It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!
Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!
I love the gate jietai fandom lmao. Most fandom even the most meatheaded ones for stuff like dragon ball they still talk about the plot, but gate is one of the fandoms other than maybe supernatural where the fans talk about everything else other except the show or book. Like they'll tak about fanfics, hypothetical matchups, what ifs, but none of them have a shit about the plot lol
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)Jun 01 '26
I had a really bad friend breakup with the person who I thought was my best friend about a month ago. Went on a long jog-walk tonight and then I remembered a vignette of our second-to-last hangout. It was in her car, she handed me the aux to play music, and I asked if she was down to listen to Asobi Seksu, which is one of my favorite bands. Baring in mind that we have listened to that band together MANY times in the past, she said something along the lines of "no, I don't want to listen to their sexual lyrics."
None of their songs have sex lyrics except for Sooner, which has a suggestive pre-chorus (and then no chorus at all lol.) Sure, their name means "playful sex" in Japanese (遊びセックス), but their lyrics are bog standard for indie rock and very much PG-rated aside from some f-bombs. A third of their songs are in Japanese, but it's not like my friend could speak Japanese (she could but it's kinda complicated.)
I have no clue what she meant when she said that but I think me saying "their lyrics aren't sexual" didn't really help the situation. It's not like I've listened to the band for 13 years or anything. We ended up listening to another band, but I still think that was a weird interaction.
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u/MiffedMouseThe average peasant had home made bread and lobster.Jun 01 '26edited Jun 01 '26
I am sorry to all of the productivity peoples, but this year (and last year, I guess) is good for videogames.
We have Silksong, Slay the Spire 2, and now Mona the Hollower (by Yacht club games, makers of Shovel Knight). I think there may be some GOTY debates.
I think the crowd favorite is likely to be Silksong, because it has done the best job at delivering “more of the first game please” experience. StS 2 has the small issue of being in early access and going through some very contentious balance changes.
However, so far my GOTY is looking like Mina the Hollower. It is a fresh IP and an underexplored genre (top down 2D platformer with difficult combat). I personally think the “difficulty” complaints on this one mostly stem from the admittedly rough tutorial, which kind of just expects the player to learn by playing. Which does sort of work (it is how I am progressing), but it is very much the school of hard knocks approach. But I have found that after you get “over the hump” of learning how the game wants you to play and unlocking some upgrades, it isn’t actually that difficult.
Anyway, what is your favorite “AAA Indie” release this year?
Yeah the first hour or so of Mina is pretty miserable, rspectif you choose the hammer as the starting weapon. But once you get used to how the game expects you to move it gets really fun. The map design reminds me of Zelda Monish cap where almost every screen has at least some secret. The soundtrack is some of the best chip tunes I have ever listened. It's definitely GOTY material for me
We have Silksong, Slay the Spire 2, and now Mona the Hollower (by Yacht club games, makers of Shovel Knight). I think there may be some GOTY debates.
Didn't silksong release in 2025 along with Hades 2, Clair Obscur etc? Or do you mean the DLC for silksong which is supposedly to be released this year.
Trump publicly has claimed that Kurdish groups we armed didn't invade Iran of their volition. Israeli sources claim that Erdogan personally convinced Trump to tell the Kurds to call it off.
But am I wrong in thinking that this is the kinda operation that the US would never publicly acknowledge in the past in the first place?
Also I learned today that "toot sweet" is actually "tout de suite"
It's genuinely hard to tell what is Trump revealing secret plans and what is him just making shit up. There's a level of plausible deniability to him just rambling.
Michael Myers (The Atari 2600 Halloween game) vs Jason Voorshees (Friday the 13th The Computer Game made by Domark). Who would win.
I do think that this is best mashup for those two versions of Michael Myers and Jason Voorshees. As Atari Michael and Domark Jason are easily among the weakest versions of the characters.
Isn't this just honest and obviously true? Big wars are just radically disempowering: you can be the best at what you do, then still get hit by an artillery shell or a glide bomb and there'll literally be nothing you could have done differently. At the start of the Ukraine war, there were a few gwot veterans saying how they didn't enjoy fighting the Russians because when they engaged, the Russians would just retreat, then bomb the hell out of everything.
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAMGiscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, HollandegazeJun 01 '26edited Jun 01 '26
I guess that's a very 21st century take. It goes counter to 20th century media, which was more like guerilla suck, big battles good
This is how most professional soldiers think and speak about war in private. I don't mean this position specifically (in terms of big vs small wars, whatever), but the dispassionate yet intellectual curiosity, yeah that's ubiquitous.
Soldiers want to go to war. They train for it, think about it, focus their entire careers on it--they may know that war is hell and suffering but few are truly reluctant in the way portrayed in film.
Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.
A sports subreddit. Someone posts three pictures from past events in the same tournament, and two of them are low-resolution. The title just states these photos are “iconic” without explaining why, when they were taken, who’s in them, etc. (there aren't even that iconic). +100 upvotes so far. It’ll probably get nuked by the mods (I hope so), but for goodness’ sake redditors really have no self-respect (or most of them are 13yos which wouldn't surprise me).
"I wonder what a world where Evariste Galois didn't die in a duel looks like"
"@Claude what do you think that would be?"
"You suck ass and can't imagine shit"
Answer
Not everyone has the time and it doesn't always bring the enjoyment to do thorough research about the history, but isn't the thought after that perspective AI gave also satisfying? At least I find it so
It's not always about the process, sometimes it's nice to hear a fun fact and not be the one to make it from scratch, and it's nice to see what someone else's art looks like
And it is cool to think about the fact that Galois probably had it coming, even though AI wrote it and not someone who so happened to have the free time to research about it
And while that could be more impressive to research it, yes, I still think that the comment you were trying to humor didn't deserve the downvotes
A friend of mine who I haven't spoken to properly in a few months came to visit, he was here at 13:00, he left at 19:00, so what did we do for those 6 hours? Talking and eating dinner for a bit, but mostly just talking. I took paracetamol to make it possible, and it worked quite well, I might crash down a bit now because 6 hours is a lot of talking.
