Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
All alliterations are accidental.
User ID: 83
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
26d ago
I used to do that up until something over ten years ago, but then the giant HDD I kept it all on broke and I just gave up on the concept.
Nothing in life is permanent, and holding on to anything requires continuous effort and attention. Can't hold on to every piece of data that seemed remotely interesting at some point. The internet is ephemeral, but so is all existence.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
9d ago
similar to how parents protect their children but expect their children to obey them.
Note that modern parenting does not expect this. Obedience is not demanded and disobedience is not punished.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
7d ago
Why shouldn't I just let the fat pack on and on?
Why do you want to continue to live at all? Whatever your answer to that is, it probably works better when you're not getting dragged down by half a ton of flab.
Also, what's wrong with diet and exercise? Eat half, move double, problem solved.
Fair point, but I would maintain that there is still a significant difference in reach and intended audience between the big-name game companies of the 90s and those of the 2020s.
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.
25d ago
n+=1, Vitamin D has positive mood effects.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
19d ago
Finally, buxom blondes tend to come with uncertain mass distribution curves.
Oh this, oh this.
No matter whether you like tits, ass or hips, with even a little age mass goes where it wills, and it obeys no rules but gravity.
IMO if it were as simple as choosing between strength and weakness as terminal social values, it's an obvious choice. And our societies have not chosen weakness, obviously - we just pretend, as an overreaction to the ostentatious pro-strength attitudes of mid-20th-century fascism, opposition to which has since been the West's moral compass needle (in combination with some lingering Christian ethics). But everyone and their dog knows, and knows either very consciously or deep in their bones, that strength is better than weakness. It's just become polite to act as if it weren't the case. But we know that we want to be strong, that it feels better, gets us better results, is seen as better by others. The ability to act, to do, to accomplish is praised, and even if not praised, is still obviously desirable in every way.
But one problem is that being strong is hard. Being weak is easy. And yes, western society has made it too comfortable to take the easy way out, both by raising the baseline level of comfort available even to abject failures, and by espousing pro-weakness rhetoric (that we then drag our heels to act on, because nobody sane really believes it, leading to more confusion).
Another problem is that even a society that openly praises strength and abhors weakness still has many failure modes, but arguably none worse than those of a society that pretends to love weakness.
Are we all just saying the same? I feel like we're beating a dead straw horse here.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
15d ago
In your imagination, sure. Just like imaginary monsters.
Southkraut
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18d ago
Good points. I think we need to differentiate between two groups:
- The tinkered-together video games of back when and the more creative indie games of today.
- The almost mass-produced AAA titles and derivative indie games of today.
The kind of mature industry that can churn out one Total War game per year, and a Modern Warfare every two years, and two Superhero games per year, and another Hero Shooter or Current-Thing-Clone so often they all just blend together...didn't exist in 2000. And didn't reach or cater to the same size and type of audience. Very very obviously the writing of the second group will be of a completely different nature than that of the first.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
19d ago
I don't really give a damn about doxing, but I don't live in America, and I'm not enough of conversationalist or social networkers to make a good host for a German Mottizens meeting, so by force of geography I don't see it happen for me either way.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
19d ago
Overall I fully agree with the posters above that safety guidelines regarding the dangers of outdoor activity are fantastically wrong, but you too have a point. You can get an awful lot of skin cancer from the sun, though may take decades for it to show. How serious a problem it is varies from person to person; some can get away with a lifetime of sizzling, others will regret not covering up a little.
I compromise and wear a floppy hat. That's my safety right there.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
21d ago
No. I need to ferry around lots of people and things; having less space in the car makes it borderline useless.
Besides, this is retarded. There are many very small cars to choose from, without any of the extra hassle and just as fuel-efficient as the end result of that hack-job. And if all you want is to drive around yourself, no passengers and no cargo, then you may as well get a motorcycle or one of those scooter-sized cars that barely have an enclosed cabin.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
26d ago
If you speak French and have a remote job it could be interesting.
I do and I do, actually. Not sure whether my contract allows remote work from outside Germany though. But then again, I'm not married to this particular job. I am unfortunately married to a woman who falls apart at temperatures above 15°C, whereas I begin to feel comfortable at 25°C and more. I don't think Morocco is a realistic option, sadly.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
28d ago
Why not drink water?
Southkraut
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17d ago
I think he's implying you paid no attention to the Ukraine and Russia in the years leading up to the war.
Southkraut
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27d 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
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
28d 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.
28d ago
Speaking of traffic, is there anything in the pipes that might get us more new blood?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
5d ago
I spent a good part of saturday clearing dandelions out of my parents-in-law's small garden. Not a lot of surface area, but I ended up with buckets full of roots, stems and leaves, and my daughter got to play copiously with the white fluffy seed things. Dandelions are great. Fun to look at, fun to play with, fun to commit localized genocide upon, and they always come back.
So it's not just in the city.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
7d ago
Well eat away then, champ.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
7d ago
Honestly, I found it thoroughly unremarkable.
Now, it's been a long while (20 years?) since I watched the old Shogun series, so I certainly have some rose-colored glasses on, but somehow I didn't really enjoy my the new one like I expected to based on my fondness for the old one.
The plot seemed to meander meaninglessly, with the intrigue too opaque to make sense to the viewer, and the characters too guarded and game-of-thronesy for their motivations to really shine through.
The visuals were...decent, I suppose, but the desaturated and heavily filtered appearance made it look unreal and cheap.
The characters, oof. Yabushige was fun but too cartoonish. Omi, Nagakado, Saeki, Hiromatsu, Buntaro, Tsuji and Fuji were enjoyable, relatable even, but seemed to have very limited agency. But ultimately the whole tale revolves around Toranaga, Mariko, Anjin and Ishido. Ishido, meh, good performance but is mostly just there to act as a less-competent foil to Toranaga. Toranaga I don't know about; I just greatly preferred the Mifune version. Mariko and the Anjin were outright painful to watch, with Mariko being so wooden her husband wanted to kill himself (I guess that's the point) and getting too much attention by half, and the Anjin just being an overdramatic clown.
At least the fight scenes were modestly decent.
Overall it's just...mediocre. There were production values, some decent performances, some that really missed the mark for me, but in the end it needs to measure up to Rome, and no, it's not Rome.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
18d ago
Accuse them of not providing honest data, or of being too brainwashed to meaningfully answer relevant questions, or of the data being somehow low-quality?
Or bite the bullet, admit that they're better on those metrics, but stand fast and declare that it's not worth the restrictive gender roles and religious indoctrination.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
19d ago
As dovetailing said, great circles. I once saw the Aurora Borealis on a night flight from Germany to Japan.
Yes, but you can clearly see a gradient of morality that's pretty much the gradient of skin darkness. From the very dark Liet-Kynes, practically a saint, to the darkish Chani, morally flawless except for her doing violence, to the lighter Stilgar, a fanatic blinded by propaganda, but at least on the right side, to the much lighter Atreides, greedy egoistical colonialists who exploit the natives for their political games and are nominal heroes only because they fight even worse people, to the almost-albino cartoon villain Harkonnens.
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