Toth

Just earlier today I read Isaac Asimov's "review" of the script Roddenberry showed to him. Yeah, the core premise is... mindboggingly stupid, though admittedly I really liked the shore leave scenes fleshing out the friendships of the main cast. No! Just no! Leave Saavik out of this plot. She... may not have been much of a character in her movies either, but I just don't find it plausible to have her be a villain. Granted, her positions didn't feel quite right for a Vulkan to have altogether... The man had quite a number of glaring flaws, but I must say, I don't understand the recent bile thrown at this specific commandment. Why? Just because current Trek showrunners like to shit on it to rationalize why Starfleet bridge officers snarking at each other like catty spiteful teenagers is somehow good television? Without this specific commandment TNG wouldn't be the competence porn it was. I... really loved that about it and wished so much modern Trek shows could just go back to that formula. I suppose SNW does, mostly. I take that every day in order to avoid shallow soap opera drama. Well, Towards the end of his life he was acting and speaking like in some weird daze, as if he wasn't quite there (and I suppose his alcohol and drug problems were a large part of the problem). I like to picture him as some rambling stoner that everyone nodded at and then ignored at this stage.

I suppose it fits here, given that it's technically some kind of royalty thread, but... I'm kind of baffled about something I incidentally stumbled across yesterday. Is everyone close to the power in Britain related? So I was researching for a lesson about the English Revolution and somehow stumbled across a Sir Winston Churchill. In the 1650s. Made a bit of a double-take and it turns out it's truly an ancestor of the later Winston Churchill, with the latter being specifically named after him. Neat. But while scrolling through his Wikipedia page, I notice he had a granddaughter named Anne Churchill, who married a certain Charles Spencer. Spencer? It couldn't... then I look down his family true and it was. So Winston Churchill was Princess Diana's cousin of the 7th degree. Meanwhile Anne also had an aunt named Anabella Churchill who was a mistress to King James II., which doesn't amount to anything, given said revolution I was researching about, but still. This whole family tree looks like a damned pretzel. And now I want to play Crusader Kings again...

I guess I'm just fearing it would put even more pressure on me to be constantly performing well and not allow a single slip-up. In dating even moreso than when it comes to friendships. I have mentioned it before, but I have made the quite frustrating experience that people really, really don't want to deal with anyone who comes with any kind of baggage. In my three matches I made twice the mistake of very carefully mentioning I'm not good with people, still trying really hard to spin it positively, but both times got extremely negative reactions. Therefore I'm still inclined that take is still absolutely correct. Even if I am working and productive most of the time, only dealing with the occasional bout of intense loneliness throwing me off, every little piece of evidence that I may be mentally unwell and in need of work, would eventually be used to drop me. Which is pretty much one of my main inhibitors. If I hypothetically meet someone I was interested in, I'd just know they would have countless better guys to choose from and it would be unfair of me to expect them to like a guy who is definitely not easy on the eyes, doesn't know how to express affection, has a terrible work/life-balance, hasn't seen anything of the world, has no friends whatsoever, dislikes sports, has trouble being spontaneous, only comes in a package with his mother, has only solitary nerdy hobbies and reacts disturbed by gifts and compliments. I probably missed a couple more points. I can fake only so much. The moment any of these points comes out, any self-respecting woman will take to the hills. Not that I even get this far, what with my extreme lack of options where to mingle with people given my aversion of forcing myself to go to places I don't feel comfortable to be at. Or that seeking anything was a good idea in the first place. My second fear of course is my situation with my mother complicating things. She regularly mentions an incident where she met the mother of a former classmate of mine ages ago, crying bitterly about her daughter moving in with her boyfriend and when she was worried about still being able to pay the rent of her apartment, the girl told her to look for a smaller one. She keeps bringing it up as a horrific betrayal of an ungrateful child... and seeing how much that event seems to be on her mind, I just fear that me getting a girlfriend could trigger all kinds of fears in her, causing unnecessary conflict. Which brings me right back to point one, because what self-respecting woman would want to endure such a conflict, particularly for a guy like me? The third thing is that on top of all the things I am lacking, I also really don't know what I could possibly bring to the table. Unconditional loyalty? Anyone could claim that. A stable income? Sure, but too superficial for the kind of relationship I'd imagine. Something on eye-level, sharing with each other's lives. Just doing things together, new things, old things, sharing in experiences while still having some room for oneself, encouraging each other's ambitions. Which I have also seen people online dismiss as essentially just describing a best friend. Which... I guess I would like to have? I just am completely clueless about this whole romance and sex thing and what little I am observing through the people around me, all those emotions seem to only make them miserable...

