ZanarkandAbesFan
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User ID: 2935
Playing through Lies of P for my second time. Partially because I got the itch after watching some of Joseph Anderson's stream of it, and partially
It's really surprising to me how much more I've enjoyed it this time through. I think a large part of it is just how much easier it's been for me this time around, meaning I've been able to enjoy the combat mechanics and boss fights rather than finding the whole process mostly stressful the first time through. This has other benefits: taking the time to beat the tougher non-boss enemies rather than running past them means I've picked up more upgrade materials, in turn making my character stronger and the boss fights less punishing. The whole time period and setting has also really grown on me, probably because having played Soulsborne games for ~13 years now I'm just tired of the whole medieval fantasy aesthetic.
ZanarkandAbesFan
5mo ago
The FBI director being a fanboy is cringe, but that's all.
I don't even know see it's cringe, honestly.
ZanarkandAbesFan
5mo ago
About half of US deployable air power is ready for Iran boogaloo 2.0. It would be very symbolic if it began exactly at 4th anniversary of three day special operation to desatanize Ukraine.
How it will start? As massive decapitation strike on enemy elite human capital.
I'm fairly sure nothing's going to happen. My bet is Trump will get no concessions in negotiations, then he'll loudly make up something about how he got the IRGC to agree to a deal where they stop funding terror/their nuke program and rant about how he deserves the Nobel Peace prize, the Iranians will say they didn't agree to any of that and Trump just hopes everyone will forget the whole circus.
I think prescriptivism has its place when it comes to helping individual people communicate more smoothly or socially appropriately, but trying to apply it on a larger scale is basically nonsensical. If enough people start saying "him and I went to the store together" then the analysis of the language simply updates to recognise "him" as functioning as a subject pronoun in that context (or more realistically, acceptable in a certain register of the language, but that's another topic). I'm fairly sure you already do this sort of thing: for instance, I'm going to bet you say "It is me" when you answer the telephone, rather than "It is I", despite the latter being technically "correct", according to prescriptivists.
I get a lot of the motive behind prescriptivism, particularly in an era when it seems like it's difficult to recognise the value of certain standards in behaviour, dress, or indeed language without some relativist going all "akshually" about how it's all just some cis-heteronormative construct or whatever. And if I'm helping a younger relative write a university or job application letter I'm definitely going to make sure they get their "he and I"s the right way around. But if I'm doing the same thing in twenty years and everyone is saying "him and I" by that point, then I'm going to tell them to write that instead.
ZanarkandAbesFan
5mo ago
I live in Sweden. The vast majority of people I come into contact with speak English and Swedish. Almost none speak a third language (that I know of), unless they're originally from another country.
IME the whole "Europeans all speak 3-4 languages" meme is standard reddit European superiority complex.
ZanarkandAbesFan
5mo ago
Why is second language education so routinely terrible in the United States?
Is it worse than second language instruction anywhere else? The main argument I hear for this is that Americans (and Brits) only speak English, while educated people everywhere else speak English as well as their own native language. But I'm fairly sure this has less to do with the superiority of their teaching methods and more to do with the following:
1/ The sheer amount of English-language media means they can spend hours every day being exposed to engaging content in their target language. 2/ Economic opportunities in English speaking countries mean there's simply a much stronger motive for these people than for a teenager in the US sitting through a French or Spanish class (you allude to this in your second paragraph)
ZanarkandAbesFan
5mo ago
Fair enough, that' an interesting perspective.
ZanarkandAbesFan
5mo ago
One funny part of this whole discussion is that the weak man/skinny nerd archetype (that Anti-Ds claim have been overproduced as a consequence of America's "good times" and will be responsible for America falling into its next "hard times") probably make up the majority of people employed at LockheedMartin, Raytheon et al. designing and building the advanced weapons, aircraft and warships that are actually largely responsible for the overwhelming nature of America's global military superiority today.
ZanarkandAbesFan
5mo ago
There is a huge amount of sex and sexual assault, while which I'm sure happened plenty in the Middle Ages, reflects our modern culture's obsession with sex more than it reflects the lived reality of the characters.
