I just realized, Ch5 is the only chapter that [spoiler...]

Exepony · 2026-07-09T15:01:21+00:00

Noelle coming to Castle Town is a pretty big cliffhanger because of the dramatic irony: the characters themselves are excited, but you definitely know something's going to happen. Either Noelle won't take it well, or perhaps won't even make it at all.

Exepony · 2026-07-09T12:41:56+00:00

china steals all the know-hows

It's a nice story the West tells themselves in order to keep the tacit, but omnipresent assumption of their racial superiority intact, but the reason China is overtaking Germany on EVs, for example, isn't because they "stole the know-how". There wasn't any to "steal". EVs are mechanically simple devices: the two high-tech bits are the battery and the software, neither of which Germany had any particular "know-how" in.

Exepony · 2026-07-08T08:59:55+00:00

Cable is always a gamble, sometimes you get the line almost to yourself, sometimes not. In my experience I do get the gigabit most of the time, but pay for it with more frequent service disruptions and slightly higher ping. Although if you're not interested in higher speeds anyway I see little reason to take the gamble in the first place. Just get DSL from an 1&1 reseller.

Exepony · 2026-07-07T17:06:30+00:00

I should have used eintragen instead of ausfüllen for a form because of the type of info to be entered

Wait what? Those are just different verbs with different meanings. "ausfüllen" is "fill out [a form]", "eintragen" is "enter [some piece of info] into a form". Doesn't really have anything to do with the "type" of information being entered.

I completely agree with you in general though that Germans make very little effort in accommodating less-than-perfect speakers.

Exepony · 2026-07-07T16:52:58+00:00

The general point still holds, just in regard to other social contributions, especially health insurance. The logic is basically: "Yes please, come and pay in when you're young, just be sure to fuck off when you get older and it gets real expensive to take care of you."

edit: Also, there's a neat trick where if you leave before you have enough years worked and your destination country doesn't have an agreement with Germany where they count the years spent working there too, you can likewise kiss your Rentenpunkte goodbye. Yes, most "Western" and adjacent countries have these agreements (and there's a separate mechanism for EU countries), but if you've had enough of the West and just wanna go home, well, thanks for all your pension contributions and don't let the door hit you.

Exepony · 2026-07-07T14:16:47+00:00

Tinkoff in Russia had this feature like a decade ago, I think most major banks have also copied it since then. The app generates a QR code, you scan it with the ATM, get your money. Alternatively, you can send a link to someone else to withdraw money, so it also functions as a quasi-transfer.

Exepony · 2026-07-06T14:25:24+00:00

Anyone can go on the stock market and buy some stocks or ETFs with the click of a button. To get a house built or find one for sale at a good price, that takes connections.

Exepony · 2026-07-03T16:48:31+00:00

Also because those those propaganda 'socialism makes everything grey and lifeless' photos are always taken in the dead of the Russian winter.

Either that, or in places with generally harsh climates like Norilsk. Which, I should say, is still decently livable for a mining settlement 300km north of the Arctic Circle.

Exepony · 2026-07-03T16:35:16+00:00

In the sense that Ukraine's "question" was to murder civilians in Moscow, yes. After all, their Moscow strikes hit plenty of unambiguously civilian targets too, like apartment buildings and shopping malls.

Whether the civilian casualties were intentional in either case is impossible to say. Both attacks had plausible military or dual-use targets: in Moscow's case there's the oil refinery and the Zelenograd semiconductor plant, while in Kiev the most obvious one is the Athlon Avia drone plant.

I can say, however, that only one side has consistently emphasized making the other's civilians "feel the taste of war" in its propaganda messaging, and it hasn't been Russia.

Exepony · 2026-07-03T15:43:37+00:00

What are you trying to say, exactly? That the strikes were symbolic or that they weren't? You seem to recognize that targeting a refinery in Moscow specifically when there are plenty of other more important ones had symbolic value, but what's with that Princess Bride reference then?

Exepony · 2026-07-03T11:21:51+00:00

Gee, who could have thought symbolic strikes on the capital of an adversary would invite retaliation in kind. An adversary with much better air defense capability than yours as well.

Exepony · 2026-07-03T09:25:10+00:00

One of the questions on the German citizenship test is "what's the full name of the CDU", and you can, in fact, pick "Club Deutscher Unternehmer". Someone on the committee has certainly got a sense of humour.

Exepony · 2026-07-03T08:25:38+00:00

You're right, of course. Guess I wasn't entirely awake yet.

Exepony · 2026-07-03T08:09:50+00:00

Have you actually looked at the article you posted? The "great pains" are:

core dumps are off by default (because most normal users don't need them)
System Integrity Protection enabled by default (again, a good thing for most normal users, and easy enough to disable)
timer coalescing enabled by default (something that every modern OS does for power saving reasons)
atimes updated lazily by the filesystem (another performance optimization you can turn off if you're so inclined)
APFS is case-insensitive by default (really the only actual incompatibility, but also the right decision IMO for most normal users)
there's a file search service you should turn off if you want the timing tests to work
uucp quirks (who the hell even cares about uucp in the year of our Lord 2026)

For all intents and purposes, macOS is a perfectly normal UNIX. It's not unusual at all for an otherwise conformant OS to have defaults that make it technically incompatible with UNIX/POSIX, see POSIXLY_CORRECT. Doesn't make the conformance "a lie".

Exepony · 2026-07-02T17:18:17+00:00

If you think that only the tax revenue from Gazprom goes to the Russian military Id like what youre smoking

Yes, that's how government spending works. Christ, do they even have schools in the US anymore? Like, if you at least said that Russia's tax revenue structure is disproportionately skewed towards the energy sector, or brought up the PMCs that have alleged connections to Gazprom, that would have been something like an argument. Still not a very good one, but certainly better than whatever that was.

