xzar_monty

This is something political and current, but not related to the discussion here at the moment. This is a lovely clip of Richard Dawkins commenting on the way Jordan Peterson talks about religion and how he obstinately refuses to make sense or commit to a definite argument. I have delved into Peterson in a professional capacity (i.e. not in my free time, thank you), and I have been astonished by how poor he is as a writer. I mean, in my 25+ years in publishing, I think this is the worst printed sentence I have ever seen: "Many herbivores, comparatively defenseless, facing imminent and brutal death, freeze in place, paralyzed by fear, depending on camouflage and immobility to render them invisible to the terrible intentions of nearby red-toothed and razor-clawed carnivores." If there ever was a perfect example of purple prose, it's this. In a writing class, I would give it an F, even at sophomore level. It's a complete mystery to me where his editor was. Dawkins' comparison to Deepak Chopra is apt: there is a whole lot of people ever-prepared to be thrilled by obfuscation whose intent is to hide a lack of content.

This is a really good explanation of how these things can be so poorly understood and, also, why conspiracy-type thinking can be so common. It's not easy to grasp the complexities of a situation, look at it from the right perspective and analyse the probabilities of various scenarios. I am reminded of the Sally Clark case where she was sentenced for murder because there happened to be two cases of sudden infant death syndrome in her family. It's easy to argue that someone had to be a murderer because having two cases of SIDS in one family is just so unlikely. But you only have to look at it from a different perspective to begin to understand why it could happen. I mean: given all the families and all the births in the world, what are the odds of that happening sometime somewhere? It's going to happen, but it's going to be very rare.

This is precisely the kind of language you want to write when discussing intelligibility. Anyway, there is a good basic rule to determine whether something is a different language or merely an accent / dialect. It goes like this: go into a place where people speak differently from the way you do. Try to speak like them. If they appreciate your effort, we are talking about two different languages. If, however, they don't like what you're doing or are even somewhat insulted by it because they think you're making fun of them, then we are not talking about two different languages but merely two different dialects / accents. In other words, Cóckney and Scouse are different English dialects -- an East Londoner going into Liverpool and trying to sound like the locals is generally not appreciated. But English and French are different languages -- a Londoner going into Paris and trying to speak like the locals is generally respected, even if he doesn't do it very well.

At this point, on this forum, it is obligatory to note that Tolkien rather famously "based"(*) his Elvish language(s?) on Finnish. As for what that actually means, I have no idea, because nothing I have seen of Elvish in his works reminds me of anything I know about my first language. So Finns understand Elvish... NOT. (*) So "based" could mean "was delighted by the discovery of the Finnish language [as he definitely was, which you can check from his letters] and decided to invent a language".

You're not wrong. Interestingly, even though most Karelians live in Russia or Finland (more in Russia than in Finland), the third largest group of them lives in Ukraine (though it is significantly smaller). I am not all that familiar with their languages, of which there are at least two, Karelian and Livvi-Karelian.

Cannot speak for genetics, but linguistically it's definitely not. Like @Zoraptor says above, Estonian is closer by a decent margin. Take this from a native Finnish speaker who has studied quite a few languages and knows a thing or two about the topic: listening to Estonian, a native Finnish speaker is just on the verge of understanding it; the sentence structures are almost identical and the vocabulary sounds incredibly familiar. It's a bit like listening to someone who is extremely drunk or slightly unhinged: you know they are speaking something that you almost understand, but it doesn't quite make sense. However, a native Finnish speaker listening to Hungarian will understand nothing. It's just another foreign language that definitely requires study before you even get the basics of it. By the way, here's another detail about Finland that I think is quite interesting and something someone like @BruceVC might appreciate: whereas a country like Italy has a clear north / south division, in Finland the division is east / west, with the west doing a lot better in many ways. Whether it be overall health, employment or other stuff like that, people in the western parts of the country are likely to do much better than those in the east. Some of the details are downright bizarre: a Finn from the western parts of the country is much less likely to get into a serious accident than someone from the east (which is a nice demonstration of how everything tends to coalesce, i.e. healthy people tend to have jobs and friends and interesting hobbies and not a lot of stress and all the rest of it, and it all comes together into a whole, whereas people at the other end of the spectrum tend to lack much or all of that and thus tend to get into all kinds of trouble much more easily. Chronic stress seriously impedes your thinking and thus almost certainly makes you more accident-prone, perhaps even Hemingwayanly so.)

