SunlitZelkova

TIL that even in the midst of rising Cold War tensions in the late 1940s, ZIS received a license to build GM's Old Look bus and their engines. It was designated ZIS-154 and had reliability issues.

Animation tends to get a much more free pass, probably for the following reasons. 1. It's target audience is kids, which probably don't require the same level of subliminal stuff/"fine tuning" (read: interference from suits) as live action shows for adults do, so the creators get more freedom. 2. Animation is a much more drawn out process, you have the script and some storyboards and that's it. You have your voice actors record and... it's done. From then on you're animating around the audio they produced. There's no room to make last minute changes or meddle in the middle of production, which is what tends to kill shows. It's also harder for them to meddle during editing. Another reason The Bad Batch probably did well is because it was handicapped by a heavy merch presence. If it was as marketable in that way as The Mandalorian, you'd see a lot more interference from suits in order to put in scenes to help sell merchandise. Mando S3 was basically a giant advert for Grogu plushies. I'd like to believe that if the show's creators had their way, S2 would have been the end and we wouldn't see Grogu again until the Mandoverse movie that's rumored to show how Palpatine returned. Or S3 would have focused on Mando by himself and dug more into what the post-Empire world is like without him being handicapped by the kid.

I’ve realized I don’t enjoy my project of researching modern orders of battle of militaries anymore. I’ve been this a lot lately. Examining hobbies, subjects I’m interested in, entities I follow on social media, etc., and realizing I’m either super interested in it or it doesn’t bring me joy. And in the case of the latter I then stop. It feels really good! As someone in their 20s, I think it’s important to take a look at yourself every several years and think about who you are and what you love. Make sure you truly enjoy it in the moment, and are not just carrying on a routine. At least for me, routines might as well be chores. Chores just create stress. I’m taking what I do in my leisure time very seriously because I’ll be heading to university later this year. In the past I spent a lot of time doing random stuff and then getting bored, being left with a feeling of deep unsatisfaction. I don’t want to feel that there if I’m entering into an intense regime of studying and will only have maybe several hours to relax on the weekend.

Stuff going through hyperspace can still collide with other objects. It’s why special courses have to be plotted for traveling to different star systems (“calculate the jump”), instead of just going in a straight line there. It’s kinda unclear how long it takes to get there. In The Clone Wars show Anakin’s fleet jumped from the Outer Rim to Coruscant in “under an hour” while Luke & Co apparently took long enough from Tatooine to Alderaan that he become nominally able to use the force.

Part of the reason I'm interested in Soviet history is because I see a lot of parallels between then and present day society. The way you guys talk about it, "profit" sounds like the present day's equivalent to "quota" in the Soviet economic system. Whether maximizing profit or meeting/exceeding the production quota, both are achieved with the sacrifice of quality and ethics.

I've had nuclear anxiety for almost half my life. It's on and off. I sometimes find myself having otherwise gone about my day just fine, only to frown because something triggered me and I realize the world is careening towards a disaster that will kill billions. I look at people on the street and (living in a well off part of the US) marvel at how happy and oblivious they are, and then am overcome by thoughts of the suffering they may have in store for them in the future. It makes me so upset at the people in charge and the wider population who don't speak up over the direction the world is taking. Sometimes I have a thought that it would be better not to think about it if I can't have an impact anyways, but that's the kind of thing that lets the problem drag on. So instead I end up... embracing it? One coping mechanism is to read Fallout lore and listen to a little playlist of 40s and 50s music I have on my phone. I just drop concern for the individual livelihoods of other human beings (which really isn't my business anyways. I'd hate to have someone telling me how to "live long and prosper") and instead treat it like a... historical research project? Living in a movie? Living in some sort of Fallout game set in the pre-war era? I don't go crying and fretting over every homeless person in the city so why would I do so in the event of nuclear catastrophe? I see Fallout and all the hubris that destroyed that world, and see it here too. There's even the enthusiasm for science and tech without limits too. I guess my subconscious thinking then goes like this: Fallout = kinda like real life*, Fallout = cool, so real life = cool? And then I just listen to that music and enjoy reading news about political developments or new advances in science, awaiting for it to all (possibly) end in some pretty explosions. Yes, pretty. Because if people find storms beautiful in art, and tsunamis and typhoons inspire awe and respect for nature, I don't see why nuclear war wouldn't inspire awe and respect for the power of humankind. Even if it is destructive towards people, just as storms are destructive towards other living things. *IMO of course. Idk. Sometimes the way to deal with a feeling of nigh-divine, near-natural-disaster-like doom is to embrace what causes it. Granted, I am spiritual and probably don't worry as much about ensuring my own physical existence than the average person. So from a certain point of view, I can joke and trivialize disaster without feeling like I'm allowing myself to fall into danger, because I feel I never truly am in danger. And as for other people? That's their problem, and rightly so. I for one would not want someone constantly instructing me on how I "need" to ensure my own safety and happiness, at least when it comes to big, abstract concepts of security ("world peace", etc.) that don't pertain to immediate physical safety. I could go on but I'd be rambling more than I already have. I hope this isn't political, I didn't think it was after reading it over.

