u/LouReedTheChaser

Tried doing the medieval Irish silverside/cabbage pottage recipe tonight as we had one laying around in the fridge and didn't have much else ideas for what to cook. Except I didn't have leeks, great start I know. I fucked up the pottage by putting too much stock in because I was worried it would end up burning due to not having enough moisture, but instead it ended up soggy, I'm guessing it's meant to be just enough to steam them instead.

But the flavour was good, and the silverside ended up really nice and tender despite only being cooked for about two hours. Definitely much faster than the more 'traditional' method of slow cooking it that seems to be popular in the Commonwealth countries today.

I want to give the ancient Roman ones a shot at some point, because they're usually pretty simplistic in preparation but stuff like defrutum is just completely absent from the standard meals of most cuisines today (outside of the Turks apparently), so it should be up to my horrendously novice skill level and provide a decent amount of novelty.

All the Western governments are doing so, except for the US and maybe Germany, after two years of 'Israel has the right to defend itself'. Labor here for example has only really become remotely critical of Israel in the past year. News article came out recently about Kamala attempting to cozy up to the pro-Palestinian wave of Democrats like Mamdani.

I despise these worms. I wish they held even an ounce of shame for supporting evil because it was the easy thing for them to do. As unhelpful as I know it is, I'm just some pleb living in bumfuck nowhere who has his own feelings of shame and rage for not being able to do anything myself except maybe donate to the right causes, which is ultimately just going to provide a small amount of temporary comfort to the survivors. I see some dogshit hasbara from Ben-Gvir or Netanyahu himself pop up every now and then trying to justify their actions, and well, I can't describe what I wish I could do to them by reaching through the screen somehow here. Those who held power, who had the possibility to speak to ttese people and say no to their sordid requests, and did nothing, I just wish would go away with the rest of the Israelis. Fucking Reagan could say no to them, and these people who got all uppity when people heckled them are now coming back with their tails between their legs, trying to latch onto the next successful movement? It genuinely sickens me.

Of course the phrase 'One day sveryone will have always been against this' has been dropped so often since 2023, and I knew it would be true, but I didn't expect 'one day' to come so soon.

Excuse the opening framing, but:

Sony just announced they're ending physical video game production from 2028 onwards. This is in the same breath as them closing the storefronts for their older game consoles and in the same week as them deleting a bunch of digitally purchased films from users' drives.

Between stuff like this, the huge push for streaming services over the past 10 years and focus on data centres over consumer computer hardware to the point we've seen announcements this week about component prices staying overinflated for the next several years I'm feeling like a total moron for laughing at the 'idiots' who constantly rambled on about Klaus Schwab during the coof days.

Art, culture and entertainment really has become totally disposable in the eyes of the elite. It's hard not to think about things like the debacle from a couple of years back over a bunch of television episodes getting removed from Netflix and the like because of perceived cultural insensitivity. Movies getting edited or outright removed because of licensing.

I was never one much for streaming, I've always relied on pirating or buying physical copies of movies/music/games/literature, so I've missed most of the slow decline, but it really seems like these corporate giants are now at the point where they're ready to pull out the rug from under us over the next 5-10 years maximum. I don't think anybody is organised enough that we'll see any sort of pushback either, and of course politicians are already a part of their interests in some way.

This especially sucks for people living in rural/regional areas. I think it's less common in other countries, but here in Australia you're still lucky to hit 30Mbps in a lot of areas. Stuff can take a long time to download and high-quality streaming still isn't a thing.

Brutal

Poor Moby. Perfect example that as much as some contrarians will say here after dealing with annoying perpetually snarky younger millennials and zoomers you can unfortunately be too sincere as a person

I grew up in the Scouts. Every ANZAC Day I would go and serve the veterans at the RSL with the rest of my troop. Bringing out food, doing dishes, whatever. They were definitely too old to be Vietnam veterans, and I doubt even then there were any WWI veterans left in my town. Just regular old kindly men, maybe with their old uniforms or medals. Obviously, as a kid, you didn't really grasp the significance of what they were involved in. You knew it was important to respect them, of course, but you didn't get it.

Then you get older. Maybe you see the Spielberg stuff. Very much a glamourised depiction of what happened. I wouldn't base your opinions on that. But it gives you a taste for what happened. Then maybe you learn about stuff in school. But an academic examination of the Holocaust by people who weren't there at a period where most kids are tuned out isn't a real education either. It does, in a way, seem almost unbelievable at first, even when you're shown the photos. I'm not surprised you see a lot of younger kids now completely disconnected from this part of history at this age who mock it, as horrible as it is. Then you go past all the pop culture stuff and the minimal stuff you learned in school, the little tidbits and facts that get repeated in the quirky articles and todayilearned type shit and it really is just nonstop suffering and horror.

Of course we learned little about the Eastern Front here. Mostly just that it was between the Soviets and Germans, a lot of people died. But all the starvation, mass killings, atrocities, just glossed over. But even the Pacific Front, despite being Australian, I don't think we ever really got a chance to appreciate it. We didn't experience quite the same harshness from the Japanese as the Americans, but we still lost plenty of men to malicious intent, mistreatment as PoWs. That sort of thing.

