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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2728 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 7, 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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I'm back with a new account! Glad to see this place is still active.

Why a new account?

There recently was a post about how another poster wants to host other motte users as couch surfers.

I want to do something similar. At free of cost. (You will have to find your own accommodation)

  • I like playing tour guide.

  • I can give a tour of my city that no other tour guide will offer. I know the places with "character". But it won't be only that. It will be a mix of the touristy and the local things for a more "complete" experience. No such other service exists because tourists are normies.

  • I have a good car. (Think Uber plus level)

  • I can save you a lot of money. By showing you good hotels and places to eat and things to do that are not tourist traps.

  • We can discuss motte'ish topics. I will specifically go to places where there will be things to point at and talk about.

  • Can introduce you to other rationalist adjacent people so that you have a group of temporary "friends" while on your trip.

How do I do this without doxxing myself? I don't particularly care about being doxxed. But some info-sec is required to keep away malicious actors, etc. Perhaps we take a path of mutually assured destruction, I don't know.

What do I gain from this? I like playing tour guide.

Why Mottizens in Particular? Because I've had better experiences, better enough to justify the time/money on my part when there is a common worldview/values/interests/IQ, in short, be a good fit for a conversation partner.

Let me know any pros or cons of this I am overlooking.

I think you should try and vet primarily through offering this to the people here you're familiar with and trust. Beyond that, it's always a risk!

This may have been me actually - I'd also be down to host and visit. I'm still a year away from being able to go international for vacation but psyched to see the interest.

This is an interesting idea.

Despite having a guest room, and wanting more guests, I would probably not participate. My husband already thinks I do too little to maintain anonymity online, and he is more careful about it than I am. Also, logistics of going everywhere with four people, and I'm quite out of most people's way. But it is appealing.

Nice idea, I would actually do this too. I have a guest bedroom and everything. I guess the tricky part is that you'd have to disclose to everybody what city you're in, so they'd know if they're going to be passing through or not. I don't necessarily mind that but I see the trouble.

I wonder where such information could live, too. Posting in this FFT, it'll quickly be lost/forgotten.

I think easier would be if the tourist broadcasts where they are going and the hosts reach out to them.

I understand, major potential for abuse in addition to potentially ruining the pseudonomous nature of the space and the benefits that provides.

Im sure there is a technological/encryption solution that can facilitate this process.

-you don't have to show them your id.

-if you stuck to people who've been here a long time, especially once it's more established, that should prevent most bad actors. There's probably voluntary auxiliary thought police scraping this site in the never ending fight against 'fascism', but bad actors who'd pretend to be here for the debate for years seem .. implausible.

-getting personal info of people based on their license plate - is that easy in the US? It's not in Europe, generally speaking.

IIRC, there was a fairly big scandal when it was found storage of Swedish license plate register was outsourced to IBM and dozens of their remote admins had complete access to it.

Sounds great! I recently visited a couple of Mottizens on a trip and it was a lot of fun.

As for doxxing, I mean anyone visiting will assuredly find your identity pretty easily. I would say if they’re a relatively level headed and consistent poster you don’t have anything to worry about. Just keep all the info in PMs or another service.

We have lots of programmers and aspiring programmers on here. Is there interest in my hosting a (possibly regular) "office hours" via discord etc? Career advice, code review, anything I can help with. --FAANGer

Edit: link is http://meet.google.com/ieq-zixv-xwf

Thanks for hosting this!

For those of you who weren't able to stop by:

  1. Shame on you ;)
  2. I'd summarize @lagrangian 's advice as the classic advice remains the best route: Grind Leetcode then mass apply to the major companies.

Wow, ok, let's do it. Provisionally scheduled for Thursday 7/13 at 6:00pm Pacific. Google calendar/meet event here.

I'm open to other platforms/schedules if people have input. Barring that, I'll be in the call as scheduled. I will post a reminder in the Wednesday Wellness thread.

Edit: link is http://meet.google.com/ieq-zixv-xwf

How does one get a Google account these days that isn't tied to an existing identity?

No info is required when signing up, at least for me (from the US)

Last time I tried, I couldn't dodge the "provide a phone number or another email" bit. Will have to try on a VPN.

I can pm you an account if you like, randomly generated or of your choosing

I will probably miss this one, but that would be nice if you run another.

interested (i could help)

I'd hop on as well. I think I'm good at my career overall, but I'm a medium fish in a small pond.

Sounds interesting

Also registering interest.

Sounds great!

I’m interested

Is it going to be free or what? lol

Yes

I'm registering my interest.

After recently becoming rich (read: middle class in socal), I've started doing more rich people things; eg I'm a member of a couple museums I like near me, the gemological institute, and I bought a membership and season tickets to my local orchestra. Hence, I've been going to more soirees, concerts, events and such and have developed some feelings.

Re: Some types of 'cultural' activities are just better than other types. I know, I know, taste and what have you. That said: if the only thing that you do outside of work and buy shit is watch sports, I am tired as fuck of you. Even if I disagree with 80% of the people here on 90% of reality, at least your fucking here! That already give you a bunch of points or interest.

Everyone I meet at these highfalutin type situations likes dumb garbage prole entertainment. They watch sitcoms or NFL or MMA or whatever. The problem seems to be when that is the ONLY thing you consume.

Secondly: Man I love having a social circle that includes some cultural elites. A lot of dudes I used to be around in trade actually had more money than these people, but they spent it on eg a bigger truck or cloths or shitty furniture that is still expensive for some reason or vacations to Cabo or Acapulco. I know that finding these things to be fucking lame as fuck and boring makes me an elitist piece of shit but fuck man. Acapulco? You're gonna spend 10k for 7 days in a shitty hotel?

Basically, I am devastated but unsurprised to find that the better half actually do live better.

Also I got the subject of my most recent ban in the mail and it is fucking beautiful; a heavily used Stanley no. 8 type 9 jointer from 1900ish in nearly mint condition somehow; many carful owners. It is now my precious son and lives on a special shelf so I can admire it from my computer.

I found the opposite direction - I used to buy more memberships, etc. in the past than now. I didn't become poorer, on the contrary, though I don't consider myself rich either, maybe mid-mid class. When I lived in California, we had some museum, etc. memberships but we discovered for various reasons we're going there less and less until it just didn't make sense to do it anymore. The fact that this coincided with every public institution getting aggressively woke and actively proselytizing didn't help either. But even after moving, I am browsing through the offerings of local theatres, etc. and most of the things just don't attract me. Maybe it's the price that a pay for not being in a big city - and if it is, I'm fine with paying it - but that's something I don't really even observe as an option. TBH, if I did, I probably wouldn't like it anyway - it's hard for me to imagine what "cultural elites" could provide me that I want and don't have.

