In the last week, I have seen two videos of groups of men punching and puting to flight TCC officers. And one video that supposedly shows a TCC office going up in flames. Previously, this stuff was rare; you'd usually see mainly women shoving and berating the TCC pressgangs, and obviously the guys being kidnapped trying to escape. The TCC wasn't getting attacked though, that seems new.
trompete
joined 3 years ago
I would like a row of sittings ducks please.
Best I can do are sitting duck related meetings with expensive consultants.
Perfect!
But that's what I'm asking. Assuming the quote is correct, and he really did say a decision has been made to create a security zone and they're currently solving this problem, what does that mean?
Security zone is vague af (which I guess is the point), but people have been speculating about quite a large area potentially. Something about getting Moscow out StormShadow range, everything east of the Dnieper, stuff like that. And whatever forces crossed into Sumi chasing the Ukrainians out of Kursk, that'll not be enough to achieve that. So must be an offensive, am I wrong? They would not announce this before starting, so they would have started already. It's also about time for a spring/summer offensive, assuming they had one planned. Supposedly they built up two new armies.
But who knows I guess we'll see in the next few days.
Did Putin just announce an offensive to take half of Ukraine?
Ok, I have another one. Radi ("Rettich"), which is long white radish and quite big. It tastes similar to the small red round radishes.
You cut it into an accordion-like strip, salt the insides lots, then wait at least 20 minutes while it weeps. You then rip off bits with your hands, squeeze some of the salty liquid out, and eat it with a buttered pretzel or bread in a beer garden, as Brotzeit ("bread time", basically an irregular snack pause between meals), or for dinner.
Kohlrabi is also really good just eaten raw with some bread and cold cuts. You need to cut the outer gummy-like parts off. It's nice and crunchy and subtly spicy not unlike mustard somehow.
When I was a kid, my mom used to boil (or steam?) Kohlrabi and then serve it with a creamy dill sauce. I hated it. All the crunchiness is gone, the spiciness is gone, there's only a hint of Kohlrabi left. It's like she somehow managed make the water it was cooked in into a gel-like solid.
Man I have never even heard of any of these, the vegetables in the shops here suck.
Having said that, we have a fairly common one here that I think might not be that well known internationally, called Wirsing (pronounced like "were-sing" or "were-jing", think werewolf), apparently it is called savoy cabbage in English. It's a big round head with big leaves like white cabbage, but they're green and wrinkly. In my opinion the taste and texture is a bit like kale, but I haven't had that much kale tbh. Kale is common in the north of Germany but not here in the south.
Wirsing is not my favorite, but maybe it's niche? Anyway, it's not eaten raw, it's blanched (for e.g. a salad), steamed or put into a stew.
The Bavarian Cookbook* has this basic recipe for a steamed Wirsing, which I assume is lifted from the French somehow (CW: meat and butter are optional, but they're mentioned in this recipe):
- 1 kg savoy cabbage
- (optionally) salt water for blanching
- 30 g oil, or optionally bacon, cubed
- a half onion
- salt
- 250 ml liquid [it just says "liquid", by which they mean pretty much anything: water, stock, even wine; I have seen milk, but probably best to dilute and add the milk later so it doesn't burn]
- (optionally) 20 g of flour as a "dough-ling" [unsure about that one, I assume they mean mix the flour with some water, probably like a starch slurry], or with 20 g butter as a beurre manié [1:1 flour and butter kneaded together]
- a little bit of nutmeg
- (optionally) 10 g butter
Wash, remove stalk and very large ribs. Cut into eighths and then into wide strips. Optionally, for old Wirsing, blanch in salt water [I think this is to remove bitterness]. Fry onion in oil or use rendered bacon. Add salt, Wirsing, and only a little bit of liquid. Cover with lid and let steam on moderate heat until soft, add a bit more liquid when necessary. The cooked Wirsing can optionally be thickened using flour "dough-ling" or a beurre manié, bring to a short boil while stirring lightly [this is to get the flour taste out]. Add a little nutmeg, add salt and seasoning to taste, optionally improve using butter or fried bacon cubes. Cooking time about 45 minutes.
* Some background about this cookbook from German Wikipedia, which I think is interesting:
The book's predecessor was the cookbook published in 1910 by the Bavarian Association for Economic Women's Schools in the Countryside for young women and home economics teachers for “utilization in itinerant cooking courses” at the Miesbach Economic Women's School, which was founded in 1903. These itinerant cooking courses were held in winter when work in the fields was at a standstill. The Miesbach itinerant teachers, often so-called higher daughters, came to the villages with mobile cooking equipment and taught cooking and home economics.
