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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2815 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 15, 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 just overheard a random person exhorting the virtues of ChatGPT and strongly recommending they sign up to the family of one of the patients admitted in my oncology ward of an upscale yet reasonably accessible hospital while walking around today.

If that's the degree of penetration, well I'll just officially proclaim this the moment that AI is here.

exhorting

*extolling

Yes, the use of exhorting here is grammatically correct. Exhort is a verb that means to strongly encourage or urge someone to do something1. Exhorting is the present participle form of exhort, which can be used as an adjective or a gerund2. In this sentence, exhorting is used as an adjective to modify the noun virtues. The sentence could be rewritten as “I just overheard a random person who was strongly encouraging the virtues of ChatGPT and strongly recommending they sign up to the family of one of the patients admitted in my oncology ward of an upscale yet reasonably accessible hospital while walking around today.”

Source: I asked an AGI. And it makes perfect sense to me.

Not sure if kidding, but that makes no sense at all? Using exhorting as an adjective is not typical usage anywhere that I can think of, and "the virtues" are not really a thing you can exhort.

You've been hallucinated on -- at a broader scale too I'd suggest. What use is ChatGPT to a cancer patient?

Using "exhorting" as an adjective is not typical usage anywhere that I can think of

No, that part is perfectly fine.

  • Good: "I overheard Akpu exhorting Babulal to use ChatGPT"

  • Good: "I heard Akpu extolling the virtues of ChatGPT to Babulal"

  • Bad: "I heard Akpu exhorting the virtues of ChatGPT to Babulal"

It's being used as a verb in your first example; Babulal is the object. "The virtues of ChatGPT" do not make sense as an object for that verb, as you point out.

It's being used as a verb in your first example

A participle is a verb and an adjective simultaneously.

It can be, but that's not what it's doing here. Per your article:

  1. Participles are used to form periphrastic verb tenses:

The present participle forms the progressive aspect with the auxiliary verb be:

Jim was sleeping.

Akpu (was) exhorting Babulal -- subject, verb, object.

That's a different construction with a different meaning.

  • "I saw Akpu exhorting Babulal": "exhorting" is unambiguously an adjective(+verb).

  • "I saw [that] Akpu was exhorting Babulal": I'm not a linguist, but I would still call "exhorting" an adjective+verb here (acting alongside the verb "was"), even though it also can be considered part of the "was exhorting" verb construction. But that may be breaking things down too far.

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We are made of matter. Matter is not created or destroyed. It just changes form. Right now, for a brief moment in time, it has taken on a form that is self-aware. That's you. After you cease to be, where does your matter go? It goes everywhere. And because time is infinite, it will eventually reconnect. Every last atom. Infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters, after all.

And if that is inevitable, it is also inevitable that your matter will take on a self-aware form again, eventually.

Reincarnation is real.

You might be interested in Greg Egan's book Permutation City, which takes this (as he calls it) Dust Theory, and runs with it to the extreme.

Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/16/caesars-last-breath-sam-kean-review-decoding-the-secrets-of-the-air-around-us#:~:text=Caesar%27s%20final%20breath%20–%20exhaled%20as,all%20the%20air%20on%20Earth.

Caesar’s final breath – exhaled as he was stabbed to death in the senate – would have contained about a litre of air made up of about 25 thousand million million million molecules. At the same time, a litre of air represents 0.000000000000000000001% of all the air on Earth. When you crunch these numbers, says Kean, you will find that roughly one particle of the last air that was breathed out by Caesar more than 2,000 years ago will appear in your next breath. “Across all that distance of time and space, a few of the molecules that danced inside his lungs are dancing inside yours right now.”

And because time is infinite, it will eventually reconnect.

Entropy says otherwise, unless you have an observed mechanism to reset the system. claiming it must rest because otherwise the system doesn't make sense is begging the question.

I've finally gotten around to playing Starfield and after fixing the terrible lighting (and not fixing the terrible UI, I think I've missed something when installing SkyUI) I think it's peak Bethesda at its worst. The only thing that keeps me going is "player sees number go up: neuron activation".

The main quest is surprisingly anemic even for Bethesda. The planets are realistically barren and I really want a land vehicle to get around on. Fast travel is essential, but it's such a kludge. Lore and exposition? Ah, you'll glean enough if you play enough. But I want to put more mods on my gun and for this I need to level up this and level up that, to gather this and to gather that and so on.

I really like it, I think it’s their most interesting setting. I imagine it as a kind of world where semiconductor processes below like 500nm or whatever they had in 1990 were somehow technically impossible, and so technology progressed but computing specifically never advanced exponentially the way it did in our timeline over the last 30 years (and beyond). Obviously there are a few times the setting contradicts this but as a broad rule I very much enjoy it, an interesting alternate history.