You're in the honeymoon phase. Enjoy it now because in a few months or years you'll start to realize the money doesn't buy you happiness, class or status and you'll feel pretty desperate that you spent money on uhhh, the gemological institute rather than on improving the happiness of the people around you. And if you don't reach that point it's not great either

Nah dude, I was old as fuck when I got my degree (at least in comparison) and I know what I like, and that is gems and the institutes thereof and steam engines and classical music. The people around don't need my help in terms of money, they all have theirs; and when they need something heavy lifted or a pipe soldered or a some such they know who to call.

You gotta be less cynical! They good life really can be good, and money absolutely buys happiness 1:1. If it doesn't, you need to spend it on different shit.

Nah man, I know what I like too, but I'd rather go without them than make the people around me jealous that I have something they covet. It actually makes me feel horrible to flaunt status around other people. It's just sick and would be ridiculous for me to brag about what I have when it makes other people upset. I'd rather use my resources to empower people around me than make them jealous. I have ruined friendships from envy before and I would much rather have the friendship back than be able to feel superior to them because of what I have or what I've been able to experience.

Maybe it's my area but flaunting status would be buying a big dumb mcmansion or a Maserati or something. Nobody gives a shit about my nerdy obsession with Shostakovich and how he is the best modern composer and fuck the haters.

This is socal though, where your either buy your 700000 dollar luxury truck in cash or live on the street with no in-between.

This post is exactly the kind of obnoxious rhetoric that makes vast swathes of people look at high art as "high falutin".

adjective: high-falutin \

(especially of speech, writing, or ideas) pompous or pretentious.

Do you actually enjoy these things you esteem or enjoy the markers of status you think they imbue you with?

In that case, why not just optimize the entire process by getting more status?

I (and many others) have some (reasonable) contempt toward status chasers. But at least that's understandable, you can't be human and not chase status, its too much of an ask. But chasing proxies of status. Jesus that is truly contemptible.

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/03/dont_hate_her_because_shes_suc.html

I don't know, dude. I always liked them things and I never give a shit about status, autist that I am.

I just think that low culture is the equivalent of jangling_keys_10hrs.wav.

It's fine for what it is, and I like to watch the keys jangle sometimes too. That said, when it's the upper limit of what you can appreciate it probably says something about your IQ.

(this isn't helped by 'good' low culture getting appropriated up the status ladder. Lots of literati types going out to see Billy strings or Chris Thile do old fashion country; +-0 shelling out to watch NASCAR)

The US is weird among Western countries in that the government doesn’t heavily subsidize highbrow arts, which means seeing opera, large orchestras, ballet etc is very expensive if you want non-shit seats.

In Europe, probably 80% of the average opera ticket is government funded. Almost all orchestras are substantially state-funded. Ballet is very heavily funded. ‘Higher brow’ theater (at both the avant garde end and the by-the-book Shakespeare end) is very much subsidized too.

I think this affects cultural perception in an interesting way. In the US, going to see these things isn’t necessarily a rich people thing (there are plenty of schoolteachers and college professors at Rachamaninov at the NY Phil), but it has the cultural cachet of being higher brow, higher class, and above all older, since young people aren’t paying $130 a ticket (even the cheap seats are like $90). In Britain/France/Germany, a lot of the audience to these kinds of things pay $20 a seat because they’re so heavily subsidized, so you see a lot more students, young people in general.

In the end, the European approach is preferable. The government wastes so much money on supporting the bottom of society that, at the very least, a few billion for the legitimate high culture of this civilization is owed and earned.

people aren’t paying $130 a ticket (even the cheap seats are like $90).

You can get cheap seats for under $30 and there is typically a student discount. The price is not the issue.

At the NY Phil? Not to something good, and not in seats that offer even a somewhat decent experience.

  • it was you who brought up the cheap seats

  • "Students can purchase $25.00 (including fees) rush tickets for select concerts up to 10 days in advance both online and in person at the David Geffen Hall Welcome Center. "

  • the vast majority of Americans do not live in or near NY

This doesn't really make sense an an explanation. First, Americans tend to have more disposable income than Europeans to begin with. Secondly, tickets for the sporting events, EDM concerts and other low brow media are even more expensive, yet extremely popular.

Yes, because they’re more popular. Nobody’s denying that 22 year olds will save up to spend $3000 on Taylor Swift tickets, but that doesn’t mean their price sensitivity on high culture is zero.

In the end, the European approach is preferable. The government wastes so much money on supporting the bottom of society that, at the very least, a few billion for the legitimate high culture of this civilization is owed and earned.

This does not check out.

EU spends more on the bottom and supposedly the top.

Ideal is spend on neither. Let the market decide what the "people" want.

Lesser of two evils is where you spend on A instead of A and B.

I'm assuming you want less spending because you say the government "wastes". So.. why would you want them to.. "waste" more?

Because if I’m paying 45% marginal income tax that seem extremely unlikely to change under any foreseeable government, I think at least they should use some of my money to fund things I enjoy.

“The man” is always going to take a big chunk of what you have, at least I’d like some of it to be returned to me.

Unprincipled, but understandable.

When you say better half, are you referring to those with money vs those without money? Because I know plenty of middle class people who enjoy all sorts of culture, including art, movies, musicals, plays, history, etc. They also really enjoy going to a football or baseball game.

Middle class is upper class now! Inflation, donchaknow.

Basically, I mean the type of people you meet at the event for the opening of a new exhibit at the museum of steam engines and early mechanized agricultural engineering, which is sick as fuck.

I've been to many museums and exhibits and openings and such events. I can't remember any case where I "met" any people. Don't get me wrong - there were always people there. There were present in the same room as me (sometimes too many of them for my comfort, but I understand, they want to enjoy the same thing I do, no bad feelings). But I never had any meaningful interaction with any of them. Such is the life of an introvert. Are there people that live differently? I'd be curious to learn about their exploits one of those days.

I am playing with max debuffs here, what with being an introverted autistic shaved gorilla, and all I can say is:

Anybody at any sort of event for anything that isn't normie as fuck has something interesting to say and will say it at length if you give them .2 of a chance.

I somewhat disagree. I find the consumers of "high culture" to be about as boring as the consumers of "low culture" and within the cultural upper middle class I find the consumers of low culture more interesting, at least they made a choice to do something they enjoy. Nerds are of course a whole other matter.

More to the point though I find "consumers" uninteresting. Unless you're producing something, you're probably about as interesting as a snail.

