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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1733 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 1, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Last year I reviewed Barbie and Oppenheimer. I was very harsh in my critique of Oppenheimer, and my review included this sentence: "[Oppenheimer is m]iles and miles below the still-wonderful Memento, which I'm increasingly confident will, years down the line, come to be seen as [writer-director Christopher Nolan's] only film really worth discussing."

I rewatched Memento last night, and... wow. It's nowhere near as good as I remember it being. It's a puzzle to be enjoyed once and then discarded, gaining nothing on subsequent viewings - there's as much point in watching it again as completing a crossword a second time. It's interesting that, long before he was a big-budget Hollywood player, most of the elements of the Nolan "house style" were already on full display here (with the thankful exception of the omnipresent shaky cam, frenetic cutting and bombastic sound mixing). Excluding two secondary characters who receive barely any screentime and whose briefly sketched sub-plot is more affecting than anything in the A-plot, none of the characters feel like real people, but rather robotic ciphers completing their subroutines. On two occasions in the film, Lenny is confronting a man he believes raped and murdered his wife, with the intent to kill him - and he sounds no more angry than if the man in question had scratched the door of his car. And believe you me, there is no conflict between a film having a contrived plot and having characters you like or care about: Psycho, Vertigo, Secret Window, Seven, Fight Club are all psychological thrillers with no supernatural elements whose plots are at least as silly as Memento's (if not more so) but whose protagonists I felt invested in, one way or the other. The narrative structure of the film may be "innovative", but its very artificiality (specifically the overlapping between the end of one scene and the beginning of the next) calls attention to itself, disrupting the immersion every time it cuts to black. Nolan sets up rules for how Lenny's condition works and then constantly cheats them when convenient: Lenny can become distracted and forget where he is and what he's doing by the sound of a door slamming or the act of scaling a fence, but he can fall asleep for an hour with the explicit goal of exploiting his condition to trick himself into believing he is somewhere other than he really is (geographically and temporally) - but he still knows who the prostitute is and why she's there when he opens the bathroom door? The passage of time within the film makes no sense: Lenny murders Jimmy Grants in an isolated location, and seemingly the entire criminal underworld in the city (but not the police) knows about it in a matter of hours. Natalie talks about losing Jimmy in a manner suggesting he disappeared at least a few weeks or months ago, but at the end of the film you realise she was talking about:

  • someone who vanished yesterday
  • whose body still hasn't been found
  • who's a drug dealer, and she knows it (how does she know he isn't just laying low after a deal that went sour?)

"Yeah, but Lenny showed up at the bar wearing Jimmy's clothes and driving his car, she knows Lenny must have killed him." Right, so her talking sadly about Jimmy disappearing is entirely for the audience's benefit. She's not manipulating Lenny in the long-term - that would be oxymoronic. He only can be manipulated in the short-term, which she does so successfully, in one of the only scenes in the movie that really works as intended.

At the time Memento came out, certain critics said that fans of The Usual Suspects were likely to enjoy it, which is accurate, but perhaps not the compliment the critics intended: both films are gimmicky schlock with contrived plots, and twist endings which come off as incredibly arbitrary and unearned, even anticlimactic.

As a pre-teen/teen, I said that my two favourite movies were Memento and Donnie Darko. Donnie Darko holds up. I suspect that a major reason I referred to Memento as one of my favourites was shoring up an inferiority complex: I was trying to conspicuously advertise how intelligent I was that I was able to follow this movie with an infamously convoluted narrative structure. Now, of course, I'm emotionally mature enough that I no longer think one's taste in films (or music, or books) has even the slightest bearing on one's worth or merit as a human being; and the way to show off how smart you are is to do things that only smart people can do, a category which does not include "follow the plot of a Hollywood thriller film". I suspect that a lot of Nolan fanboys are people who never actually progressed to this emotional stage and remain stuck at the mental age of precocious teenagers desperate to be taken seriously by the people at the grown-ups' table; it's notable how, whenever one of Nolan's movies comes out, the fanboys make such a conspicuous song and dance of how you have to be really smart to understand it, and that most of the people who didn't like it were probably just too dumb to get it. Such people bear a strong familial resemblance with those people who go out of their way to mention their IQ or MENSA membership, to compensate for their visible paucity of actual intellectual achievements. (There's a big difference between "dudes who like listening to Tool" and "dudes who think that the fact that they like Tool means they're smart".) Nolan seems to be aware of this aspect of how his films are received and seems determined to lean into it by topping himself at every turn, insisting that a perfectly conventional Hollywood biopic or WWII movie be told in anachronic order for no adequately explained or narratively satisfying reason; or adding an extra layer of impenetrability to his films by the rather crude device of simply drowning out all the expository dialogue under layers of music and sound effects.

Am I now at the point where The Prestige is the only Nolan movie I can honestly say I like, without any qualifications? Christ. Maybe I should watch Following, Insomnia and The Dark Knight Rises just so I can honestly say I've watched all of his films and thought that almost all of them were mid at best and embarrassing at worst - but I really don't want to.

The music was okay though, and Joe Pantoliano gave a good performance.

Found a new album recently that I'm hugely into, an event that's increasingly rare nowadays especially considering how voracious I've been with my music consumption in the past. The album in question is 裸の王様 (The Naked King), an absolutely ridiculous funk album from the Japanese band JAGATARA, released in 1987 and which sounds like a seamless blend between Talking Heads-like afrobeat and Japanese city pop. Unfortunately this band didn't have a very long life, as the bandleader Edo Akemi died while taking a bath in 1990.

This is one of the finest albums I've heard in a bit, they juggle these mammoth 7-10 minute songs while maintaining the energy throughout in a thoroughly engaging way. I think the only thing that drags it down is the final track, where the infectious flow built up by the first three tracks is interrupted by a more ballad-like number - which I don't think they particularly excel at, and is the only song on there which really seems to have aged. Still, this album is very worth your time.

I quite enjoyed this album, thank you for the recommendation.

Is the visual experience at a movie theater noticeably greater than the experience with the highest end of smaller screens?

The way I model this for myself is by asking "would I rather watch Top Gun in a movie theater or this setup." Especially with IMAX....movie theater wins. Sound is part of it, but it's also just that much more immersive.

I'd say it's the aural experience. Movies theaters really like to show off their subwoofers, every slammed door or a thrown punch goes straight through your bones. And the volume level in general is higher than what you would set on your tablet or even TV.

What's your question? What do you mean by visual experience? What sort of theater do you have in mind?

It'll depend greatly on the quality of the theater. 4K at home can be fantastic on an oled.

