Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
All alliterations are accidental.
User ID: 83
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
How much nuclear firepower can Russia even bring to bear nowadays? What delivery vehicles for which kinds of bombs do they posses in what numbers and in what a state of readiness? I still keep hearing people talk about nuclear war as if the Russian arsenal were still what the soviet one was forty years ago, but I have a hard time imagining that it is.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
3mo ago
That image just starts at bad and then goes through eight stages of worse.
Southkraut
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7mo ago
at a certain point you’re driving out as many viewpoints as you’re enabling by tolerating certain people.
Might be true, but trying to carefully micro-manage which views need to be pruned to what extend in order to give room to which other views, and deciding which views bring how much value, and having an apparatus in place to enforce all of that...well, it might work on small internet forums where small teams of savvy mods who know their userbase well and actually care to maximize viewpoint diversity (though still - by what metric?), but I don't think it scales at all without devolving into conformity enforcement machinery.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
8mo ago
The optimal level of bike theft isn't zero, given an environment with bike thieves.
Explain yourself.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
I usually use Youtube via a heavily uBlocked and uMatrixed Firefox, which means no ads.
Whenever my wife asks me to play a song via the Youtube program on my phone, I almost drop the thing in fright - people actually listen to music or watch videos that are preceded by several advertisements, plus interruptions, plus another round of ads in between videos? It's intolerable. I'd rather not.
I just finished watching Dune 2 and took some notes while doing so. Notes, not an essay, so what you get is a jumble of thoughts.
- The Director turned a fanciful book that made little sense into a visually impressive film that makes even less. All visual spectacle.
- Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.
- Soundtrack with people suddenly screaming in fantasy-arabic, ouch, my ears.
- Emperor: A fucking joke.
- Chani, if it weren't rude I'd say she's an ugly bitch.
- Irulan - the acting suited the character, the speech did not, the looks did not at all.
- Margot Fenring, Lady Jessica, Alia, pretty actresses, decent acting.
- Fight scenes: Absolute trash. Ridiculous acrobatics VS completely passive victim-badguys. Harkonnens, Sardaukar, no matter, they just stand around dumbfounded and do some slow-motion waving once per scene, while the Fremen breakdance all over the place. And of course the Fremen have regular guns and use them...from off-screen at impossible angles, but not when it would actually make sense. None of the fighting makes sense!
- Lasers and metal-storm like helicopter door guns looked nice though.
- Sardaukar standing around in the desert sun in triumph-of-the-will formation.
- Worst of all: The boots. Floppily open-topped boots in a sandy desert. Ouch. Luckily it wasn't all of the characters who wore them, but I still pitied the ones who did.
- The Fremen hideouts are...giant highly visible architecture. How stupid exactly were the Harkonnens? Do the people of the future just not believe in reconnaissance? Same for the Fremen having a massive but completely unnoticed troop buildup just around the corner from the Emperor's army. Everything is so damn visible! But then the Fedaykin just dig themselves out of the sand at the feet of the army, so I guess nothing needs to make sense anyways.
- Javier Bardem, I don't know if he's a good actor at all. I don't know. Feels like he's phoning it in, or was never much good to begin with and I overrated him so far because I'm a Cormac McCarthy fanboy. Or maybe he is good, but the movie is such overrated tripe that he falls flat.
- The final duel between Paul and Feyd-Rautha is...meh. Not as bad as the one-sided fights preceding it, but it looks like stage fighting 101, with nothing but flashy, highly-visible moves meant to be easy to counter. Makes sense for a movie, of course, but still looks something in between silly and boring.
- Now, to be fair, Dune is difficult material to work with, because it made little sense even as a book. But this is just...all shape, no substance.
A thousand apologies for a worthless post, worthlessly posted, but I needed to put it somewhere.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
6mo ago
Relax man. My wife bought the same plushie - the octopus that can be flipped inside-out to show a smiling or frowning face - a few years ago because she thought it was a funny way to clarify her mood, i.e., actually angry or just hormonally incapable of expressing anything other than grumpiness.
