majestic

If it is fundamental enough, then of course it can be. See, for instance, I would never vote for a libertarian, even if I would agree with every other stance that person had. On the other hand, if there would be a candidate who realizes that class warfare is not magically over just because the Soviet Union dissolved, but who would be to oppose legalization of cannabis, then that would be an issue I could live without. It is just not important enough.

A combination of economic lobbyism and European Union law. Only a handful of religious minorities (including our 4% protestant population) had Good Friday as a public holiday in Austria, meaning that roughly five percent of the population had an extra public holiday, i.e. basically one day of paid vacation more than everyone else, as long as they are members of their congregation. Which the European Court of Justice found to be a discriminatory practice, and it is hard to argue with that finding. Faced with the decision to either take away Good Friday as a public holiday for religious minorities or granting it as a public holiday for all residents, the choice was easy: economic lobby groups said that the economy would collapse if everyone had one more paid day of leave, and thus it was taken away. Needless to say that we had a right wing government at the time, headed by the People's Party with their supposed Catholtic roots. One would think that good Catholics would be amenable to add such an important day of Christian belief to the roster of public holidays, but, well, when the party donors do not want to deal with a work time reduction of 0.0038% (I calculated this based on the average work time of Austrian employees, based on official statistics for 2023), then they do not want to deal with it. There's a certain irony in some of the same lobby groups insisting on a 3.75% decrease in overall work time just four years later during negotiations for our collective agreements. To make working full time more attractive.

The tithe is tax deductible, but only up to 400€ per year. As for the "benefits", well, you can have a proper Christian burial, receive the sacraments, have a church wedding and participate in communion. That is for non-orthodox Christians Churches, and I have no experience with congregations of other faiths. All for the tiny price of 1% of your yearly base income before income tax (your yearly gross income after all prior deductions, i.e. social social security, tax free income and payments specifically exempted from income tax, like our variants of a 401k). You have to calculate your tithe yourself, but if you don't, then the church will collect an estimate based on sex, age and education. Whether or not it is benefitial to let the church estimate your tithe depends on how much you earn above or below average. I have let the church estimate my tithe for years now, as they were generally way off the mark (to my benefit, obviously). How very Christian of me, huh? That is the same, you can just visit any mass, funerals or baptisms, you are just not allowed to participate in communion. Theoretically, that is, it is not like anyone actually checks your congregation membership when you partake. Data protection is just an excuse. Your parents sign you up via baptism, and at age fourteen you are supposed to confirm your membership through ritual, which I suppose is the same for the US offshoot of the Catholic Church, although I have to admit that I have not put in the effort to check. When you do, the moment you start earning an income that is not from any apprenticeship, the church will send you a letter, demanding money. The data your congregation has on you is simply your birthday, sex and place of residence. How much this is just a silly hurdle designed to prevent people from readily leaving congregations they joined is seen in the inverse: if I were to sign up for another congregation, that can be done directly with them. Joining? Easy. Leaving? Oh no, please go to your district administration and tell them that you want to leave and they will inform your congregation for you. Just to make sure nothing goes wrong. There is full separation between church and state here (in theory, at least), but the first couple of elected governments after World War 2 were lead by the People's Party (or, as it was called at the time, the Christian party) and had deeply Catholic roots, and thus decided to reinstate Austro-Hungarian Empire laws passed in 1868, but conveniently keeping the church tax law from Nazi Germany.

I just sent my declaration of my intent to leave my congregation to the responsible district administration. It is a silly bureaucratic hurdle the churches demanded which requires certain documents to "prove" that you are indeed a part of the congretation you want to leave. The official justification is data protection, because leaving your congretation requires the disclosure of personal information to said congregation. And we would not want to disclose any personal information to the wrong congregation, would we? Yes, that justification is about as silly as it sounds. You cannot just leave your congretation by talking to them directly for no other reason than to introduce extra bureaucratic hoops to jump through in order to deter as many people as possible from leaving a certain Church with a proclivity for child abuse. At the end of the day, this is about money, as both major Christian Churches in Austria and Germany can (legally) collect money from their congregation members, colloquially known as church tax, it is a required tithe that goes back to laws made by the good shepard, The Führer (no, really, the church tax really goes back to laws passed by the Nazis). With the government removing Good Friday for us Protestants as public holiday a while back and the Church now wanting a membership fee in excess of what is tax deductible, it no longer makes sense to be a part of the Protestant Church.