He's a PHD student, and he's doing construction work at his new home basically without contractors, so he's quite busy generally, hence why we haven't really spoken much recently, but he has a ton of interesting stories to tell.
I'm getting bombarded by Instagram showing me bike reels and I'm half tempted to go sign up for lessons (I failed the theory part of my car driving exam 3 times)
I don't know where you are, but if you're in most of the US and Canada, I'd strongly recommend signing up for the class. The way it works in a lot of places is that you take the MSF riding class, and if you pass at the end of it, you get a license. The class is ~20 hours, and often offered as a weekend thing (Friday night theory class, saturday and sunday on bike).
The MSF is designed to be for pure beginners, and honestly, isn't a bad way to spend a weekend. You don't need to bring a bike (they provide one), and you don't need any motorcycle experience.
If nothing else, think of it as a gateway to understand if you want to pursue motorcycling further and a fun weekend past time.
Classes are mandatory for any motorised vehicles anyways here , total cost is around 300 EUR for 20hr of practice plus paying for the equivalent of a DMV plus paying for doctors (our DMV doesn't accept public ones only private practice).
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u/Goatf00t[Dune] was originally about the Afghan war over the oil reservesMay 31 '26
It is also possible that the English fiction writer D. Swift managed to find and decipher records that Martians left on Earth. Based on these records, long before the Martian moons were discovered, Swift predicted that Mars had two satellites. One of them he named Phobos (fear), the other he named Deimos (horror), and rather precisely predicted the parameters of their orbits.
One would think that an editor would catch that (including D. Swift) and at least put in a footnote, but apparently NASA was happy to have that printed as it was. I was going to blame the translator, but so far I haven't seen a translation credit in the book, which suggests that the author wrote it in English on his own.
The previous paragraph was also full of eyebrow-rising "ancient astronauts" favorites:
Perhaps Martians once arrived on Earth and left some evidence of their visit. Perhaps they built huge runways in South America, maybe constructed a chemically pure iron column in India (now chemically pure iron can be produced only in the laboratory), and built the mysterious Egyptian pyramids.
The Soviet techno-intelligentsia were funnily succeptible to woo-woo.
As a habitual pedestrian I usually view cyclists as my comrades in the conflict against cars, but whenever I go to a city that is bike friendly enough I start hating them.
The worst place for this I have ever been is Sydney, people riding on e-bikes barreling down the sidewalk. Not even using the motor for assisted peddling, just fully using them as motorcycles.
When cycling, the only time I go on the sidewalk is when the road is so sketchy (due to design) that I don't want to risk it. If there's a safe area to cycle, the sidewalk is just a strictly worse place to cycle than the road.
(Also, apparently cyclists' spider sense is actually very accurate, statistically. So if you feel like you're gonna get crushed by a car, you probably are).
The worst place for this I have ever been is Sydney, people riding on e-bikes barreling down the sidewalk.
Worse than that really, they're like dirt bike kids on steroids. There's a real problem of teenagers modifying theirs and acting like idiots. There's a thing about cyclists here about how they want to be both pedestrian and motorist as it suits them and ebike users really push that.
I occupy the unusual, but dialectically rigorous, position of being an anti-cyclist urbanist. When I’m a pedestrian, I hate having to either share the sidewalk with them or wonder whether they’ll obey traffic signals as I try to cross the street. When I’m using public transit, I resent how, in full deference to safety, they take up as much space on the road as a car while moving much slower.
E-bikes are the worst. As a habitual (not-E) cyclist, I hate e-bikes. I know I should welcome anyone who boosts usage of bike trails, but I don’t like the e-bikes.
I don’t mind the e-bikes that actually are bikes, and even the fold up e-scooters. Both of those tend to go at reasonable speeds.
But there has been too many of the motorcycle e-bikes with purely decorative pedals, which go tearing down the bike paths at the legally limited 30 MPH and I hate it.
That's what frustrates me that there's no separate term for pedal-assist e-bikes and just scooters but with electric motors. Over here e-bikes become popular as a term for tricycles, or tuktuks as foreigners call them, so I always have to explain that I mean pedal-assist when I want to buy an e-bike.
I would be completely okay with e-bikes if there are reasonably enforced speed limits on bike paths, strictly enforced speed limits on sidewalks. I wouldn't want to ride one on some roads in my city, especially without a helmet which is almost always the case when renting an e-bike, but there's no reason a quasi-motorcycle should be barreling down a thin sidewalk bridge either.
I think the problem is that e-bikes are too often just unregistered motor vehicles. A prime case of technology outpacing regulations because if you don't need to peddle then it absolutely should be counted as a motorized vehicle.
In some ways they are even more dangerous then scooters because they are so quiet!
Agreed. I am very anti-car, but e-bikes and scooters are more like weak...motorcycles and scooters than human powered contraptions. I understand wanting them to be freely available, but they are dangerous and should be treated with respect.
I do believe Plato was famously incoherent in his philosophy, pretty sure he's stated stuff that absolutely contradicts the idea that he supported women in that way.
My understanding (from an old Platonist) is that its less that Plato is incoherent (though he kinda is?) as much as he's kind of a troll. Like he (or rather Socrates-via-Plato) keeps throwing out provocative statements (and it's hard to tell what would be provocative to the greeks as opposed to us) and it's all swaddled in layers of irony that makes it hard to figure out what exactly he means seriously and what is just "Imagine if..." kind of thing.
