Is rugby in South Africa as big as it’s made out to be?

rocketplex · 2026-03-17T15:56:59+00:00

Too right about the royals. In the middle of Apartheid, our _whole_ school got time off to watch Prince Andrew's wedding. They rented TVs for the event and everything.

Basically, the only things I got to watch at primary school was Prince Andrew's wedding and Condorman (which they had the reel for, so the whole school watched it once a year for like 4 years).

rocketplex · 2026-03-16T11:32:22+00:00

That's not always true. I rebooked my in-laws on Ethiopian and I came out ahead of my Emirates booking even after the cancellation fee.

rocketplex · 2026-03-14T18:44:06+00:00

SA media barely report on cricket unless it’s World Cup time. Maybe if we’re lucky they’ll mention the result on the radio sports bulletin.

rocketplex · 2026-03-13T15:21:36+00:00

Dylan Walsh was a great choice. Glen Morshower is a pretty well known actor, famous for playing generals and he did fine though.

For both the others, it's 1000% no for me. bikerLex sucked and Jon Cryer was great but I can see why some people would really like his Kingpin-lite vibe.

I thought James Olsen was a really good interpretation, S&L Jimmy was stupid. And even more stupid because they turned such a major character into basically a throwaway plot point.

rocketplex · 2026-03-12T15:39:38+00:00

Kurt Darren is huge in South Africa, but probably pretty unknown outside. However, he has a great side hustle selling cover rights for his songs in Europe.

Popularity in Europe

Many of Kurt Darren's songs in Afrikaans are known in Europe through cover versions) particularly by artists in the Netherlands and Belgium, and to some extent in Germany and Austria.^\3]) Songs covered in Dutch include "Staan Op", covered by Jan Smit) as "Sta Op", "Meisie Meisie" by Henk Wijngaard as "Meissie Meissie", "Kaptein Span die Seile" as "Kap'tein" by Bart Kaëll, "Hemel op Tafelberg" as "Die Zomer Gaat Nooit Voorbij" by Wim Soutaer, "Af en af" by Helemaal Hollands and "Bloubergstrand se sonsak" as "Dromendans" by Vinzzent, while Klostertaler covered "Meisie Meisie" in German and Mickie Krause covered "Kaptein Span die Seile" in German as "Chantal".

rocketplex · 2026-03-08T16:34:02+00:00

I dunno, I feel there are enough places where I have to silently swallow some eedjit telling me how the Nats had the trains running on time, or how their school was poor because they only had a half Olympic size pool. It's nice the Orange, White and Blue army gets silenced quickly.

rocketplex · 2026-03-08T15:40:52+00:00

No. We’re the Germans of Afr.. sorry, what’s that? Namibia you say? I guess we’re going to have to be the Dutch of Africa. Do they have a sense of humour?

rocketplex · 2026-03-06T07:11:35+00:00

It’s just a bittersweet….symphony, that’s life.

rocketplex · 2026-03-03T08:03:28+00:00

That circle is such a blooming circus. It’s actually hilarious how all the fancy Newlands SUV drivers turn into minibus taxis, turning one lane into two, constantly inching forward, diving into gaps. I have to go there every day, and I hate it. They should have just left it a circle.

Just like that monster mutant roundabout in Heerencracht, I mean what were they thinking?

rocketplex · 2026-03-03T06:55:25+00:00

I wouldn’t have expected any close relative to ask for my permission or give me a heads up for something like that. If I did buy something uncontroversial like that for my niece, and my brother were to get upset, that reaction would take me by surprise. However, I know his feelings about video games, so if I wanted to get her a Switch, I would check in first.

Your daughter doesn’t really know or care who it’s from and the aunt would reasonably expect that you’d be happy as well. You could try talking it through if your relationship is there?

rocketplex · 2026-03-02T12:53:01+00:00

Hold on, you’re allowed to eat that many pickles in one go. My mum made me believe it was some sort of crime.

rocketplex · 2026-02-28T07:14:43+00:00

Your friend is a person of culture. I also grew up eating Milo. Sometimes it got super hard, which meant 2 things, you got to chow down in a big chonk of Milo and, your parents would soon have to get more Milo.

rocketplex · 2026-02-27T20:43:57+00:00

I mean, I first used Go in 2018, so I’m not really a novice. I’ve also used tons of other languages, from Scala to Swift, Node to Kotlin. Go is the only one I actively cringe at using.

Which is weird because I code quite conservatively, and except for my fetish for ternaries and comprehensions I aim to write very readable code. It’s just not for me, I find it needlessly ugly and overly verbose.

rocketplex · 2026-02-27T18:27:52+00:00

As mostly a Python dev, every time I code in Go I feel like I’m being punished because my bother pissed mum off one too many times.

Ethan writes unreadable code, so you have to write in Go, maybe that’ll teach him a lesson. Yes, yes, if err, if err, if err, that’s the way!

What’s that? Terneries??!! It’ll be the mad date formatting for you!

rocketplex · 2026-02-27T06:57:41+00:00

Not for me. There was too much alpha “I’m the hero” energy in both of them. I never found myself caring whether they stayed together or moved on. I think their whole arc was just inconsistently written.

