Random Rant Thread

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Dec 2, 2021 19:35:16 GMT 1 K1power said:

Funnily, Norman Reedus lives in both those 'villages'.

Yeah, and I'd think that's definitely not a coincidence. I suppose Kojima likes The Walking Dead.

Hell, if The Walking Dead was a village, Death Stranding is just a nightmare that Reedus had one night when he was 12. The former is still a very good work of art, while the latter isn't. Because a 12-year-old boy's nightmare is only interesting on a peripheral level, at the margin.

I mean, in any fiction it's inevitable as long as you are making up an interesting story. Your characters must be somehow incredibly important to the universe that you are creating, and in that process you must sacrifice some Others, the world _out there_. But when you are trying to depict a universe, its birth and death and rebirth, all the catharsis and philosophy around it, when that's the main point of what you are doing, as is with Death Stranding, you shouldn't rely entirely on the viewer/player's emotional attachment to the characters. That's just super lazy. You are supposed to be dealing with something bigger than a boy's subjective nightmare, a universe, and it just can't feel like something smaller than a small village. It just can't. It's an abysmal failure if it does. And Death Stranding does big time.

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This is very important to understand. Not just with an epidemic, but with many other things too. Most people never get this. Math really is essential in our life.

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Of course way too early to tell, grain of salt, etc., but it does seem to point in the direction where Omicron's main advantage is its immune escape. The infection-induced immunity in particular - which is the dominant kind of immunity in South Africa - might be pretty ineffective against this variant.

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Lin Wood is one of the most spectacularly far-gone nutjobs out there, but man. If you don't mind being unhinged, go nuts, I guess.

Apparently he doxxed this on his Telegram feed. Holy crap, man. It's Tucker Carlson asking Hunter Biden for help getting his miserable kid into Georgetown, lol.

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It takes a variant like Omicron several weeks to take hold in a country, so if you are right in the middle of a major wave of infections, most likely of Delta, you are seriously, seriously disadvantaged to deal with the new one.

The US is entering an ever-so-predictable Thanksgiving surge now. That's just a very bad timing to say the least, and I'm 150% sure that Omicron is already absolutely everywhere in the US.

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This is the reinfection chart for Omicron, and as you can see, compared to Delta and even Beta (which had some immune-escape characteristics too, and was very prevalent in South Africa in particular), the reinfection, meaning getting infected despite the prior infection(s), rates are significantly higher.

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And meanwhile:

It's all Delta.

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Occasional reminder that Hillary Clinton's team chose this joke as her running mate.

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UK Labour is the stupidest political party in the entire universe. Bar none. Good Lord.

It's just absolutely mind-boggling, and my thesis that the worst Democratic operatives in the US who were responsible for the mess of the Hillary campaign, like a bunch of Bill Galstons, have all moved to Britain to work for Labour is probably true.

I mean, I know a few who actually did and do now!

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A guy that I used to work with and who now works for one of the Silicon Valley giants told me that the anti-vaxx contents are watched disproportionately by viewers in Eastern Europe (including Russia). That's pretty much what everyone assumes given the low vaccination rates and everything, but it seems that there's actual non-public data to back that up.

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Damn.

Spahn warned that the number of Covid-19 patients on intensive care wards would “significantly rise” above the 5,000 mark in the coming weeks and months. On Friday morning, 4,793 patients suffering from the disease are lying on intensive care beds at hospitals around Germany, about half of whom are intubated.

Nearly 4,800, soon to be nearly 5,000. That's a lot of people in ICU beds even for a country of 85M people. It's remarkable that German health care sector can deal with that many critical patients at once, but it's really dangerous to have your health care system overburdened to such a degree at this juncture.

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Dec 3, 2021 14:13:53 GMT 1 miscmisc said:

UK Labour is the stupidest political party in the entire universe. Bar none. Good Lord.

It's just absolutely mind-boggling, and my thesis that the worst Democratic operatives in the US who were responsible for the mess of the Hillary campaign, like a bunch of Bill Galstons, have all moved to Britain to work for Labour is probably true.

I mean, I know a few who actually did and do now!

It's very depressing. I gave them the benefit of the doubt after Starmer's election as leader, but it's now extremely clear they are clueless.

In other news, I still watch The Walking Dead. Its basically a guilty pleasure now.

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I guess I keep getting Boris Johnson wrong because I keep underestimating the stupidity of Labour. I thought the biggest factor in the remarkable survival of Boris Johnson was that he's the Brexit personified that cannot be easily removed from the British polity, like a tumor, and that the second biggest one was that he's adored by a significant faction of the British mainstream media as if he was one of their own.

But there's always Labour and their incompetence. Somehow I kept missing that elephant in the room.

Oh, and The Walking Dead is a fine TV show that should be more than a guilty pleasure, and the fact that I stopped watching it around Season 5 says more about my priority than about the quality. Despite what I've said about it recently, it's clearly one of the best shows ever.

Which I can definitely not say about the spinoff show (World Beyond) that I was forced to watch a few weeks ago, lol.

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The funny thing is that you can't even tell how many people actually got vaccinated in the US, but are expected to cure an infectious disease that makes dead people walk and crave for flesh. Like I said, the CDC is the most overrated American agency in fiction, more so than the CIA.

It does seem that the official CDC vax figure in the US is off. The actual vax # in the US is most certainly lower than the official one.

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Wrong.



The bottom-right one is not an oxymoron at all. Come on, man, they are doctors and nurses. I would argue that there are disproportionately many kooks in that world. So many kooks, all kinds of kooks. You shouldn't call them people of science just because, because many of them are far from it.