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Southkraut

Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.

3 followers   follows 4 users  
joined 2022 September 04 19:07:27 UTC

All alliterations are accidental.


				

User ID: 83

Southkraut

Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.

3 followers   follows 4 users   joined 2022 September 04 19:07:27 UTC

					

All alliterations are accidental.


					

User ID: 83

Thanks, that will come in handy when I decide to complicate matters.

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.

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.

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.

Pravin Lal, you are too early.

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!

That's meant to be inexperienced in fighting.

a two-handed swing can miss

A man-sized target?

I'll echo your reasoning.

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.

And by the time this discussion is done, Zorba will come in and find that everyone has banned everyone and he's all alone on the Motte.

That's true enough, but it wasn't so in 1945.

  1. Rightful German Clay, had to protect the German minorities.
  2. They attacked us first! Remember the radio station!
  3. Had to be done to push the starting positions of the inevitable anti-bolshevik war further East.
  4. Lebensraum. We needed space to live.
  5. It was just an anglo puppet and we had to call them on their bluff.

Alright, alright, I'm just fooling around here.

The Anglos and French did that first in the Crimean war, though.

Yes they fought, but their having fought no matter how much and how well doesn't save the Germany of today. We can trace our unmaking right back to them. Barbarossa, for all of his ineffectual campaigns and fruitless labors, left the Germanies roughly in the state he found them in. The Nazis took a struggling Germany and, for all the little glories they won, burned it right down to the ground and left the withered remains to the mercy of the victors. Certainly perfidious Albion had its schemes and probably quite a laugh at our fate, perhaps on can believe that Hitler himself would have preferred peace with them, but in the end they played Realpolitik and they did a hell of a lot better a job of not bringing their own countries to bloody ruin.

Unless you subscribe to some school of thought that completely denies the significance of consequence, I find no way to absolve the people who had complete authority over the country from complete responsibility for its destruction. Whatever our enemies might have done, however justified any given aspect of German military campaigning was, given that kind of authority those kinds of results speak for themselves.

And so as to not neglect the Unhinged Gangsters bit - I stand by that. Something like the Night of the Long Knives is decidedly ungerman.

I "have" to feel that the great sin of Germany was what it did to the Jews, Cripples and Gypsies. I do feel that the greatest sin of Germany back then was what it did to Germany and the Germans.

As for those WWI vets, you can validly suggest that they weren't all unhinged gangsters, but I will insist that more than enough of them in positions of great power were, and this includes big names like Himmler, Göring, the non-veteran Göbbles and Hitler himself, and a thousand lesser party barons who managed to escape post-war condemnation only because they lorded it over the Germans instead of bullying foreigners or minorities. Some more unhinged, some more gangster, some perhaps neither but alas the the party was top-heavy with unhinged gangsters and the top had the last word on acceptable behavior.

I'm fine with denouncing the common depiction of the Nazis as fundamentally evil, fine with admitting that they did some good, fine with any claim of there being worse things in the world than Nazis, fine with theories that posit that Fascism may have good points, but not fine with attempts to whitewash those particular Nazis as saviors of the Germany they destroyed in their mania and incompetence.

Look at their mismanagement, the purges, the wealth accumulated by party functionaries, and the ground-level stories of German peasants and tradespeople being bossed around and told to shut up and get with the program or else, and look at the total and utter catastrophe that was WW2. It takes a lot of revisionism to clear them of the blame for that. You can, if you like, completely ignore the horror stories of concentration camps and death squads or any principled objection to authoritarianism - there's still more than enough left to condemn the Nazis in general both for what they attempted and for what they ended up achieving.

And I honestly don't know enough about JFK to answer your question.

Nice, a submission statement. Even if it is just part of the text itself.

As for the story itself - "surprising nobody". Still, thanks for running the numbers.

While some of what you say may be correct, I feel the need to temper your enthusiasm.

German society had numerous problems in the 1920s. It was shaken up by the effects of industrialization, urbanization, unification and democracy, and even more badly so the first world war and the following economic crises. The country was very troubled and not at all self-sufficient. What the national socialists turned the country into in the 30s and 40s wasn't much better. Some problems were solved, yes, and maybe it even was the nazis' doing, but what they made of Germany wasn't a lasting high-trust society but a totalitarian shithole that steadily degraded its social capital - by replacing Germany's formerly durable culture with the artificial crackpot pseudo-culture invented by party ideologues, by pouring ever-more resources and manpower into military endeavors (one can make the case that this was justified, given the Bolschewist threat, but frankly I think a large degree of doubt is merited here), and finally by ruining what was left of the country's international standing and plunging it into the war that almost destroyed it at the time by the after-effects of which are slowly destroying it now.

For all that I know many at the time may have fought for the country proper, or against bolshevism, but on the whole the fight was corrupted in means and in goals and led to the worst possible outcome short of an actual Nazi victory, because let us recall for a moment that the people in power at the time weren't sagacious guardians of Germany's heritage and future but a bunch of unhinged gangsters high on their own supplies of ideology and drugs and intent on transforming Germany from a real country with a real society populated by real human beings into some nightmare caricature. They might have coasted for some time on the industry of the people and the military heritage of Prussia, but Nazi administrative competence was, frankly, not much to boast of. I have no doubts that whatever social and economic capital Germany had at the time, the political leadership would not have failed to destroy it in due time.

So, yes, I guess they wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism or Capitalism...but instead we would've seen a third flavor of cultural self-destruction.

Fair enough.

Anyone incapable of understanding 'this post'....

Please, do finish that sentence.

Of course not, but what the hell will? He's disgusted by his friend.

Arguments? Spew your disgust at him. Chances are that'll have more weight than any attempt to reason him out of something he didn't reason himself into.

Was it worth it to password protect that archive in the first place?

What the hell did I just read. It seems this post makes sense to people, but it goes right over my head. What does someone setting himself on fire have to do with your drinking stories?