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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3357 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 12, 2023

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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Is there any gender-inverted noir fiction other than that chapter in Hyperion?

I asked Bing's Sydney. Btw, I am now pretty certain that she does in fact use GPT4 in the Creative mode. Anyways, she had some suggestions:

The Crow Girl by Erik Axl Sund: An example of a modern take on the noir genre, The Crow Girl is a violent story with an unreliable narrator. Detective Jeanette Kihlberg has the requisite messy personal life and cynical worldview for noir stories, and the crimes she finds herself investigating, involving mutilated, mummified children, explode into a horrifying and exhilarating mystery that spans decades and continents

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson: A bestselling and acclaimed novel that introduces Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant hacker and investigator who teams up with journalist Mikael Blomkvist to solve a decades-old disappearance of a wealthy heiress. The novel explores themes of corruption, violence, misogyny, and revenge in a dark and gripping way.

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith: A charming and humorous series that follows Precious Ramotswe, the founder and owner of Botswana’s first and only female-run detective agency. Precious uses her intuition and common sense to solve various cases, from missing husbands to wayward daughters, while also dealing with her own personal issues.

Tart Noir edited by Stella Duffy and Lauren Henderson: A collection of short stories by various female authors that showcase the subgenre of tart noir, which is characterized by strong, independent, and often sexually assertive women who are involved in crime, either as detectives, criminals, or victims. The stories range from dark and gritty to witty and humorous, but all share a noir sensibility

Btw, I am now pretty certain that she does in fact use GPT4 in the Creative mode. Anyways, she had some suggestions:

I've always considered Sydney a "he". Strange how the minds work, isn't it?

Detective Jeanette Kihlberg has the requisite messy personal life and cynical worldview for noir stories

Sounds noir

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

No, Sydney, why would you think this is noir fiction?

A charming and humorous series

Not the words I would use to describe noir fiction.

Tart Noir edited by Stella Duffy and Lauren Henderson: A collection of short stories by various female authors that showcase the subgenre of tart noir, which is characterized by strong, independent, and often sexually assertive women who are involved in crime, either as detectives, criminals, or victims. The stories range from dark and gritty to witty and humorous, but all share a noir sensibility

With a name like that, there must be a story there that counts. Good work, Sydney.

It's Eurovision Song Contest time, and words cannot describe how crazy Finland has been over this year's Eurovision and Finland's predicted chances to do well. This thread is just a short list of stuff revolving around the Finnish Eurovision entry that's been seen here.

We should use this as an excuse to take advantage of our new NATO membership to divide Sweden between Finland, Norway and Denmark.

But then we'd have more Swedes here.

Finland deserved to win. Sweden's song was good, but it's not sporting to send a previous winner back, especially one with an established music career.

Overall not a particularly memorable contest in my opinion. The staging was great (as always) but very few stand out songs.

I try to not watch Eurovision because I think it's boring and the music almost always mediocre and I don't care who wins, if anything I prefer Sweden not to win so that the final doesn't end up here.

That said, sending artists with established careers is very common and so is sending previous winners, they just don't tend to win.

That Loreen won with that stale euphoria interpretation says more about the general level of the competition this year than her imo.

They were robbed.

Also your link wouldn't play for me in the US.

This one does https://youtube.com/watch?v=rJHe-iZ5HSI

This will probably get buried but it's outrageous that you can be bankrupted by medical debt if you get sick in the US! In Europe this doesn't happen.

EDIT: thanks for the gold kind stranger

I'm really exhausted by what seems to be this interminable stuck-at-superficial-memes discussion about health care in the US. I've lived in the US, spent a few years in the UK and experienced NHS, found it surprisingly shitty even though I was looking forward to rubbing Americans' faces in it, and then I ended up back in the US and actually on Medicaid (by near accident! a story for another time though) and found the quality significantly higher.

My new EA cause area for improving health care in the US is to arrange to have everyone live in Europe for a few years so they can get past using it as a cudgel for trying to advocate for their ideology that will fix everything.

I suspect it would backfire horribly and important lessons wouldn't be learned because the irony is too thick, but I dunno I'd really enjoy hearing "whaaaat? I need to wait 3 weeks for a blood draw because the one phlebotomist for my area is on vacation?"

To be clear I'm not saying the UK health care system is an order of magnitude worse (or better) than the US one, just that there are tradeoffs that can be hard to appreciate until you experience them.

This will probably get buried but it's outrageous that you can be bankrupted by medical debt if you get sick in the US! In Europe this doesn't happen.

