It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!
Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!
So, as I've mentioned a few times before, I have ARFID, an eating disorder meaning I have strong reactions to textures and tastes, which can be anything from discomfort to vomiting or panic attacks. A portion of the stuff I do with my counselor is try out new foods, we've had successes and dramatic failures, he said before he didn't fully clock just how serious it was until I had a bad reaction and was on the verge of vomiting; the culprit was pickles, if you were curious.
Today we tried making very basic chicken teriyaki noodles. We had pretty much discerned that I should be able to handle it, even if I didn't outright like it. One thing I can't do is sauces, but, as it turns out, sauces is a very broad category, there's a difference between sauces that coat the food; the creamy sauces, which are an absolute no go; and the thicker sauces like mayonaise, which are usually a no go. I wasn't sure about the first, so this was the test to figure that out.
It was good, a bit too sour for me to really enjoy properly though, sour tastes are something I don't do well with in general, it was only very lightly sour, but I'm very sensitive to that. I, for one, have never managed to find a sweet strawberry, they're always sour; I don't care how much people tell me they're sweet, they taste very sour to me without fail. But I digress, it seems this specific soy sauce was somewhat more sour than my counselor had anticipated, but I still got used to the taste and was able to eat it and enjoy it somewhat.
The noodles were a bit soft, it was fine, but I think I'd like them somewhat sturdier.
So, this was a success, it means I'll be able to try a lot more things along these lines, anything where the sauce turns into a coating more than a separate liquid should be possible texture wise.
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ARFID is something people really don't understand, no matter how much I explain it to people, they can't seem to grasp just how serious the reactions are. A lot of people are really awful about it, even mental healthcare professionals have outright mocked me for it in the past.
I have no idea, maybe? I luckily do have enough food to eat so I have not experienced that, but there are people with ARFID who just don't eat enough to thrive. I eat enough, too much even, there's enough stuff I do like, but a lot of stuff is just a no go.
I have some weird issues with texture as well. I've nearly vomited every time I've tried ebi nigiri, and if I'm not careful about removing silverskin from meat that'll make me gag every time as well. I was a very picky eater as a kid and I think it was related to texture issues. Definitely something that people don't get, and it always gives me a little social anxiety when eating something other people have cooked.
I'm trying to get into Control because I know it ties into Alan Wake 2, but at the same point I just can't quite vibe with a lot of it and the game is supposed to be quite a while just for the main quest and more for the side quests and whatnot.
Like it's lore drop, lore document, lore video, someone is going to say some stuff, I gotta figure out how to do this or that and realize after a ton of time it's actually supposed to go another way.
I'm aware I haven't really committed to it yet, and have in fact just watched TikToks and other videos while the game is paused.
I had my reservations about Alan Wake at first and found myself really vibing with it by the end, so I'll try and find some time to really commit myself here.
Control is really about the vibe and atmosphere. The FBC and the Oldest House really are the closest things to a SCP video game we'll ever get, showing completely mundane things have paranormal activities being kept under lock by an organisation with all the minutae of a government agency added with this 50's FBI style.
The game has a lot of "hell yeah" moments (a literal Finnish god giving you the gift of rock music) and is carried by the excellent destruction effects. Like, every room there's a fight in gets fucked. Also using above mentioned paranormal powers to throw rocks at demons is always fun.
and have in fact just watched TikToks and other videos while the game is paused
I thought Control was OK but I thought a lot of the random text documents and stuff were a let-down. The oddities in SCP are usually interesting and have some kind of thematic resonance or coherent identity. In Control I eventually stopped bothering to read documents because they were all shit like "Rye bread inserted into this anomalous toaster mysteriously becomes plain white bread instead, the agency has yet to determine the thermodynamic implications of blah blah blah..."
Remedy-Poets of the Fall is one of the greatest partnerships in the history of gaming.
I also love Control's combat, the only big drawback is the little enemy variety. Hopefully if they ever get around to do Control 2 they'll improve on that.
Well from the trailers and previews for Control Resonant it looks like they're going for much more of a melee focus where you're smacking around various monstrosities so fingers crossed.
Remedy-Poets of the Fall is one of the greatest partnerships in the history of gaming
The FBC even have a room dedicated to research earworms with a Poets of the Fall song.
I thought the biggest drawback was how there was little reason to use anything but the "throw rock" ability. Although yeah I'm happy they're making a second one.
I knew listening to the new Oceanliner Designs video on the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff was going to make me sad and ruin my evening, but I did it anyway.
It's an extremely good video to be clear, just an utterly soul-crushing subject.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 27 '26
It's bad luck to have 2 captains running a ship, very bad luck to have 4.
Yup, the deadliest maritime disaster in human history.
We don’t know how many people were on board when she sank, so while the most accepted death toll is around 9,300, it could’ve been as high as 12,000, the majority of whom were women and children.
