Toth

Was it? Damn, you are right... So that means "Craster's rape shack" was already before that. Yeah... sounds about right. Season 4 had already very questionable choices. I guess my memory has been playing tricks on me because of that... So yeah. I just remember I already found the execution of the Red Wedding in Season 3 off and thematically hollow, but ultimately still within the bounds of the original narrative. But yeah, season 4 was then where they stopped caring.

Sounds quite like my experience. Tyrion parting with Jaime on good terms in the season 3 finale was my personal "Fuck this, I'm out" moment where the show went utterly off the rails and everything in season 4 was just confirmation of that. Season 1 was great and brought me to the books. Season 2 was... mostly okay, though the Dany stuff they made up themselves was really plodding. Season 3 was "checking the boxes" of stuff happening, while still somehow consistently messing up the deeper meaning of things, until completely faceplanting at the end.

Die Linke are also quite pro-Russia, but apparently won't play any role in the next parliament, with even their direct mandates being challenged. For fear of turning this into a German politics thread, I'm a bit worried about the Greens. According to the polls their votes remain relatively stable, but experience has taught us that they usually overperform in polls and then get wrecked in the actual election. AfD likely doubling their results is just a terrible, terrible state of our democracy. The thing now is how to form a coalition. When discussing the last polls with my students the other day I still thought a Grande Coalition of CDU and SPD would be the most likely outcome, but with the SPD cratering in the polls like this, I feel like a Kenya coalition may be the only feasible outcome. That... sounds like it could either be very stable (given how past CDU/SPD coalitions may have been governing with the handbrakes on, but usually uneventful, while Greens/CDU coalitions had been working rather well in a number of states) or an absolute shit show due to Merz and Söder's populist nonsense and them doing another Lindner and whining every day of every week of the way.

I don't either, but I feel like it's just very much in-character for Trump, particularly that he also wouldn't care for the moving parts. Ultimately the last word will be with the Ukrainians in regards to what kind of peace deal they can accept. All I know is that it is very likely the last year of the war, particularly since Russia can't keep up the current intensity much longer.

And who also tried to hire killers to murder five people...

... I don't think he needs external help to look incompetent... ... aaand I wouldn't get my hopes up. Trump's tendency to go the most short-sighted, destructive path on any possible topic, that's just the kind of nutjob he is. Case in point, I had some students roleplay Ukraine peace talks and was admittedly a bit blindsided by how quickly the students playing Trump and Putin teamed up on Ukraine and backed the one playing Zelenskyy and the one playing Germany into a corner to accept essentially only verbal security guarantees and no NATO in exchange for Russia backing off some of the annexed territories (for now). Was a bit scary, all things considered...

Someone on another forum pointed this comparison out: https://www.ctvnews.ca/resizer/v2/PVERPW3SSNEOLAVCJHEIHVFBLY.jpg?smart=true&auth=eb6e846e023bfbb74d8b4f9c5c1bc2dce9b4a860defd6dfcd009627c795c4b0f&width=563&height=316 https://blog.sz-photo.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/SZ-Photo-detail-00022112.jpg

No offense, but I'll believe that when I see it. Case in point, once again not dating related, but yesterday I had a chat with a pen pal from another forum, talking about her ice skating hobby, with me trying to show interest and asking questions as I have no connection with the hobby whatsoever. Eventually we ran out of things to say about it. She: "What are you doing right now?" Me: "Not much. Just trying to motivate myself to prepare two more politics lessons for next week." She: "Ewww, no! I don't want to talk about politics, that's just depressing!" Me: "Ha, it sure is! But no worries, I wasn't trying to talk about the topics, it was just my reply.^^" She: ... .... Me: "And what are you doing this evening?" She: ... ... ... .... I throw my arms up into the air. What did I say wrong again? I feel that this, trying to make small talk only to get abruptly ghosted, encapsulates most of my attempts to stay in contact with people. I guess ultimately I'm too relentlessly boring to excite people and so just lose their attention. Whenever I was on the apps and the rare match happens, it goes pretty much the exact same way, only already after two or three sentences or so. At least I got to finish the lessons afterwards...