How do you keep getting into situations like that? But seeing how you are clearly being sought after by many women like this, I'm sure some great fit will eventually come up! Meanwhile the only dates I will ever get are these: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/856230992573366312/1119938480420696144/20230618_123310.jpg I mean, I guess I am making a bit more progress on... looking more approachable, what with further practicing mindfulness (a little) and forcing myself to look people more into the eyes and acting... expressive, I guess. As I said before, I was surprised to have not been met with intense annoyance and hostility as I expected, given that this is the reason I've avoided trying to look at people or smile in public for as long as I can. Eventually I want to move it up a notch and see whether I could maybe possibly get into a tiny bit of small talk with a stranger as a personal challenge. Still, already the smiling part feels like I'm massively overstepping boundaries, particularly when it's a woman my age I happen to make eye contact with. So then I usually still balk at the idea and look elsewhere. A few weeks ago I had a scene where I was sitting in the train, dozing a little, when a woman sat down next to me and eventually sneezed. I contemplated for several minutes whether it was appropriate to say 'Bless you' and glanced a little at her, but then she sat up and changed seats. Could be because of the draft in that area, but I couldn't help but wonder for several days whether my one glance at her face made her uncomfortable.

*incoherent screaming* Today I saw that two of the date seeds I planted have actually sprouted. When I tried it last year, I had abysmal luck and nothing came out of it despite it being supposedly very easy. Now this! Yes! I hope they survive...

Yeah, the review I saw noted that the predominant way of griefing is to wait for some hapless guy to take stuff near your base and when they get flagged as stealing everyone on the map is allowed to shoot them. Very mindboggling system, but given that you are otherwise immune to PvP, after the heads up I found it easy to avoid. However interestingly my only contact with another player so far was actually fairly nice. Yesterday a quest popped up tasking me to take over a workshop which can apparently passively generate resources (I think) and so I did, with it warning me that other players can challenge me to take it for themselves, though that didn't happen. Instead I got notified twice of attacks on that workshop, first by ghouls, then by Chinese (?) attack robots. The former got stuck somewhere trying to get into the quite spacious baseball field, so I wandered around trying to find the last of them as the quest stubbornly refused to finish. In the end another player came in, killed the stragglers, saluted to me and plopped away, I guess either logging off or fast traveling. The guy was level 250. I think he saw my blind level 7 ass aimlessly wandering around and took pity. I suppose I will try to at least finish the main quest and explore the map. I ended up making quite a couple of screenshots. The textures may be Fallout 4 like a little grainy (though it feels a little bit sharper all in all), I found a Fallout game that for a change isn't obsessed with grey and brown and instead goes for green reclamation of nature after the disappearance of humans visually very interesting. Finding a cottage snuck deep in the woods, overlooking those woods from the top of a mountain or traversing a broken highway bridge across a canyon is quite fun. Like Werthead says, the map is really good. It helps that unlike Fallout 4, you don't walk into a point of interest every five meters into every direction. Things are spread out in a way that getting somewhere feels like a realistic task, though it's still not so spread out that it becomes tedious. Still was quite surprised to find that above mentioned bridge that looked so small on the map was a whole exploration area with several levels, all filled with ghouls. Survival aspects notwithstanding. I find it interesting that food spoils, so you are discouraged to forage huge amounts of stuff and forget about the system from there on. However the hunger and especially the thirst meters are plain ridiculous. I had to stop every 10 minutes with what I'm doing to down three whole ass bottles of Nuka Cola to not dehydrate. This feels quite excessive and makes me focus on looking whether there are perk cards to soften up that system. Yeah, you are! Seriously, it's beyond me why in this day and age anyone would preorder a game. Yes, people don't necessarily have to be me and wait for games to come down to single-digit "Grabbeltisch" prices before considering buying them, but preorders or buying on release, spending a ton of money on a product that is quite probably still a barely playable bug riddled beta? It just makes no sense to me. And particularly Bethesda, whose track record is REALLY bad, not just in terms of bugs, but also in terms of trying to stiff people on their preorder bonus. Fallout 76 was lambasted for downright cheating people with very misguiding marketing (backpack, Nuka Cola bottle) with people ending up with goodies of significantly poorer quality than pictured.

