Gorth

Old thread...

On a sort, well, wouldn't call it a positive note, but at least *something* may have out of the Cuban protests and death of one of the protesters... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-57844864 "Cuba has temporarily lifted import duties on food, medicine and other essentials following recent unrest. As of next Monday, there will be no limit on such goods brought in by travellers until the end of the year. Thousands took to the streets on Sunday in protests over food and medicine shortages, price increases and the government's handling of Covid-19. One demand they had was for people arriving in Cuba to bring in supplies without paying customs duties."

When did that ever stop Germany? They were also among the first to support Ukraine's invasion and occupation of Crimea, they immediately supported Albanian separatists in Kosovo (which was actually the something like the birthplace of Serbia in the seventh century) etc. USA is not the only ones flexing muscles when it comes to realpolitik, legitimacy be damned. Russia and China does it too, the England used to be the undisputed world champions in the sport of Gunboat Diplomacy, so not a uniquely German (or US) thing.

I was semi serious https://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/stories/s709110.htm German tourist killed by crocodile in Kakadu https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/03/21/teenager-mauled-by-crocodile-tried-to-impress-backpacker-who-th_a_21903819/ When 18-year-old Lee De Paauw jumped into crocodile-infested waters in far-north Queensland on Sunday morning, he was convinced he would walk away with his bravado and the girl he was trying to impress. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/1411154/14ft-crocodile-kills-backpacker.html 14 foot crocodile kills backpacker (paywall, don't visit) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/28/british-tourists-film-moment-crocodile-lunged-out-of-australian-creek-at-them A crocodile attack that left a British tourist with a leg wound has been captured on camera in Australia. In the footage, posted to Facebook by Ally Bullifent, a crocodile can be seen jumping out of the water towards the women as they scream. (poor lizard was taunted by tourists... didn't get to eat them) ... Etc.

You bloody racist! I'm sure those tribes are human too.... As for the Coelacanth, that one is indeed an oddity. Nobody doubts it's existence either, because hard evidence was produced (fresh corpses, not just 60 million year old fossils) Edit: I should say, nobody has good reasons to doubt its existence...

They could be distant relatives to the Australian Saltwater Crocodile, which can survive on European backpackers for a long time.

Believe? No, not really. Again, not quite the same as believing there is none. There just hasn't been any hard proof presented and I suspect people sometimes work themselves into some kind of self induced (mass) hysteria, seeing things, because of the way brains compensates for what they expected to see and are not seeing and then fills in the gaps for them. It's a mechanism that is so strong, that people truly believe they saw "something", because it's real in their brains, having generated the same input as if their sensory nerves had registered it. They could pass a lie detector test too, because to them it *is* real.

I saw an episode once of something I suspect would have been a "ghost hunter" kind of show. It was cringe worthy. People running around with shaky-cams trying to recreate the Blair Witch Project atmosphere, using narrators with ominous voices and jarring background music to create a sense of drama where none was. Vampire Bloodlines: The Masquerade made a much better job of creating a creepy atmosphere. Anyone remember that quest? Edit: Not the haunted house (best quest ever), but the ghost hunters setting up shop in an old decrepit building, preparing to shoot an episode... I'm an agnostic in this regard too. I don't believe the ratings dependent TV shows for a second, but wont rule out either that there may be things we can't see in spectrum human sensory organs can perceive. I feel the same way about religion. Don't believe the word coming out of the mouth of a priest (any religion) for a second, but that doesn't mean The Big Bang is an all encompassing theory.

Mostly playing Guild Wars 2 these days... the release of the legendary armory resulted in a mass reshuffling of gear and the revisit of living world season 3 started tonight too. I'm sort of up to speed with that. Short explanation: Legendary armory is a new feature where your legendary gear gets stored and instead of deciding which alt gets what legendary gear, they can now *all* use the same gear, as they all have access to a an "instance" or copy of the gear. I.e. if you have a legendary sword, all your toons can now use that one sword and each one select their owns stats and appearance independent of each other. Legendary prices are expected to become... legendary The revisit part is Arenanet throwing carrots at people while waiting for the next major expansion (the third expansion), which got delayed from end of 2021 to somewhere 2022 (officially blaming covid for slowing down the process). They created a new set of achievements, which is basically replaying all the existing "Living World" story content, grind your butt off, do impossible jumping puzzles and do triple backwards flips with your left hand tied to your right foot... or something. Anyway, the reward for doing it all is a legendary item (amulet iirc) once all of it is done. And people are on a stampede throughout the story, crowding my personal space on the current map(s) a lot When not doing GW2, sort of alternating between Killing Floor 2 (for some hectic co-op shooter action) and Dungeon of Naheulbeuk (sp?), the latter still being very fun to play I figure, once the dungeon crawl is finished, then I might pick of Fallout New Vegas again. I actually never completed it... cough cough. Made it to Hoover Dam several times, but something always got in the way, usually something silly like moving country or what have you, taking me away from my game for prolonged periods of time

Phew, sounds good, I was worried there for a moment

She was *the* grunter! I think tv stations at the time were actually whinging about it, wondering if they should censor the sound when shown in day time tv A formidable tennis player though. A career that literally got cut short (bad pun, I know) before reaching it's potential for longevity.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57826851 "Websites for a Russian-linked ransomware gang blamed for attacks on hundreds of businesses worldwide have gone offline. Monitors say a payment website and a blog run by the REvil group became suddenly unreachable on Tuesday. The reason behind the disappearance is unknown, but has sparked speculation that the group may have been targeted deliberately by authorities." I suppose there are two possibilities. If it's just the internet assets that disappeared and are never heard from again, it's probably the CIA that got fed up with the gang. If the gang members disappeared and are never heard from again, it's probably Putin that got fed up with them....