I really like the quests! They’re breezy, they take you all over the galaxy. I think the Zero-G combat is great, the space combat has fun arcade vibes, I like that quests have lots of opportunities for persuasion, and while the main story is amateurish I respect that unlike Mass Effect it’s an attempt at actual science fiction and not Star Wars, and follows through with actual science fiction. The cities are great, and Bethesda’s best. I’m still finding interesting things after a few weeks.

I need to go back to Baldur’s Gate 3 and I just don’t want to. Back to Larian’s awful British-writers-writing-Marvel-movies dialogue, the horniness, the Wacky and Zany Events™️ and the boring story and FR setting I don’t care about.

The cities are great, and Bethesda’s best.

The cities are great, but the rest of the environments aren't, especially after Skyrim and Fallout 4. The road to Markarth is simply spectacular, as is the road to Riften, Boston sneaks up on you in an amazing way, you never notice how you end up among its skyscrapers.

I’ve spent (perhaps too much) time this last week playing Path of the Dovahkiin, a Skyrim modpack.

It replaces the loot, xp, and spawning systems to make something much more like Path of Exile or Borderlands: blitz through packs of enemies, sift their corpses for cool gear, portal back to town to sell it and level up, repeat. Most of the existing mechanics of Skyrim are adjusted to suit this character-improving feedback loop.

The end result is a game that sacrifices verisimilitude in favor of a very different part of the Elder Scrolls experience. Bethesda always tapped into that sort of number-go-up power fantasy; it was just trading off with all the other design goals of their fantasy worlds. Can’t let your merchants buy anything without breaking the economy in half. Can’t keep the full space of spells and skills without taking dev time from quests and environments. And, of course, can’t limit you from being a murderhobo or a paragon.

That’s what I’m thinking about when you say “neuron activation.” Bethesda games have always done it, but they are forced into compromises by the rest of their game. Skyrim is 12 years in to a fanatical modding scene, determined to take the game in each of these conflicting directions. Give Starfield a few years, and I expect its community to home in on its stronger points. Until then…have you considered reinstalling Skyrim?

Every time I consider reinstalling Skyrim I:

  • run out of time downloading and installing the mods
  • realize I only enjoyed playing as a sneaky archer and I have no desire to do that again

God, I wasted so much time installing this pack. I didn’t realize, when I started, that the launcher only automated the installations and not downloads. It pops up a window for the right versions, but you have to click “download” manually unless you have some sort of nexus subscription.

It was far too long and involved far too many bullshit graphics mods. I wish there was middle ground to get all the gameplay mods without downloading 100GB of 4K rugs. I set up an autoclicker and chatted with my gf while I tended it. The upside is that I learned a lot about new music genres!

In the end, I’ve made an illusion mage who frenzies entire rooms, then goes invisible while they lose their damn minds. Anyone who survives is paralyzed and hacked to tiny pieces. It’s good fun, and cheerfully breaks the normal gameplay in half. But that’s kind of the idea!

To expand on the questline anemia, the start of the game at the same time resembles Mass Effect and doesn't. Before Shepard interacts with the beacon, we already get a lot of information from the starting mission:

  • aliens exist and there's some residual mutual mistrust
  • humanity has been playing technological catch-up with them
  • humanity has been establishing colonies in places no one has tried to settle before
  • the aliens have some form of galactic government
  • the galactic government has some sort of elite special agent force
  • Shepard is the first one to join them
  • there's some weird shit in the universe
  • the galactic government is very interested in it
  • evil robots exist
  • one of the elite special agents is a traitor that likely works with the evil robots

What do we learn in Starfield before we interact with the beacon?

  • humanity has been mining asteroids(?) with lasers
  • humanity is split into a group that prefers more order and a group that prefers more freedom (have to pay attention to the banter)

What do we learn in the tutorial mission?

  • there's some weird shit in the universe
  • there's a literal super adventure club that tries to investigate weird shit and no one else cares about it or them
  • there's a bunch of annoying pirates
  • there's a place called Neon that is a wretched hive of scum and villainy (have to pay attention to the banter)

Yes, the former is a space opera and the latter is a sandbox, but when the training wheels come off in Starfield you end up knowing practically nothing about the game world or the key plot hooks. At least in Skyrim you get to see the big bad dragon and the two civil war factions.

Recently I've been having a good time with ICBM and Capitalism Lab. The former is a small indie game where you balance between researching technologies (satellites, two kinds of radar, SLBMs, ABM or MIRV tech) and producing those weapons, so you can dish out more megadeaths than you take.

Capitalism lab is probably the most detailed and intricate consumer run-your-own business game. Build farms, factories, stores, trade stocks, research products, borrow money and advertise, import and export goods between cities... It's very much a creature of the early 2000s graphically but I find it quite charming.