I think it might reflect somewhat on the author as well. One of the reasons I stopped reading his books was all the weird sex-related stuff. I'm a bit prudish though.
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
Glad to know someone got the reference :)
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
Bigger cities probably account for a lot of it, but French people are more likely to make friends with strangers than stick to their friends from secondary school (like I did). They still do the latter but it's less of a barrier than in Ireland.
That's interesting - growing up in the UK it was generally understood that the Irish were generally more social and more open to chatting with strangers on a night out than ourselves.
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
I'll say the same thing I said in previous threads, go watch the British show Police Interceptors and compare their professional deescalatory polite behavior to the current thuggery of the ICE and you'll understand how much room for improvement there is while still getting a job done. They are public servants, they should be professional instead of behaving like some sort of legalized gang.
The British approach of being polite and "Policing by consent" has led to large parts of the UK essentially getting to make their own laws because the dominant ethnic group doesn't consent to being policed like the rest of the country. It's not a strategy I'd recommend.
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
(Demography is the most important thing ever and nothing else matters)
Tell that to North Korea!
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
I assume they do a lot of monitoring.
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
And regarding the police (and ICE), a great way to get the left to stop attacking law enforcement so much (and to hopefully improve community relations and improve the skewed perspective most leftists have about law enforcement), would be to get more leftists working in law enforcement.
This has not worked out well for the UK.
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
lol
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
Hanania/Fuentes
What do these two people have in common?
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
Right, but it's not about merit, it's about the sort of person who sits on the prize committee and who they're going to admire. They're never going to like someone like Donald Trump, and I'm surprised anyone wouldn't see that.
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
Europe neutered itself after the war,
Well, the US had a part to play in that neutering.
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
There was this story about members of the UK labour party volunteering for Harris. It probably doesn't amount to an example of the British Government getting directly involved but I'd say it's pretty poor form nevertheless.
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
And as far as I can tell, he only wants Greenland because he didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize and because it looks big on the Mercator projection.
The Nobel prize thing is probably the most farcical part of this whole circus. If Trump thought that the Nobel Peace prize committee of all groups was going to elevate him with that sort of honour, he's a lot less bright than I thought.
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
Moreover, it's obvious that there's a fraction of the American right (a powerful fraction? Who knows, but it tends to become evident in times like this) that just plain hates [Western] Europe. This issue cannot be even discussed, as Euros pointing it out immediately leads to the said rightists going "you're imagining it, you're gaslighting us, nobody here even THINKS of Europe at all [post le epic Mad Men meme here], we just hate cucked European governments, Europeans have always hated us so we're only reacting now" etc etc.
If one was online 20 years ago, the same fraction was hating on [many countries of Western] Europe back then, too, for not joining the Great Freedom Crusade for Freedom, with somewhat different arguments (the word "cuck" hadn't been invented back then, after all), but clearly still similar impulses. Indeed, it seems likely that many of the warblogger readers and Bush diehards of those days are now Trump diehards, doing the same stuff as back then but believing it to be somehow different because Trump is so so different from all the preceeding libs and cucks that it's completely different when the same things happen over and over again.
Are these the same groups of people? The sense I get of the type of American who really hates Europe is that they're mostly highly online Gen-Z types. Most of them weren't alive when the GWOT started.
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
Trump appears to have now given up on getting Greenland altogether and dropped any threats of tariffs.
"The art of the deal"
ZanarkandAbesFan
6mo ago
Removing the last and a good chunk of the second-last part scraps the deal and you will need to enforce it with full coercion and foil all attempts at getting out from under the boot. It is symptomatic of Trump's foreign policy that he complains about the lack of local populism and cultural protection, then immediately makes the parties that agree with him look like cucks.
The UK doesn't have great alternatives just now. Any attempt to build bridges with Europe seems to run into Macron trying to cuck Britain even further. Maybe this sort of thinking is why the current government is being relatively accommodating to China's new embassy?
Well, I was wrong about this.
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