#germany is on some bullshit

[mileenaxyz]

Namibia has entered the chat.

ETA This part 😂😂😂...

[taylorftparamore]

i love when europeans say shit like "in europe we do this" and it's such a broadsweeping claim that i am like. ain't no fuckin way. ain't no goddamn way. i KNOW you're lying.

[the-deadlock-south]

we lost the game but i won in looking cracked in front of strangers so did we (i) really lose (yes)

[panvani]

I actually finished Monster a few days ago but I will state my feelings on it for posterity's sake: I think Monster, while composed of a number of well written and evocative vignettes, ultimately fails to execute its overall emotional arc well. If the story had been explicitly framed episodically with an overarching B-plot connecting these episodes, I might feel more positively towards it, but the fact that it must nominally develop its "main plot" each chapter while devoting most of its screen time to tangentially related stock characters was extremely frustrating. None of the twists or reveals actually felt consequential because information about the main plot is fed to you so painstakingly and in a way that's so repetitive that its conclusion is largely predictable and almost anticlimactic.

Monster ultimately does not do a very good job of developing any of its main cast. Its story and characters warp around Tenma, who is just not very interesting. I was frankly just fed up with him and the unilateral adoration that every character holds for him by the end of the story. Nina was extremely underdeveloped for the character she should have been and supposedly was within the story and any pathos that could have been elicited by her was neutered by first having her be barely present for the vast majority of the story, and second by also relegating her into being a Guy Who Just Loves Tenma. Eva was probably the closest any character had to a real character arc and her writing was just so absurdly misogynistic for nearly the entire story I couldn't enjoy any time she was on screen. Johan should have been an interesting character, but the manga got so long and drawn out that by the end I was just fed up with him.

The story overall was weirdly saccharine in a way that felt almost childish in contrast to its intended tone, and while that's not in itself a bad thing, its attempts to portray humanity as Overall Good felt simplistic and often cheap. It kinda goes hand in hand with how horribly it attempts to address WWII. "Well, The Nazis Felt Really Bad About It" and "If You Think About It, Japanese People Were The Real Victims" are not, uh. Themes that show a willingness to contend with complex morality or any real belief in human goodness aside from superficial self-reassurance. Also Urasawa Naoki is insanely insanely insanely afraid of sex.

Ultimately I think Monster would have been way, way better if it had just been shorter and had treated its main plot in any reasonable manner. It had a lot of interesting, evocative moments, and a lot of the ideas of the main plot could have been really good to chew on if the main plot hadn't lost momentum long before it was actually wrapped up. Nina and Johan are given very interesting treatment on occasion, and I have been thinking about their characters and relationship quite a bit since finishing Monster, but the plot was so bogged down in the Various Extraneous Dipshits and the need to conform every aspect of Nina's character around Tenma that there's no actual interesting conclusion to be drawn from them.

I think on an arc-by-arc level, Monster is quite well written, and it has a few really strong moments. It just makes such poor use of its format overall that it sours the whole experience.

[astramachina]

i will say, fuck disney, but he really popped off with the og EPCOT. that was my shit when i was a kid and it's still technically my favorite of the orlando parks even if it's slowly turning into an IP nightmare.

[thecolorsfucked]

just saw the german venue cancelled purim thing like

everyday i wonder how jewish ppl dont just go apeshit

[mr-ladystardust]

respectfully, can they speed this the fuck up?? I want to sleep

[reginaofdoctorwho]

hell is real and it's the classroom discussion page on the gender and sexuality unit

[mayhaps-magical]

Very little beats the emotional rollercoaster that is waking up, checking Tumblr and seeing your country trending only to find out some bot dumped half a kphjillion ad posts into the tag and you didn't manage to sleep throught a disaster

[cheralith]

childhood bestfriend!kaiser who specifically always demands his managers to reserve a spot for you at every single one of his games.

you always go to support him, with him insisting he needs you there as some sort of “lucky charm” (he won’t actually admit he thinks those superstitions are bullshit), so imagine his shock when he finds out that your seat is empty on the day of one of the most important games of the season—the game that will decide who gets to compete in the german cup.

it’s ten minutes before the game starts and despite his coach’s pep talk to the team, all kaiser can focus on is your empty seat and the absolute betrayal you’ve bestowed upon him, your supposed “best friend.”

he hasn’t realized it��nor will he admit it if he ever were to come to such an epiphany—stubborn as he is, but the reason as to why he does so well in games that you’re present at is because of the fact it gives him more motivation to win and impress you rather than just solely being dependent on the faces of despair from his opponents. a unique sort of euphoria that he gets whenever he can spot you jumping up and down in your seat with his number #10 jersey on, that your praise belongs to him and him only.

so when he steps out on to the field and sees that your seat is still collecting dust, he seethes silently to himself, gritting his teeth, pissed that he even called you his best friend to begin with. because what sort of friend doesn’t show up to one of the most important games in germany’s football?!

he’s still planning to win, of course. he’s michael kaiser—he’s famous for doing so. and he plans to use all his rage that you’ve caused to do so, just in spite of you.

because he’s michael kaiser, number ten of bastard mündchen. he doesn’t need your help. he never did.

