Bookpile: Dangerous Jokes

Lawful Unfunny dept.

19 May 2026

I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.
—Bukowski

Be warned that this is a so-called crossover book, meaning it's an academic treatise that was retrofitted to have slightly broader appeal. In this case, the concession to pop-science is made by way of a three-page afterword of allegedly practical advice which won't tell anyone anything they didn't already know, and the 161 pages preceding it are distinctly unfunny. Offensive jokes are not quoted directly, thereby ensuring that the discussion will be remote from the daily conversations which are supposed to be the book's primary subject (this is not a theory of stand-up comedy, thankfully). Instead, Horisk mostly busies herself with rearranging the deck chairs of Seventies theory and taking ethical advice from the NYT while the West is merrily amusing itself to death. It's hard to believe that this book was published three whole years after the writing was spraypainted on the wall in 2021, though that is probably a sign of just how slowly her much-vaunted common ground shifts.

Much like how the concept of a carbon footprint shunted the blame onto the individual consumer for not Buying Green™ we here seem to be just one step from the introduction of bigotry offsets. As a good consumer solipsist, Horisk can only see the personal guilt that might be incurred by a single listener in the audience of a bigoted joke, neglecting that jokes are usually told in a crowd. Questions of how they might bolster in-group cohesion are largely relegated to footnotes, and so we are left with an etiquette manual for fine dining at a time when it might have been more prudent to point to where the lifeboats are.

The danger mentioned in the title seems to be chiefly the risk of getting sued. Court cases referenced include Moore v. Kuka Welding Systems 1999, Henderson v. Irving Materials Inc. 2004, Witt v. Roadway Express 1998, Smith v. Northwest Financial Acceptance, Inc. 1997, Baskerville v. Culligan International Co. 1995, Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc. 1998 (in which Scalia clarified his view on smacking buttocks: it's a sometimes-food) and Swinton v. Potomac Corporation 2001. Of particular interest is Swinton, where the jokester habitually carried a handgun and so could not be presumed to simply mean things in a non-intimidating way: this might suggest that humour depends in part on a temporary potential for self-abasement, which evaporates if there is a power imbalance. (That is, comedy requires going out on a limb.)

Engaging with someone suffering from rich kid syndrome, seemingly unable to even imagine that they could ever be brought low, has a uniquely annoying character to it. Paraphrasing Sartre, we might say that the wannabe brunchlord asserts his right to play, to soar in the realm of metaphor, far from the madding crowd with its cries of bread and rights abuses, while saddling his (unambitious) opponent with the duty to speak seriously; thereby branding him as someone dour who doesn't enjoy a good joke now and again and might not even be capable of advanced thinkery such as daydreams about how he's going to be rich tomorrow.

(The ethno-supremacist meanwhile attains his easy smugness simply by claiming membership in a dominant ethnic group, a simple way out with an obvious appeal to the sort of people who do not like to think too closely about much of anything. When cries of elitist are so common, it's perhaps an accusation that someone isn't playing the usual joking-game, or plays by different rules.)

Throughout this book, the watchword is politeness über alles, to play the game and never step outside the lines. The problem with this is that Be permissive with what you accept, and conservative in what you transmit may be a good principle for E-mail servers, but leads to squalor in real life; the conversational equivalent of being swamped with junk mail because it would be rude to stuff the postage-paid return envelopes.

Where did this whole fixation on inoffensiveness come from? A key insight had to be furnished by a PhD student: the dinner-table peace is all about not upsetting peepaw (which brings to mind the anecdote about someone's grandma who, upon hearing the title of the book Rethinking Economics, blurted out Is that even allowed?) In this vein, all-ages restrictions seem to be more for the benefit of the old than the young, so it should be no surprise that chasing the broadest possible target audience has resulted in a calcification of pop culture.

Grandparents of course are the product of previous cultural evolution; so a fixation on politeness emphasizes the steady-state, the outcome rather than the process. As it turns out, the most interesting aspects of humour may be instead its dynamic potential, something that is touched on briefly:

This indicates a semantic connection between thoughts of various different out-groups, minorities etc., but the point is not developed further.

The so-called practical advice for how to respond to bigoted jokes has clearly not been field-tested, serving up only the claudicant observation that there is no way to confront a bigot without risking your own likeability. This does identify an asymmetry to conversations that may explain why there are so many crybullies (tough guys who can dish it out but not take it): when there is a social cost to calling their bluff, but practically none to bluffing in the first place, most people simply won't bother and may in fact come to resent the few do-gooders who think they have the right to upset the social order.

Claire Horisk, Dangerous Jokes
204 pages, Oxford University Press 2024.
TASTING NOTES: Subpar paper quality for a hardcover edition.
Score: 46°

iSafety on the iInfo 'igh Seas

perverse incentives dept.