It's really easy for people to forget just how much suffering humanity went through at that time. Even if you were just a civilian, again, especially on the Eastern Front. I'd like to visit a place like Belarus one day, just to remind myself how much our forefathers lost. Entire settlements of people who all knew and loved one another, extended families, who would've gone on to live quiet, normal lives otherwise, just completely wiped off the map. All at a time where extended knowledge of the world outside of your town, the proliferation of video as a format, the concept of interconnection, really just starting to take off. For the soldiers, imagine what it must've been like to end up in places you'd only heard of in stories, only to end up bleeding out under an unfamiliar sky, halfway across the world. Or forced into labour camps, and marched endlessly after you think salvation might be coming, only to succumb to sheer exhaustion.

And all this is after the previous 15-20 years was fraught with day-to-day misery of mass poverty and starvation.

I hope, I pray, that I or no-one around me ever has to experience such a thing. Yet you see people dismissive today, in various ways. The edgy rightoid who says 'BASED!!!!!' to victims of the Nazis. The NAFO liberal, or the politician who bangs on about appeasement not working when he lives in a place where he's completely insulated from any sort of conflict. The blossoming communist who plays down the sweat, tears and blood of the West in exchange for mindlessly gassing up the USSR, or dismissing Western culture revolving around the war as purely an excuse for propaganda. So on and so forth. I've seen many of these types pop up, over and over. Mostly not in person outside of a couple of the war-hungry people I know via milsim communities, but they absolutely are there.

I don't know what I really wanted to say. I just wish we could hold onto the importance of what our ancestors have sacrificed for us a bit stronger, for a bit longer. As frictions start heating up, I become more and more worried. I don't want my nephews, or my friends' kids, or maybe one day in the future my kids, to have to experience a collective trauma the previous few generations have gotten lucky enough to avoid, for the most part. Even just the past couple of wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, with the flood of nonstop HD video, is enough to put chills in me. Let alone the poor souls experiencing it firsthand. These horrors should be disappearing, not ramping up again.

Also it makes everyone go into cultural critic mode but we all suck at writing

I get it's meant to help stave off the genderslop and general ragebait threads but I don't think it's really helping

Sorry for mentioning it here, but even if you're the one of five art hoes left on this sub your BF will be playing it anyway. New GTA marketing cycle has finally started back up again. Oh look, neon colours and synthpop and whatnot, fun. And then there's that He-Man movie that released last week, because clearly 55 year old manchildren are a demographic worth targeting.

We've been living in this decade for nearly 50 fucking years now. When will the constant pastiche of tropes from that period finally become hackneyed enough that the creatives and even the businessman recognise that enough is enough and retire it for a good long while? I'm not saying there aren't recursive art movements based on the 80s I like. I love Carpenter Brut and Com Truise. The sad part is the first wave of synthwave + vaporwave is getting old enough that I'm sure a nostalgia trend will pop up for it within a few years. But it's tiring. It's the modern form of barbarians living in the ruins of Rome. It's time to do something new.

Even the 90s nostalgia cycle was pretty limited in scope and moved past quickly. And now that the Y2K revival craze is done there's nothing unique left to draw from for a second chance in the cultural spotlight. Just an ouroboros of 'HEY, REMEMBER THIS THING?' over and over and over.

One of those albums where anything you write has been said by someone else, a hundred times, maybe less, maybe more. If you post here there's a damned good chance you already know this is special. Exemplary musicianship by Marr, Joyce and Rourke, and Morrissey is firing on all cylinders with his sharp wit. Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others might have a top 5 guitar riff of all time, so wistful and dreamy. Happy anniversary to the album that inspired a whole generation of indie acts.

I've had several popular posts I made years ago straight up get reposted to the same subs with the entire chain of comments spat out verbatim as well by an array of different accounts. You make a new post now and like 2-3 different accounts will immediately come in and start repeating whatever you said in the main body of the post slightly distorted to look like they're saying something while straight up contributing nothing. they've also learned that hr speak doesn't let them blend in now. they all talk like this. and you know what's sad? it works, a lot less people seem to cotton on that they're reading automated text. You see the same shit on other sites. Search results now lead to not even secondary or tertiary sources, but husks of sites that just draw everything together from an amalgamation of random bits of data long divorced of context.

This shit sucks. You know what I loved about the internet? It was a communal gathering of people from all walks of life. A Mongolian farmer, a German degenerate and a Spanish layabout could all talk to each other about some random niche topic. Sharing of all the various arts. Anecdotes, tutorials, recipes. A digital Library of Alexandria. But that's done now. The corporations and governments sanitised it, and now the soulless drones have come in to make sure the earth is salted. Trying to interact with anyone turns into funhouse mirrors.

I don't know what to do. I grew up with this technology. Most of my friendships are kept up through it. People have moved and such, after all. I made such incredible connections with people I never would have had the opportunity to speak to otherwise. Seen and listened to so much beautiful works that would be forgotten by the sands of time in an analogue world. I can't give it up. Why must everything good be ruined?

Over time I've ended up preferring Soon and Sometimes but I really don't think there's anything else out there in music that immediately gives you that feeling of "what am I hearing oh god it's pure syrupy magic". Splashing someone in the face with holy water. It took me a long time to get into other shoegaze bands and appreciate them for what they were because I was disappointed they didn't manage to have that essence that Loveless does.

I know I should hate all the post-/qa/ wojak stuff for being incredibly derivative and incestual as far as memes go but there's a charm to it. It's become so played out that it's looped from unfunny, back to funny, back to unfunny and so forth several dozen times over. Funny to see how far along the road these things have gone since they were exclusively known as feels guy when I was discovering 4chan as a preteen back in 2010. It's the internet equivalent of being around from the Cretaceous to see theropods go from apex predators to dodos and dumb chickens.