Happy (or sad) Monday guys!
Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.
So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?
This explains a lot
https://preview.redd.it/i8ija5almk2g1.png?width=728&format=png&auto=webp&s=1d96fa89300791926a7b78d7397828a2e344b0c7
"Those politicians in Washington need to get over their partisan differences and get down to solving real issues that affect people"
Now, based on the fact that the majority of Americans agree with this statement, you might conclude that the majority of Americans are stupid. But consider: when they say "real issues" they are talking about the McDonald's Big mac meal costing a dollar more than it used to.
This is one of those things that is so frustrating because it's not like affordability and general welfare isn't ideological issues!
The ideological part comes in in regards to who should get affordable living standards and general welfare.
No, also ” how”
I think I’m gonna start watching Mayor of Kingstown. It pops up into my brainrot feed from time to time and looks super interesting.
I'm probably 5+ years behind the discourse about this, but I just found out Neil Druckmann is Israeli and that one of the inspirations of The Last of Us is the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange. Huh.
Neil Druckmann comes off as kind of annoying in interviews, which didn't help the way that many people were willing to be maximum uncharitable towards him based on TLOU2.
That's too bad. I never played TLOU2 but I did look up the plot and generally liked the direction it went. Of course I also didn't think "Joel did nothing wrong" in the first game.
This stupid subreddit subliminally convinced me to watch 8 seasons of The Practice because James Spader as Alan Shore appears in the last season. It’s a good show, but still.
You should have watched one season of The Blacklist. He's in the whole thing but it's not a good show. He's still a delight, though.
I’ve seen that lol, also a good show for the first few seasons
Inheriting your new character's drama in Ck3 is always just so funny to me. What do you mean you have 5 rivals and we havd an ongoing murder scheme when you ascended to the throne?
Nothing a lil’ INCEST CHALLENGE won’t solve right?
I've long ago adopted the policy of creating a new religion that reduces the amount of things people can be blackmailed for. Normally, the blackmail material is just my dynasts getting around which I can typically handle with No Bastards and Polyamory. However, the first proper run of CKIII I ever did, by the third character, I discovered my new player character had become a witch and had a strong hook on them from being blackmailed over it. I made a point of making Witchcraft virtuous partly just out of spite for the blackmailer.
The zootopia abortion comic is so imprinted in my brain Im gonna be watching zootopia 2 waiting for an abortion moment
… what? …
The Zootopia abortion JFK murder comic.
https://preview.redd.it/ittffd6f6i2g1.png?width=1008&format=png&auto=webp&s=78bbdefa960332889236e115e9bf887e337f1505
I can see the Drinker video already. "Disney pushing "The Message". I tried playing the game I played with Acolyte, counting how many white people were in each scene and the results were devastatingly woke. Go away now."
Zootopia Loss
Guess who made the worst prediction ever three years ago
heh badhistory who was the least skilled teacher in your school-life?
Here (France) one of our English teachers had no real expertise except being ok at English and having self-published erotic novels in English with Amazon, my class didn't see him but from what I heard he wasn't good at pedagogy either
I'd say either our chemistry teacher who would give us "history lessons " about the soviet union (she believed in the Asiatic hordes of Stalin and was saying it as a good thing among other stuff), she was good in teaching chemistry (all 3 hours we did) but we barely did any actual chemistry,it was mostly her schizorants.
I had a professor that refused to answer emails unless you worded it in a hyper specific style and grammar.
I had a terrible Swesish teacher for two years. Swedish is mandatory in Finland and almost universally hated, easily the most hated subject in school. She would have struggled as a teacher for 14 year olds regardless of the subject, but Swedish was the worst possible choice. She had no authority, so she got bullied every day by a bunch of 13 year old boys. Her voice was so quiet that the back row couldn't even hear what she was saying and all the stuff she wrote and projected on the screen was written with a pencil on grid paper and was almost impossible to read. She should have used a powerpoint or a marker or even the old school blackboard and chalk.
Oh I've seen some of these
What do people in Finland think of Sweden in general and the Swedish minority in particular?