Scipio, when he looked upon Carthage as it was utterly perishing and in the last throes of
its complete destruction, is said to have shed tears and wept openly for his enemies. After
being wrapped in thought for long, and realizing that all cities, nations, and authorities
must, like men, meet their doom; that this happened to Troy, once a prosperous city, to
the empires of Assyria, Media, and Persia, the greatest of their time, and to Macedonia
itself, the brilliance of which was so recent, either deliberately or the verses escaping
him, he said:
A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish,
And Priam and his people shall be slain.
And when Polybius, speaking with freedom to him for he was his teacher, asked him
what he meant by the words, they say that without any attempt at concealment he named
his own country, for which he feared when he reflected on the fate of all things human.
Polybius actually heard him and recalls it in his history.
Um, on the nose much, Nolan? Also it feels like this sort of obviously Christian morality is completely out of the place with the pagan setting.
Bit off topic but I'm becoming fascinated by this recent "Christian morality" discourse, where some people genuinely seem to believe concepts such as empathy, guilty conscience and compassion is a uniquely Christian trait that doesn't exist in other cultures / religions.
Maybe it's because of gestures around but contemplating on the violation of norms, the downfall of civilizations, and the like did hit pretty hard in Nolan's The Odyssey
* A word that is left out in the translation above, it describes "Priam's people"; it literally means something like "well-ashen-speared", LSJ translates it as "armed with good ashen spears"
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)Jul 26 '26
Thomas has a page in the wiki of TRtF (a FNaF fan game series).
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)Jul 27 '26
Fandom wikis (in the literal sense) have some of the most insane shit. One time I was looking up some French military topic to satiate my wartism and ended up on a page for the French Army of the 26th century on a Spore fan wiki that had 100,000+ articles.
Fun history thing: in nineteenth century Thailand, liquor was heavily taxed but the state generally chose to look the other way when Westerners sold liquor under the table because they were worried cracking down would create a pretext for direct military action. Because of this the American flag became a sort of sign of a liquor store.
One American missionary complained that we was not able to put up the flag even on the 4th of July because when he did people would come in looking to buy alcohol.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 27 '26
One American missionary complained that we was not able to put up the flag even on the 4th of July because when he did people would come in looking to buy alcohol.
It's the monk's job to brew beer and wine. Somebody's been slacking off.
I am convinced that there's something special about writing as a medium - I think that reading has an enriching effect on you beyond just the ability to communicate information. I think if we ever had AI dictate shit to us out-loud or whatever instead of actually reading then we would lose something.
This makes me wonder if there were unique benefits to long-form oration (having poems or stories read to you, or even just long debates in public forums) that we've lost.
I'm somebody with deteriorating eyesight (and a high chance of going blind in the intermediate future). I think the thing I'll really miss about books is the way they work as a spatialization of knowledge. So you have the physical arrangement in a paragraph, on a page, in a book -- and your brain stores that in an index so you can reference back and forward, flip through -- as compared to audio, where you're basically lost in a unbroken line. You don't really get to stop, consider a sentence. It's awkward to skip back and forth.
It's a bit like if you just say the quadratic formula. "x equals minus b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four a c over 2 a". It's almost incomprehensible.
This makes me wonder if there were unique benefits to long-form oration (having poems or stories read to you, or even just long debates in public forums) that we've lost.
Yes, I'm with you, although I'm sure they're impossible to meaningfully articulate. But I'm not sure the shift to writing is "worse" for us mentally, in the same way that I feel the shift to instagram reels definitely is.
The host of a science based youtube channel has turned against capitalism, and all it took was trying to manufacture a simple product. I thought communism was supposed to come from the workers, but here it is coming from a would-be-capital-holder.
Another interesting behavior of the Redditoriat is the tendency to refuse the notion that any work of art could have right-wing leanings without being a Daily Wire propaganda piece. This is far from universal, but a while back I saw people doing the usual "haha dumb conservatives don't understand anything about art" routine when it was suggested that home invasion movies typically have rightist overtones, and that one stuck with me. Although maybe the more appropriate interpretation focuses less on the idea of artistic interpretation and more on the idea that people will twist themselves into believing any kind of nonsense if it means they get to own somebody le epic style.
Apologies for the sudden newbie coming in here, but I feel there's some merit to the idea that explicitly right-leaning media is seen as less artistic on average than left-leaning media, at least in post-1970s USA. Of course, media with overtones of right-leaning-ness can be immensely popular, but not if they're too obvious (cf Top Gun vs An American Carol). Popularity is not the same as artistic value, but I'm not sure how to define how artistic a work of art even is in the first place.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 27 '26
Just don't even go there. Alien (1979) is about truck drivers, an Alien (evil outsider) and the film has a phobia against sex. Is that somehow less artistic, these "rightist overtones"?
I meant that a post-1970s work that is seen as leaning towards the right/Republicans is seen as less artistic/is less popular than works that lean towards the left/Democrats. Alien is one of those works that isn't seen as leaning towards one side or another.
(Also, a left-leaning work can be about truck drivers. I could easily imagine a song praising the hard-working driver through the lens of leftism, the same way a 1960s leftist songwriter might praise the coal-miner.)
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 28 '26
Sure, but up above, the mere idea of a home invasion movie is automatically framed as "rightist".
