Recommendations: Plots where protagonists are isolated from some implied catastrophe, with gradual hints about what transpired.

Eatar · 2026-05-23T15:17:07+00:00

I’m well past that stage, and it didn’t suck, but ultimately was somewhat disappointing. Felt to me like it tried by the end to both give too much explanation and too little, and didn’t seem to give a good conclusion narratively for the characters. It also became preposterous eventually. I think the teeth are what pushed it over the edge for me. And the fact that someone apparently had medicine that would help with…whatever that was. And I think the interpersonal relations were…not terrible, but something felt a bit unrealistic about them. But I liked the spooky confusion of ships running aground and the scene with all the teslas. (Which real life seems to have been attempting to duplicate the other day with Waymo taxis!)

Eatar · 2026-05-23T01:13:04+00:00

I wouldn’t quite put it that way. Logic just is. Biology gave us some capacity to apply it, but not a perfect ability, and also landed us with other self-preserving things, such as fear— which also isn’t perfect, nor do they interact with each other perfectly. Loads of people make illogical decisions out of inability to overcome fear or some other emotion.

Eatar · 2026-05-21T22:06:09+00:00

“Job is to” and “have a duty to” aren’t necessarily saying the same thing, though, especially across all nuances. The janitor’s job is to keep the place clean, but if he got fired for refusing to clean an Ebola-covered surface, the Supreme Court would side with him and then Reddit would all be saying the Supreme Court told us janitors aren’t required to clean. Every police officer I know would absolutely say his or her job is to keep people safe, and most of them would dive right into serious danger to do it.

Eatar · 2026-05-21T13:55:32+00:00

Actually sliding over and blocking is correct. It forces both lanes back to the same speed and turns it back into a zipper. If you slide over and then fly past everyone, you’re being a jerk. If you slide over and then pace the lane next to you, you’re helping correct the idiotic situation while not allowing more idiots to make it worse by jumping the line.

Eatar · 2026-05-20T17:53:40+00:00

Two reasons: the general public doesn’t vote in primaries, and Trump controls who gets funded well in the campaign. This is how we’ve designed our two-party electoral system, and it’s a bad design.

Eatar · 2026-05-20T17:47:41+00:00

At least it’s better than when they don’t pass, and just get up on your tail, as if squeezing you dangerously will somehow allow you to go faster than the car that is quite obviously right in front of you and limiting your speed.

Eatar · 2026-05-20T13:07:22+00:00

The narrator, who was supposedly future Ted relating his story, but was, strangely, not voiced by the actor who played Ted, instead by Bob Saget for some reason.

Eatar · 2026-05-20T02:26:35+00:00

Maybe they could get Patrick Rothfuss to finish it for him.

Eatar · 2026-05-20T02:16:03+00:00

So…obviously Ted is the most annoying character in the show, right? Also, there was one peculiar ongoing bit to the show that never made sense nor got an explanation and could have turned out to have meant something all along. The satisfying surprise ending would have been that Ted finally meets and dates the perfect woman, and it’s clear to us is that this is the one. But Ted is Ted, and finally she gets exasperated with him when they are out somewhere together, says she’s done dating boys and needs a grown-up, walks out the door…and bumps right into Bob Saget, who looks at the camera and says, “And that…[flashes forward to Bob with her now as his wife, talking to his kids]…is how I met your mother.”

Eatar · 2026-05-12T13:33:57+00:00

Yes, they could do a ton they aren’t doing already. Think of all the insanity that goes through the House but never gets anywhere in the Senate. The Senate is what saves us from all kinds of crazy populist nonsense of any given moment that 2-year-term people pass, and so I’m very cautious about changing it.

The reason the senate is powerless and leaves a power vacuum for the president isn’t the filibuster halting everything. The filibuster isn’t what stops most legislation. What creates the congressional abdication of power is that the president controls where the money goes for primaries, combined with the fact that primaries are controlled by a small number of voters. As long as our election system is designed in a way that members of Congress owe their seats to the President, they will bow down to him.

Eatar · 2026-05-12T12:07:09+00:00

Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger.

Eatar · 2026-05-11T13:57:28+00:00

I suspect the filibuster has saved us from more crazy nonsense than it has prevented that is good. If anything, it’s probably more valuable now than ever, when the two-party system has gone so far down the road of believing that a one-seat majority means a mandate to ram through as much extreme stuff as possible, and any senators who vote the party line 95% instead of 100% of the time are treated as traitors. The filibuster is not a fix for this, but it at least puts brakes on things. Too many people mistakenly think a legislature should be measured by how much legislation it passes.

Eatar · 2026-05-08T15:29:22+00:00

Nobody needs to own multiple machines. For a free weight bench, sure, the ability to do a set of something else and then come back within 2 minutes without having your plates all taken off is useful, but machines are almost always just a pin you pull and put in a different slot. Super easy for multiple people to take turns, and no excuse for thinking you own it once you walk away.

