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Toth

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  1. Holy shit, I guess I'm tearing up right now. As an idiot with far too much bile curiosity I had earlier stalked around Reddit and looking through a profile of someone who said something wise, I saw in their post history a BDSM subreddit. I'm don't think I have a kink or anything, but I thought for fun I could scroll through it... you know, the bile curiosity stuff... and... I guess I can be lucky nobody was talking dirty, which would have repelled me instantly, but instead everyone was very warmly and excitedly talking about all their communication of needs and wants and how they express their trust in their partners and I must admit just a couple of minutes of scrolling were enough for me to feel my heart cramp and ache and I just got hit with a wave of envy and despair that I haven't felt yet in this intensity. All going through my head right now is that I will never know what trust and intimacy like this feels like...
  2. I feel like I need to give a bit more insight into how our politics work and why this is so problematic. Germany's constitution is technically very robust in regards to checks and balances, particularly when it comes to lawmakers on federal and state level having to work together. The state governments together with the proportional representation system means that throughout Germany almost every party is in a coalition with any of the others somewhere in some form. Technically, this should mean that parties have to always find compromises and common ground and can't afford to burn too many bridges with each other or else they wouldn't be able to govern in the future. This worked so well that after some tense hiccups in the 60s, for the last decades the problem rather was that parties essentially met in a rather conservative middle ground and no matter which of the two biggest parties, the center CDU or the center-left SPD, was in charge, the country would be very much run the same way with not many changes. Heck, for a large portion of the time, the two parties were even in a coalition with each other. At least that's my take as someone spending more than half my life under the Merkel government. But unfortunately when the centrist consensus of politics is that you shouldn't touch anything, but rather leave unpopular changes to future generations, then everything that breaks along the way will eventually need fixing. And now we are in a position where everything needs fixing all at once. Public services have been underfunded to hell, there is simply not enough staff for government offices to work efficiently (which is one reason why they are getting overwhelmed and overworked by the constant influx of refugees), courts are in a dire place (banal cases get dragged out for years and even high profiles ones dismissed because of errors made by overworked judges), schools of course (having to tackle the influx of immigrant children with low literacy and mental health issues that can't be caught by kindergartens and primary schools then hit the middle and high schools, causing problems for everyone at a time when a huge chunk of the teachers is going into retirement and there are nowhere near enough new ones to take their places), infrastructure (train privatization has put public transportation on life support when the train company just wants to extract profits and let the tracks rot until the government is forced to step in, causing much of the cargo transport to migrate onto the roads... leaving those then obviously in an expensive constantly demolished state) and of course housing (expecting the population to shrink, the local governments sold off the public housing sector to cut costs, but now with the populations in big cities going through the roof instead, nobody is building more houses because the private investor groups prefer to sit on what they already have and watch its value go up). Add to all this the inflation caused by the Ukraine war and its fallout and you've got a pissed off population where particularly the less well-to-do (and less educated) hurt the most, while the population at the same time isn't used to a government actually setting out to change anything (with chancellor Scholz being specifically voted for for being a quiet milktoast administrator with no daring creative policies). And THEN we got a point where through social media or simply opportunistic copying the same kind off insane culture war nonsense that is plaguing the US got imported to Germany by the center-right. Leading up the last elections, the center-right CSU and libertarian FDP openly declared the Greens will establish some kind of communist hippie dictatorship, companies scared of environmental regulation were posting hit pieces in newspapers and of fucking course all the Russian trolls flooded the internet with frothing accusations that they will snatch away the meat from your table and so on. And this hasn't really stopped, it's just that the FDP continues to throw its hissy fits even while in a government with them, leaking unfinished law proposals to the press to whip up uproar to force the Greens to back off from essentially anything they want to tackle, with the Greens eventually sniping back and blocking FDP proposals, the CSU asking for new elections each week and the CDU putting a rich narcissist weasel in charge that got frequently compared to Mr. Burns during the last election and who is opportunistically jumping on each chance to divide the ruling parties. Naturally, while his junior parties are publicly at each other's throats and causing public trust to plummet, Scholz is being Scholz and decides that it looks particularly