(see, what he doesn’t know is that you’re simply home sick with a cold and that you’re still dressed in his jersey, just also with a sweater and bundles of blankets on top to stay warm, but regardless, you’re still watching and cheering him on from behind the tv screen. you’ve sent him some texts and voicemails telling him so, but none have received a reply back yet and you can only imagine what this drama queen has in store for you once he wins the match.)

[melancholicscoundrel]

h e l p m e I’m in love with an anime character AGAIN

[foone]

Have you heard about the Polish Train company, Newag, and the bullshit it turns out they got up to?

So, the regional rail operator Koleje Dolnośląskie bought some Newag Impuls back in 2016 . In late 2021, some of them need to have major maintenance done, as they've been in service a while. So the company SPS (Serwis Pojazdów Szynowych) gets the contract to fix them. They basically take the train apart, replace a bunch of it, following all the rules in the documentation Newag gave them, and... it won't move. The train says everything is fine, the brakes are off, there's plenty of power, but you push the throttle up and it won't move.

SPS spends a while trying to figure out what the fuck is wrong, with no luck. So they hire some hackers from the Polish security group Dragon Sector. Dragon Sector figures out how to get into the code of the computer system that runs the train, and OH MY GOD.

So it turns out there's a secret train-lock system. If it's on, the train won't move. This will be triggered in some situations you might think are normal: the clocks are wrong, the serial numbers of the various parts have changed, and a firmware mismatch between the main computer and the power system. Now, the fact that it makes sense to not run the train in these situations until someone can check it? that doesn't extend to the fact the train uses a SECRET lock system, rather than just popping up an error message telling you what's wrong. There's also the problem that while these are all potential error problems, they can't be cleared by anyone with the technical manuals, which are supposed to cover everything about how to run these trains. Only Newag themselves can reset this system.

Which, you know, keeps SPS from properly fixing them. Only Newag can fix them now, but not because SPS lacks any technical ability, but because Newag sabotaged their own trains. But don't worry: it gets worse.

So now that Dragon Sector knows what's happening, they get to look at other trains. It turns out the trains aren't all running the same software, and there are other tricks in there.

One of them is a "how long has the train been stopped?" check. If the train hasn't hit 60 km/h in 10 days, the train locks itself and won't move until Newag can clear it. So, like, if a train is ever out of service, like it's going to a repair place... it'll break itself. Unless the repair place is owned by Newag.

But two of the trains go further: See, these trains have GPS built in, right? You may be able to guess where this is going...

THEY JUST MAKE THE TRAIN CHECK IF IT IS PARKED AT THEIR COMPETITORS' REPAIR YARD AND BREAK ITSELF IF IT WAS.

The sheer audacity of this move. This is frighteningly bullshit anti-competition self-sabotage.

This has, obviously, made some parts of the Polish government to start investigating this. Newag may be (and hopefully will be) in a lot of trouble.

For more info, there's a great video of a presentation by the three people from Dragon Sector who did the hacking, which was presented at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress in Germany.

Ars Technica also has an article on it, but it predates the presentation so it doesn't have some of the later details.

Anyway, the good news is that in the end the hackers at Dragon Sector were able to unlock most of the trains: A few had additional trickery that they didn't want to hack around, because it might break the train's certification. For the others, they discovered undocumented "cheat codes" in the software that they could use to bypass the secret lockouts... presumably the same ones that Newag would have used when they "repaired" trains.

[anarchotolkienist]

I really hate the idea that the US represents a continuation of Nazi Germany that seems to have gotten some caché on sections of the Left (primarily admittedly the really idiotic ones). It is utterly ignorant of the structure of Nazi Germany, the relationship between capital and Fascism, colonialism and Fascism, and the role that Nazis played in the Cold War order (on both sides of the conflict, though more prominent on the Western side, at least in the form of Nazi collaborationists who then jumped on to the other anti-communist force after the Nazi train had gone and decided to become some kind of liberal democrats). It also profoundly misunderstands what Nazism is - if the country with the most Jews in the world is somehow Nazi and has been for 80 years, then I guess the fucking Nazis have stopped caring about the Jewish Question suddenly. It is edgy bullshit to make American teenagers feel better about a worldview that completely centres America, and it's fairly directly anti-semitic. Stupid as all hell.