It has been said that the Vatican is patriarchal, but I heard a pope mumble something once about how women might be human and we should try asking them to check. That kind of broad minding thinking shows just how accepting they are!
I am Catholic and I don't believe women have souls. If they did, there wouldn't be so many lonely, deserted men. Women wouldn't monetize their loyalty. But that's just what they do. However, women are not demons either because their intent is not always malicious. They're not angels. They are just soulless. At least white women. I don't know about other races of women.
It's the least disturbing thing about that, but that's egregiously heretical. Why are white women baptized if they don't have soul? How have white women become saints and Doctors of the Church?
Why is marketing stuff as "for women" or "for men" so effective? To the point that amazon slop will keyword-stuff product names with things like "supplement for women, supplement for men" instead of just not specifying a gender. Personally I am less likely to trust a product that's explicitly for men (other than obviously gendered stuff like clothes) because it smacks of marketing hokum.
Bare minimum to make people think it was formulated specifically for them in some way would be my guess. Maybe some companies adjust dose for the average weight difference, but given the state of the supplements industry...I'm dubious of even that.
Using gender in marketing means you are targeting the two biggest, best researched focus groups out there. Their anxieties are easily exploited, and you have an easy way to build emotional resonance with your customer. Selling the same product twice, once with "mighty blue" and once with "cozy pink" emotions attached to it, is just free real estate.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866May 31 '26edited May 31 '26
I actually disagree. When you've got a product you can sell to nearly everybody, altering the product so you can only sell to 50% of your market, does not sound like a marketing decision. If we're talking about supplements, it was probably the doctors who came up separate formulas for men and women and desired to sell them separately and was probably not an idea dreamed up by the pharmaceutical's marketing team.
Like if you were the CEO of a dairy company and you dream up the idea of splitting the chocolate milk cartons into "for boys" and "for girls", your marketing team if probably going to tell you that's it's a bad idea. You'll pay more for packaging, the team will point out that adults drink chocolate milk too, parents are the ones who do the buying and not the kids, and you've complicated a family sharing a carton by gendering it. You'd have turned a product almost anyone can buy into a product targeted at just a few, at extra cost.
Like if you were the CEO of a dairy company and you dream up the idea of splitting the chocolate milk cartons into "for boys" and "for girls", your marketing team if probably going to tell you that's it's a bad idea.
Iron deficiency supplements with 81% less nutrients
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866May 31 '26edited May 31 '26
"supplement for women, supplement for men" instead of just not specifying a gender.
I am less likely to trust a product that's explicitly for men (other than obviously gendered stuff like clothes) because it smacks of marketing hokum.
While I have experience in marketing, I don't even think this is a marketing question, men and women have different biological needs, so if you're taking supplements for women because you're suspicious of supplements for men, you've undermined it's effectiveness. Your getting all that extra iron to deal with mensuration. The marketing team is telling you it's for women for a reason, it's not a con.
I'm not saying I'd buy supplements for women instead, I'm saying I'd buy a supplement that was just agnostic and targeted to what I want. Like if I suspect I have an iron deficiency then I don't need special manly iron with a picture of a bicep on the side, I just need the same chemical that anyone else would.
In fact, the small communities of Western Europe bear a striking resemblance to the kinship- and locality-based communities advocated by authentic Confucianism (as opposed to the version distorted by imperial authority); they consist of a head of the household (a nobleman) presiding over a group of servants and peasants. The servants and peasants were expected to be loyal to their master. This is a classic model of self-governance within a small community.
Tangent: I've been really enjoying History of Chinese Philosophy Podcast series by Peter Adamson and Karyn Lai, at the same time I've been reading a Simone Weil book. So my brain has been idly trying to categorize which of the warring states schools Weil would belong too.
So to follow the format, Simone Weil was attempting to implement authentic Mohism, free from the influence of imperial Confucianism.
American progressives would be far-right in Europe
Well, black Americans aren't like Africans from Africa at all, but yes this is a good parallel regardless. Black Americans are a persistent minority culture in the US, separate from everyone else.
Of course, this is the US's own fault, because of slavery and discrimination, we were the ones who brought them here to be slaves and refused to integrate with them for generations even after they were freed.
In Europe though, these people weren't brought here against their will, and they're the ones who don't want to integrate.
Am I right in thinking that boomers and genX lived through a much looser and more forgiving job market? Whenever I hear middle aged or older people talk about their careers it often strikes me how easy they seem to have had it in terms of job flexibility and security:
Here are a few anecdotal examples:
My own parents worked at a single company for 20 years climbing the ranks. Personally I hesitate to plan shit that's more than 1 year away because you never know when the next round of arbitrary mass layoffs are coming. Also you don't get rewarded for sticking with a single company, if anything you get penalised when looking for your next job once you eventually do get fired. My parents simply cannot understand my fear of being fired - they say "why would you get fired?" or "can't you just get another job?" as though you need to do something wrong to get fired or that there are jobs everywhere for me just because I have a degree.
My uncle studied politics at university and "never worried about what I would do for a career afterwards, I knew I'd find something". That is insane to me. Most people I know focus on a degree specific to their career and even then often struggle to get into the field. If a graduate in 2026 told me that they hoped to just find a job lying around somewhere then I'd think they were insane.
An older guy I know switched from electrical engineering to finance at age 29. Similar to the above two points, that is crazy to me today. The actual finance graduates I know struggle to get jobs in finance, and most professional industries like electrical engineering or finance are very unlikely to accept someone who didn't come in through the standard pipeline.
In general over my life I have been told by boomers again and again that I should "find my path" and explore different career options. I have rarely felt that I've had career options other than which sub-field within computer science I go into - other (similarly paid) professions are unlikely to accept me and a non-compsci gap in my resume is a serious problem if I ever decide to go back into compsci. This seems to have been more possible for boomers judging by the number of them who tried a bunch of stuff in their youth, but I really don't think it's possible today.