Both have a couple of mods that add huge amounts of extra content. In the case of Capitalism Lab's 'Real World Mod', too much content. Does there really need to be separate categories of 'cars' 'luxury cars' 'cabrio cars', all using the same inputs? Are pistachios, oysters and ducks really needed as agricultural goods? In ICBM, there is Dawn at Midnight and Parabellum that adds armies and special forces, superweapons, ASW helicopters... The AI can't really use armies and they don't really fit the style of the game - ICBM is about nukes and nukes hard-counter slow, unstealthy, vulnerable armies. These mods are fun to play but they're not a really coherent experience.

Nevertheless, I think it's a sign of quality for a game to get people so invested in it that they make all this extra stuff for free. I think the difference between a soulful game and a soulless one lies in how dedicated people get about them. For instance if you go to the Civilization V or VI Steam Workshop, it's a barren wasteland in terms of high-effort content. There are a few quality of life mods, things that add a little extra flavour, cultural unit packs, a few techs here or there. One half-baked Game of Thrones mod for Civ V.

None of it holds a candle to Civ IV. There are true total conversions there - stuff like Realism Invictus, History Rewritten and the Fall From Heaven family that stripped out and replaced every unit and technology along with half the game's mechanics in a thoughtful and intriguing way. And then there's the final boss of bloat, Caveman2Cosmos! They put in buildable aquariums, Cislunar O'Neill Cylinders and Tamed Llamas into a 4X strategy game that's really just supposed to be about 6,000 years of history on Earth, not hunting prehistoric animals or going to the Big Bang to start the universe. It's basically unplayable in its slowness and complexity yet it still inspires awe in that real people thought a game was so good that it needed all this extra stuff. Better that a game entrance and mystify the somewhat-autistic people who make these works for free than mildly entertain the great masses of the people, those of us who'll never make high-effort mods.

Anyway, that's my two cents on soulfulness in video games.

Wow I remember Capitalism from its release in the 90s. I remember the first time I figured out you could make far more money by owning all the copper and capturing the value of the high tech sector rather than racing up the research and development to make bleeding edge computing and electrical products.

I had no idea they had a version after capitalism 2, I'll have to take a look.

Note that Capitalism Lab does have always-online DRM, while Capitalism 2 is available DRM-free.

I'm drunk and didn't read half of this. Not that it will stop me from making a comment..

Civ 4 is indeed the big boy pinnacle of the Civ series. I spent many a shift reading Sulla's comments on the civfantatics forums over 15 years ago. The consolisation of games continues its steady march, crushing the thinking man's games under it's treads.

The slow fall of Civ games as the standard-bearer of big picture strategy gaming of course also tracks the ascent of the Paradox map fillers as the inheritor of the same mantle.

Sulla's wise words are neatly compiled here for a final, damning condemnation of what went wrong: https://sullla.com/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html

He's right on many things, but I'm not sure I agree with him on the penalty point. At least for me, Civ4 games always go through the same trajectory: Early game is boring( unless I play a fantasy mod where exploring is actually dangerous & interesting) because nothing much is happening. Mid game I have the best time because there is enough to do every turn but still almost every decision matters. Late game is just tedious because I'm spamming cities, buildings, units, etc. Every mouse click is on its own unimportant, but I still have to do it because collectively it matters, and without penalties it's actually mostly optimal.

Penalties, if done right, minimize this problem: Spamming isn't optimal anymore since you only want to do it if the benefits are greater than the penalties. As he points out himself, city maintenance from civ4 was a great way of limiting city spam without removing it, and what's that if not a penalty? Likewise, "I'm penalized for something good" isn't a good argument either imo; Ideally you want several different viable paths, and without penalties you end up with boring obvious plays way too often. I like when I have to make a situation-specific call for every city whether it's worth it to connect it (yet), and this decision comes up different for different cities. Without a penalty, it's just "of course I do".

I mean, that sounds fine. The game opening up and offering more options in the midgame is natural to a well-designed game - as is the tedium of the endgame as you steamroll towards victory. Note that this is the same trajectory as the queen of games, Chess. You begin with limited options, and usually perform one of a few standard openings. The interaction between the players causes the game to develop into something complex and unique. But as the board empties, freedom of action narrows once more, until eventually one player is railroaded into defeat or surrender.

Did you know that there is a rally point function and 'all cities build this in queue' function? Alt-click cities bar to select all cities, click what you want them to build and right click a tile for them to rally there. Once I discovered this late-game with 20-30 cities became much more enjoyable.

I like early game because I aim to start a war by turn 75 and conquer a civilization. Or sometimes I'm trying to grab wonders and eco up really quickly.

City maintenance can be quite oppressive early on, when I've just conquered another civ. But I suppose it has to be to stop me snowballing incredibly quickly, taking another couple of civs. If things have investment costs to balance the rewards, that's alright. It's generally good to have more cities in 4, albeit they take time before they pay off their investment. But in 5 it's suboptimal to have more than 4 cities, as I understand it, due to Tradition's bonuses. Tall play dominates.

