majestic

Scholz, like every German chancellor before him in recent memory, is beholden to the powerful German industrial lobby, and facing an economic downturn in the middle of high inflation would be hugely unpopular. That's all there is to it. Natural gas is a major component of heavy industry (and agriculture, and a whole lot of other stuff besides heating), and Germany just won't work without it. Other nations around it also refused any gas embargo, it's just Germany that gets the flack for it. Why? Who knows. Hating on Germany is an ever popular activity and that the conservatives are now foaming at their mouthes is fun to see. I mean, how could he have denied them their god given right to rule? Putin doesn't need to have any dirt on Scholz. Also, decrying humanitarian aid to refugees is a little strange. That's just how the Dublin agreement is supposed to work. That one of the biggest crybabies about sticking to Dublin and not helping with the 2015 refugee crisis is now drowning in refugees would be delicious irony if it weren't for the suffering of innocent people (and we all love hypocritical winging, right? Right?). Make no mistake, Merkel would have waffled about just as much. Oh, and she'd have used more of her trademarked platitudes, like "We must not let ourselves be divided on this issue", the only difference is that she wouldn't have run afoul of Germany's very own dual Rupert Murdoch: Friede Springer and Liz Mohn, because she's friends with both. edit: Not a German, by the way. I also am highly biased against the CDU, if that wasn't obvious from prior posts, so if you find any polemics that you disagree with, feel free to do so. edit 2: The SPD has a whole lot of connections to Russia, that part is true, of course. However, you'll find plenty of parties in Europe, some that have ruled or are ruling at the moment, that do. Nobody refused Russian money until it became unpopular, and that was only a while ago. In France, 42% for Le Pen might not seem much, but given today's rather charged political climate and (understandable) anti-Russian sentiment, I think it is really telling that 42% of French voters still cast their lot in with someone with known Russian ties. Heck, Le Pen's party was basically bankrolled by the Russians.

I also could not recall anything about the crewmember I knew died in season two, other than the scene of her funeral being hilarious because everyone was acting so sad but for me, it was Tuesday...

I had to look up who 'Airiam' was. To provide context for this achievement, not that long ago I got a call at work - a question about a record a colleague of mine created 7 years ago. From the creation date alone I could tell which customer requested it and remembered enough about the corresponding e-mail that I received in CC to find it through a keyword search.

Seems like I forgot to mention last week's Picard thing. This just keeps getting worse, and it keeps meandering around, and it'll probably rush its conclusion. There's like what, two episodes left, and several plot threads still open. There's no way they will converge into a cohesive finale. There might be one, but certainly not for Picard's writing team.

Well, not sure if posting this is... interesting for anyone at all except myself, but one of our local musicians died today. Apparently an accident at home, which is more often than not code for suicide. A comedian and singer/songwriter, he was most widely known for making a local version of "Heartland Rock", also often covering Bruce Springsteen. It's a bit odd, one of those guys who were always there. Second generation to grow up with that music even. Just recently survived a bout with Corona too.

One of the pedals of my ergometer broke off. Time to hunt for a replacement. Meanwhile I've found that extended walks are decidedly not a decent alternative. They take longer and remove time from my somewhat cramped days. Eh. Plus that'll set me back some 500€ or more. Yay...

TV setting? You need to fiddle with the image setting something fierce before it stops being weird, unless it comes with a usable film mode, and even those require... adjustments. My least favorite part of modern TVs, telling them that they can stuff all their image enhancing doodads up theirs.

I'd be curious how many girls are at the school I was at nowadays. We had like, don't remember exactly, but maybe 15 (out of 220) in the first year. Only five or six graduated, and one of them wasn't part of the original 15. Although, on average, that makes the girls a good deal smarter* than the boys. 30% graduation rate vs. the ~10 to 15% overall. *Obviously, that statement is factually untrue there are a whole lot of different factors to consider. Teacher bias and the fact that applying for a course like that meant a special interest for any of the applying girls while it was fairly normal for boys (it was 26 years ago, after all), for instance. There's also something else to consider - not many of them ended up working in the field they studied. One of them became a psychiatrist. With a special focus on 'kink awareness' and 'non-traditional' relationships (i.e. polyamory).

Yep. To notice much of a difference you need to have a gigantic screen or sit really close to a regular sized one - the human eye has only so much resolution, and we're pretty close to that with 4k already. The only thing it does is create more screen real eastate for working, if you have a screen to match and the inclination to use one of them. My colleague at work has a gigantic screen rather than two or more separate ones, and he's constantly moving windows back and fro and what not, and it's just making me dizzy. One giant screen where my eyes have to dart from one corner to the next just so I can have four Full-HD sized windows open next to each other at the same time? Yeah, no thanks. That's definitely not for me. 8k is going to be the same sort of voodoo we now have with super expensive (and super not doing anything) speaker cables, outside of a very few special interest applications or theater sized silver screens. Pretty sure you'll also get the same crowd yelling I CAN SEE A DIFFERENCE just like they can HEAR the difference between high quality speaker cables and cables for 4000$ per yard. Sure you "can" hear the difference. I'd hear a difference too if I'd been had like that. Doesn't mean it's there.

