site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2696 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 4, 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.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Regarding the viral Planet of the Bass, it was surprisingly difficult to dig this half-remembered reference out of the thick sludge of my brain, and Google and LLMs were not helping when I wrongly told them it was Balkan; so in case others are experiencing the same struggle: Stop The War - Speak The Hungarian Rapper

This isn't enough for the CW thread, so here: a fairly reasonable take on "movies are too damn expensive today".

There was a bit of kerfuffle in the CW thread about the radical wing of the environmentalist movement, epitomised by Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. I saw something related last night which some of you might find amusing.

Walking through the street I saw a poster for a charity rave, the proceeds of which go to Extinction Rebellion. Sort of amusing in its own right (especially given that the tickets for this rave are... free?), but when you take a closer look and notice the name of the headline act - well, the jokes write themselves, don't they?

I've been enjoying the webnovel Shadow Soul. TLDR - antihero MC, monster-infested wilderness survival, progression fantasy.

Pros:

There's a lot of it (over a thousand chapters). The setting is rather original and has plenty of mystery, at least once we leave Earth. The aesthetic and tone is very Dark Souls (I say despite never having played any of those games). The character arcs are not as simple as they seem to be, our MC doesn't go on a 'ruthless villain to heart-of-gold hero' arc, at least not linearly. There are swings and roundabouts on his character arc, resentments and reverberations.

Our MC quickly acquires a crippling flaw that he has to hide and helps drive the plot in interesting directions. He can't lie or avoid questions. This causes all kinds of problems which he has to deflect or proactively avoid and some he just has to live with. His Main Character syndrome is recognized in-universe, he gets a 'Fated' attribute which makes really unlikely things more probable. There's a bit of humour in how he slowly learns to stop thinking things like 'what's the worst that can happen' after experiencing countless disasters.

The worldbuilding grows and grows organically. The System everyone gets doesn't seem like a cheat and doesn't drown people in numbers like in some litrpgs. It's definitely cultivation-inspired but only loosely so. The characters are pretty smart too.

Cons:

Editing is poor by literary standards, middling by webnovel standards. Mildly juvenile humour at times. Perhaps the MC has an excessive level of embarrassment about being a horny teenager, which is at least reasonable. Niggling issue IMO. The categorization of monsters is somewhat opaque - over 200 chapters in I'm still not sure how it works, or what the exact order is, or if there's more than one system of classification for monsters. Great Ones, Unholy Ones, Cursed Ones, Fallen Ones... wat mean? Admittedly I did drop it at chapter 50 for 3 months, so I probably forgot how it works. Anyway, it's not that intuitive but this is only a niggling problem. The prose isn't that spectacular, as is common in webnovels. It's not obviously ESL though.

By far the biggest problem is that the sites it's on tend to be the cancerously ad-infested ones. If your dao of adblock is high (Brave does it for me), then you can read away on this link. Otherwise you suffer a cursed existence, languishing and suffering because the author didn't put it on Royal Road: https://www.lightnovelworld.com/novel/shadow-slave-30071448

If people interact with other people in ways that doesn't involve being slowly driven insane and killing each other, it's not DS.

Well, there is a fair bit of slowly going insane and killing eachother, though that's not everything.

I adapted and expanded my reviews of Barbie and Oppenheimer (which I originally posted as comments here and here) as a blog post: https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/p/movie-review-barbenheimer

So this post should be higher effort, but that'd take away from important Baldur's Gate 3 time, so all I'm going to say is: Hot damn did Larian deliver, at least so far. I've got a few minor nitpicks, but I can't recall the last time I enjoyed a game this much. Was up until 5 AM playing it last night.

I'm also trying to figure out when exactly I got hyped for it. I ignored it all the way through early access, then a week before launch, I suddenly was all-in, and I don't remember seeing any news or reviews or anything other than "Oh hey, it's about to come out."

My husband started up Baldur's Gate 3 with my five year old on the chair next to him, and now no one in my house has slept in 48 hours. She keeps running in and out of our bedroom screaming about monsters and worms going into eyes. The baby wakes up and starts crying. I can't safely have both her and the baby in the bed at the same time. I hate this game with a burning fire and I haven't even played it yet.

Yeah, this is on your husband. Mindflayers are not suitable for five year olds.

I mean, you have my condolences, but that was really an own goal by your husband. I'm honestly not sure how he expected that to go.

Did your husband not know it would contain disturbing imagery before he began playing? I’d even avoid the new Zelda with children that young.

He says he just wanted to stay on the character creation screen and have her make a character. Turns out it's not a Barbie dress up game!

Kids these days. I watched Predator with my dad when I was super young, and never thought anything of it. I was so young I didn't even understand what I was seeing when it shows the guy skinned and hanging.

