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I want to live abroad for a while, but this is one of the things I struggle with. I could not imagine only having 7-12 days of vacation per year. I don't live to work. Fuck that.

Oh, I didn't know it was a thing. Or maybe I forgot.

Just a reminder to Spaff that Steam has refunds now. Buying a game and finding out it doesn't run on Mac is exactly what those are for, even though $3 isn't the end of the world. edit: New game god cliffy b? Did Jake reference a random issue of PC Gamer in passing? I remember that issue but that's pretty obscure. Also, my version of alt-f4 is: tilde-q-tab-enter Opens up the console and types quit in a lot of games, especially those with an id engine heritage.

Personally I think having a segregated society is slightly odd. I imagine that it'd lead to more racial tension / conflict, because that happens whenever people group together, but I don't live in the US so I don't know how well it works for you guys. With integration I mean that all these immigrants need to become functioning members of society, they need to get jobs, they need to learn the language and from the other side they need to not be discriminated against. Their kids need to have the same opportunities as everyone else and not form a lower class in society. That's harder than it sounds and we've frankly been doing a poor job at it so far, before this flood of immigrants started, which is why you see the rise of right wing extremist parties. Since we have very strong laws governing job security and because employment fees are high, it's both expensive and risky to hire people. That actively works against immigrants. And because we have extensive social security and subsidized healthcare it's very expensive for society to support so many new people until they can support themselves; that builds resentment which only makes the situation worse.

Are you guys outside Europe following the refugee crisis? Germany is apparently expecting to accept 1.5 million refugees this year, and Sweden is taking as many or more per capita. How it works is often that one or two people show up, and if/when they get residency their family is allowed in too, making the real figure even larger. That's a lot of people, and it's not counting the unregistered ones which by some estimates are just as many. I'm worried that it's going to add even more fuel to the fire that is European right extremism and I'm worried (more like convinced) a large portion of those people will never integrate into society (there aren't many manual labor jobs here for example). The other western European nations are basically doing nothing and they can get away with it because Germany and Sweden said they will accept everyone. It's a completely fucked situation. On one hand, how can you deny those people help, but on the other hand we can't help everyone (we all implicitly accept a higher standard of living in the west even though people are miserable in places all over the world).

Of all the "The Swapper" threads you could've bumped you picked this one!

I'm not judging, but I can't imagine eating 4000 calories a day. That's a different reality from my own. I need to be eating more (I dunno, like 2500+) to put on some weight and even that feels like a gargantuan task. Right now I probably eat around 1500 on average and some days way less than that. I guess the lesson is that it's hard to change your eating habits in either direction.

Inventing names and mnemonics for every rule and every operation bothers me. It's not something I've been exposed to much myself, but it's a preconceived notion I have about math teaching in the US. For example, I've never seen 'sec' used in anything but american textbooks, to me it's completely redundant and adds no clarity. Mnemonics bother me because they make math seem like it's about memorising arbitrary rules. For example, there's apparently a rule called FOIL for multiplying expressions like (a+*(c+d). Memorising how to do that serves no other purpose than to make you better at working through 20 of problems like that in a row. There's a well known rant on the subject of math education. It argues for a unreasonably radical shift in the way we teach math, but it's a well written and thought provoking piece of text nontheless. It's called A Mathematician’s Lament. It's 25 pages though.

I hate reading things on a phone, or doing any kind of browsing really. Typing is even worse. I don't know how people stand it, or enjoy it (which they must do, considering how many faces you see buried in phones).

Get Anki to practice Kanji. The more you get a given character right the less frequently it'll show it to you, so it makes you focus on the characters / words you have the most problems retaining. It's more efficient than just working through a list of say 200 characters every day. There's ton of language exchange online. Check out lang-8 for example, it's only for text but it's still useful. I don't know what it's like where you live, but in my town you can find real life language exchange groups too, expats who want to keep their language alive, exchange students who want to practice a foreign language, other people learning a new language practicing with eachother etc. I never go to those because I'm too shy hehe but I hear about them a lot. The LearnJapanese subreddit is also pretty good for asking dumb questions and getting answers fast. I think consistency is the key. The hard part is not letting a skipped day turn into a skipped week, month, half a year etc. All that missed time piles up. As a matter of fact, I think I'll sit down and study some Japanese right now. Thanks Twig

Thanks for the heads up, definitely setting my alarm for that. Also, in unrelated space stuff, this cool image showing how large the Andromeda galaxy would look in the sky if we could see it more clearly was floating around recently:

I had my first ever interview today. I think it went okay, but it's kinda hard to know isn't it?