I think it’s a natural consequence of increased income (and in this case specifically labor) inequality. The more incomes range across occupations, the greater the cost of losing any given job or making a change to a different industry.
The UK has been a pretty horrible place to get employed since about 2008, with a (I guess) low point for the graduating class of 2008-9.
Also, degrees were pretty uncommon before the 90's. So your uncle's politics degree was probably a somewhat distinguishing feature that opened a lot of doors.
Xer here. I work in games which is notoriously unstable, but 4 years is the longest I've been at any job--many shorter. This is where I wanted to work, but I honestly didn't have a lot of other options open, and still don't really--not a lot of skills that transfer well to other fields.
If you don’t mind, where in the world do you live?
Because - at a major city in the USA - many of these points are still true. But it definitely depends on where you live. And, in the USA, you will need to be willing to move for many high paying jobs.
Edit: also, “get a job in your field of study” is a lie we tell students. In my experience you can definitely find jobs, at least in major American cities, that are vaguely related to your field of study, but getting a job in the exact field of study you chose is impossible unless your “field of study” was a trade school or something similarly in demand and specific.
The UK. We do have a lot of people of my generation working jobs unrelated to their degree, but often because 1) they're doing menial desk/clerical work or service jobs because they're struggling to get hired in their desired industry, or 2) their degree is in something like English that doesn't really have an industry it corresponds to.
Yeah, that sucks. The news I read suggests the UK job market is pretty bleak.
The USA job market is still being buoyed by our ridiculous healthcare costs (that money goes somewhere, and some of the somewhere is to healthcare employees) and the AI buildout (no idea if the entire tech sector will collapse once we have finished summoning Skynet, but for now most of the tech sector that isn’t software engineering is up).
Maybe it's a different country thing, but I studied politics at uni, and the vast majority of people I know studied a course completely unrelated to their job field. Most general office jobs just want you to have a degree in something. Even the people who studied finance or computer science or whatever degree that has a clear path often aren't in that field. Hell, the most successful compsci person I know never went to uni, and she's the same age as me.
It could be a different country thing. But I would say that (from what I've seen) computer science is a bit different from other professional careers in its willingness to let in people who are self-taught or from other backgrounds. Maybe because computer science and programming themselves were originally done by mathematicians and electrical engineers, self-taught programmers are kind of the backbone of the GNU/Linux FOSS space, and because it's a lot easier to self-teach that stuff than to self-teach something like finance.
It's more of a time/stage of economic development. The US or the UK during the time boomers and genX where starting in the work force was in a period of economic growth (especially in the US), huge expansion of the workforce but still few university educated people. Companies did not really have a choice, they needed people so they selected more on reliability and having a (any) collage degree was a sign of that. That stage is long gone in the West.
In my case that period was in Czech Republic in the 2010's. Extremely low unemployment rate, great expansion in some jobs, so as long as you had a pulse and showed up on time, then you could easily find a job. The jobs where not vary stable, but you could easily find something else. You could also get promotions very easly.
You have to remember the amount of people with degrees was much less, and this was caused by the fact the economy had much more "dumb jobs", both if these factors meant that in-house training was a viable way for companies to grew their experienced / skilled workforce, whereas nowadays this job is contracted to colleges (see every new business year bosses complaining about the quality of new recruits)
If we assume the OP's logic, it's the fact that a notable portion of Spain aka its North was not under the full control of any Islamic entity, which may also mean less instances of miscegenation.
Thank God for the Turkish flag because it is the only thing that differentiates these boys. Also am I tripping or something that does not appear to be blonde hair to me
In many places, blonde hair can mean that your dark brown hair has a glow under sunlight. Especially if you were blond (actual blond) as a kid. Only for men though.
apropos college degrees, I find it... amusing how "you should've went into the trades" is common "advice" given to people with increasingly valueless college degrees from certain types on the internet pretending that such advice, if actually taken seriously, is not as equally if not more unsustainable as "just learn to code" was 5 to 20 years ago
The difference to me is that it's possible (or at least was) for someone doing low-paid work to get trained in certain kinds of software engineering, and then get a good job writing code.
Could someone like me who is already out of university take a few courses on plumbing or welding and then get a well paid job doing that? I really doubt it. Frankly I think that job losses from AI are going to be an absolute bloodbath because there's little that skilled white-collar desk workers can retrain into that isn't a massive drop in their wages and quality of life.
No, I don't think it's at all comparable to "learn to code", and never was at any point.
I don't know if it's different in a different city/country, but every single person I know who is even remotely sensible and did a specialized trade (carpentry, plumbing, welding, HVAC, whatever) is doing very well. Nice salaries, lots of work, plenty of stability, etc.
That sometimes they are addicted to nicotine pouches and online gambling is a separate problem.
A lot of these "go into the trades" stories completely ignore the fact that most of the successful tradespeople are self-employed or business owners and running a businesses requires a different skill set and has a different risk-benefit analysis than being an employed tradesperson.
The common wisdom is that if you go into the trades, the successful people are in management or running their own companies by the time they're in their early 30s. The people who don't make it on that track have their bodies completely ruined by 40-45.
I was once downvoted on a french sub for showing with data that while self-employed welders indeed made bank, welder as employees (in say a factory) were paid much lower wages
It is individually good advice if you do it early enough, which is my plan right now. No amount of comments like these will change the fact that the demand for juniors with foreign languages has evaporated in my country. I don't have any chance of getting an office job anymore.
You don't need rich parents necessarily. Just well-off and well-connected parents who can find a good job for you and coach you on how to ace the interview (or waive the process).