Finns have a weird relationship with Sweden. They are our closest ally and our fiercest sports rival. Especially working class Finns think that Swedes are effeminate gays who have been born with a silver spoon in their mouths and have never experienced a day of hardship. The most obvious proofs of their lack of manhood are how cold they prefer their saunas, the singsongy way they speak and that they didn't participate in WW2. They are also stereotypically indecisive, everything must be discussed in a team meeting/committee in contrast to Finnish management culture where the boss decides on his own and quickly.
Fenno-Swedes are thought of as Swede-lite. Stereotypically they are all rich/have a rich daddy and own sailboats, eat crabs and drink absinth. Pappa betalar, daddy pays, is probably the most widely known Swedish language saying in Finland.
Dang you can grow hemp now in RuneScape. Nothing will beat the oh ranarr though
How else are you supposed to make rope?
Okay so the new Black Ops 7 campaign is terrible, probably one of the worst in the series.
But the most realistic part is the opening cutscene on NOT CNN which in the ticker tape mentions the senator character from Black Ops 6 who for some reason looks like Mike Johnson is still in office.
That game was set in 1990 and he looked like he was 40.
This game is set in 2035, 45 years later.
This is without question the most realistic thing in the game.
EDIT the COD Wiki says hes from the 1940s so actually hes like 90 some.
Someone looked at Chuck Grassley and said yes but more.
https://callofduty.fandom.com/wiki/Jack_McKenna
Wow. Worse than Black Ops 3? That’s actually crazy.
Believe it or not maybe yes.
Every mission is either bland open world map from Warzone, followed by a drug hallucination where you go back to a B01 level and interact with a legacy character and either fight zombies or a giant plant.
Repeat five times. Then after you beat the final boss played by the little girl from Mad Men whose the only person putting in effort, suddenly the real villain is revealed and you gotta play discount Helldivers for a few hours.
Why the fuck does Treyarch keep doubling down on having zombies in campaign?? It sounds fucking dreadful, and like a worse version of the MWIII (2023) campaign, though the Helldivers thing doesn’t seem half bad on paper at least.
Its also just play on the same damn Warzone level from the campaign but with 50 objectives and rising difficulty.
I'm being too kind by saying Helldivers.
Is the villain that clanker girl with black hair from the trailers? Ngl she’s kinda fine… if only I weren’t robophobic.
She's not a robot and yes.
I actually didn't realize it was Kiernan Shipka for quite a while.
Yeah so this weekend I actually looked up Kiernan Shipka and uhhhhhhhh. AWOOOOOOOGA
New celeb crush unlocked!
Shes really talented.
Also yes she is an attractive lady.
Didn't Black Ops 6 only come out like 3 months ago? How are they up to 7 already?
The releases are always every Oct-Nov, assuming CoD's producers are still doing the annual releases.
It was actually last year, it came out days before the 2024 election.
I remember because I genuinely not even kidding around have PTSD playing Nuke Town since that what I played the evening of November 5th.
when aliens put that chess chip in your brain
If action movies have taught me anything, he was holding himself up between two rafters.
Seeing tory politicians in the UK go after noise cancelling headphones in the school... And I hope RFK Jr won't be encouraged by that rhetoric overseas because if he is a million autist march
Are you stupid? Then, maybe this...
https://preview.redd.it/jqgfa8tjxg2g1.png?width=580&format=png&auto=webp&s=acc375f7da442fdfe5814bd4f71a35106e03b997
is the machine for you.
Probably doesn't work yet - I'm yet to print.
Does not include flared base.
The radical left woke mob on Wikipedia is cancelling the CDC.
Rome didn't fall, it ascended to the dark age!
dubai chocolat
dubai chocolate
MBZ labubus
Two arab states fighting a proxy war in europe is at least novel. Usually it's the other way around.
TLDR recently released a video about the UK economy where they say that while the UK does have a historically high tax burden, that's more "an issue of changing demographics" than anything else. Does anyone know what that could be referring to? There's no further explanation.
I’d also be curious what they’re basing the “historically high tax burden” claim on. The UK’s tax revenue as percent of GDP is only slightly higher than the OECD average and has only increased ~2.5 percentage points since 2000
Apparently the ONS expects the tax-to-gdp ratio to rise to hit a post-war record high by 2027-28, but it is still pretty normal by global standards like you say. You see people say things like "we already have the highest tax burden in our history" a lot on TV and such as a reason we can't raise them any further.