Amazingly I found some actually quality TV. And from my native land! I thought this would never happen. In 2019, HBO produced a Czech TV series. Labelled as fiction, but ..more thoughtful Czechoslovaks would have many a word to say there.

It's called 'The Sleepers' (2019).

Sort of a spy drama, though spies (or sleeper agents) are not the main characters. Almost no James Bond nonsense(implausible feats) except a very little in the middle. You do get to see state-security plainclothes agents casually bullying a lot of people while investigating, British diplomats being unhelpful and so on. A bit like 'True Detective' but about 1980s Czechoslovak dissidents, state security and politics. You have to pay attention because details matter-you'll be bewildered if you're treating it as background. The Czech title 'Unconsciously' is more fitting.

Acting is great - they got 75% of good local actors, the sets are almost perfect - if you want to show some US planned economy enjoyers how eastern bloc looked in 1980s, this is perfect. The screenplay is pretty good. There are a few hiccups, one implausible coincidence and one piece of laughable nonsense, but for TV or cinema it's really, really good. There's even a personal connection: one of the major characters is played by a grand-daughter of 1968-69 minister of planning.

It was produced by HBO but is no longer in their catalogue even in former Czechoslovakia, due to either some merger and sell-off of rights or because it's a 'conspiracy*'.. ThePirateBay has a copy which we watched. There are subtitles to be had here.. Unless you are fluent in Czech, English and Russian you'll need them.

EDIT: fixed some typoes.

Thanks. There isn't enough good Cold War CEE media. Russian companies could be producing great stuff, but the government is too insecure about the past to fund anything that isn't another cut-and-dried drama about a man of duty.

Comrade Detective was unwatchable. On the one hand, it was a too obvious pastiche of an America buddy cop genre to be taken seriously. On the other hand, it was taking itself too seriously to be enjoyable.

Do roombas actually work now? Id love to get one but still have memories of the early generation units which where pretty much worthless on carpet. My place is small (1200 square feet) and a mix of carpet and tile.

I got one of the iRobot ones - expensive but very good. The auto-unloader worked for about four years without needing a replacement bag.

Thanks, I ultimately ended up getting one of these (came down to the fact that the i3s are half on Amazon right now)

My Roborock works great. You need to have lidar mapping. You have to be okay with China having a floor plan of your house (who cares) and some information about your schedule (who cares)... and possibly a persistent footprint in your local network (much more concerning; you can cut it off and make it local only, but you might lose some features, depending on model). It sucks at mopping; I don't even bother with it for that.

Started playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker around 11 last night and ended up staying up till around 2. Very absorbing, the methodical gameplay really appeals to me, and the zero-g six degrees of freedom movement with conserved momentum is nauseating (in a good way). My first death really took me by surprise.

Ironically, the interruptions of the storyline are the worst thing about this supposedly backbreaking wageslave job.

The story is awful. Ignoring how grating most of the characters are, the anti capitalist message requires the company to be cartoonishly evil and the gameplay requires it to be absurdly generous at the same time.

Right from the start, they kill you to extract your genetic material, which is something that can be done perfectly well with a Q-tip. Whilst at the same time they let you keep the value of everything you disasssemble out of the goodness of their hearts.

They’re lucky their gameplay is so absolutely perfect.

I'm in my 40s and believe I'm finally hitting my stride as a young cranky old man. What did it?

Working at a company full of Python developers using Google Cloud.

OMFG I do not care about

  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • cloud triggers
  • Celery jobs
  • Python in general
  • anything that ends with .yaml
  • Docker

It's not because I don't know these technologies and can't handle it. It's because they're stupid. They seem like they were some half-baked approach done by someone barely competent at the task they were given and bam they're now the industry standard and we all need to use it and everyone frowns at you like you're an idiot if you think people shouldn't be forced to huff that original barely competent developer's farts all day every day.

Well, fuck that and fuck you if you agree with them. We should not tolerate the simplest things taking 100ms (or 5 seconds) or taking 100MB (or gigabytes) or 10 approved PRs.

I'm going knee-jerk write everything I possibly can in C++ from now on. I'm pushing straight to main prod. I don't care if it's not memory safe or difficult to reason about or not "best practice". I will use indomitable volition to solve the problem and when I do it'll be so much faster and I get to really dig in and be cranky and old and superior. Behold, this actually takes only 50 micros and uses 5MB of RAM and the Hertzner server costs 1/10th and the overall cost is 1/100th and this is right and good and just. While you're entering day three debugging some inscrutable GCP error I'm shipping.

I am elite and I know how computers work and this is how you do it. Sorry if you can't keep up, young whipper snapper :sunglasses: :muscle_arm: :smug_smirking_face:

Get. Off. My. Lawn.

Docker is a great achievement. Like Dropbox or Tailscale, it didn't invent a new thing, but it made existing technologies into a premade solution so simple and painless that it would just work, so it would become just a tool.

Yes, it did a lot of the defaults wrong for running in prod. But it made deploying stuff and undeploying it ten times easier. How do I compile Apache Comet so that it uses the same glibc as the server in production? Yes, you could spin up a VM for that and Vagrant makes spinning VMs up easier. But Docker makes it a snap. How do I deploy some enterprise software that requires an idiosyncratic combo of JVM and Python? Docker makes it a snap. How do I test out and cleanly uninstall afterwards some random server software? Oh, and it needs Postgres and Redis to run. Again, Docker (Compose) makes it practically a zero-friction task.

yeah Docker's fine

dockerizing every single possible thing is not really fine. it gives way to some super aggressively microservice oriented architecture that adds much, much more overall bloat

from now on. I'm pushing straight to main

The last guy I knew who pushed straight to master was a CTO and he bricked his company’s product while it was in active use by really serious clients.

I get that you’re exaggerating for effect and I’ve definitely known some very irritating guru programmers who insist that your one-man proof of concept prototype be audited like it’s intel assembly code, but stuff like docker and CI and PR requirements are used because it makes good things happen and bad things not-happen at a vastly superior rate.

Likewise we had a very good programmer who implemented a bespoke deployment solution based on ansible and a bunch of other stuff, and even before he left it had started to contort into a horrifying mess of spaghetti that was steadily losing features as they became unsupportable. We eventually ended up with a custom Debian for all_dependencies.deb because one of the tools he’d used had stopped supporting versions properly.

We eventually ended up with a custom Debian for all_dependencies.deb because one of the tools he’d used had stopped supporting versions properly.

based

While you're entering day three debugging some inscrutable GCP error I'm shipping.