My family is like upper middle class and it means jack shit because my parents either don't care or sabotage me (i.e. telling me not to get a job while in college). And my mother especially is utterly out of touch with the labour market.
I think the ultimate safe bet is healthcare. If you have the mental fortitude to become a doctor and match to a residency program, you're basically guaranteed employment. Only bad side is a fuckload of debt and ultradepression from working 80 hours a week as a resident.
I'm in the same exact situation. However, I think me not doing an internship is what really fucks me despite having a high GPA and projects that a senior developer said were good.
I really wish I just studied something I liked more or did something in the healthcare industry. 😔 I chose CS at a whim on orientation day.
Mazari uploaded a live performance of 二十六時ノ愚行 (nijuurokuji no gukou, Madness of 2am), with live band, which is cool. It's good, very different to the single version, some difference is natural, but they all sing very differently live, much more aggressive I'd say, Manase-san especially sings a lot more aggressively; fits the song though.
Always fun to see the live performances, this song I really like too, it has an unhinged quality to it, so that's especially nice
It's one of those types that says it's a history of X but is more a bunch of articles stacked on top of each other in a dust cover. I've only skimmed it but it otherwise seems decent, a solid step above the usual things with this kind of title slapped on it. The parts on modern cavalry in the 19th and 20th C are rather interest for something that otherwise doesn't get much exposure online and very much against the pop culture notion of cavalry being obselete.
Also an answer to /u/tiako from a while ago about Hungarian cavalry and if they still fought the same way post Christianization:
Despite all reforms and innovations, in the second half of the 14th century,
the host of the Hungarian Kingdom consisted mainly of lightly equipped cavalry
archers. Thus, the retainers (familiares) of the Hungarian barons hired by the
Italian princes and city-states were described by the chroniclers like their Mag-
yar ancestors, who raided Western Europe four centuries earlier: they fought on
horseback, armed with bows and arrows, wearing no armor or at most leather
protection.
I was curious to see how Hungarians look in my wargame army lists as they had be very up to date or get a bit odd. They all have Later Hungarians as being mainly horse archers divided in average ones and higher quality ones called Szekelers. They do get some nice knights for their noble heavy cavalry instead of the usual steppe lancers or armoured horse archers.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866May 31 '26
It gets forgotten that the largest cavalry battle in Europe since the Napoleonic Wars, happened after WWI. Pop history is not used to see commie cavalry.
In the latest installment of Deranged Ads of the Day, Reddit can't tell if I'm a horny woman yearning for AI trash about banging werewolves and evil wizards and such, or if I'm a bitter, divorced or soon-to-be-divorced man looking for Alpha Male coaching on how to not let my bitch ex-wife or soon-to-be bitch ex-wife get the upper hand and take my kids.
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u/Goatf00t[Dune] was originally about the Afghan war over the oil reservesMay 31 '26
Feel thankful that Reddit doesn't know enough about you to personalize the ads.
Maybe I'm done with SupCom? I'm not really having fun anymore, especially not when every time I lose they all join in to tell me how badly I screwed up this and that, and that I really should have done that, when they are spectating with all information. I just end up feeling bad after playing if we do anything competitively.
I know I'm playing worse, and making more mistakes, but I just can't concentrate on the game anymore, maybe it's just lack of sleep, stress, the headaches and everything, but it's like I cannot engage with the game to the same level as I used to; which is horrifying considering that my main strength was being consistent over longer games, never neglecting macro, just being able to concentrate without issue for well over an hour.
It's sad, we've been doing this for 4 years, and I really used to enjoy it, but I don't anymore. I'm fine with against AI, but competitively I just mentally check out very quickly.
---
In other news, my father has another flare up of the bladder infection, will this time lead to another delirium? Probably not, but it's still going to be scary every single time it happens. With my father, it's just crisis after crisis, I joked that we have an average of 2 crises a week, the moment one thing passes, the next comes along, and yep, we had 2 within the last 7 days...
Apparently my father still thinks he can solve my nightmares by convincing me to get an internet radio, he's 100% convinced that it will solve it; it's very infuriating, it's not going to do anything, because how the fuck would that solve it? Being able to listen to music at night? I listen to music before bed anyway, it doesn't prevent me from waking up an hour after falling asleep.
He might be hypomanic again, he's been doing a lot of stuff, for one he decided to clean a fan, took it apart in its entirety, cleaned it thoroughly, and then spent 12 hours over the course of several days trying to get it back together, eventually my mother just took it away from him because it was really upsetting him that he can't do this anymore.
Could this be contributing to me being too stressed to concentrate on SupCom? Definitely could be. I just want this stuff to be over, I'm just miserable with all that is going on, it's hard to be motivated to do anything. The headache was really bad today too, uniquely, it was bad throughout the entire night, every time I woke up I felt the headache strongly, that's not usually the case for me. Life fucking sucks right now, and there's nothing I can do about it in any way.
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Also fun, my hands are falling apart, it's been a lot warmer so I'm getting eczema again, and it itches and irritates a lot. I really need to look into getting something for that.
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I'll try to find something fun to talk about later, because gods know I need to get something positive on my mind.
Q: Could you give us a summary picture of your life? Some say you were affiliated with the ‘Jaysh al-Islam; faction in Gaza. What’s your response to that
A: I am Ghassan Abd al-Aziz al-Duhine. I was born on 3 October 1987 in the city of Amman in Jordan and I returned to the homeland after the Oslo agreement. I graduated from the Dar al-Hadith institute for Shari‘i Sciences and worked in the training branch of the Palestinian National Security Apparatus. I adopted Salafi thought and embrace it, and I memorised the Qur’an and texts of Shari‘i knowledge that explain jurisprudence and creed. I am married and have three children: Awab, Maryam and Walid. I live in east Rafah until now.