Disagree there.

There are vanishingly few producers of culture in the world; and many many hobbyists. If you are after that set you better be lucky or good.

What you call "culture"? There are heaps of books written every year. There are hundreds of movies made. Thousands of musicians perform old and new music daily, thousands of bands and individual singers perform and release albums. Painters paint and sculptors sculpt, all the time. I don't think there is a person in existence who even knows about single percents of all culture produced, let alone trying to consume and appreciate all of it. Can we really define this enormous torrent of information as "vanishingly few"? Or do we only include a tiny sliver of it into "culture" - and if so, what exactly is included?

Depends how broad you are being.

Definitionally, we all contribute the greater culture; but in this context I would say an audience is required and specifically that that audience influence what culture is produced in the future.

Eg, GRRM? Producing Culture. Christopher Rowley? Not producing culture. Osamu Tezuka? Culture. Deen? No culture.

Audience measuring is a tricky business. Justin Bieber probably has much bigger audience than Marcel Proust. But if we measure by audience, there are millions upon millions of people spending billions of dollars on cultural products made by thousands upon thousands of producers. Again, "vanishingly few" does not agree with that.

I don't really care if you're a professional or a hobbyist, hobbyist frequently have more interesting things to say anyway.

I don't really care if what you're producing is culture either. I prefer to hear about your new sales plan to what it was like at the Met. Consumption is uninteresting, people who define themselves by consumption are uninteresting, people who define themselves by consumption they engage in for (mostly) performative reasons are the epitome of uninteresting.

Disagree again then.

If the most interesting thing about you is a 'sales plan', you aren't interesting. Most work is brain dead easy because most people aren't in the top percent, by definition. There is usually nothing there of interest or of value; unless you are in the arts or the sciences. I'd much rather talk about something other than the rote and routine drudgery people have to do to not die. Almost anything other than that, really.

He said "producers" not "the top 1% of producers", so I don't see why hobbyists shouldn't count.

And if for whatever reason you want to stand by the distinction, his point that they're more interesting still stands.

within the cultural upper middle class I find the consumers of low culture more interesting

There are a ton of PMC dudes from perfectly decent upper (middle) class backgrounds who just watch basketball, smoke weed and play GTA (etc) in their free time, I don’t think this is really uncommon.

It isn't, those are just on average more interesting than the one that consume "high culture". If I have to hear from one more person who "went to a really intimate and casual concert where they sat on the floor right by the performers" then just fucking shoot me.

I don't care about what you experienced at the museum or concert or whatever, because you didn't either. People who engage in performative hobbies are boring as hell, regardless of whether that is culture, hiking, wine tasting, marlin fishing, traveling etc. It's not that these are by definition soulless activities it's that they attract empty people like moth to the flame.

Few people play GTA and watch basketball for status (although these people exist, I've met them) which makes it preferable for me to hang out with them rather than the "refined" crowd, even if the latter occasionally pay me to engage in my hobby.

Ultimately of course you want to hang out with nice, interesting people; it's just that I don't find consuming high culture an indicator for any of that, it's a mild red flag.

People hike for status?

Absolutely, not as much for thru-hiking but that happens as well. It's kind of the same as traveling.

A lot of hiking is not for status though and perhaps it shouldn't have been on the list, it feels a bit borderline. I originally included hunting as well and it's similar. There are people (primarily city) people that hunt mostly for status but the majority of hunters just hunt in their area, don't have access to some exclusive hunting lodge and they don't really care to tell anyone about it.

In a sense it's similar to golf. Many people play it for fun but in some circles it's an advantage to socially to do so, which means that some people will do it for social status.

I don't know about hiking in particular but there's a conformity to a lot of these activities that at the most charitable are reflective of status and at the least charitable are indicative of pretense. A reasonable rule of thumb is whether a local could do it cheaply, an outsider couldn't do it without paying, and the modest locals might arbitrage their resource to the wealthy outsiders. The status anxious locals save up to imitate being a wealthy outsider, often somewhere else, and the wealthy outsider is already partially imitating the modest authenticity of a locale. It wasn't a PMC careerist who came up with fishing, horse riding, making wine or any of the other stuff that is typically for toffs and peasants, but PMC careerists do come up with sales plans and can probably demonstrate a level of critical insight into that activity that is potentially more interesting than recycling what they've been told about a wine's terroir.

I think a lot of the people haunting museums and art galleries couldn't care less and are doing it for the clout, or at least because it's expected of them.

Not all, but a large fraction.

I don’t think so, most of the people in regular galleries (as in exhibition spaces rather than sale spaces, usually) and museums are retirees who have tons of free time, also watch TV / do gardening / look after the grandkids but then maybe visit a museum or gallery once or twice a week. Art scene for living artists in London/NYC/other big art cities is young rich people living off their parents (since working in the arts doesn’t pay unless you’re in the 99.9th percentile of luck/success) but these are themselves usually fine, too often with minor-major substance abuse issues but overall typically more interesting than their peers or siblings who go into consulting or law or finance.

re cultural activities: Agree that if you only do/consume one thing, it's probably bad

re how people spend money: cultural elites just waste money on different stuff ime (in LA, mostly with entertainment folks, which i guess can be elite or not. Big diff is they can get free things vs the rich ppl in "lower brow" activities)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wg7iiVKJ2CU

Bud light released a commercial. Subtext: we screwed up.

It gave me a chuckle.

If you have the context of associating it with them screwing up and being a mea culpa, it's mildly funny. For all the people who touch grass and don't think about politics like that, it's a commercial where people drinking Bud Light are having a terrible time

If you watch the commercial closely, not a single person in it is actually drinking Bud Light. They carry it, they wave it around, they open it, they hold it, they store it, they spill it, they do a hundred things with it, but one thing they never do with it is actually drinking any.

I think this is true of beer commercials in general -- IIRC it's prohibited to show drinking on TV in some jurisdictions, so advertisers are as conservative as possible to ensure that the ads can show everywhere? It's always been the case in Canada, anyways.

See here:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=aqqd1qQ-a5g&t=59

Yeah this is hilarious. You can advertise beer, but you can't show one thing that people are actually supposed to do with the beer, because I guess if you don't show it, impressionable viewers won't be able do figure out what it is to be done with the beer and thus will be saved. Makes total sense, eh?

