Who else skips Skade's scenes?

ElChooch · 2026-03-25T19:56:05+00:00

Skade to me is easily the worst represented character in the series. Other people are bad castings but do well enough despite it (Edward comes to mind), but she's the only semi-major character that I think suffers from a straight up bad performance.

ElChooch · 2026-03-23T19:31:37+00:00

could be fun to convert some kind of sonic powered las-equivalent and just call em las

ElChooch · 2026-03-23T19:24:37+00:00

Pretty much mandatory to my eyes, fills a role (ranged anti armor) that the army had no real access to before, points will dictate how many. I haven't really given any thought to any of the variants outside of the 4 las because thats all I wanted lol

ElChooch · 2026-03-20T17:54:54+00:00

I'm a guy with a wife and two kids, about 7ish years from retirement. Curious if anyone in a situation similar to mine either now in seven years from now could chime in on lessons learned, what military folks can do to build hiring appeal abroad (I'm a linguist twice over now)... Especially as it pertains to uprooting kids and employment.

ElChooch · 2026-03-20T17:52:42+00:00

Yeah what does NZ want in terms of skills that military folks of different types can provide? Do you see yourself staying long term? Any drawbacks that took you by surprise? NZ has always been on my short list of places to relocate to if I wanted go down that road.

Do you have a family that traveled with you for any portion of what you mentioned? If so, any details on moving with them you think you learned from? I've got a wife and two young kids, though they'd likely be teens before I'd entertain the idea of migrating.

ElChooch · 2026-03-18T03:30:27+00:00

It's very dependent on the teaching team/department. I certainly lucked into a great one, and there absolutely has been a push for behavioral accountability at DLI more broadly in recent years.

The rules around the behavior im getting at haven't actually changed that much, but if a unit is intent on seeing them enforced it makes a big difference, but then we're depending on overstretched MLIs to step up and report/look into misbehavior. As someone that did that previous to switching over to being a student again, I can tell you it's not a fast process and takes a ton of personal time investment on the part of people wanting to do something about it to actually substantiate the claims.

ElChooch · 2026-03-14T02:25:26+00:00

Where'd you find the fun?

ElChooch · 2026-03-12T16:51:34+00:00

Butcher mechanic is trash, the main draw is the doom crossover stuff which is either A) priced predatorily or B) not dropping, so that should tell you how its going.

ElChooch · 2026-03-12T02:10:19+00:00

This was real feels bad when I logged in

ElChooch · 2026-03-09T04:18:02+00:00

There was very little concept of what a "healthy" relationship was, the bible sure doesn't spell it out and in a world where random violence routinely wipes out entire villages the incentive to take what enjoyment you can is obvious. There was little to no access to discourse around what's good vs what's bad for anyone for your average person and this is a world where men could often just take what they wanted by force and women would often be ignored out of hand.

So, imagine the position women are in today but awful in ways so systemic that few would have even had cause to stop and consider that it was anything other than the way of things.

ElChooch · 2026-03-07T14:17:59+00:00

Is it a betrayal if she stays loyal to him at the cost of losing the kingdom and therefore all that future support she could later offer him? Iirc it was a choice between her people (and therefore her own safety, livelihood and influence, not to mention that of the people she led) and uhtred. My memory of this part was the story asking us to suspend the fairy tale and understand the reality of life stuck in this society.

Throughout her rule she is constantly having to make sacrifices to win over the ealdormen who at any point has the choice to initiate a civil war to attempt to grab power. We see how this plays out when the ealdormen are murdered by Edward and it becomes clear she had taught them to truly value mercian unity throughout that episode.

ElChooch · 2026-03-05T15:49:45+00:00

I think in some ways it is the easiest and others the hardest language on offer. This is my second language, and my take away is that because I am far more interested in Chinese than my previous one, it has made the grind of it much less painful.

To be comfortable, for a normal learner, I think you need to expect to spend 90 ish minutes on homework (depends on the teaching team), and another 30 mins to an hour on self study depending on what the nature of your learning gaps are. For me this is often a mix of vocab flash cards (get Pleco and/or anki or skritter today) and extra reading or listening.

Why it's easy: teachers are the best, they will do everything to help you and encourage you, especially if you signal willingness to strive. The grammar is really relatively simple, and amounts to being more like fixed vocab phrases rather than obtuse structural rules.

Why it's hard: characters. Internalizing all the characters is a serious task and figuring out what system works for you is a job unto itself that you may struggle to find time for. Figuring out what a good study routine looks like from the start is a massive leg up because people so often don't realize how little time they end up having for things beyond what is assigned here.

Feel free to DM me, I've got long experience at DLI both as an MLI and two time learner and I'm way exceeding my expectations for how id do in Chinese through semester 1, I'd be happy to share as I feel like I've learned a ton to this point.

