Personally, I use a sheet of paper with a bunch of checkboxes with dates on 'em taped to the bottle

The tradition of registry services in Germany being an absolute nightmare continues to this day!

I'm really curious how my naturalization will be handled because my family name has special Romanian characters. 

I was confused for a moment and thought you were talking about like, the Assamese and the Mizo for a moment there.

Elite drink when you want to knock yourself out.

When someone says "X shouldn't talk about politics and just focus on Y", what they always mean is "X shouldn't talk about politics I don't agree with".

The dipshit from BU? Fuck that prick, send him home.

>there are people that are really excited about it and praising him.

MAGA Scum gonna MAGA scum. Pity we have so many of the chromosomal cul-de-sacs here in New England.

I feel like most of the games you mention are relatively unique or are reasonable continuations/improvements over their past versions. The original SWBF2 for example is a pretty obvious example of a clear improvement and leap over the original SWBF1. By comparison what is the point of the newest COD? Does it do anything meaningfully better than the last 6? probably not right, and at the same time you are expected to jump game every year as a new version comes out.

Large franchises used to experiment more as well, as an example Age of Empires 3 is a very bold and fresh take on the formula compared to AOE2 while AOE4 is basically a much more conservative reimagining of AOE2, it fixes a lot of the obvious bad stuff like lag of unique units and relative sameness of the factions without really rocking the boat too much. You might prefer AOE2/4 over 3 but it is still a very safe bet they made. There are plenty of places where they just in general played it very safe, still only 200pop for example, despite the fact the original devs clearly constantly tried to push the number of units back in the day.

I also will say that i dont hate all remasters or franchises, AOE is a good examples of good remasters generally speaking and i think the new BF is a good example of a franchise returning to form but it also took 2-3 bad games for that to happen - the francise nearly died doing nonsense like hardline and 2042.

Am I the crazy one in that I don't agree with Act Man at all, that new IPs were the best?

I am really mixed on this, because the nature of video game development means that actually franchises are the best, like it is almost universal at a game's sequel is better than the game. But also I think it is a bit unhealthy how the upper end (budget wise) of video games are so dominated by franchises now.

Does Tales of Symphonia count? Or is that a franchise?

That is a franchise (Tales of) and Symphonia is one of the most popular and foundational games in it.

Find kind of funny even in this delusion, humanity took 100 years to go from "flight" to "space flight", if I am interpreting this correctly, the super roman empire industrial edition didn't recruit Germanic scientists after their Rhine-Elba campaigns of 1190 AD smh.

When I get a +7 adjacency on my libraries in Ancient Era.

I feel like linking economic growth to scientific advancement is tenuous at best even for people who think that science is basically a tech tree.

I'm crossing my fingers that they're not gonna issue a flight ban.

Does China have a history of issuing flight bans as part of its posturing?

Bavaria is beautiful, if you've got time Passau on the way to Vienna might be worth a night.

If you decide to stay a day in Berlin you could visit the Neues Museum, they were setting up a exhibition on the battle of Tollense when I visited. (It was already really cool when they were two thirds or so done.) And Nofretete is rather spectacular.

You could visit Ettal when you are in Mittenwald or Garmisch, for Bavarian Baroque. Linderhof, of course, is also nearby.

Starnberger See is the prettier lake, but you are directly next to Ammersee when in Andechs - be sure to have heard the early history and legends of Andechs, they are, even for a Bavarian monastery, rather colourful.

Pay a visit to old Franz Schmidt's house in Nuremberg for me. Actually I have read a fair number of German microhistories this year so I am a little jealous, I always think it is very cool to visit places you've read about.

Update, drinking the ouso was a bad idea, I think, the sumatriptan didn't work for long after getting home and the headache has come back with a vengeance, probably intensified by the alcohol. I like ouso though and you get it for free, so I couldn't resist, it's my first drink containing alcohol in 6 months, second drink of the year. It's not a good idea, I know, vasodilating alcohol kinda counters the vasoconstricting sumatriptan, I generally don't consume any alcohol, partly for that reason.

https://preview.redd.it/3jxwvpphoo1g1.png?width=602&format=png&auto=webp&s=ca5fef90aadba03cc33bf78cb6f8dd9cb9a73c9a

I hate you for how true this is. Which makes you the Jesus of historical analogies.

Trotsky entered the state of occultation in 1940.