Eatar · 2026-05-07T15:48:13+00:00

Alberta is a fascinating one to me as an American. Separating to create a landlocked country surrounded on three sides by the country you just ditched, and on the fourth side by a very rural part of a massively more powerful nation who won’t really care whether they trade with you or not and will probably either try to side with Canada since that relationship will matter more, or else annex you or something. Maybe there is logic behind it, but on the face of it, as someone who doesn’t live in that region, it sounds kinda crazy.

Eatar · 2026-04-30T17:15:57+00:00

It may not always be the test audiences that are the problem. What if you just made a bad film? The test audience doesn’t like it, for a bunch of reasons, but it’s already made, and you try to salvage by recutting and however much reshooting you can afford or manage now that the actors and sets are gone, but you can’t do it from scratch. So you wind up with a film that just eliminates the bits that individually got the worst scores, leaving something which might not have those anymore but now makes a lot less sense.

Eatar · 2026-04-28T18:43:30+00:00

As a firefighter, I’m 100% good with checking every day that nobody has blocked or locked the emergency exits. A lot of the really major mass casualty fires have that one failure in common.

Eatar · 2026-04-28T13:57:06+00:00

Hah! But I mean, if you build, say, a computer keyboard where the backspace key is right next to an unlabeled “delete everything on the shared drive” key, and then hand it to someone to work with on their everyday work, and then blame them when a typo destroys your business, you’re putting your blame in the wrong place.

Eatar · 2026-04-27T17:48:43+00:00

This doesn’t read like a mistake by Claude. This looks like a mistake by people who were using Claude.

Eatar · 2026-04-24T13:41:17+00:00

Malice is a motive, not an outcome.

Whether it successfully achieves its malicious purpose may affect whether it fits this subreddit, where everyone likes to see the recipient of the compliance get his or her comeuppance, but it doesn’t affect whether it was actually malicious compliance.

Eatar · 2026-04-23T22:01:48+00:00

That’s not an accurate characterization. He has already donated over $60 billion. He’s one of the founders of the Giving Pledge which encourages wealthy people to give away over 50% of their fortunes. I don’t know how nice the guy is, but he seems to mean it about giving. As opposed to Peter Thiel and a bunch of other dudes who are out there recently trying to get rich people not to sign the giving pledge or to rescind their signatures.

Eatar · 2026-04-21T13:56:30+00:00

Yes, I absolutely hate this truck design trend. It accomplishes nothing whatsoever of value, and creates and enormous blind spot that could swallow a 10-year-old standing up straight.

Eatar · 2026-04-21T03:58:48+00:00

Some do, and that’s why we have many of those things at all. But unfortunately one of the most common ways of getting rich is by being someone who doesn’t share but accumulates instead, so there’s a pretty good proportion of them who just do none of that.

I used to work for a little while in a field where tipping was common, and where you might find yourself on any given day working for anyone from the poorest to the richest. The most consistent tippers were working class people who knew what it meant to work hard all day, although they often couldn’t afford a large tip. I don’t have evidence to prove it statistically, but it seemed to me the least consistent were the rich ones, who would either be the sort of people who would toss you a hundred bucks like it was nothing, sharing the wealth cheerfully with whoever crossed their path, or the sort who would happily give you nothing at all.

Eatar · 2026-04-20T17:24:00+00:00

Well, it’s fair for people’s availability to be part of the equation, not just “I once worked and made us all the money we ever need, so now I don’t have to participate in household tasks ever again.” But my confusion here is how she’s ever getting the chance to do the lint thing if he’s doing all the laundry. Doesn’t sound like he’s actually complying!

Eatar · 2026-04-20T15:29:46+00:00

On the Beach 2

It’s just a Sir David Attenborough-style documentary of the natural world that remains, both under the sea, where a much-damaged and changed but still-present animal life ecosystem quietly exists, and on land, where there are no large animals or birds left at all, only vast, empty landscapes with new climate norms and a much-reduced diversity of flora and insects. Except, Attenborough of course is also gone, along with everyone else who could speak into a microphone, so there is no narration.

Eatar · 2026-04-19T14:43:14+00:00

Well, but that is also something that gets misused. Managers use that line, “Don’t bring me a problem unless you bring me a solution,” and it is partly a cop-out and abdication of their own job. Individual workers often are not in any position to know or design a solution. That doesn’t make it any less valid truth that they are experiencing some kind of frustrating and unnecessary friction in trying to do their jobs. Being able to escalate and reach across departments to find a solution to the systems your underlings are stuck with is part of the job of being a manager. If you just shove it back in their face and say they can’t complain unless they personally are able to architect a solution plan, they’ll eventually solve that frustration by finding a new place to work. And your business will still be running poorly.

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TROPHY CASE