majestic

Oh, trips down memory lane, and about schools, yay, I love those. Let's see. High school, or at least the sort-of equivalent that I signed up for (grades 8 to 13, 5 year course), had 50 minute teaching units. Five minute breaks between each unit, with a a 50 minute break (for lunch) after four or five classes. Most of the days started at 08:15 and ended 16:25. We had some school days ending at 17:20, and some started at 07:20. With my commute times being what they were, I left home at 06:35 (5:35 at the insane days that started earlier than normal) and was at home ~18:15 at the earliest, shortly before 20:00 at the worst. Homework and assignments usually took another hour, longer on days with accounting and maths, as those had teachers who delighted in giving out a lot of assignments. Right, in between we were supposed to study too, I guess. During 2nd and 4th grades we had to apply for a summer internship. Students were not allowed to proceed to the next grade without them. The busiest schedule we had in 11th grade, clocking in at 14 or 15 separate classes, including "voluntary" extracurricular activities. Least busy was the final grade with 8 classes, but we had a year long project for the finals and a paper* to write. By least busy I mean we "only" had 30 units per week in the final grade, as opposed to 36 + ECs. Projects were picked or assigned from a pool of projects submitted by companies, government agencies and NGOs. Most students wanted company projects because they were an easy way to find a job (and the companies had free talent to check out for a year) - plenty of us who had a company project actually worked part time for those companies during the final year, so the ones from the agencies and NGOs ended up being assigned. My group got their project from the school board: digitising administrative processes at schools. Pretty neat topic that no one else took seriously, although I suppose the idea came a bit too early (talking late 1990ies/early 00s here). For the paper we were provided a massive set of anonymized data from our school: students' grades in each class and the amount of classes they missed each year. The basic idea was pretty simple, we were to find a correlation between the grades and missed classes. It seems logical enough, I suppose, students who miss a lot of classes should generally have worse grades than those who don't, except try as we might, we could not find any meaningful correlation, it was near zero. One of our teachers was so baffled by the results that she went over our calculations. Three times, in as many weeks. The only thing we could show was that there were certain classes and teachers where lower attendence in genereal tended to lead to worse grades, but that is logical, we had classes where the grade directly depended on attendence, like PE, or teachers that factored attendence into their grades. Needless to say, the presentation of our results did not go over too well. The obvious problem is the small sample size, and that one needed to pass an SAT to even get into the school in the first place, and even then, the dropout rate in the first year is above 50%, and of everyone who started the same year as I did, less than 15% actually graduated. Once past the first grade you're left with students easily capable of making up any missed time, and missing classes is not the leading cause of the high dropout rate in the first year. *Not to scientific writing standards, but it did include research pertaining (at least superficially) to the project for the final exams. Im dichten Fichtendickicht sind dicke Fichten wichtig. *scnr*

Yeah, I'm also a total Eora lore buff. Personally, I, like, totally love how Eowyn faked his death at the hands of Priest Padraic. What did you like best?

It would be interesting if you could share your thoughts as to why. I'm neither particularily versed in teaching techniques (modern or otherwise) nor with your school system, so I am left guessing as to what exactly you think is so crazy. I might also not have the best perspective, given what the last five years of my school life looked like. We certainly never got a homework amnesty week, but plenty of projects over breaks and holidays. Edit: Well, whoever the person is, they are coming across as a major douchewaffle, so there's that.

You clearly need to git gud, nub.

Speaking of healthy food: Was pretty good.

Preordered the Switch 2. I need to make an effort to use it more than my old OLED Switch, which sits mostly unused in the dock.

So, I suppose Trump is actually the head of the PANICAN party?

So, what do you like about Tiny Fishing that makes it worthwhile to play? I am currnetly playing We Are Warriors on my phone, which is a great idle game with just a smidgen of strategy involved. You can unlock cool skills and fun heroes, and best of all, if you're stuck - as it is normal with idle games - you can just open your wallet and buy yourself progression. The best part is how that progression is random, so you don't even know if you can proceed after buying in-game currency. If you get unlucky it'll just increase your units' hitpoints, and not their damage. But! During events you can just buy additional points for the skill tree. And they're only 2.49€ per piece. What a great deal!

Elon Musk, seeing how he already suggested a zero tariff policy between the US and EU.

