u/Proud3GenAthst

I once read a fan theory that Matrix the simulation is not a simulation of the real whole world in 1999, but rather very size-limited simulation. Based on how the characters speak rather vaguely about locations. Namely in Reloaded, where they refer to locations as simply “The city”, “the highway” or “the mountains”.

Given the vagueness, it makes sense. But if that’s true, how does it work for the people who don’t fit there anymore? Since the machines keep growing them, perhaps the Matrix should be larger than one small state with one major city.

Or do you have something else to share?

I think the obvious is Sharon den Adel from Within Temptation, because she’s basically Amy Lee of Europe. Them performing Shatter Me together would sound pretty natural. Same with Cristina Scabia from Lacuna Coil

No one can make a mistake by collaborating with Simone Simons from Epica, because her voice is out of this world and then collaborating would make me cry dry.

Same with rather obscure singer Adrienne Cowan from Seven Spires

Courtney LaPlante from Spiritbox is the new big thing right now, so that would be kinda surprising if they don’t collaborate at some point.

It’s my understanding that they are rather controversial in their home country Ukraine, because some see them either unpatriotic or straight up pro-Russian. I once met with a Ukrainian girl at a metal festival Masters of Rock and I asked her what she thinks of them and she said that she hates them because she views them as pro-Russian.

But another time, I asked Helle Bohdanova, a frontwoman of another Ukrainian metal band, IGNEA at their meet & greet what is the “consensus” on Jinjer in Ukraine. Obviously she couldn’t say, because she can only speak for herself, but basically said that she doesn’t hate them, because she understands their position, coming from Donbas, but IIRC, also mentioned that she considers them coming from holding pro-Russian sentiment.

To give a little backstory, they’re all from Donetsk (except for Vlad the drummer who joined after the band relocated to Kyiv) and their first language is Russian and grew up surrounded with Russian culture.

When the war in Donbas started, one of the members called it out on social media, describing it as “civil war”, which of course didn’t fly with Ukrainians. The fact that they did a few concerts in Russia in 2014 didn’t help either.

They also have 2 songs that are arguably pro-Russian coded: When Two Empires Collide (Which I believe is about the War in Donbas and annexation of Crimea and frames it as conflict of geopolitical interests of Russia and the US) and Sit, Stay, Roll Over (Which I believe is about criticism they received for performing in Russia)

On the other hand, when the War in Donbas started, they relocated to Kyiv, instead of to Russia, strongly implying that they prefer Ukraine. They also vocally criticized the full scale invasion. They also have at least one song that affirms their allegiance with Ukraine; Disclosure, which is about an interview they had with a journalist who was holding them under fire for having alleged pro Russian or pro Soviet sympathies and its video features the singer, Tatiana showing her Ukrainian passport. What’s also noteworthy is that AFAIK, they never performed in Russia again after 2014 while they performed about 100 times in Ukraine.

But what’s bad optics is that shortly after the full scale invasion, they received a permit from the ministry of culture to leave Ukraine to tour as cultural ambassadors and never returned, with strong indications that are now touring illegally and the male members possibly illegally moved to Poland and Bulgaria.

Ukraine ran out of Patriots, Trump squandered almost all of them for absolutely stupid war with Iran and now, Ukraine seemingly has no choice but to build its own ballistic interceptors while suffering regular bombing raids with Iskanders and Zirkons.

Honestly, do you think that Ukraine can make it on time and that they can keep functioning with regular missile attacks?

I was anti Israel not that long ago. When I was, I was forcing myself into the mental gymnastics that the Jewish state is somehow a second coming of Nazi Germany, just to fit in ideologically.

Besides it being extremely offensive to Jews as a whole, because it’s Holocaust inversion and it being gross over-exaggeration (and minimizing the uniqueness of the Holocaust). It’s also just absurd in its face, because its a state co-founded by Holocaust survivors and many of its first inhabitants were Holocaust survivors themselves.

Anti-Zionists act like antisemitism is not a thing and actually sounds dumb when they talk about Israel, sounding as if the Holocaust is somehow not important to the people of Israel or its supporters abroad or as if the world without Israel would be fine and dandy for Jews.

But I just did a quick googling and according to Google AI, apparently, only 200,000 of Holocaust survivors moved to Israel in the first few years of its existence (and coups hundreds of thousands more in the upcoming decades). Before the Holocaust, there were about 9,5 million Jews living in Europe. Minus 6 million, that’s ~3 million.

