly extent the route went all the way to Korea and Japan. Undoubtedly this was an unenviable and dangerous job, and they'd be vulnerable to a whole litany of risks ranging from storms to piracy during these long, lonely months spent at sea. But there is something exceptionally evocative about a life spent moving around constantly; much of your contact with the world would be the ocean, and your fragmented contact with human societies would consist of these brief vignettes of far-flung lands with cultures and traditions completely alien to yours. You'd be placeless, constantly moving, seeing things most people would never get to experience in one lifetime.

Such an experience is increasingly less common nowadays. The convenience of modern travel makes it easier to get around, but in an odd way, it also makes the world smaller and less interesting. Yes, the world has slowly become more homogenised due to how interconnected everything is, but part of it is also inherent to the mode of travel we use now. Travelling from Colombo to Guangzhou no longer requires you to sail into Southeast Asia and navigate around the Straits of Malacca, stopping at port towns all the while to restock and refuel; instead now you have the opportunity to travel straight from point A to point B, missing everything in between and depriving you of many valuable experiences you wouldn't have otherwise sought out yourself. I enjoy having the ability to shortcut between destinations as much as the next person, but I also deeply feel that something has been lost; it's a specific type of experience that many premodern couriers and merchants would have had, but is alien even to many modern travellers. The endless wastes in between your destinations are worth seeing to some extent, even if just to give you a visceral appreciation of how big and empty much of the world actually is, and sometimes there are things of value to be found in them.

I think there's a deep-seated need in me to roam, and as strange as it sounds, taking walks late at night satisfies that specific brand of wanderlust just a little bit. You're taking in a view of your city that isn't necessarily meant to be experienced by people, and you're not doing anything or going anywhere; you're walking just for its own sake. The very fact that there's not that much to do at all recontextualises your environment and makes it the sight in and of itself, and granted you don't always find something truly interesting, but when you do it pops even more because of the context in which you found it.

Perhaps, over the weekend, I'll take the train to the CBD in the early hours of the morning, and just walk around.

I enjoyed reading this. Thanks for posting it. :)

I watched a movie that had a somewhat similar theme yesterday. Gerry (2002). It's not a very good movie, but it starts up some thoughts due to the location and situation they're in. Two men lost in a huge desert landscape.

I'm not sure I'd had the balls to regularly walk around at night. Do you have any means of self defense?

I've been doing this on and off for years now, ever since I moved to Sydney.

Typically I don't carry anything to defend myself, which is maybe not smart - I'm a fairly small guy too so it'd be hard for me to actually physically protect myself if I ever needed to use my fists. I do keep my wits about me and am often prepared to flee the scene if anything occurs (I am reasonably fit, so I do have that going for me), but maybe it's a good idea to bring some means of self-defence just in case.

I'm just inherently not a very fearful or neurotic person. Sydney isn't exceptionally dangerous, and perhaps my threshold for unacceptable risk is a bit skewed because of where I hail from - growing up in a third-world country where one's baseline risk is much higher does things to your risk-aversion. I certainly do have my limits though, there are parts of the city I wouldn't do this in.

How did you identify the actually dangerous parts of the city? Just the poverty and news headlines heuristic, or?

I've thought of wanting some sort of self defense means for walking alone at night/traveling alone, but haven't figured out what. Would a pepper spray be sufficient? Hm.

Just the poverty and news headlines heuristic, or?

Yeah, that's a big consideration, I would be careful in parts of Western Sydney. Frankly, a non-insignificant part of it is also just me going off vibes; it's generally not hard to tell by sight alone which parts of the city are less friendly or maintained and where you might have a higher risk of being jumped. Some element of common sense in there too. Don't walk down back alleys where your avenues of escape are limited, for example, make sure you have ways to remove yourself from the area if a situation arises. Sometimes I do flout that rule, but it's not hard-and-fast, it's just one element that can be used to evaluate on the spot. It's all pretty ad hoc.

Ne Zha 2 is currently the best selling movie you’ve never heard of. It’s a sequel to an animated film from 2019 which was… fine? Impressive for a first-time director with a small budget but nothing to write home about.