I run a cancer forum on reddit https://old.reddit.com/r/coloncancer In the 6+ years moderating the community, I have encountered exactly zero Americans being bankrupted or made destitute due to medical debt, or being denied treatments or long delays owing to unaffordability. Everyone gets good, timely, high-quality treatments regardless of socioeconomic status, including costly surgeries and the latest chemo even if there is low likelihood of the procedures working. High medical bills are either negotiated lower, covered by various insurance programs (like Medicaid), covered by charity care, etc. Medical debt can be easily discharged, unlike other types of debt.

Fascinating!

One thought: is the group of people that doesn't have insurance and therefore doesn't get annual physicals and therefore doesn't have their colon cancer detected before it's way too late (a) a real cohort and (b) very well represented here? That would be a case of people having worsened outcomes because of poor access to care, no?

From what I have read, Canadians who have above average risk factors, such as family history, seem to have the hardest time getting timely colonoscopies, which would detect the cancer sooner.

Probably don't tell stories about their good treatment so we only hear from people with bad treatment or that have mental illness (i.e. half of Reddit).

So here's another +1.

I had a serious form of cancer about 10 years ago. My treatment was wonderful. My doctors were excellent. Treatment started very quickly after I first went to primary care doctor with a mysterious lump. Furthermore, my cheap insurance paid for most of it. There were no surprise bills. I was out less than 10k out of pocket. I am lucky to be living in a major city in the US.

My step-kid has been on Medicaid for most of his life and he has some kind of non-metastatic cancer that grows and regrows in his throat. It's fatal for some kids and I think it's Make A Wish eligible (not really sure what that is but it sounds grim). In his case he merely had to have throat surgery under general anaesthesia on a near-monthly basis when he was a toddler to keep cutting them out.

Fortunately as he aged they stopped regrowing so aggressively and now he only needs surgery about every 12-18 months.

The surgeon who sees him is some kind of leading expert in this surgery and he's seen at this hospital that I didn't even know could be so shiny and nice.

Anyway, we never once had to pay out of pocket to treat it while he was on Medicaid. Now that we're on a private insurer it's about 10-20% co-insurance, so it's a few grand out of pocket every time we take him in; seems like a great fucking deal all things considered.

The surgeon did make a... funny?... remark once when he was finally switched to a private insurer from Medicaid that now the reimbursement will be enough that he can celebrate after each surgery with a mid-range IPA instead of PBR. Not sure how much to read into that; given how health care reimbursements work I could imagine the dude has a garage full of exotic cars or he really could mean he all-in nets beer money on each surgery. They both seem equally possible. I do hope he has a lot of exotic cars though.

Wow, that sucks. I can't even imagine how stressful that would be. Having a good doctor makes a world of difference.

The system seems to rely upon the good nature of some doctors. There are lots of doctors working for not much (compared to the stress of the job and compared to something like a Google engineer). On the other hand, there are profit-maximizing doctors pulling down 7 figures who are probably responsible for a large percentage of the cost inflation.

It's tough to get rich seeing patients. But if you own an MRI machine or other diagnostic equipment you can really make bank. I'm pretty sure it's been shown that doctors prescribe more unnecessary tests when they are financially rewarded for doing so.

But if you own an MRI machine or other diagnostic equipment you can really make bank. I'm pretty sure it's been shown that doctors prescribe more unnecessary tests when they are financially rewarded for doing so.

Owning a medical practice where you have your own MRI machine and write prescriptions to use it does sound like it would be pretty lucrative.

In my experience most of the American expats who talk about how great the healthcare system is in other countries are almost always young people who don't have to deal with catastrophic problems or manage long-term conditions, and if they did wouldn't have had a comparable experience back in the US. I remember one former coworker who was living in France brag about how he went to the doctor for some minor ailment and was only charged ten dollars and got a prescription that only cost a few bucks. Well, that's pretty much how it works in the US if you have any kind of insurance at all that isn't an absolute bottom-feeder. I had cellulitis about a decade ago and that's pretty much how it was at urgent care, they gave me a bunch of prescriptions that were so inexpensive the OTC probiotic the doctor recommended was more expensive than all of them combined. For more serious ailments the usual story is that you go in and don't pay anything up front and then in a few months the insurance company sends you a bill that's more than you think you should pay based on your understanding of the policy but not enough that it causes any financial hardship or is worth complaining about. So like a few hundred dollars.

When it comes to medical bankruptcies, I practiced bankruptcy law for a while and they aren't what you think they are. While you occasionally see someone who was uninsured and now owes a hospital $60 grand or something, that's pretty rare. What's more common is that a relatively low-income person has insurance but an injury or illness keeps them out of work for an extended period and they're forced to borrow to pay for expenses. These people aren't likely to have short-term disability insurance, and long-term disability from Social Security doesn't kick in until after they've been out of work for a year (though they get paid from the date they stopped work), and takes a while to process. By the time they get their disability payments or are back to work they're so far in a hole that bankruptcy is the best option. They usually have a lot of unpaid medical bills that are included in the bankruptcy, but that's not the driving force.

