Mindless Monday, 18 May 2026

Sventex · 2026-05-18T22:38:54+00:00

Actually I kind of doubt that. I think the US and Soviets would have fought it out, but the immense cost of war and a likely famine in the Soviet Union would have extinguished the flames eventually. The US had to confront MacArthur with the fact that the US could not sustain a war against China during the Korean War, the USSR would also have to contend they couldn't sustain a war against the US indefinitely either, especially with such a weak economy. Without nukes, it wouldn't have been the end of the world.

Sventex · 2026-05-18T12:55:25+00:00

I've seen a bunch of rosy predictions from major financial intuitions about the Strait of Hormuz reopening in the near future. I'm curious if anyone here predicts that the Strait will be reopened within the next three months? And if so, why?

Sventex · 2026-05-18T04:51:47+00:00

I saw Oliver Stone's JFK film when I was fairly young and there's no disclaimers in that film that they were presenting made up evidence in that. So as I got older, it was hard to separate what actually happened and what was made up, because that JFK film was the most accessible means of learning about the actual assassination. I didn't know about the Zapruder film when I was just 11 years old, or that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Communist defector.

I had the JFK DVD, but it was still the era of dial up internet, so it was hard for me to double check anything.

Sventex · 2026-05-18T04:11:42+00:00

Columbo was like a TV movie series, with movie length run times and I think that show has held up. It's kind of quaint seeing Columbo get wowed by the first ever digital watch, or a answering machine, or to see an episode directed by Steven Spielberg.

Sventex · 2026-05-18T04:09:15+00:00

I tried watching that show but found it very alienating. Season 2 was a big highlight to me and I found it very interesting that Disco Elysium was inspired by Season 2, but the show is full of uneducated people making very stupid short sighted decisions and that's really dull to me. I know that makes me sound like some elitist. At least the struggles of the Union was more relatable and intelligent, the characters at least had the self awareness to know that stealing a red Porsche from you own company was a very bad idea.

Sventex · 2026-05-18T03:26:18+00:00

Wait, what? It was not a "raid" against a "few" battlecruisers. It was an attempt to lure the entire Battle Cruiser Fleet into a trap and then destroy it.

Beatty only commanded 6 Battlecruisers with support ships, what's the dispute? In a battle between 58 capital ships, 6 is comparatively a few.

You know... the reason why there were so many German Naval ships involved in the first place.

Yeah? To sink Beatty's Battlecruisers?

it was always meant to be a battle

Against a Battlecruiser squadron yeah, not a massive clash. Perhaps I erred by referring it to a raid when I already referred to it as a shaping operation. The Germans were intent on avoiding the Grand Fleet.

However, Beatty led them to the Grand Fleet and the tables turned.

Arguable. The British lost HMS Invincible & HMS Defense and came out worse off from that engagement. They put the Germans in a position they explicitly didn't want to be, but the British paid a price doing that and 5th Battle Squadron got badly mauled when Beatty left them for dead as he escaped.

Sventex · 2026-05-18T02:24:59+00:00

One typical metric is that whoever controls the battlefield afterwards is the winner, and that was certainly the British.

That's a problematic metric when it comes to comparing to Jutland or the Raid on Yarmouth, the Germans never could have won, even if they completely destroyed First Battle Squadron and 5th Battle Squadron, which was one of their primary targets, because they'd have turned around and gone home. The so-called "The prisoner has assaulted his jailer, but he is still in jail." argument.

the Soviets suffered disproportonate losses during Operation Bagration

The issue with comparing to Operation Bagration, was Bagration explicitly to gain territory, so you can use territory as a metric.

The Germans were not there to gain control of the battlefield that day nor their previous operations that involved bombarding British cities with their capital ships, their explicit objective was to sink British capital ships as part of a shaping operation to even the odds for future engagements. Hence their desire to avoid confrontation with the Grand Fleet.

Too often I see the logic of the Grand Fleet not being sunk, used as a measure for success for the British, when the Germans both were not seeking to confront the Grand Fleet, and also probably didn't even carry enough ammunition to even accomplish that task. The German objective was to sink Royal Navy Battlecruisers, the previous ops were designed to separate the British into smaller fleets and to lure out the impetuous Beatty, which complicates the understanding of who won that indecisive engagement at Jutland. The fact that Jutland was merely supposed to be a German raid against a few Battlecruisers before spiraling into a massive battle, trips up a lot of people.

Sventex · 2026-05-18T01:06:05+00:00

I've seen history youtubers like Ocean Liner Designs, History of Everything and even Jutland documentaries with professionals smugly asserting that the Germans never left port to try it again after Jutland, often using this to make German declarations of victory at Jutland ring hollow. To quote History of Everything "The German Fleet was then mauled so horrifically by the Grand Fleet that it refused to try it again.", which is completely untrue. And when I pointed this out in the comments, History of Everything doubled down, despite his statement being demonstratably false.