But Ne Zha 2 is worth writing about. To get the CW part out of the way, it was animated entirely using Chinese firms, allegedly after the director felt exploited and ignored by other international animation groups. Maybe (probably?) AI was involved and some other animators don’t like this. It still looks better than any other effects work I can think of.

But the movie is just broadly excellent. The dialogue and characterization are sharp, the plot is tight (except for an indulgent act 3), and again, it’s visually astounding. Worth seeing in theaters!

the best selling movie you’ve never heard of

At least some people here clearly have.

https://www.themotte.org/post/1689/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/299405

I will be visting a city named prayag for this religious festival that happens once every 12 years (or 144 years but they say that every 12 years) called mahakumbh and I am already regretting all of it given the terrible hygiene, crowd and pajeet aura coming from that place, on one hand I am a Hindu, on the other hand, it does seem kinda odd given people pump sewage in the ganges in most cities inside of India. It has had millions of visitors, literally mllions and that scares me.

Have you guys had any vacations or visits to subpar third tier places that you went through with despite knowing early on that you are gonna regret it regardless?

P.S. I will tale a dip in the middle of the river via a boat but I am not too excited about it, sinking money in the tickets was stupid lol

Ever wanted to learn more about congressional hearings on UAPs and the proposed coverup, but most sources either avoid going into depth or assume that you already know lingo and who's who?

Jimmy Akin's Mysterous World recently did an episode on the secret government program Immaculate Constellation. As always, it's pretty informative and measured.

Sure enough, I finished reading The Hobbit to my daughter again this week. My wife has moved onto reading her Charlotte's Web, but the kid brings up questions about The Hobbit constantly all the same. Why did Bilbo take the arkenstone from Thorin? Or the ring from Gollum? Why was the Dragon so curious about Bilbo's riddles instead of eating him? Why was Thorin mad at Bilbo? Why are the goblins so mean? Why did the Elf King imprison the dwarves?

Broadly she's been exposed to facets of the human condition none of the other children's books she's read have exposed her to, and it's wonderful to see her mulling over the scenarios in her head days, even weeks after we read it. It really makes me appreciate Tolkien even more as a writer. I mean, it's not the first longer form chapter book we've read her. We read her an abridged version of Wind in the Willows, The Wizard of Oz and another illustrated book called Brambly Hedge. And those have all be fine stories with good and evil, and characters with flaws. But in that simplistic way where friends broadly stay friends, characters with a flaw display that flaw in every scene, and things are just more simplistic and black and white.

I suspect I'll be reading The Hobbit for a third time soon. She's also been begging to start The Lord of the Rings, but she's almost certainly too young for that. I should probably refresh my memory about it too.

I finished reading The Illiad and loved the shit out of it. It was a slower read for me, and I tried to get through a chapter a day. I also grabbed a book about the fragments we have from the rest of the Greek Epic Cycle, but it was underwhelming. I think I want to grab some of the Greek Tragedies that derive from the epic cycle though. At some point. I'll probably read The Odyssey next.

Currently reading The Mote in God's Eye, and it's a page turner like I haven't picked up in a long while. I'm about halfway through with 200 pages left, and I expect I'll finish it this weekend. It was written by a pair of conservative authors in 1974, was nominated for all the awards, and damned if it didn't deserve them. It's a phenomenal first contact story that evolves into a mystery/intrigue thriller. Highly recommend it. I plan on getting around to the sequel some day.

If you're interested in recommendations for children you may be interested in The City of Dreaming Books. I picked it up not realising it was written for children (probably 9-12), but enjoyed it enough to finish it regardless. It's about a Lindworm that discovers the best book ever written and goes on an adventure to discover its author. Adult readers will find many of the plot beats a little predictable, but it's timeless and whimsical.

Regarding Lord of the Rings: if she's expecting it to be more hobbit, she will be surprised, what with it being slower and more epic (grander, more serious) in feel.