regal when he's mostly ignoring it and hide from the public. It's quite telling that his "not until our allies make the first step" in regards to weapons deliveries to Ukraine is the most direct communication he has been doing and even that makes him look like an anxious coward. And of course in the middle of all this the far-right AfD is on the rise. The party started out as a silly "we don't like the EU and want the D-Mark back" party, but opportunistically jumped onto the racism angle during the refugee crisis, resulting in the racists in it getting louder and louder, attracting neo-nazis who eventually took over as it kept self-destructing, with its leadership always getting ousted and replaced by ever more radical shitheads. The thing now is that while the German constitution is screaming "Never again!" every second page, there is surprisingly little you can do against a legal party conspiring to dismantle democracy while not really spelling it out like that. It needs to be officially banned by a court to do so first. And that only happened once in the past, to the communist party KPD, but that has to be viewed under the lens of the Cold War... and that the party was so blatantly under the thrall of the USSR that they kidnapped and imprisoned members who refused to bow to orders from Moscow. We also shot ourselves in the foot when the last attempt to ban a party against the far more blatantly neonazi NPD was dismissed by the court with the reasoning that yes, they totally would abolish democracy if they could, but they are too tiny to do so. Now with the AfD, the danger is that the reasoning will be that they are already too big and represent too many voters to abolish them despite at the very least planning to roll back constitutional rights to German citizens (as in the meeting in the article it was not "only" talked about revoking German citizenship from immigrants, but also from political enemies and then send them... somewhere...). Unfortunately in the middle of all this, the CDU is locally faltering on its promise not to work together with the AfD. Because it's just like in the past in Germany or Italy where conservatives thought that communists are a bigger threat than fascists and so the fascists would certainly work out fine as allies. Just that this time it's environmentalists who are treated as the bigger threat than the fascists. Sigh... On the "bright" note, the degree of polarization has caused the "Werteunion" (the far-right wing of the CDU) to create its own party, as well as the... "Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht" (yes, really, the party is named after its leader) splitting off from the left-wing Die Linke. Both parties propose right-wing populist "solutions" in the same vein as the AfD, but with a different veneer and there is some hope that they will grab some votes off the AfD due to its voters mostly originating from CDU or Linke voters anyway.
  3. My gaming OCD really won't ever allow me to finish a game, huh? I was in the last 4 missions of the BSG Deadlock campaign, but during the week too tired to do much thinking. But I still had that lingering itch for a survival game that got triggered by the overwhelming Palword hype. Initially quite a few weeks ago I played Lego Fortnite to satiate this. Yes, really. It was free and since I had collected a few brick built Star Trek ships, I dig the Lego optic and it's free and I watched some people play it on Youtube. However I still found it... very bare bones and restrictive. The idea that you can't harm any enemies in the next zone until you craft the next powerful weapon felt rather stiff, perpetuated by the nightly swarms of skeletons being really annoying and a waste of resources to fight off. And you can't even build all that much because the pieces are awkwardly shaped and pretty much designed for the needlessly complex prefab houses that don't do anything (aside keeping the skeletons out, I guess). But now... well, in a sale I bought Conan Exiles for a few bucks and played it this week occasionally. I'm still not very far, just dicking around at the starting river experimenting with various mechanics, but the game still feels like it's urging me to just go wander the world and find a really nice place to set up camp. My first trip was further west along the river, but I got mauled to death by hyenas and lost my stuff, thought in hindsight it was nothing noteworthy. Then I explored the desert in the north and found a place with tons of iron, which I considered as a place to settle, but the lack of trees or coal put a dampener on that. Right now I feel like it's still less of a hassle to carry the iron south back to my hut at the river instead of carrying tons of wood north into the desert. My next trip will probably lead me to the east into the jungle. Hopefully I will have more luck there then. Though right now I was starting to try out the thrall system, which I considered the main feature of the game. I really want to build a castle and populate it with people, but damn, right now the fighter thralls are frustratingly weak. I "recruited" my first, gave him a set of light armor and a bow, made him follow me to a nearby camp with two exiles... and of course he ran head-first into it despite me setting his weapon preference on ranged and got instantly killed. I "hired" a second one, so far used her only to follow me around while I was killing crocodiles to level her up, but otherwise leave her parked in the camp because I am too afraid to take her anywhere given how these thralls seem to be made of porcelain. How the hell are they supposed to help defend your base?!? So yes... my current goal is to make myself a heavier set of armor and go explore the jungle.