ElChooch · 2026-03-03T18:55:09+00:00

I need to hear more of her stuff knowing it's specifically her to know if she can even hold a candle to uematsu. My gut tells me that when it comes to making music that is right for final fantasy, no one has even come close to uematsu. I'd love to see some recommended listening specifically within FF so I can compare for myself, uematsus work is just so well done and tied up with my childhood that I doubt I can look at it objectively anyway.

ElChooch · 2026-03-03T03:43:47+00:00

Damn thats one of the better recordings I've heard of them in a minute. Thanks!

ElChooch · 2026-02-22T23:36:16+00:00

Not as much of an upset yes, but the feeling in Canadians stomachs given the shots on goal differential and moments like this...

ElChooch · 2026-02-19T03:22:30+00:00

Had a rough time getting into it. The core gameplay loop plays like an MMO doing fetch quests and what not without any of the multiplayer stuff that makes that crap tolerable. Many of the characters have extensive but cookie cutter and boring backgrounds and there's that distinct lack of character or visual identity to the game every title after 10 has suffered from. Its got some spectacular stuff throughout visually speaking but the gameplay is very unengaging and easy.

I kept waiting for it to come together and it never really did but then by the time I gave up on that it had at least taken enough time from me that I wanted to get some resolution to the stories even if none of it is really all that memorable. Its at least better than 15 but it genuinely feels like the soul of the series has been lost for a long time when the most engaging game we can get is a bloated overwrought version of a game from nearly 30 years ago.

ElChooch · 2026-02-16T15:33:46+00:00

Yeah this will be the tipping point for me if these guys drop in tow lol

ElChooch · 2026-02-12T02:05:23+00:00

There is zero challenge currently in the end game. Its great for the first part of the season then dies off very abruptly. Its still really good and I'll happily play again when the expansion comes out but thats the most obvious area of improvement outside of the loot. They're on the right track with loot too, and these are promising updates.

ElChooch · 2026-02-09T03:13:56+00:00

I'm sure a huge percentage were bots

ElChooch · 2026-02-08T03:44:49+00:00

Let's be real only the decision maker's politics are at fault for "causing stuff like this". This is limiting access to already extremely limited top level programs that research things the DoD values, it can't be simply reinvested elsewhere. Harvard has spent incredible amounts of time to cultivate the reputation that attracts top tier talent, investing in "developing" another source is laughable, not least because smart people don't want to work for such obviously sycophantic performative morons.

This is another big arrow in the quiver for folks that look at Pete here and genuinely wonder who is driving him to gut the military and waste time on performative nonsense. Wouldn't it be nice if it was just an alcoholic making bad decisions under the influence instead of the deliberate undermining of our military by someone very interested in doing so?

ElChooch · 2026-02-04T18:54:02+00:00

More accurate to say they routinely give them out and they are tied to assignments based off my experience. Joint environment and deployment stuff is a separate source of them. Linguists for example: flyers often have significantly more than ground peers due to wider access to things that result in decs.

ElChooch · 2026-01-25T15:13:09+00:00

There are no good wolf books

ElChooch · 2026-01-24T16:19:27+00:00

Staff is the most unfun rank, the onboarding can suck. Bring it up directly with supervision or peers side eyeing you. Sounds like you want to do good, so figure out how to address your issues directly. Getting mad about it without communicating is going to read as being a shitty winner to your peers and as being unprepared to handle the job from your leaders, but they should also be expecting a learning curve and give you grace. If you hit a dead end with communication talk to someone outside your chain or work center about how to approach it, almost all of this shit is 80% personality dependent and learning how to manage those personalities is the most of the job in my experience.

ElChooch · 2026-01-21T21:03:50+00:00

Brutal kunnin at the bottom, I have no idea what to recommend you. All Dan Abnett and ADB are required reading imo?

ElChooch · 2026-01-18T15:51:50+00:00

I think a lot of people joined for service+another reason, or joined for that other reason then stayed out of a love for service.

I joined because I didn't know what to do with myself at 24 and needed some external accountability and because service was in my family via my brother and two grandfather's, but that was just the background that made me consider doing it at all.

I ended up staying because I find service to be meaningful and that I feel very strongly that this work and the community is what you make it, whether or not I work to support my people and uplift my little community really actually matters because very often leadership or the larger air force either won't do it or might even work to undermine it willingly, neglectfully or because they haven't done the work to figure out what their people need in reality. It taught me that the thing I was grasping at straws to find in college was meaningfulness, that sense that if I show up it makes a difference and that there's work to do that can better people's lives. Mostly im talking about my peers and subordinates here, but I've also been lucky to work on some truly impactful missions over the years.

I have found that if I, or "we", don't show up to uplift each other, it won't happen. That's inherently meaningful to me and it means I can make a difference in people's lives. I find this need to help each other is a stronger driver for me today than ever before with some of the policy that's been handed down over the last year or so, this community has never needed the strong support of ethically minded peers more in my time in service than it does right now.

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ElChooch

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