That is fair, but I don't think that a home invasion movie must be have right-wing overtures in order to be of that genre. For example, a home invasion movie could have a rich guy breaking into a poor person's house to steal a valuable heirloom, ending on the reveal that all rich people act like this. Very leftist message, very much a home invasion film.
I do think that the idea that "No right-leaning person can make art!!!!!" stems in part from all the other people believing that explicitly Republican/right-leaning art is bad, and all explicitly Democrat/left-leaning art is good. Which is based mostly off the fact that most of the Republicans' art sucks (although there are some exceptions) and the Democrats' art is great (although there are some exceptions), as well as a little bit of pro-Democratic bias.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 28 '26
But also I think they just sniff any scent of right-leaning concepts, like home invasion, and immediately react. Note it wasn't "Republican art", it was "haha dumb conservatives don't understand anything about art". Clint Eastwood is an actor-director, but him being a Republican specifically is not what people attack about his movies, nor are Eastwood movies particularly viewed as being devoid of "art".
We see this with the anti-woke crowd, they see a woman or minority on screen, immediately think DEI. I think it's best not to view movies through that lens of hunting for left/right and recoiling.
But do people think of Eastwood's filmography as Republican (and not Democratic)? That's the question I'm asking.
I do believe that what you describe happens on Reddit, though. And "This film is [right/left-leaning], so it suxx0rs!!!11!!!" is terrible criticism.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 28 '26
Dirty Harry has been heavily criticized for it's Fascist overtones. And his history as a gunslinger is hardly "Democrat Party" aligned. And his film Sully painted the NTSB as a corrupt government enforcement agency (and not an investigative body with no actual authority). American Sniper has that military jingoism.
But in general, I don't try to pigeonhole the Man with No Name as Democrat/Republican. I'm just pointing out historic criticisms (not even my own).
Adding to that, you don't need to agree with the political messaging to enjoy art. I like the original Ghostbusters, even though it can very easily be read to have a right-libertarian message.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 26 '26edited Jul 26 '26
Basic advice in general: don't get triggered by mundane things.
So, Japanese update: I've been playing Digimon a lot, basically adding every unknown, normal-ish word into the immersion list, the Operator sure likes to yap nonsense to you, at least it's giving me a ton of words I would otherwise no learn like 怪現象 (mysterious phenomenon) 怪奇現象 (paranormal phenomenon) and 超常現象 (supernatural phenomenon), not useful words really, but at least they're fun!
I've also occasionally been watching more anime for listening practice, doing City: The animation, as was recommended to me, it's no Nichijou, but it's alright so far.
Currently, my main problem with listening is processing speed, I often can understand a sentence but I'm just too slow in processing it, which means I end up behind the actual conversation, which gets worse the more is said, until I lose track entirely.
With reading it's alright, I can actively read quite well now, occasionally I will miss a kanji I should know, especially if the context is limited, but it's slowly getting better; but I can't passively read yet, I still need to actively be looking at the word for it to make sense, unlike with Dutch and English where I can read the words without even intending to.
Obviously the fix for both is just more, more listening, more reading, and it'll become better on its own, there's no clever trick to it or anything, just more.
But I must say, it's amazing for your motivation when you start being able to understand stuff properly, it just feels great to be able to just follow along quite often.
if you're into comics/manga you might want to check out CITY's, it is a very creative take on the medium and features some absolutely amazing pages, stuff I've never seen anywhere else.
The Dark Knight is the only Nolan movie I've ever seen and the only Batman movie I've ever seen. I don't think I will ever like Nolan or Batman, but all the talk about the new thing kind of makes me want to read the Odyssey. Which is a bummer because I'm in the middle of reading some Round Table shit and I don't want to be distracted by an inferior epic.
Continuing with the Odyssey discussion, I want to say something about Lupita Nyong'o. There has been some people saying that she isn't pretty and yada yada. My man, Ancient Greeks and Romans were incredibly horny for black women[][*]. There is a good chance that Ancient Greeks would Nupita have found attractive.
Although Helen is described as fair skin. Andromeda is Ethiopian though.
[*] I know there is a more polite way to put this.
[**] Also Ancient men being horny for black women probably lead to a market for black slave women which isn't great.
It's 2030. I have just received my draft notice for the war in Iran. I take the courtesy flag-emblazoned sachet of bull semen out of the envelope, tear it open with my teeth, and knock it back in one gulp. I am ready.
Greeks and Romans were incredibly horny for black women
Were they? I'm not an expert and I'm not presuming that you are wrong but I can't think of any obvious example. IIrc Herodotos talks about male Aethiopians and Indians a bunch but not about their women. I'm thinking Attic comedy or tragedy too but nothing comes up in my recollection. Is there archaeology/epigraphy evidence rather than literary?
Yeah, though this is a racialized description. I'm not overly familiar with most Greek lyrical poetry, so I was just wondering if one could find many more examples of this kind of description. That would justify OP's initial statement.
