I heard once that it gets so bad in November in large part due to farmers in Punjab and such clearing their fields by burning the dead crops on it, something like that. Is that true?

The stadium was only filled 1/8th of its capacity. Nonetheless, boos and jeers could be heard when the Israeli national anthem was being played.

Granted, I haven’t played it myself yet, but Mega Man Star Force 2 is that for a lot of fans of that series. The first game already got a lukewarm reception because of how it was simultaneously “just more Battle Network” and “not simply more Battle Network”, but it has a very heartfelt story and some people are turning around on it when they can judge it on its own merits instead of constant comparisons to Battle Network, which has better gameplay. It still sold a decent number of copies.

The second game basically killed whatever momentum the series had by then. The story got dumbed down significantly which made it feel even more like Battle Network (although it still has its moments), the space theme was lost to “lost civilisations” shenanigans that many fans weren’t interested in, the gameplay changes were meh and you frequently had to navigate through a maze-like “Sky Wave” with a too high encounter rate. Sales numbers were well below expectations.

The third game has the best gameplay by far and a story close to or as good as the first game, but the damage was already done. It sold the least of the three games. But at least the series ended on a high note with very few loose ends.

Had to throw a jab at China at the end of the video. Ugh… They wouldn’t even have been been lying about the surveillance cameras, but they just HAD to bring up “social credit scores”

Recall requires a computer that is compatible with Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot:

Only a small portion of the most recent laptops are “Copilot+ PCs”.

This means that for everyone else, this information is irrelevant. It will mostly impact business employess and higher-income dupes. Also…

“Total Recall”

“Zionismus über Alles”

• CEO of the right-wing Axel Springer media conglomerate in leaked messages

Apparent magnitude is a logarithmic scale, so 4.0 over 4.7 makes the Qianfan satellites 5x brighter than the 1st-gen Starlink satellites.

The researchers hope that by raising alarm early, they hope things can change for the better, like how SpaceX redesigned their satellites after public scrutiny. One of the mitigations is to just constantly point the shiny surface away from the surface. But it sucks that any legitimate and good-faith criticism gets hijacked by sinophobes.

The article actually spends the latter half talking about interference by Starlink and another American one, BlueBird, including in the radio wavelength. It’s really only the headline that’s problematic.

I wonder why these constellation satellites are always so bright. I never heard such things sabout other satellites, or is it just their large numbers that suddenly makes it a problem?

Notions like “the best defence is offence” and a preemptive/preventive war have existed for a long time, to be fair. It’s just that this isn’t the first time Israel or the US have pulled that card and it never worked. Hezbollah was founded the first time Israel invaded Lebanon ffs.

Even if it did work in this case, it would be short-sighted, as the injustice in Palestine would continue and it’s just a matter of time before things blow up again. “No justice, no peace” and all that.

Once again, that’s not what’s being said. She gets reprimanded in those cases.

Sometimes, there doesn’t appear to be any thought involved at all [in her outbursts of “dysregulation”], and when Margo reminds our daughter that it’s not okay to hit like that (“like that” meaning without consent), she looks genuinely startled, as if she has forgotten that we’ve ever talked about any of this. We do our best to respond calmly, to remind her that she has to ask before she hits. She knows that she can always get her boxing gloves and hit her bag if she needs to let off energy. We also model this for her by practicing martial arts in front of her, and demonstrating how we request and receive consent in that context.

That is not what’s going on. They teach her that violence is allowed only in rare cases, and not recklessly or disproportionately. Read the article, please.

As a young boy with bullies, being picked on, [Nic, the daughter’s father] was taught not to use martial arts until it was absolutely necessary. If an older kid was being physical with other kids and attempted to do so with him, he was able to respond appropriately and not preemptively. “Right time, right action,” Nic says. He saw situations where people around him got into conflict and reacted early with violence, and then they’d just end up fighting. Because even as a child, he knew where those boundaries were—the boundaries between circling and testing conflict, and outright physical aggression—and he was able to verbally deescalate confrontation. Because he wasn’t in a state of fear, he thinks, he was able to maintain a thoughtful process about situations as they unfolded.