I think Sulla is unhappy about how V isn't so much about investment costs as fixed or proportionate costs. Cities make each tech or social policy more expensive in perpetuity, there are going to be many cities that can never pay off their science/culture debt. In addition to mere opportunity cost you get endless costs.

Did you know that there is a rally point function and 'all cities build this in queue' function? Alt-click cities bar to select all cities, click what you want them to build and right click a tile for them to rally there. Once I discovered this late-game with 20-30 cities became much more enjoyable.

Yes, although I admittedly barely use it. Maybe I'm a bit too much of a perfectionist, so I tend to micromanage every city. Could be that I need to put more work into optimizing the ratio of suboptimality vs micromanaging tediousness more.

I like early game because I aim to start a war by turn 75 and conquer a civilization. Or sometimes I'm trying to grab wonders and eco up really quickly.

You still frequently click through like 30 turns with nothing happening except exploration though, and I don't like the ratio of unit speed vs tech advance in the faster modes.

City maintenance can be quite oppressive early on, when I've just conquered another civ. But I suppose it has to be to stop me snowballing incredibly quickly, taking another couple of civs. If things have investment costs to balance the rewards, that's alright. It's generally good to have more cities in 4, albeit they take time before they pay off their investment. But in 5 it's suboptimal to have more than 4 cities, as I understand it, due to Tradition's bonuses. Tall play dominates.

I think Sulla is unhappy about how V isn't so much about investment costs as fixed or proportionate costs. Cities make each tech or social policy more expensive in perpetuity, there are going to be many cities that can never pay off their science/culture debt. In addition to mere opportunity cost you get endless costs.

Maybe it changed, but Sulla in that rant is complaining about the opposite? According to him, spamming cities in 5 is always strictly optimal since happiness doesn't scale appropriately - you only need to make sure that they don't grow too much, and only have a limited number of big cities. But smaller cities are always worth it, the opposite of Civ4.

In general though, I've increasingly grown somewhat disillusioned with 4X games. Imo the real reason why empires had a limited size historically is the limitations of army movement speed and communication speed, so that past a certain distance from the capital any state was de-facto independently managed, even if officially subordinated. From there, true independence often wasn't a large step anymore, and trying to micromanage at a distance leads to so much dysfunctionality that it speeds up the process if anything. Even worse, Emperors of large empires may have a decently sized crownland that they personally manage but are really mostly wrangling a bunch of subordinates. If you don't do that appropriately, or you are just plain unlucky with a bunch of spoiled brat troublemaker heirs of your originally competent subordinates, everything falls apart fast. Happiness, upkeep etc. increasingly seem to me like extremely stupid, gamey workarounds to the problem, and as a result large empires are always either way too stable in games, or the mechanics for instability also feel random and gamey. Only CK at least attempts to simulate internal politics. But the AI isn't really there yet to consistently make games fun that force you to set up subordinates. CK is fun for a few runs until you understand the blind spots of the AI, and then it also increasingly feels silly.

A US appeals court has ruled that, if a copyrighted standards document (ASTM, ASHRAE, NFPA, APA, etc.) is incorporated by reference into a law, then it is legal to post a DRM-free copy of that document online.

This is hilarious, I can't wait to tell my boss

Just make sure you can cite the specific law that incorporates the specific standard by reference.

Also, you need to delete from your uploaded copy any trademarked logos (not names, just logos) of the organization that issued the standard. Use of the logos is not covered by fair use.

What are the implications of this ruling? I use the NFPA every day.

Presumably, you will be able to download NFPA standards that are part of the law for free from somewhere (such as Public.Resource.Org), rather than having to pay for a paper copy or a DRM-laden electronic subscription. But this ruling does not cover standards that are not part of the law. So you'll have to check the law to see whether or not the particular standards that you use are incorporated by reference.

Interesting.

The NFPA used to publish a PDF version of the NEC that you could purchase. They stopped publishing it after the 2017 code because people were sharing it and distributing it without permission. So now, if you want to access an electronic version, you have to pay to access it on the NFPA website. It’s not nearly as user friendly as the 2017 PDF version but I understand why they made that decision. They were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars via pirating/unauthorized sharing.

With that said, it would be awesome to get another PDF version of the 2023 NEC. Interested to see how this lawsuit changes things.

They were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars via pirating/unauthorized sharing.

It appears that no such evidence was offered in this particular lawsuit.

