Toth

It was... an adventure... the meetup itself was nice and casual I guess, but the entire ordeal around it right now still causes me to think "never again" more often than about the hanging out part.

Didn't think I would get tagged here when I specifically tried to avoid posting it here. But yeah, the licorice was surprisingly well received. As was the woodruff. They promised to keep me updated on the further taste testing. Though she was kinda overwhelmed by how overboard I went with the candy. She had the same idea, but only brought a chocolate bar and a package of smarties and was then disappointed to find out that AI lied to her that we didn't have them in Europe (apparently it misread the quote from Wikipedia talking about the US having different Smarties than Canada and Europe). Lesson for you all: AI sucks and you always need to double-check! She also brought me some Canadian coins and a manifest of the Quebec independence movement because of course she did. Despite me getting stuck in a massive train shit show they somehow spent so much time finding a parking place halfway across town and then, well, crossing it, that I somehow arrived first. We then had a bit of a welcoming talk, exchanged our gifts and I tagged along for dinner. The father of her friend who organized the tour first talked a lot with me, with her urging me to tell stories she already knew about, the family then took their leave and it was just the three cosplayers left, we talked more in the café and eventually they accompanied me on my brisk walk back to the train station. The other girl was also rather apologetic about cutting into our meetup like the father was, but I think we saw no real issue about this as we had the same nerdy topics and I think it was just natural that we had to get to know each other as well. I did note that they rushed through places so much on their trip that the impressions were threatening to all kind of bleed together for them. Also my slight exercising of my abysmal French skills in the week prior were completely fruitless. I managed to get some pre-memorized sentences in at the beginning and a few snippets here and there, but when I tried to tell a story in a way to include the mother and kid brother who didn't speak any English and reflexively tried to tell it at the pace I would speak in English, it was a car crash of a sentence until I gave up. It got a bit overshadowed by my train back home also getting a 150 minutes delay, the very last trains of the day back home then forcing me to three nonsensical changes because there was nightly construction work only on that very night, the last train stopping just before my station and me then having to walk home from the next town over through the forest with my phone light and then getting drenched by a hilariously massive downpour that happened after I was nearly home. I arrived home at 2am... at least with a story to tell, I guess.

I hope so... Though at the moment I'm wondering whether I'm going to overdo it in some way and will look like I want to prank her and her travel group. She had said she wanted to gift me some stuff from Canada and I was kind of prepared to respond in kind. As lasting gifts it's only very small things: Two funny Steins;Gate keychains since she is a big fan of the show and since she collects foreign coins two "pfennige", so the small cent coins in Germany from before the Euro, as well a duplicate commemorative coin for 30 years fall of the Berlin wall. Since all of that is literally just stuff I had in the back of a drawer and because we had talked about local dishes and treats a few weeks ago when she asked me about what she should be trying when here, I got the sudden idea to also get her some "Maiplättchen", woodruff candy, which I found out is actually specifically a traditional Berlin thing and completely unknown even in other states. On top of that I've read woodruff as a flavor is completely unknown outside of Germany with only Italy being an exception, so that was an additional motivation. So I set out to find some... and... to this day couldn't find any. I'm shocked! I remember as a child they were occasionally at supermarkets and pretty much always at dollar stores and now they are completely gone, all replaced by big brand candy. Everywhere. I even went as far as going to a candy manufacture today and it was "closed due to the temperatures". Dang it! I got the address of another candy store that definitely got it that I will visit tomorrow after school, but that really got me disheartened. ... and while doing all of this I of course started looking for alternatives, and doing this, I got a tad carried away. I know German chocolate would have been a safe bet, but with 37°C outside, chocolate doesn't feel safe to me. And I still had that idea in my head to go for "unique" instead of "popular". The first thing I picked as an alternative for woodruff candy is "Ahoj Brause", a 'soda powder' that apparently is pretty unknown outside Germany. I wonder if I kill them if I encourage them to eat it straight from the bag. It also got woodruff flavor, so I had incorporated it with this idea. A colleague then told me that Marzipan isn't really known in America, at least not the way we use it. So I bagged a package of decent quality. And while at the aisle, I saw "Erfrischungsstäbchen", uhm, 'Refreshment sticks'? Essentially small chocolate pralines filled with lemon syrup from Eastern Germany. I doubt that's known outside Germany as well. And THEN... I saw a bag of Salmiak and was going back and forth quite long whether I should add that not necessarily as a gift, but maybe as an experiment then and there. I read that outside Northern Europe Salmiak is completely unknown/causes very negative reactions for some reason. But it's another thing that I loved as a kid. I'm still on the fence, but I also bought it even though I now feel like I set up some kind of Youtube reaction video called "I fed these weird German candies to unsuspecting Quebequois. Their reaction was shocking!". Glad that Fallout 4 helped! Don't let the Deathclaw in the Witchcraft Museum get you! XD