[dasha-through-the-snow]

Like, seriously

Almost every single country's public holidays fit into the same predictable mold:

Day of national unity

Celebration of some glorious military victory that no one alive has any connection to

Day of independence from England/Germany/France/Spain/Russia/Turkey/Japan/whoever

Assorted religious holidays, half of which coincide with the start/end of the harvest season and at least one is conveniently in the middle of the darkest, coldest and most depressing month

NEW YEAR'S, FUCK YEAH, LET'S GET DRUNK AS SHIT

Something very political/historical

Random bullshit

And most people in the Western world are very secular about all of this too. Santa is way more important for Christmas than Jesus, for better or for worse.

[jinxedshapeshifter]

I think the vibes between prosecutors vs defense attorneys in Ace Attorney is incredibly funny. Most defense attorneys are pretty normal but then you get to the prosecutors:

Edgeworth is obsessed with the Steel Samurai, looks like a fucking zombie if you kill one of his arguments, left a note saying "Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth chooses death" not expecting people to take it as a suicide note then finding it weird when people get mad it him for leaving what FEELS like a suicide note when he goes to Europe, has staring contests WITH HIMSELF in reflective surfaces, and has a chess table set up to where it's just a bunch of Edgeworths surrounding a Phoenix, among other things.

MVK killed a man over a win record, reveals his ATM PIN in court, and suggests cross-examining a parrot and doesn't expect the defense to actually do it (despite having known Phoenix for more than a day AND PREPARING FOR IT). There might be more in Turnabout Goodbyes that I'm not remembering or more in Investigations that I don't know about because I haven't played Investigations.

Franziska became a prosecutor at the age of 13, has a perfect win record which means she won against ADULT DEFENSE ATTORNEYS in Germany for 5 years, carries a whip with her everywhere she goes, and gets upset when a 9 year old gets mad at her for prosecuting her cousin.

Godot allows himself SEVENTEEN CUPS OF COFFEE A TRIAL (how is he still alive, how has he not died from a caffeine overdose), was woken from a coma by the scent of coffee, usually reserves the pet name "kitten" for pretty women but calls a male defendant kitten multiple times, FLIRTS with the aforementioned defendant, assaults Phoenix with coffee multiple times, speaks in cryptic coffee metaphors all the time, and has such bad trust issues that he didn't tell Phoenix about a plan he made with Misty and Iris (and telling Phoenix about this plan could've cut down on the amount of bullshit that happened in Bridge to the Turnabout).

Klavier is a rockstar who acts like he's more focused on his music than being a prosecutor but actually isn't, is a perfectionist to the level that he got pissed about Daryan missing a cue and is so gay for Apollo that Apollo shows up and he lights up IMMEDIATELY, assumed Apollo set his guitar on fire, uses two massive speakers as desks in his office, has a floor to ceiling filing cabinet for some reason, and is somehow the more normal of the Gavin bros.

Barok is all but stated to be a vampire, HE HAS BATS IN HIS OFFICE, he's so particular about how his office is organized that he won't let anyone touch his chalices, wine bottles, or wine casks, he throws wine bottles into the gallery behind him, slams the prosecutor’s bench WITH HIS LEG if you upset him enough, accuses Ryunosuke of being the reason he smashes his crystal chalices, and does not seem to care about Ryunosuke taking a 10 year old to investigate a murder with him, among other things.

The Paynes (including Taketsuchi Auchi). Just everything about them all but especially the fact that they have some variant of "this man is the most incompetent prosecutor I've ever fucking met" in their court record profiles

I haven't met Blackquill or Nahyuta yet but based purely on vibes and what I DO know about them I'm assuming they fit into the "prosecutors are really fucking weird" trope Ace Attorney loves so much.

In comparison the defense attorneys are incredibly normal (although still not really normal) and it's hilarious

[ofliliesandremains]

jeesus fuck. my heart goes out to all US-Americans because me personally, I could NOT deal with this man's bullshit.

Yeah, my government (germany) is shit, too but at least we haven't had a blatant display of propaganda like that for quite some years. Not since the time of my great-grandparents.

Like how stupid does he think y'all are?? Woo-hoo, big strong hero man