21 Apr 2026

Cars are the ultimate consumer good, yet oddly enough the company that attracts consumers like no other has trouble wrapping its design collective's head around it. After a decade of floundering, Apple (Computers) finally gave up on their highly-anticipated collaboration with VW (das Auto) to create a flying Apfelwagen or somesuch which, most importantly of all, had iPhone iNtegratiOn to save you from having to keep your eyes on th'i Tarmac. While the enthusiast press seems mostly to be blaming the failure of Project iTanic on the difficulty curve iNvolved in creating any kind of autonomous road vehicle, in fact the first warning signs became apparent much earlier.

At one point, the otherwise sunnily-disposed Californians had to consider some less–sunny-day scenarios —, what should happen in the event of a crash? True to form, Apple's engineers did not stoop to merely tinkering with the problem piecemæl but instead challenged the very paradigm of auto accidents: why don't we just make it so that none of the other cars on the road will ever collide with ours?

It really exposed the consumer solipsism that was always there, the same mindset that results in shaming text messages from non-Apple devices by painting their speech bubbles green (the preferred fix was to simply bully everyone into buying an iBauble; truly the free market at work). In this case, though, it couldn't be smoothed-over like when customers were unaware what 2G or bandwidth might be.

Now, this kind of engineering-by-wishcasting doesn't necessarily lead to absurd outcomes, as long as you're simply taking a well-understood commodity and making it more convenient. It is however emblematic of a school of thought that just goes ahead and assumes that everyone else will play nice. As often as not, the result is that the few who do bother to go along with it wind up footing the bill, or worse: sticking to the speed limit might actually make you a road hazard if you're the only one who does so.

Nowhere is this attitude more prevalent than in legislation, which often seems to presume uniform compliance and nearly always fails to predict the knock-on effects and auxiliary markets that it might create.

Age verification is a typical case of overly literal thinking about the internet: you get carded when you go to a club, so it makes sense that punters should get cyber-carded before they are 200 Okayed into the cyber-club. However, the lack of friction means that Online is less like a busy downtown and more like scattered island-states: if the next port over offers cheaper booze, you can simply lift anchor and be there before happy hour.

As with the astroturfed pushback to 5G networks, there seems to be a concerted effort to go back to a Seventies model of gatekeeping that appears more comforting at a glance to the fax-machine generation. The whole rigmarole also operates on the antiquated assumption that the internet is mostly a frivolous distraction and not an inexhaustable fount of knowledge — when people have to find answers or phone numbers in an emergency, they're going to reach for the sites they're familiar with and the apps they already have on their phone, and any kind of delay or unexpected malfunction could literally cost lives.

If by some miracle verification was made completely safe and reliable, it would remain a liability. Even though confirmation of 「above/below 18」 might be only a single bit, that extra information can be the vital dot in the bitmap that unmasks the user: if you can estimate when someone turned eighteen, you can carry out targeted phishing based on their star sign, and then you've got a customer for life.

When the internet is regulated with no concern for how network traffic actually looks like, the results are similar to the designers of the Apfelwagen hoping to sweep traffic accidents under the rug altogether, or efforts to ban the sale of alcohol in a place that has ready access to the sea. All the while, the excuses for carrying out this exercise in futility are more two-faced than ever, indulging in the familiar motte-and-bailey tactic: vulnerable women must be saved from self-employment within adult entertainment, children must be shielded from deviant sexualities and perhaps… corrected, even corporally so.

This is all especially problematic in the context of mobile devices since it provides yet another attack surface, perhaps common to most phones in an entire country, enabling the tracking of travel patterns. Previous experiments have shown that simply charting someone's movements throughout a day allows anyone to estimate with a fair degree of precision what they do (the people making guesses in the study were laymen, not experts). Hence, simple surveillance alone makes it easy to estimate wether someone is observant, a habitual pipe-smoker, frequents radical bookstores, or works at a clinic that performs abortions.

RGB gamerfeels

clear as liquid crystal dept.

15 Apr 2026

Purple patches from the silver screen

overdue for the rubbish heap dept.

21 March 2026

Back when the ill-considered field of ludology was trying to contrive an excuse for not putting down their Nintendo controllers they came up with something called process intensity. Its raison d'être seems to have been to act as an easy way to cordon off all that effeminate storytelling from Real Gaming™ so that the Serious Ludo ologists could get back to the all-important business of watching Superb Mario bounce around in their idiot boxes.

The conceit was based on the vague intuition that cutscenes aren't very game-like, and when a system is streaming video files off a CD-ROM it's not doing much in the way of novel computing, just shovelling prepackaged bytes into the furnace of a playback plugin. This may have sounded sensible in the age of rotating optical platters, when only a few titles like Interstate 76 rendered everything in-engine. The renegade interrupt of Mass Effect and elements bursting free from flashbacks in Cryostasis had yet to blur the lines between interactive running-around and passive consumption of canned storylines—it could only happen once the tech moved beyond pre-rendered cutscenes and slow storage.