Absolutely untrue. The original Xbox ran a forked version of Windows 2000, and this was confirmed in a recent leak of the source code: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/21/21265995/xbox-source-code-leak-original-console-windows-3-5

Relatedly I find it interesting how people have the idea from things like the Orpheus myth and the Epic of Gilgamesh that resurrection/immortality being a doomed pursuit and failing at the last minute is a universal trope, but then you have things like Hawaiian mythology where everyone is being resurrected all the time and it's no big deal.

it got me wondering when exactly did people come up with the "death gives life meaning" belief and "immortality is a curse" trope

It is in Tolkien which I assume is where it filters to most places today. Although interestingly the more traditional Christian view is that mortality stems from Adam's Fall.

How long does Slay the Princess take to play?

Also I should rewatch Baccano. I don't remember too much about it but the big antagonist reveal and "mercy is a sign of strength, not weakness" line really stuck with me.

I imagine it's difficult to model all of the frameworks of wartime diplomacy in that era. On one hand, in an Eurocentric perspective the full conquest of a state without some sort of claim leading to personal union is awkward and not terribly realistic. On the other hand, events like the full conquest of the Mamluks did happen, so it's like do you have an ottoman event that railroads it or try to redo the entire war diplomacy framework? And this is without the gameplay issue that making conquest too easy trivializes the whole game.

Also Poland called a Crusade for Jerusalem and now owns Jerusalem (????).

How do crusades work in EU5? Is it just the country with the most warscore annexes the crusade target? Or is a new crusader state formed?

It's pretty good now, not perfect, but much better than it was a couple years back.

Hmmm, hard to say. They do have some fairly interesting diplomatic stuff but a lot of the game is still about fiddlign with industry.

OTOH, it fairly quickly becomes self-sustaining, and you mostly do spot-interventions as your capitalists do invest stuff on their own, but how quickly you get to that point depends.

Just imagining how awful the CGI would be for this if it were made today.

Beyond what others have said, there’s also two reasonably big single-issue voter groups (read: Those who are Never Happy) emerging on either side of the political divide that are focussed around Israel-Palestine and migration. I don’t mean to comment on the comparative merits of either group (though to clear my own biases I’m naturally more opposed to anti-migration folk) more than just establish that there’s two growing groups that are nigh impossible to please.

The problem with Labour PR is that they’ve - arguably - seemed to devote an awful lot of effort to attempting to appease the anti-migration lobby, with little success and in a way that alienates the rest of the electorate who perceive that there are a great many more issues with the country.

See, for example, the Renters Rights Act which came into force with very little fanfare. Even when the date for s21’s abolition was announced there were crickets from No. 10. Should have been huge - the amount of people made homeless via s21 is in the thousands - but it seemed almost like something they were ashamed of doing! Compare this also with Conservative fanfare about the failed Rwanda scheme at the same time that they brought in the ECCTA, a pretty considerable piece of legislation for the investigation and enforcement of corporate crime.

They would have worked fine in the early 00s. They're vaguely wet authoritarian technocrats. The problem is, the UK is in an identity crisis, in an economic slump, in an uncertain geopolitical position, politics is back in the building, culture is metastatizing around the world, the elite have gone mad, and everybody wants red meat.

To win in this political conjucture, you need a solid base. Technocrats win on the back of a deactivated, 'I'm alright' voter. At the present moment, even people who are economically comfortable tend to be culturally radicalized, and don't feel 'alright'.

The base KS could actually access is the Corbyn coaltion between downwardly-mobile graduates and working class. The base he tried to access is the culturally radicalized, culturally working class Essex man -- basically for factional reasons: he wanted to marginalize the left in his own party. Unfortunately, the Essex man thinks he's globohomo, and that won't change even if he starts livestreaming videos of his cabinet dousing migrants in petrol.

So he's unpopular because he's alienating his own base, while failing to appeal to Farage's.

I'd say its partly true but not the whole story. There are a few things going on in my opinion:

Labour does suck at PR, but there's also an absolutely insane amount of hate towards them that's being drummed up by the press. I've never seen anything like it, to be honest. From day 1 of their parliament you've had rags like the Telegraph manufacture constant outrage-bait about them. It doesn't matter if Labour hasn't actually done anything lately - if it's a slow news day they'll merrily print shit like "LABOUR TO 'ANNIHILATE' WORKING FAMILIES, SAYS TORY MP" entirely unprompted.
I see the newspapers in my local shop every day, and I'm pretty sure that there's been some transparent attempt to tear down Labour on the front page of at least one major news paper almost every day since they took office. I saw more criticism and outrage toward the Labour government in the days before they took office than I did for the entire time the Tories were creating the mess Labour now needs to fix.
It's gone so far that I see some people have devolved into near-hysteria about it. It's not hard to find comments and stuff online where people call Kier Starmer "the worst prime minister of all time" and say he should be thrown in prison.