In their defence, the question of why someone didn't build an unmanned or droid piloted X-Wing sized hyperdrive missile always existed in Star Wars, even without that scene. It just took this movie to bring the matter up in popular discussion.

I wasn’t interested enough to watch at all, and the first episode wasn’t too interesting but after I got to two a couple days later I watched all the way to the latest episode (5) in one sitting. It’s not astoundingly great but it’s good, IMO. Much better than the sequels anyhow. The reaction to it on r/prequelmemes is pretty funny. For a long time those guys were pretty loud in asking for High Republic content and the moment it hit it turned into a poopstorm over the tiniest things. Then there were people complaining about the complainers, and complainers about the complainers about the complainers. Star Wars has always been political. Empire vs. Rebellion was an allegory for the Vietnam War (or what George thought about it anyway). The prequels opened the door to a little more “greyness” in the way the franchise approached politics, because you have the Republic fighting against the tyrannical Confederacy, but in the end it just results in it becoming the Empire. The Clone Wars animated series wasn’t really able to touch on this because it was limited by the good guy vs. bad guy Saturday morning cartoon format, but Andor has kind of touched on it. But even then, Luke believing there was good in his father and him turning on the Emperor in the end is (a very tiny) degree of greyness in the OT, rather than black and white evil. (Although that probably wasn’t what George intended originally, but that’s a topic for another time) I agree it often seems like they don’t care about the story. I think part of why there a lot of prequel fans nowadays is because even though the dialogue wasn’t great, it had a coherent story crafted by one man. Contrast this with the sequels, which were basically written by playing the telephone game between JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson. And most of the D+ shows. Rumor has it those are often written by committee, which is never a recipe for success.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a real thing they trained to do. I recall seeing a member of the Matrix Games forum with a quote from some US Army document consisting of interviews of German officers on what to expect when fighting the Soviets. This is a paraphrase, but some German officer basically said some Soviet unit had a hard time trying to cross a river during the day due to the weather. They tried again at night, and the German scouts observing it reported hearing marching music playing as the enemy attempted to ford the obstacle. It's not much, but I myself can attest to the power of a good march. During 2018 when I was going through a mental crisis, the marching renditions of "We need a victory" and "Upon a nameless hill" immensely helped me slog through the day. I still hum marches when the going gets tough fighting Leopard 1s in the T-62 in War Thunder lol. Only the Soviet stuff though. I never found American, British, or Japanese marches particularly inspiring on a human level, although they are still decent tunes. EDIT- Oh, and "Sluzhit' rossii", that's a good one too.

Another way is if you lower the context of "all knowing." For example, it would probably be pretty easy to make an AI that is "all knowing"... when it comes to folding clean clothes. I've struggled with the all-knowing being trope and concluded it isn't possible to express with the means available to our physical bodies. Because the only way we can write about it is as if it is a being loosely akin to animals on Earth; regardless of whether the being is immortal or omniscient it is basically just an Earth animal with superpowers. But being an Earth animal involves giving up a certain degree of knowledge. You accept you don't know things and thus interact with the world to gain them, whether it be talking to the mortal who discovers you or reaching into the temporal world and playing god. Thus if a truly all knowing being/life form exists, we could never know it. At least not in its all knowing form. Only in an illusory, lesser form adapted to basically mess with humans. A Cosmic Joker if you will.