And of course the ratio can “worsen” if GDP decreases or grows slower than tax revenue which is what you might expect after an island economy wrenches itself out of a much larger division of labor it had previously integrated into
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing_of_the_United_Kingdom
Pensions for the pensions god!
Sorry, best I can do is raise the retirement age.
Why are futurologists so damn optimistic about their predictions? I'm not willing to bet more than 1 euro that we'll get to Mars by 2045, we were supposed to get there by 2020.
On the other hand, for some reason I find wildly off-the-mark predictions (especially in fiction) pretty fascinating (I discovered an entire wiki page about "futures now past", really cool).
Because the billionaires funding this stuff need to pretend that they're not going to die. "Sure we might be able to develop this technology, just not in your lifetime" doesn't get the dollars from Musk.
Having played Cyberpunk 2077, with Soulkiller and engrams, it seems that "one man's trash is another man's treasure" applies to dystopias and utopias too.
Pros: I can survive being shot in the head
Cons: a man wearing leather pants who no one else can see will yell at me until I die
[deleted]
Very interesting. I've heard about Kurzweil, even though I've not read any book by him. From what I've seen around, it seems that a lot of his predictions turned out wrong. In his latest book, from the Wikipedia article, he claims that "Singularity" will happen in 2045, which sounds far-fetched (and to be honest, merging my mind with a machine is not exactly something I'm longing for).
The problem with "exponential growth" is, apart from the so-called complexity break, that the development of scientific knowledge and technology is also affected by political, socio-cultural and economic factors. Taking the example of Mars: people who are optimistic about landing on the planet by 2030 will tell you that a lot of predictions made in the '50s and early '60s about the Moon landing figured it happening in the '70s, and it turned out these predictions were too pessimistic. However, after the Moon landing people imagined that Mars would be next and by now we would have reached it. Of course it didn't happen. One reason is that politics mattered a lot in the Apollo program, and after the lunar landing, the same "urgency" was no longer felt.
I'm now 4/6 episodes through Ken Burns' American Revolution, and thus far I'd say it's... OK.
Good stuff:
Stuff I think could be better:
They mention Herman Husband or William Manning before the end or we riot
Huh I didn't know this came out this year. I've been meaning research more about Loyalist politics during the War of Independence. Adding onto your point about how the War is often sanitized in US imagination, I'm deeply curious about the vitriol they experienced. Like many of those people were straight up expelled to what would become Canada, which immediately draws some eerie comparisons to later revolutions and Civil Wars.
I haven’t watched it yet, but from people’s comments and reactions, it seems to be his most “gloves off” documentary yet so to speak, what do you think?
I guess so. To the typical upper middle class white lib Ken Burns audience, it might seem kind of radical. To an actual radical (and historian of the period), it feels quite tame. Again, I will withhold final judgment until I finish the last two eps today or tomorrow.
I look forward to it, thank you!
There's definitely something weird going on with my body.
I had my RMR tested - basically a way to find out how many calories you burn at rest that's way more accurate than those online calculator things. The results claimed that I burn way, way more calories at rest than I thought I did.
Like, the result came back at ~1900 kcal which puts my maintenance at about 2500. Yet, I've been eating ~1600 kcal a day for weeks now and that's only been enough to lose a measly 0.5kg/1.1lbs per week.
I'm not sure how that's even physically possible. The nurse was kind of shocked I only eat 1600 and suggested raising it to at least 1900 - I don't think I can do that though since even 1600 is barely enough to lose at a decent rate. There are only a couple of causes I can think of: (1) The test was done wrong, maybe the mask wasn't fitted right. (2) My ADHD medication can give me the jitters when it first kicks in, which it did during the test. Maybe that threw it off.
I got that test to give me clarity but it's just left me far more conflicted than I was before. Maybe I am eating too little and need to bump it up? But then why is the loss so little every week? Maybe I should stay the course and risk losing muscle mass? I don't know.
A kg of fat represents ~8000 kcal. If you're at a ~900 kcal/day deficit, you're burning ~6000 kcal/week, so you'd expect about 0.7-0.8 kg/week loss. Seeing a 0.5 kg/week loss isn't implausible with how imprecise some of the measurements can be: it's definitely possible the test was off a bit, but there could also be some errors with how you're counting calories or with your weight measurements.