So you are saying cheating should be regarded as a learning experience for the one being cheated on to consider how much they must suck to drive the other into it? Yeah, sure, sounds like great advice... Why can't the potential cheater be expected to just voice what is frustrating them or leave? I should note I was just putting it forward as another reason why people suck, not as an excuse for me to not be out there. My actual excuse is that I'm 31 years old and living with my fucking mother, so dating is out of the question, on top of being too ugly for the apps, having no friends, a terrible work-life balance and getting one annoying health issue after the other. A guy like me shouldn't be thinking about it, it's just my constant loneliness that drives me to topics like this. I should also note that my initial post contained some musings about how I am actually capable of putting up with a lot of clashing values in order to not get dropped entirely, but I thought that would be too much of a random tangent when I just wanted to share that bit about the statistics that caught my eyes.

These days I am trying to make another run at Conan Exiles and got quite a bit into the game, I think. It still is a very fun survival crafter, with I guess the main marketing points being the egregious nudity (including a penis size slider in the character creation screen), the ability to enslave NPCs by whacking them with a stick and dragging them tied up into your base and finally a rather pronounced dungeon crawling aspect where the map is littered with caves and ancient ruins, some with simple physics puzzles (like having to push buttons to raise and lower water levels in a sewer to swim to the next room). Have now built a base further north than in my first attempt, now pretty much on the edge of the savannah biome. Managed to do most of the "Journeys", the tutorial quests so to speak and explored most of the desert area. Ended up enslaving half a cannibal tribe to put them to work on my crafting benches, though I now found the "capital" of the Exiles faction, where there are guaranteed named crafting thralls (which are automatically of the highest level, even if the Exiles faction is the weakest one). So I'm now kinda farming that to replace my camp population... and wonder whether I should find a nice empty plateau somewhere to build a small castle and man it with my old thralls (given how crafters can now also be equipped with armor and weapons and level just like fighter thralls). Would be a neat undertaking, I think. Also good to try out "The Purge" where you can trigger an attack by an NPC army that will try to take your stuff. Wonder how well my old thralls will fare. The exploring part is also quite interesting. Never managed to do much of the dungeon diving in my first run. And I guess I seem to have very naturally encountered the "main quest". I went into "The Dregs", aforementioned sewer dungeon and after slaying the serpent monster at the end, I found not only some chests with good legendary weapons, but also a broken staff that came with a note to bring it to "The Tower of Bats", a mountain with an albino bat monster that I had found earlier (and that in my first attempt just punted me off the mountain -.-) to repair it with its blood. Which I did, which turned the staff into a funny chatterbox with a British accent that told me to go find "The Archivist" in the ruins of "The Nameless City", the capital of an extinct race of giants, whose kingdom used to be essentially the game world of the "Exiled Lands". There are giant magic tablets scattered all around that tell their history. Apparently they were... extremely condescending aliens that were stranded on Earth thousands of years ago, ended up taking in human refugees that they then enslaved with magic bracelets that kill you if you leave the borders of their kingdom, but then the humans rebelled and overthrew them. The bracelets are now repurposed by people outside the Exiled Lands to, well, exile undesirables like the player character and throw them into what is essentially now an open air prison. I thought the Archivist would be at the end of a dungeon, but instead his library is essentially just one of the only intact buildings around, and he quite courteously greets, being just the ghost of one of those giants who is forever bound to guard his library. He then teaches you how to fast travel and that to remove your slave bracelet, you... need to gather a bunch of scattered artifacts that have been stolen from the Nameless City thousands of years ago. I actually already got one of those from a dungeon very close to the starting area, but for the rest I still have very little clue where to go to. I suppose I will have to do the Adventurer/Explorer journeys first to see more of the map and explore the other biomes.

