Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
All alliterations are accidental.
User ID: 83
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
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
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
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.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
This is the correct take.
Which makes the messy visuals and such gameplay flaws Civ4 does have all the more grating.
Alpha Centauri's visuals have, by comparison and in my completely nostalgic view, aged better. But AC instead has a host of balance and pacing issues, with many in-game entities seeing little use, the mid-game going by in a blur and the game being over before it even reaches the end-game.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
Same resolution as every year - "more HEMA".
So far this year I made it to one mock tournament to fight, one real tournament to watch and help out a little, and zero training sessions. It's better than nothing, but still abysmal. Having been sick for over a month helped little, of course, but who cares about excuses. I did get a ticket for a big weekend event later this spring, and that one was always pretty great in the past. I hope it still holds up, now that I missed it for several years. It also contains a tournament that I'm signed up for, and that one will probably have better fencers from a wider area than the ones I made it to lately, so I expect to - pardon my Swabian - get my ass handed to me, given the absolute shit state I'm in. Still, I need to make it to regular practice/sparring somehow. Sparring, preferably. But all other obstacles nonwithstanding, all HEMA clubs nearby start at something like 20:00, and none is closer than an hour by car, and damn I hate nighttime driving ever since all the cars in the world decided that the only way to be safe was to blind everyone else.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
Same here, but not sure it's something to be loud about!
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
The Vietnamese who run all asian fast food here never told me! I feel betrayed!
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
Dealing with female passivity, flakiness, and fickleness, the female inability and indifference to uphold their word, is a common source of frustration for men that transcends time and space
when it comes to dating.
There, fixed that for you.
Consider time and space transcended; this message has reached you from the land of married men.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
And here I am hoping my GTX 1660 SUPER never quits on me because there's no way in hell I can afford a new card.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
There's Fall From Heaven for fantasy, Realism Invictus and A New Dawn for a Vanilla+ experience, and Caveman2Cosmos if you want Civ4 taken to the uttermost conclusion of its premise.
I recommend Caveman2Cosmos, though there are many rough edges. Especially as one approaches the cosmic end of it - I'd go as far as to call that unfinished. But most players barely make it past the cavemen, so I guess it's fair for the modders to focus on the earlier parts.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
What do people think about a 'Culture War Request Thread' where people without the time (or wordsmithing skills) can suggest current hot topics that others may be interested in investigating/developing?
Isn't that also sort-of the Small-Questions Sunday thread?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
Thanks, that will come in handy when I decide to complicate matters.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
Yep, that does the trick. Thanks!
I'm trying to calculate the strength of solar radiation for a given latitude as a simple factor from 1 (equatorial) to 0 (polar), assuming no axial tilt or any other complications. My trigonometry is weak. How do I do this?
Arccos curve looks good. Is it arccos? Arccos(latitude / 90) * (2 / pi) looks pretty decent.
Edit: It was Cos all along!
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
Incidentally, for any Gamma fans out there, Grok posted his plans to completely revamp the artifact system in the near future.
I was a fan...but I just completely ran out of steam. It's the setting, I think. Yes it's a classic by now, but it's also thoroughly used up and I'm entirely sick of seeing it.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
A little bit of everything lately.
Helldivers 2 I play semi-regularly. I like it. It's got shooting, it's got some tactics (if you're willing to sneak away while your teammates who went in too loud get eaten), it's got some loadout customization. Not sure how long it'll last, but for now I'm having fun.
Following a conversation on the Motte a few months ago, I started trying to 100% Slay the Spire. Which is to say, 100% it even more - all the achievements I had (not something I usually do), but so far I hadn't completely Ascension 20 with any character but the Ironclad. Well, that's changed now. I've done it with all of the starting three, and I'm currently working my way through with the Watcher. Overall not very rewarding; it feels like any eventual victory is down to stubbornness rather than skill, mostly a matter of playing until the RNG smiles on me and gives me the cards I need.
I played some X4: Foundations. Mostly out of nostalgia for the very first X: Beyond The Frontier. Oh so very German a game. The autism seeps out of every impossibly bad UI element, every pitiably unaesthetic spaceship, the massively insufficient AI, the giant uncanny valley that is the NPCs. This series got away with all those problems 25 years ago, when they could blame it all on hardware limitations or the youth of the industry. But now? Now "dated" doesn't express half of it. They did accomplish some impressive performance optimization, though. Ah, my countrymen.
Other than that, Nebulous: Fleet Command remains one of my favorites, though I've run out of fleet ideas to try and I'm disinclined to just repeat myself in the pursuit of perfecting my skills.
And I recently got roped into playing some Wargame: Red Dragon. I hadn't done that in a decade. The micromanagement and lack of UI support was as bad as I remembered, and I had as little fun as I expected.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
Pravin Lal, you are too early.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
Rimworld has always taken my personal crown for "most mods applied". Think I had almost 150 in one playthrough.
Same here. It's what saves me from ever wanting to play it again - too much hassle!
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
2mo ago
That's meant to be inexperienced in fighting.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
2mo ago
a two-handed swing can miss
A man-sized target?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
2mo ago
I'll echo your reasoning.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
2mo ago
Tangentially related.
I recently received a gift copy of Pacific Drive (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458140/Pacific_Drive/). Ostensibly a game about driving, scavenging, tinkering with the car, and uncovering the mysteries of its setting.
Well, at some point fairly early on, you unlock the ability to decorate your car...and the available decorations are a large assortment of "pride" flags, plus "black lives matter".
I searched and discovered a mod that removed all those, installed it, it worked, and so as to facilitate the same procedure for others I posted a guide on steam on how to remove those flags. Hardly a day later, the guide was banned. I asked Steam Support why this was, and they told me that it had violated the community guidelines. I asked which one exactly and how, and received a non-reply that simply gestured at the guidelines again, but also told me that I should not have included an obscured link the guide. I offered to remove the link and asked whether that would make the guide pass muster, and if not, what other rule remained broken. They finished up by telling me that the issue was resolved, and closed my ticket.
I wonder a little how people can stomach doing customer support in such a way.
Thank you for this.
Can you fit a nuclear shaped charge in there somewhere, too?
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