Losing weight is just a slow process: there's so many calories in a kg that it takes time to lose significant amounts even with very low intake. The hard part isn't hitting a number for calorie intake, it's sticking to it for long enough to make a difference. If the nurse is suggesting you raise your intake slightly, that's probably not a terrible idea, even if you opt for somewhere in the middle of those numbers. It's more important that your diet is healthy and sustainable (over the course of months or even years depending on your target) than that you hit some high loss/week stat.
The St. Peter bells ring the passing of all things.
Twinned olive trees, white in full flower, declare the great empire's certain fall.
The emperors do not long endure: They are like a dream one night in spring.
The patricians and the plebs perish in the end: They are as dust before the wind.
It is a toss-up as to what fandom that I was formerly-involved in that I find more annoying, for several reasons: the Fallout Fandom or the Warhammer 40k fandom.
I guess Fallout edges out 40k, if only because a lot of the lore for 40k is gated behind books and shit. Fallout fans have zero fucking excuse when the lore is in the fucking game.
Don't mess with us Fallout fans, we'll ignore both blindingly obvious context clues and half the fucking framchise depending on the argument
Star Wars fans are the scum of the earth.
Some how SagaOfNomiSunrider has returned.
https://preview.redd.it/543kni87cg2g1.jpeg?width=320&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f0ed3c9dbc5f53b956cee9f0405db91c2dbeb442
https://i.redd.it/f2jzmw5dyf2g1.gif
Would you say they are cockroaches, or perhaps deserving of some sort of cosmic punishment?
I would say they've been punished by the cosmos already.
My basic rule of thumb for how to tell if a general historical survey book is garbage or how quickly it gets to the French Revolution. If you write a "History of Germany" and you reach Austerlitz before you get halfway through your page count? Garbage. Throw it in the trash.
Outside of Europe the timescale roughly holds even if the specific events change. If you write a history of India and spend more space on the period after the Mutiny than before? Garbage. A history of Japan that reached the halfway mark with Perry? Trash.
There are a handful of exceptions (places where the pre-1800 written record is too sparse) but only one inversion: If more than half the book is pre-Roman you can toss it right in the bin.
>He doesn't realize that the history and the world started on 14 July 1789
It actually started in 1776
🇱🇷🇱🇷🇱🇷 USA USA USA 🇱🇷🇱🇷🇱🇷
The acausal Revolution occurring in a place called, for whatever reason, France.
Add Frankopan's "The Silk Road" to that list. Annoyingly that book focused more on long distance trade routes and how they shifted over time than covering the actual Silk Road, which is what I was interested in.
I actually liked that book well enough, but it was neither about the Silk Roads nor a New History.
was it at least about central asia?
It is not.
I remember getting about of a third of the way through before realising Frankopan had diddled me and this was actually some "re-centred history of the world" book. I read on but felt violated after it
I would gently push back in saying that industrialization, liberalization, and the massive technological and social changes that accompanied them have to some degree "expanded" the amount of history in the centuries following them, relative to those that preceded them.
If you were to say, write a history of labour economics in western Europe since 0 CE, I think it would not be crazy to have the post-French revolution section be as large or larger than what came before it.
Sure with some specialist topics, like I won't expect a history of railroads to have more pre-1800 than post. But if it is a general survey I expect it to treat the period before 1800 as an actual topic of study, not just a curiosity or a sort of prologue to when real history begins (which, frankly, is what the average modern historian thinks of it).
Maybe I'm stupid, but I tend to find a fair bit of pre-modern history boring because a lot of it is 'cookie-cutter-Merovingian thug knifes other thug and nothing changes'. There is other stuff, like I can go for a good empire, but as soon as it descends into locally-oriented warrior elites stabbing eachother for no good reason I just honestly switch off.
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about!
I've read more than one passive-agressive comment from medievalists about "from the origins to present days" or "2000 years of history" books.
I dunno about that, though. Yeah the changes were further reaching with industrialization, but a generalized “Western Europe” has things that, at least in an immediate moment, will have much larger immediate impacts.
Spain accessing the New World, and the wealth/gold that came from it? 4th century migration patterns and the collapse of the Roman Empire (I’m sorry but I’m not meming this time) and what exactly that looked like? Crowning of the HRE, the gradual split of the schism of the church… I can see a larger section dedicated to the Industrial Revolution than each individual event, but surely not all of them. The biggest difference is that we have better records about the Industrial Revolution than the other events listed….