I have an anecdote to share here, although it is, of course, only directly applicable to the media in Austria, and it was over a decade ago. Back then, the company I worked at, was robbed. Goods worth five million Euro were stolen in a matter of hours. The robbers brutalized the workers of the night shift, bound them with gaffer tape and threatened to shoot them if they made any sudden moves. They grabbed their access badges to unlock the fenced off section of the warehouse where the exact goods they were looking for were stored, loaded the pallets they wanted onto their truck, and left. Perfectly orchestrated, it was fairly evident that it was an inside job, particularily since they took nothing else. The media reporting was fraught with errors. All of it. Not a single one that I read, and I checked a lot, seem to have put in the effort to do some fact checking. The most egregiously wrong accounts came, as expected, from the yellow press, but our public broadcasting company (ORF) made massive mistake in their reporting: they filmed a camera overlooking the entrance of the warehouse and wondered why nobody checked who rang at the door late at night. The cameras at the warehouse were part of the CCTV surveillance system in place, and labour law clearly states that the captured footage is only to be accessed by specially designated people and only in case of initial suspicion. It would be downright illegal to check the CCTV surveillance footage with no good reason, and they should really know that. One yellow press article wondered how the truck managed to move past the security checkpoint at the entrance to the warehouse. Why and how was the gate opened for the truck? Indeed, how? Oh, right, that was because that particular warehouse had no security checkpoint and they simply looked at a different branch of the company. How utterly detestable can you be to not even go to the right address for your footage to generate more buzz/clicks? It is really hard to believe that this was a simple mistake, the two locations are not even in the same vicinity (entirely different cities, even). Articles from outlets with better reputation got most of it right, but still openly wondered how and why the night shift workers could be overwhelmed and how nobody noticed it for hours, and why they even opened the door when someone rang at 02:00. Yes, why indeed. They could have just asked, you know. The entire night shift consisted of only two workers, both of which were beaten up and bound. They opened the door because of regular nighttime deliveries for a special project of one of our largest customers, who, at the time, due to irregular shipping schedules, could not properly advise of inbound shipments ahead of their arrival. It was the perfect moment for the robbery, and the robbers, who were later actually caught, turned out to actually be the very same people who made the deliveries. Conlcusion: for at least this one instance, it was shown that our public broadcaster does not know or does not care to check labor laws, the yellow press outright lies for effect and even quality media outlets rush to get their headlines out without due diligence. Ah, sign of the times, I suppose.

Treated myself to a Dragon Roll at our local Asian place. As far as I know, Dragon Rolls are usually made with either ebi tempura or grilled unagi. They just went ahead and used both, and added a little Terriyaki sauce on top, which makes their dragon roll an exposion of taste that goes from perfectly soft and sweet to crunchy fried shrimp when chewing.

Ah, yes. That... Sorry, could not resist.

There's one other thing, the AI models are only going to get better. Still waiting for a model that takes modern, icky digital coloring and makes it look like actual painted cels from the heyday of animation. Where's my "make K-On! look good" AI?

Somehow, even when expecting a terrible film, Sony comes along and proves that indeed, it can always get much, much worse.

Female streamers creating content in the Pools, Hot Tubs & Beaches category are more often hypersexualized than those streaming video games. I am currently looking for funds, I am planning a study to see if water is wet. PM me if you want to contribute, or know someone who wants to.

In case anyone's interested in just how bad performance can get: Reminds me a bit of the good old times in Lagforge. It's been a while.

https://www.techpowerup.com/320693/apple-m-series-cpus-affected-by-gofetch-unpatchable-cryptographic-vulnerability Woopsidaisy.

Who cares, they all voted for Putin anyway.

Wrong, Arrakis is not a desert any more by that point!

Recently got the news that a former friend of the family was found dead by her son. Her son used to be a friend of mine until the end of school caused us to lose contact. Say what you will of the perils of mobile phones and social media, one thing they certainly made a lot easier is keeping in contact with each other. The only people from school I still have contact with were those from the vocational high school I went to - and that only because we all had instant messaging (anyone remember the then ubiquitous ICQ?) and mobile phones. Friends and acquaintences from before, like the aforementioned son? No, not really. Anyway, apparently she already had two heart attacks and was diabetic, and her health issues caught up with her. She also went through a lot of mental health issues, some ages ago, some years ago, some recently, like when she had an affair with a married man and did not take it too well that he would not leave his wife for her. She also had two sisters, and both commited suicide, one of them as a little girl, the other as adult. The other sister was a former teacher of mine - sort of, she gave me (private) physics lessons when my school's physics education was, well, let's say, a little lacking in depth and focus. She had a stroke a couple of years ago, then fought tooth and nail to get enough control of her body back so she could end her life on her own terms. Wee, that post became a little bleaker than intended.