It was Saturday, but I rode the train to Seattle and back to Portland on a day trip. And near the Tacoma Dome, I saw a very peculiar piece of graffiti on a distant railway bridge (one used for freight). RIP SERGEI PAVLOVICH FLY HIGH As expected of such an economically STEM focused region Even the delinquents know about space history. So as I’m typing this I had a thought. Is there ever an instance when one kid is exposed to a certain subject in childhood and goes into the exact opposite field as an adult, while another child goes vice versa? The three years I was in Bellevue were very formative, and it’s where I got interested in aviation. Yet I’m most certainly gonna end up in humanities. Although, my case doesn’t count probably, because life taking a bad turn and a mental disorder prevented me from ever being to study hard in math and science.

It would be very interesting to find out when this change took place, and why. I also wonder if it actually happened at all. The three things shown in that picture, Legos, what looks like a mobile suit type plastic model, and an action figure, are questionable as toys. Lego could pass as an artistic form of plastic model (indeed when I restarted buying Lego Star Wars, initially I justified it due to a “lack of plastic models about Star Wars” because I was still felt I needed to be publicly beholden to the popular complex that Legos are for kids), while plastic models are made by people of all ages and the action figures adults often buy are so detailed and expensive it’s questionable if they are toys or just premade models. In addition, even if the product is also played with by children, it doesn’t mean adults can’t do it too. No one talks about the NBA as “adults playing a schoolyard pastime and people cheering them like little kids at an afterschool match.” I’d also be interested if there is any parallel between the rise of toy purchases from adults and the “de-nerdification”/main-streamization of comic book stories. I first heard of that particular phenomena in regards to the popularity of the MCU but maybe it goes as far back as the Nolan Batman trilogy.

I had a moral quagmire today about whether it's okay for me to have fun playing war themed video games. It was probably brought on by the last two weeks of intense study of modern day orders of battle and potential conflicts. Topped off with scrolling the "For You" section of Twitter for the first time. My conclusion is this: it's terrible, but hey, there are worse vices. Ones that physically harm you or even others. If it gives you dopamine every now and then *shrug* And here's another thing: I know so much more about history and politics now than I did before getting into war themed play (starting with little paper planes I made and leading to video games). Stuff about those two subjects that make me a far more informed person than I might have been had I not gotten into that kind of play. I think as much as this knowledge is terrible, I'm better off having it than not. I can make much more informed decisions in society and be more aware of what's going on in the world. So I'm going to continue playing war themed video games, despite often feeling awful about turning the end of the lives of thousands of men and women (whether real or hypothetical/fictional) into entertainment.

I was reading a book about psychology and the media and it talked about how if you sell something as being real, it can become real in the minds of those who see the video/movie/show/whatever. I think we often forget that history is just a story and TV shows are just made up. So people in countries that have fortunate winds upon them think the road their ancestors took to get there is the only way to keep things good, lose creativity, end up basically slamming their head into a wall over and over again when confronted with a new problem, and of course it doesn't work and the society in question collapses. Story becomes reality (law) and we lose creativity when it comes to problem solving. People see TV shows and think that what is depicted on TV is the only way to go about life. So people set unrealistically high expectations for relationships and can't keep up with the stress of... acting (wink wink)... in a certain way and eventually break up or divorce, or set high expectations for their own life (wanting daring adventures on yachts and snowmobiles, flings with pretty people, high physical fitness, eat delicious food, have satisfying job, etc.) and when it doesn't turn out that way they just become depressed and start making bad decisions. Looking at the mess of the world makes me think when it comes to the humanities, looking back on past ideas has more negative effects than positive ones. I wish people could forget about whatever happened in the past, identify the problems now, and make new solutions for them from a clean slate, without the sort of chains or binders that seem to shape people's behavior. And I wish people would look at TV shows, movies, advertising, and even music and go "okay, cool" and then ignore it and make their own decisions about what their values are and what they want to do in life. Unfortunately my wishes may not be realistic as learning from the prior generation may be the very way humans learn to live in the world, survive, and thrive. So every generation keeps making mistakes, and so does the next one, and then the next one, forever until the universe winks out of existence or the last malnourished human dies in 2978 or whenever humanity goes extinct. Oh, that actually leads me to an interesting question: what if human-level intelligence is a negative trait in a species? Humans often make fun of dinosaurs for lacking intelligence and thus being unable to prevent their extinction, but they lived for 135 million years and humans have been around for like 2-5 million tops. We are literally in the middle of a major extinction event we caused and we might not escape it. I guess we can't say for sure until the day all humans actually cease to exist.