Is it weird I kind of don’t trust general history survey books? At least the ones I seen at Barnes and Noble on displays.
So, I have cleared the Japanese Basics lists on Renshuu, aside from the Kanji. I must say adding in the Kanji makes stuff a lot harder, though I'm starting to know some of them, the readings are very hard to remember, the meanings aren't that hard. Adding in the Kanji increased the amount of questions I get too, because suddenly I'm not only asked to translate a word but also how to pronounce it in Kana. It almost doubled the amount of questions I get per day on the Vocab alone.
I think I'm going to build up more knowledge of Kanji and the words that I know before adding in even more words, I'm going way too fast anyway, so I'll go and focus on getting the basic grammar and more Kanji down. I still have 283 Kanji left in the basics schedule, I have currently set it to 20 per day; if the amount of Vocab questions go down again, I might up the speed of the Kanji, but currently it's over 2 hours per day, which is mental; not that I don't have the time, it's the one thing I have in abundance.
I think focusing on the current Kanji will be a good idea, it's 363 kanji in total in this list, so that's a significant portion of the amount of Kanji I need to learn; so if I just focus on getting those down, it'd probably make life easier in the future, I won't need to learn the words twice as often.
---
At least I'm spending my time productively now. I was talking to a coworker I hadn't spoken to in a while yesterday and I mentioned I was learning Japanese, he was really positive, almost excited for me; which is just very encouraging.
How does Renshuu drill you on Kanji? The advice I usually get on kanji is to focus on vocabulary and memorize the kanji as parts of words rather than memorizing a specific kanji character and all its myriad readings.
This approach really works well for me, but I do already know how to write chinese, so your experience may vary.
Also, if you can find the time, you should try immersing in japanese content now. It's frustrating at the start when you don't know enough words to understand it yet, but just listening to it will help your brain get used to how the language is used in practice and figure it out. It'll really help with grammar, since it's kinda like learning english from tv or movies, but with more effort.
And honestly, it's been working for me and I'd love to see if it works for other people too.
It drills you on Kanji seperately from vocab, it asks for Kunyomi and Onyomi readings seperately and meaning seperately, but it only asks you to learn readings relevant to your level, which is a mercy. You can customize to quite some extent, I can set it to only drill me on meaning only, for example.
Before I've learned a kanji, vocab drilling gives Furigana with it, after I've learned it, it's just the kanji. All the Kanji I'm learning now is used at least by one word in the vocab list I've done so far, and when I learned the Kanji, it starts quizing words with that Kanji more often because I start at level 1 mastery again. This is why the vocab reviewing has become so long, I went from 100-ish words to review per day to 200+. I suspect it starts with the most used Kanji, so that effect might be the worst at the start.
I'll try to immerse myself, beyond the music I listen to normally, as music generally isn't the most natural language; I'll probably have something like ラヂオアジテヰタ on in the background if I'm doing other stuff, that'll help my brain adjust further. I'm already somewhat used to how Japanese sounds, because, beyond the music, I spent hundreds of hours reading Sci ADV VNs, though that is Japanese voice acting with English text.
Oh that's great. Honestly, at the pace you're going, you'll probably overtake me in learning quite soon.
I'm gonna share this vlog in simple everyday japanese. There's this awesome feeling when you can completely watch something like this and understand it without any subs or looking it up at all. It's great for validating your learning and motivation as well.
Also the vlog is for a samurai festival so that's pretty cool too.
Thanks. It's the one plus about chronic illness, a lot of time to spent however you want, within capabilties; It's just nice to be using my time productively.
Thanks for the encouragement though, I really appreciate it!
There is one obvious suspect that no one has mentioned yet
what ungrateful proxies, another banger from rNeoliberal
Abbas got his post-graduate degree from some university in the USSR. Probably more an example of leftover Soviet soft power trumping over EU cash?
you're probably right, the PLO is a potpourri of socialist ideologies
What hard power projection does Russia have in Palestine?
They could bomb shit if they sent the Kusnetsov
I feel like the only damage the Kusnetsov can inflict is to dock workers and marine ecosystems at this point
Even if they targeted pro-Palestinians groups, I don't think NATO or Israel would think that is very cashmoney of them.