Too late. You can't tell people "I hate you and piss on everything you hold dear, you ugly stupid fucks" and then just come back and say "never mind, my bad, I didn't really mean that, let's be friends again, we need your sweet dollars, my dear friend!". I don't think anything short of full throated coming out as deplorables can save this brand in the eyes of the red tribe, and there's no chance they'd do that. They are still sponsoring pride parades. Mulvaney wasn't something they did by mistake. It was a mistake, but it was full intentional, and everything that caused it is still there. Tranheuser-Bush is probably too big to fail and can keep the brand alive indefinitely, but I don't think their stance in the red tribe will ever recover.

Too late. If this had been the type of commercial released back at the start (instead of the disastrous attempt at getting Mulvaney as an influencer), it would have been unremarkable.

And the Marketing VP would have nixed it for that reason: too much fratty humour. Too white. Too old. Doesn't elevate and expand the brand.

That they're putting it out now is clearly just pandering, and it doesn't read to me like "we screwed up", but more "this is the kind of stuff you dumb rednecks like, right?"

I just got a real keyboard for my iPhone, and boy is it weird. I have yet to see all of its fun features, but for now, I’ll just enjoy using it to Mottepost.

Would it surprise you to learn that almost all my posts are made on mobile?

I think I even type faster on it, autocorrect is a helluva drug. It's certainly more convenient in my eyes, and I've always cocked an eyebrow at people praising phones with mechanical keyboards.

This make me wonder if we can get autocorrect for a computer?

I'm pretty certain there's some means of doing so, and I know that Microsoft Word does it automatically for small errors, or at least it used to.

I'm not aware of a more general solution, but only because I haven't looked.

What's the quote from some character played by Samuel L. Jackson? "Nothing typed by someone's thumbs has ever been important." At one point in my life I wholeheartedly would have endorsed this, and I am still more likely to write more substantive posts with my computer via Qwerty-typing with two hands. But I'm older and less impulsive now and have learned to hate ppl saying "OK boomer" to me.

I use Hotmail, still, and I still call it Hotmail, and my address is my actual name without any numbers (I got in early) and Hotmail does the autocorrect thing. So maybe type in Hotmail and copy-paste it elsewhere? That seems an idiotic solution, though.

I can't even type with my thumbs on my phone since I got a phone and started needing to text way too late in life. So I do pathetic one-fingered hunt and peck typing.

Keyboards all the way!

I find typing on my phone easy enough (although not as fast as on a keyboard). The hard part is opening other tabs to reference something. Editing is also easier on a desktop or laptop.

Aight grandpa, let's get you back indoors safely ok? Haha

Honestly, autocorrect is a marvel. Swipe input makes one handed use feasible, albeit my current phone is finally big enough that it's still a chore. If you're on a remotely recent smartphone, then do try either Google's keyboard, the zanily named Gboard, or the Microsoft owned SwiftKey. They're largely interchangeable in my eyes.

I can touch type on my phone without looking at the keyboard. I just did so for this very sentence.

It would not surprise me. I’ve turned off my autocorrect, however, because I was correcting it more often than it was correcting me. That and turning off auto-capitalize have been real boons to my phone typing speed.

As in…a physical keyboard, linked to your phone?

A Bluetooth Logitech keyboard. Unfortunately, after a few minutes, the widely-spaced chiclet keys were too distracting. I was going to buy it, but it’s no great improvement in my WPS.

No half measures. Get a 100% mechanical keyboard and sling it around your neck and connect it with a USB to lightning adapter.

You'll make any surviving hipsters proud.

If I were rich, all of my keyboards would be genuine IBM Model M’s. Windows, Linux, Mac, phone, they’d all be the real deal.

In my case it would have to be PS/2 to USB to Lightning. For some reason I thought in 2011 that PS/2 was the better option. I probably was worried about either rollover or not having enough USB ports on my PC.

I hope the keyboard proved its worth if you've been having onto it for this long!

Yes, it's a Unicomp keyboard, which is basically IBM Model M. I love both of them to bits (I bought one for the office and one for my home PC), can't say the same about my coworkers.

SwiftKey is driving me up the wall.

Just today I noticed it autocorrecting load-bearing words in comments I've made, which if taken literally would invert the argument I've been making. I suspect the reason nobody calls me out on it is that they can clearly see it's an error, either from a brain fart or otherwise.

Leaving aside a distressing tendency to autocorrect a perfectly valid word into a similar but entirely unrelated word. Wtf.

It's like a self-driving car that works 99% of the time, just well enough to lure you into complacency before veering off into traffic. At least the stakes are far lower, but that just makes it more insidious when it happens. I'd rather not have to proofread everything I write, at the risk of looking like an idiot.

Is this possibly due to me overtaxing the small ML model it's running by consistently using words from other languages and jargon that it's dictionary didn't come with? So that it becomes so underconfident of valid output it gives up and substitutes something else?

What does this program do exactly? Use ML to autocorrect?

The most basic keyboards use Markov Chains, which are even simpler than what we would normally call ML.

I am under the impression that slightly more impressive models are behind tasks like predicting more than one word at once, or figuring out what you meant when using swipe input.

I would kill for something like that. Idk how you and others here type such long comments on a phone, it kills my hands.

You mentioned some stress related injury right?

I can see that being an issue for you. Have you tried using swipe input instead of just typing?

Yeah it has gotten a lot better but the act of using a phone even scrolling a bunch on it is still difficult if I spent more than a half hour or so. Honestly given the fact that I want to spend less time on my phone, not a terrible problem.

I have tried swiping but it didn’t seem to make a huge difference. Voice. Dictation is nice but unfortunately it’s dealing with the same 99% problem where you have to go back and edit it too much even though it’s pretty much there that being said, Apple’s voice to text has gotten way better even in the last year and I think it’ll be an early and easy problem for transformers to solve.

I don't know how feasible it is for you, but I do think you need to lay off your hands for as long as you can to let your wrists fully recover.

I'm not a physiotherapist of course, and I do hope you're seeing one!

On the topic of the best speech to text, the most advanced model is Whisper by OpenAI, available freely. I don't know if there's a convenient packaging for it, but it is very very good.

Interesting I haven’t actually tried it, might use it to dictate posts!

And weirdly enough when I went through the whole rigamarole of going on medical leave from my job for months (4 separate times), using medical braces, and barely using my hands, they tended to get worse! Idk if it’s a stress related issue or what, but lack of rest doesn’t seem to be the problem.

I’ve seen lots of physiotherapists, and definitely credit the habit of daily stretching/exercise they helped me instill as crucial to recovering so much. I don’t do it anymore cuz the good ones near me are pricey and don’t take insurance.

That sounds fucking terrifying to me, I'd die of boredom if I couldn't use my hands.

I hope whoever is advising you is doing a good job, from my limited recollection the next degree of escalation is probably steroid injection into the joints.