Good points, you try to bring these up anywhere else like reddit or hacker news and get downvoted to oblivion.

The medical system in the UK is unusually bad. I found the medical system in Germany, Austria and Italy each far superior to it (and at least the last one of the three has no case for better socioeconomics). The US one was also superior, but (at least in the incarnation that you get as a PhD student at a reasonably rich university) still inferior to the three continental European countries above. My one encounter with the Canadian medical system put it only slightly below the Europeans. It's not clear to me if it's something cultural, or a consequence of the specific implementation and incentives it produces (I have low-confidence information that Sweden, which has the most similar medical system to the UK out of the ones I sampled so far, is similarly bad), but nowhere else have I encountered the combination of doctors who were this aggressively unwilling or unable to bring their brains to the job and just stubbornly prescribe heavy-duty medication which at best did nothing and at worst had nasty side effects based on an autocomplete-tier diagnosis (or actually googling the symptoms right in front of me) and complete lack of any equipment to even do something like basic blood tests (you get a referral to a lab and have to get another appointment once the results are in before they look at them, and the hope is clearly that in the >=7 days it takes the problem will resolve itself one way or another).

I found the medical system in Germany, Austria and Italy each far superior to it (and at least the last one

I hear this all of the time but I can't reconcile this with my experience.

I took my sister to the doctor in Italy once, in the countryside, and the doctor was an obese stupid looking guy in a big dimly lit room with no computer or desk. He looked at my sister's really strange bite on her leg and seemed oblivious to the possibility that this insect bite could cause Lyme disease. Even though she told him (in fluent Italian) that she was concerned this was a tick bite and that she could get Lyme disease. He just gave her some of of cortisone injection and sent her on her way.

She got Lyme disease.

On the plus side it was free.

I dunno I'm sure there are some doctors like this everywhere but if there was a doctor in the US that was this incompetent and they charged $200 I feel like the community would deal with them.

It's so unbelievable I'm doubting whether this actually happened even though I was definitely there and sober.

(Your UK assessment seems very familiar)

On the plus side, we're probably less than 5 years away from really good multimodal medical diagnosis AI. Hopefully these tools will start being used more, checklist manifesto style, as a sanity check for any diagnosis.

I don't know if this is accurate for Italy or not but this is something I've noticed in Sweden.

Primary care is becoming a low status speciality due to a combination of increased workload and an influx of poorly educated and wetted non-eu doctors working in that sector (non-eu doctors that are not in primary care seem decent enough). This means that going to the doctor has become a complete gamble and unless you know that your gp is competent you can expect to have to do their job for them.

However, If you for some reason end up in a hospital you'll receive excellent care by competent doctors.

The end result is that if you unwittingly go for a one-off primary care visit in Sweden and you uncritically accept what the doctor says then you're more likely than not to receive very poor care for non-emergency issues (where they can refer you to a hospital).

In practice, I think that the way that the NHS squeezes doctors and nurses is a false economy. The result is staff shortages, the importation of less competent doctors and nurses from the third world, and the flight of talented trained medical staff for sunnier climes with better pay. It's of course, entirely typical of our politics - see immigration, housing, infrastructure. Saving pennies today to end up poorer than Poland by the end of the decade. The UK was once, I remind people, on track to be richer per capita than the United States.

(I had a different reply here but I deleted it because I was triggered by stuff that resembled something that you weren't actually saying. Sorry.)

But how much better is it? Perhaps less than those numbers would imply, on many metrics.

What metrics are there, out of curiosity? I've only really seen "outcomes" mentioned but in my surface view these are confounded by issues of affluence (e.g. more obesity, more driving everywhere). Also it seems like ass-covering and hostility-to-rationing drive up costs as well; a socialized medicine death panel could cheerfully say no that test is expensive and highly unlikely to find a problem so there's no rx for it end of story, but in the US an indicator that you could have a 0.01% chance of a horrific disease justifies the test so end of story.

In the UK you can usually get ‘that test’ done privately for less than the cost of the average annual deductible in the US if you really want it.

So, interestingly, my current wealth insurance plan is one where I pay out of pocket for stuff and then apply for reimbursement. This puts me in a position to shop around before I get tests to find the lowest price out of an attempt to stay under the per-incident deductible and also generalized fear that I might be stuck with the whole bill.

It's really eye-opening! The variance between rates quoted for a test is sometimes an order of magnitude and I can't get anyone to tell me why.

I've listened to podcasts with doctors and they will complain about such and such imaging machines being shit and others being great and that's why they refer to so and so place only.