The only thing that ever gave me nightmares was the squirrel/mouse/rat living in my closet, making noise I knew I could hear, which my parents never believed me about. They always assumed I was making it up, had a bad dream, was misinterpreting the sounds of the house settling at night, etc. But I fucking knew there was something in my closet.

Wasn't until I cleaned it out as a teenager that I found an old abandoned rodents nest, and suddenly I felt vindicated for all my childhood night time protests.

Is it Woke?

Ok, part 2 of my response.

This post over at Blues News spoke to my curmudgeonly soul.

Eh, I'm kind of frustrated with the game. There are so many little annoying things that I'm finding that are adding to to my frustration.

The UI need work. The "mini" map is way too big, and FFS get rid of the fucking version number always visible. I wish they had an option to turn off quest markers. The descriptions on some abilities and spells are missing important information, which is driving me insane. This is especially frustrating during character creation. I had to re-do my character a couple of times because of this.

I'm somewhat familiar with D&D 5e rules, and they've made so many questionable changes to the rules that they might as well not even be allowed to call it D&D.

They've made all races the same by giving them all a selectable +2 and +1 attribute bonus instead of each race being unique.

They've removed detect magic and identify. Part of what I like about D&D that's missing from other home brew RPG systems is picking up magical items that can be enchanted or cursed, but you don't know until you identify them, either with a mage in your party or by paying a vendor. You can take your chances and equip them without identification, but if they're cursed, you have to get someone to remove the curse before you can remove the item. Remember the cursed ring in the original Baldur's Gate that you can find pretty early that changes your character's gender? I figured Larian of all developers would have had had fund with stuff like this.

Spell casters that have to prepare spells don't have to rest to prepare them, they can switch them any time outside of combat.

Spells don't have verbal, somatic or material requirements.

Apparently the game does have ritual casting for classes and spells that support it, but the spell description doesn't indicate if it can be ritual cast until you take it.

It seems like anyone can cast spells from scrolls regardless of class, without any requirements or restrictions.

I'm sure there are more that I haven't found or can't think of right now. Most of these are clearly done to appeal to casual players because they're ruining the role playing experience for me. I can't believe WotC approved of some of these changes.

I'm fine if Larian wants to use a modified home brew rule set, but at least put in the option to play with the authentic rules. Solasta handled this perfectly. It had several presets for difficulty from super easy, to the default Solasta rules, the authentic rules, up to a super brutal rules, or you can tweak every option of the rules to your liking.

So many people and reviewers are jizzing their pants over this game claiming it to be the best RPG ever. The game good and has the potential to be one of greatest RPGs, but currently it doesn't deserve that title. People need to take their blinders off, give it proper constructive criticism, so hopefully Larian can turn it into something great.

I don't think BG3 has any overtly woke current year nonsense. However, I am getting the impression BG3 has a very progressive design aesthetic towards excessive accessibility, blank slatism, and against conventionally attractive women/"male gaze".

There are verbal components. Almost no spells can be cast if silenced unless you have a special perk iirc only available to sorcerers and even to them it's more taxing.

and against conventionally attractive women/"male gaze".

Imo untrue.

25% of the reason I enjoy this game is that you have story-related reasons for using basic spells to mask the homelier party members as inhumanly beautiful dark elves.

Those rule change points are all autistic nitpicks. Spell don't have verbal, somatic, or material components? Those barely come up in actual tabletop unless a spellcaster is tied up or something. This reads like someone who's only RPG is D&D 5e, the rules of which are holy writ. I played Neverwinter Nights, and that played fast-and-loose with the tabletop rules too, and I didn't have a shitfit over the "parry" skill.

And the game is full of conventionally attractive women. Unless you mean that the female dwarf faces are way hotter than the human ones.

Those rule change points are all autistic nitpicks.

I mean... maybe. But when I bought Baldur's Gate 1, it basically had an abridged version of the D&D rules as it's game manual. It prided itself on how autistically it adhered to the AD&D 2e ruleset. They made some technical concessions, but they weren't "streamlining" things willy nilly.

This Baldur's Gate 3, I'm just not seeing it as the sort of spiritual successor in the same vein that Doom 2016 was. I don't intend to invest $60 and 200 hours into it so I can definitively make that claim. But what I'm seeing says this is not a game for the sort of grognard who liked the first two Baldur's Gates. It's for a modern, more laid back, more casual audience. They seem to be doing very well with their new audience. Good for them I guess.

Compared to other modern RPGs, BG3 is very UNforgiving. You can easily get in over your head and wind up having to re-load an earlier save. The game plays for keeps, there's no take-back-sies apart from save-scumming. I wouldn't call it dumbed down to appeal to casuals, that sounds like boilerplate criticism of all modern games, because all modern games are beset by the scourges of feminism, anti-westernism, anti-whiteness, and appealing to filthy casuals. Or something.