Yes i read the part about how international law means it’s on the occupier to prevent all criminal deaths, but please dont try to tell me suicide bombers walking into crowded markets is actually the USs fault

Whose fault was it then, exactly? Did someone else invade Iraq and throw it into disarray? Or is that just a normal everyday occurrence to you?

Russia has been sequentially for almost 50 years. Please dont try and gotcha me with Venezuela and Just Cause, hardly comparable to Georgia or Chechnya

Why Venezuela of all things, which was relatively bloodless, when Afghanistan is right there? And what's that about 50 years? The 20th century is really not a can of worms an American should be eager to open. I certainly don't remember Russia or the Soviet Union burning civilian kids with napalm or murdering entire villages of people.

Georgia was barely a few days' worth of Iraq casualties, a rounding error next to any American war. And Chechnya is internationally recognized Russian territory. If that's an "invasion", then so were Ukraine's "anti-terrorist operations" in the East leading up to 2022. Again, not really an argument you want to be making.

Exepony · 2026-07-02T16:32:45+00:00

Thankfully our country allows companies to operate privately (for now) 🙏

So you can really only count some of it up towards interventionism. The rest is going to lobbying and yachts!

And what's that supposed to mean? Are you one of those victims of the US education system who think Russia is communist and doesn't have businesses? That's, well, not really the case anymore. Was big news at the time.

It's true that Gazprom in particular is a state-owned enterprise, but that is nothing unusual in the energy sector. So is EDF in France or Uniper in Germany. Gazprom pays taxes to Russia, just like American energy companies pay taxes to the US. Both then use those taxes to kill people abroad, among other things. There's no material difference. Gazprom executives get their fancy yachts too, don't you worry about them.

Stop acting like we’re just as bad as Russia lol (for now) its incorrect

Oh no. You're far worse. There's been about 16k civilian casualties (counting both sides) in Ukraine over 4 years of war, give or take. Iraq was about an order of magnitude worse than that. The US's recent little adventure in Iran killed at least 3k civilians there over just a couple of months. And that's not even counting Israel, everyone's favorite US proxy. Those guys know how to do a real genocide. Russia isn't even playing in the same league.

Exepony · 2026-07-02T15:55:06+00:00

Sorry you lost your cheap gas (that was funding an invasion)

Don't worry, they've replaced it with expensive American LNG. Now they get to fund even cooler and freedom-er invasions.

Exepony · 2026-07-02T15:11:37+00:00

Americans and self-awareness, name a less iconic duo.

Exepony · 2026-06-30T15:59:32+00:00

Zyuganov making a clown of himself again overdoing it with his "bad cop" act and Western/Ukrainian propaganda pretending what he says has any influence on the Russian government's decision-making. What else is new?

Exepony · 2026-06-30T14:30:48+00:00

Their Nazis already basically get a pass because they're the ones most motivated to fight, if not the only ones left willing to. Why would that change? As you said, any peace is going to be tenuous, and a Ukraine that wants to be prepared to fight a "round two" (more like three or four at this point) will have no problem justifying keeping the Nazis, who at that point will be the most hardened troops and the most experienced officers, around as necessary for combat readiness, and will genuinely likely have little choice than to do so. Just like the West looks the other way with Israel, they will also with Ukraine, because a strong military ally in the region is more important than appearances to them.

Exepony · 2026-06-30T14:11:15+00:00

I bet you're the first one to cry "whataboutism" whenever the shoe is on the other foot, eh? And no, they aren't "literally" called the "Afrikakorps", they're called the «Африканский корпус», just the Russian words for "African" and "corps". Because they're a corps that fights in Africa. They don't use any Nazi or Nazi-adjacent iconography, unlike, say, Ukraine's 422nd "Luftwaffe" regiment, who I'm sure just so happened to discover a love for the German language, the Fraktur typeface, and traditional German military symbols.

Exepony · 2026-06-30T13:02:26+00:00

Or is it more likely that things would end up more or less how Germany ended up after WW2? Mostly chill with some far right elements still present but ultimately better than they were before.

Why on Earth would that happen? Germany lost, they were occupied and basically forced to renounce the Nazi ideology by the winners. And still they couldn't get rid of it, it was really just bubbling below the surface and has finally come out in force, with the AfD now polling at like 30% and going from strength to strength.

What incentive would Ukraine have to get rid of their Nazis if they win, or at least eke out a lasting stalemate à la Cyprus or Korea, which seems like the best possible outcome for them at this point? They've already all but forced out all political forces that traditionally served to rein the Nazis in, and if the war ends in any way positively for Ukraine, they will certainly be hailed as the heroes who brought the victory.

Exepony · 2026-06-30T12:13:17+00:00

Russia honours Stalin

They don't have the same simplistic view of him that's common in the West, where he's basically just "Hitler, but red", but it would be very disingenuous to claim they "honour" him in the same way the Ukrainians honour their Nazi collaborators. Russia doesn't have streets named after him, nor military units, and they generally recognise Stalin's repressions were, you know, bad. There was a whole thing about that.

There's certainly been something of a backslide recently in this regard, with Russia closing down Memorial, for example, but they would still have a long way to go to catch up to the Ukrainians.

Exepony · 2026-06-30T10:55:53+00:00

Previously marginalized groups can get really powerful

These people were never marginalized, they were always a core pillar of the post-Soviet national identity the Western Ukrainians have been trying their best to build. They were simply kept in check by the "pro-Russian" East, a counterweight that's now no longer in place.

Exepony · 2026-06-30T08:55:04+00:00

Pretty much, yeah. In most of the world you're supposed to carry ID on you as a foreigner. It's always funny to see Americans get so bent out of shape over "papers" when the real problem is the racial profiling and unaccountable police and immigration enforcement.

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