  4. The difference in tone between campaigns and the involved players is pretty interesting. In the convention one-shots I was at, the focus seems to have been a lot on solving that one problem we were presented with, with almost no ability to roleplay any situation (I guess not helped by the DM in the second one shutting down any attempt to make persuasion checks). The Star Wars campaign I joined meanwhile is very focused on Empire-building. The players are all driven by amassing resources to get a bigger ship, to crew it, to amass more resources to get an even bigger ship. It feels very much like playing the Star Wars Interworlds Mod for X4. The roleplaying at most happens during the shopping episodes, but otherwise it's just getting from one combat encounter to another. Now yesterday I for some insane reason decided it would be fun to join one of the one-shot campaigns occasionally hosted on a fanfiction discord I am subscribed to. The difference was quite stark, with everyone immediately coming up with a name, backstory and personality for their character made up on the fly and acting it out in the campaign. Admittedly, I myself hope I didn't push myself too much into the foreground because my character was oddly perfect for most of the situations. It was a van Hellsing style monster hunter campaign in a foggy little town haunted by a demon... and I thought it would be amusing to make my character an artificer based on Egon Spengler. He aced all the investigation and crafting checks (of which there was a surprising amount of), but then in the final fight was badly mauled to near death because I missed the penultimate crossbow shot at the monster... in a pretty embarrassing fight because we all rolled terribly and the DM had to make sure the monster just kills one of us at a time so that we make it to a second combat round... not to mention the two instances before where we completely fumbled an interrogation of a key witness where asking the exact question we needed to ask and that he would have answered failed critically somehow and the other where we found the lair of the monster and failed to see the fucking door... In both instances she fudged the situation a bit and allowed us to make a second attempt by doing a very similar, but slightly altered check. Which I guess makes sense to move the campaign along, though I was already trying to think of alternative ways to solve the situation. The dice god hated us.
  5. I find it funny how the game in the early main campaign stated in a throwaway line that many of the people in the colonies outside the Helios Alpha system didn't take the Cylon threat all that seriously. Either they thought that it's a Caprica only problem or dismissed it entirely as something blown out of proportion to justify Caprican political takeover through the unification of the colonies. In a pre-pandemic game, that level of willful denial of the facts in the face of the Cylons blatantly harming Millions through chemical attacks feels kind of prophetic. But I also can see how that leads to kinda jarring twists like the one you mention, reinforced by the propensity of the people in the show to be irrational backstabbing pricks betraying each other at the slightest provocation.
  6. In today's world, the name Henry Cavill rather comes to mind.
  7. Since early morning Reddit is flooded by Russian Liberation Army and civilian footage showing gunfights across Kursk and a couple of armored vehicles crossing the border into Belgorod. I doubt they are really there to hold the towns, but they are certainly intending to embarrass Puting just in time for the election. Meanwhile in Ivanovo a Russian military cargo plane grounded after loosing an engine during the landing and a couple Kamikaze drones struck more refineries across the country.
  8. Let's be serious, any Ukrainian force taking Moscow would stand before the exact same problem Prigozhin faced: Putin would just piss off to St. Petersburg and continue the war from there.
  9. I think the proposal was not to go for Moscow, but instead to just go through Belgorod to circumvent the mine fields at the contact line and then unravel Donetzk from the north. Still comes with the caveat that they are entering Russia, which opens a can of worms that Ukraine has made sure to keep closed by pointing at Russian separatists for any raids on Russian territory so that Putin can't moan about the country being in mortal danger and deploy nukes. Also supply lines then would have to go through Russian territory until the mines are cleared, which is dangerous and leaves them wide open to get harassed by whatever forces Russia can scrounge together from the North. I have no doubt Russia would at first still be just as taken aback as during Prigozhins thunder run, probably loose a whole bunch of fighters throwing them against the Ukrainians, but eventually manage to put up resistance, which would leave the forces involved in a precarious situation given how they'd have to leave the security of much of their anti air screen behind to do this. So I do think it would be a bad idea. At least going for a big push. Small raids like last year are a different matter and help binding Russian forces that otherwise would reinforce the front lines. Similarly however, keep in mind Ukraine is also forced to have national guard troops stay ready at the border right now to deter a sneak attack, so it's not like neither side looses manpower to the situation as it is. I would be however not quite so certain about these same Russians who made fun selfies with Prigozhin's traitor forces to turn against the Ukrainians. Keep in mind many of them have family ties to Ukraine themselves and have witnessed these shattered by the war. Sure, some will have eaten up the propaganda whole-heartedly, but never underestimate just how passive and apolitical Russia is after 20 years of getting every sign of a political spine broken preemptively. The majority will just duck away and roll over, no matter who says they are in charge now.
