majestic

And the bourbon. Beer and vodka is all you ever need.

I still have the second book in the series on my to read list. I began reading it a while ago after finishing the first book in the series and then just stopped. It's one thing to have the books have as little exposition as possible or only where it makes sense to make them more immersive but Malazan takes that to a level where it's bordering on hard work to keep track of everything. Unlike with A Song of Ice and Fire where at least the kids have things explained to them once in a while and you have somewhat interesting allusions to the past (e.g. the tragedy of Summerhall) Malazan feels like you're on the outside of one long ass in-joke.

For me that certainly isn't true, and on a rational level I can understand writers not owing their readers anything (or their publishers, as talked about in the Rothfuss article). But on a somewhat more subjective one I'm not sure that's correct. The writers owe us their livelyhood, and in exchange it's not too unreasonable to ask for some effort, yes? I just would like to have a somewhat timely continuation of series left not just with a cliffhanger but the most unsatisfying ones you can possibly imagine. In the past 15 years we've gotten two books by GRRM, and both were preludes, setups, some more preludes and some more set up and then the last one ends before two pivotal events that were actually already written but moved into the next novel due to space and pacing constraints. A novel that looks more and more like it will never be finished, let alone the entire series which has one more novel. Planned, at least. It already overran from a planned trilogy into having 4, then 5, then 6 and now potentially 7 books. Not that I ever expect 6 and 7 to come out unless George dies and either Sanderson or Brian Herbert finish them (yeah... I went there. :p). There's a bright side, not even these two could come up with something worse than the ending of the HBO adaptation. But who knows, strangers things certainly happened. Stephen King finished The Dark Tower eventually. Although with that ending, I'm not sure people enjoyed it having an end all too much. Heh.

Probably sitting somewhere with GRRM, living the good life and not giving a damn.

's a quick way to tell MMO veterans apart from regular players.

Further proof:

PooZooka sounds like something the Golgothan would use.

Well to explain that, this was lunch: While tasty that wasn't very, say, satisfying. Dinner wasn't much different either (well less tomatoes and more picked peppers with sauerkraut and some bread with ham). Plus an awful lot of stress at work right now. Yeah...

It's a highlight of many reaction video channels. Heh.

Me hungry. Me HANGRY. Hulk smash! No, really. I feel like I'm digesting myself. Like Pizza the Hut in Spaceballs.

I can empathize. My father had one of those machines from hell at work and most of his colleagues and partners had them too. At work... and at home. I spent hundres of hours (not exaggerating here) supporting these abominations. Nothing worked the way it should*, especially when you had one of them VIA mainboards that came with driver installers that potentially just killed your Windows. *Not even talking about gaming here. Those were work computers where the serial ports randomly stopped working until you manually (re)assigned port numbers, for instance. This was particularily fun with telephone systems or people who just wouldn't get any readouts from their manufacturing, laboratory or meteorological equipment. Getting games to run with some stability was a different kind of hell. Bonus points for having ATi cards.

That Nazis on Twitter latch onto anything that supports for their point of view? Possibly. But two videos and a handful of posters on a message board sure make for a terrible sample size.

In Greece? Just more likely he forgot to file attachment "C" as in "cash" with the tax papers. Kidding...

Can we have a "facepalm" reaction to posts? Please? Pretty please?

Yeah, you missed the video Volo linked a while back where a pack of Blacks started kicking the living daylights out of some innocent white girl waiting for her public transportation? Because that one was treated all the same by everyone else here. No, wait, with even more scrutiny because the guy on Twitter gave his location as occupied Ireland.

You people, Trump can't even post his lunch on Instagram now? Really? Just leave him alone already.

Trump doesn't lie. A lie requires... intent, doesn't it? Most of the time he just doesn't know any better and in the cases where he potentially would his personalilty traits substitute an alternative reality. It's not that uncommon. We had a guy like that at work, he secretly worked for a different company for a year, then switched and later blamed our managers for ruining his carreer after getting fired from his new job because, to quote, they "actively prevented him from poaching customers" and that's why he failed at his new job and got fired. In no objective reality this could be considered the truth, but for him it sure is. He's just incapable of conceiving anything else. Trump's the same. He looks at the pictures of his inauguration and he really sees bigger crowds than at Kenyian Muslim president's. Whether or not that makes him fit to be president is something else entirely. Objectively that's a no. He's like a post-brain fever Caligula with less proscriptions (probably because the US doesn't have prosciption lists, not because he would find the concept repugnant). He even had a fake victory over Britannia Syria. Go there, lob a few missiles, pretend like Oboma failed to deal as decisively with Assad as he did and leave.