Linguistically, it's really interesting: Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland are all close to each other, whereas Finland is far removed from all of them. The former Finnish president Tarja Halonen made a clear distinction between Finland and the Baltic countries, claiming that we are part of Scandinavia, not the Baltics. Fair enough, but if you look at it from a linguistic point of view, Finland is right next door to Estonia and very far away from Scandinavia.

Indeed: WW2 was a huge business opportunity for Sweden, and they probably milked it for all they could. I would in fact love to know the statistical details of this in relation to Sweden's overall finances. Like, for instance, of all the countries that benefited from WW2, was Sweden among the ones that benefited the most? A Swedish friend of mine doesn't get tired of pointing out that after avoiding fighting in WW2 and benefiting from it, Sweden started to become increasingly naive and turned out unbelievably so, until very very recently, when it has finally started to realise that quite a few of the people who have moved into the country have absolutely no intention of even trying to "integrate" or whichever buzzword you want to use; their plan is to do something completely different. (This is his opinion.)

On that page, the sort-of headline reads: "Examining the True Story of World War II Drama ‘Narvik’". After working in publishing for over a quarter of a century, I have developed a rule whereby no newspaper / magazine that uses exclamation marks on the front page is worth reading, and every book / article that talks about "the true story of" or "the secret life of" something or someone, should be ignored.

You might want to do a brief study about the Holocaust in Norway and then possibly reconsider your position on this. Incidentally, this continues to be a question that much of Norway is extremely firmly in denial about.

As the saying goes, friendly Sweden is always prepared to fight against threats from the east, and it's going to fight all the way to the last Finn. After that, Sweden collapses.

I have never heard of anyone doing it. BUT, what I have heard of is that whatever you can think of, you can rest assured the somewhere in the US there is both a group that regards it as the greatest crime ever committed, and a group that regards it as an integral part of their religious rites. (I have never heard of this infamous case of yours, either, but would like to know what you're referring to.)

Why do you think that is? My first guess would be location, the second being, obviously, local preferences. Like, it's quite easy to find good squid and calamari in southern Spain, for example. Not so easy in Scandinavia.

My first thought upon reading about putting coins into food!

These traditions are fun. There is one in Finland where you put an almond into the traditional Christmas rice porridge (https://scandicuisine.com/finnish-rice-porridge/) when it's ready to be served. The person who gets the almond is supposed to either get married the next year or just have good luck in general.

I think this sentence is a fairly accurate description of how dire the political situation is in the US right now: neither the democratic nor the republican party has been able to put forward a decent candidate that has a chance. Also, it is more than a bit worrying that the US is beginning to look gerontocratic in the same way that the Soviet Union did for decades after Stalin. (This is a strange parallel to Russia that the US seems to have, another one being that apparently most citizens feel they have no way of influencing the politics of their country.) Previously, I was baffled by how the same people used to appear as candidates for both parties (i.e. the Bushes and the Clintons), but the current situation is not baffling, it's simply bad. It would be good to understand it a lot better. The quality of political debate has also disappeared; it's fascinating to see how civilized, intelligent and articulate people like Nixon or Bush Sr. sound compared to what the US has now.

All the three DLCs for PoE2 are also very good, and I heartily recommend them. If you only want one, do go for Beast of Winter, as it is the best, storywise.

Speaking of oppressed Russian-speaking locals, the ever-whiny Russian embassy set up a service for Russians in Finland to report on all the ways they are being mistreated and oppressed here. This was a particularly low move, even for the Russian embassy, although it was probably to be expected in the current circumstances. Let us just say that it not go down all that well: the service did receive an awful lot of feedback, that's for sure, but I would estimate that a lot more than 99.9% was automatically generated and not exactly what they were looking for. Someone, perhaps even anyone, might have guessed that this was precisely what was going to happen, but apparently the Russian embassy did not, because it was, shall we say, upset. No surprises there, either.