Neat coincidence - I recently finished reading The Hobbit to my own kids, aged 5 and 8. We also watched the old 70's animated movie version, since it happens to be available on HBO, and I got to explain how minor characters and plot points often get cut in the transition from book to film, so that the film doesn't end up too long.

I have an Iliad and Odyssey pair illustrated by Alan Lee and perfect for my precocious 7-8 year old who's reading them over and over again now. The Iliad book is called Black Ships Before Troy.

We're enjoying The Hobbit too but right now she prefers The Odyssey. Had a good conversation on lotuses as they appear in modern life.

How old is she?

Meanwhile my parents let me buy It in middle school and I dipped half-way out because I got bored only to then eat the rest of his works like a bag of chips.

Have you read Beren and Luthien, The Children of Hurin and The Fall of Gondolin? I absolutely adore them. They read like real fairytales.

If you like fantasy similar to the Lord of the Rings, I cannot recommend the list from this website enough. I’ve read them all and The Broken Sword, Conan the Barbarian and Gormenghast were absolutely delicious. Especially The Broken Sword.

http://starsbeetlesandfools.blogspot.com/2012/06/suggested-readings-in-fantasy.html?m=1

The Lord of the Rings is more accessible to children than I'd thought it would be; IIRC I waited until my youngest was 8 or 9, but probably didn't need to. The biggest limitation for me was that I wanted to let my kids all watch the movies shortly after we finished with the books, but I wanted to start with the Hobbit movies (because that way you get LotR second as a climax rather than the Hobbit trilogy second as a disappointment), and aside from quality concerns, those movies are more graphic and gory about the violence than I'm happy with. But if you just stick with the books, the main issue with LotR for kids is that it demands a level of attention and patience that younger kids might not have yet, especially if yours just got to the point where the Hobbit wasn't too much for her. IIRC my youngest was fine with the meat of the books, but perhaps just barely, because both she and her (then 10 or 11) brother decided to skip most of the history/sociology/geography prologue. Maybe that's a good touchstone? If your daughter is so interested in hobbits that she can make it past "Concerning Pipeweed" then the rest of the books should be a breeze.

The sequel to Mote is probably worth reading, but "worth reading" is a big letdown from "one of the best science fiction books in history", so go into it with tempered expectations if you don't want to be disappointed. There are no other Niven/Pournelle collaborations as good as "Mote"; IMHO the only ones that are close in limited ways are "Footfall" (first contact, with a psychological gulf), "Lucifer's Hammer" (civilization as a character), "Inferno" (wild plot), and "Legacy of Heorot" (page turning suspense+action), but they're all more flawed in other ways.

I was given LotR (in a Russian translation) around age 5 or so, and seemingly read the whole thing, though it's hard to say how much of it I understood or whether I skipped around, especially since the movies and finally rereading it in English could have implanted any number of false memories. I did remember the maps, the copperplate etchings of barrels that the particular print version used as chapter separators, and being mildly irritated when the movies came out much later because I seemed to have had formed a very particular mental image of one segment (the rocky area that Frodo and Sam traversed before the swamp with the dead elves) and it looked different in the film, so it was probably not zero (and whatever I was doing with it, I am told that I was so absorbed that my parents got to enjoy many months of relative peace).

(We also had a comic book version of the Hobbit, which I probably was given earlier, but couldn't get into because I found the pictures confusing. I still struggle with comics/manga visual storytelling now.)

"one of the best science fiction books in history"

So, I hit the 200 page mark where things take a pretty hard turn, and I've been incapable of stopping until my eyes no longer want to focus tonight. 180 pages later, 80 pages left, and I think I have to put it down for the night. But I know what I'm doing ASAP tomorrow morning.

I don't think I've read a novel this compelling in a long, long time. I'm not sure "reads it nearly cover to cover in one sitting compulsively" is the utmost criteria for a science fiction novel. But it's not nothing.

Good idea putting it down for the night. You probably will have enjoyed the extended denouement more over breakfast coffee than you would have last night.

