>>46981
On the way to work today it struck me how really thoroughly moronic it is that games like Elite Dangerous, Starsector, I mean virtually any game ever made within the last 20+ years that's set in space insisting that somehow the corporate sector will colonize and rule over space or that corporations even have got any kind of a longterm future, which I guess I will at least get to see debunked in my lifetime. It's not that it hasn't occurred to me before but just sinking in the depths to how moronic it can be be partly because of the fact that no such technology is ever going to be available to us anytime soon which would make space a remotely profitable venture as opposed to something where eccentric billionaires sporadically donate money towards in token and often meaningless gestures towards personal hobbies simply because theyre the ones that presently concentrate most wealth and power. Even the colonization efforts of the new world were at first largely funded by the crown iirc and that at least was just several months of voyages, not the year and a half to three years it would take us just to get to Mars and back anf forgetting the fact you can at least load a fleet of ships up with gold but you can't exactly load up cargo shuttles with shit even from Mars to bring it back here.

>but ernst how the fuck is that even related

Chiefly because of the fact that it's become ky conviction that space exploration and colonization will be solely the domain of governments and religions for the time being, with Mormonism and Scientologists sadly more likely than not being the chief explorators unless as I strongly predict some type of a Catholic or possibly even Eastern Orthodox subsect emerges which preaches the merger of the two concepts for whatever bizarre reason.

And no, I am not talking about 40K either however that is sadly not likely to be too far off from what would actually happen eventually mixed up with a bit of Unitology from Dead Space and non-stop internecine warfare rather than anything even resembling the Imperial Creed. Considering how much the Arabic and Moslem world at one point pioneered astronomy it also wouldn't surprise me if they should suddenly stop being so damn backward and retrograde as a cultural amalgamation and to instead actually begin both forward looking as well as past looking to previous glories that don't involve beheadings.

I would actually say that it is most likely religions that will motivate it honestly and like I said it really came more from thinking just the name the "Pillars of Creation nebula." There is certainly something very, not sure the right word religious? Spiritual? Mystical? About the night sky and always has been intersecting with religion.

It is the sad realization that we could literally build a moonbase right fucking now with just the budget surplus of Germany and spread out over a decade. We're talking the tens of billions here not even anything substantial but our useless fucking corporations don't want that because there's no money in it. It's hard not to be cynical about the extraordinary waste of this absolute shittiest of systems and the amazing things we could do with a fraction of that money and that with any government ruled more by nationalistic, monarchistic, or in any way less mercantile impulse we'd likely have more of that.

I note this also because paganism is really a dead end, and what's worse, is all the people looking back longingly to some backward age of mud huts like a bunch of Arabs. It's probably partly why I'm perplexed by anyone who's a big fan of medieval and dark ages themes, even if it's a fantasy setting, because it makes me cringe in not entirely dissimilar ways that even Adolph Hitler cringed so fucking hard core about it. These larping retards are celebrating a retrograde period of collective shame and embarrassment for us more often than not, rather than looking forward to the future and to victory in general.

I do think though that when it comes right down to it it'll likely be the religious impulse more than anything which motivates the national governments or other organizations to begin doing things like serious space exploration efforts again, because in some of these instances we won't even see any kind of a return in the investment in knowledge for a generation or two, and that is not something that any profiteer is ever going to be capable of fathoming. They'd burn the whole world for a higher margin the next two consecutive quarters.

>>46949
>>46986

>Congrats

Thanks. I'm looking for rooms along the train tracks but they even want more than 400€ for a room in a fucking tiny village wtf?
Tbh, I'm sad and frustrated. I should not take it personal as they say but it's really like those job interviews, ot always feels bad to be turned down because somebody fits it better. I'm not so keen about sharing a flat, I think it is ok and can be fun nonetheless but I was a bit worried, now I don't even have a room or a flat. Zwischenmiete is oftentimes to short, some were for half a year but did not even get an answer, so... I'm even getting the panics again, not finding people or not being liked. The mediocre struggles of semi social people, ugh.

>But what wouldn't one do for a Frikandel!

Well, exactly. But quarantine would be shit rn, with a new university and semester starting soon.

Everything is going smoothly. My tests and homeworks keep coming back as As, I know what I'm doing during class and I'm atop of things generally.
Things make a bit more sense each day.
There is one week until the mid-semester Chinese-exams. We have to know the materials from the first chapter of the textbook and that's about it. Should be easy if I prepare properly. (Basically the hanzi, the phrases and the three pages' worth of grammar.)

On the way home I saw a Chinese family get on the bust and I eagerly listened to them talk. After 10 minutes of concentrating I realised that I understood fuck-all (aside from the very obvious particles and words), but it's probably not surprising after just 4 weeks of study.
It's actually a very pretty language. No idea why people say it sounds "bad".