To the extent that the East / West division makes sense, I cannot but agree. It seems certain that Russia regards "the West" as not only weak but stupid, too, and even more so than it previously did. This, incidentally, is where an autocrat such as Putin has a clear edge: he doesn't have to think about any forthcoming elections, whereas everbody in the West has to.

I wonder if this is true: https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/putin-patrushev-plan-prigozhin-assassination-428d5ed8 The Wall Street Journal has at least been a very trustworthy source, but I'm not sure if that holds anymore. (Good American newspapers tend to be an awful lot better than the better English newspapers, just as American publishers are head and shoulders above their British counterparts when it comes to fact-checking, editing and overall quality. Sometimes the difference is astonishing. John Cleese, for instance, wrote about this briefly in his memoir.)

Off-topic, but art both is and isn't subjective; this has been repeatedly pointed out since at least the 1500s. For instance, while you may like whoever you please and there is essentially no debate about that, if you try to argue that Britney Spears is a better singer than Ella Fitzgerald or that Ed Wood is a better film director than Orson Welles, you just don't know what you're talking about, i.e. you are objectively wrong. Something similar applies to interpretations of artistic works: there's a continuum ranging from the true but trite to the outrageously wrong, when it comes to the question of what a work of art is "about" -- so if you say that Hamlet deals with loss and deceit, you're right but your observation is meaninglessly trite, whereas if you say that Hamlet is an extended metaphor for a frat boy party in Cancun, you're just outrageously wrong. The more interesting questions of interpretation, in this case, would deal with questions such as whether Hamlet is genuinely mad or merely pretending to be so, and whether his status, in this regard, changes during the play.

Apologies, but since this is a forum with role-players on it, it's hard to avoid very bad jokes along the lines of "It would be quite a feat for either side to improve their initiative", whenever I see terms like that.

You may want to check this out, for instance: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/escapism There are, of course, other definitions. As for what you say about it being a "literal escape", this is an extremely good example of how the word literally tends to be used wrong. It's becoming increasingly common, and while it can be extremely funny, it's a bit silly, too. An escape is "an act of breaking free from confinement or control", so unless you happen to live in some kind of confinement or under some kind of exterior control, games are not a literal escape, please. A figurative one, sure, but not literal, no way. (Another way of being unintentionally funny is by saying that something is "very unique", which is a phrase that always merits a huge facepalm.) Anyway, as this is getting off topic, I'll finish now. ... but here's one Mr. Pinker being funny on the figurative use of the word "literal":

I would suggest that you're probably using the wrong term here, i.e. instead of escapism you could or perhaps should be talking about simply having fun. Escapism as a phenomenon is not particularly healthy, while there's nothing wrong with having fun playing a game, even if it's an alternative to the constructive things in your life. As for your second point, fair enough: there is something decidedly unappealing about other people going for a wee in your cup of tea while you're drinking it. So I agree with you there.

To a certain extent, you do have a point. However, there are other aspects to the question. For instance, if games are escapism to you, I'd strongly suggest that you find something better and more constructive to do (and yes, I know this sounds patronizing). Also, what you wrote made me think of a character in Ocean Vuong's debut novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. A couple of guys debate about whether it's better to buy Coca-Cola or Sprite, and one of them is a strong supporter of Sprite. The other, later on, finds out that the Coca-Cola Company actually owns both brands and so no matter which one they bought and buy, Coca-Cola will win out in the end, which he finds incredibly sad. I found myself unable to empathize with this, although that was clearly what I was meant to do, because it seems to me that buying either Coca-Cola or Sprite is stupid in the first place (they are designed to exploit your weaknesses and they are quite likely to contribute to you becoming sick and fat) and that the simplest way to deal with these soft drinks is to ignore them both. So, as cynical as the game situation appears to be, I don't think there's any real reason to expect that the industry would work in any other way, and so I would simply ignore all games that contain the kind of stuff / options that you oppose.