Yeah, I wrapped up the last 80 pages over coffee this morning. Currently basking in the post-book glow. Definitely ranks among my favorites, and I can't recall the last time a book pulled me through the last 300 pages whether I wanted to or not. With 50 pages left it almost feels like an obligation to finish it that night. Last 100 can be a stretch, and there is often a good enough lull where you can save the rest for later. Don't know that I've ever had a book put a figurative gun against my head and gone "READ MOTHER FUCKER!" before even the halfway mark before.

Any idea what caused the issues with their writing collabs? I read mote as a kid, and even in that it was obvious they had weird conflicts with each other's... OCs, I guess we'd call it now.

Honestly, in my opinion their collaborations were purely win-win. If you look at the novels Pournelle wrote on his own, they were relatively dry and often a little hard to maintain interest in. If you look at the novels Niven wrote on his own, they were relatively fantastical and (except for the fantasies, where you know what you're getting into) sometimes a little hard to take seriously. Their collaborations don't all thread the needle between those SFF extremes perfectly, but they do better than either alone. There was definitely always conflict between their characters, or between their characters and the worlds/universes they built, but that's a good thing. "Inferno" in particular worked well for me solely because (spoiler alert, albeit such an extremely vague spoiler it's probably fine) they took a clash between one of Niven's major styles vs one of Pournelle's influences and really leaned into it and wrapped the whole book around it.

how old is your daughter? Been wondering when it is time for the hobbit.

She's 5. I have no clue what is typical for The Hobbit. I know another Mottizen said he read The Hobbit to his kids around 6 I think? I might be misremembering. A friend of mine tried reading to her son when he was 4 with an illustrated version. She acts like it went great, but her husband intimated to me that it went nowhere. So there's that. Was the idea behind me buying a companion artbook through.

It was a little touch and go at first without lots of pictures on every page. We'd go weeks without reading it, and she'd just want to hear Brambly Hedge again. She did really enjoy tracing Bilbo's path and adventures along the map in the back of the book though, and was very excited to get to the dragon. Even so, that didn't always carry it. Then I got a sketch book of The Hobbit by Alan Lee, and my daughter looks through that while I read to her, and suddenly she wanted me to read more Hobbit to her morning, noon and night, and then start over as soon as we finished.

this sketchbook I assume?

Indeed.

That was the age I read it with my mom. Although I think we'd listened to the BBC audio drama first. That was brilliant.

Wow, The Hobbit really is good for kids, huh? I think the main problem with Lord of the Rings proper is that it's really boring a lot of the time, perhaps too boring and slow-moving and overall wordy and complex for a kid. The content itself is morally fine for them, not traumatizing or anything, but all those other things make it hard to start so early.

Turning this back to Culture War material, you'll probably never give them a new kids book, would you? There's something profound to me that we used to be so sure of ourselves that we were constantly churning out works that everyone could enjoy, and even now, everyone can still retroactively enjoy them, but at some point, the cultures diverged enough that nothing can be trusted anymore, writers cannot go with the old frameworks respected older works once used, and classic themes might appear corny and simple by now.

you'll probably never give them a new kids book, would you?

Kids media (books, movies, games) have, as a general rule, always been complete shit.

This is mostly because the stereotypical kid media isn't actually made for children- they're made for adults who think that's what children like (and they kind of have to be, considering that's who's buying the tickets).

Meanwhile, consider this kids' toy and the fact that the movie it's based on is in a rating category such that theaters would refuse to let the person who would [want to] own that see.

Now, consider that scene where Robocop shoots that guy's dick off. That's going to trigger alarm bells in the adults who see it, but not the children; for the adults, it's "yeah, they're trying to rape the woman", for the children, they're probably not going to get the full implications of "hair down there" (or kinda just roll their eyes a bit)... but "he got shot in the dick lol" still has universal appeal. That's true for most of the superfluous sex scenes in other movies, for that matter- the main downside is not that they'll get it and enjoy it a little too much, but that it degrades the movie to pander to an audience that isn't them. They see sex scenes [and sexuality] the way everyone else sees wokeshit; and ironically the only movies to point this out are themselves 'kids movies'. [Shrek is another one, but is far more explicit about shitting on it, a lot more literally, in the first scene of the movie.]