That would mean that once Israel was finally re-established, which Jews waited for since 70 CE (iirc), only about 7% of the Holocaust survivors immediately moved there.

Also, there’s only about 1,5 million Jews living in Europe now. Within 80 years, 1,5 million people could easily be made out of about 500 thousand people or fewer. So my guess is that after the Holocaust, overwhelming majority of survivors must have moved somewhere. Why not all to Israel? I realize that many survivors took refuge in many different countries, but it’s my understanding that these countries didn’t accept that many refugees and they could have moved to Israel afterwards.

I’m asking, because the fact that not that many immediately moved to Israel can serve the anti Zionist narrative, that Israel is actually not that important and that the 200 thousand Jews who moved there could have easily been Jewish supremacists who wanted to create Israel to have their own apartheid ethnostate.

Why didn’t Israel start out with larger population, so to speak? Is there a book about it? Or even a book about Zionism and what was going on in the region during the Holocaust and in the few years surrounding Israeli independence?

I asked a similar question here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUkraine/s/rKJiFF8pXL

And I promptly bought and opened Gates of Europe by Serhiy Plokhy. But while I’m almost on half, I’m not very satisfied compared to what I expected based on what people say about the book.

For one, it’s very dense with information, doesn’t go very deep into historic events or persona and overall, it’s just tough to understand. It’s perhaps because it contains lots of terminology from ancient and medieval times, making it very foreign to me and it’s easy to get lost in because I feel like I can’t leave or ignore any piece of information because everything becomes important later, so much of the book becomes just a blur in my brain.

Is the problem that the book covers millennia of history within 400 pages of one volume? Is it because of the author’s prose? Or is it because I’m just not used to read literature like that?

Do you think you could recommend something better to me? I’ll look up the other regimentations in the original post, but since I didn’t get that many, maybe there are some others.

I heard that ballistic interceptors are extremely hard to make and normally would take several years to develop. However, Ukraine has pleasantly surprised us before with their war tech innovation and they’re probably done quite a bit of reverse engineering on Patriots and other interceptors they were given.

But at the same time, I’m doubtful it will be done so fast, given that they overhyped Flamingo so hard back in August 2025. They said they’d be in common use by October and didn’t start using them until probably February.

And I thought that by now, August 2026, FP-7 would be in common use already and that next month, Ukraine will be using FP-9 to pummel Moscow with.

If you know something about this kind of technology, be honest, can Ukraine really take away Putin’s only remaining leverage by developing its own interceptors in just one year?

First of all, I’m glad that my instinct was right and that I only had the misfortune of picking bad books, according to many readers (Shatter Me, Sarah J Maas books).

Second of all, I gotta admit that I’m pretty naive and tend to get seduced by beautiful eye candy of a book cover (contrary to the common trope not to judge a book by its cover). That’s why I got seduced by books by Sarah J Maas.

But as of late, I see in every bookstore, Brimstone, a sequel of Quicksilver by Callie Hart. It has insanely beautiful cover and if it wasn’t so expensive, I’d probably already bought it just to collect dust. What do you think about those books?

And in addition (or rather to get to the point), who are some authors I’m safe to avoid like a plague? In the original post, I asked for original and non formulaic novels, now I’m asking for the opposite, which authors are good to just ignore.

I’ve been hearing about Russian economy collapsing for 4 years now but it’s still in the stars.

I actually keep hearing contradicting information about it, making its true state a mystery. On one hand, inflation is high, labor shortage is high and banks are in trouble.

But at the same time, the share of GDP that goes to the war ever is not that high. Israeli GDP share is higher, which is what worries me the most. During WWII, The Soviet Union GDP share that went to the war effort was about 30%.

I know fuckall about economy, so I need to get educated on the matter rather than just relying on opinions of random people on social media. Is there some actually online sources to follow?

I’ve recently decided to give another chance to reading after first discovering that reading is fun right after high school. That was only short lived because I ordered a big bunch of books in English, which is my second language.

I’m 27 now. Being a late-bloomer who only now finally tries to get out of my comfort zone so I don’t remain a complete screwup. I decided to start by reading.

Now, I’m interested in politics and especially geopolitics, but I think I should also read some novels too so I have some diversity and overall to train reading.

And I’m curious about some interesting young some literature. I think that Young Adult is a good place to start for someone like me, because once again, I’m a late bloomer who can still relate to young characters and because it should be good starting point for immature readers like me. By immature, I mean readers who haven’t read that many books yet and aren’t quite capable of properly comprehending a book of any kind because of potentially complicated or just alien subject matter.