  10. Sure! And that's exactly why I'd want the AI to use them instead of ships that actually complement its "Attack! Attack! Attack!" strategy.^^ Huh. The C&C bundle is actually somewhat neat... I have most of the games in their, but am lacking the addons to C&C3 and Generals as well as Red Alert 3 and those are impossible to find separately.
  11. Fucking Revenants. Why don't the Cylons start using Basestars instead of these damned gunships? I can take the fighters and the Basestars, but loosing your flagship Battlestar from full health to death in one turn because three Revenants bee-line towards it instantly is just no fun at all. And leveling officers is a pain. Had this happen in a story mission I attempted twice and both times with the same outcome. Still won, but got horrific casualties. Also learned yesterday that I being constantly in max aggressive stance is pretty much always preferable because of the insane range boost it gives your ships. So far I actually played all my battles on Def+1 because I thought it increases my staying power, but given how useless repairs become when the Cylons bring in the big hitters and it's all about focusing down their gunships before they mess you up, the reach is desperately needed. I only switch my Battlestars into defensive posture in turns they have their flak up, while using the intervening intervals going ham at them. Admittedly, after spending the first five turns making frantic dives because the suckers almost always spawn far below me and Artemis classes can only fire upwards. This has made battles much easier, since I now don't have to fight everything at knife-fight range anymore and can just circle the Cylons with my flak up and my Adamants on max aggressive posture. Unfortunately doesn't help much against those bloody Revenants. For that reason I'm experimenting with Minotaurs and Rangers. The Ranger-class seems rather situational. I always have my Artemis/Adamant stack, with the Rangers now sitting far behind and above to the side, trying to shoot rockets past the flak screen. This works when the Cylon fleets are spread out, but not when they are a massive blob going straight into my flak line. Then the Ranger just kind of sits there uselessly. Not to mention it can't help against the Revenants because they are always the vanguard doing the aggressive shit. Therefore I am starting to put more Minotaurs into my fleet, which I so far try to use in place of my Manticores, which... is not very effective... I guess they are better with broadsides from below like the Adamant than using the forward guns like the Revenants do? In that case I guess I have to use them in place of the Adamants instead... But seriously, I just wish the Cylons would use Basestars and carriers instead. Vipers are so overpowered, in the last story mission where you defend a Basestar that wants to negotiate with the Colonials, my vipers cleared out the entire fighter complement of two Cerberus carriers and a couple of Talons in 2-3 turns. That was easy. But mostly because the Cylons only had one Revenant.
  12. Okay, that was a costly bunch of turns in BSG Deadlock. I guess I just have still far too many Manticores flying around and not enough Battlestars to go out and hold the line. First I did an optional mission with one of my Helios Alpha fleets that had four Manticores and ran into a large fleet of massed Talons that focused fire and destroyed three of them, completely ignoring my Adamants. And now I did the, admittedly, very stupid thing of playing a story mission, attacking a Cylon Fleet above Sagittaron that is responsible for a chemical attack on the planet, with a fresh fleet with a green commanding officer. My fleet only consisted of an Artemis, two Adamants and one Manticore. The enemy fleets consisted of two Revenants, two Arachnes, two Nemesis, at least one Talon... and on top of that you get attacked by Sagittarians with two Manticores and two Adamants. My first attempt was an utter disaster, with the Revenants focusing fire and destroying one Adamant in one turn, leaving me utterly crippled. I was considering loading my last save and use the Daedalos fleet with all the experienced heavy hitters, but now I thought I try it again, placing my fleet as far back as possible from the Cylons, hoping to let the Sagittarians fight the Cylons. That... didn't work too well. The Cylons made a beeline for me and the Sagittarians only managed to pick off one Talon from what I saw in the replay, then just dicked around in the background until I was finished with the Cylons. Blargh. I however this time had a lot of luck that the toasters in charge of the Revenants suffered a stroke or something and turned away from me. They were probably thinking the Sagittarian Manticores were easier pickings, however that meant they didn't fire too many salvos at my Adamants and I was free to