Ah. It’s more scientific than Star Trek. At least no transporters\replicators. Hyperdrive malfunction is like a small nuke, Jedi are no more magic than, eh, telepaths in Star Trek.

But as a Star Wars fan I agree it’s clearly fantasy set in space. That’s not an insult, rather its clear self-positioning.

If you don’t consider Star Trek sci-fi too, then it’s all fine. I also love Babylon V and also don’t think it’s sci-fi.

I thought I was getting into an epic fantasy adventure and instead I got a wanky musical about walking!

That’s how medieval people perceived their epic fantasy adventures. It’s correct. And authentic. And very cool, when you think about the distances they went, the scenery they saw and that they had no Google Maps, GPS and mobile phones for connectivity. It’s between a very long hiking trip and a one-way ticket sleeper ship to Alpha Centauri.

BTW, another wrong thing from the movies - it feels there as if it all were happening in one world. As if they had regular trains between Minas Tirith and Fornost. As if they had TV. I dunno, something like that, because they behave there as if immune to distractions, one can imagine that in Forgotten Realms setting, where magic does everything that mobile phones and GPS can do, and “adventurers” roam everywhere, but not in Middle-Earth.

In the books they acted like saga characters with some transcendent (in otherwise medieval surroundings) knowledge of the ideals of French revolution and Catholic distributism mixed in strange ways.

In the movies they acted like entertainment park animators. Too much superficial glossiness, too little of the feeling of the book, say, Barrow-Downs, I still remember how the descriptions of the rain and the sun and the stones felt.

LOTR itself is world building through characters, and building characters through their reaction to the world.

The films are just action with lots of nice views.

I think both.

Danger in that world was on the sidewalks and unintended. Danger in this world is on the main pathways the most, and intended by its administrators.

Edgy vibes of that time seemed more like when you reinforce your right to call a president of your country a little bitch. Or like how it wasn’t traditionally welcomed to physically punish kids in many cultures in the Caucasus - because teaching fear of punishment also piggybacks teaching fear of enemy. BTW, this was also a principle in Dragomirov’s writings on how teaching should be done in the military ; his approaches to actual warfare were kinda archaic even in his own time (basically “straight at them” bayonet shock attacks), but the parts on didactics are good.

The pop music I hated then and hate now.

So yes.

No, the kit was for PS2, PS3 could run distributions intended for it without modifications, I think (maybe with some firmware changes), but those were by enthusiasts, while the PS2 Linux was provided by Sony.

I first got into programming via Basic on the ZX Spectrum, and I do worry how future generations will get into it now they’ve all gone back to phones instead of PCs.

Maybe the future generations will realize the difference between “can” and “should”, and there’ll arrive a niche for simpler PCs. I hope.

Funny, I miss that exactly. The feeling of spring\summer air and the fragrance of jasmine\lilac\linden\freshly mowed grass and the clouds, and ICQ animations with cats scratching your screen and “hasta la vista baby” and all that, and the Web when it was actually hypertext on hundreds of pages hand-crafted all with real people.

And yeah, going to friends to play Tekken, and them coming to play SW: RotS. Watching “A Nightmare on Elm Street” in a summer camp. Older girls watching “Charmed”.

It also looked so cool and, a rumor had it, could run Linux (it could, but only the fat models and with a hard drive sold separately as part of a kit, and only a specific kind of Linux with Sony’s patches, and slowly as hell, but)

I thought “gnostic vibe”, but yes.

Yep.

Parents sometimes can’t help not wanting to put their kids through what traumatized themselves.

Except inverted.

Eh, my dad wanted me to not be teased because of clothes or whatever. Except I saw through the bullshit and didn’t ask anything. So he basically forced me to wear the ugly shit he thought would look good. When all you can wear is ugly shit picked by your well-meaning parents, ya knaw.

“Demonstrative consumption” is the word. It hurt my social ties with those I’d want to talk to, but was ashamed of this, much more than fucking poverty probably would.