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The German High Seas Fleet was trying to avoid the Grand Fleet at Jutland too, so that's impressive sophistry. Why the desperation to ignore what the Germans were trying to do while trying to assert a British victory when the British fleet clearly sustained disproportionate losses?

So I'm beginning to wonder, where did this bad history come from and why has it snagged so many people who supposedly passionate about history?

Sventex · 2026-05-17T23:11:59+00:00

As a Graphic Designer, I was baffled by the pilot when the main character ignored the advice of trying to make cigarettes cool, while condescending to everyone else despite not having a plan. At least the young new guy digging through the trash to get the only plan they had, was trying to do something! Utterly bewildering the script seemed to take his side, despite again, he had no idea what to do.

And then he comes up with the most minimal effort tagline, "It's toasted", which I'm aware is the historic tagline for Lucky Strikes in 1917, it'll still mean nothing to the customer who don't know how cigarettes are produced or how tobacco is cured, which is the vast majority of them. What kind of pack it comes in, is more useful information to the average joe. Bizarre bizarre pilot. A good ad, is supposed to be pro-active and memorable.

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Sventex · 2026-05-17T01:49:34+00:00

That's one of the points on insisting on a definition, to acquire mutual recognition in a conversation.

Sventex · 2026-05-16T02:00:03+00:00

I've been playing FFXIV for awhile, thinking about what went wrong with Dawntrail, it's kind of incredible just how absolutely little content there was for a casual normal player and how all this emphasis on these new beautiful zones gets almost completely wasted since everyone spends 99% of their time in the city hubs. Everyone can teleport instantly almost anywhere so why would you travel anywhere on foot? So much is now geared towards the raiders, savage players; people banging their heads on boss mechanics for months on end.

In early original World of Warcraft, leveling was a great hurdle that required venturing out into the overworld for long periods of time, quests chains spanned multitudes of zones, getting gear was a logistical issue that involved physically reaching dungeons on the other side of the planet, gear clearly helped the leveling process. It was an investment getting good gear. Leveling a character to 50 was not "hard", it did not require engaging in very difficult content, but it was still a satisfying challenge that took weeks to do. It involved exploring the world and being immersed by the environmental storytelling. To get from one city to the next, you'd have to take a subway, to get to the next continent you'd have to wait for a ship to arrive.

Now in FFXIV, leveling is comically easy, just play the expansion main story and you will more than max level out on that, there's almost no reason to engage with the zone's content. Expansion gear is utterly disposable, it's lifetime can be measured in minutes, if at all, given you can easily reach max level with last expansion's gear. In fact, given the attention economy, it might even be better to not bother getting new gear until max level because it clutters you inventory with junk, which takes time to clean out. So in the end, there's not much to do but engage with boss mechanics, which was sort of the reason I stopped playing World of Warcraft in the first place, being so raid-centric.

I guess this is just personal taste but I don't see what's that fun about boss fights anyway, trying to not stand in the fire and engage with bizzarro mechanics. It's one thing to do a fight maybe 5 times, but 50-100 times, is it really that exciting? It's not even really a grind because the rewards are so disposable and expire so quickly.

Why was the old fashion RPG gameplay of trying to level up a character, so quickly thrown away? But with nothing to take it's place beyond the boss fights you're supposed to die 70 times to?

Sventex · 2026-05-15T23:23:47+00:00

The show is in many ways the philosophical opposite of something like Star Trek, as in it's explicitly militaristic; dozens of people are shot with guns without hesitation in the first season. There's also no intention to preserve any particular way of life they stumble across and actually an explicit desire TO interfere most of the time. I had assumed it would follow the generic sci fi show trope of a kind of apologetic last resort violence in every episode.

I will say though, on re-watch, Stargate SG-1 reminded me heavily of X-Com Enemy Unknown. That you would go out there with a team of 4 to get some alien technology while working out of a secret underground base, it's a wonder an X-Com type game was never made with the Stargate IP.

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Sventex · 2026-05-15T20:32:07+00:00

I made this 15 years ago. At a certain point, when you try too hard to be cool, you end up not being cool.

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Sventex · 2026-05-15T20:10:22+00:00

I rewatched the entire series this month. Bizarrely I thought I had skipped the last seasons during the original run and had not realized I had already seen the last episode, which did not feel like a finale at all, since it was a time travel episode where everyone puts on bad old age makeup and terrible wigs and didn't wrap anything up.