Indeed. What I found the most striking at the beginning which doesn't even come up much in most reviews is not just that the plot is nonsense and the quests Skyrim typically "go there, kill something and come back" types of tasks, but just how incredibly confused and directionless everything is. Inside the vault you didn't even get a quest or a dialogue or anything. You wake up all alone, everywhere are robots telling you to leave and guarding stands offering you starting equipment and then out you go. You can read all the terminals to get a bit of a sense of what was going on with the vault, but everything I found was mostly about the "kicking everyone out after 25 years" part, while the part about you having to search for the overseer doesn't come up anywhere. It seems like a random idea popping up in your character's head and getting added to your log the second you leave the vault. Logically your task would be to rebuild and construct a village with your fellow vault dwellers, but there is nobody whatsoever around and so you just shrug and mindlessly follow quest markers that you barely know why you should bother with.

You are also very optimistic today, huh? @Zorral?

First result I guess, the fish in the Gulf of Mexico are literally suffocating by the hundreds of thousands: I'm literally paralyzed by despair since I've seen that. We are all so fucked...

Speaking of Bethesda jank... Amusingly, after watching a scathing review about Fallout 76... I ended up buying it in a sale for 7 bucks because it still looked oddly fun in terms of exploration and gunplay. ... and I must say... that's pretty much the only thing it has going for it. What a confusing Frankenstein's Monster of a game this is. You start, after starting it three more times because it was stuck in a tiny window and refused to save the setting changes I did until it suddenly did, you get a cutscene about Vault 76 being the "best and brightest" (which never comes up again) and how it's supposed to open 25 years into the apocalypse and kicking everyone out. Except you, apparently. Because you overslept? The vault is a mess of confetti and party stuff. But... it is also mentioned that you were staying behind... for at least a year... for some reason. And in this time you never bothered to tidy up the party stuff? Or weren't pestered by the robots telling you to get out already? It's such a weird state where the game tries to justify a time skip for the Wastelanders questline after the initial main quest of finding your overseer who slipped out of the vault a day prior and discover the world... without you ever doing the latter... It's such a bizarre example of the game barely bothering with a coherent explanation for what I feel sounds like an unnecessarily complicated set-up of openly competing storylines. Then on top of that I decided to follow the Wastelanders storyline at first because it was the closest near the vault and in typical Bethesda fashion there was yank when I entered a bar where the barkeeper had her hands raised as a raider kept her at gunpoint and after he was dispatched, she remained with her hands raised throughout the entire next dialogue because the animation didn't fire before she talked to me. Also when I wanted to get into the game again at a later point, it kept freezing on the boot-up. I looked up and you have to erase its folder in the AppData directory and suddenly it worked again. How... can they miss such a stupid bug?!? But otherwise... well, it does indeed feel very much like a Fallout 4 mod, what with the large amount of carried over assets. And while I occasionally run into other player homes, multiplayer seems mostly unnecessary.

First POV footage of a Leopard in action: Very textbook use of shoot & scoot, making use of the tank's mobility advantage and even using a smokescreen to retreat from a position. We need more of that! Though a little annoyed at the Wehrmacht Balkenkreuz. I know it's probably just soldier's humor, trying to taunt the Russians, but it's still quite tone-deaf. Couldn't a modern Bundeswehr cross be enough to say "Look at our shiny NATO toys coming to get you!"?

This is going to get good! Prighozin already says he will refuse. So either Putin sees himself forced to club him down and dissolve Wagner, enforcing the law, or side with him, give an exception and embarrass Shoigu.

On Reddit I have actually seen a brief POV from one of the Bradleys. They managed to deplay a smoke screen and got out. Looked chaotic and messy, but many in the comments pointed out how surprised they were how overall well the Bradleys protected their crews.

They said the first thing I mentioned, that a source in Ukraine said a sabotage action had been discussed in Ukraine's intelligence service three months before it happened. That's a major difference to saying that the US government is convinced that they did it, but frustratingly the headlines I've seen everywhere were ridiculously suggestive.