You have my sympathies. If you are so unhappy in your relationship that you need to throw yourself at other people, you need to have the balls to end it instead of using another person as a jumping off point because it'd be the more comfortable thing to do. And yes, that's how I see the underlying morality of cheating in a relationship. I'm sorry for being kind of absolutist on the issue because my father cheating on my mother has wrecked 12 years of my life and counting, but how the hell is there an angle where cheating would be good? I'm a strong proponent of that "Do unto others as you would have them do to you" idiocy and think any action that hurts another person is a non-starter right away. And hurting other people as way to "figure things out", seeing your partner as just good enough until you find someone better so that you can drop and ghost them, seems to be a cruel thing to do no matter the circumstances. And I have to say, before you guys are trying to argue, that I don't count seeing other people during early dating stages or FWB situations or whatever other labels don't expect commitment, only labels where a committed relationship is expected (including polyamorous ones because that appears to come with a whole can of necessary communication worms as well). I can't imagine the people in these studies to have too much of a differing view from that either. I think. I hope. That said, if I ever get into a relationship, I guess I'll have to expect that she'll drop me for a better guy the moment she can because I know with my lack of experience and awkwardness I'm just too low value a partner to have around. Seeing the kneejerk replies of you guys tells me that I'm not cut out for a world like this where wanting to communicate a label is seen as oppressively tying someone down and so it is expected to remain in a state of anxiety about the other walking away and insist you have no right to be hurt about it or whatever at any point. Sigh... I suppose it's correct that I'm particularly hermit-like these days, having given up on any attempts to go out for the time being. I guess I'm also beaten down by politics, look around and see selfish, hateful and short-sighted people everywhere and that in addition to my current health issues makes me not have the energy to invest any time into flailing around and trying to get the attention of people who'll never give a shit about me anyways.

Now that's just depressing: Casually scrolling through my news feed I stumbled across an article about a study where a quarter of German men admitted to having cheated on their partner during vacation, with a third of men from Berlin having done so. Meanwhile 17% of the asked women admitted to the same. I wondered about the sample size and saw that it was originally a European study with 9000 participants, the article just focusing on the share of 1000 German participants. Okay, fine, so maybe just a low sample size. So I googled a bigger one: The first hit was a study from 2020 with 9500 participants where 31% of women and 27% of the men admitted to having cheated on a partner before. I then got flashbacks to all the times I was sitting in the train with kids behind me pulling out the flowcharts trying to make sense of who in their classes cheats on whom with whom. I guess that checks out, but ultimately it just paints a grim picture of how high the likelihood is that whoever you are meeting will end up hurting you because they simply don't care enough, are short-sighted, impulsive and lacking empathy.

Have you seen any videos of how the Russian army looks like these days? On what grounds are you saying this? Just the raw numbers of how they keep managing to bribe enough poor souls to sign up for the next suicide waves? Russia is scraping the bottom of the barrel of cold-war stocks, by the end of this year they will be utterly incapable of conducting motorized offensive actions of the current intensity. I suppose North Korea handing them all their vehicles could still be an option to give them a boost, but even then, Ukraine has shown time and time again how they can survive by throwing drones at just about every conceivable problem. So even Russia just sustaining the current level of grinding forward would still not lead to a Ukrainian collapse, just pushing the inevitable stalling further into the future. Also the US is not Ukraine's only ally. Even more North Korean aid and the possibility of Trump failing to freeze the conflict is still in the air, in that case I hope South Korea will feel free to get more engaged.

What?!? I mean... sure, this is quite the pro-Ukrainian bubble here, but even the most pessimistic estimations are far away from a complete collapse that would allow for complete annexation or regime change. Russia is nowhere near capable of enforcing a capitulation, not when their military has devolved to meatwaves on dirt bikes and golf carts. So I think the worst possible deal right now would be freezing the conflict at the contact line with ongoing minor skirmishes to keep it going, with no security guarantees for Ukraine, while Russia is remaining in war economy mode and either collapses from the stress or makes another go at it in 10 years when they have managed to rebuild their forces and count on Ukraine not being able to arm themselves in the same proportion once the western world stopped caring again. There will be no insurgency.