Frank Herbert on Dune in an interview with Charles Platt: The first book is a classical hero's journey, indeed, but even then Paul has visions of what his jihad will cause. It becomes much clearer with Dune Messiah.

What are you talking about, Dune (1984) was directed by Alan Smithee and written by Judas Booth. Well, at least the version broadcast on TV. Heh.

Hey, the 14900KS is here! Well, and no one cares, except maybe for overclockers. For them the extra money for (more or less) eliminating silicon lottery might be worth it.

Strange 180° turn by Disney. The Force Awakens was playing it safe to the point of being derided as a remake of A New Hope, while The Last Jedi basically threw everything out. It killed the past, as Kylo put it in the movie. Certainly a lack of planning of everyone involved in that mess. I already repressed most of the mess that the final Game of Thrones season was. There is also the scene where Arya kills the Night King, after several seasons of building up the confrontation between Jon Snow and the Night King. The New Jedi Order novels and following stories were too bleak for many a Star Wars fan. It is easy to see why, it saw captured refugee ships crashed into planetary shields (that novel in particular had great timing, it was released shortly before the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center), wars on a scale not yet seen before that killed billions, an alien civilization into self-mutilation and tortue, an insect civilization absorbing people into their collective conscious, the (sexual) torture of an underaged girl and the deaths of many a beloved character, including Chewbacca, almost all of Han and Leia's children as well as Luke's wife. And all that is before we come to the events with Abeloth where the Jedi order is basically persecuted by the restructured New Republic, now lead by a former Imperial hardliner and Luke and his son are exiled because the Jedi order is (not so wrongfully, when you think about it) accused of causing a devastating civil war, and a Cthulhuesque Dark Side entity lays waste to Coruscant. I mean, yeah, you are not wrong, all of that would still have been better than what Disney came up with, but surely you can see why Disney would be somewhat loathe to adapt that material into their newly acquired cash cow franchise aimed at selling merchandise to children.

It makes sense in the context of prior established lore, as Darth Sidious was Darth Plagueis' apprentice, and it was established in canon that Plagueis found a way to immortality, and Star Wars quite clearly has viable cloning technology, so bringing back Palpatine makes sense in the setting's established rules. It is still a poor choice as it both shows creative bankruptcy worse than having a second Death Star in Return of the Jedi and it retroactively makes Anakin's sacrifice meaningless. To be fair to Jar Jar Abrams though, what else could they have done after Rian Johnson killed off the main antagonist in the second movie of a trilogy without any thought as to what to do afterwards? It was a little too late to set up a new villain and Kylo Ren would have made an even poorer one. Alas. True, and I do not expect everything to be consistent in a show of this length and with that many changes and mysteries added to elongate the series past the point of what the creators wanted to do, just because it was wildly popular. However, most of the problems are the less problematic retroactive continuity changes, like when it was established that the Man in Black cannot kill candidates directly, even though he quite clearly killed Eko when the actor wanted to leave the show, or how he was supposed to only be able to take the shape of dead characters, but often ran around the jungle as Walt before that rule was thought of. This is in contrast to the issue with the outrigger that should not travel through time with the group. Here the violation follows the establishment of the rule, without any added clarification. My thoughts on How I Met Your Mother should be somewhere in a thread on this forum already. It is pretty much the only sitcom that I enjoyed, and I particularily also liked the latter seasons where the general consensus was that the show already stopped being funny, but that is on me and my kind of humor. One may or may not like Ted because he is an idiot and the premise of the series was probably not good enough to actually carry nine seasons (the strength of every character who is not Ted on the other hand was more than enough in my opinion), but the quality of the scripts and the work that went into the overall craftsmanship of the series is leaps and bounds ahead of other sitcoms, or most comedy in general. Well, except for the ending. I cannot comment on Newhart, but "it was all a dream" endings are more often than not just terrible. You may not enjoy everything, but certainly more than I do, which makes me a little envious, to be completely honest. I cannot for my life fathom how you managed to like Rings of Power, but I admit I am almost curious enough to try Wheel of Time just to see how bad that must be for you to dislike it. To be fair to religions, they have been around for much longer than the time it took to make the six seasons of Lost, so that is not a very good excuse. I am not sure I would go so far as to say that Lost is an intentional religious allegory in the strictest sense (watch Revolutionary Girl Utena for that, although it not based around Western religion), but it certainly has its roots in the various religions and philosophies of the world and makes heavy use of religious imagery, much like Neon Genesis Evangelion did before. Fun fact, that series also had an ending that was wildly controversial, with a similar problem: offering no narrative closure in lieu of a thematic one. The similarities are striking enough that one might think they were intentional. Most likely not though. Neon Genesis Evangelion was very much allegoric too, albeit on a much more personal level: it was a way for the series director to work through the trials and tribulations of running an almost failing studio and his depression. Lost, as a whole, can be seen as the clashing of Western and Eastern philosophical and religious thought. The changes on the island, especially regarding the Man in Black / Smoke Monster and his relationship to his brother Jacob can be interpreted as the rise of the duality between good and evil as brought into the larger world by Christianity (also represented also by the commonly played Backgammon, and as Locke said, two players, one light, one dark). It seems strange from our point of view perhaps, but the conflict between good and evil and the inherent duality of the two sides, with the ability to actively chose and even switch the side you are on (through redemption arcs or a gradual fall towards villainy), rose with the prominence of Christianity. Look at the theater plays of ancient Greece, for instance. The ancient Greeks would have most likely laughed at the preposterous idea that Darth Vader would just switch sides at the end of Return of the Jedi as your lot in life is preordained by your destiny - as set by the gods. They would most likely not have batted an eye at Zeus showing up and setting things back to what they were though.