That's just not true. The US administration has not said anything whatsoever about being "convinced" that Ukraine destroyed Nordstream. Where did you hear that? I have been debating this nonsense for days now and not even those who claim with utter conviction that it was Ukraine had provided any source saying that. So what do we know: - a source in Ukraine that the CIA considered not trustworthy stated that Ukraine made plans for a sabotage three months before it happened and the information has been relayed to German authorities - there was a chartered sailing yacht with six Ukrainian nationals passing two of the three explosion sites a few days before the explosion ... ... ... And that's it. That's the smoking gun. At the same time three Russian war ships with their transponders off and one carrying a mini-sub had lurked in the area as well. Maybe some intelligence services know more and don't tell for whatever reason, but as it stands now, we as the public have no information to base our finger pointing on. I personally need someone to explain to me how six guys on a sailing boat without a pressure chamber managed to dive 80 meters and apply a notable amount of explosives to crack a pipeline designed to withstand stray blasts from leftover WW2 ammunition. The "how" is too me somehow a far better indicator to judge who might have done it than any "why", because the "why" makes no sense for either faction. Ukraine has lots to loose attacking infrastructure of an ally that just got around to increase their commitment while Russia would put a lit on this point of pressure on Germany and make it easier for it to justify weapons deliveries. Then again, you could also argue that Germany at the time of the explosion already diversified and the pipeline became worthless, so blowing it up may have been a statement of threat towards other maritime infrastructure, as well a way to sow discord. I also vividly remember how the internet was carpet bombed with accusations into every conceivable direction in the days after explosion. So... Once again... the Russians had the mini-sub, the Ukrainians didn't. And Russia has had a history of short-sighted acts of cruel pettiness, so while I admit I don't know anything, I still find it somewhat more plausible for Russia to be the culprit there and am very annoyed about the media blowing up every kernel of news that's saying that investigations are still going into every direction, including the two Ukrainian leads. I should also note, I'm looking at the dam with a similar "how" mindset. And have to think of the Antonivskyi bridge near Kherson as a comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonivka_Road_Bridge The Ukrainians shelled it numerous times to bring it down, but only managed to put holes into it that the Russians then managed to fix up and continue to use it as a supply route. Artillery simply wasn't able to catastrophically bring it down. However when the Russians retreated, THEN they allegedly blew it up themselves successfully. If bringing down a bridge is this difficult with artillery, how difficult would be blowing up a concrete structure that is designed to withstand ludicrous amounts of water pressure for decades, if not centuries? And that in a single night and so swiftly that the Russians weren't able to point a camera at it and immediately use it to condemn Ukraine in their propaganda? The dam was in the hands of the Russians, they had all the time in the world to place as much explosives as they want, so I also see here a much more likely culpability. Not to mention that drowning the people you want to liberate and shortening the areas you could possibly advance into just seems extremely unlikely to be considered minor arguments for Ukrainian strategic thinking.

Seems like you've already stated yourself why it's in Russia's short-term interest to use the dam as a roadblock. Also the mines shouldn't have enough of a punch to crack the dam like this. There is one video from 2022 circulating where the Russians on their retreat already tried to blow it up and it barely made a dent: Likewise, the idea of Ukrainian artillery destroying it is even more ludicrous. The timing is just too suspicious for it to blow up the moment another retreat from the area seemed imminent and it seems that it did indeed disrupt the Ukrainian advance in the area. Meanwhile I'm getting irritated that my other go-to thread about the war is flooded every few days with people claiming it's completely confirmed that Ukraine blew up NS2 and that there should be consequences for this, when all their sources are clickbait titles of articles that state it's still one of the leads that is being investigated, but there is still no certainty. Why is it yesterday of all things articles like this pop up once again yesterday alongside similarly clickbait-y articles with an 'expert' claiming blowing up the dam could just as well be in Ukraine's interest because they couldn't get through Russian numerical superiority or something, with the headline similarly briefly being "Expert says Ukraine could have blown up the dam", at least for a few minutes before changing it to something somewhat more neutral. I sometimes really hate our 24h news cycle...