BG3 ADDED weapon-intrinsic short-rest maneuvers, too, shit that isn't in 5e at all, and even the 5.5 playtest has those as always-on, not limited resources. And it has new conditions that don't work the way 5e conditions work, and there's no grappling. 2/10, elbows too pointy.

You can almost always go back to camp and for 500 gold re-roll and re-spec your entire party for the current encounter.

That's not unforgiving.

Underrail is. 15 hours in you're forced to go into a garbage dump full of landmines, acid-spitting mutant pitbulls, traps, sentry turrets and more traps and more acid pibbles and people who try to have a jack-of-all trades character suffer impressively.

Compare Owlcat’s implementation of Pathfinder. The rules customization for that game is incredible. Tooltips are pretty damn good, too, as far as I recall.

I can defend a few of the changes. Streamlining is a dangerous line to walk. Cutting material components, probably good, definitely in line with the house rules for most tables. Verbal and somatic, eh, were they going to have any mechanical impact outside of Silence? On the other hand, spell swapping is a pretty silly way to fight the fifteen-minute adventuring day.

Others make more sense as part of an ongoing debate within D&D. Racial bonuses, for example, work like this in the next playtest. They’re not just a nod to blank-slatism, but a point of conflict between the Gamists and the Narrativists. Between the kind of people who pick Dwarf to optimize their saves and those who pick it because they read The Hobbit too recently. It’s a conflict as old as roleplaying, and flattening it out is yet another attempt at synchronizing the experience between players. Even though it means a bit of dumbing down.

Racial bonuses, for example, work like this in the next playtest.

They actually work like this currently in 5E, at least for any playable races published in or after The Wild Beyond The Witchlight; Monsters Of The Multiverse reprinted (and rebalanced) a bunch of racial options as well, and all of them use the floating modifiers method rather than set race-specific ASI bonuses. Your larger point stands, I just wanted to point out that on this particular point, BG3 is actually in-line with the state of the current edition.

If every race gives the same stat modifiers, why not just give everyone more points for ability scores during character creation? Apart from killing another sacred cow, except that at this point all the sacred cows are animated undead skeletons with skin draped over them.

For all intents and purposes, that is what has been done. The “racial stat bonus” has been replaced entirely by a pool of a +2 and a +1 which can be freely assigned to any two stats after the initial array of ability scores has been determined by rolling or by using the point buy or standard array method. You end up with numerically the same total available scores as before, you just have more flexibility in how you distribute them.

Last I saw, there isn't a single conventionally attractive woman you can romance. But you can have a bear go to town on your bussy. A significant portion of the media around the game is about how horny it is. But it's clearly not horny in any way that appeals to me.

Shadowheart isn't conventionally attractive? Or am I just a weirdo who likes gawky art hoes? Is conventionally attractive now code for Blonde Aryan Woman Standing in a Wheat Field?

Regardless, the hottest female faces in the character creator are dwarves. Half of them look like Sco-Jo.

Shadowheart

I don't know what's worse, being named Shadowheart by your parents or changing your name to Shadowheart yourself.

I was christened Dirk Steel and then I changed it to Phoenix...

Is conventionally attractive now code for Blonde Aryan Woman Standing in a Wheat Field?

Near as I've seen BG3 has two body types for women. Russian power lifter and 13 year old boy. It's rather on the androgynous side.

I'm just saying, I doubt Rule34 Baldur's Gate content is going to sweep Pornhub off it's feet the way Overwatch did.

The Belgians just aren’t a very attractive people, I have to say. Something about Dutch Catholics.

So far, the only "woke" thing I've encountered is that character creation lets you do whatever the hell you want regarding genitals/build/voice, but it's a pretty high magic setting, so whatever. I certainly haven't seen any "current day" topic stuff, and I'm not expecting anything as unsubtle as "Tiefling Lives Matter" to be a dialogue option, if that's what you're asking about.

character creation lets you do whatever the hell you want regarding genitals/build/voice

As long as what you want fits one of two body types for each sex, because that's all you get. You can choose from one of four patterns of public hair, but no option for breast size. Also all the hair options fucking suck absolute dick. I'm enjoying the game so far, but this is the first dnd crpg I have ever played where I didn't spend at least half an hour on character creation, because it was too demoralising. I just picked the first options I didn't hate and moved on - I put more effort into my goldbox characters lol.

I'm assuming the body types were for animation purposes, but I personally was very happy with the hair options. It's nice to actually have a few basic ponytails to pick from.

Hmm, seems like a torrent is out, with the overwhelming praise I can't help but want to try it, even if I find a typical DND setting rather boring.

I loved Divinity Original Sin 1, especially since the humor was laugh out loud good, and while I certainly could see that 2 was a big step up in scope, it took itself too seriously for my taste.

