Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
All alliterations are accidental.
User ID: 83
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
22d ago
overcomplicated shitty design that barely works in the first place (something the Germans have been historically, and are still to this day, guilty of)
I just want to confirm this. Every company I worked for so far was in the business of making overfitted and overengineered clockwork software that went over time and over budget and tended to fall apart at the seams when any changes were attempted.
Germans cannot do things like agile, modular, minimum viable product or cost-efficient, it seems.
Southkraut
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24d ago
Why not drink water?
Southkraut
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24d 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
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24d ago
Speaking of traffic, is there anything in the pipes that might get us more new blood?
Southkraut
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25d ago
If my wife were stable, then a rural location near Ulm, with a view of the Alps (given decent weather). I have history with the place, friends there, there's work and activities, and once you get far enough away from the town proper, the landscape can be nice. But really, it's the distant mountains on a good day. Hundreds of kilometers of mountain range in plain view for anyone with good eyes. See https://www.swp.de/bilder/die-schoensten-sonnenauf-und-untergaenge-aus-ulm-und-neu-ulm-16130225.html .
If the previous condition were met and if my income were better and/or its growth stronger, lake Constance, directly on the shore: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodensee. Not as broad a view of the mountains, but closer to actually go there and explore (in Austria and Switzerland, then), and being near a large body of water is nice. But the area is famously expensive the closer you get to the lake, so, money.
And if I hadn't fallen for the heartfelt patriotism meme, then I'd want to live near the ocean. Obviously lots to choose form here - but if I have to pick something I personally know, then the French Atlantic coast is beautiful, though the local inland geography and architecture do nothing for me. At least I speak the language. Mmmmaybe Japan? I've been there, it's beautiful, but I'm really not sure how isolating it would be to live there as a foreigner, unless you manage to slot yourself into an urban expat community. And frankly, I'm not good at networking.
If I am to just throw something out without ever having been there, then Portugal, just going by the map, looks good. Warm and with the Atlantic all over. But my wife would probably melt. Then again, with that constraint the Japanese summer would've killed her already.
And lastly, if I had no concern for standard of living or safety, then I might just want to spend my days in some ancient Carthaginian settlement on the North African Atlantic coast. Say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essaouira, just living with history at my back and the stark, naked face of the Earth below me, and the Ocean gently wiping it all away.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
25d ago
commonalities between these locations
Geographic size.
Southkraut
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26d ago
I don't want to make this about semantics, so let's not. If you really want me to bite the biggest bullet available, then fine, what Americans count as "civil rights" is egalitarianism taken to excess and any society is better off throwing it all out than accepting it all without question. It's quite possibly better to make too many distinctions between people than to make too few. The optimum is likely neither 0 nor 100.
But we needn't go that far into the abstract. Concepts like slavery, race and marriage are tangibly real, universal and highly relevant to almost everyone in ways that transgenderism is not, and no amount of false equivalence will make the latter any more substantial than it clearly isn't.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
26d ago
the first thing
The first thing, or at least the earliest thing that comes to mind right now, was the gays. Slippery was the slope, and here we are with men pretending to be women and political activists wanting to force people to validate these delusions.
It's not much of an extrapolation to see where the wind is blowing from, and where to.
I find myself questioning further why the FDP tolerates being in it's current coalition.
My read is that the leadership in general and Lindner in particular seem to have been burned by the "better not to rule at all than to rule badly" policy based on which they rejected forming the Jamaica coalition in the previous elections. And it is my impression that they have, in the past few years, run on a largely practical and non-ideological platform. As a member I receive the party newspaper, and it's full of equating liberalism with whatever the hell is currently expedient. Apparently liberalism is anything from feminism to subsidies, so long as the results are good enough. In other words, I think the FDP of the past few years just tried its damndest to be able to say "look, while the others are willing to ruin the country for the sake of ideology, we're just trying to keep everything working!". As a rabid ideologue, I'll accuse the party of having been far too reasonable and conciliatory throughout this term, because lo and behold, most voters do not appreciate reasonable, milquetoast and modestly productive policy. They either hate the FDP for being the enemy, or hate it for not waging the culture war.