Well, happy to hear that it was an enjoyable evening! Given my own history, I have zero incentive to meet any of my former classmates and am somehow rather grateful that I'm barely meeting anyone by chance anymore now that there seems to be less incentive to regularly take a train to Berlin for them. The only ones I still occasionally stumble across are a pair of twin sisters from my primary school whose boyfriends live here and in the next district over, so I bump occasionally into them and then they mostly don't react when I greet them, even though I had a couple of conversations with them a few years ago (and of course fell on my ass switching up their names because I'm not able to tell them apart anymore after all these years). Mmh... regarding the topic at hand, I... stupidly signed up again on Bumble (and Tinder, gah) on the weekend, wanting to check something out that I've read. Namely that guys have seen they are getting notably more likes if they don't fill out their bio and just use pictures. Having nothing to loose, I did that aaaand... yes, nothing as usual. Got two Likes on Tinder that must be bots as the algorithm buries them and one like on Bumble that I matched with and who then proceeded to let the timer run out. So yeah, the closest thing to attention that I'm getting is the porn bot that followed me on Reddit just now. XD

Yesterday evening there were panicked posts by pro-Russian bloggers of 3 km deep penetrations by Ukrainian forces at Zaporizhhia and this morning I'm seeing news relaying Russian claims they repulsed 8 Ukrainian battalions, destroying 37 tanks and armored vehicles and killing 250 soldiers in the process, posting a shakey incredibly grainy footage of some pixels in a field getting shelled as proof and congratulating themselves that the Ukrainian offensive is therefore utterly defeated. So taking the usual trustworthiness of the Russian MoD into account, I say chances are high this was only another small probing engagement that saw the Russians frantically give up their positions, causing the Ukrainians to push much deeper than anticipated, so they retreated after embarrassing the Russians.

Yesterday I came home from work and wasted six hours once again scrolling through mental health site posts in a weird haze as I was once again being drowned in crippling loneliness and continued to do so since waking up three hours ago. I hate myself so much, why can't I just be normal...

Students yesterday asked me out of the blue about the last movie or series I watched... and I realized I haven't watched any for years. That caused me to think about why and I have a certain feeling that streaming services in general killed all my motivation to do so because I don't see a reason to pay money to get access to stuff I will complain about anyway. It's just so much of a hassle nowadays with so many competing services with each only having one maybe possibly interesting show and lots of garbage and it just simply doesn't seem worth it to me. If want to know what's up with Andor or Lower Decks, I end up skimming cropped out scenes on Youtube to judge whether it's worthwhile and then move on. Really weird...

True. I must admit, it always irked me how there are only very few really good TOS episodes that I can watch without cringing. Specifically "Balance of Terror", "Errand of Mercy", "Trouble with Tribbles", "Journey to Babel", "The Doomsday Machine" and... that's it, pretty much. Granted, there are a couple of average episodes as well like "Arena" (as silly as the Gorn fight is shot), most of the time travel episodes, "Space Seed", "A Taste of Armageddon", "The Devil in the Dark" and maybe "A Piece of Action" just for the silliness of that planet's hat and the Enterprise shooting a stun phaser barrage into a city block. Have I missed any? I think if you've seen these episodes, you've got the best of TOS alright.

I've been thinking about making a Soba/Miso combination that I stumbled across because I got stacks of soba noodles in a sale and have an opened miso bag in the fridge for weeks already. That recipe calls for poached egg. Maybe that's easier because you don't have the hassle of peeling it. XD But yes, I also read that troublesome peeling is a sign that the eggs are actually very fresh.

Both our combat encounters were ambushes where we took out our opponent piling on them all together during a surprise turn, we didn't even get to roll initiative or whatever Pathfinder uses. We very nearly had a third encounter where a guard caught us setting up a trap, but I managed to divert him with Ghost Sound. Yes, I took the goblin wizard. Trying to get into the barn proved quite difficult when we noted it was locked and nobody picked the rogue. Our fighter lost two fingernails trying to pick the lock, causing much amusement. In the end the DM threw us a boon and let the cleric burn a hero point to get the hint that we could just dig our way in.

Fairly sure 2. I guess if you say so, it may be the reason why we were even able to sneak around so successfully. Though the DM said this campaign usually ends with a Total Party Kill.

Just came back from a convention where I had my first ever pen & paper game with a group of strangers in a one-shot. It was a game of Pathfinder (which I can appreciate a lot considering I had bought Pathfinder/Starfinder a while ago in a Humble Bundle anyway). We were a party of four unarmed lvl. 1 goblins tasked to raid a village for weapons and chickens. Went actually quite well since we avoided fair combat at all cost, but instead were only sneaking around, setting traps and killing two guards in ambushes, raiding a barn in between. We were too stupid to find the chicken coop and bailed after getting the amount of weapons we needed to get, but success is success.