Fourteen years have elapsed since Defendant first began posting Plaintiffs’ standards. And four years have elapsed since Plaintiffs’ expert opined that Defendant’s activities “would” threaten the market for Plaintiffs’ products. Now, aided by the passage of time, the court is less deferential to conclusory opinions that market harm “is real” but “difficult to measure”. One can reasonably expect that if over the last four years market harm was occurring, or was likely to occur, Plaintiffs could provide economic data and analysis showing that to be the case. For example, Plaintiffs could have offered a side-by-side comparison of sales figures for standards that have and have not been reposted on Defendant’s site to demonstrate the market impact of Defendant’s postings. They could have provided testimony from former customers who stopped purchasing Plaintiffs’ standards because they are available for download on Defendant’s website. The fact that they do not provide any quantifiable evidence, and instead rely on conclusory assertions and speculation long after Defendant first began posting the standards, is telling.

 

Ultimately, the court finds that “the evidence is such that a reasonable jury could not return a verdict for” Plaintiffs that Defendant’s actions have caused, or likely will cause, market harm with regards to the specific standards at issue. Accordingly, this factor supports Defendant’s fair use defense for each of the 217 standards at issue.

I need a co-op game to play with my son.

My son has finally started gaming. He's always loved watching Dead Cells gameplay videos and is having an absolute blast now running and jumping through the levels himself. The combat is too complex for him, but he's still enjoying the game a lot. While I enjoy the resulting peace and quiet myself, I kinda want to play together with him, especially since he's not good at other forms of play.

So, I'm looking for a casual 2D platformer with good graphics that supports co-op play. I have never played anything other than single player, so I have no idea if some game like that even exists.

Yoshi's Crafted World has a great co-op mode. My son and I played it a lot when he was around 4, and he then moved onto just playing by himself. There are also good Kirby co-op games, like Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Basically, a Nintendo Switch is going to get you pretty far.

Oh yeah, and if you like crafted world definitely check out Kirby's epic yarn. Like crafted world, epic yarn is a fantastic platformer even if you don't like outrageous cuteness everywhere - in both games the controls are almost as tight as super meat boy, the level design is constantly surprising without being jarring and the gimmicks stay fresh from start to finish. Depending on how you define a game though, epic yarn might fall short - there's no real fail state.

Try Elden Ring

Yeah, right, or Battletoads.

character development > having fun

My friend's 5 year old loved TMNT:Shredder's Revenge, and it's nostalgic for millennials.

Thanks, I'll try it. I've never been a fan of beat-'em-ups, but perhaps it might work.

Epic Megagames’ Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Party Mode. Gameplay video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=C8oXr-lsrqs

Mario! Galaxy or Odyssey - both have co-op, and in both games it was designed for precisely your situation. The second player isn't another mario or luigi, instead they play a little sidekick guy - a star in galaxy and a hat in odyssey. Their character can't die, but they can collect things, control the camera and attack monsters. So you start off with you playing as mario and your lad playing as the hat, and once he's gotten the hang of playing switch roles, so you can help him out when he's having trouble. The Lego games are good to play with kids too, they are also quite forgiving.

Oh, this does sound just like what we need, thank you! I'll try them out.

I'm usually not big on platformers.

But Terraria, was a 2D co-op game I loved. It's a bit of a mix of a platformer, survival game, crafting game, builder, tower defense, and RPG.

Thanks for the suggestiion, I also loved Terraria and played through it several times, but it's too complex mechanically and probably also too simplistic graphically for my son.

Seconding Trine. That game is basically made for coop.

Is it worth skipping Trine 1? My youngest kid loves that one, but her siblings don't, so she rarely gets to play. Is Trine 2 enough of an upgrade that non fans of the first might enjoy it?

I feel fairly confident that the exact game you are looking for is Rampage Knights - it's an absolute blast in co-op, with great humor and fairly simple combat that retains all the great roguelike elements of Dead Cells.

Another strong candidate in the vein you describe is Enter the Gungeon. Again, the co-op here has everything you're looking for, but I will note that camera management is a bit more of a pain point than in a game like Dead Cells or Rampage Knights because of the top-down viewpoint.

You can't go wrong with either of these games, and if your son likes Dead Cells, he'll love these too.

Pushing back a bit on Gungeon. I've been playing it a lot with my fiance and although we have a lot of fun, in some ways it's actually more difficult than single player (for me) because she's not very good, which means she dies a lot. This means she spends a decent amount of time as a ghost and not a normal player, and also the way to resurrect a dead ally is by using a chest. Although it doesn't cost a key, it also uses up the chest so you don't get a weapon from it, meaning by the late game after she's died and been resurrected 4-5 times we are significantly underpowered.

OP does not specify the precise age of his son, but it's implied to be young, so I suspect the kid would spend the majority of time as a ghost given the difficult gameplay. There are easier co-op games out there.

Very fair point, Gungeon might be a bit high up the difficulty ladder for a child.

Thanks, I'll try Rampage Knights.

Isn't that more of a metroidvania? Terraria maybe? It's more minecrafty, not a lot of coop metroidvania though.