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Work was kicking my ass the last month. But that finally ended, so I got out to my workshop to finally frame a fun map I got.

The Algorithm thought I would be interest in Lord of the Maps, and I was. Purchased a nice map of my state around Father's Day. But I skimped on the frame. $70 for a frame? Fuck that, I can probably build one at least as good, right?

Took me a month to get around to it, but I eventually did. I didn't do anything too fancy. Milled down the red oak cause I had plenty on hand, I let it get out it's movement in my shop for about two weeks, but it actually didn't move any more. So I cut it to final dimensions. Put a slight 15 degree chamfer on the inside edge because I saw someone else do it and I liked it. Then I worked it with some aged barrel stain. I did also do some splines on the corners to reinforce the relatively weak glued miter joints.

A few things happened. My miter gauge must have been a fraction of a degree off, because the miter joints in aggregate opened ever so slightly towards the outside after I glued the whole thing up. So I guess I'll be recalibrating that. I calibrated it when I got it, but I suppose I didn't do a good enough job. The second thing that happened was the stain was slightly blotchy in a few places where I may have left it on too long. A lot of cleaned up well when I hit it with some mineral spirits, but some of it didn't. Oh well. Next time. In retrospect, I'm not sure I'm pleased with how the splines turned out either, and I might use small dowels next time.

The cost breakdown is insane compared to a store bought frame. I used probably $8 worth of red oak, the 16x20 glass pane was also $8. I used about $2 worth of hardboard for the backing, and then it used pennies worth of stain, glue and brad nails. So about $18 all told, versus $70 ish.

It seems to be that recreational indulgence in handicrafts, like wood working for one, is far more common in the US than the West, let alone outside the Anglosphere.

I don't know whether it's because of cultural factors that value self-reliance, more free time, large houses with more room to dedicate to things like this, or a combination of the above.

I don't know a single person in India who has a similar hobby, only those who do it for a living. Of course, we lack hobby culture to an extent, but still..

It's probably the large houses.

A lot of asian immigrants in the US turn their backyards into vegetable gardens and chicken farms, not exactly the least laborious hobby.

Is it just seen as low status in India? I know my wife laughed at me a bit when I said I was interested in taking a pottery class, because that's something only people making poverty level wages do in her home country.

Not low status per se, just not something people usually think of as a hobby. If someone with any respectable level of status did it, nobody would look down on them for it.

I had a bizarrely strong urge about ten years ago to build a cinderblock shed in the backyard. It passed, but the strength of the urge startled me; it was something I fantasized about for about a year.

If I were to take pottery classes, it would start with digging up my own clay in my backyard, to prep for a post-apocalyptic/post-collapse future.

I love watching the Primitive Technology videos on youtube, where half the videos are about bootstrapping your own pottery kiln.

Hardware Stores / Home Improvement Centers are very popular in Germany and being able to build (or extend) your own home gives bragging rights. The slogan of one of the larger chains is "There is always something to do" and a competitor has "respect for making it yourself".

Ads:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ryg3BCRH0Nw

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AKdc6xdNu_0

One celebrity, a sport athlete who won the world cup, made with his wife home improvement ads, eg doing their own gardening. I just now realize how strange that is, as in other countries such super rich stars would instead advertise that they have servants for everything.

Part of it is the traditional image that a "real man" should be skilled in using power tools and be industrious (and the feminist idea that women should be too). And also because manual labor is very expensive, it is cheaper to do it yourself "as a hobby".

Germans play Eurotruck Simulator as a hobby so I don't see why they wouldn't cosplay as handymen at home either heh

It's the space. Wood shavings and sawings are messy, you want a dedicated workshop even if you don't need large stationary power tools like a table saw or a jointer.

Even wealthy Americans still imagine themselves as middle class, as frontiersmen generalists who could get dropped in the woods and handle anything.

Even poor Indians, if they have vast caste imagination, think of themselves as Aristos above manual labor.

It’s the Scout mentality. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are all about being prepared, no matter where you are.

Makes sense to me.

My guess is physical space + wealth.

When I watch woodworking videos, I am in awe of the size of these guys' garages and workshops. Google suggests the average US house is 3 times larger than the UK's. Plus these guys have the cash to buy the tools and the wood, and a big truck to transport it all. Americans are just richer.

If the UK were a US state it would be the poorest or 2nd poorest. We are so damned rich in America and most Americans don't even realize it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/08/26/if-the-uk-was-a-u-s-state-it-would-be-the-second-poorest-behind-alabama-and-before-mississippi/

That's a crazy statistic to read. The fact that Alaska would be first by that particular measurement is also strange.

Wish I had remembered this in time for my effort post.

I think this does explain a lot of it, but I'm sure there must be cultural factors if it's not the case in other comparably wealthy countries. They do likely have smaller houses though, when I'm thinking of places like Switzerland or Singapore.

Speaking for myself, there is something mythical about woodworking. My household had items that grandfathers had made, my wife's household had items her grandfathers had made, I myself feel a deep calling to leave my daughter with some things I've made for her eventual household. It's like a totem of generational competence. Some proof that "We are people who make things". And it's a lot less ephemeral than the code I sling as a career.

I don't see any Indian making that claim, even if their ancestors had that as their own profession!

Not a knock against it, I'm sure it's a perfectly valid hobby if you're meeting the low standard of enjoying it. I'm just perplexed regarding why it's a rarety elsewhere.

Probably the lingering effects of America being a frontier nation once upon a time. Where self reliance is a virtue.

It's fading. That is clear as day. The learned helplessness I see all around me is depressing. People acting like any sort of manual labor or recreational competence is beneath them, and the only worthy use of their time is byzantine credentialism scams. Why be the chump making things when you are supposed to be ordering them around?

Rarely do I see any of these people living lives as lofty as their view of their place in the world. But that's a topic for another day, and thread.

There are some valiant attempts to reclaim the virtue of self-reliance and the dignity of manual labor but it feels like, at best, fighting a delaying action. Ten years ago Mike Rowe (of Dirty Jobs fame) was invited to give TED talks or testify to the Senate about manual labor. Now the flavor of the day is just giving money to college grads who can't handle their finances like adults.

But is it really worth their time? You've admitted you're several hundred dollars in the hole, though you do have something nice to show for it.

I'm not claiming that as a general standard for hobbies of course. If just seems to me that barring some low hanging fruit, for educated professionals like the majority of us, it makes much more sense to pay someone else to do it and free up our time for other activities.

I can't say it would be a sensible decision here, even skilled labor like that is cheap enough nobody bothers.