Went to the convenience store to buy some lettuce and bread-rolls for a burger. It tasted fine. Probably one of the better lunches I made for myself during uni so far.

The Oriental Art History lecturer actually went and read the CV/biography I wrote up and gave it a score of 10 out of 10 with the added comment of Thank your for the in-depth and well written introduction. (At fucking 12:36 :D)
So it was probably good. Maybe they were right and I'll feel more at ease and at home here than I had in HS.
I've actually been leaving the building whistling a tune during the last two weeks or so.
Even the room is cleaner.

The only thing is that it's getting colder, but even then, taking the bus with my shoulder-bag in a tracksuit top to shield against the morning cold feels somehow right.

>>46960
I'll get back to you on this topic when I'm less tired. Probably tomorrow.
Just saying.

>>46984

[Camera]
field of view = 60
#viewing distance = 6666.0
viewing distance = 666666.0
small feature culling pixel size = 16.0

[Cells]
exterior cell load distance = 1

[Terrain]
distant terrain = True

It looks way better with "exterior cell load distance" set to something over 10 but it's to slow to play sadly. I'm fine with the classical Vvardenfell sfumato anyway

[Camera]
field of view = 60
#viewing distance = 6666.0
viewing distance = 666666.0
small feature culling pixel size = 16.0

[Cells]
exterior cell load distance = 1

[Terrain]
distant terrain = True

Now here's something you don't hear everyday. Potentially patriotic Post-Hardcore:
https://youtu.be/p7gYipg-LNM

Sadly, absolutely no information about this band can be found anywhere online: no interviews, no websites, nothing. These German gentlemen released three albums from the mid to late '90s on the controversial Skull Records and later Rock-O-Rama. Considering how wildly different this band sounds from their labelmates, I'm too damn curious as to how they got signed onto those labels. Given, the Schaffelhuber brothers had several endeavors outside Rechtsrock, including distributing completely non-political music through their various labels. Allegedly, they were involved in bootlegging. In any case, their albums were later reissued by Rock-O-Rama Records and billed as "Patriotic Rock", so right-wing sympathies could very well be possible although it's apparently difficult to discern.

I've also asked Germans elsewhere to help transcribe these lyrics or at least parse out their themes, and none reported anything overtly political. Some cringed at how melodramatic their lyrics were, though.

"Drei Kreuze" particularly grabs me. Despite the shaky vocals, the bass tone is infectious and the synths heighten the atmosphere. All the instruments serve the arrangements well. The music takes some surprising turns just when you start worrying it would be too predictable. The shifts work and are far from anything gratuitous or incongruous in the wider context of the music.

Side note: these guys couldn't look more quintessentially 90s if they tried.

I'm listening to the most recent Descendents album at the moment and it's really fascinating how the contents of punk music lyrics can change over a few decades.

Can't have no more juicy burgers
Can't have no more greasy fries
Doctor took my lipid profile
He told me I'm barely alive
No more fat
No more fat
No more chicken pot pies, no more chorizo
I can't have that
Got this problem from my father
Grandpa died at forty-five
Heart attack and a triple bypass
Future's looking very bright
No more fat
No more fat
No more apple fritters, no more ice cream
I can't have that
No more fat
No more fat
I like food, but all the food that tastes good...
I can't have that

>>46511

> no need to introduce questionable elements like Russian roulette to stress how traumatized the characters are

It just goes together with the whole "one shot" theme that is mentioned at the beginning when they go hunting. Also when Mike and Nick are forced to play against each other and Mike keeps telling Nick to pull the trigger is when he starts suspecting Mike of wanting to kill him and that's what actually leads to his trauma. It probabaly could've been done some different way, but I don't think it's that arbitrary.

>I would rank Platoon, Full Metal Jacket or not-so-Vietnam Apocalypse Now

I've yet to see Platoon, both FMJ and Apocalypse Now are great movies, but they are very stylized and at times too comedic which leads to a detachment from all the terrible stuff that happens, frankly they're too fun to watch, whereas The Deer Hunter is much more realist and had a much bigger emotional impact on me.
I just really enjoyed the whole epic three act structure & the breadth of characters with their own destinies.

>I don't really get the point of making them Russian immigrants

I'm not sure but I think it's to highlight the absurdity of them going to war, since they're "Americans" only for a few generations and still decide to fight for "their" country. The USSR being involved in the Vietnam War on the other side also adds a bit of irony. And also all the rituals & traditions around the Orthodox church (even if clumsily executed) add a certain gravity and highlight the sense of community. It probably wouldn't work the same way with e.g. Italian immigrants whose culture (or maybe rather how it is perceived in media, e.g. The Godfather) is quite different.
It's funny when you dissect all the mistakes like that, they did strike me as odd but I didn't really mind them tbh. As you say with the example of Nick saying that his name is actually American, one might interpret these "mistakes" as the community losing their roots and becoming "Americanized", even if that's maybe not intentional.