But are you? My experience has been k8s makes shipping - and by that I don't mean compiling the code (or whatever people do to package python apps in your country) and throwing it over the fence for some other people to figure out how to run it, but actually creating a viable product consumable over the long periods of time by the end user - way smoother than any solution before it. Sure, I can build a 50-component system from the base OS up and manage all the configs and dependencies manually. Once. When I need to do it many times over and maintain it - in parallel to debugging bugs and developing new code - I say fuck it, I need something that automates it. It's not even the fun part. Yes, it means I'll pay the price in pure speed. If I were in a hedge fund doing HFT, I wouldn't pay it. 99% of places I've seen it's prudent to pay it. My time and my mental health is more valuable than CPU time. Not always, but often.

In cranky neckbeard era UNIX-based distributed system environments I almost never hit a problem that I can't diagnose fairly quickly. The pieces are manageable and I can see into all of them, so long as the systems are organized in a fairly simple way. Like maybe once or twice in 20 years have I been genuinely stumped by something that took weeks of debugging to get to the bottom of (they were both networked filesystems).

With cloud-based garbage, being stumped or confused about unintended behavior is more the norm. Especially on GCP. I am frequently stuck trying to make sense of some obscure error, with limited visibility in the Google thing that's broken. The stack of crap is so deep it's very time consuming to get through it all and we often just give up and try to come up with some hacky workaround or live with not being to cache something the way we want or weaken security in a way we don't want to. It's just ugly through and through and everyone has learned helplessness about it.

I almost never hit a problem that I can't diagnose fairly quickly

There can be only two reasons for that, based on my experience: either you are an extreme, generational quality genius, proper Einstein of bug triage, or you've just got lucky so far. In the former case, good for you, but again, that works only as long as the number of problems to diagnose is substantially less than one person can handle. Even if you take 1 minute to diagnose any problem, no matter how hard it is, there's still only 1440 minutes in a day, and I presume you have to also eat, sleep and go to the can. Consequently, this means a bigger system will have to fall into hands of persons who, unlike you, aren't Einsteins. And if the system is built in a way that it requires Einstein to handle it, the system is now under catastrophic risk. It could be that the system you're dealing right now is not the kind of system where you ever foresee any problem that you couldn't handle in a minute. That's fine - in that case, keep doing what you're doing, it works for you, no reason to change. I am just reminding that not all systems are like that, and I have worked many times with system that would be completely impossible to handle with the "lone genius" mode. They are, in fact, quite common.

There can be only two reasons for that, based on my experience: either you are an extreme, generational quality genius, proper Einstein of bug triage, or you've just got lucky so far.

I just know UNIX really well. It's not a freak accident. I used to go to bed reading UNIX programming manuals when I was a teenager. I know it at a fairly fundamental level. But it's also an open platform and there's been a lot of forks so there's been some natural selection on it as well on what runs today (not that it's all awesome everywhere).

I can't say the same about cloud platforms at all. They're purposefully atomized to a much larger extent and you can't see into them and there's no wisdom of the ancients text books that take you through the source code. The API is all you have, and the documentation usually sucks. Sometimes the only way I can figure some of the APIs out is by searching GitHub for ~hours to see if someone else has done this before, if I'm lucky.

Consequently, this means a bigger system will have to fall into hands of persons who, unlike you, aren't Einsteins. And if the system is built in a way that it requires Einstein to handle it, the system is now under catastrophic risk. It

None of what I'm arguing for really requires being the lone genius, but I recognize trying to hire teams of people with this kind of knowledge is probably a risk.

Whatever not my problem crank crank crank

Certainly I’ve found that diagnosing problems in Azure-based CI is an absolute nightmare because you can’t just go in and fiddle with stuff. You have reupload your pipeline, wait the obligatory 40 minutes for it to rebuild in a pristine docker, then hope that the print statements you added are enough to diagnose the problem, which they never are.

That said, it was still better than our previous non-cloud CI because it didn’t fail if you had more PRs than PCs or if you got shunted onto the one server that was slow and made all your perfectly functional tests time out. So I can’t condemn it wholeheartedly.

And not just for you the original coder either. When I’m brought in on a project, the first step really shouldn’t be ‘reinstall your OS so it’s compatible with the libraries we use’.

Yeah that's another aspect. When you graduate from "one man band" to development team, and from development team to 20 teams each of them doing their own thing and needing to coordinate and figure out how not to step on each other toes, turns out hyper-smart CPU-optimal solutions are very rarely the best ones. You need common languages and solutions that can be made reusable and portable. Otherwise the undomitable volition solution needs to be thrown out and redone, because however good is whoever wrote it, he is not very scalable. There were times where lone heroes could single-handedly win battles, by their sheer will and awesomeness, and it's very romantic. But modern battles are never won that way.

I will push back slightly against ‘never’. Comma.ai was pretty much a one-man self-driving solution and that was on part with the big boys for motorway driving. Likewise Palmer Luckey invented modern VR pretty much single handedly. But it’s rare and usually only happens within niches the mainstream hasn't noticed are viable.

OK maybe never is going too far. I'm not saying one-man band can't compete necessarily. In some cases, with the man being particularly awesome, it can happen in a particular place at a particular time. But scaling this to a company of hundreds of people would be absolutely impossible, because one person can not communicate effectively with hundreds, it's just physically not possible. One person or small number of persons can not be the bottleneck. And super-clever solutions would necessarily make them the bottleneck. It's either one-man band (maybe with a limited cast of janitorial staff) or a scalable corporation, but not both. And for some niches, being small is fine, but most businesses want to grow. And, very frequently, those who do grow eat up those who don't.

Agreed.

I'm reminded of a cranky user from /r/learnjavascript who was like "you don't need any library, not a single one, everything can be done in standard JS". From my understanding, this works as long as you're the only one maintaining your own code.

And you have a perfect memory.

as a young cranky old man this is a risk I'm willing to take

Everything you listed except Celery is how I got into tech and make six figures now, lol. I don't know how computers work** since I don't have a CS degree and don't do tech stuff for fun (anymore), but I agree that a lot of people use the tools you listed terribly (especially Terraform and k8s, wtf). But I'm curious what your objections are to the tools you listed. How would you do things differently? Usually when I run into someone who pooh-poohs those tools, they're the sort of person who wants to write their own epic genius 1337 codegolf in-house tool that has zero documentation, is full of idiosyncracies, and will become someone else's pain in the ass when they leave the company in a year. And then it's a part of the workflow that I have to use/work with/work around/slowly start making plans to sneakily deprecate. I dunno, I'm in my mid 30s. Maybe in a few years I'll start to get crusty too.