That's a very nice way to put that they had a silly public Twitter spat, because this is diplomacy in the year 2025, apparently. With first Fico threatening to sanction Ukraine if they don't allow for Russian gas to flow again, then Zelenskyy writing up a scathing summary of how Fico abandoned his people hiding in Vietnam instead of taking any of the reached out hands, including his, then Fico doing several posts stating his security concerns in regards to meeting in Kyiv and suggesting a meeting at the border, culminating with Zelenskyy just dryly replying "You can come to Kyiv on Friday". Meanwhile in Germany 10 unknown spy drones have buzzed around the military airport Manching near Ingolstadt, raising a debate about changing the laws to allow the military to shoot them down. Kinda baffled how helpless Germany is to espionage like this due to bureaucracy (and admittedly concern about the safety of the neighbors). I have seen a comment that if something as brazen as this happened in the US, the FBI would kick your door in two hours later. Also there are reports that voices in the SPD want to raise three further Billion Euros for Ukraine in a way similar to Biden pushing as much stuff as possible to Ukraine before needing to hand over the reigns to Trump, but as usual Scholz vetoed that. At this point I'm seriously wondering what the heck Marsalek knows about him... -.-

Same. In general, I must admit, I am kind of burned out by the stupidity of people these days. In an age where the onslaught of charged buzzwords and extreme opinions online make critical thinking skills and questioning everything you hear vitally important as to not get swept up in propaganda... I always again and again meet people who get through life having very strong opinions on things they have only very surface level knowledge of, violently refusing any deeper digging as they see even the debate of those opinions as an attack on their self. And that's everywhere on the most important political issues! So dumb and infuriating! Is it so weird that I'm of the opinion that you should actually get less set in your path the less you know about something and not the other way around? I must admit, I do have my strong opinions as well, but feel like I need to engage with them a lot to justify having those, while still trying to be open to the idea of being wrong... only to meet with people who don't do this and yet think repeating their opinion as loud as possible makes it more right. We are doomed...

I'm not sure lying about it... or rather framing it in a more proactive and less helpless way, can help me overcome the shame I feel about it. And I think how much it weighs on me would be utterly clear to any outside observers if I do as much as even just brush the topic, so I prefer to avoid speaking about my home situation entirely. Bizarrely, my mother said I should tell people how hard the divorce was on her to excuse it, so she would even somewhat side with you on there... But ugh, I don't want to overshare with anyone and be viewed as a fuck-up in real life. Yeah, I suppose that makes sense. I have pretty much taken all the steps right up to actually searching for one, so... I'm out of excuses, except that I feel too exhausted to get help. It's on my list of New Years resolutions I gess. The hammering-with-my-fists-against-my-head thing is something I... hadn't seen in quite some time either. I actually did that regularly as a kid whenever my parents were angry at me to punish myself for doing something stupid and letting it come to this. But usually I was able to wait until they left. It's a testament to just how cornered and on edge I have been feeling these months that I just completely exploded in self-hatred right in front of her... To the point that afterwards I felt extremely tired and short of breath. Funnily enough in her monologue she also mentioned how much more resilient she is compared to me. It was rather muddled, but I think she was trying to get across that I would have broken down if I was in her shoes instead of powering on... which I thought a rather strong statement when I feel like her extreme paranoia and fearfulness is a direct result from the divorce affecting her. Unfortunately she is utterly unwilling to see it that way and when I suggested therapy for herself a decade ago, she just laughed it off.

Well, I guess that went better than expected. After that incident I locked myself in and went to bed for a while. After a few hours I went out to grab something to drink and my mother immediately asked me whether I'm done with my exams. I said no, I'm too exhausted to work on it and left. She followed me and demanded to know what's wrong with me since the Christmas party at work, saying I've been even more withdrawn than usual since then. I told her I can't tell her that without her getting upset, to which she started guessing that I must have gotten berated at work because I suck at my job so much, which I denied. And since she was refusing to go, I was forced to admit that I've been down because I'm 31 and putting my life on hold for her and how my coworkers asking me about whether I'm at my family for the holidays had triggered me. She found that reason to be hilarious and childish, but didn't throw a fit like I had feared (though afterwards is unusually quiet and I wonder whether she's fighting her urge to give me the silent treatment). I did however got her perspective: That I'm acting just like my father and blame everyone but myself for my narcissism. That there is no reason for me to keep her living with me secret, that this is perfectly normal in this economy and nobody will bet an eye. That she has no means to survive without me and that there is absolutely no other way for us to go about it. That it's in part my fault for not searching for houses she likes and not willing to compromise on the level of division between households to speed up the process. And most of all that I am in no position to complain about my level of exhaustion because I am only spending so little time at work and sit at my desk at home so much, so all I'm doing must be playing videogames and being lazy, I have no right to be tired and not finish my work as soon as I can. I... think I will have to power through again. Managed to get a few exams done so far. But my weird stress attack was more violent than expected. I found my arms are bruised all over and my headache is still there. No idea how I will ever get rid of that eye infection. I was supposed to take the eye drops the doctor prescribed me only for a week, but that was four weeks ago and I'm still dealing with it hurting.