As for how they've actually done - they've been very underwheming. They have definitely done some good stuff, although they've been terrible at championing it. The Tories managed to get away with making problems worse with their shitass policy and still flaunting it as a success (i.e. pitching help for first-time-buyers as a solution to the housing crisis). I think anyone with most of their brain still inside their skull should be able to see that Labour far better and more competent than they were, but they're not doing even close to enough.
They come off as timid managerial centrists that are afraid to make the big changes we need. When they won a strong majority I hoped it would mean they'd push through the serious shit that could actually turn things around like scrapping the planning system, but it's mostly been "fiddling at the margins" as they say.

Just to play devil's advocate for a second, I think you could argue it's not all Labour's fault. They are constrained (or at least think they are constrained) by an extremely petulant and short-sighted public who will backlash against pretty much any serious changes they want to make. Just look at what happened with Winter Fuel Payments.

Between the hostile media and glue-eating electorate, I think the only way things are going to seriously turn around in the UK is if we get a government who's willing to metaphorically tell the public & press to shut the fuck up and take their medicine even if it means being extremely unpopular. Unfortunately, that isn't the Labour government we have right now.

Most news agencies are in the hands of few conservative billionaires and it is very clear that they are only selectively reporting on what is happening.

I think the internet slang for that these days is "holy shit, two cakes!"

Somebody else has already done it, but somebody else won't have done it exactly the way you would do it. There's any number of wildly unoriginal pieces of art that people like because of the author's personal touch.

If you get too in your head about originality, you end up doing nothing and then never get better or more original. Of course, do the thing anyway is easier said than done sometimes.

Doing anything beats doing nothing.

This happens to me but with games. Which is great cause I can just play the game rather than spend the time making it first lol

Well you could always give it a stab and then find a unique spin or a new idea as you're creating right?

American government in general tries too hard when it comes to naming things.

No, it can't be a "Counterterrorism Act 2001" like a normal country; it needs to be the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001" 🦅. I blame presidentialism making the legislature so boring and ineffectual they have the time to waste on things like this.

Anything that isn't given a ridiculous name like that is otherwise buried in an acronym that must contain either I, N, or F (interstate, international, national, and federal) or B, A, C, or O (bureau, administration, agency, act, commission, council, corporation, or office). (I won't complain about "department".)

What's an IEEPA? Oh, that's the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. BLM? Bureau of Land Management. FTC? Federal Trade Commission. ICC? Interstate Commerce Commission (now dissolved). OMB? Office of Management and Budget? OPM? Office of Personnel Management. (Real "Ministry of Administrative Affairs" vibe with both of these.) FERC? Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FHFA? Federal Housing Finance Agency. Examples abound.

And although other countries also do this, the number of little independent agencies established by Congress is enormous. There are at least 442 of them just with the power to promulgate rules. Presidentialism in the US makes it hard for Congress to oversee the executive, leading to an enormous proliferation of tiny executive agencies to insulate functions from unrestrained executive control.

Should just name them after pieces of furniture to placate Vance.

Plus, they actually sound cool: Operation Adirondack, Operation Davenport, Operation Ottoman.

British operational naming conventions:

Operation Granby

Unpretentious, ambiguous, discerning.

American operational naming conventions

Operation Enduring Screaming Jesus Eagle Liberty Freedom Justice

Eye-rolling, silly, stupid.

On one hand, these all sound like something a 12 year old who plays too much Call of Duty would make up, but Hegseth is such a loser that anything related to him is destined to be lame. If a SecDef less obviously desperate to look cool and administration less cringeworthy in general than this one had come up with these, we probably wouldn't give them a second glance.

Older operation names were definitely cooler in general though, From Overlord and Downfall in WWII to Rolling Thunder and Apache Snow during Vietnam to Desert Storm and Gothic Serpent in the 1990's.

No, bad history is two subreddits down to the left. 

It seems to me most genuinely popular revolutions involve multiple parties whose agendas only partially overlap, so talking about them as if they were the act of a single collective agent with collective motivations is inherently misleading (although it is a convenient fiction for the revolutionaries themselves, each of whom claims to speak for “the people”).

>This is absolutely bad history. Correct?

Absolutely.