I have no idea why you would think so. I have not seen Loki. Nor have I read anything by Robert E. Howard, so I would not know. I liked the Conan the Barbarian movie, but I doubt that would serve as qualification to judge his writing. I also did not hate Conan the Destroyer, but that is probably because I watched it at the age of ten. I was not specifically talking about endings, but series endings are often situations where characters behave like they should not, or events happen that do not logically follow from what happened before, or a lot of setup is wasted with no payoff. This is often because the writers want or have to achieve an ending that they have in mind while the natural flow of the series no longer makes the ending properly achievable. Two examples are the ending of Game of Thrones, and the original ending of How I Met Your Mother. Game of Thrones ended in a way that will probably make more sense in writing, if the books ever come out. Dany in the books is much more likely to burn down King's Landing in a fit of anger than show Dany was. How I Met Your Mother on the other hand was an example where the showrunners actually filmed the series' ending several seasons in advance, and it made no sense any more, but seeing how it contained shots of Ted's children that were long since grown up by the point the series ended, they could not go and re-shoot an ending that worked better. I probably expect too much from professional writers in this day and age. The flood of content must be written by someone, and clearly there are not enough good writers to go around, which contributes to the overall feeling that there is a steep decline in quality. Still, my expectations stand, and they are not even that high a bar to clear. I do not really need witty dialogue, although it certainly is nice, I do not need deep, thought provoking entertainment, although it certainly is nice, and I do not need Shakespearean prose. Fun fact, just yesterday I ran across an egregious consistency problem. I am rewatching Lost, and there is a series of episodes where the characters on the Island are randomly jumping through time after the island becomes disloged from the regular timeline. In an earlier episode they made it clear that only the items they had with them when they time jumps began move through them in time. Cue them finding a paddle boat on the shore two episodes later. They time jump while paddling, and one would expect that they just get dropped into the water afterwards, right? Because the paddle boat was certainly not amongst the things they brought with them, right? Yeah, nope. See, that is exactly the sort of thing I am talking about. The rule was originally introduced so they can bring the Zodiac they were on with them, when the time jumps began. That is fine, really, beacuse who cares about how time travel really works in a work of fiction (one could certainly make a case that introducing time travel is almost always a bad idea in and of itself, but that is not a point I want to argue here). It also helps that they can just always have their small arms and, well, their clothes. Just as long as the rules are applied consistently, which they, in this case, are clearly not. I just do not think that it is too much to expect from a team of professional writers to catch that one.

Beats me, but whenever I complain about bad writing and non-sensical storylines/storytelling in sci-fi and fantasy I more often than not get a reply that I should just relax, turn off my brain and enjoy the ride. It's not high art, you know. Just silly entertainment. Yeah, maybe it is not high art (as if that is not subject to change, Jane Austen's novels are classics today but were very much derided when they were first published), but internal consistency and characters not behaving randomly is not a hallmark of high art. I would argue it is the barest minimum we should expect as an audience.