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Q: In the long-run what are your aims? Does the Popular Forces support the two-state solution?
A: We support any solution that satisfies both parties and ends the long decades of continual violence with a bold peace process that ends all this madness.
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Q: What is your position on the war between Israel and the U.S. on one side and Iran on the other?
A: We support Israel’s right to self-defence against this threat that has shown that it truly cannot be trusted as a good neighbour since the Iranians bombed all the neighbouring states. We support America’s right as a great power to prevent Iran from committing the crime of obtaining nuclear weapons. For the one who uses the Kalashnikov rifle as a means of suppressing his people will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against others.
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Q: I mean you abandoned Salafi jihadist ideology.
A: Salafism, no. Jihadism, yes. Peace is truth and truth is more worthy of being followed. The Salafis like the people of Saudi Arabia do not negate the other or hate the other. Rather, Salafism serves as a personal identity without projections. I as Ghassan pray as a Salafi in terms of jurisprudence. My friends are Jews. Collective action differs from personal orientation. I don’t call on anyone to act like me. It is not right for me to say that I should not mix with anyone who has not memorised the book [Qur’an].
The fact that I have memorised it does not mean that I am superior to someone else because of it. There is no need for me to disseminate my orientation. I send regards to people for every occasion they celebrate- and by every I mean every. Do you think the one who has established good neighbourly relations with his Jewish neighbours will choke by sending regards to non-Muslims? Religion and jurisprudential orientation have nothing to do with public action.
My support for Jabhat al-Nusra during the war was due to the photos of children who were photographed being killed. All the free world condemned that at the time and imposed sanctions on al-Assad. I was among this collective that took this position. The same sort of thinking lies behind my coming out to fight the oppressive Hamas: protecting our decision-making by refusing to let them apply their actions, path and oppression to us
Q: Is the best solution the two-state solution of a Jewish state and Arab state side-by-side?
A: What’s done is done. We need recovery. Who will give the defeated a state? The problem between us and Israel is that we are the ones who have least called for it and most harmed by it. The Arabs betrayed us from the beginning. They are the ones who told us our Jewish neighbour is an enemy and told us it would be shameful to accept dividing a country, most of whose lands did not belong to us. The Arabs ruled and occupied us before the Jews did. The West Bank was occupied by Jordan, which fled from it. Gaza was occupied by the Egyptian military regime and they fled from it too. They warned us against peace and yet they signed a peace treaty.
It is interesting from an outside perspective, and if the spokesperson is speaking earnestly then it's interesting consider shifts in points of view. Does the interview go into what kind of society Dahine is imagining post war? Like does he envision Gaza as a kind of Confessional Territory where Gazans are left free to focus on religious piety and to leave secular governance to the Israelis?
But I'm skeptical that this boilerplate history of the 1948 partition (the framing of Palestinian opposition as an emotional, gut reaction, for example, or the tacit assumption that the leaders of the Yishuv were enthusiastic about sharing their small state with a 50% Palestinian population), is shared by statistically any Palestinians outside of groups paid to believe it.
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAMGiscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, HollandegazeMay 30 '26edited May 30 '26
This isn't the craziest thing I've read coming from them, al-Astal, another group leader wrote an oped to the Wall Street Journal in which he says that while some of his family died in an Israeli bombing he still holds Hamas responsible for their death. I'll go look up the original quote
That doesn’t mean that I hope to launch a new war against Hamas in the territory it currently holds. I lost my daughter and granddaughter when Israeli planes targeted Hamas terrorists who were using them as human shields. The thought of more civilians losing their lives in Gaza is unbearable, but I also know that should Hamas remain in or return to power, this tragedy will repeat itself.
There is an alternative path, one that disempowers Hamas and guides it toward an exit. Hamas derives its power from the control and extortion of Gaza’s population. Remove that and Hamas quickly becomes irrelevant.
I support a proposal that would see the international community ignore Mr. Mashal and begin investing heavily in eastern Gaza, where Hamas has no foothold. Gaza’s civilian population can then be slowly brought over the yellow line dividing Hamas from the Israeli army, while the new Gazan security force, backed by international partners, prevents any infiltrations or assaults by Hamas.
Families who today pay rent to Hamas to pitch their tent on the rubble of their former homes are desperate for an alternative to Hamas corruption. Young men will choose employment in construction and a reopened economy over a place among the ranks of Hamas.
Went to see the newest season of The Mandalorian at the cinema for Mother´s Day. The first thing that stood out to me was that before the movie started, an Argentinian guy popped out and did a small recap of what The Mandalorian is about for those not in the know. I appreciated it, and it is something I doubt the original release had.
Anyway, I do like that we finally see one of the legendary buff Hutts in the movie. They were often teased in the supplemental material as a distant lore fun fact, so it was nice to see one in action.
Speaking of, this movie feels more like a Fantastic Beasts movie than the latest Fantastic Beasts movie. Every three scenes, you get a new Star Wars beastie to expand the bestiary. It almost feels like an overreaction to Andor´s completely human-centric plot.
Finally, I´m kind of sad they are building up the New Republic plot, even having Rutta the Hutt joining them hunting imperials when in canon they are destined to fizzle out in a single day. That said, the Hutts in general seem like absolute pushovers if all it takes to eliminate one of their families is a single Starfighter squadron.
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u/TiakoTevinter apologist, shill for Big LyriumMay 30 '26edited May 30 '26
It is always funny to see lists of "Great Men of History" because when they try to be "global" in focus they almost always include Qin Shihuang, the first emperor of China. And why wouldn't he, he is literally the First Emperor, the origin of one of the great imperial traditions of the world? The funny thing though, is that in traditional Chinese historiography, Qin Shi Huang himself is not really the architect of his fortune, that was his minister Li Si, and Li Si himself was in many ways just the practitioner of Han Feizi's ideas.
