Overspark

I might get downvoted for this, but Breaking Bad. I made it into the second season, constantly annoyed at how massively unrealistic and terrible these people were to each other. People kept telling me it would get better later on and that I should stick with it, but after that failed to materialise I just gave up.

Yes, that’s what happened in NL too. The previous government was a horrible combination of extreme right-wingers, a farmers party and the regular right-wingers, who all didn’t like or trust each other. Predictably they failed to realise even the simplest of their promises and they blew it all up when right-wing voter opinion started to turn sour after it looked like they would have to water down some of their promises in order to get anything done. The last election was a massive win for centre parties, although we unfortunately narrowly failed to make the left-wing party the biggest one. And this pattern has played out in a similar way in several EU countries in the past year(s).

Right wingers have already lost most of the gains they made in most EU countries. There is a pattern where right wing parties gain enough votes to get into parliament, fuck it up massively and then lose again in the next election. So far only Meloni in Italy seems to be doing well. So they can scream all they want, but that doesn’t mean they’ll get anywhere.

Brexit was a pretty good example of how incredibly dumb that is. Efforts in other EU countries to garner similar sentiments have largely failed IMHO, so I don’t think this is a credible threat.

He did, but that doesn’t excuse what the US did.

I did not expect a Guild Wars reference in my Cyberpunk content! Recently picked up GW2 again and having a blast this time, so relevant to my interests. 😂

Obviously fuckheads are responsible for their own degenerate behaviour. But there’s a lot more to this then just some random fuckheads being fuckheads. The reason this night was worse than any other we’ve had in history was because the perfect circumstances were created for maximum fuckery. And those circumstances were created by our government. They were warned countless times by many different groups that this was the worst possible way to go about doing things and they stuck their heads in the sand and did it anyway.

The whole existence of fuckheads is one of the reasons we have a government in the first place. It’s their job to keep our society functioning as best as possible even though fuckheads exists. And they definitely failed to do their job this time.

Fireworks are only legal on new years eve over here. And there are a few countries in the EU where insanely powerful explosives are also legal (basically hand grenades), so they very easily find their way into our country, even though they’re not legal here. The police do what they can but it’s impossible to make more than a dent.

Fireworks used to be a fun way to have a great party. But as they got harder and louder, and the country got more and more densely populated, the problems also started to pile up. So the tone slowly shifted from a big party, to a rowdy night, to eventually a largely lawless night where it’s more and more outright vandalism and rioting, instead of having a party. The past years it’s been “normal” to have several deaths, thousands of wounded and scores of cars, houses and other buildings (from bus stops to supermarkets) burned down on new years eve. So even though the Dutch as a people are very resistant to changing their culture, the call to outlaw all fireworks got larger and larger. So large that even the last right-wing parties gave up their resistance last year and admitted that the only way forward was to do away with it altogether. But instead of banning it immediately they wussed out and said they would ban it after one more year with fireworks, even though everyone in law enforcement, the fire departments and medics begged them not to.

So naturally, everyone wanted to go out with a bang, and they basically succeeded. At half past midnight every mobile in the country got an emergency text to only call 112 (our version of 911) in life-threatening situations, since they were completely overwhelmed. Even though they doubled their normal capacity and every policeman, fireman and medic in the country was working as hard as they could to keep things under control. In my opinion political heads should roll for this but it seems the general opinion is to shrug your shoulders and keep on keeping on. Ironically the rest of the year the Netherlands is a very tame country, with less than 100 murders a year in the entire country for example. It’s just this single night that got completely out of control.

As predicted. If only the cowardly government we still have would have had the balls to outlaw firework sales a year earlier, we wouldn’t have had this “final blowout” and things would have been less bad. Still not good though, the culture around new years day has been insane for a while now.

Yeah this. Python was already popular with the early adopters, and it’s a fairly easy language to learn and use. After that it became a network effect thing: all the best tools were already written in Python so people continued to do so.

Why not switch to LibreOffice?

Absolutely. And I’d go so far as to say that anyone who doesn’t like it is watching the wrong show. They’ve clearly telegraphed from episode 2 onwards that this’ll be a slow moving tale, mostly about Carol. It reminds me in a lot of ways of The Leftovers. If you want answers that was the wrong show to watch, you only watch for the crazy shit and how people respond to that. Plur1bus is a lot tamer in that regard (and gives far more actual answers), but it’s a broadly similar experience.

Yet another nail in the coffin of client-side anti-cheat. If you’re seriously affected by people using these kinds of cheats on their PCs (this one requires specialised hardware) then no amount of client-side anti-cheat is going to make a difference anyway.

Met een griepprik.

Nee hier zaten we op te wachten…

Nope, same here. Edit: in The Netherlands.

Or maybe all those things will work two years from now. And if some issues remain there’s still LTS support for a while in multiple distros, since this only affects future versions.

Mooi.

It’s a different kind of storytelling than most audiences are used to. You’re not just handed a complete story with all the details explained, you’re more along for the ride while you barely know who these people are or how things got this bad. Along the way some things become clear but many others do not. To me this feels far more realistic than most movies that are made today. And there’s some very impressive cinematography on display along the way as well, with minimal (or none? can’t remember) CGI. So yes, I’m certainly one of those people who think it’s absolutely brilliant. Should probably rewatch it again, come to think of it…

Oh man we really did not need this.