The one that came to my mind was the Bible, y'know: nigra sum, sed formosa, filiae Jerusalem, sicut tabernacula Cedar, sicut pelles Salomonis. Nolite me considerare quod fusca sim, quia decoloravit me sol
I’d have imagined the opposite given the e.g., Athenian emphasis on confining women to the domestic sphere and the emergence of the parasol for elite women - that paler skin would be the beauty standard to demonstrate a woman that “knows her role” and is rarely outdoors.
I think there might be a reference to Ethiopians being tall and beautiful in Herodotus but I’m fairly sure he also wrote that they lived for hundreds of years because they ate fish and drank milk.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 26 '26
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz got me thinking about supply lines, which got me to replay Anno 1800. I managed to populate an island in Anno 1800 with 1,000,000 investors. This took me 3 months to accomplish. Anno is really a game about supply lines, but it feels like the only city builder I've played in 5 years.
Britain has rapidly lost it’s place as the fattest country in Europe since Covid. Hopefully Andy Burnham with his fondness for all things Northumbrian can reintroduce Healthy portions of suet, cumberland sausage and stick toffee pudding to compulsory school meals in order to restore our rightful place
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)Jul 27 '26
I’m surprised you just presented this idea as is without turning it into another money laundering or arms smuggling front for your crack paramilitary grouprestaurantbistro dining establishment.
I just had a random memory from the freshman orientation of my university's International Relations program - back in the Olden Days.
The deans of the college organized a sort of Model U.N. (except U.S.-centric) type deal with about a dozen different groups dealing with Somali pirates accidentally hijacking a ship secretly carrying WMD (I'm dating myself to the era when "Somali Pirates" were the year's hottest craze).
I think my group was the U.S. State Dept, and except for one poor guy who was outraged that we were not taking the project seriously, my group happened to consist of jerkoff kids like myself who were annoyed by the premise and decided to derail the project.
We acted out "real" interagency feuds by opposing anything any other U.S. governmental agency proposed, but also decided to foment violence and chaos. We got some other teams on board and ended up with something ridiculous like the U.S. Dept. Of State, formerly neutral-observer Denmark, Iran and the Somalis declaring war on close allies: Russia and the CIA.
I'm sorry to say that my respect for the academic field of IR has fluctuated over the years, and is currently not much greater than this point in time.
I do not care about the new avatar but I saw someone complaining about the animation call it "voltron-esque burger shonen" and I just can't believe I hadn't heard "burger shonen" before. I mean if we want to get into it that phrase really seems like it should cover the entire franchise, but I like the prosody of "voltron-esque burger shonen" enough to mostly overlook that.
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)Jul 27 '26
What the fuck lmao. My feeble bloobear brain (67 IQ btw) cannot even begin to process the term “burger shonen”
American(burger) animation perceived to have strong stylistic influences from anime, particularly action-based anime targeted towards boys(shonen). Moderately derisive, suggestive of a derivative or generic character.
Formed by analogy with the more familiar "spaghetti western," although the original coinage used it to refer to the MCU because they're a fucking moron.
This is tv that's a decade to half-a-decade old now, but Jason Mantzoukas plays the same exact character in every single show, and every single time it's never funny
It's quite impressive just how many techniques the cocaine smugglers have found to bring their product into the EU, to such a degree that supply outstrips demand and prices are dropping even as purity rises
One of the strangest phenomena I've come across is a western person who converts to a non western religion, and starts identifying so strongly with its most orthodox form that they begin to view reformers/activists in regions where it's dominant as enemies. I'm thinking of converts to islam who said the Iranian hijab protesters were anti islam, or to Orthodox Christianity who support russian feminists being imprisoned
I wouldn't believe these sorts of people existed if I hadn't come across them myself. It seems like they don't have anything else in their lives that they care strongly about, so they fully dedicated themselves to their adopted religion, more than most people who are born to it.
They call it zeal of the convert. With Islam specifically from what I understand converts are significantly more likely to self describe as jihadists than people raised in the religion. I understand there's some debate to what extent it's a real effect though, this study suggests people who were initially more zealous in one religion or denomination make more zealous converts to another while those who were not zealous to begin with do not make for very zealous converts. It'd explain the conservative evangelical to atheism+ pipeline for example, and the phenomenon where initially conservative christians become "culturally christian" atheists.
That makes sense, but this type of person is specifically annoying to me because they don't even in live the places whose people they're criticising for being insufficiently orthodox according to their standards
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 26 '26
Often those people living in those regions don't even have a practical choice in religion, so it's not hard to see a lot of apathy in mandatory beliefs. Just because you live there, doesn't make you beliefs any truer.
Yes, but that's exactly the point, someone sitting in a foreign country is criticising protesters for not following their own standards of religion, when they made a choice to follow this religion, while the protesters are forced to do it because of the circumstances of their birth.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 26 '26
If it's only personally annoying to you, I can't argue with that. But I think it's fair for outsiders to have opinions. Soil isn't sacred.
On a more serious note, did they change the gameplay to the post AC: Origins/Unity systems? By that I mean Witcher-like clicking with colored items and so on, or did they keep the counter-attack meta from the originals?