My dad and I were talking about how he wants to buy an Insta360 (basically a GoPro but better) for when he rides his motorcycle, and then when I opened my phone 30 minutes later I was bombarded by Insta360 ads on Instagram, specifically for use with motorcycles... despite never having seen such an ad before and never searching for motorcycle related topics. There's definitely a privacy issue with phones and it has nothing to do with whether the apps come from the US or China. This century liquides me off sometimes.

No, but I think you are oversimplifying what it is. Each team spends years training to perfect what they do and it is, IMO, an art. That said, I don't know to what extent the average sports spectator appreciates this. Intense team rivalries likely originate in how many modern team sports were invented at Victorian schools, and later the advent of the railway allowed schools to reach and compete with each other more easily. So in that sense it originates in institutional competition. Capitalism also influences it to a great degree as team names become brands, and there is a competition to increase notoriety and prestige by winning more competitions. Of course, this was perhaps prevalent in the ancient times as well, as Greek Olympians' achievements were used as political capital by the different city-states. Exhilaration from watching sports can either come from enjoyment of the art of the game or enjoyment of one team bidding to dominate over another. A person doesn't like every single form of art on the Earth and not everyone enjoys cheering on the metaphorical mounting of one entity by another. So I'd say there is nothing wrong with you. Being in the minority is not a negative attribute. Of course, humans are social animals, and therefore if they feel they aren't properly engaging with other humans, they will instinctively doubt themselves to try and get on the "correct" course, because fitting in is (was) necessary for survival. So your feelings can't be helped.

Save it for retirement. EDIT- okay, set aside some for continually upgrading my computer as necessary, but then save the rest for retirement.

Ah, the romance of interwar aviation!

The Beagle.

@ColdJ I agree with all the points in your response. Just one thing though. I think this is subjective. There are wealthy people who are happy are people who lack material possessions that are happy, and wealthy people who are depressed and people who lack material possessions who are depressed. That said, I think the key thing is allowing everyone to have happiness. Amassing wealth involves keeping it away from others, so regardless of whether the wealthy person is happy or not, theoretically, I’d say people on average would be more happy if we dropped notions of mine and thine and worked together. Emphasis on theoretically because realistically I think there’s all those very hard behavioral issues I mentioned earlier preventing humans from becoming cooperative and altruistic enough to realize such a society.

Thanks for the correction, I wasn't aware of that. I think my point still stands that there are other factors in why modern hunter-gatherers aren't seen engaging with big predators often, yet those cultural traits I mentioned still existed even when they did. People in North America were practicing hunting/gathering long before Europeans arrived. We know this from their oral histories. Farming occurred to some degree with crops like maize. But many chose just to hunt and gather. We know they did try to form a city at one point now known as Cahokia, but it was then abandoned. This makes me think there was a conscious decision not to farm too much or live in large groupings, making the nature of how societies form a cultural factor rather than one defined by material conditions. I guess we could say culture is defined by material conditions, but that makes me wonder why places like Nebelivka didn't develop into kingdoms/empires with social hierarchy, because Europe ostensibly had the conditions to support the maintenance and growth of the city indefinitely.

