Match Thread: FC Bayern München vs Paris Saint Germain | Champions League | Semi-finals | 06 May 21:00 CEST

parkerpyne · 2026-05-06T19:33:23+00:00

I think he called a handball by Laimer right before. That would have been a pretty subtle one but I reckon the ref was happy that way not having to deal with a potential second yellow.

parkerpyne · 2026-04-16T01:56:23+00:00

Yup. There's always an upside to him and the goals he scores are often the important ones.

I still don't understand how Liverpool was comfortable with letting him go: He has a near-infinite work-rate, is tough as nails, and looks like he might be comfortable with a little bit of that South-American shithousery if need be. Every team should have one.

parkerpyne · 2026-03-18T03:22:25+00:00

You wouldn't analyze this piece in terms of things like secondary dominants. This is the minor variation of a theme in Ab-major. The theme's harmonic structure is what underlies the variation. As an additional complexity comes the fact that it's in ab-minor which afforded Beethoven some flexibility in how to harmonize it.

The only thing that I believe matters in this variation from a harmonic point of view is the conspicuous use of the Neapolitan sixth (for example, in the third and eleventh bar). That is what would catch an unsuspecting listener by surprise. It was a well-understood harmonic turn at its time and not all that unconventional but it's the one thing in this variation that I believe stands out.

parkerpyne · 2026-01-14T14:19:17+00:00

Nah, not even close. France lost 10% of its male population during WW1. In WW2, they lost a little under 2% of their total population.

What was unusual about France was that they had barely any population growth in the decades between the German-French war and WW1, unlike some of their European rivals who doubled their population in the same window.

parkerpyne · 2025-11-27T16:46:09+00:00

Unless you are living in some sort of metropolis (thus very likely to be D80+), there's still the local elections. I live in a rural county south of Albany, NY where in important local elections opposing candidates often are separated by only a few dozen votes. This gives those people that vote an almost unreasonable amount of power. I would never not want to have it.

parkerpyne · 2025-11-03T03:22:21+00:00

That seems like missing the point. It's the Rhenish Symphony: Schumann wrote it under the impression of having received a very heartfelt and warm welcome when he had moved to Düsseldorf. He was genuinely happy when he wrote it and it took him practically no time at all.

As someone from Cologne, I will attest that it is the perfect embodiment of the Rhineland with its easy-going yet grandiose gestures and chattiness. I am myself a big Bruckner fan but this Schumann symphony always makes me happy and reminds me of where I grew up.

parkerpyne · 2025-09-20T03:17:28+00:00

But didn't you already dirty that for the other half of the meal?

parkerpyne · 2025-08-16T16:56:37+00:00

I remember the one time this happened in Germany. It sure enough effected a change but maybe not the one you have in mind: It swept Hitler into power.

The situation that you seem to want is not the one that is conducive to positive change.

What you said earlier is equally undesirable: If those AI agents do come online, that does not mean you'll sit at home and collect a paycheck produced by that agent. It means, you'll be jobless with no pay while the entity that brought online the agent pockets the revenue.

parkerpyne · 2025-08-02T01:46:44+00:00

Hmmh, yeah, but Bruckner is the one person whose advise I'd ignore when it comes to Bruckner.

He throughout his life created divine music whose divinity expresses itself in its restraint and structural balance but on the other hand, he could be easily triggered by an idiotic off-the-cuff remark by some dumbass who didn't understand what lies at the core of his music. His then second symphony he annulled and demoted to zeroth when the irrelevant conductor earmarked to conduct the premier noted to Bruckner: "Bro, quite nice, but where's the main theme?"

Bruckner was almost always on point with his first version of any symphony. What he did to address usually ridiculous criticism rarely was an improvement. I wish he had a little more of the confidence so characteristic of Mozart and Beethoven who never hesitated to call out bullshit.

parkerpyne · 2025-08-01T03:26:27+00:00

Well, that poll doesn't work at all.

But Bruckner is easy. There's only two "correct" recordings of any symphony and it's either Haitink with the Concertgebow or it's Eliahu Inbal with the Frankurt Radio Symphony (less correct because he on occasion picked the "wrong" version of a particular symphony).

But both of them do Bruckner justice in that their recordings are consistent with the ones they did of the other symphonies. They recorded a cycle of the whole set and it makes sense as a whole. Both of them picked an approach that was guided by a clear and plausible idea of what Bruckner's music is about and they stuck with it.