So I for one actually buy the neurodivergent-people-excuse. And not for love of that meaningless term.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
8mo ago
Brigador. Homeworld. House of the Dying Sun. The writing is short and to the point and qualitatively decent and all of it supports the gameplay or world-building and isn't just wordy padding. Remove any of the writing in those games and they'll be poorer for it, because what little there is serves a purpose and is good enough to be worth reading.
Okay, that was a bit of a joke doubling down on "videogame writing is universally bad" by implying that the less, the better. Serious answer: None that I can remember. Cyberpunk 2077's writing is pretty good IMO, but I really mean that it's pretty good for a videogame. I enjoyed my time with it, recommend it, would happily play and read more of it, but even then it's the whole immersive package that makes it work, and the writing mostly contributes by being above-average for its medium.
So far, whenever I followed someone's suggestion of "play this, it's text-heavy but well-written!", I ended up sorely disappointed.
Game writing tends to be derivative (all fantasy CRPGs, all AAA titles), or excessively pretentious (Sunless Seas/Skies, Cultist Simulator), or just plain low-quality either because the developers barely speak English and saw no need for proper localization (E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy, Shadow Empire) or because the writers they hired are untalented hacks (Hunt: Showdown, Destiny 2).
There may be games with good writing in genres that I don't play, but I don't really consider visual novels and the like games.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
If the recent fortunes of the German communists are any indication, then it won't take any involvement by the right for them to falter and slide back into oblivion.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
Well, it's still the anti-covid measures that, as far as I can tell, are the single worst thing that ever happened to me through no fault of my own, and the impact of which is still very palpable, and the perpetrators of which are currently getting away with it because the public at large is over it and I am not yet willing to let it go. Not until bodies have hit the floor, until heads have rolled, or until apologies have been spoken.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
Moral vegetarianism is ethically backwards in that it accords far too much moral value to powerless creatures that are unable to participate in human society. Moral value is a social construct, and cows are part of economy, gastronomy, landscape or perhaps someone's personal pets, but they are not part of society.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
3mo ago
There are pots and boxes out in the open and the rug and whatever you call that little piece of cloth on the little table aren't aligned with anything.
By all means, it's not terrible, certainly better than my place, but it doesn't live up to the standards that I was raised to see as baseline.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
10mo ago
Okay. So whom are you murdering today? Or do we already live in the best of all worlds?
Southkraut
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1yr ago
Sounds too good for 2A to be true. Where's the hook? Sloppy methodology maybe? Cherrypicked data? It's all perfect but will be ignored by policyshapers?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
26d ago
I like to drink lots of coffee, and generally I can stomach it fairly well. When I notice that I'm overdoing it, I either cut back or water it down. Sometimes I cut it down to a single cup a day for a few weeks. Sometimes I quit entirely for a few months. If you notice health problems that might be related to coffee, quit coffee. At least for a while. It's just a drink, you can drink other things. And the withdrawal symptoms aren't that bad, in my experience - maybe a mild headache for a day or two; nothing modern medicine can't fix.
Decaf weirds me out. Just like non-alcoholic beer. It's wrong.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
The thought of having a viable insect population in my living quarters, nevermind of permitting its unchecked growth, gives me the twitchy eye and makes me mumble "Hans, get ze Flammenwerfer".
Beyond that, all I can see is "All quiet on the western front: effective altruists have their priorities backwards". Nothing new. Maybe touching grass would help those people, but I wonder about the mental ecosystem that produces such impossible notions of morality in the first place.
I agree with your reasoning.
The whole affair is just very slightly unusual in how hitherto-respectable politicians and functionaries ended up going to an event with Sellner. Did they not know in advance that the Identitarians would be there? Did they expect perfect secrecy to hold up? How the media would spin it seems obvious, and I don't mean in retrospect.
I wanted to type out my opinion of the whole thing just to add a German sorta-nativist perspective and some details regarding the media coverage and "public" reaction to the affair, but as I set to it it turns out to be too tiresome. The goodthinking people of Germany have promptly held several rallies to denounce the participants and their ways of thinking, but no more than that because what more can they do that they haven't already, the initiatives to ban the AfD have been underway long before this event and there's just not much more that anyone can do in that direction. The overblown reactions I'd say are part AfD Derangement Syndrome and part a performance of the rites of the German Civil Religion.