Cut the man some slack y'all, will you, he's a stable genius who saw that trade and economic relations no longer guarantee peace when Putin's Russia invaded the Ukraine and how COVID affected global supply chains. He's also seen how little materiel the West can really produce when needed, and rightly attempts to bring back manufacturing to the US. In case of an all out war against the Chinese, the industrial base and all the resources need to be at home to win a protracted war of attrition. Which is actually be a sensible position to have, and the Biden administration had that on the agenda, at least in some ways. It's just that the US has an deranged idiot at the helm who surrounded himself with lickspittles and yes-men, and now nobody's left to tell him that the emperor is naked. Trying to make sure that any eventualities in a potential conflict with China are planned for is a good thing. Alienating all your allies and trade partners in a block of equal economic and purchasing power or on those who whold a monopoly in certain goods is not. Taiwan, IIRC, as already stated that they are not going to react to the tariffs. Sitting on a de-facto monopoly, they can afford to. What are the US companies going to do, stop buying from TSMC? Now, if only there'd been some incentives act aimed at breaking that monopoly. Can't quite put my finger on it. Must be something that the libtards wasted money on. Just because Trump thinks this should have been done decades ago, does not mean it will work now. The world's a much different place, and while the United States is still a large chunk of the global trading volume and GDP, it is no longer as relevant or consequential as they used to be. That could backfire very hard, very quickly. Plus it just proves that the word of the president of the United States is worth nothing, and no treaty with the US is worth the paper it is written on. Which has always been the case in some ways (ask the Kurds), but never like this, and never that much and directly against the inner circle. I mean they even pissed off the otherwise nice Canadians, and that takes some doing.

Just like actors in real life, they're all reptilians. Game is a psy-op.

Serious headphones warning for this one. Christ, the audio is bad.

Indeed, they just added two greek letters and cancelled them out so it looks more sophisticated than what they actually did. Trump and his voters will look at the formula and go "Woah, this is complicatid stuff. Liek nucular science! Covfefe!", while in reality it just expresses the trade deficit in relation to the imports. Take times 100 for the percentage value and fiddle a little to the numbers to make them look nice (the trade deficit between the US and the EU was more like 37% in 2024, but who knows which year they took their numbers from) and put them on the giant tariff sheet Trump read from to show how mean everyone else is to the United States, and you're done. I'm somewhat surprised that the more fringe MAGA elements (the conspiracy kind) is so cool with a Jew running US commerce. Weren't they the ones behind the forest fires with their space lasers and trying to the establish the New World Order? Or is Lutnick a good Jew fighting the good fight against his people? Questions, questions...

Observe, if you will, the reason why Alfred Nobel ignored economics when founding the Nobel prize: it is voodoo and crystal ball gazing. It also doesn't explain why there's a 10% minimum tariff on nations with balanced trade - or no trade at all, due to being populated by penguins. Although that's probably becuase they look better in a suit than Trump.

So, is he, like, trying to get stuffed in a box by his tech-bro handlers? 32% tariff on Taiwan. Woof.

Yeah, no, it's real. Split into several parts though, so maybe the joke will be that he'll release one part per year, for a decade.

Hey. Surprise of the decade. If you ever wondered if the world's really going to end, here's proof that it will: I don't even...

I've found something new for @bugarup:

I thought about posting this in the funny thread, but it's probably only funny to a maximum of three people in this one.

Have you tried watching the above video and looking at the animations? That just makes it so much worse. Killing it with fire might not be enough.

Woke up, checked my mail, Amazon tells me I am now subscribed to Luna+'s free trial. I certainly did not sign up, I also did not get any notifications that a new login happened or a new device was registered, which Amazon normally sends my way, plus I have 2FA active. Killed the subscription, deleted the app from my catalogue, checked my device list (everything in order) and changed my password, just to make sure. Did read that it is possible to sub to Luna+ even when you have a security PIN set up, so I guess it's technically possible that my wife clicked something on the Fire TV stick. Would be strange, but not impossible. Nothing else was ordered, so that speaks against a hacked account. I mean, out of all things, why'd anyone hijack an Amazon account just to sub to the cloud gaming service, not change the e-mail address or buy stuff that cannot be returned or cancelled (like Microsoft licence keys)? Bizarre.

There's two ways Strange New Worlds can go for someone: either you're like me and end up hating every character except Pike, that by default makes the episodes bad, and you start nitpicking, or you don't, and can enjoy the series for what it probably is, the best of the nuTrek shows. Personally, I'd rather be forced to watch A Night in Sickbay on a loop than subjecting myself to any more nuTrek TV or film dreck.

No, they're talking about the manga.

I have very fond memories of playing Raptor: Call of the Shadows, but it's been 30 years, how has the gameplay nodaways? Guess there's not overly much you can do with shoot-em-ups, controls-wise, so it probably still plays well enough. Not sure I want to replay it, it was pretty tough to beat even before 30 years of reflex and response time degredation.

Korean apparently. Anyway, dunno, what's like, your problem, man? Look at these characters, they're great.