The San people are at least 20,000 years old. Their historical range spans much of southern Africa, where numerous predators live. The reason we don't really see them battling lions and leopards is likely because they were forced off their land by European colonial officials. I'm pretty sure it's incorrect that prehistoric people deliberately left animal populations to recover. After all, in the Americas they hunted large mammals like mastodons and giant sloths to extinction. That said, I don't have direct evidence to back it up. Hmm, the only thing I question about this is why empires didn't arise in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, when the aforementioned Tualatin Kalapuya people who used to live where I now am lived seasonally in (albeit) permanent structures made of cedar wood. Further up north of course the tribes in Washington had their longhouses. Tribes in both Oregon and Washington would catch salmon, process it, and then store it, but due to their culture of providing basic needs for each other, theft was not as common as in Europe. On the other hand, fishing and smoking or drying salmon was a labor intensive process. But the chiefs in Washington and British Columbia had no real political power over the wider populace, because the average person understood that another person had no real right or ability to order them around. They did not possess an army or police force and thus couldn't force people that way either. What the chiefs were able to convince others to do was go out and capture slaves to do the processing and fishing for the tribe. However, the chief was not a king or emperor in the same way as seen in Europe. An off hand, off the top of my head speculation would be that European and Middle Eastern religions often resulted in strongmen being able to claim they derived their power from god, whereas such ideas were rare in North America (at least what became Canada and the US). Which is to say that... ...so yeah, I think there is a sort of tyranny of history and empire that dooms us as I said in the post before this. But I'm replying just to clarify I personally believe it is cultural rather than decided by material conditions. I'm sure there's arguments that point to the latter though too. I agree, but I think it not just invalidates attempts to look at history in a new way, but also ways of looking at history that are biased, but so embedded in daily life and culture we might not realize they were. So really we can just make it up. Then it comes down to whether humans have the actual power to make choices or are dominated by limitations upon their cognitive capability and/or material factors (being limited by instinct). That biological/psychological question I mentioned. I know the rest of your reply wasn't meant for me but I thought I'd comment. Another thing I'd mention is how vicious children can be toward living things. I recall hanging out with my mom while she babysat two three year olds one day, and we found a caterpillar while we were out on a walk. I was looking at it in wonder and was horrified when one of them crushed it, while smiling and laughing. That memory left a strong impression on me. I feel like this sort of belief is only possible through religious or pseudo-religious belief. Because realistically all of the humans are subject to the cycle of suffering he and I described, so none of them can escape it. This brings me to a notion of Philip K. Dick's. He believed to defeat the "Empire" is to become it. So even if you overthrow whatever system or individual is causing suffering, due to the limitations of living in this entropic world, you're probably gonna end up doing a lot of the same stuff the old ruler did. He said this both as a critique of nations and religions, and the inability to overcome this problem led to a major existential crisis in his final few years. The only way the good shepherd theory works within this "agency-denying model" is if this shepherd is somehow more than human (or not human at all). Which, however, people aren't unlikely to believe, at least from my POV. But I think a good shepherd coming along is just another would be (or future) king/emperor. Whether someone believes there is a good shepherd while adhering to the agency-denying model or not is a test of whether they can mentally step away from the fervor of desire for change at any cost or are simply part of the large group of humans who are "taught and indoctrinated before they are old enough to think for themselves." Because belief in good shepherds is kind of part of the bad behavior exhibited in human history that he and I are lamenting. It would be quite ironic to end up believing in a new one in the process of wishing the old ones had never come about.

Ads are how people fund stuff. It can't be helped in the way our economy works. Spying on people to "improve" their ads? That's what bugs me.

I spy a book about Soviet aviation in the Korean War.

I think this is an ugly train station but it matches the vibe of your city! Like in a good way, because a dirty city has a beauty of its own. I'm biased though because I live in Portland and once near Seattle, blessed with the gorgeous Union Station and King Street Station. Your project is really cool. And thanks for that info about how radio stations are named, I had no idea. EDIT- And I don't mean your drawing is ugly, I mean the source material is. The drawing is really good. Not a negative comment directed at you or your choices, just at the IRL architects.