Mario is more platformer, the new one coming to switch soon, wonder? is co op iirc. Maybe Bread and Fred for heavy emphasis on the platforming and co op elements.

New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe

I'd strongly second the New Super Mario Bros series, but with the warning that it's easy for players to get in each others' way, so you always want at least one of the (up to 4!) players to be both skilled enough to compensate for this and patient enough to put up with it. If not? Penny Arcade called the multiplayer "Divorce Mode". I could play with my kids for years before they could play with just each other without fighting over who messed up whom.

What's the stupidest joke you shouldn't find funny but always do?

For me, it's the "made you flinch!". It's funny to do and even more amusing to see done in third person. It's even sometimes funny when done to you.

The offer handshake then adjust hair is a good second contender. But there's more of an art to it. It works best when you prank some guy, then get him a bit heated, offer to reconcile with a handshake only to hit him with a last-second juke.

I feel like if I could just do the whole fake lunge and then "ha made you flinch!" as an adult and then just laugh it off, life would be a lot less dull.

I have a long-time running joke with my wife where I say something along the line of "she seems a bit grumpy today" seemingly referring to our daughter, then I wait for my wife to agree to follow it up with " and <daughter's name> also, I guess" (If people don't get the joke in this written form, the point is that I actually was talking about my wife in the first sentence, so I made her agree to being grumpy by being deliberatly obtuse). My wife never can decide between being furious and amused herself, and I just never grow tired of it either because both are extremely in-tune with each other (if one is grumpy, so is the other; if one is tired, so is the other, etc.) so it just fits so well all the time.

My favourite dumb joke is deliberately shitty accents or mimicry. The more confident the set up the better.

<Word ending in -er>?! I barely know her!

I have a great knock-knock joke. You’ve got to start.

Whose there?

Lol you lunatic, that's not what he meant! He meant you have to ask 'You've got to start who?'

Have friends over for dinner, sit everyone down around the table to eat, tell everyone we need to say grace first (being secular people, they look around confused), ask everyone to hold hands, then say "grace!"

(Said without any pauses)

What's the hardest part about telling a joke timing.

Or with an extremely long pause. Best version of this is to freeze your face and let the pause hang until the person starts thinks your having a stroke or something then hit ‘em with it.

That or just kind of walk away and start doing something else then say the punchline at a distance.

Really stupid, really funny.

I'm going to do this one to my girlfriend right now

Due to lack of response, I’m going to assume that she rightfully killed you.

The episode of A bit of Fry and Laurie with Paul Eddington in it does this bit really well. I'd link it but you have to watch the whole episode (series 2 ep 5 if you're interested.)

Not sure if this counts but I find the Colonel Toad meme format amusing for no discernible reason.

Farts into momentary conversation lulls.

Someone doing the no traction foot slide on ice (and not falling).

I read that Zuozhuan review on ACX and loved it, but my excitement plummeted after conducting more research. Seems like it’s all about successions and family drama and massive battles. What I really want is an exploration of a society in decay with a nuanced exploration of morality. What do you recommend? I’d lean towards nonfiction that places its focus on culture, economy, and social patterns rather than aristocratic affairs. Ideally a book that’s been widely studied, just like the Zuozhuan.

I think there are histories by Tacitus and Cicero was a political figure during the fall of the Roman Republic. It’s obviously not a single book, but I would imagine that reading both would give something like that hist.

I've lived an entirely straightlaced life and have zero interest even in marijuana. I'm not interested in drugs per se. What I am interested in is the apparently mind-opening power of psychedelics. Aldous Huxley's essay "The Doors to Perception" has once again made me curious. For those of you who have experimented with mescaline or whatever else, have these experiences changed you deeply and permanently? Would even taking small amounts grant you clarity or creativity without some terrible drawbacks?

I think of Carl Jung's advice, to "beware of unearned wisdom," and I think that expresses a healthy conservatism about these things. But then again, millions of people have used caffeine and nicotine both recreationally or for work. People now use marijuana for medicine. So why not use psychedelics for whatever positive effects they bring? I also think of people having bad trips or frying their brains. My mother grew up in the 70s and recalls a few people who made themselves permanently insane through some wacky experiments or other. I think ultimately it's better to leave well enough alone, but I'd like to hear different views.

Scott wrote an interesting post about heavy psychedelic use was making people weird https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ In addition to the sites own comments, it was discussed on HackerNews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386406

Notice the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402462 about the cozy-weird.