**by this I mean I have only basic knowledge about DSA, time/space complexity, Linux internals, etc. compared to turbo nerds who spend every weekend contributing to OSS for fun

ETA: One thing that I think is lost on a lot of engineers is the value of legibility. Terraform might suck, but you can explain what it does to some dumb non-technical stakeholder or some mid/low-quality engineer. It has tons of docs, and there are lots of slick videos explaining it on YouTube. HCL sucks, and it reinvents a lot of basic programming concepts but worse (for_each), but it's pretty easy to get started with.

There's also the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" factor. As a manager, part of my job is pushing for new/better tooling. If it's something mainstream and there are case studies or tons of threads about it or some Gartner bullshit or whatever, I can budget approved easier. What I pick is almost certainly not the optimal tool/software, but I have to get shit done and I can't let perfect be the enemy of good.

This also comes into play with public cloud (touched on by @ArjinFerman). I've never worked anywhere that has fully optimized cloud spending, there's always tons of waste. But after the corporate card is attached to the AWS account, I can provision servers/containers/clusters when I need to, and I only get yelled at about billing once a year as long as nothing ever gets out of hand. Is it wasteful, inefficient, and dumb? Yes, but that's just a reflection of the wasteful, inefficient, and dumb nature of the vast majority of human organizations. It's not a technical problem.

tl;dr a lot of the devops/infra people know these tools are dumb/inefficient but the alternatives are endless red tape or deadlock.

Usually when I run into someone who pooh-poohs those tools, they're the sort of person who wants to write their own epic genius 1337 codegolf in-house tool that has zero documentation, is full of idiosyncracies, and will become someone else's pain in the ass when they leave the company in a year.

To use a toy example, discussing one aspect: lets say you have an app that needs to be up all of the time. A simple solution is to set up the app on one box and a standby on the next box. If it goes down, you simply respond and assess and confirm yes, the primary is down. Lets start the standby.

People absolutely cannot resist looking at this and saying well why do that when you can have the standby take over automatically. And yes I get it that's a reasonable desire. And yes, you can do that, but that model is so much more complicated and difficult to get right. There are frameworks now that help with this, but the cost of setting up an app now is still an order of magnitude higher if you want this kind of automation.

Unfortunately, the modern distributed computing environment is organized around the idea that everything needs to be as high availability as Google search or YouTube. This is the default way of standing up an app.

Maybe your business has one big bread and butter app that needs this, and by all means go ahead, but businesses also have like 100x as many apps that are just support or bean counting tools that absolutely don't need this that you kind of get pulled into setting up the same way. It becomes so difficult to set up an app that teams lose the vocabulary of even proposing that as a solution to small problems.

Definitely agree. One of the more challenging parts of my job is having to be the guy who who says, "Okay, you want this app to be HA... but why? If you can justify this to me and tie it to some positive business outcome that merits the extra engineering hours spent, we can do this. Otherwise, no." I've only ever worked on understaffed teams and so I've always had to be extremely judicious when allocating engineering effort. Most ICs want to do this kind of thing because it's cool, or "best practice," or they see it as a career builder/educational opportunity. FWIW in 1:1s I ask what their career growth goals are and actively try to match them with work that will help them progress -- so I'm not entirely unsympathetic to their wishes).

It also just seems a lot easier than it really is. There's the whole Aphyr Jepsen series where he puts a bunch of different distributed databases to the test that everyone knows are supposed to be good and correct and they fall apart miserably. Almost every single one. It's bad enough that people don't really understand the CAP theorem's tradeoffs, but the real world systems are even worse because they can't even live up to what they claim to guarantee.

If you really think your application has outgrown the directory tree of .json files or the SQLite instance, show me how you plan to deal with failures and data consistency issues. It's not trivial and if you think it is I'm not going to let you drive.

or they see it as a career builder/educational opportunity

I feel like this is the unstated rationale for using every single cloud provider's API

A simple solution is to set up the app on one box and a standby on the next box. If it goes down, you simply respond and assess and confirm yes, the primary is down. Lets start the standby.

Then the standby goes down, or doesn't start. Your next move? You start debugging shit when people around you run with their hair on fire and scream bloody murder at you, the system is down over 2 kiloseconds and you still didn't fix it yet, are you actually sent from the future to ruin as all?

And note that this will definitely happen at 3am, when you are down with the flu, your internet provider is hit by a freak storm and your dog ate something and vomited over every carpet in your house. That's always how it happens. It never goes the optimistic way. And then you realize it'd be cool if you had some tools that can help you in these situations - even it it means paying a little extra.

a bulk of my experience is in quant trading where every minute we were down cost tens of thousands. we actually did engineer a lot of systems the way I described just because they were so much easier to reason about and took much less effort to stand up and maintain

They are easier to reason about up to a point. Which a typical HFT trading setup will probably never cross, but a lot of other companies frequently do.

yes, and if we reach that point we will introduce the complex multi-master thing

but most things never reached that point

People absolutely cannot resist looking at this and saying well why do that when you can have the standby take over automatically. And yes I get it that's a reasonable desire. And yes, you can do that, but that model is so much more complicated and difficult to get right.

Who's going to get paged awake at 3AM on Saturday to run a shell script to fail over to the standby? I presume there's some services out there where two or three days of downtime is fine but I don't have any experience with them.

In contrast I find it's pretty easy to set up a service with a few replicas and a load balancer with health checking in front of it so that nobody needs to be manually selecting replicas. It's not complicated and with reasonable infrastructure it's a problem you only need to solve once and use it everywhere, in contrast to hand rolling another unreliable service that's going to become somebody's operational burden.

Put another way, being a pager monkey for one unreliable service is already dumb. Doing that for ten services is just ridiculous.

In contrast I find it's pretty easy to set up a service with a few replicas and a load balancer with health checking in front of it so that nobody needs to be manually selecting replicas.

yeah that part's easy. what about if you want to make the database they write to redundant? you have to worry about CAP issues and that makes things much more obnoxious

Yeah but you've presumably already had to solve that problem one way or another because you've (I assume?) already got a service that needs a highly available database. Surely configuring replication for MySQL isn't insurmountable for a leet haxx0r such as yourself.

no? not every system wants the same CAP tradeoffs. not everything benefits from the overhead of being a distributed system. it's not free to make something distributed.

example: github.com has real costs because it's planet scale and multi-master. it takes 250ms+ to process your push because it makes geographic redundancy guarantees that cannot physically be improved on. if you did away with the multi-master setup it would take significantly less time

you have "solved" the distributed system problem here but making every push take that much longer is a big cost. in this case, it just so happens github doesn't care about making every developer wait an extra 250ms per push

to say nothing about how you've also blown up complexity that needs to be reasoned through and maintained

(and yes, it doesn't have to be geographically redundant, I'm simply upping the scale to demonstrate tradeoffs)

I certainly don't call 250ms a big cost here. That is literally so small that I would never notice it.