God I love Wagner. Why do people hate Wagner? Because of the Nazi thing? I mean okay fine, but I mean have these people listened to Wagner? It's like when in that Motte podcast and @KulakRevolt kept hating on The Great Gatsby. I mean I feel like at some point people aren't paying attention to the things they should be paying attention to.

Exhibit A: This is Siegfried's Funeral March. Yeah, from a film, but hey, I have never had the good fortune to watch the 17 hours which is Der Ring des Nibelungs though I would do it in a heartbeat.

Many years ago I watched a pretty uneven film called Aria and was introduced to Wagner apart from the usual Apocalypse Now sequence. The film had only one Wagner piece, a haunting section from the longer opera Tristan Und Isolde called Liebestod. You can find this in both instrumental and vocal versions. My favorite is the one done by Leontyne Price, and was the one used in in the film. You can watch that here.

So why the Wagner hate? Too rhapsodic? Too emotional? Neither of these critiques holds water with me. I mean listening to Wagner 24/7 is probably not advisable, but sometimes a little Wagner is just what the musical doctor ordered.

Fight me!

I dislike a lot of Wagner's oeuvre, and would pin this on two factors:

  • Despite lots of exposure as a frequent concert-goer, classical piano training and everything, I still can't appreciate operatic singing. The excessive vibrato means that the voice always spends more time sitting at pitches that are gratingly dissonant with the rest of the orchestration than in consonance.

  • A lot of it strikes me as melodically and harmonically monotonous, and the chord progressions, when they don't get washed out by being slow-walked, still fall flat emotionally. This may be a problem that I have with the German folk musical tradition in general, to which Wagner owes a lot. (For the same reason, I have a good track record of shocking connoisseurs by declaring a dislike of Schubert's songs.) This song, which we had to sing at school, seems close to a central example of everything I dislike about it. (So, curiously, a near-opposite of "too emotional"? Maybe someone is having an intense emotion there, but I don't empathise with it.)

That being said, there are a handful of Wagner pieces I actually do like, like for example the Vorspiel from Parsifal.

I'm with Rossini on this: Wagner has beautiful moments but terrible quarter-hours.

There are beautiful lyrical moments, but that's mostly the music. Singing in German is a tough row to hoe (can you tell the sound of it is not one of my favourite languages?) and it's only at times that he makes it work.

The politics, unfortunately, is entangled with the work, but trying to leave that aside - I think Wagner's view of Love (as in the Tristan and Isolde sense) has been a terrible one. Love cannot last on earth and leads inexorably to Death. You can't live like that. Grand tragic passion that wrecks the lives of all around you as the only true love? Go away.

EDIT: I note you mention the Wagner pieces as, in essence, having heard "His Greatest Hits". You haven't sat through the seventeen hours, you've had the best bits plucked out for you 😁 The Liebestod is beautiful, and the Love Duet which precedes it has been used to great effect in BBC Radio 4 versions of the Holmes story The Adventure of the Devil's Foot but the underlying philosophy is essentially nihilistic; this is a barren emotion that can only be realised by the death of the lovers and sinking into some kind of cosmic, impersonal, energy. From Act II Love Duet when they realise and consummate their love:

So let us die

And never part,

Die united,

Heart to heart,

Never waking,

Never fearing,

Nameless,

Endless rapture sharing,

Each to each devoted,

In love alone abiding.

Tristan's idea is that only in the endless night of death can they truly have their love. Even the night of physical love they are sharing is not sufficient. And in the end of the opera, in the end of the Liebestod (Love-Death, literally translated) Isolde agrees: to melt back into the energy of Nature, to be engulfed by the World-Spirit, is their only culmination:

In the billowing torrent,

in the resonating sound,

in the wafting Universe of the World-Breath ---

drown,

be engulfed ---

unconscious ---

supreme delight!

But if they are reduced to non-consciousness, submerged once again in the Universal, will they even know each other? can they even experience this love, this bliss, if they are no longer the unique personalities of Tristan and Isolde, if they don't know themselves or each other? They don't even have the fruits of this tragic love-in-death after all!

That's the emotions-over-reason spirit of the romantic movement though isn't it. It's not supposed to make sense, making sense is for squares. Think about it logically - the less sense it makes the more potent and authentic the emotions must be!

Well Tristan and Isolde obviously weren't imagined by Wagner, though of course he may have chosen that story to illustrate some grander theory of his own about love. I don't particularly feel the kind of doom-filled approach to love that you describe as Wagnerian, but then again I don't analyze it, I just listen. I don't understand German, nor do I read through translations as I listen. I just listen. And I've, as I say, never had the opportunity to watch. Or, never made the opportunity or taken it.