Find someone who loves you as much as I love random *Deadliest Warrior* screengrabs.
https://preview.redd.it/7alottfboe2g1.jpeg?width=583&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=734db9e787339221b05f3edb8c6d7d2c04013981
Absolute horseshit that the IRA won that one.
99% correct
That was IRA vs Taliban right?
Yeah, the image I found has “Taliban” blacked out for some reason, presumably to make it a funnier reaction image.
I feel like it could go either way, personally.
I think they did the Taliban really dirty in this one, because pre-2001, the Taliban had MIG-21s, T-62s and T-55s, and Soviet artillery systems. They controlled the vast majority of Afghanistan for almost a decade.
In contrast, the IRA had at best, improvised armored vehicles, and was a guerilla army for it's entire existence, unable to actually hold and administer territory.
That’s one of the hilariously dumb things about the show, homogenizing large military formations into like eight guys.
If we’re talking about a big fight with both at their best, yeah, Taliban wins easily. Squad deathmatch, no vehicles, splitscreen shit? I dunno.
The IRA were smaller but the British did acknowledge that they were proficient and disciplined in a fight. Rural guerrillas like the Taliban tend to differ widely in quality between part-time/militia and full-time fighters, and consistently took heavier losses against better trained Coalition soldiers as opposed to the ANA.
Who cares, it’s all dumb “could your action figures beat mine” fun at the end of the day.
How many times did the IRA openly engage the British in anything like straight up battle? Basically just a couple times in South Armagh, right?
(during the Troubles I mean, not the War of Independence)
Yeah, that’s yet another problem, there aren’t that many instances of those kinds of fights happening. Much of it is either indirect or either on such a small scale that modeling it is kind of weird.
What's funny to me too is that a group of Taliban basically fought the deadliest warrior battle against a SEAL team and won with zero losses
Are you talking about Operation Red Wing? Also, I just realized that this is the operation that Lone Survivor is dramatizing (I never saw the movie).
Yup. The book, movie, and after action reports massively exaggerated the effectiveness of the SEALS, and were considered the truth until a video from the Taliban side, combined with Ed Darack's book Victory Point (he was a reporter who traveled to the province that Red Wings happened in and interviewed a ton of the people who were part of the operation and subsequent cleanup) basically showed that the SEAL team fucked up, got ambushed and quickly eliminated in a half hour gun battle. There's no evidence that any Taliban fighters were killed in the battle
Yeah that debacle and then writing a bestseller puff piece about it tracks for SEALS. Since I never watched it I just remembered it being used as a gag in an old Dropout/Collegehumor Oscar parody skit.
Edit: holy shit, I just read some quotes from the book and the author just comes out and says that US troops should have more leeway to ignore rules of engagement and that the "liberal media" is at fault.
Rome, long fallen, must stand; long standing, must fall.
Its always kibda funny how downtown vs suburbs has radically different connotations in us vs europe.
Finally standing up for the proletarians who actually have to make the drugs themselves rather than the fat-cat drug dealers who just sell commodities.
I'll stop buying crack from drug dealers when I can buy it from anyone else.
I really hope France cracks down on this. Drug money is money wasted on one of the worst and useless vices in existence. The bourgeois shouls instead use their money to help the struggling French pensioners.
...so the pensioners can buy drugs?
This is what the Abundance agenda wants.
sets living standards to "Chemical Bliss"
https://preview.redd.it/orqqymbw9e2g1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=e90abc3bd9b752f35d9007b4d421e827540da65f
I wonder what would lead an AfD politician to that conclusion
btw to the 3rd worldists on here, who are the African Americans of your continent?
Eastern Euros fuming and foaming at the mouth trying to decide whether to accuse their fellow Eastern Euros of being black or Jewish
Karl Marx writing about Lassalle: “Yes.”
Poland is the white negro of Europe - John-Jacques Lennon
Poles are white passing.
An AfD politician complaining about making victimhood into national identity? The lack of self-awareness is astounding and amusing.
Currently homebrewing a setting for my own TTRPG campaign i am going to be running soon.
The game Dominions (specifically the Hellenika mod) has a Nation in it - Bethel She'em - where the repeated ritual suicide of their actual god is the core mechanic the nation is built upon.