Mmm, I notice it. if I'm working on solo projects I switch to a git repo on a personal server instead of github just to avoid it

no?

So you've got a system where you can't pay some latency for availability (I'll level with you, 250ms is an ass-pull on your part, even planet scale databases like Spanner that are way overkill for something like this can manage much better latencies, to say nothing of a simple MySQL master/replica situation), but it's totally fine if it goes down and stays down over a weekend?

If we're talking about a system where 24% uptime (aka business hours) is totally cool, yeah I guess you don't need to think about reliability, but again ive never seen a system like this so i don't know if they exist.

If we're talking about a system where uptime actually matters, it's totally unsustainable to page someone awake to do a manual fail over every time the primary shits the bed. That also comes with a cost, and it's probably bigger than a few ms of latency to make sure your database is available. Making stuff run all the time is literally what computers are for.

(I'll level with you, 250ms is an ass-pull on your part, even planet scale databases like Spanner that are way overkill for something like this can manage much better latencies

I can tell you for an absolute fact that plans to use Spanner to back geographically redundant multi-master git repos made latency even worse. But this is a digression.

(and yes, it doesn't have to be geographically redundant, I'm simply upping the scale to demonstrate tradeoffs)

I'm saying the magic distributed database introduces tradeoffs over the single SQLite file, and they vary by project and used github.com as a mundane but easily accessible example.

tl;dr a lot of the devops/infra people know these tools are dumb/inefficient but the alternatives are endless red tape or deadlock.

Oh, that explains a lot. I'd off myself if I had to work for a MegaCorp, so most of my work was for small companies with little to no red tape.

Yeah, it's pretty grim. The only place I didn't have to deal with that kind of thing was at a place where the entire leadership consisted of former software engineers. Otherwise it's a constant battle.

and the Hertzner server costs 1/10th

This in particular has me regularly scratching my head as to how we got here. Surely, I must be missing something if the whole industry decided this is the way to go. But why is it that any time I run the numbers, cloud compute ends up feeling like highway robbery? "Noo, you don't understand, you can set up auto-scaling, so you only pay for what you're using at any given time!" Sir, at that price differential I can rent enough servers to cover peak demand several times over, and still have money to spare relative to your galaxy-brained auto-scaling solution. "Nooo, you have to use reserved instances, they're cheaper!" How is that not just renting a server? How are you still making it several times more expensive given the scale you're operating at?

Am I missing something, or did they play us for absolute fools?

Sir, at that price differential I can rent enough servers to cover peak demand several times over, and still have money to spare relative to your galaxy-brained auto-scaling solution.

I like this mental model.

It comes up in health care too. For example, if I get surgery done at a free market place like the Oklahoma Surgery Center, there's a good chance the TOTAL cost will be less than just my personal out of pocket cost using a standard hospital that accepts insurance.

I also use a wealth insurance based approach to health care and I am regularly surprised that a bit of negotiating and shopping around can bring the cash price of something down to less than it would've been with co-insurance.

At the end of the day it's usually easier for a random organizations to spend money on a cloud bill that keeps getting bigger than it is to spend money on sys admins to set up a cheaper, more DIY solution. Hiring the sys admin takes expertise a lot of orgs don't have, and often the search takes time, and you're kind of at the mercy of sys admins who have ornery and persnickety temperaments (not unlike me!)

If you're a tech company yourself you often have the talent to DIY it, though you may or may not consider this the highest ROI investment.

It's not unlike commercial real estate. You can probably save money by buying an office instead of renting, but it's not like you just write a check and you're done. You need to now bring on a facilities maintenance crew, and concern yourself with additional financing and accounting issues, and maybe also directly work with contractors and the regulatory state. Is it natural for your org to pivot into commercial real estate? Or are your resources better invested in your primary business?

  • reversed stupidity is not intelligence
  • everyone only pushes directly to staging, but some people also have a separate prod environment

I got out to see the local college do a production of Pierre, Natasha, and the Great Comet of 1812. It's a sort of rapid mishmash of an episode in War and Peace, fun in that it's one of my favorite books, and the music was enjoyable. The college kids did a fair job, especially for a fall semester performance with several obvious freshmen in key roles.

Dolohov and Anatole were great, as was Ellene, who commanded every scene.

But like Hoffmeister, the casting disappointed me. Pierre, while a talented singer, was ruined by woke casting. He was skinny. Pierre MUST be fat. The entire character is based in his size. He should ideally be noticeably tall while also being chubby, the kind of guy that looks harmless when he slouches but when he rears up you realize he's a bear of a man.

The ginger cast as a Pierre did his best, but his efforts to emote and over-act being drunk and sad didn't work because it made him seem frail, where if he were fat moving awkwardly could still portray robust strength. This interacted poorly with the script, which did a poor job communicating age when using a student cast. Anatole and Dolohov refer to Pierre as "old man" sarcastically, despite being his age, but frail skinny Pierre just seemed ancient. The communication between mid twenties Pierre and teenage Natasha is meant to be more intimate and frank than that between Natasha and Marya Akhrisimova, but that's not clear in the casting. Pierre's confrontation with Anatole was confusing, in the book it's clear that once roused Pierre tosses the young rake around and roughs him up, even though he'd been a genteel cuckold to that point.

Andrey was also cast weakly, but that's a tough one in the script, especially at school: he only gets one real scene, but he needs to be charismatic, upright, and dream hot for the love between him and Natasha to work.

Overall I had a great time. One of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite works. I think if I were reworking the script I'd try to make economic relationships clearer, but that's probably tough. But the driving aspect behind a lot of the plot is Natasha Ellene and Anatole all need to marry rich.

Paul Dano as the character I thought was good casting, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_%26_Peace_(2016_TV_series).

Also love the novel.

I’m playing Dragon Age and enjoying it. I don’t really disagree with the criticisms of the game from some reviewers. There is indeed a lot of peak millennial YA woke cringe dialogue…but the same was true of Baldur’s Gate 3 and both God of War reboot games, and many people enjoyed those; this doesn’t seem any worse.

I appreciate that this is an RPG with the filler removed, much needed after both Inquisition and Andromeda were ruined in large part by barren open zones that were unnecessarily created to try to attach the studio to some kind of perceived open world trend.