Okay, even in Mount & Blade Star Wars can't get rid of its hallway scenes. Am not complaining though, since I got one for myself. Just jumped in yesterday evening for an half an hour ride. Got the mission to save someone's daughter captured by pirates. I went there, paid the ransom, realized the girl was dropped into space instead of my party because my party was full... and used the opportunity to attack the pirates to get the ransom back for myself, since now there was no danger for the girl anymore. The battle was what was essentially a narrow open promenade of a space ship, with walls to the left and a window to space overlooking a planet on the right. The pirates were charging my firing line and despite heavy casualties they kept on coming and almost managed to make contact with my troops. I then put away my blaster and drew my lightsaber and just rushed in, hacking wildly at everyone. Lightsabers in the mod apparently make so much damage, combat becomes more Jedi Knight and less KotoR. You don't whack people with a glow stick, instead every hit sends heads and limbs flying, they made it downright gory. I only lost one unlucky Rebel Recruit. Well, enough space to grab the hostage and return to Yavin.

Sorry, I wish I could say something, but I don't know anything beyond what I had seen in Fallout 4 and somehow doubt that's gonna be very helpful. Personally I guess I would focus on whatever historical things there are available. Freedom Trail. The ships in the harbor. Maybe a trip to Salem and hoping to find something that is less kitsch (or just enough kitsch to get the kids entertained).

Thank! I'll try that! Though I saw it is also possible to reduce the difficulty in WoIaF, so maybe I make another attempt there first. It IS very unusual. Of course it makes heavy use of the Napoleonic warfare mechanics Mount & Blade has with its DLC. So just about any unit is either just line infantry, snipers are rifleman and speeder bikers are dragoons. Granted, there are still the odd Jedi or Gamorrean running around as dedicated melee infantry, but those are actually pretty rare. In other words, it IS very Star Wars in that the battle tactics mirror Geonosis in Episode 2 with armies just standing in the open shooting at each other and barely hitting anything because Blasters work like Muskets with magazines. The whole mercenary gig the game revolves around however does feel extremely fundamentally Star Wars. I am also glad, even though the merchants all have lightsabers and the game wants to encourage you to pick one up as a late game melee weapon, that Jedi are actually as rare as they are. You can build a Jedi Academy or Sith Temple on a holding of yours, so it is possible to recruit them in numbers, but so far I have yet to see one in the wild. I only recruited Rahm Kota who starts out with Force Powers and a lightsaber equipped and then gave a lightsaber I found after beating a Sith ghost on Korriban to Kyle Katarn because it just feels right. Otherwise I only met Yoda, who hates me because Utapau was his fiefdom that was taken away from him to be given to me, and nobody else. I suppose the Emperor sits around on Coruscant and Vader on Mustafar. And I think I saw Obi-Wan listed as a lord somewhere as well.

Bannerlord has less mods, as far as I can tell (and I don't have Bannerlord because it's not yet at the level of bargain bin pricing I'm usually buy my games at). I did write on the previous page my reason for why I bounced off the "World of Ice and Fire" Mod: The battles were horribly, comically unfair. Nothing more, nothing less.