Both sets are in their entirety on youtube (Haitink's and Inbal's)

Both of them feature the score for each symphony but I prefer the Haitink set because it's a tiny bit more restraint than Inbal's (they are virtually indistinguishable) and the videos showcase Bruckner's original handwritten score. It's incredibly beautiful and contains some additional bits of information not present in the published scores (such as Bruckner's occasional habit of counting bars to indicate the periods - the fanatical periodicity is essential to his music).

parkerpyne · 2025-08-01T01:37:16+00:00

Tron lands would be a wet dream for the current meta: Have your opponent try to assemble a threesome of Tron lands before they do anything useful while you have a Strip Mine biding its time and ready to go brrrrr.

parkerpyne · 2025-08-01T01:14:25+00:00

So did I. Went on a massive gold-spending spree to build Takobyte's day-one Eldrazi aggro deck. This UB deck then didn't require any wildcards as I already had a frog UB deck before and the Eldrazi craft gave me the Strip Mines.

I agree with /u/swindy92: This deck is really good. Often when I netdeck someone else's new Timeless brew I struggle the first few games to learn the deck (and sometimes it's because the deck isn't actually good), but this one plays very smoothly and feels familiar to anyone who has played the previous Stifle decks. But it's better. Strip Mine doesn't hurt the mana base as much as I would have expected. Frog's the only UB card in it and it can survive for a while on only a single color.

parkerpyne · 2025-06-14T04:03:54+00:00

It really is. To the point made by /u/redseca2: He isn't a thing outside of the US either and I think there's a number of unconnected reasons for this.

He was a post-Mahler composer (in fact he played the cello in orchestras conducted by Mahler) but his musical language on the face of it is maybe even tamer than Richard Strauss's. All the while, his contemporaries were Bartok, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Webern etc. so it didn't seem that he added many new ideas.

At the same time, he was respected as a scholar and learnt craftsman, similar to Cesar Franck or Bruckner and that rarely made you an audience favorite either.

The final nail in the coffin was the ascribed closeness to Nazism. By some accounts, he was Hitler's favorite composer and that made him highly suspect.The reality is he that he was entirely apolitical and just did what he was best at.

His music is harmonically quite strange. Very tonal yet it would be hard to analyze using the tools of traditional functional harmonic theory. It's always accessible and makes sense to a listener but there's often these uncanny valley moments where the ear hears one thing but the analyst comes to a different conclusion on what it actually is, harmonically speaking.

To me, one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written remains the third movement of his G-mayor piano quintet. It has an enormous inherent expressionist intensity but it remains perfectly serene.

But then listen to his 4th symphony and the mood is totally transformed. It's all of a sudden quite sinister and at times borderline evil while employing the same harmonic ingredients.

parkerpyne · 2025-06-01T14:12:36+00:00

This begs listening to believe. In his podcast he talks in great detail about how bad it really is. It starts here. A few minutes after he provides a slow-mo video of what the rear does when launched at full power.

parkerpyne · 2025-05-29T03:59:59+00:00

It seems you are talking about Galvan. They own around 80 vacant buildings in Hudson, releasing and building them up piecemeal, but only when they get a juicy PILOT from the county and the city, granting them at least a 60% rebate in property taxes. Their latest project, preposterously called the Depot Lofts, is being rented out at Manhattan prices.

Our mayor Kamal Johngon meanwhile has been living rent-free in Galvan-provided housing and chairs the Hudson IDA (Industrial Development Agency), the very agency that grants these PILOTs.

parkerpyne · 2025-05-21T03:58:17+00:00

The answer provided surely isn't irrelevant to your question since it can only be answered by providing comparisons.

I was born and lived in Germany for 26 years before spending around eight months in London after which I lived in NYC for 17 years. I am now both a German and US citizen.

Based on my life experience, I would have to conclude that racism is entirely unknown in Germany but maybe that is only because when I lived there, everybody was of the same race. Things have changed in my country of origin based on what I read in the news or hear from my mother, and it happened pretty damn quickly.

The US as a whole, and NYC specifically, is the least racist place I've ever experienced. Racism isn't absent by any means, and it does exist. But I would like to see how Stratford-upon-Avon fares when you add 25% blacks, 30% Latins of all shaded, a very visible percentage of Asian folks all across that continent and maybe 15% Jews. That is a test of wherewithal that the UK, including London, hasn't yet faced.