Okay, fuck. I messed up and exploded in front of my mother right now. I have been finished with most of my stuff and am still fighting with a headache and an eye infection that I have been unable to get rid of since October, so initially thought to take today casually and relax for the most part. It's still holidays for me. But my mother somehow kept insisting I'm lazy and should do all my work first before I should be allowed to relax and kept mocking me about laying in bed. So I reluctantly sat at the desk to correct my last exams or so while she was piling up NINE plates of catfood in my bed because her incessant worry about the cat not eating on its own just never stops. I guess what she can't do anything for was that at the same time I was struck down by another wave of loneliness and isolation and I was frozen in place... causing her to once again berate me for not just hurrying and doing my work, to which I had a violent reaction and just started to shake, scream and hit myself on the head until she left, muttering about me being stupid. I... just can't... where is my life going? I... I'm so exhausted from being on edge all the time...

The pacing in the first half of the episode was a bit crazy (the outside events admittedly lampshaded by Captain Freeman, but Tendi and Rutherford's anger issues came frankly out of nowhere, in Tendi's case also feeling like backtracking to episode 7). But given how meh I feel about most modern shows, that's pretty much just nitpicking. Indeed very fun end to a show that ultimately managed to be very, very fun despite the high reliance on nostalgia.

Have been catching up with Seth Meyers Closer Looks today... with which I mean I have now reached the clips from 6 months ago and I must say... doing my stuff while hearing bone chilling Trump rallies where he declares again and again bloody vengeance upon the Democrats is really affecting my mood despite comedic commentary. Of course I was long aware that this will become really nasty, but... I guess it just strikes me once again just how far gone Trump and the Republicans have become and are wholeheartedly embrace fascism with not a lick of pretense. And people still voted for him to burn democracy down...

Well, I hope you all have nice holidays. Merry Christmas! Secret Santa was kind of a success, I hope. I think my stuff was decently well received, even if she chided me for my lack of gift wrapping skills. On the other hand, I feel like despite all the doom and gloom it's a step up when it comes to my "Merry Christmas" greetings that tell me I'm... either trying to network more or am just more notoriously online than even before. Last year I made only two Christmas greetings to people, this time I made seven to people and four to groups, receiving five replies altogether. Oddly enough, the people from across the pond I met on Reddit were the most responsive, people I met in real life the least...

Looking at the estimated Russian casualty rate, combat has picked up pace again, unfortunately. Last week there was a small dip to 1200-1200, but now we are once again at 1800-2000 per day. All I can think of is to feel pity for the exhausted defenders. We are soon reaching the third year of the war. It's madness. Looking at the Reddit feed, most videos are about massed North Korean infantry assaults in Kursk with not a single vehicle in sight, just infantry trudging across eerie snow-covered sunflower fields to get picked off by swarms of drones. There is some grim stuff out there, but I have to point out the battlefield with all the un-harvested pitch black dead sunflower stalks on the white of the snow is extremely creepy and haunting, as if from another planet.

Fair enough. I feel like it's oddly the... regularity that makes it feel like a chore, particularly when I'm not really in the mood for gaming these days. Hell... maybe I will have to make that Star Trek game on that Discord server happen eventually...

Oh, I didn't think to go to that much effort because the guide on the package told me to just boil it for a few minutes. And I may have raised the heat up quite a bit due to my freshness concerns, despite refrigeration. If I die of food poisoning overnight, you now know why... I just bought the bonito flakes from "Wadakyu" on Amazon. But for Ramen so far only used the powder from "Shimaya" and liked that one well enough. I haven't been experimenting with Japanese cuisine for too long a time and I guess will get fresher ingredients once checking out that giant Asian import market that opened up a few months ago near where I work. Have been passing it with big eyes repeatedly.^^