Notices by simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 03:37:59 JST 
simsa03
Thanks. I tried exactly that a while back. Didn't work, so I stopped subscribing to that account. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 03:22:14 JST
simsa03
Didn't get it to work myself. -
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George Takei :verified: 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 (georgetakei@universeodon.com)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 01:00:28 JST 
George Takei :verified: 🏳️🌈🖖🏽
Oops...
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 03:18:29 JST
simsa03
"S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl" will be the second game, I guess, that I'll purchase at full-price and not at some discount. And it's not that I like these tedious tinker-and-resources-gathering/crafting/managing games. If I want chores, I'll clean my bathroom.
But like 20 years ago with "Half-Life 2", I'm a tourist who loves to wade through absurdly overdone landscapes, with weather effects and atmospheres so ridiculously overblown that you wouldn't even on drugs encounter them in real life. I just love strolling around looking, watching, gazing.. until I get shot by some AI generated villain.
("Half-Life Alyx" is another gorgeous visual experience with so many details and consistent "world building". It's just wonderful wandering around there and studying the debris, the fauna, the extraterrestrial impacts on the Odesa-styled City 17...)
Sadly, today's progress in computing powers (both for the CPU as the graphics cards) invites the industry to either remake old titels (to "freshen" them up visually) or publish new titles primarily with the emphasis on graphics and visual effects. Otherwise these titles have become pretty boring (with regard to story telling, game mechanics, loot system and such).
Not to mention the absurd length of such games. Remember when games like "Half Life, "Half Life 2" and others took about four hours for a decent playthrough? Now you can waste up to 60 hours to get only through tzhe main story line and various side quests. Ridiculous. Who has that kind of free time any more?
Anyway. I'm looking forward to "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl". Although to be released today, I'll give it two more months until the main bugs are fixed. And spend my time until then with "Tomb Raider" (the first game of the relaunch trilogy) which is still an amazingly consistent self-contained game; with "Half-Life: Alyx" (the PC mod version); and some others like "Far Cry 5" (very nice landscape), "Callisto Protocol" or "Dead Space", or the original "F.E.A.R." series
As an afterthought: I tried "Black Mesa" and "Black Mesa Blue Shift". Awful games. Look like Playmobil in overdrive. Shiny plastic surfaces, and the XEN world is such a terrible visualisation of somebody's bad mushroom trip... They overblew it on all accounts. Both games show in their "extraterrestrial" environment the deep influence "Dear Esther" seems to have had on game developing. But while the latter Indie game is a gem that too my knowledge first successfully used a "walking simulator" to engange the player in a trance like state (stunning graphics), the kids of the "Black Mesa" Remake teams took the visual ideas of "Dear Esther" and streched them all for the sake of mere bombast. Shock and Awe. (Never thought that Donald Rumsfeld would win even one battle.)
As a second afterthought and thereby returning to "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl": There is a whole genre of games built around the concept of a "zone" of some unknown influence through which "stalkers" move carefully in order to garner riches and avoid "anomalies". These idea rest on two templates.
One is the 1971 sci fi novel "Roadside Picnic" by the Soviet authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979 based his movie "Stalker" losely on that novel). Here the the topoi of the "zone" and the lone scout (called "stalker" after the Tarkovsky movie, I guess) were first introduced.
The other template has been the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 with its subsequent evacuation of the entire population due to radiation, the abandonment of the aerea, and the rewilding henceforth, with radiation givin the the rewilding its specific drift into the unexpected.
Both templates are ruminated again and again. And in their combination, the specifically otherworldly character of "Roadside Picnic", the strangeness of the aliens' visit and what it might mean what they left behind, is substituded with the survivalist theme of the nuclear power plant catastrophe of 1986. I'd love to see games in which the more miraculous aspect of "Roadside Picnic" plays a decisive role. Wonderment and fascination not because of sneaking skills and visual traumatisation of the player but because of the bafflement and wonder created by the story. A shock and awe not of Rumsfeldian liking.
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten #games #scifi #Strugatsky Tarkovsky #stalker #Chernobyl -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 02:15:14 JST
simsa03
A self-congratulating, piously acting nursing home, as I said. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Nov-2024 14:05:07 JST
simsa03
♪ Guy Davis, "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" (live) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boDyiHlCgGM
Great live version.