A German channel I follow recently released a video about the dark sides of YouTube, and oh boy, does that get weird. Weird, and really disturbing. On YouTube, once you take a wrong turn, it seems like all the supposedly friendly family community rules fall off a cliff. While videos get demonetized or deleted for what YouTube considers bad words, it looks like there are loop holes the size of Mount Everest. There's a channel called Lilly, operated by the Only Fans model LillySlim. It has 5 videos and 25k subscribers, but her most popular video has, so far, generated over 875,000 views. It is supposedly a brazilian waxing tutorial, except there is absolutely no waxing going on. She does have a cheap razor and uses it for hair removal, but the point of the video, which features four minutes of full frontal nudity under a shower, seems to be two-fold: it is an ad for her Only Fans and it caters to a shaving kink that seems to have an immense amount of playlists on YouTube (if you are into that, well, just search YouTube for brazilian waxing tutorial). The channel is almost two months old, so if YouTube had any issue with it, it would have been removed by now. Oh, and in case that needs to be said, the results are very much not suitable for work. Well, but these videos are at least gated behind age checks and there are consenting adults involved and they are just at odds with the image Google is trying to project on YouTube. There's also a channel of a (now) seventh grade girl with 15000 subscribers who posts videos about her life, gymnastics and, uhm, swim wear and leotard try on hauls. The swim wear videos have views in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands, while every other video has views more in line with her subscriber count. Just for the record, it is not just a fluke that happened once because a young girl posted some seemingly innocent content because she is into gymnastics and showed off her leotards. There is no way her parents are not the driving force behind those. Gee.

Well, what do you know, our lying sack of manure former chancellor was found guilty of perjury. Not that eight months conditional sentence seems like such a great blow against Kurz, however - while it stands as a terrible indictment of the political landscape of our time that this perjury trial is by far and large a minor side theater in a much larger corruption complex with Kurz and his former associates at the heart of it all - aspiring crown witness Thomas Schmid being judged credible is a major win for our federal attorneys. Sebastian Kurz already said that he wants to appeal, which can be a bad idea. A slap on the wrist sentence (8 months out of potential three years with no time served in prison) like that can blow up in the face of the convicted parties after an appeal, as these sentences are basically unofficial offers to close up cases when the judiciary has better things to do. Usually when the convicted party appeals, the federal attourneys follow suit and appeal the sentence. Well, we will see. I am still rooting for him seeing a prison from the inside, the much more interesting trial for the misappropriation of public funds is still coming.

It is hard to do it proper justice in words, and it is only a short scene (also, the linked video is time coded to the relevant part): A perfect showcase for why it is generally accepted to not weaponize faster than light travel, or at least come up with some countermeasures, in soft science fiction. It renders everything meaningless, and you can tell from the look on Leia's face as it dawns on her just how many lives the Rebellion wasted in attacking two Death Stars conventionally. Or, to follow the train of thought, one has to wonder why the Empire built the Death Star in the first place, if all you need is to strap a hyperdrive to an asteroid to destroy planets. Rise of Skywalker features a scene where Merriadoc Brandybuck (okay, it just is a cameo by Dominic Monaghan, but it could be Merriadoc, and it would not be the silliest thing to happen in Rise of Skywalker) shows up to ask why they are even bothering to prepare an attack if they just could execute another Holdo maneuver (Holdo is Laura Dern's character in The Last Jedi). It is glossed over by stating that it was a one in a million chance to land the hit. It was worth a laugh at least. Disney's Star Wars is very big on breaking established rules in order to have "cool" scenes in their movies and series. This one is just the most egregious one, followed right up by making Vader's change of heart at the end of Return of the Jedi meaningless because Palpatine is still alive and well, but it does not stop there - there is a scene in Rogue One, for instance, where a hyperspace jump is done directly through an oncoming blast wave, while still in the atmosphere of the planet. Made me immediately think back to our heroes' escape from Tatooine in the first Star Wars film, and what a loser Han Solo must be for first clearing the planet, and talking about how hyperspace jumps need to be precisely calculated lest something bad happens. The most damning thing about these? Basic writing 101 that should set professional writers apart from creators of fan fiction, and as far as these films go, we are not even talking about the terrible acting and the flat, boring characters yet, the cringeworthy dialogue or the lack of any proper setup and pay off in the trilogy, except for one scene at the end of The Rise of Skywalker where Rey and Kylo Ren teleport a lightsaber between them.