And that is just such a cool theme that I am going to steal this for my setting.
Now - does anyone here know of non-Abrahamic religions/myths that have similar motifs? just so i can get some inspiration :)
Bethel She'em in the mod is heavily inspired by ideas from Kabbalah, but i want to see what else is out there
Well you have the whole thing in ancient Egyptian religion where the Pharoah was seen as being an incarnation of Horus while alive while becoming his father the underworld god Osiris upon death (with the new Pharoah obviously taking the role of the new Horus). The myth of Odin hanging himself on the world tree is an example of ritual suicide (though there may have been some Christian influence on that). You could also include motifs of descending into the underworld which appears in a bunch of mythologies i.e in Greco-Roman myth (orpheus, heracles, persephone), Mesopotamian (Nergal and Ereshkigal), Japanese (Izanagi and Izanami).
If you really think about it, Rome never fell, because nothing is really more Roman as LARPing as Rome, and that's a tradition that continues to the present day.
"So now the guy's got Paulus as his lord, any problems he goes to Paulus. Trouble with the miller? He can go to Paulus. Trouble with the neighbours, fields, bandits, he can call Paulus. But now the guy's gotta come up with Paulus' money every due no matter what.
Daughter marrying? Fuck you, pay me.
Oh, wanna collect firewood? Fuck you, pay me.
Old man died and wanna distribute his stuff huh? Fuck you, pay me."
Maybe one day I'll run for office and it won't be my communist schizo posting that gets me in trouble it will be the cringe club penguin music videos still attached to my name I made in 2007
Listening to someone read out vintage quotes from famous men in defense of Epstein is a trip. Only topped by listening to those men's email correspondences with Epstein about sexual scandals.
[removed]
Mostly Lawrence Krauss.
https://preview.redd.it/tkegszs3gc2g1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=851a91cd229ac049f7b5bbcb530b8965a18d699f
Rome fell because they didn't use the Nellie Ball.
LeBron prevented the first fall of Rome when he used his patented chase-down block on Attila. What happened after that is on the front office.
Whoever made the decision to sell the Nvidia stock should do the honorable thing
Apparently Bill Clinton lent George W Bush his copy of Oliver Stone’s W., which is just awesome.
Like, there’s this massive inertia associated with the peaceful transfer of power to the point where former heads of state are exchanging DVDs.
Didn't they also strip out all the W keys from all the keyboards in the White House out of spite during the transfer?
That was Cheney when he realized that Bush’s computer password was his own name.
Fallout co-creator Tim Cain says today's games could learn a lot from 80's games.
I'm thinking, I don't think I've ever even given games from the 80's much of a look in my entire life, beyond Tetris.
Hm... Legend of Zelda? Super Mario? Thats about all I can think of in term of 80s games.
Poor forgotten Infocom.
The earliest Legend of Zelda game I ever played was Link's Awakening on the GameBoy, and that's 93. I know Dragon Quest III from 88 must have entered the cultural zeitgeist since I still see artwork of that game today, but I've never played it. I'm thinking the 80's really weren't much of a golden age to draw on.
From what I understand DQ was huge in Japan but DQIII wasn't released in English until 92.
To get the really influential 80s games I think you have to look to arcades rather than home consoles.
Well there's also Pac-Man, missile command, mega man, Karate Champ and the original rogue (as in where we get the term rogue-like from),
Bubble Bobble? Giana Sisters? Draconus? Metroid?
I had a really productive conversation with my friend this afternoon.
I’m turning 30 next month, and I’ve basically circled back around in one of my core beliefs and reverted to my 16 year old self’s view on this specific matter. I’ve spent nearly the entirety of my 20s trying to change my mind because people would tell me that what I thought was wrong/bad/creepy. Specifically the last one.
The belief is: that it’s normal to text your best friends/very close friends on a near-daily basis.
It depends on your style of friendship. Like, I very, very rarely text my friends, because I don't have a reason to, what would I even say? But that's very typical of autism, like, I don't generally even ask people how they're doing either, unless I have a reason for it. It's not that I don't want to know, it's that asking that question doesn't cross my mind normally.
Instead, if people want to say what's going on in their life, they can just do that, in fact, that's great.
