I find the nutty prosletysing religious folks marginally more bearable than the militant positivists and atheists who can’t stop from bringing up their belief that free will is an illusion and we should all be hedonists, or that transcindentalism is an illogical lie (maybe bitter memories here).

Both infinitely more bearable than the exclusionary and persecutionary religious extremists.

A very important and good distinction.

Fully agree, also happy cake day.

Alas, also no dedicated gaming device newer than a 3DS.

I am thinking about getting a Steam deck of some kind though. Maybe it’ll be playable on that?

That sounds great. The kind of game I’d’ve loved but never had any Sega consoles (and no one really spoke about emulating them) so missed all of it.

Sounds up my street, when I next have time to game I’ll consider getting it.

Thanks.

Strife - last commercial release (at least until a recent retro game using it) of the Doom Engine. Picked it up for £3.50 or something about '97.

Think Hexen but plot, charming pixel-comic art, and some potentially frustrating boss fights and rpg lite elements.
Lots of fun, and does interesting stuff. I quote the voice acting quite a lot, but no one notices.

Or maybe we can think about the question and what it means and understand more about the world rather than judging.

Let’s all touch grass, and then come back and think about what meme genres (or indeed subgenres) might mean together.

Those are wonderful things to read, I’ve learnt a lot and have more to appreciate and have some good positive things about them both now, too.

Thank you.

Thank you for the thread.

To have a brighter section: what are your favourite or most appreciated thing about the two states?

Qatar: rich, oil wealth, decent news reporting but also the gulf states use of practically (if not actual) slave labour and massive inequality, linked to racism. Mostly an unknown to me.

Pakistan: massive sexism and religious intolerance issues, expounded on with the beef with India and allied with the PRC.
Could be a mixing pot of people and ideas, but various ethnic groups feel exploited and get involved in armed resistance, meanwhile -Ahminis (edit: Ahmadi, my bad) and women have a habit of getting murdered and mob justice seems to support that… Which is sad. Instability in the government that transcends the love of cricket.
Would like to know more, met a few people from there and they’ve generally been decent folk, but also were glad to have moved to Europe…

Really? A calculator only puts out what you put in.

A LLM gives you what has been put into it by it’s massive illegally scraped training dataset.

A better question would be is there a point to closed book/non-reference material exams, and in that setting is there a place for LLMs?

Most countries in South and Central America have a less exclusionary relation with their indigenous people, and having a rebellion against their ruling classes with indigenous participation rather than switching one set of white rich property holders for another.

Part of that due to the Spanish settlers marrying and having kids with indigenous peoples, and the metizos being a large part of the population, rather than US focused pure European ancestry without one drop of black/native blood. Meaning the US has a lack of tie to pre-settler culture and history that these nations don’t to the same degree.

I do agree that Canada has an issue with it too, as does Australia. New Zealand has been working to integrate Maori culture over the last decade or so and made big strides to integration.

The old world cases are also more complicated, you could say South Africa but that history of oppression and apartheid and recognised and have been integrated somewhat to self identity, though obviously a long way to go and the ANC being corrupt and infighty hasn’t help one jot. Maybe the party will collapse and South Africa can finally start to move in the right direction?

Russia has had a long history of culture as well as imperial expansion. Yes, the people of Siberia and Central Asia have suffered a lot, but there’s a Russian identity that goes back over 1000 years anchored to (albiet mostly western Russia places and events).

For Türkiye, Morroco, Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe, Zambia, I’m gonna need your notes to begin to comprehend what your point is with them - probably due to my own ignorance on their history. (Except Türkiye, I just think you’re wrong there, but intrigued to see your logic.)

Moe is a cutsey anime style, iirc.

I can imagine it’s harder to have a national identity when your nation is based on forced removal of indigenous people and their persecution (not to mention all the slavery), because my normal line is usually “everywhere has the same amount of history”, but if the US doesn’t see the history of the American Indians as theirs, or at least as something to honour and commemorate, then I can see perhaps that that might cause a mental malaise.

But older, but 0800 2 15000 manages to be stuck in my own, and I’m sure many people’s heads to this day.

Capitalism.

East Asia loves gatcha. It’s a huge thing all across the region.

Reminds me of an episode of Friday Night Dinner.

The dad has spent the whole episode complaining that the mum is angry and not talking to him for having dream cheating with “the Lady Di”.

At first it seems unreasonable for her to be in a huff, and the sons are on their dad’s side… But over the course of the episode the way that he goes on about it and keeps proudly dropping more and more details of the dream, such as it involving a named romp in a bath of milk, building up to the dad declaring something along the lines of “and she really had a fantastic pair of tits” as the final scene closes and goes to credits.