I've started reading The Old Republic Star Wars EU (well, Legends) books. Already done with Revan, now reading Deceived. Eh, for all the dismay these books have caused in the KotOR fandom they're not half bad so far. But I also liked SW:TOR and as "real" fan of KotOR I or II I'm not supposed to, so what do I know. Heh. It's a refreshing break from Hyperion, which I read before Revan: Hard to believe Hölderlin was only 22 when he began to write the novel. Guard Dog might feel right at home with the hermit and his weariness of the world... and people. Very well worth the read, although I can't vouch for the quality of the translation.

Yep. I'll be watching Star Trek: Lower Decks the moment I can. The I will most likely come here to complain about it. Le sigh.

For the love of Trek, please, make it go away.

Good coffee is exquisite. If you find yourself drinking a vanilla pumpkin latte with a shot of caramel and wondering why it isn't good keep in mind you're not drinking coffee but reprocessed, overpriced sewage. If you drink coffee and you find it tasting like water that ran through rusty pipes, then, regardless of what you're been told, you drinking reprocessed sewage, not coffee. Good coffee will never taste like ash or burnt or rusty pipes. If it does, the water used was too hot or the coffee of inferior quality. Getting good coffee is a bit like getting good beer or bread. Depending on your location it can turn out ot be really difficult and you might have to look way off the beaten path. I don't really subsribe to the ideological wars fought over how to prepare coffee. Filtered/drip, Espresso, Arabic? Doesn't matter, they can all be good.

Clay recently released a new Sexy Losers comic. That's... two this year now. 2020 really IS weird. (Also if you want to google, very very much NSFW, and be warned, they're really offensive ).

Beautiful Desolation /thread Well it's a joke, yes, but the game sure has some pretty locations, so it's not entirely nonsene.

And dynamically exploit sustainable web-readiness.

My father asked me to look over some pages of text he's written. His, uhm, command of German grammar* isn't the best, and so off to proofreading I went. German grammar rules are complex enough, but then there are exceptions, and even the exceptions sometimes have exceptions. There is one in particular that drives me nuts. We have prepositions that force the use of certain cases even if said case would not be indicated otherwise. That's mostly fine, one eventually gets the hang of it (as native speaker, at least), but it wouldn't be German without exceptions. There's a small set of prepositions that can indicate the use of either dative or accusative case. An (meaning at, to, or by) is one of them. Which case is indicated by the preposition then depends on what you want to express. A location following "an" is always in the dative case, e.g. Die Katze sitzt am Fenster (The cat is sitting at the window, am is a contraction of an and dem, the article of Fenster), unless the verb of the sentence is used to express direction towards/away from the location, i.e. Die Katze lehnt sich ans Fenster** (The cat is leaning against the window, ans being a contraction of an and das, accusiative case). Confused yet? You probably should be. The dative case is always used when an is used with expressing time, e.g. Am Montag (Montag = Monday). There's actually no exception to that, which is a nice change of pace. There is, however, an exception for appositions whenever an is used to express time. Why? I have no idea. Really, none. Whenever you have an apposition that apposition inherits the case of the element it is in apposition to. Which in the end means that when expressing a point in time with an, the following apposition can have either the dative or the accusative case. Both are considered correct. E.g. Am Montag, dem 23. Jänner, gehen wir aus. and Am Montag, den 23. Jänner, gehen wir aus. both meaning On Monday, January 23rd, we'll go out, and both are correct German. Using the accusative case feels wrong. It looks wrong. It just... isn't. It should be wrong, dammit! I was halfway through correcting every instance of den until I remembered that it's not really wrong. Bah. * In his defense, German grammar was created by Satan himself as a means of torture, it's not uncommon to struggle. It's objetively hard even for us natives to write grammatically correct German. ** To make matters even worse, if you'd remove the third person reflexive pronoun sich (here meaning itself) from the sentence, you need to use the dative case again, e.g. Die Katze lehnt am Fenster (The cat leans against the window - no more present progressive) because lehnen alone no longer indicates any direction in the act of leaning, it's just something the cat does at the location. So that makes sense, does it?