I quite like the new gameplay. Good RTwP will always be my preferred system, but Inquisition already ruined Dragon Age 2’s sublime and hugely underrated RTwP-action-hybrid combat, and this is definitely better than what we got in 2014.

People complain about facial animations, but they’re much less distracting than in Mass Effect Andromeda or Star Wars Outlaws / AC Valhalla (for non-facial-capture scenes, obviously). You can’t do much better than this without either hand-tuning facial animations like CDPR or capturing them directly like Larian, and it’s clear Bioware didn’t have the budget for that.

Choice and consequence is pretty good so far, better than some recent RPGs. I like the world and level design. The game has a nice, breezy pace. I will keep playing for now. I am more concerned about Obsidian’s Avowed, which looks like it might turn out like the Outer Worlds, which was passable but very dull.

Thinking back on it, I retract my judgment from RTwP. Neverwinter and Dragon Age 1/2 were perfectly playable. The thing that turned me off was the Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment engine, which had low-level casters with few spells per rest and concurrently made resting a pain in the ass. Thus casters were a liability 80%+ of the time. Never finished BG1 because of this (Torment was good enough to suck it up for the duration) and haven’t tried BG2.

I think that's particularly an issue early in BG1, to the point where I would actually recommend just using console commands to start BG1 at level four or so. Level one play in AD&D is extremely limited and dangerous and BG1 doesn't handle it well.

AD&D has a common issue in most of D&D, which is that casters start out fragile, weak, and extremely limited in what they can do, but become overpowered in the late game. The result is that there's a kind of 'sweet spot' of AD&D combat where fighters and casters are competitive, and there's excellent gameplay at that point, but both very low level and very high level gameplay are broken and boring. I suspect that part of BG2's sterling reputation comes from the fact that you start BG2 around the beginning of the sweet spot, and end it just when you're starting to exit it. Around levels eight through fourteen or so is 'the good bit' of AD&D, where characters have enough options to be interesting, casters are powerful but still have meaningful weaknesses, and fighters are still essential.

BG1 and Throne of Bhaal are noticeably weaker than Shadows of Amn just because the system is unbalanced. It sucks, but there are ways to work around it. XP is on a weird scale in AD&D, so if you just start BG1 with a few extra levels, you don't actually end up that overpowered by endgame - you just remove a lot of the early pain. And once you hit epic levels in ToB, wizards are overpowered, but they're not as overpowered as in the tabletop game due to the limitations of the Infinity Engine (the game can't handle, to pick a very simple exploit, constantly flying; and it certainly can't handle most of the degenerate combos AD&D allows on paper), and because using a wizard effectively requires a lot of tedious spell management, you can and perhaps should manage by still letting extremely-well-equipped fighters do a lot of the work. ToB is not that difficult a game, so you don't need to abuse the extremes of power that much.

Yeah that isn't RTWP, that's D&D caster design. They start out weak and become godlike at high levels. It's a shame you didn't play BG2, because at the levels in that game (especially the expansion) your casters carry the party. You have a ton of spells per day, and also high level spells are absolutely nuts in terms of their effects.

If you never played BG2, then you may play BG3 and find it okay.

It is a retarded, drooling cousin of the older games. The first Dragon Age was already huge step down compared to BG2 in the terms of combat. I can't even imagine how dumb this game is now. BG3 had some okay writing and the tactial gameplay was fun, but it's overall a huge let down.

At times I've been morbidly curious about BG3, but as a huge BG2 fan I just fear it's going to ruin what I remember playing through so many times. I worry that it looks like a product of the post-5e D&D culture, which I don't care for at all. Would you say that these concerns are justified?

The people who criticize it as more of a Larian game than a BG game are probably right - but there's also some of what you call post-5e culture. (I think- I avoided that like the plague). Marvel-speak and such is mostly related to certain companions, but the overall writing isn't that good.

Don't think it'll ruin it - the games really do feel a lot different, but you're going to be regularly disappointed in the writing. It's really a shame that people let to write something that expensive are just.. meh. Same as with Fallout 3 & 4.

Personally, I'm not going to even consider anything AAA ever again. I also probably only played BG3 bc a friend bought it for me. Maybe the new Cyberpunk - at least the main game had good writing. There's 'Atom RPG', a not so new Soviet Fallout-inspired game. I'll get into that once I learn cyrillic.

I can't really judge BG3 fairly, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, in hindsight, Neverwinter Nights is the real Baldur's Gate III - it still has that late-90s D&D culture, BioWare's writing style is still pretty close to what it was in the originals, and it evokes the Forgotten Realms setting as it existed at the time. NWN vanilla doesn't impress me that much, but once it hits its stride in Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark, I'd argue you do get something that's visibly kin to BG2.

From what I've heard, if one is interested in something more authentically in the style of Baldur's Gate, the Owlcat Pathfinder games are much closer, both in mechanics and in terms of writing?

To change subject somewhat...

I count myself a Dragon Age fan, but I'm definitely put off by everything I see in Veilguard. As it is, I loved Origins and Awakening, though 2 had a handful of interesting ideas but ultimately was an unsuccessful game and laid the groundwork for the series' pivot away from Origins' style, and then Inquisition had its share of good moments, but was definitely a game at war with its own design. I can imagine rescuing 2, and I can imagine splitting Inquisition into two different games, both of which might be good on their own merits but which do not successfully fuse, but neither of them ultimately work as a whole. More concerningly, I'd say that Inquisition, despite some superficial similiarities, is a different genre to Origins, and then Veilguard seems to have reinvented itself yet again. I find it a bit hard to talk about Dragon Age as a series - I'd argue that Origins/Awakening essentially take place in their own little continuity, and they work best as a stand-alone game like Jade Empire. Inquisition refers to things from Origins sometimes, but it's clear that it's not the same world.

To me, Veilguard looks like a passable action-adventure, plus some cringeworthy woke scenes that everyone is fixated on, but one that has nothing to do with any previous Dragon Age game beyond a couple of proper nouns. So I'm inclined to give it a miss. I doubt it has much to offer a Dragon Age fan.

I played NWN.. back around when it came out, but I do remember being disappointed. Not sure why.

BG2, on the other hand..

I feel one can get used to almost any kind of graphics as long as it's not 320x240. Young people have no idea what they're missing if they haven't played modded BG2+ToB. With the anti-cheese patches and stratagems(I think) it was an amazing game.