At best, it's integrated organically into the story- hard to take the sex scene out of Terminator because the entire story is built around it- but if you show a kid that movie I guarantee you he's mainly going to be stomping around the house making robot sounds and saying "I'll be back" way too much, not trying to act out movie sex.

Anyway, so Tolkien is like that. The "wokeshit"/moralizing that is there (which is... mainly bog-standard Christianity in a way that isn't quite as blatant as Lewis' is) isn't all that jarring, as there's a reason for it to be there and it's generally intended positively rather than "Remember Kids, Leave Room For Jesus"-style messaging (like "see, the race of rock people are all gay, remember that being gay is OK" in the middle of a mediocre-to-bad superhero movie).

It's not all that accurate to group "elements of media that adults like" as "adult" to then exclude "not adults" from it. It's OK for most things to be universal.

you'll probably never give them a new kids book, would you?

Yeah, that's been a problem. I'm actually working on a draft of an effort post about that. I'm gonna try really hard on it, and probably eat a month long ban for something I never saw coming if past is prologue.

The bright side is that there are plenty of 'old' kids books that are perfectly serviceable and great to read, even as an adult.

This applies to everything, nowadays, from video games to TV shows. Amazing.

Christian kid's books are still being produced, and generally not full of woke shit. They are mediocre, but kids eat that stuff up. Feed volume and keep room for the classics.

Start Lord of the Rings anyway -- I read it after the Hobbit and even my little kids liked it more and were even more engaged.

The Mote In God's Eye is indeed a fantastic book. I don't know how many other books end literally with an around-the-table conference that still delivers an absolute nail-biter of tension for the ending as you're just praying the main characters can piece together the information in time ... while still feeling lots of empathy for the antagonists (of a sort). On the gripping hand, .....

For the first time in my life, I am investing money from a trust fund given to me by my parents. I am well aware of all the pitfalls and common advice, but there are some lessons I think I can only learn through experience. The temptation to believe I can beat the market is strong. So, after allocating most of my unearned wealth sensibly, I am gambling the rest(stock picking).

How much money is worth learning the lesson? I already feel pretty uneasy about what I've done. The real danger is that I might make it big and become addicted. Otherwise, it's a win-win situation, right?

Or is this just rationalization? I really didn't feel anything until I spent $1,000 on leveraged trades, so I thought I needed to push myself to get the emotional reaction I wanted from a loss or extreme volatility.

You should learn to trade leveraged derivatives like options, futures, and options on futures because it's awesome and fun. It's the modern equivalent of dark magic, and everyone is sure it's going to destroy you and those you love.

And the most fun part is that it really can!

You shouldn't start with any less than $5,000. $10,000 is better.

Keep in mind, as you're trying to beat the market, that short and long term trades may be taxed differently, and adjust what your meaning of "beat" is accordingly.

I generally outperform the market by guessing demand trends ~6 mo out. I made good money off of LNG infrastructure companies(a separate thing from energy stocks) after the ukraine invasion, for example. If you're not good at this, I'm sorry, I don't have an algorithm, stick to index funds.

Oh, when a democrat gets elected, buy silver. Sell it before a republican gets elected.

I can outperform the market, but only if I am paying close attention. My full-time gig requires sometimes 100% of mind for multiple days at a time, and if you're not doing your own research and able to execute on Bloomberg alerts, you'll miss out on big swings. I did not play as long or as successfully as WhiningCoil, but after 5 years of my $10k play fund performing identically to my bigger funds attached to indices, I decided to focus on my family and job.

My minimum investment into a stock is generally going to be that same $1,000 mark. You ultimately want enough position slots to keep you interested - I.E. 10 slots would be $10k. One problem I ran into is that instead of closing a successful position and moving it to something else that excited me, I would just invest more elsewhere and divide my attention, then miss the previous win turning into a loss.

All that said, it meant I could use that fun money as a way to avoid buying some physical crap. If I had extra money in checking I would buy stock instead of some frivolous bike part. Since this is already trust fund money you can't physically touch, that's of no use to you.