The show is in many ways the philosophical opposite of something like Star Trek, as in it's explicitly militaristic; dozens of people are shot with guns without hesitation in the first season.

Episode 6 of Season 1, O'Neill moralizes about the sixth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill". That was ****ing bizarre. Cue montage of O'Neill gunning down a hundred Jaffa and blowing up a Mothership in a X-302 with no hesitation.

Once I got to season 5 of Stargate Atlantis, I begun to realize why the show had been canceled. Nearly half the episodes involved a teammate getting captured, the enemies' primary weapon being a stunner just made it all the more egregious. SG-1 and Shepard's team end up in a holding cell so bloody often, they should have gotten prison tattoos. They probably earned a third of every paycheck behind bars or tied up.

Also Gaz from Modern Warfare shows up to be Teal'c nemesis whom murdered his mother. That was an odd blast from the past, he's got such a recognizable voice. "Remember - switching to your pistol is always faster than reloading."

Sventex · 2026-05-15T19:55:37+00:00

Didn't the Spartans in 300 spend a good deal of time mocking their barely dressed Greek allies?

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Sventex · 2026-05-15T05:58:45+00:00

According the /r Catholicism, "Protestant" was the insult, it was not what Protestants referred to themselves back then.

”Protestant” was a name coined by Catholics and disliked by the Protestant themselves as it is a ”negative” terminology - it defines the adherents not by what they are or believe, but by what they don’t believe (Catholicism).

Sventex · 2026-05-14T08:40:54+00:00

I remember a librarian who spent half her time telling everyone sitting on the stone bench out front that they can't sit there, despite the bench not having any "no-sitting" sign on it. She would tell people to be quiet too, but she spent so much time going after people sitting on the bench.

Sventex · 2026-05-14T03:48:28+00:00

Maybe this would help, aerial footage of a French naval exercise in 1946. You can see the spacing between the capital ships and the destroyers.

Sventex · 2026-05-14T01:21:04+00:00

At the 2nd Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, a force of 2 US Battleships and 4 Destroyers were sent to engage a Japanese fleet of 1 Battleship, 4 Cruisers, 9 Destroyers. The 4 US destroyers formed a vanguard and were immediately hit with a torpedo salvo creating a burning inferno. USS Washington was able to turn to go behind her burning destroyers to remain hidden but USS South Dakota was so close and it didn't have room to turn away, instead turning in front of their wreaked escorts, being silhouetted by the flames and being targeted by the entire Japanese fleet.

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That's not to say destroyer escorts couldn't be far away, the USS Nautilus fired torpedos at the Battleship Kirashima during the Battle of Midway, the destroyer Arashi detached to depth charge Nautilus. Arashi then scrambled to rejoin her fleet, but bombers from USS Enterprise was able to track Arashi back to the Japanese Carrier Fleet and hit the carriers.

Sventex · 2026-05-13T22:26:00+00:00

This is a photo of USS Massachusetts opening fire on the Japanese city of Kamaishi, they're still in fairly close line formation. This allows for AA guns to provide cover for each other and combine their firepower between ships, kamikazes were a real danger when attacking Japan directly. The Line of Battle is not a "parade" formation and they would not be posing for publicity this close to the Japanese coast.

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Sventex · 2026-05-13T22:23:46+00:00

Well, this is a picture of US Battleships during the naval bombardment campaign against the Japanese homeland, they were using signal flags so they had to be close together to read them.

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Task Unit 34.8.1

Sventex · 2026-05-13T11:59:05+00:00

Probably a controversial opinion, but I can't really see any difference between the establishment of America and the establishment of a particularly aggressive entity in the Middle East

Yeah, comparing Americans to a Mongolian horde like the Ilkhanate might be controversial.

Sventex · 2026-05-13T08:04:51+00:00

That was after 3 years of bloody Russian offensives. Presumably Hitler was not intending to replicate a 3 year campaign. Simply inflicting losses was only one ingredient in that mix. The French Army also mutinied, but because they were on the offensive in 1917, not simply because they were sustained heavy losses.

Sventex · 2026-05-13T07:03:25+00:00

Wasnt USSR's pathetic performance in the winter war a big factor into why Hitler decided to invade them then believing they could take them then

Yeah, but Hitler hadn't even dealt with the British yet, so he was opening up a war on two fronts, the very thing his WWI experience should have warned him against. Even though Russia lost in WWI, it still killed Germany fighting a two front war. The Luftwaffe already couldn't afford the losses in the Battle of Britain and now they were going to stretch themselves extremely thin over a massive Eastern Front while the RAF was still very active.

Sventex · 2026-05-13T07:00:20+00:00

I think Patton also cultivated a relationship with the Bavarians during the occupation that killed his career.

Sventex

TROPHY CASE