With children, consent is a practice—they are literally practicing it, testing the boundaries of what happens when they violate it, checking to make sure it is reciprocal, feeling for all the edges. Sometimes, our kid hits Margo outside the space of permissioned rough play, with all the wild vigor of a still-forming human who cannot always control her urges, who occasionally wants to see what will happen if she just lets her body loose. She screws her face up and swings her arm around to deliver slaps, her tiny body moving so fast that it is difficult to grab hold of her wrists to stop her, like the gentle-parenting gurus Margo favors tend to recommend. This isn’t cruelty or anger, but dysregulation. Sometimes, there doesn’t appear to be any thought involved at all, and when Margo reminds our daughter that it’s not okay to hit like that (“like that” meaning without consent), she looks genuinely startled, as if she has forgotten that we’ve ever talked about any of this. We do our best to respond calmly, to remind her that she has to ask before she hits. She knows that she can always get her boxing gloves and hit her bag if she needs to let off energy. We also model this for her by practicing martial arts in front of her, and demonstrating how we request and receive consent in that context.

She does have boxing gloves, coincidentally, but only for hitting a punching bag “if she needs to let off energy”.

In his essay on Stalinism Koba the Dread, Martin Amis proposes that Lolita is an elaborate metaphor for the totalitarianism that destroyed the Russia of Nabokov’s childhood (though Nabokov states in his afterword that he “[detests] symbols and allegories”).

The paragraph is titled “Sounds Familiar” for crying out loud

Of course, the obligatory China mention. “Digital totalitarianism”.

Hold up, you are the same person that went gushing about thighs beneath a previous comment of mine…

…

They’re picturing a depressed person as a nihilistic killjoy that doesn’t want to do anything and lives without a purpose, I’m assuming.

Just want an excuse to post this

I didn’t know that. That makes this train a little less absurd, at least.

It’s just branding, because it’s a shuttle service between a mainline stop in a nearby village and their Gigafactory outside Berlin.

The best part is that this train isn’t made by Tesla, it’s just them leasing battery trains from Siemens, and they don’t even operate them:

Tesla plans to switch to operating battery-electric trains from the Mireo Smart family, manufactured by Siemens, replacing diesel trains currently transporting employees to their factory near Berlin.

[…]

The trains will be leased from the newly established leasing company, Smart Train Lease, founded by Siemens in early 2024. The operation of the trains will continue to be managed by the passenger transport operator Niederbarnimer Eisenbahn (NEB).

Source: https://www.railway.supply/en/tesla-is-transitioning-to-environmentally-friendly-trains/

In 1967, Astroboy [sic], the Japanese animation and comic book icon, died protecting a North Vietnamese village from American bombers.

Throughout the postwar period, progressive artists, directors, and authors in many countries, not least the United States, have represented the US in critical ways. Peter Katzenstein has described representations which criticize the United States for failing to live up to its often lofty human rights rhetoric, as “liberal anti-Americanism”.

While opposed to American wars and other international actions, it must be asked, however, if “anti-American” is the best label for categorizing such writing. In Japan, critical commentary has often been combined with deep reflection on Japan’s own human rights record, past and present. This type of discourse, at its best, seeks a universal standard from which the mass killing of civilians and other forms of violence can be condemned.

In Astroboy [sic], Tezuka’s critique of the American practice of indiscriminate bombing is part of his life-long condemnation of militarism and organized violence, which included probing looks at Japan’s war record. Criticizing American atrocities in this way is quite distinct from using the US as a convenient target to reify Japanese nationalist images. For Tezuka, the critique of US destruction of Vietnam was part and parcel of his dissection of Japan’s war crimes.

Japanese popular culture, however, also sees the contextless use of anti-Americanism and vague but nonetheless meaningful images that glorify Japan`s 20th century wars.

Source: https://apjjf.org/matthew-penney/3116/article

Oh shit, I was born in 2003!