So. I dunno my prejudice is that these cheap tests produce crappy grainy images that your doctor hates but they just roll with it. But I could also totally understand if it's also because proper supply and demand forces are completely distorted and you really do overpay by 10x for the same stuff

German healthcare is also great purely on paper. You pay a fortune in I-can't-believe-it's-not-taxes and what you get is somewhere between indifference, incompetence and bureaucratic nightmares. At least that's my experience with it.

Thought: the problem I have with rap is the same problem as the pre-Christian age of heroes: while it’s good and necessary to have a heroic ideal to long for, to set our eyes toward in a far-off distance, for 99% of our days we play the role of servant and not hero. We usually work toward glory without any glory. We serve either a future ideal of ourselves or an actual boss or company. The heroic Pagan constructs are in fact inglorious precisely because they are too heroic, and the lowliness of Christ is in fact glorious precisely because of the lowliness. And so the high heroic Roman Empire was subjugated to the lowly crucified Christian.

Other thought: this video of rural Pakistani villagers reacting to the famous Agni Parthene is very cute.

Last thought: I really hate the show Succession? It seems like fantasy porn.

what

The Romans are known for their infrastructure, their cohesive military, their state capacity. One of their recurring political challenges was keeping the slaves and peasants satisfied, to the point of literally inventing panem et circenses. You don't think they had myths about diligence and service?

You could tell the opposite just-so story where the collapse of Rome represents the erosion of collective values in favor of eschatology. Wait... A thousand years of throwing lives away in monasteries and Crusades. Only the Enlightenment reminded people that the material world was worth improving!

That story is bunk, too, for the same reasons as yours. Christians didn't invent diligence or self-sacrifice, and they didn't ruin collectivism. You can mine any time period for examples for and against.

For example, Rap Snitch Knishes is an eloquent plea for cooperation in the face of state power.

It’s a blunder to say that because a religion possesses something that is called “sacrifice”, that what we think when we say “sacrifice” calls to mind all the same meaning, baggage, and effect. Rome had myths and stories that entail something Christians could call self-sacrifice. But what early Christians understood by sacrifice is a totally different thing, which just happens to share the same referent.

If you lived as a Roman you would be forced into internalizing their view of power and sacrifice: the Emperor had power and you sacrifice for the Emperor and if you’re lucky you get something in return; the gods you worshipped are under a tyrannical pantheon; the most glorious human to exist is certainly the Emperor or a great warrior who carved out land for Rome; you worship a powerful human-like god and you make a promise of sacrifice for the god to benefit you, and if if benefits you, you make the sacrifice. Because the thing you are worshipping is always high-and-mighty and glorious, what you internalize is that power and glory are the only things that really matter. This is problematic because mathematically only a few can have power and glory.

This is in sharp contrast to the Christian view. What a Christian looks at as the best is not a warrior with a lot of land and slaves. They look at a person whose mission was to help people with little care for material reward, who didn’t despise sinners, who served the Father of all mankind up to and including crucifixion, and who willingly died in our place as a servant to our shared Creator. This is an inversion of the entire Roman system, which by the time of Christianity was already collapsing from waste, ill morals, and corruption. Rome invented bread for the masses and Christianity invented heavenly bread for the Mass: they are not the same. In the Christian system, a simple laborer could understand that there is nothing in life he is missing and that he is up to the standards of God.

The monasteries provided us with the beginnings of formal logic, architectural improvements, philosophical improvements, and many of the classics from the Ancient World. But if you think the Pagans were so good, we are back to the first question: how did the lowly crucified triumph over Roman Might? In fact, how did the lowly crucified religion triumph over almost the whole world? And one point they had near-hegemony.

They didn’t. The Romans co-opted it to shore up a diverse empire, and forced others to convert.

Nope, outdated view

For over 200 years, Gibbon's model and its expanded explanatory versions—the conflict model and the legislative model—have provided the major narrative. The conflict model asserts that Christianity rose in conflict with paganism, defeating it only after emperors became Christian and were willing to use their power to require conversion through coercion. The legislative model is based on the Theodosian Code published in AD 438.

In the last decade of the twentieth century and into the twenty–first century, multiple new discoveries of texts and documents, along with new research (such as modern archaeology and numismatics), combined with new fields of study (such as sociology and anthropology) and modern mathematical modeling, have undermined much of this traditional view. According to modern theories, Christianity became established in the third century, before Constantine, paganism did not end in the fourth century, and imperial legislation had only limited effect before the era of the eastern emperor Justinian I (reign 527 to 565).[1][2][3][4] In the twenty-first century, the conflict model has become marginalized, while a grassroots theory has developed.[5][6]

According to Stark, the rate of Christianity's growth under its first Christian emperor in the 4th century did not alter (more than normal regional fluctuations) from its rate of growth in the first three centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_Christianization_of_the_Roman_Empire

Also a poor argument from common sense. Rome was already very diverse, and already had many diverse gods which usually got together fine. State-sponsored Christianity would have caused considerable and significant division in the Empire, like it would in America today, whereas tolerance and a pantheon and appropriation would have kept the Pax Romana. So the argument doesn’t even require evidence to disprove

Have you seen the orchestral version of "Dragonborn Comes" btw? Your comment reminded me of it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hnXD6FRZtn0

Brings back good memories! Ill always be partial to Oblivion though.