From some dictionary on the internet (so... take with a grain of salt) Old English man(n), (plural) menn (noun), mannian (verb), of Germanic origin; related to Dutch man, German Mann, and Sanskrit manu ‘mankind’. You could argue that the correct spelling aught to be Menn but who knows. I didn't spend several decades studying Old English and linguistics in general, like a certain Author Edit: Ah what the heck, bring in the Wiki! The term man (from Proto-Germanic *mann- "person") and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age. In traditional usage, man (without an article) itself refers to the species or to humanity (mankind) as a whole. The Germanic word developed into Old English mann. In Old English, the word still primarily meant "person" or "human," and was used for men, women, and children alike.[1][2] The sense "adult male" was very rare, at least in the written language. That meaning is not recorded at all until about the year 1000, over a hundred years after the writings of Alfred the Great and perhaps nearly three centuries after Beowulf.[3] Instead, the usual Old English word for an adult male was wer, which survives today only in the compound "werewolf" (from Old English werwulf, literally "man-wolf"). Adopting the term for humans in general to refer to men is a common development of Romance and Germanic languages, but is not found in most other European languages (Slavic čelověkъ vs. mǫžь, Greek ἄνθρωπος vs. άνδρας, Finnish ihminen vs. mies etc.). Edit2: Wer and Wif as Man and Woman. Anyone suspect the etymology of the word Wife here?

I didn't see the game (I might watch some youtube highlights later), but from the BBC stats, it looks like England was more or less outplayed when it came to possession and shots.

Highlights from the 2016 Calcio Storico (the "good old days" before social distancing and face masks)

An actual Australian kids show from the 90's... a lot of this stuff probably wouldn't go down well in the rest of the world

Scandinavians (actually, most Nordic people as far as I know)... personal space is a real thing.

Got no numbers to back it up (pun unintended), but I have a hunch that the referral scam scheme did a lot of damage, but nothing even close to the gold sellers who runs bot farms. One thing Arenanet did right, they control the market, including the buying and selling of ingame currency vs. cash shop currency. You play the trading post right, you don't need a credit card and vice versa, you got a fat credit card, you can buy ingame gold from people wanting to sell their gold for cash shop currency, for the latest skins for fashion wars. Of course Arenanet also takes a cut of every currency transaction, so it constantly drains gold out of the game. Edit: Arenanet controls the exchange rate, so they can to at least some degree control the market.

Not quite, The Gold Coast is a bit further south (where all the drugs, gambling dens and prostitutes are). I live closer to Brisbane. I usually go there three times a week, making one of days fall on the weekend. On workdays… we’ll I don’t really have to be anywhere before 9am (working from home) so I catch a shower and still get like 5 hours of sleep

No real program per se. Just rotating around the gym using the machinery and the weights. Swapping between two exercises at a time. Do 15 lifts/pushes/pulls here, next machine. 15. then back to first. Rinse and repeat 5 times. Then move on to the next two exercises and repeat. What caught me off guard the most is, I've never really done sit a lot of ups before. Nor the opposite (i.e. bending your back backwards). Being a 24/7 gym, I go there at night so I have it all for myself. Nobody else around at 2-3am Edit: In the past, I mostly did cardio in the gym, but I have a "gym grade" exercise bike at home now. Complete with heart rate monitor and everything else. Edit2: My problem with cardio is, it's so frigging boring. With an exercise bike at home, I can at least put a laptop on a table in front of it and show some movies, making it all feel less mind numbing.

Old thread (where we left off) Finally got past the point where my body hurts, waking up in the middle of the night with belly cramps, just to get cramps in all the back muscles when trying to straighten out the belly muscles The joy of pushing yourself a bit harder at the gym and doing things you normally never do...

Heh, yeah. I thought it was only in certain countries like North Korea where the government wants to have that kind of complete control over the media....

Just some interesting music I ran across a long ago and forgot about, until Youtube's algorithms for whatever reason suggested it

For whatever reason, my brain is wired so I'm much better at perceiving the world through sound and touch than visuals. I suck at remembering faces, names etc. but I can quote somebody on what they said 30 years ago and I can pick a voice out of a crowd of 50 people arguing and recognize it. I can't remember the 8 digit code to the gate in the face around where I live, but my fingers "remember" the sequence by the familiarity of the touch of the buttons in specific places. So, I thought (because of my personal bias) that audio recordings from other worlds are a fascinating thing