I still consider it the best Western RPG ever made, and if you have Pocket Plane and Gibberlings Three to upgrade it even further, it's very hard to match. There are some other competitors, but it's definitely up there in the top few. It's right in the middle of Shamus Young's Golden Age of PC Gaming (though I'd expand it to all gaming) - there was a sweet spot there, around 1998-2002 or so, which reminds me of Alan Jacobs talking about moments in time that bring particular arts to a height. There was the right balance between enablement and resistance for digital creativity to flourish.

Is this just nostalgia for when I was a teen? Perhaps. You can certainly point to a lot of excellent games outside of the 1998-2002 period, or perhaps 1997-2004, or however widely we cast the net. But I feel like there's something to it, because that period did birth a number of masterpieces, many of which have had sequels or revisits that try to capture the magic, and fail. Final Fantasy VII in 1997, Starcraft in 1998, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1998, Age of Empires II in 1999, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri in 1999, Baldur's Gate II in 2000, Deus Ex in 2000, Diablo II in 2000, Grand Theft Auto III in 2001, Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001, and so on. I could easily go on! I choose these titles because they've all had modern sequels - FFVII remake, Starcraft II, all the Zelda sequels, Age of Empires IV, Civilization: Beyond Earth, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Diablo III and IV, GTA IV and V, the entire Halo series up to now, and so on, and while the new generation is definitely much more technologically advanced, it's hard to look at what we have now and see the same kind of inspiration. Several of these games have had a lot of spiritual successors. Dragon Age: Origins was a spiritual sequel to Baldur's Gate, and of course Baldur's Gate III now exists, but while they may be good in their own right (DA:O was great, no comment on BG3), I think it's safe to say that none of them are BG2 levels of good.

Am I being unfair or just cherry-picking the best games of that period, or was it a real creative peak?

No, you're not cherrypicking.

It was the golden period when game devs were still making games for people like them-not insulting the intelligence of players, but they had much bigger budgets because gaming was expanding towards the dimmer types.

It is as simple as that. Excellent games still do get made - e.g. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri has an almost worthy successors - but they never get a lot of attention because AAA is kinda dumb now. Word of mouth only. I recommend watching Sseth's videos - he reviews a lot of such.

I still consider it the best Western RPG ever made,

By Hordes of the Underdark it got to the level I'd consider "good", before that it was at most tolerable. There are mods that BTFO anything released by the studio.

Sorry, to be clear, I consider BG2 the best RPG.

NWN is a fantastic toolbox, and SoU and especially HotU are good, but I don't think the official NWN reaches the high levels of BG2. (BG1 is... interesting. I think vanilla BG1 doesn't measure up, but modded BG1 does become almost a match for its sequel. If you have Tutu and a number of the NPC mods, I think BG1 becomes a very respectable companion piece to its sequel.)

I agree entirely that NWN has some amazing modules and adventures that beat out anything the studio published.

Do you really prefer RTwP over turn-based? I’ll grant that it works well in Faster Than Light (and is preferable to the singularly shitty turn-based implementation in Fallout Tactics, which runs both options), but for the most part, the good games that have it are good in spite of it.

I'm a firm supporter of RTwP over pure turn-based, at least in isometric RPGs like this. RTwP allows me to set the pace of combat as appropriate to the challenge - minor threats can be bowled over without even pausing, more serious threats require a bit of pause and tactical decision-making, and serious threats might become effectively turn-based. It's a gearshift for tactical combat, so to speak? Going from RTwP to purely turn-based, to me, feels like being stuck in first gear for the entire game, even when I want to go faster.

I prefer RTwP over TB, simply because TB is too slow. Trash fights aren't bad by themselves, but with TB they become a slog. The designers that get rid of trash fights are often tempted to create massive fights instead, and I get tired of having only massive fights, even if they are actually low-stakes.

I prefer RTwP over TB, simply because TB is too slow.

I've never been able to play RTWP as quickly as a well-designed turn based game.

I tried Pillars of Eternity, and the disconnect between my (intended) commands and the characters' (attempted) actions drove me up the wall1. I had to constantly monitor my characters to make sure that they didn't interpret "approach that enemy, then attack it" as "try to approach that enemy, notice that the direct path to the enemy has become blocked, circle around the entire battlefield, then attack it if you survived the detour".

If I wanted to change tactics, I had to review each character to see what their current WIP action is (if it's even possible), recall which commands have been carried out vs. queued vs. failed, determine the bearing, speed, and timing of all units if I'm planning on an AoE, then set the new command.

Contrast that to Divinity Original Sin, where if I commanded something, it happened, monitoring events is baked in, changing tactics is literally free (continuing them costs something instead), and actions are almost as fast as I can hit the skill hotkeys and aim them.

(1) confusion and opportunity attacks are perfectly decent ways to break the link between my commands and their actions. Bad UI and AI isn't.

Turn based is always slower in Larian games than RtwP is in Dragon Age/Pillars/etc because even if you have StarCraft level APM, everything mapped to the keyboard, a full rotation for every character memorized and can therefore avoid spending five minutes a round looking at tooltips, you still have to wait an age for the enemy turns. Plus it just looks goofy; all RPG combat is an abstraction but it’s immersion breaking when my side stops attacking for a few minutes and stands there while we get walloped, then the same happens in reverse. It’s necessary in chess (and on the tabletop in general), but not in games.

I often prefer it, the reasons being that i find iterative turn based too slow and simple.

I've watched some video reviews, and the dialogue doesn't seem great but it could be cherry picking. Still, from what I've seen there is nothing like Dragon Age 2's Friendship/Rivalry system which was something I was hoping for. In fact it doesn't seem like you can have disagreements with companions up to the point of them leaving the party/etc. Again I haven't played but it looks like the Dragon Age subreddit is turning on the game now that people have had time to play. Lack of continuity seems to be the biggest strike against it. Inquisition and Trespasser especially provided a pretty epic setup for this game and even with 10 years to deliver it doesn't seem like Bioware really managed it. I doubt I'll play this one (or at least wait for a very deep discount) in spite of really loving the rest of the series. I'm finishing up Wrath of the Righteous at the moment and a second playthrough sounds more appealing than Veilguard.

Is there a recent AAA game you didn't enjoy?

Didn’t like the Ubisoft Avatar, didn’t like GOW Ragnarok, didn’t like Spider-Man (1 or 2). Didn’t really like BG3. Hated Zelda TOTK.

God of War reboot games

What "woke" dialogue was in God of War?

What "woke" dialogue was in God of War?

Probably referring to the 2022 game. There are a few token black characters and some humiliation rituals where female self-inserts are presented as badasses at the expense of Kratos.

and some humiliation rituals where female self-inserts are presented as badasses at the expense of Kratos.

Valkyries stomping on his face were mostly in the 2018 game.