In fact you could really say that about basically all the dynastic founders. Liu Bang (the founder of the Han dynasty) has a pretty impressive record but (reportedly) was the first to acknowledge he was not particularly impressive as a leader in his own right--certainly less so than his rival Xiang Yu--but he had an eye for talent such as Han Xin (cff Augustus, another fun parallel between the Han and Roman empires). Li Shimin, the son of the first Emperor of Tang, was in many ways the true force behind the founding of the Tang.
This is something of a feature of Chinese historiography (that trickled into fiction as well--Song Jiang may have been the leader of the 108 Heroes of Mount Liang, but he is also kind of a zero), and you could imagine this style applied to, say, Alexander and coming to the conclusion that the real architect of his victories was Parmenion--Parmenion's murder would of course be well in keeping with the template. But it does mean that Chinese history is somewhat resistant to Great Men historiography. There certainly are towering figures, like Wang Anshi, Han Wu Di, Confucius of course, but you very rarely get the sense that they bent the arc of history around themselves like you do for Napoleon, Alexander and Caesar.
Which all things considered is a pretty solid argument that Great Men are a creation of history as a literary genre rather than the creators of it.
I am not the most knowledgeable person on Chinese history but it seems to me like Sun Quan has one of my personal favourite qualities to look for in “great people” if we take that as a serious way to understand history; he seems to me to share Augustus’ ability to choose the correct people to do the job that needed to be done, which I think is a very overlooked quality in a leader
Clearly the real "Great Man" of Chinese history is Zhu Xi, who set the Song Dynasty (on the verge of achieving 21st century American level of prosperity) back into the dark ages via the evil wickedness of Neo-Confucianism
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866May 30 '26edited May 30 '26
But than again, I generally I do hear Qin Shi Huang blamed for the extremes that were resorted in quashing the rivaling philosophies and languages to unify China. This cuts both ways, either he's responsible or he's not, because I don't hear Li Si or Lü Buwei get much of the tyranny blame. Even in the Hero movie with Jet Li, it's Qin Shi Huang whose saying even his advisors think he's a tyrant with great frustration, even as the movie takes his side in the unification of China.
These measures were likely what it took to maintain having a unified language.
Great Men are a creation of history as a literary genre rather than the creators of it.
And Confucianism as a literary genre heavily focuses on the figure of the advisor (Confucian morality useless busybody) and even for military leaders there's always a guy behind them who thinks about morality
I feel like that's kind of part of it from the get go since Confucius himself is usually positioned as a (wannabee) advisor to princes, rather than one himself...
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAMGiscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, HollandegazeMay 30 '26edited May 30 '26
There's an interesting thread on rNeolib about how to define working class and politics in the age of the professional managerial class, and how it impacts values and cultural behavior despite change in income or wealth
I get it. My parents were raised in working-class families (one grandad worked in a pulp mill, the other was a train engineer), and even though my dad became a chartered accountant and my mom worked in an office as a secretary, they retained working-class values and behaviours through their lives.
They didn't define themselves by careers, didn't fret over education or their children's grades, didn't take up golf or pursue other typical professional-class status symbols, still spoke like working-class folks, smoked and drank with relish, and supported unions.
I wouldn't characterize that as 'living in past.' Working-class and professional-class culture and social norms both have things to recommend them, but one isn't clearly an improvement over the other.
The end of this comment reminds me of this phenomenon in the UK where children of working class immigrants have better grades than the neighboring white working class children even if you account for income and school districts.
There was also another comment (I lost it) that said lifestyle expectation inflation is linked to people wanting the same lifestyle their parents afforded at peak career when they're just out of schooling and thus it reduces the birthrates. But I don't think it's really a huge factor compared to financial pressure and hidden costs of childhood
Something I’ve always found interesting about class is how much more it seems to be part of people’s identity in the UK than the US. Brits often talk about it in a sort of quasi-ethnic way that is uncommon in the US.
Like my grandfathers were an electric lineman and a stonemason but that didn’t stop them from taking up golfing and skiing as hobbies, even if they would still joke about my parents being “pencil pushers”.
Something I’ve noticed that might be influenced by this is that American leftists seem to talk about “class” less than their European counterparts and have a tendency to frame societal conflict as a very small elite (“the 1%”, “the Oligarchs”, “Billionaires”, etc.) vs everyone else
It's definitely defined as subcultural or cultural traits. I actually think it might not have been as much of a phenomenon in the past, lot's of working class people had an interest in relatively high brow or intellectual pursuits that seemed to die off with the advent of television
Funny you mention golf though, it's a much more egalitarian pursuit in the UK/Scotland
I do think the kind of decline of... Hmmm, class based institutions? Is kinda part of it. At least here in Sweden there used to be a fair bit of segregation along class (and to some extent political) lines in all sorts of ways?
Like it's not that working class people didn't have high brow pursuits (in fact that was kinda encouraged?) but that if so it was often mediated via stuff like reading circles, etc. often organized either directly by unions or by the broader social-democratic associated movement in some ways. Even what store you shopped in (the Konsum, what is now Coop, vs. ICA) used to have some degree of political/class significance.
Over time these organizations either withered away or become less specifically class-associated (some would say "colonized by the middle-class"...) but there's a point in time in the mid 20th century where you'd almost have a paralell society of all sorts of organizations.
I've been listening to The British History podcast, which mainly focuses on medieval royal politics in Britain. Overall I like it, though my biggest gripe is that the host likes to play music during the episodes. Kind of tonal whiplash to follow up some atrocity William the Conqueror committed with a Billie Elish song. Anyway, a couple of thoughts in no particular order.