My thoughts on the new Maiden album haven't quite coalesced yet, but I think these two songs are my favouites. They also happen to be the two longest they've ever recorded, so if you have half an hour to spare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CMY99WLRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8Yl6dCH8BA edit: I just found out there's a vinyl version that was mastered differently and sounds way better dammit

Heh, that's bizarre. I have to admit though that it makes me think of the San Andreas mission where you waste people with a combine harvester.

I've found myself consciously cutting back on podcasts, because at some point I was listening to them more out of habit than I was actually enjoying them.

Yeah, their lyrical content often veers into the unintentionally cheesy territory. I'm a pretty big fan of them too, I had a period of a few years around high school where they dominated my music consumption. It took me ages just to get through most of their stuff, because there's so much of it. I think the majority of it is good too, which is impressive. It pains me a a little that for some reason I wasn't able to get as into their last two albums. Brave New World was a great comeback, there are several songs on it I'd put fairly high up on a list of top songs. Dance of Death wasn't as strong but still had a few standouts and not that many complete duds. It was A Matter Of Life And Death that really disappointed me and I still haven't fully figured out why. It's not just the songwriting, because there's plenty of material on there that I think could be great. I think it's more in the production, but I don't enough about that to articulate it. It just lacks definition, it's muddy and it kinda makes everything sound the same. The Final Frontier was a slight improvement. It could be that they're recording with three guitarists now, but when you compare those records with BNW I think the difference is huge (their olders album sound way crisper, but it's a totally different sound so I don't think it's a fair comparison).

I've been listening to and also reading impressions about the new Iron Maiden album and I've noticed that many people seem to have quite strong opinions after having listened to it one or maybe two times. This is weird to me, because I usually need to listen to an album a lot of times (5-10) before I know what I think about it and I almost never like a song the first time I hear it (unless it's something very easily digestible like a DnB or trance song). I begin to like music more when I've heard it enough times to where I can remember most of a song. I know some people have week long spotify playlists and (back in the day) hundreds of gigs of MP3s, but I'd go crazy only hearing the same song once a week. When I find something I like I can listen to it a dozen times in a row. Makes finding new music harder though, I'm pretty bad at expanding my taste. Even with artists that I like; I'm not sure I've listened to the entire discography of a single artist. What about you guys? Am I just weird? There's no other form of media I'm this way with, I'll watch a movie once and enjoy it.

The lack of loot is the main reason I stopped playing. Even though the mechanics are good it's a less interesting context for them to be in. When I start a Dark Souls playthrough I have a mental list of at least a dozen items I'll want to get, and from that I can make a plan and set goals for myself. It fits so well into the non-linear structure of the world. Conversely, I think the complete lack of useful pickups and item rewards in Bloodborn fits very poorly with the same structure, where so much is optional. It also leads to a poorer mechanical pacing. Getting Havel's Ring is rewarding each time you do it, not only because it's a tense fight, but because it has such a dramatic impact on your character. Bloodborne has the same, very incremental character progression as Dark Souls but without the gear progression and the latter was key to what made DkS work.

Happy to hear it's finally coming out. One of the few games I've been anticipating. My sense is that it's been "mostly done" for ages, but that Blow is a perfectionist who's not going to put something out where every single detail isn't something he's thought through.

I got called to an interview for a PhD position I applied to (yay!). However, while it sounds like an awesome position, I'm not sure I'd want to accept it even if it were offered to me (because reasons). So, I'm applying for other stuff as well, but I don't expect to hear back from those until way after I would potentially get offered this first position. I know I'm getting ahead of myself here but it would be awful to turn down a position only to not get a different one, but at the same time the fear of that is a bad reason to accept the first position. This is probably par for the course when it comes to job hunting, but it's pre-emptively stressing me out nonetheless.

I think it was arrow keys to move forward / back and to turn left / right. Strafing was hidden on something obscure like period / comma. There was also a modifier you could hold to turn the left / right keys into the strafe keys.

Well, that's more than I pay for 99% of my games.

Ugh, I've been playing some CS 1.6 the last few days to unwind because I finally have some free time. Unfortunately there are only like two decent servers left near me, and I just got perm banned from one of them for "wallhacking". When I was 15 I thought that was flattering but now it's just annoying as hell. It would be pretty stupid of me to risk getting VAC banned on a decade old Steam account anyway.

For $20 it better be quite substantial. From puts out good stuff so it probably will be, but I'm still suspicious of DLC in general. So much of it is a ripoff.

That's what the thread is for