Warband.

Got kind of addicted to Mount and Blade again over the weekend. Damn, the Star Wars mod is so good! You can do so many things... Aside the Vanilla quests, fighting for titles, constructing buildings on properties, making businesses, melees and tourneys there are also speeder races, blackjack, an absurd amount of mercenaries, droids, clones and companions and ships to buy and use their amenities. I decked myself out in Clone Trooper gear, have formally joined the Rebel Alliance, getting Utapau as my fiefdom, fought on one campaign against the Empire at Mustafar, became the Marshal of the Rebel Alliance after the previous one got captured by the Empire, bought myself an Action VI freighter (in the civilian version, the Wild Karrde seems to be much better though), found a lightsaber on Tython (they are on sale everywhere, but until now I tried to avoid using one, preferring to stand back and shoot people because I'm still frail as fuck or rather everyone is extremely deadly in this game), bought a new speeder bike that now allows me to more effectively drive around hitting people with said lightsaber (and not get gunned down trying) and while I still go around trying to do bounty hunting missions while collecting a ton of companions, I'm wondering about when I feel comfortable calling for a campaign and challenging the Empire for real. The Rebel alliance has scattered patches of territory across the entire galaxy, hopelessly outmatched by the Empire, so to win the war, I need to consolidate some kind of corner. However, even the most backwater planet has over 300 defenders and I still can only command about 60 troops myself, and I somehow don't trust the Rebels to actually be able to converge at a rally point, with that whole scattered across the galaxy thing. Awesome mod, definitely. Shame I bounced off so hard from the ASoIaF one.

I now tried out the Star Wars Conquest mod instead of AWoIaF and... while I still suck because I'm not used to the game anymore, it's considerably easier to get around and do stuff. I started out as a Rebel, but ignored the main quest, instead opting to go around and see what minor quests I should do. In the end I ended up mostly in Hutt space and made friends with some Gamorrean lord... until he wanted me to collect money he lent to Boba Fett and I noped out. I then realized that due to me ignoring the main quest, the Empire actually is indifferent to me instead of hostile and me avoiding Imperial worlds was pointless. So made a few missions for them as well until Tarkin tasked me to destroy a pirate outpost that proved too difficult for my still fairly crappy army. Damn. So I instead went down the route of trying to trade a little, at least with so much ceramics or ale barrles as I could cram into my A-Wing. While doing that I got attacked by a bunch of Imperial deserters who wrecked my army. High level stormtroopers are no joke. At least I got a decent set of Stormtrooper armor and a good rifle out of that. Now an Imperial outpost wants me to get them "unmodified grain" and I have no clue where to get that. I guess I want to look more into tourneys soon, even if I fail, I'm level 3 and suck in combat, so the XP might be necessary. The game really swamps you with silly options. There are force power trainers standing around (that I avoid right now because I want to play an ordinary dude), at the cantina you can hire an insane amount of mercenaries of different species and at Trade Federation outposts you can buy droid armies, ships (which are extremely expensive for me as of yet) and Clone Trooper gear. I bought some droids and mercenaries for fun and they are carrying me somewhat.

Should I answer the second question?