The pieces I linked aren't the only Wagner I've ever listened to, though you're probably correct that I have been exposed to a lot of his greatest hits, as you say. I don't think this is a particularly bad thing. My first exposure to Rachmaninoff was in this same way but I've since listened to quite a few of his full concertos and symphonies. As well as of course his Vocalise which, I'm sure you're happy to know, isn't in German but consists of just one vowel.

Completely agree. He revolutionized his and all other - by way of gesamtkunstwerk - art forms. He was as much a renaissance man as there’s ever been, and the power of his vision (and his ability to execute that vision) is rivaled by a sparing handful of aspirational entrepreneurs: Ford, Disney, Jobs/Gates, Musk. His pamphlet on Jewish Music is an overblown non-scandal due to its later admirers; his views were absolutely standard for his day - more charitable even, in parts.

There are critics of every great musician in every genre, especially as they come in and out of fashion. But Wagner, broadly speaking, has a good reputation as a composer. He is generally considered one of the greatest operatic composers ever. His works appear on almost every list of “the greatest operas of all time”. His politics (and Hitler’s love of him, and upholding of him as central to German nationalist art) mean that an association with the radical right is probably always inevitable, but his operas are staged regularly and his pieces are performed even more regularly in the US and Western Europe and draw a large audience. I looked on the website of the New York philharmonic and they’re playing pieces from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in early January next year, they had several Wagner-focused concerts late last year (and probably some more earlier this year).

So I’d say he has probably broadly the appreciation he should. People who don’t like opera or classical music may have their prejudices, but they wouldn’t listen to him anyway.

How to Open Jars as a Woman or a Weak Man

We've all been there. We go into the fridge for a late night snack. The jar of unopened pickles sits there, taunting us. How will we get to the delicious contents there-in?

It might be tempting to simply take the jar and shatter it against the counter, allowing one to grab the pickles up off the floor. It's true, this is a convenient and compelling method. We can deal with the pickle brine and shards of broken glass the next morning.

But this might not be the great solution it seems at first glance. For one, your roommates might be disturbed by the sound of broken glass. It's also possible you could get pickle juice on your socks.

Another popular method of opening a jar is to pass it around a group of men (or, hilariously, a woman) to allow the best and strongest among them to open the jar. This can be effective, although often the person who opens the jar is merely the beneficiary of the person immediately before who loosened it up. The moral hazard of allowing one person to claim credit that is properly due to society at large should not be encouraged.

The laws of physics state that warm water passed over the lid of a pickle jar will cause you to burn your hand while not eating pickles.

You could also try whacking the lid against the counter or with a hammer or something, but now we're just back to the first method again.

No - for women and weak men there is one true and best way to open a stubborn jar. Use a glove or oven mitt with some friction. Works every time.

Whack the bottom with the heel of your hand a few times then try again.

If that doesn't do it, the never-fail solution is to put some dents in the edge of the lid by tapping around its circumference with a utensil. The best option for this is holding a butter knife by the blade and hitting with the handle.

Not sure how bad this is for the seal if you're intending to reseal it long term, but this always works.

Break the seal. I'm too impatient, and sometimes using a bottle/can opener doesn't work if you can't get it under the lid, so I just pierce the top of the lid with a sharp knife, the seal pops and I can then unscrew the lid.

Yes, this had disadvantages, but you get to the pickles fast and who cares past that?

This thing: https://www.thegripjaropener.com/ - makes jar opening non issue. I'm sure there are many variations of it, I just posted the first that came up in search results. I am probably strong enough to open many jars the old way, but I never do anymore - why bother? I only wonder why this thing is not the standard in every kitchen.

The laws of physics state that warm water passed over the lid of a pickle jar will cause you to burn your hand while not eating pickles.

I use boiling water from the kettle then grip it with a towel to open it. I'm pretty careless while cooking and often get burns and scratches but I never got burned doing this.

I have a strap wrench I got for some maintenance task long ago. I keep it in the kitchen now because it also works great for opening any stubborn jars.

My mother has a big plastic gripper to open bottles and jars.

The old "rubber husband" trick...

Hey now, we don't know the exact nature of Mewis' mum's 'big plastic gripper', maybe it has dual functions.

My girlfriend showed me that you could release the vacuum by prying under the lid with a knife. I can't believe I didn't know that was an option until then!

Just do it with a butter knife, or you will pry your hand open sooner or later.

Use a bottle opener on the edge of the lid, if it is a metal lid. This breaks the airtight seal, letting air in and allowing the jar to be easily opened. This is especially fun after the jar has been passed around and everyone looks tired - you effortlessly open the jar and look smart.

Turn it upside down and bang it on the bottom with the palm of your hand until you hear a little pop in the air seal.

In the culture-war thread, @Gdanning says:

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880[.]"

Note the placement of square brackets around the period that was inserted at the end of the quote. As a person who semi-regularly glances through court opinions during idle time at work, I feel like this practice was only recently adopted by jurists, as a replacement for the previous style (which misleadingly implies that the period is native to the quote):

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880."