Counterpoint: The Chronic still slaps

https://youtube.com/watch?v=s38O65mUotU

Last thought: I really hate the show Succession? It seems like fantasy porn.

I really like it but I definitely think there's a ressentiment/"revenge fantasy" element to this entire genre of shows that boil down to the idea that rich people are all particularly pathological.

It's basically the "happiness stops increasing after $70K a year" of TV.

The biggest source of universal copium is people refusing to acknowledge that those wealthier than you are also on average healthier, smarter, and better looking while also enjoying themselves more than you.

One might even say that the claim that things get meaningfully better is a cope in itself, since it distracts from the reality that the primary deficiencies in one's life very well might be mostly internal, especially if what one feels one might reasonably be able to accomplish is acquiring money...

Not when self-actualization includes advancing societal changes.

With $100K in liquid assets I could drop $1K every quarter on commissioning porn or buying a bunch of mosquito nets.

With $100M in liquid assets I could spend $1M every quarter on a court painter (or several) or on running a nice little think tank or, if I moved to a better country (which would probably be the best investment of my millions), on actually influencing politicians instead of donating to their campaign fund.

Yeah, I can quibble with 2rafa about the actualization bit (iirc life satisfaction kept rising well past the $70K mark) a significant part of the resentment here is not just that rich people are happier, it's that they have more power. Which then means people want just-so stories about how unhappy they are to compensate. We don't have heaven & hell anymore so we found an alternative.

I was recently torched and told it is a red flag to not sort and match your socks when you do laundry. I have a drawer full of the unmatched pairs and I just find a match the morning of. Is this actually a red flag or bad? Is it actually that uncommon?

It absolutely is a red flag if you are yourself accustomed to sorting and matching your socks when you do laundry.

If you do the laundry, you have to match both your own and the other person's. (And that is going to be difficult if they never do it on their own initiative. Makes also more difficult to match your own socks. Adds entropy.) If you don't do the laundry, expect to find a closet full of mixed socks, and if you don't like it that way and want to have it your way, congratulations, you have now an extra chore because you have to do the laundry.

In my limited experience, any everyday friction items like "how to organize socks" are much more important deal-breakers for a relationship than difference in political opinions or many of the "values".

I pair my socks oddly when I put them away specifically to fuck with people who think wearing odd socks is a red flag. I have yet to meet a person of substance who gave a shit. If you dress well in other respects most people write it off as an eccentricity, and then I don't have to talk to the kind of person who thinks they can psychoanalyse me based on minutia.

What was the situation you were torched in?

The trick is to always store your sock inside the other matched sock. That way, it's zero effort.

My wife wears odd socks, so if it's a red flag then she's redder than me. I at least buy my socks in bulk to ensure they are easy to pair in the morning.

The worst gift I have ever received was a set of black socks. They were nice, but each had a small embroidering that not only identified the sock as left or right, but each pair of socks had it in a different color. Now I had to sort them, as finding the matching sock in the drawer was practically impossible.

I agree with everything @MaximumCuddles said. I would just add that matching socks when you do laundry is less work than doing it later, but you have to do it now, so it's a signal you have a suboptimally-high time discounting preference. A trivial thing, by itself, but if I were evaluating if I wanted to share a life with you, I'd be on the lookout for whether this trait echoes in the rest of your behavior.

I'm not really up with the hip lingo from the kids these days. What is "torched"?

I don't think this is actually right because mornings before work are kind of dead time anyway for most people. As in, if I've got to catch the 7:45 train, for instance, if I didn't spend 15 seconds looking for a sock pair it's not as if I'm really going to do anything else with that time, so even if you add up those 20 seconds over a year I haven't actually 'lost' any time because nothing would change if I sorted the socks in advance.

More pertinently though I don't think anyone is that ruthlessly efficient with their time as to quibble over a few seconds rummaging around the sock drawer. No one here at any rate, after all we are currently on an internet forum talking about socks.

Everythings a red flag nowadays, I wouldnt put much stock into it. I wonder how the next generation of humans will even come into existence at this point.

I just have a single kind of sock. No need to pair them. Is your way bad? A little weird, but if the rest of your place is classy, seems negligible to me. If the rest is a mess, then it makes you look a shmidge worse, but on it's own, who cares?