!listening -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Nov-2024 13:55:53 JST
simsa03
♪ Guy Davis, "Waiting on the Cards to Fall" (2000) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x24b1DK_8rA
!listening -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Nov-2024 03:27:10 JST
simsa03
Yes, more of those I subscribe to on Muskodon create a second presence on BS. Which is nice. Doesn't mean that BS gets more "entertaining" that way. To me, the main vibe of BS is that of a sanctimonious Protestantism, this politeness, the civility. Ever saw a rude joke on BS? I never did. But many life-venerating haikus instead. Gosh. Get a life, people. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Nov-2024 03:21:26 JST
simsa03
The nursing home of your mother-in-la is indeed very posh, with all th equipment and accessoires you mention. And I wish your mother-in-law nothing less than such good care. The one I'm working in (my second job aside from the dishwasher job in the restaurant) is not a bad one – people are fed, cleaned, taken care of medically, etc. – but entertainment and leisure activities are the relatives' business. And when I walk the fllor, pushing my trolley carts with dirty laundry and garbage, I meet a lot of old folks. The most pressing problem for most of them: Thre is simply nothing to do, no entertainment, nothing but their own demons. It's more obvious on the demnetia floor. Here you can hear old women (it's pretty much always old women) montonously scream. Feels to me like all the screams that couldn't be mouthed and tears that couldn't be shed when these women were four or five years old children, when everything was forced down their throats to be kept in silence, is now, at old age and no barrier of self-control, breaking out. So what I hear are not necessarily present day screams, hardships of today, what I hear are the screams of 80 years ago, only now coming up for air. Then, on the other floors, old women are tearing up, wailing, nursing staff rushing to get by in oder not to get involved. But even without such hardship, the boredom drives the people mental. And so they sit there, fed and apathetic, not even interested in the TV anymore. So, yes, it''s all nice in the nursing home, it could be far worse, but the people know. They will bore themselves to death. But apart form all these things: There are worse ways to spend one's last years. I'm looking forward to spend my last round in one of the nursing homes. The food isn''t that bad. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 17-Nov-2024 12:52:08 JST
simsa03
Yes, it's nice but also boring – at least to me, and I am an old guy too. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 17-Nov-2024 12:33:26 JST
simsa03
Only now did it occur to me that Bluesky with its nursing home atmosphere is a social media platform for old people. Nothing wrong with that but also not to everybody's liking. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 17-Nov-2024 11:23:38 JST
simsa03
♪ Bauhaus, "Bela Lugosi's Dead (The Hunger Mix)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN45PJOq4po
Gorgeous build-up.
!listening -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 16-Nov-2024 23:56:38 JST
simsa03
This sentence made my day. Thank you! -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 16-Nov-2024 23:54:04 JST
simsa03
Remember to set up contingency plans, first.
Swear, later.
These fuckers are about to hurt your daughter. -
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Saturday, 16-Nov-2024 13:16:28 JST 
tinydoctor
Any sufficiently enshittified social media platform is indistinguishable from television.
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten #enshittification #socialmedia #television with apologies to #arthurcclarke
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 16-Nov-2024 23:40:42 JST
simsa03
The will lick the hooves with all the faeces on them, because T "has a mandate". -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 16-Nov-2024 23:07:06 JST
simsa03
If it were not such an insult to the anti-war activists and groups in the former USSR, one should call him a vaccine refusnik. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 16-Nov-2024 08:24:02 JST
simsa03
Green politican, Vice Chancellor, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, and candidate for the chancellorship in February's election in Germany Robert Habeck somehow reminds me of Hugh Hefner and his Playmates. https://gnusocial.jp/attachment/ad1e24900b09deddaa9ff0aad75c38d16e364f48ca78a7aa0304942e12953254/view -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 15-Nov-2024 09:26:06 JST
simsa03
About 3 million people didn't turn out to vote, which gave T the advantage in the popular vote. For whatever reasons. But to be clear: Harris in 2024 got the same numer of votes as Obama in 2008 (against McCain), more than Obama in 2012 (against Romney), more than Hilary Clinton in 2016 (against T). She only lost in comparison to Biden's campaign of 2020 (Biden 81 million votes, Harris 69 million in 2024). So just stop fretting about a "weak" or underperforming campagain.¹ The Biden campaign and election in 2020 was a rare exception, an outlier, nothing that could be expected to repeat itself to be repeated. And T? In 2020 he won about 74 million votes, in 2024 about 74.5 million votes.² So what makes people think Harris should have won? She did very fine.
Due to their panic about the upcomung fascist regime in the US people think that voters should have turned out in far larger numbers for Harris. But they did not. Or rather: They did, but not in the numbers pundits were expecting. If people want to blame a voting group at all, they may single out Latino women and men.Although Harris won a slice of the Latino women cohort, the Latino men strongly went to T.³
So people should keep two things in mind:
The election results for Harris as for T are no outlier, nothing exceptional, but average.
And give the "usual" numbers of ballots, voters in the U.S. opted for the not directly fascist but autocratic regime they'll now get. That's the way elections go. It went the same way with Hitler in 1933. Democracy at times allows to vote people into office who are determined to abolish the system. But to prevent that from happening you either need a tremendous voter turnout (like Biden's in 2020) or a benevolent dictaorship. Neither is probable nor rational, esp. with the Big Tent coalition of the Dems.
¹ https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-millions-voters-kamala-harris-trump-election-1981954
² https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/09/politics/donald-trump-election-what-matters/index.html
³ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/06/election-trump-harris-women-voters
(Image taken from source 1) https://gnusocial.jp/attachment/3b4c68a91bd3d1af3e6656af28b27972311719978ae62249f1aade950185591a/view -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 11:31:04 JST
simsa03
@tinydoctor
Paul Klee's "Angels" https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=f3c126b7a3ab2fdd&q=paul+klee+engel&udm=2&fbs=AEQNm0A6bwEop21ehxKWq5cj-cHa02QUie7apaStVTrDAEoT1FdmHTSMJP_rxgj2yFrTtBmpH5717yOBhIkqKOw9aJq6Z2qGmZszaWknzPsK10CtUKr1AqP8nMZF3T3kH9qbKKqrAltHUde54fzad6gnfc5qyhJAFs89fg0iwAxcCUpacmdytB5HuAnYV7ri2SUrnIzWa_ykJ9hvskM1FdD6Q9nmXLOrWw&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi848a249qJAxX1_7sIHVM4C-oQtKgLegQICRAB&biw=1524&bih=720&dpr=1.26
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