So, I outperformed the market by a pretty good margin. My brokerage account is up about 17% annually over the last 10 years. No clue about my crypto assets, but probably better. I had some phenomenal winners (BTC, NVDA, COIN, NTDOY, V) and some pretty stinky losers (MMM, Ubisoft, CGC). One thing I learned is that with the losers, so long as you don't gamble with something retarded like leveraged options, the most you can lose is the money you invested. With the winners, you can be up many many multiples. You invest the same amount of money into NVDA and CGC 5 years ago, and you might be down 99% on CGC, but you are up 1000% on NVDA.

All that said, I'm older, and I'm shifting my investing entirely towards low fee S&P index funds. I'm generally letting ride what I have, moving profits over to the index when I take them. Because it's been awesome, and leapfrogged me a decade or more of shrewd by the book investing. But I don't expect to get lucky forever.

Have fun, stay away from options, don't touch leverage, and my best investments have been in companies I had a deep familiarity with and a good sense of their place in the market. When COIN was priced to go bankrupt like they'd have their own FTX event, I threw another $10,000 in because I knew that simply was not going to happen. When investors wanted Nintendo to get out of the hardware market and predicted the Switch would be a failure, I flew down to San Antonio and played Zelda and a bunch of other games at the first event you could do that pre-release. I flew home and immediately bought Nintendo stock. Nvidia was just year and year after year of them having something like an 80% market share on the Steam hardware survey, and being an Nvidia customer for life (Riva 128 gang represent). With Bitcoin I spent the time to actually understand it's technology and ecosystem and came to believe it had actual value beyond the hype.

My worst picks were things I really didn't understand, but grabbed just because. I didn't understand MMM was dealing with major lawsuits, I just knew they were a big company that had been around forever. Ubisoft, I donno, I guess I just liked some of the games they'd put out on Switch and I thought they might ride it's coat tails more. CGC was me trying to bandwagon changes in weed legality. That was a mistake. Although V was one I got just because people said it always goes up, and for the last 10 years that's more or less been true. But they said the same thing about MO and that basically quit being true the moment I bought some.

and being an Nvidia customer for life (Riva 128 gang represent)

Respect! Although I'm ancient enough to have had Trident-based SVGA cards, my first Nvidia based board sported a TNT. IIRC, the 128 came and went pretty fast so by the time I was ready to move on from my 4 MB ATi card, it made more sense to me at the time to grab a single TNT rather than a Voodoo 2 (I judged 2 Voodoos to be too much of a splurge) plus recycling the current card or getting a Matrox or something. Even though by today's standards a lot of that tech was really just getting off the ground at that point, it's striking to me how rich the home computing ecosystem was and how fast things were changing compared to the relatively static niche market that it is today.

It's funny, thinking about all the video cards I've owned. The family computer had some VLB SVGA card. My first computer had a Riva 128. I upgraded to a TNT, then a Pentium II system with a Geforce 2 GTS my dad smuggled home from work when his workstation got a Quadro. After that system died I ended up with an Athlon XP system and a Geforce 4 4800. Then I did some internships and saved up for a hotrod PC with an Athlon 64 and a Geforce 6800 GT. After college I got a Core 2 Duo system with a BFG Geforce 8800 GT which was hot shit. Spent more time console gaming, but I think that got upgraded to a Geforce 270, then a 570, then a 970. At some point the motherboard croaked and some random Core i5 got thrown in there, maybe 5th or 6th gen. Whatever was current at the time. Then I had a kid and build a new PC, Ryzen 3700X with an RTX 2070S. Eventually upgraded it to a 5800X3D and an RTX 4070S. Now I'm throwing $50 a month into a saving account so that 4 years from now I might have enough stashed away to build a new PC.

It's weird thinking about how PCs have demarcated the phases of my life, and how much they've meant to me.