Okay, I've cured my desire to play Mount & Blade by trying out the biggest ASoIaF Mod. What the hell, modders? It's just comically hard! Before that I played only Vanilla and the Warhammer Fantasy Mod, so I thought I had a decent grasp on how Mount & Blade gameplay works. But World of Ice and Fire is just silly. So I jump into the game. Since I played Warhammer Fantasy as Jaime Lannister, I found it fitting that I made my character here Karl Franz and put everything into strength and charisma. I started the "story mode" of the mod and turns out you are a Stark retainer fleeing King's Landing to then do messenger missions for Robb. In Winterfell I signed up for the melee, thinking to myself that in Warhammer Fantasy that was an easy way to skill my weapon proficiencies and earn some cash in the early game... ... turns out WoIaF doesn't have all melee participants be just naked with sticks, instead I have to fight fully armed enemies in my combat gear: Which is just some peasant garb and a dagger. I get instantly shanked. Okay then. I've got 200 stags in my pocket and the crappiest weapon at Mikken's smithy costs thousands. Main quest it is, I suppose. Robb sends me to a village north that is plagued by a small Wildling raiding party. I go north and... can't find the village. I found two other villages, but not THE village. I set up camp in one of the villages, while my to retainers complain that we need to set up camp outside to sleep or morale will suffer. Okay... that I don't remember as a mechanic... I ignore them and stay in the village. I work a day in the field and all I get is a loaf of bread, so that was a bust. The village elder then tells me that there are bandits around I should train the villagers, which is a well-known base game quest. I agree. In the practice fight the villager takes me out in two hits. The hell?!? This happens again and again twice a day, with only a few sparse fights where I don't even try to block any attacks, but instead just get lucky stun-locking him. It was a baffling sight. In between that two poachers attack me, wanting me to hand over Ned Stark's letter to Stannis that picked up randomly in an event on the way to Winterfell. That fight I actually played a couple times due to me attempting to savescum around that shitty training quest. So... the first attempt was an effortless victory, with the poachers just getting swarmed and slaughtered by the villagers I had recruited. The second time they just completely slaughtered everyone, with me having absolutely zero ability to stop them. Same with the third attempt. The fourth then is a close victory with two villagers getting knocked out, but managing to capture one poacher. Okay fine. Having done that, I've finished the training of the villagers, triggering the bandit raid... and the bandits just absolutely cut through the villagers without even taking a scratch, burning the village down and my reputation taking a massive hit. Urks. Reloading my last save, I abandon the training mission and go back to Winterfell to hopefully find someone to take my villager. Only to immediately run into the Lord o' Bones. Hey, is this the wildling raid from the main quest? I can take it! Wait... he's got 118 men... I can't take it... Fuck.

Same. Truth be told, I find the choice of arguments against it baffling. From a German POV, it's also quite astonishing, when compared to a similar debate here we have about the 9-Euro-Ticket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket It was an experiment to offer people a subscription the entirety of public transport with the exception of speed trains for only 9 Euro. Personally I found it fantastic, though admittedly it helped more in making people go on trips inside of Germany rather than switch to the train for their daily commute, but it still had quite a popular appeal, lowered inflation and saved carbon emissions, what with selling 82 Million tickets in three months in a country with a population of 83 Million. Unfortunately it now costs 49 Euro and the current conservative government of Merz wants to get rid of it entirely because we can't have nice things.

Why do I have this sudden urge to play Mount & Blade Mods? Why can't I be arsed to finish one of the 20 games already installed on my drive? Gah...

That's not how being a teacher works, I can't just take a day off. I'll have to be back in class Tuesday morning and no, it's not yet summer break in my area. So no, this won't be a trip for myself. And I now... ordered the tickets and made the plunge. I suspect with my luck this will become a crazy stressful clusterfuck and we will miss each other somehow.