Allow me to dissent from the group, this whole thread is kind of a fun reminder how self selected this group is.

It’s a red flag in the sense that it’s an incredibly low bar to clear for domestic organization, similar to making your bed in the morning or keeping your sink clean.

I’m a man, but I’d still take it as a sign someone doesn’t have their shit together if they didn’t go trough the rather minimal effort to bundle their socks together.

The lack of having this done signals a bunch of clustered psychological/emotional problems including but not limited to being on the spectrum, suffering depression, having poor hygiene, having poor time management skills, lack of social skills, oppositional defiance disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and on and on.

I learned to do this as a bachelor, along with folding clothes, ironing shirts, learning to cook, keeping my bathroom clean, etc, etc.

Y’all mfers need some Dr. Peterson in your life it seems to me.

You gotta admit though, it's a fun contrast between how you diagnosed someone who doesn't pre-match their socks with depression, autism, and a laundry list of other possible disorders, but then admit that you don't understand how someone can have all their underwear in the same color instead of matching it with their visible clothing.

Socks aren’t underwear, you can see them in the course of a normal day.

You can wear Superman undies for all I care, the only people who see your actual underwear are the people you’re fucking. Or your roommate if you are particularly bohemian and/or have boundary issues.

I don't know what your normal day entails, but I do not see people's socks in the course of a normal day. Also like @official_techsupport says, black socks go with absolutely everything.

and for some reason I looked into their drawers and closets and saw one type of underwear of the same color,

Also black socks fit any clothing.

Black socks are certainly the most versatile by a country mile, but I still think they don’t look very good with light brown, tan or burgundy shoes. Especially if you are wearing slacks in one of those colors as well.

Granted, not everyone owns shoes of those colors, so your mileage may vary. But I recommend owning a pair at least, for variety’s sake.

Sometimes you just don't have the time for it.

Ironing clothes, folding clothes....is just unnecessary work. Especially if they come unwrinkled from the dryer. Cooking and clean bathrooms is more essential, and I agree that they're necessary skills.

There are only 24 hours in the day, and I don't mind if a couple of low-priority chores fall to the wayside while I am doing something more important. Wasting time while ignoring chores is pretty immature though. Especially because you can often waste time and do chores at the same time.

If you have one or two types of socks, isn't not bundling better 'time management' than bundling? In the sense that you'll use less time total? A lot of standard routines are useful things that some people abandon for poor reasons, but some of it is just ... I do it because it's the right thing to do, which I know because other people would think poorly of me if I didn't do it, which they do because they know it's the right thing to do, which ...

Comparing these small-scale norms to those of historical cultures, or cultures of the less-westernized parts of the world, indicates how arbitrary a lot of it is.

Also, a young man, especially e.g. a college student, who organizes their clothing suboptimally probably isn't depressed/ADHD/spectrum.

Sure, if you have only one or two types of socks it makes sense, but having only one or two types of socks is actually kind of a compounding signal.

I’m not exactly a fashionista but I have several types of athletic socks alone; short & thin athletic socks, long & thin athletic socks, long & thick athletic socks, socks with threading, black ones, white ones, multicolored ones.

Not to even mention the different styles and colors of dress socks I have. Which if you are matching to different colors and styles of business casual or formal wear is a necessity.

Even at my poorest I didn’t have that little variety of clothing. Besides, on this forum I sort of doubt it’s a poverty issue, I remember the poll we did back in the old place and people here are mega wealthy, I think I was literally one of the poorest people on the forum. Half my shoes I’ve bought second hand or on clearance.

If I walked into someone’s home and I was pretty sure they weren’t poor or a cultist or a religious fanatic, and for some reason I looked into their drawers and closets and saw one type of underwear of the same color, two types of socks, a closet with only T-shirts and jeans, only one pair of athletic shoes, and so forth, I’d certainly feel some sort of way about it.

And I’m a heterosexual man.

Look, you're allowed to care about the clothes you wear. Where it becomes a dick move is when you start looking down on others for not caring as much as you do. Lighten up.

I dunno, man.

All I’m saying that outside a handful of situations, having a very limited variety of clothing is highly unusual.

Not something I thought would be particularly controversial, but there you have it.

If you met someone who got about half their calories from chicken nuggets, you’d think it’s weird too and you wouldn’t be wrong to feel that way. The situations are not entirely analogous but while they aren’t in the same ballpark they are definitely in the same sport.

I think folding them after getting them out of the laundry helps maintain their softness and scent. Putting them together and inverting the heel (to make a ball) takes less than a second.

I purchase high quality socks in bulk from Costco and only have one type. Specalized socks are stored together because finding them separately would be a bitch.

It does seem like a pretty low effort way to keep organized.