In fact there was never much that could be done to salvage the whole edifice: showing that the concept is absurd is a fairly simple task. Consider a convoluted function that returns four times its input.

function quaddmg(sum)
	result = sum + sum
	result = result + result
	return result

This is more process-intensive than an optimized version:

function quadruple(sum)
	return sum * 4

However, the additional processing just amounts to the computer spinning its wheels, it does not speak to a more game-like experience. The metric is, if anything, even more useless than body-mass index or measuring programmer productivity by how many lines of code they push to production.

Real codebases often run to several million lines, which makes it an open question exactly how much a given program may be optimized without breaking anything (hence the shift to automated testing in the 21^st century; if nothing else, it provides a basic safety net against unexpected side-effects.)

Process intensity properly belongs to the age before unit testing, when games had to be implemented as hand-tuned C code because it was the only way to squeeze performance out of the hardware. The term was obsolete practically the moment it saw print, as there has been nary a mainstream game created on bare metal since Rollercoaster Tycoon and Descent.

The real problem with cutscenes, especially pre-rendered ones, is that they do not achieve a graceful integration with the rest of a game, and so players simply shrug it off as something separate, basically an intrusive advertisement for the game designer's wish to be just like a real film director.

Education by arbitration

the mis-edutainment of the youth dept.

15 March 2026

Puzzle games on 8-bit platforms were necessarily abstract due to the low resolutions and cramped palettes. While console games usually centered around jumping, shooting, or driving to cater to broad audiences, games for home computers could be considerably less constrained owing to the level of technical knowledge that had to be assimilated to get off the ground at all — even on the Commodore 64, rattling off a smattering of BASIC was required just to load games from cassette. This selected for players who possessed considerable reserves of patience.

Given that much of the software was produced entirely by one or two programmers, interaction tended to be simple: press a button to change one square at a time, certainly no side-effects reaching beyond the visible frame (not that it was feasible to hold more than one scene in memory at a time; this was the era of flick-screen scrolling for a reason.)

In consequence, 8-bit puzzle games feature some of the most illegible gameplay ever committed to magnetic tape, where you would be hard pressed to predict what was about to happen before you started mashing buttons to see what they did. Small wonder then that there was a trend towards Boulder Dash spinoffs — the format was a good fit for it, boulders slotting into the cubbyholes of Array data structures, and the mechanics almost made sense. This particular style of arbitrary interaction did stick around in so-called educational software, a sector where it didn't matter wether the content was at all comprehensible because the procurers were clueless parents and Boomer teachers who didn't look twice at the actual flow of the gameplay.

Funnily enough, while the simple rules governing the cellular automata in Conway's "game of life" made it especially suited for 8-bit computers, it took a 16-bit game, Populous, to place it in a broader context in a way that felt natural.

New Year's Predix: Peak QWOP

finger gymnastics & pocket tennis dept.

26 Feb 2026

Around the time that shoulder triggers became curved, game interfaces were increasingly standardized: hardly anyone used the right thumbstick for anything other than nudging the camera, the red button always cancelled, and so on.

Meanwhile, the experience of wrestling with unintuitive controls was shunted to a separate genre, the QWOP Flash game and the awkward-physics simulator; as it happens, this was a good match for the particular brand of millennial humour best summarized as isn't it cute how much we suck? And that it did.

The genre of gameplay slowly gathered steam, until eventually punters had become sufficiently inured to it that Totally Reliable Delivery Service was included in Game Pass. Now, this should have been the moment of triumph for qwoppers, the point at which they finally broke into the mainstream to become just another genre. That's not what happened, however.

Uninitiated normies looked at TRDS and wondered aloud why it didn't have better controls. I mean, why would you release a game with deliberately poor ergonomics? And here adherents found themselves suddenly under floodlights with their backs to the wall, because they had to explain what the point was.

And really, what was the point?

In Soviet modernism...

Po-mo and slo-mo dept.

18 Dec 2025

B-movies used to be filler shown before the serious main feature. Then Lucas and Spielberg happened, and the B-movie became the main feature, special-effects budgets competing with the star power of actors. As it happens, this was around the time that the modernist Hitchcock gave up on directing films, and postmodernism became a thing.

Postmodernism vs. modernism was a lot like the USA vs. Soviet Russia. Pomo won because it could get everything on credit, but in the process it turned into a parody of itself. (The observant reader may have noticed that Derrida is Reagan in this metaphor, just rattling off whatever mental fluff crossed the little teleprompter the post-homunculus in his head was holding up.)

Pomo was opposed to grand narratives, but it turns out it's perfectly possible to follow the little narratives right off a cliff, as well. For example: tariffs on international trade have surprisingly broad grassroots support, presumably because most people haven't the faintest idea how a microchip is made. Just like Derrida, in fact.