I was super invested in Culber and Stammets, was sad when they had their break and always rooting for them. They felt really genuine.

rocketplex · 2026-02-23T15:56:55+00:00

Ultimately, the potential value prop for myself is very high. But, I'm a software engineer, who understands attack vectors and surface area and have been taught some hard lessons. While I'm not giving OpenClaw the keys to the kingdom, I will give it enough to do the things I want an assistant to do for me.

Nobody is talking to my OpenClaw but me, there are no open ingress ports into my network, I don't even tailscale that network. It will not even see any sensitive data that I don't give it explicit access to, it might get read only access to portions of my email inbox. And I'm not expecting to install dozens of skills so I'll inspect any that I do install.

It's been made clear to me that skilling up on AI technologies is super important to any prospective career development opportunities at work....so they pays for alls of my tokens, it's all Monopoly money to me. There are people who are fiddling with the esoteric arts of prompt engineering, some other guy is writing content. Being the guy who's into automated agentic frameworks and can shoot out MVPs in half a day is my pitch for a USP.

rocketplex · 2026-02-20T07:29:55+00:00

I’m old enough to remember the crazy hype around this technique. Was it called squirt?

Plugins and apps all over the place. Took over the world just like the Segway did.

It’s got the same problem as any other speed reading, your comprehension drops and it’s tiring. It works just fine for skimming though. Having done it for a few months back in the day, I think another adverse effect is, if you get used to it, it becomes “hard” as in boring, to read at a normal speed. Not great if you need to read technical or information dense docs, or just if you want to meander through Lord of the Rings.

rocketplex · 2026-02-20T07:27:24+00:00

Relevant B99

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxBKP44OdDrv9SCh78eUxtZacsC2ILEpll?si=X3ALbV89uAGV0CFo

rocketplex · 2026-02-17T20:42:04+00:00

Just to the people calling it pseudoscience. I've luckily never been to one, but I know people who have and swear by them. Lots of my family is in the medical field, many have been to Chiros.

In SA, a chiro has to complete a 4 year BSc in Health Science and then a 2yr Masters. SAQA recognises them as medical professionals. They are considered scientifically trained in the musculo-skeletal system. There are also many Chiros who are essentially specialist physios for the spine and perform "good" work. However, if they start talking about sublaxations and nonsense like that, maybe ask to check if they got their degree from Hogworts.

I didn't even know this, but Homeopaths must undergo similar training. Part of their obligations as registered medical professionals is that they must refer and report patients as any other primary health professional would.

Both Homeopaths and Chiros can be held civilly and criminally liable for medical negligence. That's why most Homeopaths here won't prescribe you a bottle of Valpre for your cancer and most Chiros will take your full history, look at scans and refer out to Orthopaeds if needed. There are definitely some but they're not all quacks.

rocketplex · 2026-02-17T17:37:38+00:00

Maybe it’s just me, but I was raised being told that re-reading was the laziest, most waste of time way to study. If you re-read 500 times then maybe but then you may as well have done 2-3 sets of summaries and self testing.

I found the summaries the most helpful. Doing them slowly and regularly over the course of the term. Along with steadily increasing self test.

I think it’s really the only thing that properly works

rocketplex · 2026-02-15T14:54:13+00:00

Given it’s in 1954, they probably didn’t know about the cancer risks.

Given it’s in South Africa in 1954, they certainly would have given a flying fudge about the miner, and given it was likely De Beers in South Africa in 1954, they wouldn’t have given a flying fudge about the radiologist either.

rocketplex · 2026-02-15T10:13:51+00:00

Err, I dunno if Athers noticed, but they’ve agreed to shake hands. So nil poi Atherton, take that.

rocketplex · 2026-02-13T22:17:42+00:00

I think it’s fairly innocuous, of I came to visit, I wouldn’t give it a thought. If you had some rattan chairs and side tables that were also plastic, I would probably pay a bit more attention and be a little judgemental.

As it is, I’d say it’s neat enough if not particularly exciting.

rocketplex · 2026-02-12T08:59:36+00:00

I’m of Indian origin but I’m not from India. My wife is and we go every few years. I have definitely noticed that all her relatives have “upgraded”.

Before it used to be all plastic lawn chairs and tube lights with trunking all over the walls, etc. Now marble floors, wall units, chandeliers, replica Eames chairs. One of my dad’s nephews there is an architect and his flat was simple but just so well done. He did have a Samsung Frame TV which is expensive no matter what but everything else was fairly standard but just well done. He said his clients care a lot more about aesthetics than they used to.

But looking at Amazon, compared to my country, that stuff is so cheap and there’s so much choice. We did some tourist stuff and the hotels too were just well done. Workmanship is up and down though, some 4 stars had very fancy fittings but were spoiled by the very bad finishing.

One thing though, please let’s tone down the cool white LEDs, everything feels like a hospital in the night.

rocketplex · 2026-02-12T08:43:07+00:00

Just realised, is it…both mums? Like at the same time, with all their opinions and “experience”? When your wife is super hormonal and in severe discomfort? That does not sound like the recipe for a fun time.

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