Ah, I think I don't really have anything to say. It's all very tiresome and mostly just more of the usual.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
5mo ago
Okay, contrarian time: The Hock is a noble endeavor. Stupid but brave. Self-destructive but benign. I think Skookum is crazy in an entirely undesirable way (IMHO his biggest problem isn't awkwardness, sexual frustration or autism, but being straight-up delusional and obsessive), but I also don't think that him doing his Hock thing is necessarily bad. It won't solve his problem and it won't get him what he wants, but if he actually goes through with it then women will not consider him one jot better than before, but I for one sure as hell will be impressed. A rare display of masculine virtue in a domesticated age. Even if it kills him. Maybe even especially if it kills him? Don't quote me on that last part, I'm not sure about it.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
6mo ago
Germany:
German media are overwhelmingly one-sided on the Israel-Gaza issue: https://www.themotte.org/post/716/israelgaza-megathread-2/150352?context=8#context
Berlin has seen a series of riots by pro-Palestinian leftists and muslims. Reactions are predictable - indignation about violence, worry about antisemitism, the left ignoring and the right emphasizing the role immigrants play here.
Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, our head of government (no, Merkel is gone, for real), has done exactly what anyone would predict - toured the middle east in general and Israel especially, gave speeches there as well as at home, and generally took a hard line against Hamas, against antisemitism, in favor of Israel, and against Putin. And, fulfilling expectations, he announced nothing material.
Sahra Wagenknecht, hitherto leading member of the leftist Die Linke party, in the past a self-described stalinist, now an outdated socialist who failed to get with the woke times, aims to found her own party. The woman has a reputation as someone with actual ideals and principles of her own, which allowed her to stand out and earn a modicum of admiration on left and right alike. Her founding her own party is thus likely to draw at least some supporters away from Die Linke as well as from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. The current leadership of Die Linke, a party in steep decline, is outraged, calling this an ego trip. The AfD, flying high in polls, seems largely unbothered. The founding is supposed to take place on next monday.
In other news, the head of the German Union Association, Yasmin Fahimi, called the AfD - a party with strong support among unionized workers - the enemy of the workers, for its racism.
And I just heard on the Radio that two Bavarian companies will soon launch satellite-bearing rockets from a ship in the North Sea.
I played through it recently, but I found myself quitting halfway through ME3. Mechanically it was fine, if unimpressive. Aesthetically it did nothing for me, but didn't offend me either. I had stuck with it so far mostly because of the extensive appreciation the trilogy gets from others, but here I had to stop because the game just kept becoming sillier. And I don't mean the Citadel Add-On, which is comedic throughout but honestly so, but the rest of it, including highlights of stupidity like Shepard's completely nonsensical speech to Earth's high command in the beginning or The Rannoch Reaper fight.
Not sure what I expected, but in the end I just lost all interest.
As for gaming in general, hm. The future I see is dominated by lots of rehashed trash, marketed to eager and uncritical buyers, on AAA and indie levels both, and increasingly more games-as-service and, above all, mobile games ported to PC.
I'm keeping an eye on the publishers Hooded Horse and Microprose, who both seem to cater somewhat to older-school players.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
11mo ago
His post may have been shitty, but the literary critique of Hlynka taking too long to make a simple point is not entirely off the mark.
Southkraut
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11mo ago
No it won't. Not unless you spend several years out there. Any behavioral changes caused by a brief period of exceptional activity will be undone by your subsequent resumption of normalcy.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
I normally browse the motte by looking at the recent comments and going through context from there. But for the last 15 hours, it seems there was nothing but this topic. Can someone lay out why a dating ad is so interesting to people?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
I'm very faintly anti-nuclear because we need to import uranium from pretty far away and it makes us dependent on exporters, but I freely grant that this may be the least of many evils and actually looking at the numbers may convert me.
I have no idea what you're talking about and a quick googling only tells me something about a hacked cryptocurrency platform. What does that have to do with rationalism or EA and why should anyone care?
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