That being said, I’m under the impression that much of the Young Adult literature is super formulaic and unoriginal. Very often it’s about a young protagonist who despite their age are also very proficient, almost Mary Suish and it almost always revolves around love and it almost always applies the same old tropes.

I tried the Throne of Glass series. I finished the first book, read much of the second and I couldn’t get further. Partially because I’ve read it in rules, but I also tried to read the prequel book in Czech, my first mother’s tongue and even that was too boring to me. I find Celaena too perfect and the novels themselves feel very unoriginal and bland.

On the other hand, I love the series of A Song Of Ice And Fire. Not Young Adult, but interesting stories and beautiful and very colorful language. Although I couldn’t finish the third book because the English is still too much to get through. But even though I’ve read in English, I couldn’t not appreciate George RR Martin’s craft.

I think I’d much more appreciate Young Adult fiction that resolves around a character or characters who are about in their early 20s and entering some difficult situations where they actually mature, rather than books about perfect teenagers like Celaena.

And above all else, original stories. I’d be OK if it had some common and possibly overused elements like vampires for example. But the books need to have actually original plot. I’m mostly interested in fantasy or sci-fi.

Edit: Some responders appear to have been confused by my mention of politics. Politics is something I’m generally interested in and want to get educated on by reading non fiction books, which is why I decided to start reading again in the first place. It’s definitely not a topic I seek in novels and not a requirement for these recommendations at all.

I recently got interested in geopolitics and I want to understand various countries, their relations with other countries and why they are the way they are.

I’m also interested in Latin America, its relations with The West and some basic historic context on why its countries have mostly bad economy and very high crime rates and corruption.

I realize that Latin America is too broad of a term to cover it in one book and that each country was evolving under different circumstances, but I’m not looking for a single book.

I’m mostly looking for very beginner friendly books that require too much of pre-existing historic or cultural knowledge and books from authors without political agenda.

I decided to become a bookworm and think I should start with what interests me. That’s currently geopolitics.

To assure the mods that this post is on-topic, I’m interested in many layers of geopolitics, among them the topic of capitalism vs communism in context of the Cold War.

Leftists will argue that socialism fails only because the West sabotages it with sanctions or because CIA topples every socialist government and replace it with pro western puppet. I’m interested in books providing historic context for these Cold War conflicts/coups as well as books explaining the other side, that is Soviet Union.

Far left likes to do apologies for Soviet Union and other communist countries, but besides such apologies being almost categorically junk propaganda, it more often than not comes from the place of ignorance and not really understanding Soviet Union or any other country. So I’m interested in books explaining Soviet Union and its influence on its neighbours, as well as countries further away.

But besides that, also other communist/socialist topics, like the rise of communist China, the nature of communist China or the true nature of Chavist Venezuela.

And speaking of Venezuela, I’m also interested in the topics of Latin America as a whole. Like, why is it so poorly developed behind The West, when it’s culturally perfectly compatible and similar? Why do Latin American countries struggle with horrible economy, corruption and sky high crime rates? I’m interested in historic and political context on that and in generals understanding this region.

Please, I don’t want any books from blatant ideologues, sophists, hacks or pundits. I’m looking for books written by professionals who are either apolitical or politically centrist with little to no agenda in the matter. Or maybe even far-leftist authors who are open about the failings of their own politics for that matter. But I doubt there’s one.

I’ve been a political junkie for a very long time, but never really cared about China. Always heard overtly positive, almost certainly untrue narratives from the far left and whole lot of possibly (hopefully) exaggerated fear mongering from the right.

But recently I realized it’s about time to stop relying on social media to understand geopolitics (or politics in general) and that I should start reading the shit out of the world to understand it.

From the right, I keep hearing how China is aiming for world domination, expanding global influence, building army to conquer Taiwan and then some and that they’re doing some seriously fucked up shit to brainwash people.

From the left, I hear how China has amazing, futuristic infrastructure that makes the West look laughable and before and that it’s extremely progressive in the field of science and technology and that The West should emulate it and that it’s the world leader in green energy. And I heard a story about how 2 wealthy men were sentenced to death for producing contaminated baby formula. Something tells me that it wasn’t because of that, but that it was a pretext.

So what books do you have to recommend to me to understand China, its history and most importantly the historic context that brought it up is correct geopolitical position? On the first glance, it looks like a fascinating country with fascinating history that blurs the line between history and mythology and that it would be great to have it on our side and that it’s a shame it’s a dictatorship.