majestic

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?

I agree on the theme song becauseI like cheesy rock ballads, and while every Star Trek captain in the history of Trek has an episode or two of being strange, weird, a moron, or out of character (unless you're Janeway, then being out of character means 50% of your episodes) Archer's is particularily bad. Just... bad. Boy. A Night In Sickbay is a strong contender for being the worst episode in all of Star Trek, and that includes both Picard and Discovery. Yes, in season three. But first it gets worse. A lot. Then it gets interesting, even becomes really good at times - and everything is followed up by the worst Trek final in the history of ever. Discovery might have a chance to top it perhaps. edit: Also do yourself a favor and skip "A Night In Sickbay" until you've watched the entire show. Otherwise you might stop there and leave it for good. Some of the later episodes are really worth watching.

I'm surprised you guys are still all up for grabbing that sweet bait when it's laid out so plainly.

Of course it's a cheap dodge, but one that I hear far too often when people defend any given populist's corruption or dumbwittery. "But the others aren't any better." they say. That might be true, corruption seems to be a ubiquitous iniquity in politics these days. Just like Trump most populists claim that they will drain the swamp, ferret out injustices and root out corruption, and once elected aren't if not worse then at least not any better than the same politicians they rallied against. I'm with you in being baffled about people actually defending Trump as a person. Even if I would agree with the politics of his administration (which heaven forbid deserves nothing but the most scathing of criticism in my opionion) I'd be hard pressed to come up with some way to come to terms with the Tangerine in Chief. He has little to no redeeming qualities as a person, appears to have the proverbial attention span of a gold fish and he's either cognitively underpriviledged or suffers from the early symptoms of dementia. Way back at the BIS/IPlay boards we played a similar spiel on YOP with the likes of Crucis about how George W. Bush wasn't an abject moron because he's just a terrible public speaker. Back then I laughed hard at the idea, but at least it had more merit than anything said in Trump's defense. You can see the same sort of behaviour for instance with Sharp_One, who once people started calling Trump out on being ridiculous with the desinfectants and sunlight cleanses your body nonsense he came up with. He immediately linked to some bogus company's pseudo-scientific research that I wouldn't be surprised if it formed Trump's actual basis for his stated opinion. They probably read the same "news" sources. While Bush saying he believes that there's a way for fish and man to coexist peacefully is kind of ridiculous at least one could make the assumption about how he thinks that it should be possible for us to not overfish the seas (although that doesn't sound like something any Republicans of the era would come up with). Trumps blathering is just... sad. So sad. Cofeve needs to dominate. Dominate. I have yuuuuuge hands. Sharp_One was unto something though. Trump's a businessman and he doesn't need empathy or compassion as businessman. That might be right, but that does make him a terrible leader. Even if it would not, at least the people who champion Trump should realize that someone with so little empathy, coming from a life of wealth and priviledge, has no ability to even remotely understand their problems. Since I've already accused poor goldfish of having a shorter attention span than they actually have we can conclude this by another famous misquote. Trump is exactly the sort of person that would say: Then let them eat cake. 200 years ago people like Trump were beheaded by the people. Today they're their heroes. O tempora, o mores...

The Dems aren't any better something something deep state something SJWs something wokeness something I don't want faggots to marry and abortion is murder.

Oh, time for a Joan Baez cover then: Pretty sure I posted that before.

Eye of the Beholder II was the first AD&D game I ever played. Loved every second. If you're interested in playing the EOB games these days I'd recommend using The All-Seeing Eye. While drawing my own maps was a fun thing to do while I still had oodles of free time it just isn't something I want to have to do today. ASE really helps. And before anyone wants go to KKKodex on my ass here, keep in mind that Grimoire, Herald of Incline also has an automap feature (sort of).

Probably from the latest FIFA game. I wonder if football leagues would need to pay royalties to EA for that... or to FIFA. Or both?