Given my effective hourly compensation as an American tech bro: me building a new gun or retaining wall or installing recessed lighting in my home is wild profligacy or strictly a money burning hobby. But I don't want to live a life where I earn so much that I can "barely afford to sleep" as one poster wrote in a humorous story about a fictional rich man.

On some level, sure I could have paid a couple of nice Mexicans to do this for me. They recognize me at the hardware store parking lot and wave to me hoping that I'll hire them for the day. But I want to do these things myself.

If I gave the impression I judge all hobbies by strictly utilitarian rules, I can only apologize.

It's your free time, if you enjoy the way you spent it, who am I to judge?

You do understand I'm not literally hundreds in the hole right?

That wasn't obvious to me at all! You really need to lower your estimates for how informed I am about the costs in tools, space and labor it involves haha

Yeah, that was just in response to the hypothetical "what if you valued your time" question. It's interesting in the abstract, but useless practically. I have a salaried position, I can't just work more hours to make more money. If I did decide to slavishly min-max my time for profit seeking pursuits, it's unlikely I'd actually earn that much money in a side hustle or part time job. Or even half that.

If I did find somewhere that my more valuable skills could be brought to bare, I think my employment contract would actually prevent me from taking it.

Now the question of how long until the tools I purchased pay for themselves is an interesting one. The thickness planer I got has probably already paid for itself, or close to it. It literally halves if not quarters the cost of lumber buying it rough and milling it yourself versus buying it S4S or even S3S. Especially the place I get mine at that regularly has plenty of perfectly usable lumber in a "dent and ding" section. And let me tell you, S4S oak is expensive. It's the difference between paying $10 per board foot versus $2.5-4 a board foot.

My tablesaw I've gotten a ton of use out of, but deciding when it pays for itself is slightly more difficult. So far I've used it to build my kid a stool with a drawer in it, because she loves drawers. Also a box because I needed the practice. Made my in-laws a clock as a Christmas present. Used it when I rebuilt the rotted wall of my garage. Also made myself a bookshelf that was perfectly sized to go on top of my filing cabinet and hold my old game manuals. And when I replaced a bunch of rotted MDF trim.

Fuck whoever though MDF made good trim.

Then I built my wife a chair with it. And a garden. And a chicken coop. And a 3-bin compost.

Made a pair of cutting boards, one for us and one for the in-laws.

It's possible it's utility has paid for itself by now. It's been the workhorse of a great many of my projects.

My router table, circular saw, jig saw and miter saw are hard to say. I thought I'd use the circular saw more, but now I mostly use it to break down sheet goods. The miter saw I use all the damned time to rough cut planks, but I generally use my tablesaw to cut to final dimensions. The router table I've used for a lot of things that only it can do, or which just work better than a tablesaw. And the jig saw I've used to cut a lot of curves or sharp angles I wanted projects to have for decorative reasons that just were not gonna happen at all any other way. But in aggregate, it's hard for me to say these tools have paid for themselves. Still, it's a pleasure having the right tool for the right job.

In that sense, perhaps I am still "down" hundreds of dollars. On the other hand, I probably would have just spent the money on an RTX 3080 at pandemic prices, and blown a hundred hours in Cyberpunk 2077 instead. And if you are asking about return on investment or what my time is worth, that truly would have been money down the drain.

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Too much value available from actual work, relative to hobbies? If I had a stronger sense that the time I expend on hobbies could be directly traded off into significant improvements in my and my family's standard of living and prospects, I'd probably hobby less and work more.

It's not that we don't have hobbies, but they're usually not as involved, or certainly not as physical or craftsmanship oriented.

This is especially the case for men, since women tend to have hobbies here that would be unremarkable in the States.

Thank you for introducing me to Lord of the Maps: those maps are exactly what I needed in my life.

Lord of the Maps ever so vaguely invokes what I thought was a staple of nearly every home that was established in the 80's that I ever visited or lived in. An artistically taken photograph of the house when it was first built. Always with the color subtly faded, either by time or by process. And I remember in my profound summer boredom staring for extended periods of time at the one in my house, noticing how much trees grew, or which pushes had been taken out, etc, etc.

How much would it be if you counted in the time you spent? I don't know what the formula would be for leisure time you wouldn't be spending at your job anyway... say, half of your $/hour?

Counting my time? I lost several hundred dollars.

Nice work!

Given how many words there in your description I don't even know the meaning of, I think $70 may be not that wrong as a pricing point. I mean, you sound like somebody who knows what he's doing. So it took you $18 in materials and some time - let's say overall basic cost of $35? Kinda arbitrary but shouldn't be too wrong. Now for somebody like me who doesn't even know what the words used to make it mean, let alone having all the tools and the instruments and the materials and the knowledge of how to do it sitting around - 2x the basic cost sounds like not that bad of a deal. It could be a fun little project if I wanted to take up woodworking - and maybe one day I will - but if I want to just get a frame and be done with it, the price doesn't sound outrageous at all for me.

I can see this. But funnily enough, I didn't get into woodworking for it's own sake. I got into doing what carpentry repairs seemed at my skill level for the house I bought. Because finding contractors willing to do small repairs is borderline impossible because reasons, and the ones that are willing to slum it doing handyman tasks instead of flipping houses want an arm and a leg. So primarily I invested in a table saw for those tasks. Saving $60 on a random frame is a fringe benefit of having built a skill set to save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on relatively basic home repair tasks.

Same thing here for smaller tasks.

My dad wanted to use mosaic tiling to cover up a 5 concrete structural circular pillars in the new house. Maybe a five hours worth of work for a pro.

It's not the easiest or most approachable affair[1].

Contractors of any kind are hard to find in Slovakia, because the EU policy is to send anyone with IQ > 100 to university. And vocational schools were bad and have been neglected on purpose by the government.

And like in the US, they don't like doing the small stuff.

After about 1.5 years of trying to find someone to do this work.. it had to be youtube videos.

He watched a few on the exact process and we did it together in 2 days and the end result is mostly quite good.

[1]

I'll try to explain he process:

The tiles are tiny - about 1/2" squares of ceramic arranged on a flexible plastic square grid.

You use some sort of adhesive to get the grids to stick to the surface to which they're applied.

Then you apply grout to the grid and push it into the gaps, then you carefully remove excess grout so the grout lines are even.

That's really nice! I need to work up a better 45 degree stop on my shooting board, that's the only way I get the angles just right.

Yeah frames are mostly labor/markup.

You know it was funny. After I made it, and it was so damned cheap and easy, I did a quick google of "Are custom picture frames a rip off". Almost universally the results were "Absolutely not, framing is super difficult and technical, and takes a very trained eye." Random posts on Reddit by professional framers justifying how the average person should not, under any circumstances, attempt to build their own frames.