fire at their engines. However... the Sagittarian Adamants were still utterly silly. They focused fire on my one Adamant that was already stripped from all its armor because of the battle with the Cylons, then focused fire on my other Adamant (the Manticore was already destroyed by the Cylons) and destroyed that one as well. I only had my battlestar (and the four fighter squadrons) left when they went for a pincer attack with two Manticores and I was confused why I couldn't really fire at both of them at the same time. However it forced me to go left and right constantly with the flak in order to intercept their missiles. Still one of the Manticores made a suicide run ramming into my Battlestar, causing heavy damage. In the end I somehow managed to hold out long enough to destroy the last Adamant and get the victory, but the Battlestar Jupiter had its armor on both sides stripped and only 16 hull points left. And... just like you, @Werthead, I couldn't record the damn battle and only got a 0 Byte file out of it. Crap. Only got the battle report: https://i.imgur.com/potVqtP.png I now have to get this Battlestar and its tough crew through the war! Destroying 5 ships and inflicting 500 damage in its second mission! But damn... I can't loose so many ships. I need to be more patient and focus on defense for a while.
  13. ... aaand I already have five fleets mucking around! XD It didn't help that I had two Cylon fleets attacking Leonis and Canceron in the upper part of the war table, so I ended up dispatching two there, then have my shipyard forever parked home on Scorpia once I realized I can't auto-resolve battles with it and then two fleets for Helios Alpha and Helios Gamma, though I now sent my Helios Gamma fleet to Helios Alpha because the Cylons have started showing up with strength 4000 stacks and my Helios Alpha fleet is starting to loose ground. Right now one of these stacks is sitting atop Caprica and I have no means to make it go away with my old Helios Alpha fleet that is just one Adamant and four Manticores... one of which I recently lost during a mission protecting a refugee fleet from a bazillion Cylon corvettes. For fun I made my Helios Beta fleet entirely out of Adamants and I must say, once I unlocked Viper Mk2s it's an impressive wall of guns. I was particularly impressed by the Mk2s ability to intercept missiles. With the Mk1 I often wondered why I even bothered putting them on "Defend at Location" between my ships and the Cylons every turn the Cylons had their missiles ready, because one squadron could take out one or two at most. Then I watched the M2s just utterly demolishing every ordinance pointed at me, with one or two at most getting through. Kinda makes me wonder why I'd even need Flak later on as long as I have a bunch of Vipers between me and the enemy, particularly given how crazy fast they are. Likewise, I'm using the vipers to scout for the enemy and mark them for my opening missile barrage because they are so ridiculously fast. Granted, so far the Cylons haven't really brought a lot of Raiders to bear, then I guess my Vipers would end up too busy to do these kinds of missions. We'll see. I avoided the Ranger admittedly, because I have too much fun relying heavy on Vipers, so yesterday evening I unlocked the Artemis. I guess just in time for when the Cylons bring in the serious fleets. I also tried fooling around with the recording, but... is it just me or is it broken? Not only do I suffer from occasional crashes when I click on recording, the battles that I succeed in recording have some really weird metallic audio distortion to them. Don't really feel like sharing those because of it.
  14. Thanks for the write-up! Yeah, the Manticores are surprisingly good. My current strategy was to have a wolf pack of four of them just slowly chewing through the enemy formations while my Vipers are defending the leading Manticore as a missile screen. Unfortunately during the mission with the Athena I already noticed how frustrating it was to get my Vipers and Raptors out of the way for me to fire up the Battlestar's flak field, particularly when my Raptors were still hanging around to boost my firewalls. Case in point, the Cylon hacking so far is the most frustrating aspect of the game. Once in an early mission I had all three of my Manticores' fire solution systems hacked and them all disabled. I had to finish most of the enemies with my two Viper squadrons from the shipyard until I realized that I can fire again even without fully repairing the damaged systems.
  15. The other day in class during a group work I noticed one boy who got repeatedly on my nerves with his Andrew Tate fanboying quite aggressively fooling around with several girls in quick succession and they seemed to appreciate it. I couldn't help but inwardly groan... -.-
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