And I feel very annoyed that it was chosen by those jurists over the obvious alternative:

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880".

Mixing quotes and periods is one of those things that always confused me about writing.

I've always seen punctuation-outside-of-quotes as a marker of the tech industry, or sometimes of non-US English. To quote the Jargon File:

Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if “Jim is going” is a phrase, and so are “Bill runs” and “Spock groks”, then hackers generally prefer to write: “Jim is going”, “Bill runs”, and “Spock groks”. This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck.

Some of the Jargon File is quite dated at this point, but it's pretty short and, IMO, worth the read.

which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes

Never heard about such rule, and now that I had, I will defy it with the full feeling of my righteousness, because doing something like putting punctuation inside the quotes is just wrong.

I remember it from my schooling, and thinking that it was stupid. And then discovering the Jargon File and realizing that there were other sensible people in the world.

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880".

This is how I was taught to write and seems to be universal standard practice in English, so it seems weird for it to change now. The exception is when the whole sentence is in quotes, in which case it can end with quote marks instead of a period.

taught to write and seems to be universal standard practice in English,

I recall having discussions about this in the distant past. It actually is not standard practice (though IMHO it should be). See here ("The final period or comma goes inside the quotation marks, even if it is not a part of the quoted material, unless the quotation is followed by a citation."), and here which says that US and British practice is different, and traces the difference to the American use of double quotation marks and the appearance of text when typeset.

Very interesting, since I really don’t think this is a habit I’ve picked up since moving to England.

The sensible option is clearly:

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880[.]".

The quote is its own sentence, but also part of another one; thus two periods.

The only reason for the quote mark in the original example is because the sentence must end with a period but the quote doesn’t have one (there is a question of what to do if the quote does have a period, but in that case the usual answer is just to leave it out anyway).

There are several problems with this:

  1. It falsely implies, as the OP says, that the period is native to the quoted sentence when it is not.

  2. It doesn’t adequately end the sentence that encapsulates the quote, which continues after the quotation marks end until the final punctuation.

  3. It looks ugly, there isn’t a need for brackets when quotation marks and a period suffice completely.

A direct quote seems an interruption in a sentence rather than its continuation. That’s why quotes can have different grammar to the encapsulating sentence, they can have different spelling (eg. an American directly quoting a British writer might use the British English -ise spelling of some words that have -ize endings in US English) and so on. The original sentence always needs to be finished for clarity, ending the quotes and then writing a period serves that function.

Surely the most common alternative is:

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880. . . ."

That is what Turabian recommends, anyhow.

I think it has been noted by others (programmers who are used to dealing with "string" variables) that inserting punctuation at the end of a quote is a needlessly confusing practice.

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880…".

What was your dream job/career as a kid? Was it anything remotely realistic?

I remember I wanted to help terraform Mars at NASA because I was a massive sci-fi nerd. I even went into environmental science and wanted to go for that sort of thing, until I realized everyone in environmental science was a depressed dweeb who lied about their stats.

Anyway, now my big dream is to become a writer some day, even if not a great one.

Back when I was in elementary school, I distinctly recall answering this assignment with "I want to be a brave special forces soldier, fighting mutants to save humanity." What can I say, there was that one computer game I had really loved... My teacher responded with an angry note: "Don't kid around, give a serious answer." Well, that was my serious answer! Okay, humanity-threatening mutants might not exist, but that little detail aside, that was my dream job all the same.

As I grew older, I wanted to be a video game journalist. As far as I knew, they had the best job ever: they played awesome games all day, occasionally got up to hilarious banter with their fellow journalists, and had fans sending them letters and hanging on their every word. I even started a personal project to play every notable video game in history, so that I could rightfully claim the title of "the most historically knowledgeable gaming journalist ever!". Let's just say I grew out of this dream over time...

When I was a kid I wanted to be a fireman, because that's what every (male) kid wants to be in a certain age (or at least that was my impression back then). Well, that and a cosmonaut, but that wasn't really serious because everybody knew how hard it is to become a cosmonaut (for some reason, the same everybody had no information about whether or not it's hard to become a fireman). Then I learned about computers and never wanted to do anything else since.

  • superhero
  • superspy (think Spy Kids)
  • hacker
  • programmer

As a kid I had the vague impression that I wouldn't grow up. I just couldn't imagine being an adult.

I understood that I was growing up, every year the number on the cake gets bigger, but I couldn't get my head round the fact that one day I would be 18, or 21, or 30.

This is still the case for me in my thirties. The idea of being 55 and well-established, or 70 and retired, or 80 and physically worn, are impossible to tangibly imagine.

As a kid I had two dream jobs: cosmonaut and road roller driver. I stopped wanting to be the former when I got scared by some TV show about "unexplained mysteries of space" and to be the latter when I grew up. Thankfully, I got into programming in my early teens.