The internet can be a strange place.

Tell me about it. I was supposed to sand some stairs. I had no idea what I was doing, so I looked on the internet, and they told me that the weight of the machine was sufficient, the machine will do the work. After about an hour of “sanding” the same step, barely moving my hand, sitting there uncomfortably, I realized almost nothing was happening, so …. I bought another sander for my other hand. And only an hour of double drifting later did it occur to me that I was doing it wrong.

To be fair the internet advice is usually more reliable, or I’m less of a dumbass idk.

I have to ask, what sort of sander were you using, with what grit sandpaper? Did you have any sort of dust extraction?

Cause I can totally see you sanding and sanding away with a palm sander, using 400 grit sandpaper, with nothing but the bag it comes with.

Like this, but older and smaller. Part of the reason why I didn't put any weight or movement on the thing is that the paper kept getting away from the clip in the beginning (I fixed it early, but by that point I'd internalized the lack of movement recommended by the internet). Then I bought a triangular one, still small.

All 40 sandpaper. My even earlier attempt at solving the problem was trying to find sandpaper with 2 grit or something, but 40 was as low as they went.

So, there are a few areas where sanding will go wonky on you. The first is you have shitty sandpaper that wears out too quickly. I recommend sticking with 3M sandpaper. The second is that the sandpaper clogs up. All those palm sanders have a slight suction effect, but attaching them to a dust extractor will have you humming along effortlessly for hours if need be. And with the specific type you linked, that has more of a vibration mechanism than a scraping mechanism, I find I have to move them just to get the dust out from under them. I use them as a last resort when they are the only tool that fits into the space.

And if you are removing a lot of paint, I'd recommend a scraper first, as I've found paint gums up sandpaper even faster than normal.

But I'm a relative layman.

Yeah it didn't have a sucker and the paper was generic. I think the paint or lacquer was extremely tough, or maybe you’re not supposed to get all the way down to just the wood? Anyway, once I treated the entire machine as if it was just inert sandpaper and used massive amounts of down and side force, it worked okay.

Yeah, if it were me, I'd have used some sort of solvent to remove the paint or lacquer. My wife actually used this orange based paint stripping stuff to take the paint off all the countertops in the kitchen. Worked amazing, and it took zero effort with a paint scrapper to remove the resulting goo.

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I suppose they're addressing the average person, who doesn't even own most of the tools you used, much less knows how. For them it'd be a waste of 18 dollars (likely more since they aren't as efficient) to try.

Nice.

About how much time did you spend? That’s where I’d expect the store to take their cut.

Hrrrm. Maybe half an hour one Sunday doing the initial milling, then another afternoon a different Sunday to finish the project.

Have you considered using the QGIS program along with files from the Census Bureau and elsewhere to make your own custom maps? It can be reasonably fun (1 2).

Wow never thought I’d see QGIS on the Motte. Maps are definitely fun.

For the frequent posters/bloggers here - what is your relationship with writing? I was reading Freddie DeBoer's fifteen years of writing where he reflects on his journey, and lord it is dark! I have aspirations of becoming at least a part-time blogger, and I do have a small blog, but don't work on it often.

I suppose my question is, do most people hate writing like Freddie after a while, or is he just uniquely crazy? I know there's a trope of mentally disturbed writers....

I spent >10 Novembers of my life doing NaNoWriMo. https://nanowrimo.org/

I started when I was much too young to have the discipline or, indeed, ability, to actually carry it through. But I was very determined, and kept it at year on year. Finally I did crack the 50k mark. After doing that twice, I now feel that I've gotten all I can out of NaNoWriMo, and I don't do it any more. (Semi-related: I also was the city organizer for this in my city in 2019. November 2019 was one of the better months of my life.)

From when I was a teenager, it was always my goal to get something actually published. I achieved this in late 2022 by having a non-fiction essay published in an anthology about my city. It's a real book, published by a real publisher. You can get it at Barnes & Noble, and the library has 20+ copies of it, and my name is in there. I was paid exactly $20.00 for it; I put the check in a little frame, which sits in my office on a bookcase now. I would like to publish a novel some day, but having now ticked the "get published" box, this isn't something that keeps up at night anymore.

With regards to the act of writing: there are long periods of pain, and relatively short periods where it feels amazing. For me - and note that I primarily write fiction - the really difficult part is going from the state of "I have no active project going" to "I have a project and I'm well into it." I go on all kinds of false starts and dead-end paths, and it's quite discouraging. Furthermore, as I've gotten older and reached a rather stable mid-career professional phase, I actually find myself a bit starved for ideas sometimes. This would have been unimaginable in my 20s. However, when I actually managed to get the ball rolling, there are few feelings to compare with finishing a passage after which you can think, "That says what I meant it to say. I've conveyed this perfectly." It's a lot like playing golf: you put up with all the shanks and hooks because of the occasional perfect strike.

As I once said to a writing buddy of mine: I've gone through periods where I've tried to stop. I recognize that there are other hobbies I can pursue which don't come with any frustration. There are things that I am better at, than at writing. I'm probably more talented at tennis; if I put as much time into tennis as I do writing, I could be winning the local wee amateur tournaments and things. But I always come back to it. I seem to have wired my brain into that mold over many years, and now I just feel bad about myself if I don't log a few hours at the desk every couple of days.

I'm not a prolific writer, but I used to keep a blog, every couple of days, for probably eight years. Under my real name, because it had started as an assignment in college, and just kept going. One day, someone I was working for brought up the blog as a problem, as proof that I was an insufficiently cheerful person for the position I was in, as a a prelude to forcing me to leave what I had been doing. I never blogged publicly again.

The only pre-blog writer I can think of who would have flourished at it is GK Chesterton.

In general, it seems almost impossible to continue putting out high quality writing at a typical blogger pace over long time periods. I used to read Rod Dreher's blog, but he puts out negative content like mad -- three or four articles about something that upsets him a day, sometimes! There's no way that's healthy. There's a religious blog I quite enjoy (Fr. Stephen Freeman), and it's been going along nicely for quite some time now, and he seems to be doing fine with it. I suspect Orthodox priests have a better support network and feedback for what they're saying than bloggers, and his blog posts are an extension of his in-person talks and sermons.

Personally, I would like to write again when the children are a bit older, but perhaps for a small group of people I know a bit about. Blogging was the best when I would get comments from a handful of people I could either talk with in person, or whose blogs I also read. Or perhaps even letters. Not even emails, but physical letters. Maybe I want a penpal or something, and also send original watercolors.