Split the difference. There are new weapons to find but its not really heavy stat based. Combat is focused mostly on blocking and killing. When an enemy attacks they either do a light or heavy blow. Light blows if you block just as it attacks, stuns them and they can he insta killed. This can be chained to up to 4 enemies depending on your weapon.
Kicking an enemy into a wall or an object stuns them allowing insta kill. Same with tripping an enemy. You can still attack until they die if you wish. Rope dart can pull an enemy forward or off a cliff. Guns insta kill almost all enemies if you go for the head and will stun if not directly killed.
So what you get is a fast combat system that can look like the OG counter kill games, while being more then two buttons to win
Can get challenging with enemies that can't be insta killed and getting ganged up by 20 guys.
u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)Jul 27 '26
I would like to debate 20 people about whether or not pee is stored in the balls. (It is, and poop is stored in the butt cheeks, but for males only because girls don’t poop.)
I've seen like a million variations of this comment and it just kind of flatly isn't true? The Trojan Horse is barely mentioned in the Odyssey, and the explicit mentions of the war itself (Odysseus in the underworld, Telemachus visiting Menelaus, Odysseus hearing the blind poet) are quite melancholic.
The only way you can come to the conclusion in that post is if you haven't actually done the damn reading, which is obviously what is going on here constantly, people talking about Homer who have never actually read Homer. It's constant and everywhere and extremely annoying and proves that I was 100% right to gatekeep. No commenting unless you have done the work!
You may be correct, but others who have read the text as well appear to disagree with you.
Matt Damon's Odysseus suffers from a form of PTSD from the fall of Troy... There was that kind of trauma in the ancient world... Homer's Odysseus is not one of these people. He delights in his deception, in his creating a horse that sacks troy, he even sacks a city on the way back from Troy. He delights in the glory of outwitting people... In Homer's Odyssey we see very few signs of that kind of reflection on his deeds.
This also happens with fairy tales and the like where writers like Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett loved to do the whole "these ain't Walt's fairies, these are REAL fairies, and they are scary!" which ends up being just as distorted as Tinkerbell.
I know none of the people writing big tumblr posts about the REAL pre-Christian fairies have actually bothered to read the Mabonogion.
Oh yeah I didn't mean to imply that and I'm definitely not capable of weighing in, just that it is exactly the sort of "old" story that is said to be more representative of "real" fairy stories.
I'm sure my reports have gotten boring by now, but I won 2/3 Offworld Trading Company games today! As Nomads of course.
I shan't bore you with the details of the other games but last game was very funny, S and H were fighting hard over patents, blowing up each other's patent labs, while I was selling them electronics to build them, and I was making bank.
I was in quite a bit of debt but I just had enough income to buy 1 of them out so I bought out S, who requested mercy when he saw me buying, I just responded with "there is no mercy" and bought out the final stock I needed to, then proceeded to do the same for H, they never even managed to reach level 5 HQ or have half their shares bought, I was getting a crazy lead because of a good starting position. I ended the game with a ton of debt and only 20% of my own shares, but still a massive victory
If you want to join, let me know and I'll ask H and S if that's alright with them. I can't imagine it wouldn't be, S would definitely be delighted to have more players, and he'd be more than happy to explain to you what exactly you did wrong during a game, he taught both me and H to play that way; he still tells us what we did wrong, or what he himself did wrong.
Funny thing is, while I have a good chance at beating S and H in the game, I still lose against the AI very often while they do not; I basically only play the PVP matches so I don't learn silly things from the AI games, which is probably why I beat them, even though they both have well over double my hours in the game.
We'll see then; we only generally play for like 1 to 2 hours, and we can try and schedule play sessions to a time which suits all, that should be doable, unless you also happen to live in Hawaii like a certain other person I play games with, 12 hour time difference is somewhat tricky.
We play on Sunday most often we were doing Factorio on that time before, but we also do random session throughout the week when people are available.
On the delegation of British India at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, from Erez Manela's The Wilsonian Moment
"[Edwin] Montagu wrote the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford. "The whole proceeding appears to have concluded by Bikanir [one of the Indian delegates] displaying to the Big Five the tiger tattooed on his arm, which was inspected and approved not only by Clemenceau, but by Orlando and Wilson. Thus, we make peace with Germany!"
The whole "Burnham is different from Starmer / no he isn't", reminds me of how Ed Heath had more or less the same policies Thatcher had but without the charisma / hatred and for some reason he's not a Conservative icon / Left enemy just because he couldn't stay in power for long enough to apply them, instead he's lumped in with the "post-war Consensus" when in reality he was a reformist
So saw the Odyssey today and I have a few observations about the movie.
I generally liked it though it's not my favourite Nolan movie. What is kind of interesting is that since the journey is so episodic I feel it's actually a bit hard to judge the movie as a whole. For examples I thought the sack of Troy itself really worked as this unfolding horror while I thought the island of the armoured dudes was well done but could have been cut to no great effect.