Ahh, memory lane! While I can't remember every single component at this point I do remember just about every single build, starting with buying my roomie's old 486DX2/66, which by that time was slow enough that I quickly upgraded to a DX4/120 and thence to a 5x86/133 that I had been given. That was more than enough for me to run Windows 95 and play Civ 2 until my eyes bled and Duke Nukem 3D when it came out. My first Pentium build came after that, which at some point got upgraded to a Pentium MMX, and which at some point also housed the ATi card which I'm now not so sure was the 4 meg model, but which ran Quake 2 acceptably well. But the next build I remember really well because I started from the ground up and overclocked a Celeron 300A to 450 mhz, threw in the TNT and was gaming to my heart's content and preferring UT over Q3. At some point I tried to repeat my overclocking success with a Celeron 366 but couldn't quite get the 550 overclock to stick reliably, but I know I did get a Pentium 3 733 to 1 Ghz without even needing to juice the voltage, just a simple change in the base clock speed. On the graphics side, meanwhile, I had upgraded every single generation for a while and stayed in the Nvidia camp, going from TNT to TNT2 and thence to the Geforce and on to the Geforce 2. Somewhere along the line, I switched to an Athlon XP, which I ran until the corner of the flip chip sheared right off, then an Athlon 64, and then a 64X2, while GTA 3 blew me away and UT 2004, though still floaty, was finally good enough. On one of these I actually switched over to an ATi card on the graphics side as they actually held the performance crown for a bit at the time and Oblivion looked pretty indeed on that silicon. After that, it was all Intel and Nvidia again, from a Core 2 duo and and the new Borderlands sensation (which was nice after the gorgeous but otherwise decidedly mixed bag that was UT3) to an i5-2600 which I remember pairing with a Geforce 660. After that, an SSD was the next big performance boost but processor improvements at that point were clearly on the wane and I didn't upgrade again until Skylake, going with a i7-6700k and a Geforce 970. At some point I upgraded the card to a 1080ti and then the processor to an i9-9900kf. Ironically, I started playing 7 Days To Die on the Skylake system and was still going strong through all of its iterations on the Coffee Lake system and the last upgrade I had been contemplating was to either a 3080 or a 3090 (whichever I could get my hands on) when hard mode midlife came for me en flagrante delicto. Suddenly, building and gaming plummeted in importance and the PC that I write this on is one of those wee little Beelink SER5 units sporting a Ryzen 5k mobile processor and ironically runs all of the old games that I love so much without batting an eye. Meanwhile, my poor forlorn former gaming rig still collects dust in the basement waiting for me to log back in to Steam and return but IDK if that's ever realistically gonna happen, even though that old part of me likes to daydream about building out a high-end Zen based system with a matching Nvidia card and monster power supply to boot. Sadly, though, I don't think there'd be anything to play that would be worth the money and in truth I often have more fun actually making old games run in Wine or Dosbox than I do playing half of them. Even so, that's a good quarter of a century that I spent building and gaming. Wow.

Court opinion, simultaneously hentai-adjacent and terror-inducing:

  • A husband and a wife are sleeping in their bedroom. The wife, a labor-and-delivery nurse, is suddenly called to the hospital in the middle of the night, and does not wake up the husband to tell him that she is leaving the house. The couple's daughter has a nightmare and enters the couple's bed (an occasional, but not frequent, occurrence). The husband wakes up and attempts to initiate sex with the wife through digital penetration. Being half-asleep (a heavy sleeper with the disorder of sleep apnea) and in a pitch-black bedroom (with blackout curtains due to the wife's inconsistent sleep schedule), he fails to realize that the 37-year-old wife has left and the 11-year-old daughter (who is similar in size and shape to the wife, and has developed pubic hair) is there instead. After the daughter realizes what is happening, she fully wakes up the husband, who apologizes profusely for the accidental digital penetration.

  • Three years later, the daughter confides in a friend that the husband accidentally penetrated her digitally. However, the friend thinks that the touching was intentional rather than accidental, so she reports it as a crime. The husband is charged with "aggravated sexual abuse of a minor under twelve", is found guilty by the jury, and receives from the judge the mandatory minimum sentence of thirty years in prison.