If that is a measure of having your life together then I must live in squalor.

I don't match them at all on a normal day. It's quicker and celebrates the individuality of each sock. I would think it a red flag if someone took exception to this practice, that would mark them as a blind acolyte of Order in my book.

That’s a good way to phrase it. It’s maybe 40% I’m lazy and 60% I think finding a good match for a sock pair I like is a very tiny but nice part of the morning

I date a girl who doesn’t bother, even with the finding a match later part. So…

I don't think it's a red flag or uncommon. But it's a lot easier for me to pair my socks when folding laundry than when pulling them out of the sock drawer. The easiest way to pair them is to fold them together at the top like this:

https://img.thrfun.com/img/002/062/pair_of_socks_m.jpg

I just make sure to always buy loads of pairs of identical socks, and I replace them all at the same time, so I don't have to worry about that shit.

I just have a ton of these

https://darntough.com/products/mens-merino-wool-the-standard-mid-calf-no-cushion-lightweight-lifestyle-socks

In black. They work for everything. I bought a bunch of pairs a while back, haven't worried about it since.

Assuming you mean "red flag" as in "a sign this person is bad news and you shouldn't be around them, no it's not a red flag. If anything, I would say that it's a red flag to believe something so trivial is a red flag.

I also do the same method you do. Granted my socks are 95% the same, so there's no need to match unless I'm wearing dress socks. But when I need socks I just grab two matching socks from the drawer.

I have 95% dissimilar socks, but don’t mix and match. I also have maybe 30 pairs by now? Don’t know if that’s relevant or not.

"torched"? "Red flag" in what context? If a member of the opposite sex, well, you gotta do what you gotta do. Most other contexts, I'd calmly ask why they thought it mattered.

I match my socks most of the time, for the record.

It was compared to having velcro shoes type flag

Honestly that’s harsh but fair

Dumb question but how to delete a motte profile cant find the goddamn option in settings.

Don’t do it man, people need you and care about you. Just call a hotline. Tomorrow will be a better day.

Thanfully motte suicide isnt permanent, I have to do it, wheres the fucking gun.

Do you use license-plate frame(s) on your car? Why or why not?

If the car comes with them yes, otherwise no. I don't see the value so I wouldn't pay extra for them.

I currently am not because my new license-plate doesn't fit my old license-plate frame for some odd reason, and I'm too cheap and/or lazy to purchase a replacement.

But I echo @MollieTheMare's sentiments.

Yes, for practical value (less chance of the plate to vibrate and produce annoying sound) and it looks nicer (I use custom one but nothing too fancy).

I think a plain frame can be a noticeable aesthetic improvement that complements the lines on a car. Especially if the plate design contrasts with the styling of a car having a frame can make the transition look more intentional. It can also stop a rattle and noticeable dirt lines.

Frames that advertise the dealership the car is from, looks a bit tacky to me but I understand not wanting to be bothered to remove them. I'm not advertising your business for free though.

Frames that advertise your hobby or that your kid is on the honor roll, better than a bumper sticker I guess.

Frames that have any sort of translucent, or even mostly transparent material, covering the actual plate. Illegal in most states, and rightfully so. I always assume the driver is going to do something erratic, illegal, or dangerous if I see one. I honestly think the cops should impound every car they see with plates obscured on the road.

I had a car I bought from a dealership called awesome auto that stated "this is an awesome auto". That was the only dealer cover I kept.

Best I ever saw was a fellow with the plate "DREDNOT" (or similar) and the frame "My other car is a battleship".

I’ve seen a “LOL OIL” Tesla around town.

Has anyone played Tears of the Kingdom yet? Sadly my copy won't arrive until Monday.

I was a big fan of the first game and the reviews are universally positive, so I'm pretty optimistic.

I feel like the last Zelda game I got excited for was Hyper Light Drifter

I’m only being semi ironic, that game was incredible and very clearly inspired by “A Link to the Past”, which is the best game in the series that I’ve played.

My brother just got it. He's still on tutorial stuff. So far it isn't fundamentally different, but it iterates on the BoTW formula well enough. If you were really tired of the game by the end of BoTW, TotK might not bring enough new to the table for you, but if you were craving more- It's more BotW and does bring some new stuff to the table.

So far it feels more like moving from sonic to sonic 2 than from sonic to sonic 3&k, if that makes sense. But since this is still the beginning... I'm still hoping to end up pleasantly surprised.

I think there was a discussion last week. The game runs well on CEMU and it's more or less the next iteration of BotW. If you liked it, you should enjoy this one as well.

I've finally gotten around to playing Pentiment. It's a very nice detective adventure game set in early 16th century Bavaria. I found it to strike a very tasteful balance between woke and trad. At the very least, it avoids falling into either gratuitious cottagecore or Bay Area diversity. Quite recommended.