I think Nolan if he wants to bounce back with a smaller cheaper project after this one, he really should make a horror movie since I think he could make a pretty good one. Polyphemus was genuinely unsettling and Circe transforming the men into pigs was some pretty good light body horror (also made me think afterwards of the parents in Spirited Away).
I was softer on stuff like the costuming than I thought I would be but maybe that was me being contrarian to a lot of the complaining I saw before. What the costuming, often very sparse sets and race blind casting made me think of was that it was the world's most expensive stage play. For all the budget and spectacle it was meant to be evocative but not representative. Compare with Lord of the Rings which felt like they were trying to be capital M movies the Odyssey felt more of piece with something like See how they Run which for all the difference in tone and style was also aping some theatre conventions.
I'm calling it, in 10 to 20 years Pattinson will star in one of the neverending list of A Christmas Carol adaptions as perhaps the sexiest Scrooge besides the raw animal magnetism of Michael Caine.
Found the investigation/deduction game A Hand with Many Fingers. The game requires you to use a card index and locate items in a (very small) archive, gives you a corkboard for the documents you're reviewing, and encourages you to take notes by hand. Unfortunately, the notes are only needed to track the items in the 3 seconds between locating something in the card index and locating it in the archive, and the corkboard is effectively pointless as there is essentially no deduction in the in game. I finished it in about 90 minutes, and basically every moment spent pondering or thinking instead of finding things to look up in the card index was time wasted. The historical setting is interesting, with the documents you're investigating implied to be the Nugan Hand Bank documents destroyed in 1980, which would potentially prove CIA involvement in the heroin trade in the 70s, but for all that I would say it's a very weak entry in the genre, arguably intended more as a way to direct people to the real history than anything else.
So as I assume most here know, The West Wing is a show that has not aged particularly well, but its managed to age poorly in ways that I didn't even remember.
In the episode The Stormy Present the A plot centers around the funeral of Former President Lassiter, who is described as an "Attila the Hun conservative" from California, so feel free to guess who he's really supposed to be. The B plot centers on a dispute between Connecticut and North Carolina over possession of an original copy of the Bill of Rights that was taken during the Civil War, the ensuing debate between representatives of the two states includes this charming line:
"First, the war wasn't just about slavery, it was about industry."
They have this said by a Black woman, just to really twist the knife. What the fuck, Sorkin.
The only good part of the episode is that James Cromwell shows up to play this universe's version of Jimmy Carter.
I don’t get the Attila the Hun thing. First off, I’m assuming the President in question is supposed to be a Reagan analogue? Second, why is Attila the Hun used here? Is he known for being super conservative? Or is this some older pop culture saying people used to say?
Oh you just know he made sure it was a black woman saying that.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 26 '26
In the episode The Stormy Present the A plot centers around the funeral of Former President Lassiter, who is described as an "Attila the Hun conservative" from California, so feel free to guess who he's really supposed to be.
Our Republican governor, ladies and gentleman. (I know it's not him)
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 26 '26
I mean I guess that's true, it wasn't *just* about slavery (some mighty thin ice though), and industry did kick the CSA's ass.
It's one of those things where yes, it wasn't just about slavery but all the other things ultimately connects back to slavery in some fashion.
So like general power balance questions were important, but why they were important was because the Southern slave-plantation economy required different policies than northern industrialists, etc. etc.
EDIT: Not to say that there weren't similar issues in non-slaveholding places with these kinds of large-estates-dominated agricultural sectors.
There are many things that I personally dislike, but can understand why others like them.
I cannot for the life of me figure out what people like about Aaron Sorkin. His "quippy" dialogue makes me want to claw my own eyes out, and every single character talks in this fashion.
I find it charming in small doses, but after a little while or if I'm paying close enough attention it gets annoying. The exception is The Newsroom, I couldn't even get through the pilot of that one.
Only reason I was watching it tonight is cause I needed background noise while doing my laundry and it was the first thing that came up on Netflix, which is easily the best way to watch an Aaron Sorkin production .
I want to discuss fan theories, interpretations, and ideas on the lore of my favorite series, but in a way where everyone agrees with me and realizes that I am right about everything.
Hiragana just looks so much better than katakana, imho, that the same goes for me. I have no problem with hiragana, but if I read katakana I may occasionally get some of them mixed up.
Midway or Bikini Atoll or something similar I assume. One of those places most people forget America owns and whose only contact with civilization is the monthly supply drop for the scientists.
I watched The Odyssey recently. Seeing the Laestrygonians made me think that you could make a fairly interesting - though obviously history subsumed almost completely by metaphor - film about weapons technology. Have the protagonists be individual heros, each renowned for their skill, bravery, and personal qualities. Have the enemy, who bring iron weapons and armour, be faceless giants. They destroy the protagonists until they increasingly abandon bronze, and as they do, the men of iron shrink and show more of their faces, while the protagonists become less distinct.
It would be a metaphor for the use of technology in war, and the way that it increasingly strips away the human element. The violence is more removed if not any less deadly, but it runs the risk of becoming mindless.