As far as I know (very much not an expert on patent law of any kind), is that it is possible to extend medical/drug patents in the US provided the drug itself is altered in some way, i.e. "incrementally improved" - which means jack sh*t because that just means changed a bit, not necessarily more effective. Which is why quasi-monopolies manufacturing high-demand medicine like Insulin can price fix to their heart's desire. And et voilà, you end up paying 200$ for an Insulin pen in the US and 8$ for the same dose everywhere else in the world. It also proves that it is not entirely about research costs. Insulin was discovered by a research team almost a century ago, the original patent belonging to the University of Toronto. Canadians being nice as they are licensed the manufacturing to a few US companies at little or no cost, and they went on to patent their incremental improvements. For, well, also almost a century now. Hands up, who thinks these sort of price increases just happened without, ahem, illicit dealings of the companies involved? Cuz I'm looking for a buyer, I have this here, uhm, bridge in NY to sell.

Played a bit of the Everspace 2 Alpha, noticed a distress beacon, went here. Two G&B freighters under attack by outlaws that quite clearly outgun my completely unupgraded ship fresh out of the tutorial. They're heavily armored and have a goodly bunch of hitpoints, so unless I'm missing something (the first game had support drones that could buff enemies) I most likely won't be saving the freighters. Or looting their remains for that matter. Heh.

Technically this belongs in the metal thread, but I'm not sure it would get the exposure it deserves there. Nanowar of Steel really outdid themselves with this video. So let us all join in making a joyful noise and praise Odin, Lord of Furniture:

Baron Strucker from Occupied Ireland seems like a legit, unbiased source of news, I'm not sure what you're getting at there.

I've been playing Dead Cells ever since it was discounted on GOG not that long ago. Finally managed to beat the secret boss (i.e. finish Hell mode, also known as "5 BSC"). The difficulty curve of the game is really weird. It starts out easy, stays that way until two boss stem cells, then becomes insanely hard, three and four stem cells is comparatively easy again and 5 BSC is... strange, because the only truly difficult part for me, apart from not paying attention and dying to something silly is the Hand of the King (final boss in 0 to 4 BSC). The first run I've managed to get past 5 BSC HotK was the one I beat the game at - I'll freely admit that I've watched a bunch of people kill the final boss on YouTube before ever seeing him so I knew what was going on, but still, killing him first try was weird. I've seen people on Steam and Reddit post that they can defeat Hand of the King with no issues but struggle on The Giant or the final boss. For me that's entirely the other way around. Both The Giant and the final boss have very well telegraphed attacks that seldom overlap into ridiculous stun lock insta-gibs. HotK can do that, his attack patterns are way too random, they can sometimes get stuck and heaven forbid if you whack his transition phase too quickly and he fist charges you into leftover Disgusting Worm bombs. It's also really frustrating when he summons exploding banners, follows this up with his super-souped up Telluric Shock and then forces you to eat the banners by dashing around. Anyway, fun game. Will probably play some more, there's this final, final ending left to see and all that. 140 hours so far out of a 10 € investment ain't half bad.

Hm, only our counter terrorism unit has APCs, and they're pretty much MAN trucks modified to be able to withstand assault rifle fire. They're no worse than regular trucks in terms of maintenance, well, perhaps a little, but they can be repaired and serviced at every regular MAN depot. Also very much not used to cruise around or appear tough.

Looks like he's trying to keep the mal aria away. Like old school plague doctors, just with less style.

Kane's subtle reminder that you should be playing Nod, not GDI. :nod:

Heh, this would be one for the unpopular gaming opionions thread but I never cared much for TA or any of its offshoots. The allure of early RTS games was never the gameplay for me, but everything else. Sadly the genre evolved into being all gameplay and no story, what with the success of MOBAs.

You could use Galaxy for that. It's all in one launcher, at least. It'll still start Origin, Steam, uPlay or Epic in the background but you'd have only one, neat library.

Every time I see Kane all I can think of is that he's actually the biblical Cain and an alien that just wants to leave earth.

I'm pretty sure Space Force is a hell lot more fun to watch if you aren't living in the US. I agree it is seldom something to laugh out loud, but it is really amusing.

So, hm, @Gorth, you're from Denmark, then went on to win Microsoft awards and are an ERP developer. You don't happen to have worked at Damgaard, Navision or the combined NavisionDamgaard at some point in your life, have you? Or... say, still work with their product(s)? (Pretty please just say no)

You should really look at Sexy Losers strip #016. Can't link (very much NSFW), rules and all, but way back when it first came out it had me snorting coke out of my nose.

As evidenced (not by a bear though) by Roy Horn being mauled by his white lion just because it felt like it. That's what wild animals do. Heck, happens with domesticated animals just as well. Cows are vicious killers.