But, when I meet with those friends I rarely text, I can quite literally talk for hours on end with them about everything. I had times where a friend would come over at 3pm and leave at 1am, and all we did was talk; not a moment of silence.
It's not wrong, or right, normal or abnormal; it's good either way, it's just that not everyone will share that preference for communication.
I think I’m just a high energy dude.
Which is just gonna be too much for some people.
I wouldn't say I'm low or high energy, but also not medium, I cycle between high and low all the time. My peaks can be way too much for some people too, everybody here has seen just how excited I can get about things, when I just don't stop talking about it, and that's toned down quite a bit already; otherwise I'm pretty low energy.
This is incredibly normal, what the hell is creepy about that? I think you've made the right call on this one
Idk man. I think I just had the misfortune of picking dipshit antisocial girls as best friends for the past 15 years. In my defense though, when I first met these people, they were normal, but they all eventually became antisocial as fuck. For a while though they actually had me convinced that I was a psycho for tryna reach out to them too much. I remember drafting so many guilt-ridden (though I wasn’t 100% sincere because part of me questioned whether or not I should’ve felt guilty in the first place) apology texts over the years because they would all eventually chew me out for trying to text them too much (which, btw, was like 1-2 times every two weeks…)
In my eyes I was just trying to talk to or hang out with them.
Can definitely relate to having a toxic friend/fruebds warp your view of what's normal, that's pretty rough honestly. They were definitely in the wrong though that is certified Unreasonable behaviour on their parts.
Yeah, not too long ago I was driving with my school friends to the beach and it kinda came up in conversation “is texting your best friend daily normal?” They said that it was and I kinda started to question my previous (outside influenced) idea of what normal even meant in this context.
Ahhh I see what you mean. Yeah those conversations are definitely kindof bittersweet- great that you were actually right all along at least!
!00% agree with that belief
even when I was in elementary school I still used sites like Runehq to finish quests. I think the sailing quest is the first quest in Runescape I finished without a guide in like 20 years.
MbS was able to revoke the privileges of the Saudi 'ulama because having a member of the royal family serve as Prime Minister gives you a +25% bonus to Crown Authority and higher Crown Authority reduces the cost of revoking estate privileges.
(accuracy aside, the fact that you can analyze a modern country with EU5 game mechanics is really damn weird if you think about it. Saudi Arabia is out here playing the wrong map game.)
I miss arcades, I miss having places to gather that are just fun, why does nobody want to have FUN anymore. Movies are expensive, going out costs an arm and a leg with food. Malls are dead. Book stores are dying. Where is the FUN
Things my third-world country has that have apparently disappeared from the first world:
• Arcades?
• Bowling alleys?
• Active malls?
• Board game/tabletop stores where they lend you games to play?
Going to the park, on walks about towne, and to eachother’s houses are S-tier free or low-cost activities that oughta be more common these days. But I 100% agree with you.
Video games?
Making entertainment convenient has been a disaster for society.
I unironically believe that it would be better if smartphones were never invented and TVs were only used to play movies that you have.
Join the revolution
The revolution has begun.
I think TVs were bad
In ye wise old days, they used to call television the idiot box. Now those were the times.
How about home proyectors (I just want to watch black and white movies that I have in a hard drive)?.
Based. They give you square eyes. This is the real point of Fahrenheit 451
Why?
And what do you mean by movies that you have? Do you mean owning physical blu ray copies? Given how expensive those tend to be, it would be limited to quite a few people imo.
I mean no streaming services with an algorithm telling you what to watch. You have movies in your home (files in a hard drive, dvds, blurays, etc.) and that's it.
I personally think streaming services without the algorithm would still have been good enough. Streaming would give smaller and indie productions much more of an audience than they would have (and I would also think lesser known old films would also be accessible whereas in the world of physical media they would get lost relatively faster), as they wouldn't have the big advertising budget to make themselves visible without the audience having ease of access .
https://preview.redd.it/knyv5jxypa2g1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f28a3a8e5463b112db1d8dfcd3329289c63aac72
You know, I never really associated the Ancient Greeks and Romans with teetotaling, to be honest.
Besides the uhh, somewhat questionable depictions of cultures it's extra ironic since New Zealand never actually passed a prohibition bill (though they did get close)
Rome fell because they never figured out how to open spigots
You can't just say perchance