Okay, maybe I'm totally in the wrong thread at all. But I feel like abusing the Dating thread for social skills issues is something I want to decisively avoid in this case and I'm admittedly too cowardly to make a new thread for this. And the Mental Wellbeing thread would be a bit... strong... given this is just about figuring out whether this trip is appropriate or not. My issue is basically one of costs and purpose of a very last-minute one-day trip only to meet an online acquaintance. I... can't trust myself due to my anxiety and I don't know whether I'm going too far out of my way in a way that might be perceived as weird. So here is the situation: Last year I made acquaintance on Reddit with a girl from Québec due to the topic of cosplay. Somehow the contact didn't fizzle out and we had quite regular chats throughout the months about all kinds of things. Now the thing is that she lost one of her friends to cancer and the father of that friend invited her and another friend of his daughter to a tour across Europe in her memory, with Alsace, Munich and Prague being destinations. The odd thing is that this coincided with me having a class trip to Prague this month as well. But as it turns out, my trip was two weeks before hers, so unfortunately there was no way to casually have a small real life meetup with each other. A colleague I told this to and my therapist suggested that I should just plan another trip to meet her anyway, but I was very uneasy about the prospect. For one, I really didn't feel like me meeting her was too... fitting, given the reason of why they are doing this trip in the first place (though she now dismissed that, saying her friend is also taking the opportunity to meet someone). The other issue is that I'm very freaked out about the optics of a 32 years old geezer like me going out of his way to meet with a 20 years old. I have students older than her! I have absolutely zero interest of making it creepy, but I'm not sure outsiders are not going to see it that way. So in any case, I was quite content to just let it go and only exchange our impressions of our respective trips with no real life interaction. Till this morning... when she suddenly wrote me that she'll be in Munich July 07th to July 08th and whether it is not still possible for me to have some reason to be there as well in this time frame. So now with that pretty direct invitation at hand, I've spent the whole day worrying about what to do. Above concerns haven't really disappeared. The thing is, after some more messaging, Monday July 7th is pretty much exactly the only day that works, even if Prague would have been closer, but she won't be there in time before it collides with me having to go back. For this Monday I have work the rest of the days and on the weekend I'll be at a convention, so on Monday I'll be pretty dead from that anyway. The cheapest train tickets are 118€ on this short a notice to get there and back again, the trip takes 5 hours and I'll be there from 11:45 am to 4:45 pm when my train back arrives. Meanwhile they will arrive "somewhere between 1 pm to 2 pm". Just typing this down feels super stressful. I suppose I have some space to go off and do stuff on my own before they arrive, but still. Sigh... I know this is a rare chance, especially when there is little chance she'd get back to Europe in the near future, but on the other hand this all seems so alien and... desperate. So... would you do something like this?

I feel eerily reminded of the tit-for-tat exchange of rocket strikes Iran and Israel did last year, with the same logic of lobbing enough missiles to make it a face-saving statement, but hoping that it'll eventually fizzle out and one side claims enough face has been saved. Fucking dick-waving morons in charge of the world...

Has anyone checked whether Trump hasn't watched Top Gun Maverick yesterday?

Sigh... why do these conflicts need to get messier and messier? This year I hadn't yet gotten around to talk about Israel-Palestine with my students. As I said this week, it came up in two classes due to the Israel-Iran war now, and now I've got to adapt my material to the expanded scope of the current situation. Initially I had one page with a summary of the history of Israel and Palestine with a second work sheet with questions and the task to draw a diagram of actors. Now I spent the last 5 hours to write another work sheet in the same style about the history of Iran and its relation to Israel and the US, with a similar set of questions and the task to draw a diagram of actors. I suppose I now try this with two groups that then have to merge their parts into one? I already think this is too much and it'd be more clever to just treat the conflicts separately...

Odd. What's up with the rather vitriolic insistence by pro-Palestine people that Iran isn't supporting Hamas? Most of my students are Muslims with varied backgrounds and most of them feel strongly about Palestine because of that, making analyzing the conflict from a neutral POV a very tense undertaking (and I say that as a teacher who does feel sympathetic to Palestinian civilians and feels uneasy about Netanyahu's politics - however for most of my students I'm still clearly not sympathetic enough when I task them to read anything about the history of Israel and caution them to get emotionally whipped up by whatever Tiktok floods them with). Today twice in short succession I had students go ballistic at me for drawing a connection between Hamas and Iran, with Iran supporting Hamas out of convenience for its ambition of dominating the middle-east. Was rather blindsided at the idea that this is a contentious thought, but unfortunately when I asked my students why they are attacking me like this, they went on very confusing tangents that "Iran is defending itself! Israel attacked first!", which had absolutely nothing to do with the connection they were upset with and they were so worked up, I couldn't get them back to my question no matter what. Notably, the students in question were of Afghan origin. I had a bit of a flashback now as I type this out about a Palestinian student last year who had similar, but a lot less vitriolic objections. And he just adamantly insisted he can't imagine Shia Persians supporting any Sunni Muslims, even only for symbolic reasons. Is that it?