Few are the Germans who just want a little less public debt, a little lower taxes, and a little less bureaucracy. And yet the party soldiers on, and tries to do what little good it can. It almost feels like it's out of some sense of civic duty, though cynicism won't allow the thought.
Southkraut
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29d ago
Southkraut
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30d ago
Not defending HoI here - any game is ruined by the PDX DLC treatment, IMO - but the endless games are overrated trash. Visually over and mechanically under-designed, they're the darling of games journalists who play for ten minutes before giving them a glowing review, but a waste of time for anyone who tries to explore any depth.
Southkraut
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30d ago
The problem isn't that there are fewer people. That's the good part.
The problem is that there are fewer Europeans.
Southkraut
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1mo ago
Shameless plug of a Guide I recently wrote: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?&id=3195937264
I desire feedback.
Southkraut
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1mo ago
No. I've spent several days in a state of unabating rage about her having strangled everyrhing positive out of our lives. I'm escalating. Today I dumped her, myself and our daughter at her parents' house and we'll live here for the indefinite future. If retvrn to the multigenerational family model doesn't help, then my next step will be to be a very bad parent and ask my daughter to choose either mom or dad.
Does she have any interest in changing?
Only if it happens without any effort on her part, or by her doing more of what she's been doing so far.
Hello The Motte, thanks for hosting my vent.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
That certainly fits my anecdotal experience. First-hand. Lots of it. My wife's an overtherapied wreck who spends every waking hour re-heating her anxieties. Only ever gets worse.
Southkraut
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1mo ago
Whoa.
I hope someone removes that.
Southkraut
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1mo ago
rate limited by downvotes
Please explain.
Southkraut
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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.
Southkraut
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1mo ago
Thank you for this.
Can you fit a nuclear shaped charge in there somewhere, too?
Southkraut
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1mo ago
Southkraut
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1mo ago
No submission statement, but I decided to be tolerant and read it anyways. Two paragraphs in I still don't know what you're driving at, so I stopped reading.
Southkraut
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1mo ago
It truly did start out as "this is something very extreme that should be rare and only a last-ditch approach", and is now "no different to getting your tonsils out".
I can understand the impetus behind destigmatizing abortion, to some extent, even absent any political or ideological motivation. Stigmatize too much and the hard cases you outlined above have their lives ruined, but stigmatize too little and people treat it as form of delayed contraception. There's probably no practical optimal level of stigmatization.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
HEMA armchair analysis:
The swords themselves seem comparable to a Langmesser (long knife), which is a renaissance weapon for which we actually have some primary sources. Sadly I have almost no experience with it. That said, the ones we see on screen are clearly blunt practice or rather stage weapons; steel wasters.
Now, for the fencing, Curly Blackhead takes a perfectly valid two-handed Pflug guard there...only that his sword is about half the length it should be for it to make sense, and even then he's starting out within arm's reach of Mary Sue. And then we get some overcommited thrust, wild swings - all one-handed of course, which makes more sense for such a short sword - and in between a lot of stepping back to start over instead. I'd say it's credible under the assumption that this is the very first time that guy ever picked up a sword.
As for everything that comes later, eh. No point in pretending it makes sense. Every man in that scene is a bumbling idiot who stops cold as soon as she parries, they wind-up for a half a minute each but strike without any force and are effortlessly deflected, nobody follows up with anything after first contact, and they seem to stumble and forget what they're doing all the time.
As for a bunch of newbies getting to fight an experienced fencer - it's fun with a slightly elevated risk of injury, and worthless for actual practice.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
I often claim that all game writing is shit, but of course that's not entirely true because SMAC exists.
The tragedy of Earth is not that so many died. Death is an inevitable part of life. The tragedy is that so many died as victims. When the crisis came, they were helpless, unable to use their deaths to buy anything of value. Millions of otherwise intelligent people had been tricked into ignoring a fundamental truth: that no man has any rights if he is unable to personally defend them.
Well, the idea was more like "let's shut down all the bad energy (nuclear and fossil) and replace it with renewables".
The first was easy, the second was not, so here we are.
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