Even ignoring the 100+ years of what-amounts-to self-rule the American colonists had before the Brits started tightening the screws down, the Americans had very real grievances with the British, economic, industrial, legal, etc

so far the main thing im learning about the american revolution october revolution is that while you can say that the french and russian and chinese february revolutions were was motivated by good causes that went bad the american october revolution doesn’t even seem to have been motivated by a good cause. like at all

I mean, "we want to continue governing ourselves (like we have for the last hundred years) and not have taxes we can't vote for be levied against us" seems like pretty good reasons to revolt to me.

There's a trend amongst the political left in the US to frame the Revolutionary War and unjustified/less justified than other colonial rebellions. This is motivated more by American Leftists love of butchering sacred cows and overcorrecting from traditional framings of American history than anything else. The irony that by arguing that the American Revolution was unjustified they are arguing in effect that continued colonial and monarchial rule was preferable to a semi-democratic (the early US wasn't a democracy by our standards, but it was a hell of a lot more democratic than any pretty much any other country in the world at the time) Republic structured on Enlightenment principles is always completely lost on them.

To oversimply, the mother country was detached from their colonies, resulting in them becoming independent minded and self-reliant. This was the status quo for quite some time. Then when the mother country starting running low on money, instead of understand that the colonies were self-reliant, tried to impose a bunch of rules and taxes without taking the time to understanding why those that have grown self-reliant, would resist being ordered around and taxed. There was a compromise offered, if they were going to be ordered around and taxed all of a sudden, they wanted a say in government, government responded that they de-facto already work in their best interests, meaning they de facto are represented. The patriots weren't buying it when government was so detached from the realities of the colonies that they fatally misunderstood their interests. Parliament was both ignorant and uncompromising, resulting in one of the most expensive wars they ever fought, the result of their solution to being low on money.

Even simplified, it's not so simple when you want to attach morality to that.

It's like a parent that neglects their offspring for years and they’ve gotten use to taking care of themselves. Then suddenly the parent wants to impose a bunch of rules, a curfew and demand rent payments. You can already predict the immediate outcome, whether or not you want to call if a "good cause" is up to you.

The impetus for the American Revolution was in part high minded republican idealism, in part general grievance against buffoonish metropolitan leadership, in part hard headed materialist pragmatism, in part brutal appetite for the dispossession of native lands. Slavery gets a bit complicated because while it is true that a desire to preserve the peculiar institution was not a real driver of the outbreak of the Revolution, it is also true that Dunmore's proclamation did a lot to drive the southern states into siding fully with the Patriots.

It is true that people who had good, Enlightenment proto-liberal ideas of human equality and freedom and the importance of popular representation and the like invariably supported the Revolution. There were people who I cannot call to my mind who had real levelling ambitions and they supported George Washington to a man. That isn't a coincidence. But it is also true that the American Revolution very much did not end up as a levelling one. There is an argument that it was teetering in the balance but it was headed off by the Constitutional Convention, which was more or less explicitly anti-democratic.

I view it a lot like the English revolution of a century earlier. It was not itself particularly emancipatory but it contained the seeds of emancipatory politics in it. Like I have no question as to which side I would fight on but that does not necessarily mean it was the "good" one.

Also the result of both was disaster for those on the imperial edge (Ireland on one hand, Indian country on the other)

Woke opinion: Sometimes I feel a little guilty about how much I have read about specifically Eastern Woodlands Native American history from about 1650 to 1800 or so and how pathetically little I know after that. The Haudenosaunee is still around, they are (hopefully) going to field a lacrosse team in the Olympics, history didn't end in 1800 but for all I know it did.

Non woke opinion: Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Joseph Brant is so good

I'm guessing that part of the reason is that it is actually a defacto way for the government to keep track of them. So when someone graduates from doing what is essentially a novelty service to doing something like conning people out of their life savings you can easily track them down.

While I totally get how on its face occupational licensing regulation for fortune tellers is ridiculous, saying "well it is all nonsense so who cares anyway" is how you get the current nutritional supplements industry.

The application process for a San Francisco fortunetelling permit involves a background check, fingerprinting and even a public hearing. The fees are just under $350 — more than a permit for a masseuse, but less than one for a tow operator or walking-tour guide.

Excuse me, av’ you got a loicense for that tarot card 👮‍♀️

Husband’s wife

Are you one of the other wives? Are you Mormon by any chance?

a coworker commented that I talk like an old black woman

Hopefully all of them, given a little prompting. Geometric growth is still covered in most high school math curricula, is it not?

James Garfield he made a proof of the Pythagorean theorem.

This is a true friend

…why did he have access to your Twitter account? Or do you mean he just removed you from the friend list or whatever.

Also lol at the fact that fuck all no one calls it “X.” Even in actual grownup news articles they always make sure to specify that it used to be Twitter after the dumb Muskonym.