>>46529

>We only think about The Deer Hunter here as a movie about the veterans coming home and having to deal with PTSD on top of the alienation from American life because you have to keep in mind that what was really compounding the trauma of that war for these guys was the fact on the one hand you had all these cringey Hollywood liberal types screaming baby killer at them

I mean that description fits better with Rambo tbh, Deer Hunter has much broader themes about friendship, working class life etc.

A Geology of Media deals with the materiality of media, minerals/metals and chemistry, a new media history as well, that takes into account temporality of media. Now this already might sound a bit weird, it is written by a media studies guy, so the vocabulary is not easy and also weird to many as it deals with a academic turn that can be summed up under the banner of New Materalism (it is going away from signifiers, semiotics in the humanities). Also art projects are used to explicate the things he dwells on a lot.

Making it super short: The geophysical and geopolitical entanglement of media is the topic here

Basically the book literally grounds media in what is often perceived as immaterial realm of software, gui, virtuality, film and such. I think this quote sums up the books quite neatly:

>Media materiality is not contained in the machines, even if the machines themselves contain a planet. The machines are more like vectors across the geopolitics of labor, resources, planetary excavations, energy production, natural processes from photosynthesis to mineralization, chemicals, and the aftereffects of electronic waste.

The book examines media and its material base, for instance the temporal long range effects (waste), the millions of years for minerals to form, the burning of coals as 19th and 20th century tpe of energy to fuel 21st century computer und communications technology. It also elaborates on the effect on bodies, both the cognitive capitalist type of exhausted bodies in the creative economy and the exhausted, toxicated bodies of chinese iPad polishing workers, that inhale aluminium dust, the later is emphasized here and must be seen as addition to the nowdays often forgotten industrial part, that still is going in non-western parts of the planet. Not to forget all the miners that fuck up their bodies for a small payment, so that cool phones are cheap enough.

---

Thomas Bernhards Walking/Gehen from 1970s is a typical Bernhard short read, I had to laugh only a few times, especially the scene in Rustenschachers store for trousers is hilarious but otherwise the themes repeat quite a bit tbh, the secondary literature was right. I advice reading his Lime works doing it the first time was a great fun for me.

>>46944
About two thirds the way into the thread this got brought up. I don't know much about modern audio but there are DACs.

>Xonar DG

Oh dear doge that thing's an actual honest to God soundcard XD

>I am totally out of the loop and have been using the onboard for years now.

Real dedicated soundcards stopped being a thing really a decade ago for similar reasons as to why PhysX cards stopped being a thing
http://cyberpunkist.com/amp-vs-dac-vs-sound-card-explained/

What's your actual problem? Is it EM noise or purely a software/drivers issue? Well you could get a DAC but depending the age of your system you could end up running into even more problems just trying to get the drivers to work on decade old+ hardware.

>and that it is as compatible as possible.

So you're pretty much looking for something like this?
https://www.newegg.com/p/2GA-002Y-00011?Item=9SIAPPHBME8656&nm_mc=KNC-MSNSearch&cm_mmc=KNC-MSNSearch-_-Accessories%20-%20Sound%20Cards-_-Andrea%20Communications-_-9SIAPPHBME8656&source=region&msclkid=03cb92abe49e10b9b197cddb6c323b2b&gclid=CKnJ_ZmuiewCFQmMswod6pMGAQ&gclsrc=ds
Because I actually looked for Xonar DG on Amazon and got a 404 "we don't know when, if ever, this will be back in stock"

I hope that helps. If all you're looking for is a workaround I personally would just find some cheap shit that's basically just a PCIe card with audio out rather than an actual high quality DAC

You can alternatively go even cheaper which may well be what you want however
https://www.ebay.com/i/233716222190?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-213727-13078-0&mkcid=2&itemid=233716222190&targetid=4580771608074811&device=c&mktype=&googleloc=&poi=&campaignid=403204658&mkgroupid=1234751773358313&rlsatarget=pla-4580771608074811&abcId=9300377&merchantid=51291&msclkid=eae2eaca889d1f6e7bf2b5ba0289ae9f
paying for cheap chin chinese shit may cost you more in the long run as you discover the abysmal quality of it but that being stated the cheapest thing you can possibly do is get a USB3.0/3.1 device which you can then plug into the front of your case and route headphone audio through the dongle. If you have actual speakers you may wish to use the soundcard through PCIe instead which contextually sounds like your system is old enough that may not be a problem.
Semi-related Does anyone ever go onto hardware sites or someplace and try checking out the super old and I mean super old hardware? I don't know why but it's just gratifying to me looking at 512mb video cards and things like that
https://www.newegg.com/dell-ati-radeon-2400xt/p/27N-0001-001C7