I hear you on the road roller. If I ever got the chance I'd love to try driving a road/steam roller and frying corn chips. Both look like they'd be fun to do once. I imagine I'd get very bored going as slowly as they do, but I'm not going to pass up a chance to try either.

First comment here (and in fact first comment ever on the internet) after lurking for a while. I preemptively ask for forgiveness. I also was a sci-fi nerd, in fact your "tag" is maybe derived from my favorite sci-fi-medium to this day. So naturally I wanted to become a physicist to understand more about the universe. Everything turned out quite differently and now I'm on track to become a lawyer very soon. (still at uni for now) Though my wife is a theoretical physicist and it brings me satisfaction, that someone is doing the hard math/work of contributing something eternal to the realm of human knowledge for me, while I'll do something which is extremely fun, completely arbitrary and transient but will support my wife, me and future children. Besides two people trying to stay in academia is way to complicated anyway. I'm sorry for the long sentences, my mother tongue has this feature and it is hard to get rid of it.

Indiana Jones. Well, if you asked me I'd say archaeologist, but what I meant was Indiana Jones.

I spent half my childhood wanting to be a scientist or astronaut. Turns out India doesn't have a manned space program, and that the woman who blew up in the Challenger disaster was an American citizen, though you wouldn't know it from how much Indians crowed about her being half-Indian.

I've got an aunt and uncle who are distinguished biologists, which is probably where the desire to be one came from, but then I learned what the salaries looked like and that you primarily need a microscope to look at your payslip, not the bacteria.

I'm not particularly passionate about medicine, it's always been the Default™ career choice, but it pays well and is a relatively smooth ticket out of India, so can't complain too much. I'd have liked to spec into aerospace medicine or prosthetic surgery, but opportunities for that are few and far between, and psych is interesting enough.

I wanted to be an Imagineer for the Disney Parks. And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those meddling kids MAE2030-Dynamics! (and I took a cryptography class as an elective that I ended up liking more.)

Didn't think about jobs for probably too long, but was always interested in engineering. My dad and grandpa were nuclear/mech-Es and we were generally similar people, so I knew it'd be something along those lines.

I dabbled with putting "Bounty Hunter" on the career choice field during middle and high school, did some research about what it would take and then stopped. Some people suggested medicine, but school blows so why commit to so much of it?

Kicked off college thinking Aerospace, then pivoted to Computer/Electrical (which was very difficult, IMO) and landed in Software after doing very well in the first class.

A film director.

I loved watching movies growing up (still do), and I thought the idea of working with actors, crew, and producers in creating a cinematic masterpiece sounded fun. Thankfully, The Movies got me close to living out my dream; I sunk countless hours into the game.

What was your dream job/career as a kid? Was it anything remotely realistic?

Video game developer - I was a huge fan of Halo but , because it took time to get anything back home, I got really involved in all of the BTS stuff like vidocs Bungie put out, identified with the team and found the idea of working on a game with 1 million daily players enthralling.

Was it realistic for an upper middle class kid in Africa? The consensus (actual laughter) was no.

For an African upper middle class teenager in the US it was more viable - and I did end up going into Computer Science - but I'd put away childish things by then.

I hear the hours and bennies are awful anyway.

(I think I also wanted to be a writer, but that was definitely unrealistic)

Which African country are you from?

Gambia.

Nobody I know who has worked in the game industry says it's fun - the closest I've ever heard is that it's somewhat palatable from the folks who work on internal tooling and so have stable careers.

Even if you really love video games the industry ruins it for you. IMO the best approach would be to kick ass at general software development and then try and leverage it into a position at one of the few decent shops out there. I still might give it a shot one day.

Oh yeah. Maybe as a kid the idea of sleeping at the office making Halo 2 sounded cool.

But nothing I've heard since as an adult (or am still hearing about shambolic productions filled with precariat contractors like Halo Infinite) has made me regret not pursuing it further.

And I'm usually very prone to regret and worrying about the road not taken.

I remember wanting to be a ski patrol ranger. Now I just want to shift from technical project manager into something more creative.

As a young kid I wanted to be George Bush's right hand man. As a teenager I wanted to be an economist. By college age I was studying philosophy and now I'm happy if I have a job that will let me read on the side.

As a small child, I wanted to be a "danger man" and no one knew what it meant but there was speculation that it could have been anything from road construction (they work around signs that say danger) to superhero (pretty unlikely to happen).

Surely a "danger man" would be a secret agent . Just don't try to resign your position, or you might get imprisioned in a village somewhere in Wales....