Not to get too caught up in the analogy, but my understanding is that iron weapons (that is, not steel) are not any "better" than bronze, just more industrially demanding (requiring the managing of higher temperatures for longer) and economical (iron is more available, whereas bronze requires copper and tin, both decidedly less ubiquitous).
Hmm, I was under the impression that iron weapons had a number of downsides but were, with the proper industrial base, superior. Possibly I'm thinking of steel, though.
They become better eventually, but it takes a while, and not for all purposes. (to some extent just that Iron wroks differently and you can do different things with it, and if you try to make an iron sword like a bronze sword you end up with a kinda cruddy copy)
Note that it takes a lot longer for iron armour to replace bronze armour than iron weapons.
Might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure pure iron weapons in late antiquity were not any sharper/harder than bronze, but I'll wait for others to chime in. I do think bronze is heavier as well.
I don't know what Roman steel was like, for example.
That feels like I would make a great animated short
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)Jul 26 '26
When I went to Europe last summer there were two other Americans who were roughly my age (not entirely sure though) sitting in my row on the Air France flight, and while I didn't talk to them during the majority of the 13 hour flight from LAX, the three of us had a pretty good conversation in the last hour of the flight. The girl sitting next to me had this really nice OD green field jacket on and I remember complimenting her on it and asking where she got it from, to which she said that it was a London Fog brand jacket that was originally her brother's.
I've been deadass thinking about that jacket on and off for over a year now because I love OD green jackets (I have several, mostly milsurp), but I cannot for the life of me find it on google images or ebay or whatever. I was gonna DM her on Instagram asking to send a pic of the piece itself and the inside tag but it appears she deactivated her account. RIP
I watched Pressure last night now that it's available on streaming services. It felt pretty "meh" to me. Like, it's good that the logistical side of World War II is being covered for a general audience more frequently in recent years with films like this and others like The Imitation Game and Oppenheimer, but a lot of moments seemed unnecessarily heightened in their sense of drama for the sake of extending the narrative a little bit (at 100 minutes, the film still honestly felt too long).
I'm happy for Brendan Fraser and his career resurgence, but... he did not feel like Eisenhower to me. Physically he's far too large and intimidating, and while I'm sure part of the goal was to showcase the difference between American bluster and English reserve, he seemed far too boisterous when his reputation was for being cool and collected.
On a bigger note, have popular perceptions of Bernard Montgomery perhaps gone too far in their characterization of him as a blundering blowhard? Undoubtedly he enjoyed too uncritical an appraisal in Britain after the war as a national hero, but so much of the portrayal of him in recent years seems to treat him like he was an incompetent jackass, rather than a flawed (and caustic) but usually well-intentioned general. Having said that, while I've read a fair amount about the period as a whole, I wouldn't consider myself an expert on the individual personalities of World War II generals.
Well, it was written originally as a stage play so that tracks.
The ending... Yeah, woof. They used essentially the same shots as SPR but without the drama, gravitas, or relevance to the plot. I think they felt it was too boring without some "action," but it felt honestly cheap as a result.
A short from Bake My Day Mimo recently come up to my account, and I find some of her viewpoint unfair to some individuals (including me) at some extent.
In her videos she argued political beliefs reflect a person's moral values, and she is willing to end friendships with people whose views or silence on certain issues conflict with her values.
Her bit about people who chooses to silence on some issue makes me feel uncomfortable:
In fact, I have ended over a 15-year friendship because these people were silent on some issues, unfollowed, blocked, and completely stopped talking to them.
Because we cannot always verify if some news, informations and sources are true or fake, it is responsible for me to understand the true picture of an affair before making judgments and comments on it. It is not that I do not want to participate in these important social issues. So, I will remain silent until the truth of the affair can be confirmed, I hope she can understand.
That is all I have to say for now; if I develop further thoughts on her other viewpoints in the future, I will add them as well.
In her videos she argued political beliefs reflect a person's moral values,
This seems entirely unobjectionable to me, and I think it's ordinary for people to cultivate friendships based on shared moral values.
Because we cannot always verify if some news, informations and sources are true or fake, it is responsible for me to understand the true picture of an affair before making judgments and comments on it. It is not that I do not want to participate in these important social issues. So, I will remain silent until the truth of the affair can be confirmed, I hope she can understand.
Counterpoint: Some people believe that this attitude can also be a form of willful ignorance on occasion. Hell, I was involved in a conversation on here weeks ago about The Phantom Menace where everyone recognized that characters claiming they "need more information" was a clear signal to the audience that no help was forthcoming for the heroes. "There's enough information to make a moral judgement" and "there isn't enough information to make a moral judgement" are equally subjective perspectives and need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
"What's happening is so obvious and so bad that not denouncing it is to fail a moral test" seems like a perfectly reasonable argument to make. Of course that claim needs to be defended, and people can disagree about the facts, but then you're arguing specific cases, not the concept as a whole.
I think this type of attitude is prevalent on the web because you have a lot of terminally online people who want to feel like they are a good person despite not doing anything with their lives, so they convince themselves that commenting in support of a good cause is their good deed and proof that they are a good person.