I noticed it during the October 7th attacks. All the news talked about alleged attacks when anyone with eyes could see the proof in video form for themselves.

Truth is an absolute defense in libel cases. It's relatively easy to prove that someone definitely alleged AI was used. It's harder to prove they definitely used AI when Treyarch or Activision or whoever is doing COD these days sues you for libel. Even in cases like Mel Gibson being a shitheel on camera, do you want to try and convince a judge and jury that it's definitely true he's a shitheel, or that it's definitely true he's been called a shitheel? One of those is less reliant on people's opinion of Mel Gibson.

I think its to doge lawsuits, saying something outright happened opens you up to libel suits, but saying that something is alleged to have happened does not.

Personally I hate cause it leads people to think there's more ambiguity to the situation than there really is and just makes the media seem spineless and insincere, but I understand the desire to not get sued into the dirt by some overly-litigious asshole with lots of money to burn.

Not true. Sometimes they uncritically republish law enforcement press releases with some light paraphrasing.

Is it just exaggerating the extent to which he and Crick owed their discovery to Franklin? I dunno, if he didn't end up as a horrid racist I would mind more but I say turnabout is fair play here.

It is defined as a neurodevelopmental disorder though, in both the DSM-5 and ICD-11, I guess you could argue it's not a disability, which I'd dispute, but still. Dyslexia is also a neurodevelopmental disorder, and, yeah, that's just not comparable.

I do agree though, I think the label is too broad to work like that, I have complained before that I don't like the neurodivergency label, as if someone with ADHD can speak to what it's like to have autism, sure, we're both different than neurotypicals, but it's so very different. If speaking from experience, people should just stay in their lane in general.

I'm old fashioned, I identify with fellow people with autism, but I have always struggled with people with ADHD, they're like a totally different world to me, often to infuriating levels. I can go on rant after rant about how I'm treated by the people with ADHD in my life, but it's not the time or place for that.

Basically, I like keeping them serperated, sure, there's nothing inherently wrong with the neurodivergent concept, my problem is when I get lumped in with people with very different problems who I just don't share any real traits with, beyond just being different than neurotypical people.

---

I would be able to speak on more disability like developmental disabilities a bit, I have developmental coordination disorder (DCD), which is a much more typical disability than autism. As my doctor described it, I'm living life on hard mode, quite literally everything I do requires more effort because my brain cannot coordinate well; you can learn to deal with a lot of problems, but it's still a lot of effort even if you manage. The amount of times I've cursed my eyes for just not seeing things right in front of me.

DCD is more than a motor coordination problems, it also affects memory and speech, like, my speaking is pretty affected, I have DCD moments where syllables move between words, or my mouth refuses to make the sounds I want it to make. It's incredibly frustrating if you're trying to explain something and you have to try 5 times to pronounce a word you're very familiar with because your brain got stuck. It's also incredibly infuriating when people get angry at you for being too slow or clumsy, like, I quite literally can't do better, my brain doesn't do its job well.

I also have terrible balance, meaning I can't ride a bike, we have attempted it a dozen times, but I could only keep my balance or keep track of things around me, not both. I need to focus on keeping my balance when walking, if I don't I will end up putting one foot in the wrong place and trip over my own feet. I struggle navigating busy areas a lot on foot, because I need to keep track of too many variables, if it gets too bad, I reach a point of overload and can only see what's right in front of me. Like, quite literally, my brain can't process signals anymore and my vision starts tunnelling, I can see the rest but I can't process it, so it becomes one massive blur.

Fun fact, intelligence has no impact on DCD and DCD has little to no impact on IQ test scores if done properly, so someone can be a literal genius and still not grasp how to walk normally.

I am very different to people without DCD, even people with autism, sure, they might get overstimulated, but they don't have a brain that refuses to process basic movements and ends with you just bumping into chairs, tables and doors; even though I can see them and know that they're there, my brain just doesn't make the necessary corrections if I don't do it consciously.

Bit hard to take the neo-Nazi shit seriously when it’s coming from a man whose last name is “Nips.”

Inside you there are two wolves. One likes underage upskirts. The other is a coded fascist. You are anime.

Wherever happened there? Whatever happened there??? I'll tell you what happened. They lost the war!

Reddit sent me a content warning cuz I tried to quote Phil Leotardo lol

Cool guide on if you should like Germany or not.
Germany before 1806: Cool, lots of fun localized weirdness and an interesting government structure.
Germany 1871-1945: Ontologically evil; kill all Prussians.
Germnay after 1945: Alright enough.