He had sort of a trauma from his own childhood, but that’s frankly no excuse because he didn’t even try to talk to me about this. I’d tell him it’s a school half-stacked with children of thieves (aka government workers, it’s not USA so I won’t take any bullshit about “hard-working administrators”, a different part of the world), so, first, I’d prefer to have clear cultural separation from them, second, I didn’t want to be there. The dumb fat pig moron wouldn’t listen, he thought me complaining is the problem so he should find some way for me to waste my resistance energy.

Well, those little jerks played a prank on him, which I did try to prevent, but as you’ve probably guessed, he thought my resistance to his good wise decisions to be the main threat, so they succeeded. He tried to blame it on me later. I do feel bad for him, but he deserved every bit.

OK, so much for memories.

Well, I live in Russia, but I’ve read there were changes about taxes calculation logic for people of low enough income too. Maybe they are smiling about that?

It’s still funny how the supposed problem of US state debt going is apparently not a problem when it’s your side inflating it beyond the year 1946 record against GDP. Or so they say.

BTW, when people say that US state debt is being misinterpreted and it’s not a problem, - basically any country’s state debt is, until it isn’t. That would work like, well, loss of trust into US ability to support the debt, which means loss of the value of USD, which together may form a positive feedback loop. Not hard to see that if such thing were to happen, you’d have rapid inflation and probably default.

(Also maybe that talk about bringing production back to USA, Musk’s political ideas and funding for military structures, all that stuff, are being done in preparation for the inevitable, - it’s technically possible to avoid it, but politically may not be, cause both main sides just promise more spending to own the other side. Because their plans that don’t make sense now look kinda better in a hypothetical scenario of post-default USA. It’ll still have enormous human capital, and its economic situation would allow to use that for building industries anew.)

I’d prefer wooden floor.

Especially the column in the middle, just cover it with wood and add various hooks, a transformer table (closed normally, open when you want to sip tea without display glow near you) and maybe something to make the space less open while sleeping. I dunno, a cloth instead of a wall.

And if this doesn’t have a window, maybe not too good.

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China is, eh, self-defending in Xinjiang against Uyghurs? Or what’s your point?

Something like a one-party political system with dear respected leader, concentration camps, surveillance, social rating system, GFW?

Note how I don’t say anything about propaganda from every crack. That’s because western propaganda has successfully evolved in the conditions of outright censorship not being allowed. Like killing cockroaches in a building again and again you make them evolve for the poisons used in the past.

If you are going to pick the “all this is not credible” line, then don’t bother. Also credible is a synonym for “believable”, and nobody can make you believe things you don’t want to believe.

No. NATO is an extension of this particular shark. Countries in NATO or allied to it are abusing with impunity those not in.

Food delivery as something normal, I’d think. Plumber coming soon after being called. Appointment with doctor to a close enough date.

Those things affected by actually having labor rights and less dependence on colonial mechanisms.

I have an answer different from the others.

US economy depends on the US intellectual property system, a few US monopolist companies and the US dollar, and the financial system.

Especially the intellectual property system. However different laws can be in various countries, in fact everybody tries to follow US law.

It means that a lot of things produces elsewhere mean royalties to US companies, and a lot of things can’t be produced without permission, control of markets, planned development of microelectronics and tech in particular, yadda-yadda.

So - if, in some hypothetical situation, that IP system is undone, with some countries having similar laws, some more like USSR’s “public domain by default with some fixed payment to patent holders”, and all the intermediate variants, then you’ll just have a second depression. Because a huge part of the economy will shrink.

US foreign debt is a meme subject, but honestly, if USD stops being the world’s most reliable currency, you’ll also probably have a default.

US actual industrial production (what doesn’t shrink as easily) is not so impressive when looking at its size. A lot about US level of life doesn’t really match the efficiency of the economy. Say, if you look at Germany, life there is very different. In some ways better, maybe, but many things normal in the US are not achievable there.

My point is - the American IP laws were spread around by pressure. Not just that, but sometimes the monopoly roles of American companies. Part of that pressure is the military guarantor role.

If that stops being relevant, a lot of things which were a given for your economy for many years will stop existing. And for a few other economies too. It might not look as bad as the USSR’s collapse, but it will probably look as ruined and unpredictable as the 1960s world.