No, that's just because they forgot to adjust for the spinning ball Earth lie. I'm sure the placement makes sense on a flat Earth!

How would you rate and compare it to Kill la Kill?

Choosing between Macron and Le Pen is like picking between cholera and dysentery. No matter who you vote for you'll end up sh*ting yourself, but at least one of the options comes without blood in the stool. Not sure what this is going in a separate thread, it's not like the politics one is currently featuring a raging debate that would threaten to drown this subject otherwise.

It only took 600 years, but now those medieval quacks have been vindicated. Turns out apparently there is a way how wet cupping can detox you even without suffering from haemochromatosis. Who would have thought? Just checked, theoretically I could donate blood plasma 50 times per year, i.e. pretty much once per week, and it pays 30€ per donation to boot. Huh. That's a pretty penny and has health benefits. Regular medical checkups and blood testing included. Win-win-win, I guess.

Speaking of cabbage, that made me go dig in my pictures: Eh, also... hungry now. Great.

2200€, all in all, although that varies wildly since graphics cards change prices like some people change underwear. 400€ today, 600€ tomorrow. It's not pre-built but built to order. https://bestware.com/en/ Not sure if they ship to Serbia.

Well, not as fancy, but here goes nothing: Corsair 4000D Airflow black Intel Core i5-12600K ASUS ROG STRIX B660-A 32 GB DDR5-5200 Corsair Vengeance ZOTAC GAMING Twin Edge RTX 3060 2 TB M.2 Samsung 980 PRO be quiet! Dark Rock 4 4x be quiet Pure Wings 2 The 3060 is up for a replacement once the 40s come out and prices have died down a little, but it's more than good enough for all my needs right now, so not really much of a priority upgrade. Quite a deafening silence in the room now. Eery.

No, it's worse. The hell is that supposed to be?

By the way, the game in question is Iron Oath, the trailer was linked recently.

Is there any way I convince this terrible looking operating system to look like Windows 7, or maybe at least like Windows 10? If I wanted a MacOS taskbar, I'd get myself an overpriced piece of crap from Apple. This is... this... why? WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME, MICROSOFT?

No I did not, will do once everything works. Currently throwing out old hardware. I had two printers and a document scanner under the table that were not used in a while. I do mean a while. Parallel ports and a parallel switch. A Four way parallel switch. Like this only with four ports…

Hardware just arrived. Funny, usually you get a "warranty void if opened" sticker on the case. Not so this time, there's a huge fat sticker on the case that reads: REMOVE TRANSPORT PROTECTION BEFORE TURNING ON. Yeah no wonder, the transport protection is a bag of instant foam. If you'd turn the computer on while the CPU and graphics card are wrapped in hardened material blocking all airflow, you'd get some very expensive and quite crispy trash. Well, time for the not so fun stuff, let's see if it works and set everything up. Now, where did I put my display port cable? Hmmm. Questions, questions.

Okay, maybe not random game news, but it's kinda funny, at least when viewed through the lense of too little sleep and a tiring couple of weeks at work: I suppose it is not entirely impossible to write for a game without using any pronouns at all, but it is most likely going to be a bit of an awkward read. There are languages where the use of pronouns is fairly limited or generally ungendered (as far as I know Hungarian doesn't distinguish between third person based on gender at all, neither does Mandarin), or they are a different class/type of word than what we would understand as such (Japanese pronouns are simply nouns and behave as such and also have different meanings), and there are a handful that have no pronouns as separate words (like the Iroquoian languages, they have pronominal verb endings), but as far as I know every language we have has a way to refer to people in some form or another. Think about it, it would be really strange to have no way to do that. Languages exist to talk to other people. Even if you can leave them out because the context makes it clear and your languages allows for that, they're still implied. They (oh, snap!) of course meant the game has customizable pronouns that replace them in the text when set accordingly, a feature that does not need to be used and defaults back to regular usage when unused. Seems like a trifle to get one's panties in a bunch, but what do I know, maybe it really is possible to catch the gay from a computer game that allows you to pick the pronouns used to address your character.

Now he's just playing Dr. Soong in every incarnation of Star Dreck. Ancestors, lost offspring, who knows what else they'll come up with. Eventually he's going to play a Dr. Soong who cosplays as Data.

A certain 'sharp' poster of the past with a distinctly right wing bent had George Orwell quotes in his signature. They're co-opting any- and everything that fits their worldview. It gave me a chuckle every time I saw it, right next to that picture of Trump.

I already made a full backup of my entire user folder, so yeah, good to know that works too. Kinda hoping that'll work for Thunderbird just as easily, because otherwise that's going to be boring fiddlework. Oh, yeah, funny, I still have a local mailbox because that non-profit can't afford unlimited space. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure they don't analyze my mail traffic to bring me tailored ads. Screw gmail.