For the German speaking folks, the Bundeswehr channel dropped a new analysis of General Freuding about Operation Spiderweb and the latest security conferences in Europe: Granted, they are always geared towards absolute laymen with no knowledge about anything, but still very interesting in regards to the general perception of the war to the German military leadership. Freuding himself seems to be in a very good mood! He's so far still taking a conservative estimate of the lost Russian aircraft with only the publicly available videos taken into account, but even with only this he emphasized that Ukraine destroyed bombers that were fueled and armed and ready to go for the current Russian offensive, making the damage count doubly. They also hit some very rare airplanes that were obviously not able to fly anymore, but were still kept around for spare parts, so even that might show more effect down the lines. I found very amusing how he calls the Russian defense "incomplete and careless" and finds it quite telling that after three years of attacks deep behind Russian lines the average Russian base commander still can't be bothered to take drone defense seriously and considers this a result of the deeply entrenched thought that Russia is so large, they will always have safety in depth. Which clearly isn't the case anymore with modern technology. To a question about how Ukraine kept this under wraps, he emphasizes that Ukraine's secret service did this completely on its own alongside various misdirection operations, that there was no communication about it with Ukraine's allies and rightfully so, they are not obliged to. Therefore about the exact nature of the operation he can only make the same guesses anyone else can. I felt like some of the phrasing made it sound like the military brass is already eagerly wargaming how they could adapt similar tactics. The latter half is about the recent Ramstein conference and the support for Ukraine declared there. He is very happy about the support in regards to munitions, air defense, vehicle repair facilities and intelligence sharing, saying Ukraine has these things pretty much covered for the foreseeable future.

I sure hope as well. But admittedly, part of me thinks some kind of escalation needs to be necessary to remove Trump. I just don't think the Dem approach of trying to lay low and hope the best for the midterms will work, the Republicans are too entrenched and will make sure that future elections will always favor them. I keep remembering that when Merz here in Germany took down the "Brandmauer" and put through a populist anti-migration bill together with the far-right AfD, 160.000 people took to the streets in Berlin alone. Granted, the US has the issue that everything is stretched out more and people have more of an issue converging on a single capital, but I still would have expected far more than what I've seen in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Yes, ugly scenes and Los Angeles will be used by Trump to demonize his detractors, but I hope this will galvanize the protests next week against his stupid birthday military parade. The US is in such a shit position to bring about political change. I believe a general strike would be about the only thing that could truly rattle the government at this point, but everyone's livelihood being in such a precarious situation makes people too fearful to consider it. The US population is such a weird place where everyone who is either too miserable or too content to call for revolution. Yeah, that won't happen. He will more likely leave office in a casket, with McDonalds being the culprit.

Someone on another forum I'm at made a deep dive about it. Looks like Newsome has some angles of attack due to the sloppy way Trump announced it, just using the Insurrection Act but without a "Proclamation to Disperse". I'm curious whether Trump bothered to go through the formal steps. Also notably most previous instances of the Insurrection Act being used to control the National Guard apparently served to prevent them getting used by a rogue governor against protesting black people during the 60s, or clamp down on rioting white supremacists during the Ole Miss crisis (which I admittedly only know through Billy Joel). I really fear this is one of these moments that could escalate really badly really quickly and Trump and his fascist bootlickers hope that it will.. damn... yeah, Andor wasn't supposed to be used as a how-to-guide for the Empire... The guy also suggested one last angle Newsome could have if Trump's move proves legally impervious, would be to order all Californian law enforcement to stay back and refuse cooperation with any federal troops. Not sure whether that would not just make things worse, but I suppose still better than a three-way battle between rioters, police and national guard...

Give or take a decade. The Division 2 was my first thought.