Some Ukrainian officer explaining that their drone operators are getting hit more and more:
transcript
The second thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is that I’ve felt that the Russians have learned to counter our drone systems, and I’m seriously concerned about this, because in the past few days—the past few weeks, I’ve seen a lot of signs of this, when I see that the number of losses among our drone pilots has increased. Are these ambushes? These are complex measures, unfortunately. And I’ve been thinking about how we need to resist, yes—what we need to do to reduce this impact, because earlier it was only guided bombs, and now it’s “Molniya”, it’s fiber optics, it’s operations with many methods of attack and winged shoot-downs. This story—they're working on a broad scale.
And it really troubles me internally, because I keep thinking about what I can do here to improve the situation over there—to reduce this gap between Kyiv and the front line. That’s the main thing.
And the losses really, if we’re speaking about the brigades specifically, have skyrocketed. They’ve skyrocketed just over the last couple of weeks. We were also just recently at one of the brigades. This happens constantly—you might spend two hours with a brigade and you get the message that there are “200s”, there are “300s”, and of course, this greatly, greatly affects both what’s happening on the front and the overall condition of our military.
What I see now is—they’ve learned to counter our UAVs, and their success is getting better and better, unfortunately, and this is happening in several directions. First, it’s situational awareness on the battlefield. Second, it’s targeting the positions they detect—they’re striking identified positions. I’ve even heard in some brigades—“Let’s change our shifts not every three or six hours, but let’s stay on rotation for a month and then rotate out,” because today, the act of repositioning is very difficult and has deep consequences, including from the effects of the Russian enemy.
Again—three months ago they worked only with guided bombs. Now they’re using both “Molniya” and guided bombs, and now there’s fiber optics that were working three months ago in the Kursk direction, and now they’ve moved—to Kurakhove, to the Kostyantynivka area, and to Pokrovsk.
Three months ago there was no fiber optics at all in Pokrovsk. Two months ago there were just isolated strands hanging somewhere in Pokrovsk, and now—it’s daily operations—again, daily operations. And this is the problem that—I keep thinking about it constantly, and it’s more important to me than the Istanbul track, Ankara... and from what I understand, they’ve basically created an equivalent of our drone forces—that is, a separate branch of troops that focuses solely on countering drones. And in my view, we really, really need to consider—just like we have counter-battery units in artillery, we need counter-UAV units, positions that handle that, because their drones are taking out a major part of our armed forces—honestly.
And we don’t have a separate structure in our armed forces that works against drones on their side. There are specific initiatives at the level of individual units, some companies or battalions—but it’s not a systematic effort.
Return of the Obra Dinn, UFO 50
Civ 6 works ok on Steam Deck if you turn down the graphics (make the leaders into static pictures especially) and take some time to configure the inputs.
Most emulators are free software and work on Linux and have worked for a long time. As Android and Raspberry Pis have become quite popular as emulation systems, the free software emulators, which are easily portable to these ARM+Linux system, have taken off as the most popular emulators in general. Anything that's also available on Android or RetroPie will work on Linux for sure. There's an emulator for every popular console that works on Linux about as well as it does on Windows.
DOS games you can run in DOSbox. Pretty sure compatibility is 100%. This is also how e.g. GOG makes these games run on Windows, because modern Windows can't run these games either without emulation.
As for old Windows games, it is worth trying Wine, the Windows compatibly layer. Volunteers have successfully been trying to get games (especially games actually!) to run on Linux since the 90s. Twenty-something years ago I was gaming on Linux playing Starcraft, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 and god knows what. Anecdotally, some old Windows games that no longer run on Windows will work fine in Wine. A prominent example is The Sims 2. There's a video out there of some millennial Sims streamer and housewife instructing her thousands of viewers on how to install Linux in order to get that game to run better.
Steam comes with a version of Wine, called Proton, so 90%+ percent of games on Steam run somewhere between fine and perfectly fine. Not everything though, you should check on protondb.com.
Playing in a VM is a terrible idea btw, the performance will suck. You don't need to and don't want to do that.
They are either trying to be an independent imperialist power, or they're just doing the US empire's bidding. Either way it's imperialism. If you believe their insane plans will actually manifest (I doubt it), their goal is to be able to win the next round of war in eastern Europe. Clearly they're not winning this round, so wherever the front settles, they want to be able to do re-match in couple of years.
Something like that. I don't believe the universe is a simulation, but as a hobby programmer, a sort of mechanical or computational model of the how the universe works appeals to me.
Then you have the idea that gravity may be an emergent statistical phenomenon, which is true for many things (e.g. thermodynamics) and I think a fairly common thought that many people have. Then the idea that, maybe, if you assume local time slowdown, the gravitational attraction force might be derivable from that somehow, due to stuff getting stuck in the slow regions of space. As I "understand" (which I don't really), in general relativity, the gravitational "force" is just some emergent property of the the curvature of spacetime. So maybe spacetime gets curved by some local computational limit of the universe?