You know, oddly enough I wanted to be an architect as a kid. For whatever reason I loved geometric doodling in elementary school, and even in highschool really enjoyed taking CAD classes. To this day, when I'm woodworking I still sketch out (badly) my designs, and figure out all the angles and measurements ahead of my first cut. Which I would have assumed was normal, except I see a lot of youtubers winging it, and being utterly unable to do the fractional math themselves, and relying on their phones or google sketchup for everything.

When I was very young, an actor or journalist, and when I was a teenager, a philosopher or occasionally a psychologist (variably academic or practicing). I did want to do a degree (MA, maybe then PhD) in philosophy after my undergraduate degree before going back into finance but I had a crisis of confidence when I struggled with trying to teach myself formal logic (in all fairness, it was at least partially laziness) and so abandoned it.

I’m still not sure whether most good academic analytic philosophers are much more intelligent than me or just hide the relative banality of their ideas behind a tradition of overwrought language and an emphasis on ‘rigor’ that usually just means structuring arguments in a needlessly complex way.

Formal logic is... Boolean algebra. Most Electrical/Computer engineering students learn it in 2 weeks.

Mathematical logic is a pretty wide field of which boolean algebra is only a small part of the basics.

Yes, but a philosopher doesn’t need to know anything about model theory or large cardinals (unless they specifically specialize in the philosophy of modern mathematical logic). The only logic that most philosophers need is the very simple boolean algebra they teach you in CS 101.

And what percentage of that shows up in a philosophy course?

Not a lot (then again, it's such a huge field that only a small fraction shows up in a PhD in mathematical logic), but in all likelihood, more than just boolean algebra.

In addition to the propositional calculus (effectively a subset of boolean algebra and probably equivalent to the part you are expecting EE students to learn) I'd expect any advanced student in analytic philosophy to be familiar with the basics of first-order logic as well as modal logic (in fact most research in modal logic is done in philosophy departments because of how essential it is in quite a few areas -- c.f. Saul Kripke).

You're not missing much from philosophy imo. I did a minor (1 course away from major but I would've had to do an extra semester) and especially as I've gotten older, I'm less and less impressed with philosophy. It's great for signaling high intelligence/status and talking your way around people, but in terms of actually leading a good, satisfying life, philosophy is a remarkably poor guide.

Which is sad, because that's ostensibly the whole point of the enterprise.

because that's ostensibly the whole point of the enterprise.

Well... not really?

Philosophy started as a comprehensive rational inquiry into the nature of reality. It was math, science, and metaphysics all wrapped up into one. Knowing how to live a good life might be part of that inquiry, insofar as it's a prominent feature of our reality that we observe people making good decisions and poor decisions, and we want to know what the difference between them is - but it's only one component.

The surviving texts we have from the pre-Socratics are heavy on theoretical speculation about metaphysics, logic, and mathematics, but they contain relatively little in the way of practical life advice. When Plato considered ethical questions, it was typically done as a pretext to introduce broader theoretical issues (e.g. the moral dilemma in the Euthyphro turns into an inquiry into the metaphysical status of moral facts as such). Certainly by the time we get to Descartes, we have a model of a theoretical philosopher who focuses solely on metaphysics and epistemology and pays no attention to ethics at all. So the situation you bemoan has been commonplace for at least 400 years now.

That being said, there are philosophers who make "living life" their main focus, and you'll mainly find them in the continental tradition: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Lacan, etc.

I’m kinda there as well. As a hobby, I think it’s interesting to read and attempt to do philosophy. I also think reading, watching, and analysis of media is interesting. The academic fields are generally fart sniffing exercises producing little worth the money spent getting into it or the people who do it.

I assure you that you're more than intelligent enough to learn analytic philosophy (along with pretty much everyone else who posts here). It's not that hard, in comparison to say STEM fields.

I don't think it's fair or accurate to say that philosophers are "hiding banal ideas behind overwrought language and needlessly complex arguments". Do you have any examples in mind? Every field has jargon, it's unavoidable. Analytic philosophy jargon is in my opinion not that hard to learn; if you come across an unfamiliar word, you just look it up and then continue reading. There is an initial investment of time required on your part when you're first starting out, but it's nothing insurmountable. I think analytic philosophers generally make a pretty strong effort to make their arguments as easy to understand as possible.

Your reaction is not an uncommon one though - some people who are first getting into philosophy feel like they're being tricked in some way, that philosophers are surely just making all this stuff up, etc. But I think that's just a reaction to the ideas being strange and unfamiliar; it's not proof that philosophers are actually just writing BS.

As for whether the ideas are "banal", I suppose that's somewhat a matter of taste and perspective. You don't have to think that philosophy is interesting. But when people make claims like "tables and chairs don't exist", "there are sentences that are true and false at the same time", or "no one has ever felt pain before", I don't think those are banal claims! I think they strike at the heart of how we think about reality. You might think those claims are false, but that's different from being banal.

What is this place?

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!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats