@Tarte@kbin.social
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Tarte

@Tarte@kbin.social

I like cake.

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Tarte, (edited )
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The article is badly researched.

This “red-green” coalition banned new reactors, announced a shutdown of existing ones by 2022

The red-green coalition did not announce the 2022 date. They (Greens/SPD) announced a soft phase-out between 2015-2020 in conjunction with building renewables. This planned shift from nuclear to renewables was reverted by Merkel (CDU = conservatives) in 2010. They (CDU) changed their mind one year later in 2011 and announced the 2022 date; but without the emphasis on replacing it with renewables. This back and forth was also quite the expensive mistake by the CDU on multiple levels, because energy corporations were now entitled financial compensation for their old reactors.

Tarte, (edited )
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There are still large areas in southern Germany where you’re not allowed to eat wild mushrooms and every boar that is hunted must be tested for radiation. That is because of the fallout from Chernobyl 38 years ago and 1400 km away.

Tarte, (edited )
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Spain is already phasing out nuclear energy currently and Sweden wants to do it after sufficient renewables are built. Among many other states.

Nuclear is just not profitable compared to renewables. France is exporting at a loss if one would consider all associated costs (privatization of profits and socialization of losses is creating bad incentives).

Tarte, (edited )
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Please do note the official warnings of the BFS (Federal Office for Radiation Protection). Contamination of forests with Caesium-137 is a health risk in many southern Bavarian forests. It's half-life period is 30 years. The disaster was in 1986. That means it's still roughly half of it there and the layered forest grounds preserve radiation well.

If you're a mushroom forager on vacation in southern Bavaria - just don't do it. Or at least inform yourself which types of mushrooms you shouldn't eat in particular for radiation reasons.

General information and warnings (2022):
https://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/ion/notfallschutz/notfall/tschornobyl/umweltfolgen.html#doc6055566bodyText3

Specifically regarding mushrooms (2019):
https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/BfS/DE/broschueren/ion/info-wildpilze.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=7

Germany Is Seizing Jews’ Money Again: It’s fine, they’re pro-Palestine (novaramedia.com)

A pro-Palestine Jewish activist group has had its bank account frozen in Germany for the second time in seven years, after the bank requested a full list of its members’ details in what experts believe is a breach of German law. The group suspects the move was triggered by its involvement in a forthcoming pro-Palestine...

Tarte, (edited )
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"Germany" = a German bank
"seizing money" = temporarily frozen bank account until a legal dispute is settled

‘Free speech is a facade’: how Gaza war has deepened divisions in German arts world (www.theguardian.com)

“We have a conversation about racism that is led by the global south and people of colour from Germany, which the German state is trying to brand as antisemitic,” Younes added. “And if we present our relationship to race, racism and European genocides from a non-European or non-white perspective, we get cancelled.”

Tarte, (edited )
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The German constitution makes no guarantee of free speech. It’s not a legally protected right there, and Germany is world infamous for not having free speech.

That's an internet meme and it is wrong. Germany ranks place 21 of 180 in the WPFI and rank 10 of 165 according to GSDI.

There is no state in the world with fully 100% free speech. Even in the USA there are limits to free speech; some are even considered criminal and some will land you in jail. What matters is what freedom of speech entails. Germany does very much have free speech - much more than the vast majority of countries on the planet. Meinungsfreiheit can be translated as freedom of opinion/expression/speech and is article 5 of our constitution as well as article 11 of the EU charta.

Tarte, (edited )
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As a German it's fully in your right to disagree with the state and with the police (I certainly don't agree with everything that's going on). However, this comment of yours is distorting the reality too much, for my taste, to remain silent.

  • "terrifying state repression" = less public funding for some artists, more for others (not getting free money doesn't mean you're being "repressed")
  • "Berlin police has enacted checkpoints in immigrant neighbourhoods" = That did not happen. It is a myth.
  • "Politicians actively singling out activists on social media and redirecting insane amounts of hate their way." = Politicians responding in kind when you mention them in a tweet. They are humans and they are allowed to respond to you.
  • "to allow universities to exmatriculate students on behavioural grounds (aka political stances)." = Berlin trying to fix a legal loophole that prevents them from exmatriculating one student that physically assaulted a Jew for antisemitic reasons breaking his face bones. Outside of Berlin that would've been grounds for immediate exmatriculation within the existing laws.

I do agree with your general stance, but there is no need to exaggerate/distort the issues we're facing.

Tarte,
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He drove me back into using RSS after more than a decade for staying up to date. Much better for the mental health. Thankfully, since Wordpress and also some other CMS have the RSS feature enabled by default, many websites have it even if they’re not advertising it.

Tarte, (edited )
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Inevitable is a strong word when talking about a Russian victory. Putin has been grinding his teeth for two years in a three day operation and almost fell to a coup last year. He is also 71 years old.

Tarte, (edited )
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This is for the most part a very good brochure and the uninformed people here that only read a faulty summary or headline should probably read it, then make up their mind instead of being instinctively angry. Especially the part where it talks about the misconceptions with the typical „expansion comparison maps“ and what they really show was informative.

Tarte, (edited )
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Are we reading the same link? You're doing quite some mind acrobatics here by picking various small quotes/passages from only the start of the text and putting your own spin on it. This narrative is in your head, not in the article.

Tarte, (edited )
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I‘m fine with discussion. But I see little value in discussing a text with someone who has not read it. We don’t have to guess their intentions when they already wrote it down quite clearly. Neither do I see a reason to doubt their intentions based on timing. Antisemitism (violence against Jews) in Germany has been sharply on the rise in the last few years and it is the job of the Landeszentrale to debunk some of the myths that foster it.

The main point of the paper is to correct these five myths about Israel and that is what it does. It is very focused on this and one-sided, obviously. One might think it is bad taste to ignore current events. Maybe. But it does exactly what it says and I found it informative.

Are we supposed to learn and debate history while a people is exterminated?

Yes. That might be a good first step. It takes about one hour. There is much one can critique Israel for - let’s stick to the truths.

Tarte,
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I‘m using a RSS reader with rule based filters to remove uninteresting articles (to me) and upvote or downvote articles with certain keywords (for me). That way I can aggregate lots of media and have my own personal feed.

It takes some time to set up and fine-tune, though.

Tarte,
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Feedbro, it's a browser extension.

Tarte,
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I like this change. Quality over quantity.

Tarte,
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In case someone doesn’t know the reference to Futurama in the first paragraph: https://youtu.be/Wxu7z7hfVns?si=6nR-JTSaYVDA4IEt

———
Great update, and an interesting read, too!

Tarte, (edited )
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That is not legally possible in the EU. You can grant irrevocable usage rights, but you cannot give away your copyright.

Tarte,
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Why would anyone switch from Unity to Unreal to evade the revenue share? Both engines have that.

Godot might be an alternative.

Tarte,
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"non-retroactive" clause directly in their contract

I also wonder how Unity‘s approach will work in countries where that is the legal default. I have a feeling that we will be seeing quite a few lawsuits next year, if they actually go ahead with their plans.

Tarte,
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I love the mechanics. But the naming could be much better. This is not WoW.

Tarte,
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Nintendo has historically been slow to change and, more specifically, innovation.

The company was founded in 1889 and produced physical playing card games. From a historical perspective, I think they had more than their fair share of change and innovation, all things considered.

In recent years, I‘d agree with your statement.

Tarte,
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Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales has picked my interest. If it‘s still up for grabs, I‘d appreciate it.

Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun?

Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.

Tarte,
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I don’t remember if it was like this with the game Myst specifically, but generally speaking: Some hardly solvable riddles were put into many point and click adventure in the pre-internet era, because they usually came with an expensive help hotline that they wanted you to call.

Tarte, (edited )
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That’s an interesting comment, because I felt almost the exact opposite. I greatly enjoyed the story and world building, too. But I also mostly enjoyed the combat. What was boring to me were the mundane riddles. I did not finish the game because of all the stupidly easy riddles that I felt were only wasting the player‘s time without adding much. However, since I was already pretty invested in the story, I watched the ending on YouTube. I liked it, and while it was not particularly surprising (there were many not so subtle hints about the circumstances of her „illness“) it gave me some closure.

I understand why they did the two disjointed variants of gameplay together with that story/theme. It didn’t work for me. Maybe they should have focused on one type of gameplay instead of two.

Tarte,
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I know that you are mainly looking forward to the new content, and that just quality of life improvements aren't the kind of things that make people buy the game and get excited for.

Nope. I'm preeeetty excited about QOL changes here. :-)

Impressions: Starfield’s sheer scale is already giving me vertigo (arstechnica.com)

There's a quote from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. “Space is big,” he writes. “You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to...

Tarte,
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Unreal Engine is a 25-year-old game engine, too.

Tarte,
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Great news! I‘m looking forward to the expansion (haven’t played Factorio for years now), but I’m already happy about the regular Friday Facts that will certainly bring me joy.

Tarte,
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Lovely game. Much more than just an Age of Empires clone. I love that there are no „peasants“ but every soldier does farming if not in battle. Also the circular maps are fantastic for RTS gameplay.

What type of game do you want to play that doesn't really exist?

Have you ever played a game and wondered what if you could do something that it doesn’t really allow you to do, for example being able to move around blocks in Minecraft fluidly instead of in sectors, edit the world in Hogwarts legacy with spells, be able to fly in a world like Elden Ring or Elder Scrolls with epic sky...

Tarte, (edited )
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I want a historically accurate trading simulation set in the early modern period: I want a multitude of ever-changing regional hard, soft and bookkeeping currencies, also bills of exchange, individual units of measurement for each product, paying in kind, putting sth. on the cuff, installments, various per item or volume based taxations, tolls, tithes, tenure, social privileges, staple rights, scheduled trade fairs, regulated fixed prices, lot sales, return freight, regulated transportational services, craft and trading legislation, significance of saint days, city level legislation, guilds and other corporations, the very relevant concepts of honor, contemporary obligations of social responsibility, familial structures and needs for a network of professional connections, monasteries as large economical entities, etc. pp.

All tycoons I have played just reproduce a shallow version of our current concepts of money and trade and skin it with historical images without even trying to research the historical setting they're in. They add complexity in many other ways that don't focus on trade (i.e. combat).

No fighting. No leveling. No building. Just trade.

Tarte, (edited )
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Thanks for the suggestion! Eve is a nice trading simulation, from all I have heard. Many friends have suggested it to me, but I have not yet played it. The required time investment and grind of MMOs is what‘s scaring me off. The older I get, the more I enjoy offline games that I can pause at any time.

However, I don’t believe (from my outside perspective) that trading in Eve is a good simulation of trade in the early modern period.

Tarte, (edited )
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Fully agreed! It's 'took her on', though.

It's just insane how competent some people are. Here's an interesting interview from 5 month ago.

Tarte,
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In case someone is wondering about your response: My comment originally included the phrase "Not that it matters, [...]", but I immediately edited my comment after I posted it, because I agree with your sentiment. You were faster than me.

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