I've maintained an interest in the topic, despite my own, youthful dalliance being forty years ago. So I read https://old.reddit.com/r/RationalPsychonaut/ Perhaps I still dream of opening the doors of perception and ripping away the veil of illusion to see reality. But I notice that today's psychonauts have little success. I had no success myself last century and my friends insisted that psychedelics were just for fun; there were no deep truths to be discovered that way. More troubling is the posts asking for help to recover from the lingering after effects of bad trips. Such posts meet with sympathy, but little practical help. There are rather too many for my taste, and problems seem to arise somewhat at random. Yes, heroic doses often lead to trouble, but small doses are not entirely safe. And having tasted the forbidden fruit, the curious often return for a larger bite, and bite off more than they can chew. Had I read those anecdotes as a young man, they would have put me off experimenting.

I want to return to the concept of the cozy-weird. I don't want my mind opened so that I can see the out-there-weird. I've no faith in the value of the out-there-weird. But I do want to open my mind so that I can look at the cozy-weird and see the weirdness of it. I doubt that psychedelics help. One route is to study statistics and logic and spot pervasive bad reasoning; that provides loose threats to pull on, unraveling the veil of illusion and exposing the weirdness behind the ordinary. Another route is Buddhist meditation practices. Cultivate noticing ones emotional responses and how the defense mechanisms of the mind keep you socially safe by not letting you see the weirdness of the cozy-weird. I think that there is more than enough weirdness in the cozy-weird to let you escape from your straightlaced life. There is no need to go down the route of psychedelics and out-there-weirdness.

I swear by magic mushrooms for anyone struggling with depression or other persistent emotional problems. It's very much the "have you tried turning it off and on again?" solution.

I've done LSD. It was a curious experience, put me in an unusual mindset - I somehow got the impression that, as dedicated Christians say, God has a plan. It felt like a sense of peace, like there was nothing to worry about, nothing to fear, because everything was already going to happen in accordance with the plan of a force much more powerful than any of us. But that's pretty much it though, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary at all or feel compelled to do anything I wouldn't otherwise do.

My take is that it can be a fun experience if you're open to and interested in that sort of thing. But I'm highly skeptical that it's likely to cause any long-term change in your personality, positive or negative.

I have also lived an entirely straightlaced life. I had the opportunity to take a mild psychedelic in a safe environment and took advantage of it: ketamine. People say ketamine is non-addictive (like all psychedelics I guess) and I have to agree. It was a good experience, and I'm glad I did it, but I don't exactly have an urge to go out and have that experience again. It was what it was.

I don't really have any advice other than "I, a straightlaced square, took a not-too-strong-but-strong-enough dose of ketamine in a safe environment, had an experience I consider valuable, and didn't come out of it a loon." I'm pretty much the same person I was. I don't know if that's reassuring, or means that there wasn't any point to it.

Universal Love…

I had a friend who described their experience on LSD rather pessimistically. If you’re going to do this, you probably shouldn’t be pessimistic. But a false sense of profundity doesn’t seem very appealing. The prospect that after tripping, it would seem appealing, or even critical, life-changingly important? That’s chilling.

Depends drastically on your mindset. If you're already in an incredibly negative space and feel stuck with no way out, psychedelics can be the best thing that has ever happened to you. That's my own experience, and the experience of many friends who've also dabbled.

The hallucination you feel on Acid/LSD can, for some people, feel like a transcendent or spiritual experience. There is a reason psychedelics and all psychoactive substances have a long religious history.

But it is, sadly, all bullshit - at least in one way. You’re not getting an experience of the true, transcendent nature of the universe, whatever that is, you’re not stepping outside yourself, your brain is just generating a slightly different story, the input sequence to your neural network is subject to a new modifier, a dialed-up parameter, whatever you want to call it. That might be meaningful, it might even afford you some kind of genuine self-reflection (it has not in my experience) that could be of use to you, but is it ‘real’? That depends on how you see it.

I think for a lot of people regular psychoactive substance use, where it changes their life “for the better” (something usually asserted only by them) and is not done directly for eg. pain relief, acts as a placebo that allows them to undergo the work of personal transformation without the self-consciousness that doing so sober can involve. They give themselves permission to grow.

The other stuff is chemical. You can take MDMA with a new girlfriend or boyfriend, talk for 6 hours and feel like you’ve been in deep love with them for years, but again, how real could that ever be?

acts as a placebo that allows them to undergo the work of personal transformation without the self-consciousness that doing so sober can involve. They give themselves permission to grow.

It's interesting calling it a placebo. To my mind it's less a placebo, and more proof that personal transformation can happen, and is directly experiencable/achievable. In this day and age of 'nobody ever changes' that can be invaluable.

The other stuff is chemical. You can take MDMA with a new girlfriend or boyfriend, talk for 6 hours and feel like you’ve been in deep love with them for years, but again, how real could that ever be?

How real is 'deep love for years'? We have such a poor understanding of love, our culture barely even discusses it outside of a purely facile sense. The ancients believed that in the right circumstances you could fall in love with someone on the spot - but only a certain type of love.