In my experience (reading guides to writing by successful authors, or listening to interviews on the subject) there are two types of professional writer out there: those who hate writing, and those for whom writing is as easy as breathing.

The first type (the Haters) are people like Freddie DeBoer, Larry Correia, or Roald Dahl. They are more likely to look at writing as a job like any other: it's hard, and it takes commitment and work and discipline if you're going to have any chance of being successful. Dahl would write about how writing was exhausting:

The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.

I am in this camp myself: writing is hard to do. I'd rather be doing other things. When it comes time to write, (proper writing, not shooting off a comment on The Motte) I find just about anything else more attractive, like doing the dishes or weeding or finally cleaning out those gutters. For these writers the difficulty of writing is something that must be overcome.

Then there is the second camp (the Breathers) who have no idea why the first type are writers to begin with. This camp includes C. S. Lewis, Andrew Klavan, Scott Alexander, and Isaac Asimov. These are the type of people who, when asked how a young writer can start writing, would reply in either frustration or confusion that if they're not writing already then they're not really writers. Writers write, it's what they do, and it's easy. They couldn't not write if they wanted to. Lewis would hardly ever edit his books, getting them just the way he liked them on the first try. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers on earth, writing over 500 books and scads of short stories, essays, articles, etc. As for Scott:

On the other hand, I know people who want to get good at writing, and make a mighty resolution to write two hundred words a day every day, and then after the first week they find it’s too annoying and give up. These people think I’m amazing, and why shouldn’t they? I’ve written a few hundred to a few thousand words pretty much every day for the past ten years.

But as I’ve said before, this has taken exactly zero willpower. It’s more that I can’t stop even if I want to. Part of that is probably that when I write, I feel really good about having expressed exactly what it was I meant to say. Lots of people read it, they comment, they praise me, I feel good, I’m encouraged to keep writing, and it’s exactly the same virtuous cycle as my brother got from his piano practice.

That's just how it is. I would say the Haters become professional writers because they have ideas they want to share and stories they want to tell and writing, while difficult, is the best way they can express those things. The Breathers become writers because that's just what they are. If they weren't publishing books, they'd be one of those guys who constantly edits Wikipedia.

Funnily enough, I think deBoer would actually identify as a breather, considering he recently published an entire post about how much he hates the "ugh I'm a writer and I hate writing" thing: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/if-you-dont-like-writing-do-something

I would say that being a significantly above average writer comes to me with minimal effort.

I would also say that becoming the kind of writer I respect a great deal would take serious effort, to the point where if I was writing solely as a hobby, it would become a net negative in terms of enjoyment.

Wow, you're making me real jealous of the Breathers right now. This is a bit depressing as someone who has aspirations of becoming a professional writer, hah.

I think realistically I want to write because yes I have ideas I want to share, but it also seems like one of the few careers I could tolerate long term. Perhaps I need to explore more.

If you're not a Breather, then you'll just need to treat it like a job. As far as jobs go, writing isn't that bad! Beats digging ditches or working retail. You'll just need to go in with that expectation and use some discipline.

Very true. I also love reading, learning, doing research, and feel I have interesting takes. Besides, I enjoy the creative parts of writing, and when I get into the flow of it, it works well.

I'd say the issue is more that I've had creativity and doing work I enjoy like writing beaten out of me because I have so many other demands in my life to juggle. Writing is one of those things I love to do when I have the time and energy, but I very rarely do nowadays. An interesting conundrum.

Do you write anything outside of Motte posts?

I've written a few short stories and I used to have a blog, but over the last few years the only writing I do is commenting like this. I have some hope of doing some more substantial writing when my kids are older, but I don't plan on writing professionally.

Hasn’t Freddie had a lot of other mental-health issues over that time period?

Bipolar probably doesn’t help with the darkness.

He has, yeah. Sounds like he's been a total asshole to a lot of folks in the industry. Luckily I don't have the same problems with mental illness, even though he has clearly been a dick I feel for him.

I enjoy writing, as I'm sure most of the regulars who don't lurk do. There is a pleasure to be had in a good argument well presented, with just the right amount of wit.

I also enjoy writing fiction, as should be evident from my current novel being 84k words in at this point.

I've never really had the urge to write a blog per se, because I hold myself up to the stratospherically high standards that Scott and others embody, and in addition I don't think I have the patience or conscientiousness to really dig into textual sources or engage in the kind of scholarship that raises his writing from merely enjoyable to read to outright enlightening.

Of course, writing so much fiction has clearly revealed technical deficiencies, the kind that aren't obviated by mere talent. I struggle to write characters that aren't partially self-inserted, or the patience to write long outlines and plot out story threads.

You can get surprisingly far just writing without thinking too much ahead, but I did write myself into a corner recently, something I sought to resolve by taking a step back and writing an interlude that fleshes out the MC's backstory and motivations. I hope that unsticks me and gets the creative juices flowing, but I suspect that to truly elevate my writing to the level of the authors I personally respect, I'd have to put in the hours and attempt to develop a technical understanding of plots, stakes-building, and writing characters with mindsets very alien to my own. Not that I can't do that of course, merely not as well as I aspire to.

But most often, you'll see me writing because I'm bored and have nothing better to do haha

Surely most people who hate writing solve this problem by not doing it? The average pay is low and the variance is high. That variance might be a bit of a trap, for people who are lucky enough to get a wide audience quickly and only later discover that their muse is ready for them to quit but their bank account is not. But I'd expect that to be the exception, not the rule.

If you actually look for people who write prolifically without being paid for it, like frequent posters here, surely the selection bias is going to pick out people who love it. Even among paid prolific authors there's that bias. Asimov's attitude was roughly: "I never take vacations voluntarily, and I bring pen and paper so I can enjoy the ones I'm dragged along on". I loved his response to one incredulous interviewer, who asked something like: "But what if you found out you only had 6 months to live? What would you do then?" "Type faster."

Hah, well I like writing well enough now but I'm considering trying to make money on it. I'm definitely not on Asimov's level.

I imagine I'd hate writing (well, 'journalism/opinion writing') if I had to do it for a living. The pressure of a deadline creeping up on you, no ideas because you just don't feel creative this week, or maybe you don't know how to entertain your audience and can watch it slowly drifting off or losing interest? That's tough. Writing here is fun because you don't have to do it, some weeks I enjoy just reading what other people have written.

That's a fair point. Writing seems like an attractive career because I enjoy it, but the common wisdom is that if you try to commercialize a hobby you quickly lose the enjoyment. Definitely something to think about.

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This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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