ssjmarx

TRUE

Even streamers who I like in short doses like Hasan can't get through a fifteen minute edited video without saying the same thing five hundred times. It's suitable as background noise, but if I'm listening to a streamer I'd almost always be better off listening to music.

:flag-trans-pride: :uncle-ho-2:

It sucks but criticizing poor countries for their environmental record is often an excuse for rich countries to deny them any means to improve their situation. Unless those rich countries are willing to come in and pay to build and maintain a shit ton of renewable infrastructure, they don't have a leg to stand on.

He's gotta have some kind of Epstein-type agreement with the feds, right? Didn't he get in trouble in another country and get off easy there too?

I don't miss sex scenes, but I do miss romantic subplots. I think the latest generation of Hollywood reexamining all of the bad "romantic" tropes in movies fell short because while they did finally learn that damsels in distress and trophy characters were bad, they failed to come up with something to replace them with, and now every male-female dynamic in pop films is either a preestablished relationship or something seemingly completely platonic (and in some cases it's both, like in Iron Man where he has no sexual tension with his assistant outside of a couple snarky asides but then they apparently get married and have a daughter in between films).

People leave their country for a million reasons, but every person who left the Soviet Union got lit up by the propaganda machine so we tend to think that way more people did it than actually did. The Soviets themselves put rules in place to try and prevent certain high-value people from leaving, like nuclear engineers, and this created a lot of friction between a certain class of professional and the state - but taken as a whole Soviet emigration wasn't much different than, say, American emigration today.

edit: East Germany is a different story, along with German-speaking minorities being expelled from Eastern Europe after World War 2. With the power of hindsight I think it's safe to say that the East German authorities mishandled the situation and made things worse for a long time before it stabilized, which is why 1/5 of East Germans left the country - but it did stabilize, with emigration dropping precipitously after 1953 with Stalin's death.

I spent all day reading about early suspensions on carriages and cars - it wasn't until the 16th century that they figured out you could make the ride smoother by suspending the body of a carriage with leather straps (as opposed to having it be attached directly to the frame), and it wasn't until the 19th that they figured out that you could make it even smoother with a leaf spring suspension. Leaf springs themselves actually date back to ancient times and can be made of metal or wood depending on what's available, so it's just a matter of applying them to a new purpose.

Depending on how far you get sent back, there's also a lot of very simple improvements you can make to wheels that were technologically possible for a long time before people thought to do it. Make wheels lighter by making them out of thin planks instead of an entire slice of tree trunk, stronger by reinforcing the rim with a metal band, more maneuverable by separating the axle into two sections. Inflatable tires are much harder, but people would use a solid band of rubber or cork around the outside of the wheel to accomplish the same thing before pneumatic tires were figured out.

If you're doing either of those things, then you're a stone's throw away from inventing a bicycle. Just a thought.

I've had this idea for ages about someone who goes back to like 1000 AD and tries to introduce germ theory, disinfecting surfaces and medical devices with alcohol, etc. The conflict comes from them having to overcome medieval institutions being resistant to change, starting with them naively writing a treatise on what is currently considered medical common sense but getting rebuked for apparently not knowing what they're talking about.

Naturally, the main character wears a cute version of a plague doctor outfit.

"ti" in Japanese is always pronounced "Tee", if they intended it to be pronounced like the word "tide" it would have been spelled "Taidus".

What's really gonna blow your brain is realizing that nobody in either game ever says his name, which implies that Yuna fell in love with a man whose name she didn't know :thinking-about-it:

The only reason they got popular was that they were playing popular Black music while being White, also let's talk about how Get Back was originally super racist.

Vonnegut had a lot of conflicting ideas, but identified as a socialist. I think he was in the somewhat confused vein of psuedo progressive we see today that is for lefty economics but is anti-political correctness, and the ease that Bergeron maps onto American antocommunist beliefs shows exactly where that particular strain of thought comes from.

I looked up the last one and yep, that Austrian guy was in the SS (and joined its predecessor group in 1933, helping Hitler get into power. No excuses for that POS).