cichlisuite

I hope joyrex didn't sell out our e-mails since they became (unnecessarily) mandatory for logging in.

On a second thought, not really.

Mosfilm has a movie repository on yt https://www.youtube.com/c/Mosfilm_eng/videos There's also an archive of older films https://www.youtube.com/c/MosfilmRuOfficial I've watched a couple of ww2 movies recently The White Tiger set on the eastern front, a ghost German tank (yes, a ghost tank) prowls the Russian wilderness and wreaks terror. It appears no one and nothing can stop it, but then one young tankist claims he understands how to fight it. All realism thrown out the window, the generals are now facing the fact that there is a ghost tank behind their lines. It's hilarious like that, and it's a typical Russian emotionally intense drama. For a larger-than-life surrealism drama, I rather enjoyed it by not taking it completely seriously, but at the same time, the actors are very good, and overall the movie is well made, and it takes the matter seriously. 7 bounced shells / 10 (But this is nothing compared to the movie T-34 which is a hilarious exaggerated bro melodrama on steroids with most of the movie made of bullet-time (emm, shell-time?) scenes. A Russian Fury/10) Aggression: The Battle for Moscow , and Liberation (a movie about the Kursk battle in 43): curiosity drove me further down this Mosfilm rabbit hole, and I was surprised how epic and huge the productions are. Definitely very ambitious and some scenes are really fantastic live action stuff. What I loved most about these two movies is that they really tried to find actors that look like real persons: Model, Zhukov, Vasilevski, Vatutin (lol he's the SAME!). The dialogues are swinging between corny, time-capsule-propagandist melodrama and realistic-abridged. Too bad they were trying to condense such big historical time frames into a movie length, as most of story-telling "juice" gets lost right there. You can't escape a Russian way of telling a story as well, which has its own typicality, as Hollywood does. Someone needs to make a good Russian/Hwood collaboration.

but if i hear him the first night, isn't he close enough that I can safely assume he already found me?

Japan went rampant, gobbling up the entire continent, leaving only Theodora with three of her cities. So I made her my ally, gave her lots of gold for support, voted her as the congress leader (combining my votes and Theodora's we could outvote Japan by a small margin), and conspired for all other civs declare war against Japan. Now it's a world war against Japan. Theodora did not liberate Amsterdam but took the city for her, which made her a stronger opponent to Japan, but Theodora is bad at tactics so Japan is beating her in combat all the time. My small expeditionary force to help Theodora retook Rotterdam, but we had to abandon it and withdraw. However, all this time I've been managing a strong naval blockade of Japan from the east, and now I just took Japan's capital with many Wonders by a surprise attack and he is very not happy. He got cold feet and already offered peace lol.

We therefore conclude that perunamuusi knows best. This session is now adjourned. All comments are henceforth invalid. Thank you for your contributions, gentlemen.

the only thing worse than stiff label contracts is needy intrusive fans I'm coming to believe

What is crossing a picket line?

? everybody was chen-go fightinn'

I dropped a BOC album. It's on the floor. Can we put down the red banner now please? @Joyrex

see this shit Alco? do you see what you've done?

Woke up from strange dreams today I barely remember, but it left me with this weird feeling of desire to be a prairie drifter on a horse living off the land in 19th century.

It sure is dangerous, I'm glad you got out of it. Honestly I thought you were joking (as some kind of watmm banter) so I had to be sure. Sorry if I came across as prying or insensitive.

You were taking heroin at 12?

Beautifully written.

ok. here we differ, let's leave it at that.

Grand strategy is shaped through policy, and Clausewitz said that war is a continuation of politics by other means and there certainly is an overlap between politics and warfare. But before we continue with this, I must ask you if you actually read Sun Tzu's Art of War and Lao Tzu's Dao de Jing? Because apart from us being a bit off topic, you're missing the point about Daoism and its tenets about nation leaders. It's definitely not as simple as "a leader does not shape the course of narrative". And I believe the whole Tao philosophy is too huge a topic to make some inaccurate generalizations for the sake of arguments. Also, a Daoist leader would never use psychological warfare. We were talking about the supposed beginning of engineering public opinion. Unfortunately, I don't speak Chinese, and I'm not familiar with wu wei (I've looked it up though), but I've read Dao de Jing, and Dao (or Tao) is supposed to mean "Way" (also Path, Road) not "follow the path" which I think are two different things. But I'm no Taoist philosopher, nor a Chinese speaker so what do I know.

Unexpected consequences would be like if we, as people, recognized the threat, overcame our differences, realize us being brainwashed, etc, and act to expunge the corporate usurpers. Otherwise, everything is going according to plan, because the plan is to make the power of the people moot and the unexpected collateral damage (even if harmful to some extent) serves to prepare the ground to escalate the repression and control at a whim. As in, it's easier to rebuild a city to your liking after it was destroyed, than to rebuild it on top of the existing structures.

Right. Well if I'm nitpicking, you're taking Sun Tzu a bit out of context here, he is talking about warfare. But it's not entirely benign since the ways of war are often used in peace to achieve aims and maintain power. The center thing here is divide et impera. As @ignatius said, it's planting a seed of discord, fogging up shit with disinformation, messing with definitions, bending morals, spreading hate, etc. The goal is not to cultivate a loyal following, but to block the discourse, distract from actually important things we, as the demos, must be vigilant about and fight for basically on everyday basis otherwise the busy corporate and gestapo wasps will slowly but surely erode the real progress of our society. And Daoism is not passive at all. Also, Lao Tzu makes several points about how to be a leader of a nation. If anything, Lao Tzu seeks the path of least resistance (friction) as a mark of operational perfection, whether on a personal level with dealing with yourself, nature and others, or as a leader of any body. The work, according to Daoism, flows. You devote to your work, and when it's done, you leave it be. The answers to your questions and pondering is to be sought with a certain detachment to help you find a way that is not tainted by your own shortcomings as you might fall into another trap of your own making. That can be perceived as passivity, but it's actually and arduous labor that requires huge fortitude and honesty.

Sun Tzu? He wrote the Art of War. Did you mean Lao Tzu? Oh sure, you're both right. We could go all the way back to ancient Egyptians (pharaoh, the son of god and their pantheon) and religions in general. But I don't think the results are really that unpredictable. What we see today is basically psychological warfare.

well some songs require the volume knob adjustment, in any extreme

this is actually going on in all "first world countries" on a regular basis, especially the last few years. But engineering the public opinion has been going on since the TV became a household item.

I prefer V, I played VI and it introduced some interesting mechanics that I think are good, but overall it didn't attract me all that much, possibly because of the art style which is not really working for me. I love the art deco-ish UI design of the V and the terrain graphics are neat. Which one do you prefer? I'd love to play Alyx but I don't have the VR set. So I watched a bit of playthroughs on yt and it seems like an awesome game.