Other than that Kratos interacts with like 8 women over the course of the whole game, not counting the wife flashbacks. 3 of them are the norns and 3 more are the valkyrie bosses. The dwarf is 'miring at him, Freya can only beat him when he's fighting with his left pinky, the norns are apparently a humiliation ritual because he doesn't kill them? The valkyries are the valkyrie bosses, they're only as humiliating as the player's skill lets them.

I don’t know about ‘woke’ (although various aspects of the culture, language, attitude towards vice, sin, sex, therapy, relationships and so on of people in this Norse mythology are seemingly identical to those of progressive game writers in 2010s and 2020s California). But certainly the affect, style, tone, seriousness, language and so on was pure Marvel Whedon CW-show quippiness.

I let myself get talked into getting Factorio: Space Age last week. I just got my space platform going. What do I have to look forward to now?

I have a group of themotte players with a server on steam, any interest in joining?

It's tempting, but I'm more of a solo player.

It's funny, I sent my space platform off to another planet just to see what would happen. Gave it a turret or two.... and it was smashed to shit and stranded when it got there. Oops! Built a new and better one, and then used it to fly to Valcanus. Just killed a few of the local megafauna there to open up some more resources and am having a blast after I got lots of basic necessities automated, along with some automated deliveries from my home planet like solar panels, accumulators and level 3 factories.

Can you post a screencap of what you guys are up to?

I got derailed spreadsheeting the new beacon mechanics before going right back to 8x8. Optimizing quality modules and simplifying nuclear has been fun too

add me on steam: https://s.team/p/dwg-vdjj/KQWDPRPP

I can stream the game for you if you are online in a bit.

Right now I am building a small factory on vulcanus, and someone else from themotte is building up our Nauvis base

Thanks! As an uncontacted Amazon rainforest pygmy I still don't have a steam account, but apparently there's some way to get a steam key if you bought the game directly? (Or just vice versa?)

Ya there should be some way, we are mostly hosting and communicating through steam

If you buy it on factorio.com (which goes through Humble) they let you generate a Steam key.

Thanks, that's how I bought both the game and expansion, to avoid them losing steam's 30% cut. Wonder how much Humble takes: when I first bought the game wube were still taking credit cards directly iirc.

The factory must continue to grow on other planets.

This is Diwali week here in North India. I had a fun time, people make sweets, light up thier houses, in my city, markets are lit up too. There are fireworks everywhere, people burst crackers. A lot of shopping gets done, the air starts cooling down. It marks winter here. People who are not wokring soul crushing white collar jobs in a metropolis get a week long holiday here on the week of diwali. You have diwali themed parties too where people wear kurta pyjamas and play poker whilst sloshed. Also my mothers birthday yesterday, i gifted her some clothes, we did not do much else as it was also diwali. Earlier my grandad and dad would go to city palace here as grandad was a part of the royal staff due to being a part of the former feudal system but stopped as my grandads 92 now and broke his femur in half 4 months ago so cant walk much.

Here is some food that I ate yesterday, potato curry with puris (deep fried whole wheat bread) and kheer (rice pudding). Kheer is my favourite food on the planet, it takes a little time to make but well worth it. The recipes have english captions.

I saw the fights last weekend where Max Holloway got flatlined completely. He had it coming, you cannot fight for so long with small gloves in the best weight division and take this many shots, no matter who you are, you will get kod. The other fights were not as fun, Rob's freak injury and Rakic being gunshy was not fun to watch. I have had a bit of a change of heart in terms of MMA, I don't find it as fun now. I have been following it for 8 years now, just not as exciting now. The CTE stuff and fighter pay is another part of it.

My shoulder feels a little wonky. I got a partial labrum tear on my right shoulder 5 months ago, no surgery needed. I joined the gym again for the first time and feel slight pain in my shoulder even though I used way lighter weights and aimed for like 20-25 reps. I think I should not to go to failure on my exercises otherwise this can get worse. Will work out tomorrow. I will avoid shrugs altogether and avoid reaching failure or even getting close to it. I was told to do daily rehab stuff that I have not done in over 4 months which was not smart, started the rehab stuff again.

There will be no polo this weekend. I have started listening to more trance music since I started Concerta. I really like the vibe of late 2000s melodic trance. I lay down on my bed and just listen to some music; it's very fun. Listening to music whilst walking or driving isn't as enjoyable as it is when you are in a relaxed environment. Would appreciate some recommendations for music, any kind really. Posted a tweet about recs on my twitter!

P.S. It is also Movember officially, do donate to men's charities. I used to think therapy and prostate cancer stuff was cringe till I attended a session last week and my grandad got cancer and beat in the span of one or two years without any harm. So if you can donate, please do, get tested for testicular and prostate cancer and help other dudes struggling

Here are some killer glitch hop tracks that were released just for movember cascade, [if you had'nt] (https://youtube.com/watch?v=14UjO4QzPfE) and mosaic

Reuters: Diwali celebrations hit air quality in New Delhi

New Delhi topped charts on Friday as the world's most polluted city after revellers defying a ban on firecrackers to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, helped drive air quality to hazardous levels.

Thick smog wreathed the Indian capital, shrouding the presidential palace in the central district and the surrounding gardens popular with joggers and cyclists, after Thursday's celebrations.

Local government officials have banned use of firecrackers during Diwali and the winter over the last few years, in line with Supreme Court directives, but have had difficulty enforcing the measure despite the threat of jail.

In New Jersey, the posting of celebratory swastikas by Indian immigrants is causing some confusion.

After the Montville Township Police Department received a few phone calls about swastika sightings in October, it posted on Facebook to explain why.

The reason? Diwali.

"With Diwali coming up this October, I want the residents and citizens to be aware that a common symbol of this holiday is a Diwali swastika," the Oct. 16 post read. "...This post is in light of our police department already fielding calls regarding people seeing this symbol on cars and houses. We are trying to eliminate any unwarranted hostility toward any person displaying this for their religious purposes."

Delhi smog is caused by the terrible industrial setup in India and people burning agricultural waste in punjab. Blaming diwali for smog is the same as blaming GTA games for shcool shooters. Fireworks are not healthy but the underlying cause is far far worse which is farmers in punjab and Indias abysmal living conditions.

Look up the river yamuna or ganges, like every Indian water body they get raw sewage dumped in them. This is also why Indiasn congregate to goa as literally every other water body is polluted to the point where it stinks from a mile away. Yamuna looks like its a free bubble bath due to the fucking foam.

Also swastikas are everywhere here lol, I helped paint some yesterday. It is a holy aryan symbol, just that euros and north americans cant use it.

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