  • The appeals panel vacates the conviction by a vote of two to one. The prosecutor presented absolutely zero evidence that the digital penetration was intentional rather than accidental, so no reasonable juror could have convicted the husband of the crime "beyond a reasonable doubt". (The dissenter thinks that the jury was perfectly entitled to disbelieve the husband's assertion that he couldn't tell the difference between a 37-year-old woman and an 11-year-old girl.)

My man, this is the opposite of fun. This is horrifying. That poor family, they really have suffered something nobody should have to suffer. And it sounds like they had irreparable financial harm on top of it, just to pay for a lawyer for the guy.

I am not that familiar with American legal system, but doesn't the loser have to pay the winner's legal fees? The loser being the state in this case, after the conviction was overturned.

No, definitely not. That's why you will frequently see people settle or otherwise cave when someone sues them - you are on the hook for your own legal fees, and unless you have deep pockets it can ruin you even if you win. That might be different in the case of a criminal trial, but I don't believe it is.

In criminal cases costs are certainly refunded if you win on appeal. I think sometimes the state can appeal against manifestly excessive expenditure (like if you have defense counsel stay in five star hotels and spend $200 a day on dinner), but mostly they do have to pay. What you can’t usually do is get money for inconvenience to your life from being prosecuted.

Good to know, thank you for the correction.

Geez, this had a much happier ending in the Ponsuke manga version

the 37-year-old wife has left and the 11-year-old daughter (who is similar in size and shape to the wife, and has developed pubic hair

Huge girl and tiny wife? I suppose this is physically possible. But seems damned unlikely.

Quote from the defense lawyer's closing statement (part of document 100 on this page):

It is clear from the photographs that the Government admitted into evidence that, in 2016 and 2017, [the daughter] and [the wife] were a lot closer in size and weight than they are now. Their hair was significantly more similar to one another's than it is right now.

Sure, it's possible. Wish I had photos for morbid intrest.

Couple things stick out:

  • Are you sourcing these on your own or finding them in an adjacent forum? I look forward to these every week.
  • This happened on an indian reservation - not sure how relevant that is.
  • Amazing to have your best friend of 26 years and his daughter sell you down the river. Amazing to have your wife and child beg for a Jury not to convict you of a crime against one of them, and then they do it anyway. I wonder how often abused family members do this, my passive observations suggest it's uncommon but possible.
  • One problem is that these niche cases don't provide any pictures. Frankly if I were a juror they would perhaps have moved me in one direction or the other, though the fact this literally only happened once is more evidence it was just some ridiculous mistake.

more evidence it was just some ridiculous mistake.

Mens rea doesn't matter in blasphemy/sacrilege cases.

One problem is that these niche cases don't provide any pictures. Frankly if I were a juror they would perhaps have moved me in one direction or the other

I now have logged into PACER and uploaded a bunch of the publicly-available files to RECAP. Document 66 attachment 1 lists seven family photographs that the prosecutor used as trial exhibits. But of course those photographs are not publicly available. Still, in document 99 the wife testifies regarding similarities in height and weight, and the defense lawyer's closing statement in document 100 has this quote: "It is clear from the photographs that the Government admitted into evidence that, in 2016 and 2017, [the daughter] and [the wife] were a lot closer in size and weight than they are now. Their hair was significantly more similar to one another's than it is right now."

Amazing to have your wife and child beg for a jury not to convict you of a crime against one of them, and then they do it anyway.

I don't think begging the jury for leniency is permissible, and I see no such begging in documents 98–100 (the trial transcript). But they did beg the sentencing judge for leniency in document 94 (the sentencing transcript), mentioning that the family had to sell its house in order to pay the lawyer fees. Document 79 is a request for permission to appeal in forma pauperis (exempted from paying the filing fee due to poverty).

Are you sourcing these on your own or finding them in an adjacent forum?

I just check out recent New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and federal cases for fun.

This happened on an Indian reservation

That doesn't mean much in Oklahoma, where half the state counts as Indian reservations under a recent Supreme Court ruling.

Thanks, I just threw up in my mouth a little.

I literally covered my mouth in shock part way through the first paragraph. Oh my God, what a nightmare.

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