The notion of love is far more complicated and multifaceted than we give it credit for. Is the type of love engendered by MDMA the exact same as the type of love between an old married couple? Probably not.

That being said, is it still a valid and meaningful type of love? Absolutely.

More importantly - can it lead to a deeper love for the other person, or even yourself? It's hard to say but results seem promising.

Even if you think it's all bullshit, is there not some deep value in experiencing these powerful and beautiful states? What if someone has never felt it before, don't they deserve it?

I did mdma with my girlfriend early on in our relationship and it was pretty great. It’s too easy to spend years with someone falling into a routine and putting a lid on risky and vulnerable topics. Sometimes drugs are an actually very effective way to connect deeply with someone.

As KranK (RIP) used to say, taking drugs is like putting on shit-smeared glasses. You'll definitely look at the world differently, but will you learn anything new about it? When a man comes up with stuff like Vangers and Perimeter without resorting to psychoactive substances, I am inclined to trust his advice that you don't need drugs.

For those of you who have experimented with mescaline or whatever else, have these experiences changed you deeply and permanently? Would even taking small amounts grant you clarity or creativity without some terrible drawbacks?

Yes and yes. I'd recommend reading How to Change your Mind to get a better idea of the history and how these substances operate.

I would echo Jung's warning, and make sure you go into the psychedelic experience with the right mindset. You can absolutely 'see God' or 'experience the divine' while on these substances, but the conclusions you make about your experience are often wrong, and less important than the experience itself.

A good frame to think about psychedelics is that they increase the randomness or chaos of your mental states. This can be excellent if you are 'stuck' in a mindset that you do not like, such as depression or anxiety, and desperately need a new perspective. The most positive thing about the experience lies in the fact that these drugs can show you what it feels like to see the world in a new way.

For instance, if you've always been depressed, you can get a brief glimpse of what it's like to see the world without the grey cloud hanging over you. It won't fix your depression automatically, but it can give you hope and motivation to change your own mental state, and periodically help you course correct.

As someone who has taken his share of heroic doses, as well as microdosed for years on end, I have mixed feelings about the whole experience. I went into the experience of psychedelic use as an atheist, and came out having a suspicion that there may be a karmic cycle of birth and rebirth; also that there may be a transcendent cosmic consciousness from which we all come and all return to. There is a horror in having this suspicion that I may be reborn again, that all of my attachments to my family, friends and self will be ripped from my consciousness and I will be left alone, with nothing before going through the whole cycle again. There is also a horror in suspecting that since the cosmic consciousness that we all may stem from is indistinguishable from ourselves that I may eventually experience all the suffering in the universe. There were times while using when I had an awareness of the Earth as an organic entity and felt a sense of terror at all the suffering and destruction that occurred within this entity. The shift in perspective that I experienced when having used also made me more aware of the transience of all things and sorrowful in their passing. Psychedelics can amplify horrors that you scarcely knew to exist and then you cannot un-forget them.

All that being said, they have improved my life considerably. They (paired with therapy) helped me overcome substance abuse. They helped me overcome self-alienation and self-hatred and develop self-compassion. But the experience isn't without its downsides, and shouldn't be entered into lightly.

=====

EDIT: One more thing, I know that the Myers-Briggs is just astrology for boys, but before the whole psychedelics/therapy thing I was invariably an INTP, and the years since I always test as an INFP.

There is a horror in having this suspicion that I may be reborn again, that all of my attachments to my family, friends and self will be ripped from my consciousness and I will be left alone, with nothing before going through the whole cycle again.

Agreed. To me the entire Buddhist/Hindu cosmology is profoundly horrific when you get right down to the roots. Most people who subscribe to these beliefs seem to not consider them too deeply, at least in the West.

When you really consider what 'no attachments' means - you're looking at dropping all the love for your friends, family, etc. Not caring about a single other human being.

Sure Buddhist monks give all sorts of rhetorical flourishes to deny this dark truth, but I don't buy it. At the end of the day Buddhism is a profoundly anti-social philosophy, as far as I'm concerned. It also promotes radical selfishness in it's sanitized form that many western rationalists love. Gives them license and a 'spiritual' presence while being utterly narcissistic nihilists.

Had you had any exposure to Buddhist ideas beforehand?

Very much so. A precocious interest during my teen years, a few courses in undergrad, and continued curiosity afterward. However, after I started using psychedelics I had a appreciation of how the Dharmic religions and Taoism may all be reactions to the same transcendent experience.

Were you able to achieve those experiences via meditation?

Isn't Sufficient Velocity the science fiction version of Resetera? Didn't they schism from the spaceballs forum over not being radical enough?

Sufficient Velocity was created because moderation on Spacebattles wasn't enough.

I heard they schismed over some so-dull-its-totally-unmemorable dispute over modding. Much prefer 4chan modding drama which is at least exciting.

Sufficient Velocity

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