The game is set in the town of Tassing and the double abbey of Kiersau, sitting on Via Imperii in the Bavarian Alps. The abbey has a diverse cast of monks and nuns: German, French, Czech, Hungarian. There's even a visitor from Abyssinia: he's returning from the Council of Constance, and given that the abbey's important relic is the hand of Saint Maurice, it feels appropriate that he would stop there to venerate the African saint. The town is much more homogenous, as is expected. There's a wandering Gypsy tinkerer wisely staying well away from the built-up area, and the rest of the non-Germans in town are the guests of its most modernized residents.

The problems the residents have to deal with are delightfully period appropriate: conflicts between the estates, like peasants not being allowed to pay taxes in kind and being denied the use of the common land, widows not being able to inherit their husband's property (which some of the characters remind the PC is a recent change), infant mortality and of course religion. The game is set during the Reformation, so the baron we meet in the early game, who enjoys (ab)using his privilege and loves pushing people's buttons, knows exactly how to spoil the Benedictines' midday meal: talk(!) about Martin Luther(!). Of course, there are homosexuals, but you have to snoop around the deepest closets to find them. They aren't exactly happy when you do. There's a suspiciously unmarried dude I had initially pegged for a confirmed bachelor, but he turned out to be a shy incel. At the same time, there are many more happy marriages than unhappy ones, including some very unlikely ones.

Everyone's naturally religious (and I haven't played a naturally religious protagonist since AssCreed: Origins), but the Reformation naturally starts rearranging people's priorities. The aforementioned baron is probably the closest you can get to a non-believing character in the game, but he is much closer to the French royalty in the same time period, who, while remaining Catholic, allied themselves with the Ottomans and supported Protestant vassals of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor, than he's to the median /r/atheism poster.

Finally, there's a tiny feature I really enjoyed. The game is split into time slots, and you don't spend all of them investigating. You have to sit down to eat and you can do it with various families around the town or with the monks. You usually get a new clue from the table talk, but it's also a nice way to learn what early modern people of different social classes would eat for dinner or supper.

I can't really talk about the story of a detective game without spoiling it, but it certainly has a murder and an unlikely amateur sleuth in it. Like a good detective story should, it introduces the ultimate villain and the clues to the motive hidden in plain sight in the first few scenes, and I really enjoyed the twists. I can't say I am good at detective stories, and I guessed the real villain's identity before the reveal, but only in the final act. And I completely missed their motivation, which is a bit of a hot and fuzzy one if you know what I mean, even though I kept noticing the clues.

I wish I could enjoy it. It should have been right up my alley. I like Josh Sawyer games and I like the medieval period and historical accuracy.

But the way it's presented really bugs me. So much text, divided into so many little dialogue boxes you have to click through. And no way to just exit a dialogue. You have to follow each one until the end. Drove me bonkers. I just wanted to "get on with it" and the game kept me stuck clicking through crap I didn't want to read at that point.

It's not like there's anything else there beyond dialogues. It's like saying you wish you could skip all the combat in DooM.

I started Pentiment but sort of fell off and will probably try it again after working through Citizen Sleeper.

The description rouses my interest but uhh, what exactly is supposed to be woke about it then?

I have edited the introductory sentence to not imply it has something specifically woke about it. To me, indefensibly woke historical (or parahistorical) fiction implies that people back then were just like us, just more oppressed. If you picked a paragon of virtue from back then and a paragon of virtue from now, the only difference between them could be explained by unavailability of synthetic hair dyes. An equally indefensibly trad fiction ignores the real diversity and/or problems various marginalized people experienced back then. Pentiment tries to walk between two fires and mostly succeeds. It certainly beats bipolar AssCreed: Odyssey that lets you know how sexist Ancient Greeks were in one scene and has you win Olympic gold as Cassandra in the next one. Of course, Pentiment doesn't try to play on edgelord difficulty where it would force you into situations where the values dissonance was unavoidable.

An equally indefensibly trad fiction ignores the real diversity and/or problems various marginalized people experienced back then.

How many Africans were there in place and time this game takes place? This "real diversity" reminds of Rock Paper Shotgun claiming that since an African trader is attested in the same decade in Prague, KC:D being set in 15th Czech countryside has no business being all-white.

KC:D had Cumans gatecrashing the tutorial, I have no idea how that's not diversity. As I've said in the OP, Pentiment doesn't try to shoehorn historically implausible minorities into the setting.

I have no idea how that's not diversity.

Ask RPS?

On the other hand, who, specifically, is denying you'd run into a soldier from faraway lands, particularly around the time of wars between empires, or that maybe you'd see a pilgrim or a merchant if you happen to be at the right place at the right time?

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