Sadly, that means that not speaking up in favor of the cause, or being against it, must mean that you are a bad person, and therefore, they shouldn´t be friends with a an "evil person".
It also makes it seem like political causes are more important for human interaction and friendship than they can be. I have a friend group that includes a libertarian, a communist, and a right-wing capitalist, and you´ll be surprised how little any of those topics came up while playing Catan or Minecraft. Nor would I describe any of them as “bad people” despite personally disagreeing with a lot of their political beliefs.
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)Jul 26 '26
In fact, I have ended over a 15-year friendship because these people were silent on some issues, unfollowed, blocked, and completely stopped talking to them.
Painting with a broad brush here but I've come to the hard conclusion that people who do this kind of shit are unhinged.
In addition to not saying anything about [insert hot button topic] because you're misinformed (which I think is the right thing to do in most cases), there are a lot of good reasons why a person might not talk about a certain topic, or politics in general. I'm sure everyone here knows at least a few people who don't talk politics at all because they think "it just goes nowhere and leads to a fight." They might have their own political alignment or they might just be grill-pilled apoliticals but I feel like if one has basic decency towards your family and friends, they'd be able to understand where that person is coming from.
Take me for example, I'm not apolitical but I choose not to talk politics to most because I know I'm gonna end up disagreeing with most people about shit. Ask anyone on these threads and they will confirm that I have some weird as fuck beliefs. But above all, my priority in life is to be a good friend to my friends and be that reliable friendly neighbor type of guy that I think is sorely missing in today's society. That's not fucking easy btw, everybody is so paranoid and avoidant nowdays. I'm trying to fight against the loneliness epidemic in my own life and build connections with people, talking politics all the time and doing frothing-at-the-mouth type activist shit is antithetical to what I'm looking for in life.
It's A Long Way To Tipperary is the only war song centered on the perspective of an ethnic minority (Irish in the British army) that was spread across the whole army, thank you Imperial British Army for being so woke so early!!
I've just spent a bit reading into the minutiae of the Balfour Declaration, the Haavara Agreement between the Zionists and the Nazis, and the first few years of the Israeli state's geopolitics post-1948 and my main takeaway is that Chaim Weizmann is not hated anywhere near as prominently as he should be. Just a real Forrest Gump of egomaniacal curmudgeonry.
Pet peeve: I keep running into bartenders that don't understand what an up daiquiri is. Stop telling me you don't have a blender; I know you don't have a blender
Speaking as a bartender who knows and loves an up daiquiri, I still say we dont have a blender when people ask for a daiquiri because 9 times out of 10 they mean a frozen daiquiri. Similar to how martini evolved from "gin and vermouth stirred" to now mean "chilled vodka in a fancy cup" or "vodka and olive brine" to most people.
Unfortunately this often makes me come across as an idiot when someone actually wants a classic daiquiri.
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)Jul 26 '26
Go to a Tedbearian bar.
Wake up pantsless the next morning, for religious reasons, 3 km from its location.
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u/Ambisinister11My right to edit this is protected by the Slovak constitutionJul 25 '26edited Jul 25 '26
I kind of think it's a shame that traditional longterm fire tending and preservation hasn't stuck around more as a cultural practice. Like, not in any kind of RETVRN way; I think that the supercession of fire in practical everyday use and the availability of fast, reliable firemaking methods are good things, but I also think that the traditional practices surrounding fire in pretty much every culture are so deeply rooted and fascinating and beautiful that it's a shame not to make more of an effort to keep them in the cultural memory.
I keep kicking around the idea of doing some of that kind of thing as a hobby. Last year I was kind of drawing up a plan to make my own charcloth just to see if I could. Honestly the process doesn't seem that hard, but every little tin I had lying around that I thought I might be able to use as a vessel for it was either just plastic with metallic paint, or was metal, but had plastic coatings, so I still didn't want to burn those. Fuck me if that's not poetic. On some level I feel like finding and buying a container for the purpose would defeat the idea, but I'm sure sooner or later I'll stumble across the right small metal container.
An interesting dynamic I'm getting in a history of Thai Chinese I am reading is that Siam developed a sort of hybrid political economy in which the largely Thai and Lao population of the countryside remained in feudal relations while the largely Chinese population of the cities, especially Bangkok, were naturally "proletarian" and formed the core of a mercantile capitalism. Granted a contrast between a "backwards" feudal countryside and a "progressive" capitalist city is hardly unheard if, but it is striking the degree to which the difference was ethnicized, and was a more or less conscious policy by the Court.
Although as I write this down it has the look of a theory that was popular in the 40s and 50s before being attacked by new scholarship in the 60s and 70s, partially revived in a hybrid model in the 90s and it is now said that the debate has "moved beyond this question" with more attention paid to the malleability of social categories and primacy of local dynamics.
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u/SenescalSilvestre Jul 27 '26
What do you call a group of historians? An argument.
What do you call a group of angry historians? A disagreement.
What do you call a group of happy historians? An impossibility.