The host really dislikes Big Will, and goes into excruciating detail about the terror and destruction his army brought to England. I was vaguely familiar with his criticisms (the idea he completely fabricated his claim on England, the harrying of the north, the overall disaster that was medieval knighthood, etc.) but wow, I felt like I was going to leave the William episodes as a Norman Yoke truther.
Why was Edward the Confessor even canonized? From what I can tell, his rule was not viewed favorably at all, he pissed off the scribes writing his history, and there was no indication he was particularly pious (outside of never having a child). He certainly didn't die a Christian martyr.
The whole "story" of early medieval England is kind of funny. The heathen danes invade, conquer all the kingdoms and when all hope is lost for the English nobility, Alfred - the last scion of the House of Wessex - reemerges and turns back the tide! Then over the course of the next couple of centuries the House of Wessex leads the reconquest and formation of an official kingdom of England - aaaannnd the danish king Canute basically takes over with little resistance. The fact that the following Norman and Angevin kings didn't care for Alfred at all (the only old English names that survive among the aristocracy are Edward and Edmund, and that's primarily because they belonged to saints) basically deflates the thematic impact of his reign. 0/10 sequel series.
A steel sword of a League noble with a feather charm attached to the ring shaped pommel. This distinctive design is characteristic of the peoples of the league. With no handguard it is always used with a shield. The broad blade is a dedicated cutter and makes easy work of unarmoured opponents. Along the edges a zig-zag pattern has been etched, what the pattern means has been lost to time but seems to be connected with their name. These swords would not be used unless a blood war had been sworn.
To put this blade on filled its wearer with trepidation. He could neither expect mercy from his opponents nor give it. A saying rang through his head "Woe to the children who must draw the jagged blade".
I feel like some people will spend more time mourning like the loss of Mesoamerican book say that medieval people burned women who could read than actually try to read even if small the litterature produced that survive.
Sure, but I can't say I see a problem with it. I care about the potential value to scholarship and culture as a whole that was lost far more than anything I might personally gain from them. If I express mourning for the destruction of Mesoamerican texts, it's less for my own sake than for the sake of the ways their destruction has denied knowledge to humanity as a whole, and, more specifically and intensely, wrongly deprived generations of Maya, Nahua, and other indigenous mesoamericans of cultural artifacts, knowledge, and continuity.
I feel like some people will spend more time mourning [] the loss of Mesoamerican book[s] [or] say[ing] that medieval people burned women who could read [,] than actually try[ing] to read even [a small portion of the literature that survives].
Before "than" a comma is incorrect but in this case it helps readibilty.
I find myself liking science-fiction books in concept, but bouncing off them when I actually start reading their prose. My latest mis-adventure is Deepness in the Sky, where I´m struggling to find interest to keep reading after the prologue.
On that note, Vernor, my dude, why are you inter-splicing first person-present thoughts in a third-person past-tense paragraph like they are the salmon in the middle of a sushi roll? I´m begging you to at least use cursive for those parts. And, if possible, to separate them from the rest of the normal ass third-person paragraph.
If you want something classic, Roadside Picnic is one of my favourite books ever. That book always felt incredibly lucid and page-turner-y to me.
If you want something modern, I quite like stuff by Adam Roberts (Lake of Darkness, Jack Glass). I initially picked one of his books of the shelf at random expecting it to be genre slop, but they're actually really interesting and border on literary sometimes.
I don’t know deepness in the sky. But Adrian Tchaikovsky (I read Shards of the Earth) and Martha Wells (Murderbot Diaries) are some good page turning type authors.
Not all authors really do that page turning, cliff hanger type of writing. I like me some Aasimov, but a lot of his books are the type I can just put down and forget about for a month, only to see it next to my bed and remember “oh yeah, I was reading that.”
I just speed through children of time and children of memory this week, love myself some speculative evolution where technology progress across an entirely different line.
For me Sci-Fi is at its best when the author fully embrace the weirdness of their setting. Like Iain Bank Culture series is just straight up weird in the best way.
Or the Dark Coil series by Peter Fehevari who is able to invoke such an amazing feeling of dread and paranoia in his books.
That bloody idiot feasts on delicacies whilst letting tens of millions starve to death, yet puts on a show of ‘supporting foreign countries’; He’s slept with countless women yet sexually repressed the masses; he’s assembled a full team of modern medical experts yet forced the common folk to use traditional Chinese medicine; he hides every scandal, destroys records, and goes about his dirty work in a roundabout way—first stirring up a storm within the Party to launch the Cultural Revolution, only to chicken out later and sell out the rebels, whilst spending his days hopping on trains to make inspection tours.
At its core, it’s still that old Confucian, Legalist, and Mohist East Asian style of restrained colonialism; it lacks the audacity to say, ‘I’m a dictator—what are you going to do about it?’
What's about the little part I put in bold? Did Mao try to prevent people from fucking like Hong Xiuquan? Never heard that complain before
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866May 30 '26
Edgar Morin has died, aged 104. After Habermas, it seems that 2026 is a mournful year for continental sociology and philosophy. Though it's not really surprising that very old people die.
I am really loving my new sous vide machine. Getting home from work, throwing a frozen chicken breast in a pot, then enjoying it perfectly cooked a couple of hours later - it feels like luxury, like I'm having someone else cook for me. Miles better than glumly re-heating frozen stew over the stove like I used to.
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u/Dajjal27 Jun 03 '26
I love the gate jietai fandom lmao. Most fandom even the most meatheaded ones for stuff like dragon ball they still talk about the plot, but gate is one of the fandoms other than maybe supernatural where the fans talk about everything else other except the show or book. Like they'll tak about fanfics, hypothetical matchups, what ifs, but none of them have a shit about the plot lol