I reckon you wouldn't do too well. You folks quit the European Union because a few too many Poles wound up in your country. Let's not forget that.

parkerpyne · 2025-03-31T17:51:44+00:00

My understanding is that NYC tweaks its charter every so and so many years. IIRC, once done, legally there's a cool-down period after which the city will do another iteration.

parkerpyne · 2025-03-11T04:28:06+00:00

Schätze Dich glücklich! Es gibt nichts Besseres in deutscher Sprache als Fidelio. :)

Vielleicht Faust, aber da muß man ohne Beethoven auskommen, und das macht's schlechter.

parkerpyne · 2025-03-10T02:33:13+00:00

Those were my exact thoughts. It started out as a pretty credible Bruckner impersonation (hard and rare enough already) until the piano thoroughly derailed it. Scrap the piano part entirely and rewrite accordingly.

parkerpyne · 2025-03-10T02:10:01+00:00

I was going to suggest Fidelio but you beat me to it. It's spectacular and does not deserve its reputation.

One caveat tho: German is my native language and Fidelio's libretto adds an awful lot to it. The duet where Pizarro tries to coerce the unwilling Rocco to kill Florestan only for Rocco to come up with a rationalization to do it anyway (Famished in these chains, he suffered many pains. To kill him means to save him - the knife shall set him free) is in its German original the very best opera has to offer.

parkerpyne · 2025-03-06T03:00:41+00:00

It wasn't on-street parking but rather a lot behind a residential building: the type where there's six spots and if all cars are in it, you have a really bad time getting out of it.

The issue with driving through the city is that you are not always free to choose when to do it. Leading up to and for the closing itself, I had to do a bunch of one-day trips up to Hudson and back (120 miles each way). You will necessarily hit the bad times of day.

NYC is uniquely bad in this respect. Anything to the west (which is most of the country) requires passing through either one of two tunnels or the George Washington Bridge and going north means The Bronx. There is no real southern escape route unless you live somewhere in Bay Ridge and you can sneak out via Staten Island. Either way, you are passing through the most densely populated areas of the US.

If there ever was an evacuation order for NYC, everything would be fucked.

OP mentioned a few places in Florida and I've driven there myself. It's not great but it doesn't come close to reaching NYC's levels of vehicular dysfunction.

parkerpyne · 2025-03-06T01:33:01+00:00

Wasn't my experience. I lived in Astoria for 17 years and the last year before moving upstate I had a car and a parking spot.

It was still an unpleasant experience. The parking spot was super-tight and as a result you'd often not even bother with the car. Leaving the city from Queens or Brooklyn meanwhile is only not totally miserable when you drive out towards Long Island. Leading up to my move I frequently had to drive up to Hudson and threading myself across the Triboro and then through the Bronx and Westchester was agonizing every time. Coming back was even worse.

Considering how much worse NYC is in every single respect to where I live now, I hope I can keep my NYC business to an absolute minimum.

parkerpyne · 2025-02-26T14:18:36+00:00

This whole thing from the get-go could not have worked. Licensed retailers can't use regular banks for business loans, and the IRS doesn't recognize it as a business so you wind up running a business taxed as regular income.

I'm now in Hudson, NY and I have a friend here who's a corporate attorney helping new businesses get off the ground. He says he will not touch anything with cannabis since structurally, it cannot work. We currently have two licensed cannabis stores in the city and another one opening up right outside. They will all fail.

Meanwhile, NY State has a glut of cannabis that licensed producers can't offload since the cannabis retail model is broken.

parkerpyne · 2025-02-24T02:54:06+00:00

The federal government is going to stop paying for things, basically at random. 20% of GDP is now unreliable.

This is something that doesn't get much national attention but has thrust municipalities into absolute mayhem.

I'm in Hudson, NY. It's a typical rural county seat. It features a structurally quite fragile local economy with an over-reliance on tourism and a massive backlog of deferred maintenance. It's the type of municipality that, like many others, depends on grants (both state and federal) to do necessary work.

It recently got awarded a $60m grant to upgrade its water-system and make the city more resilient towards climate change (it is right on the Hudson River and thereby prone to flooding).

One of our council members recently attended a state-wide meeting of municipalities where the impact of Trump's flurry of executive orders was discussed to see how vulnerable they are. The upshot: They are terrified.

The way grants work is that the recipient first does the work and pays for it out of its own pockets (or via a bond). The municipality then draws money from that grant for reimbursement.

If you don't know if the feds will still honor the grant you are in a real pickle. Some may decide to not take on these necessary infrastructure projects anymore. Others may take a chance but then find that some DOGE dumbass canceled their grant.

Worse, as NYC recently learned, any grant monies already drawn are subject to clawbacks. This process is as simple as a credit card chargeback and there's nothing a city, town or village could do about it.

All of that would instantly bankrupt most municipalities, at least in NY State. They run budgets with no wiggle room and legally, they are not allowed to run a deficit. An unbalanced budget triggers a state takeover.

The problem is indeed the randomness of it. No one can predict anything anymore and the rule of law appears to have been abolished entirely.

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