I'm not. The first season was great, a nice little star wars story with memorable characters, nice character arc, a good overall narrative arc. The second season was a setup for two spinoff shows, both of which I didn't have much interest in. Let's not mention Luke Skywalker, who absolutely had to be there because Star Wars can't do without him. The third season implied that I had to watch a show I had no interest in for the full story, and honestly was really mediocre for me. I have zero interest in this movie because of that last season.
Truth be told, I wouldn't be surprised if a certain amount of Star Wars fatigue is setting in as well, at least for me. Most of the TV stuff produced since Disney took over has been averaging towards mediocre or falling flat. I feel it's like post-Endgame Marvel, where as a viewer you've kind of gotten what you want out of the franchise and are ready for something entirely different. I think that if Andor is the last thing Star Wars I watch, it can end for me on a high note.
> we could only get the physical cards at the airport and at some tourist office, and we forgot to look for it at the airport
Little over a decade ago I did exactly the same. I ended up buying a Suica card at Ueno station from a clerk, which was a bit of an adventure since she was eager to help but barely spoke any English and I barely spoke any Japanese. Together we skillfully massacred both languages with an ad-hoc pidgin and lots of gesturing. Due to an issue with my wireless hotspot I only had an old school phrasebook at my disposal, which was about as helpful as the infamous Monty Python sketch implies. The airport seemed much more convenient as a tourist since everyone there at the very least spoke basic English. At the time it was certainly possible to get a Suica card at a major train station, though admittedly not easy.
> The game has civilizations transform into other ones.
This is the most significant gameplay change for this edition, and from a concept point of view it's not a terrible idea, but the execution is extremely jarring. As you progress into the next age the game basically gets a reset. Alliances are gone, trade is reset, city states disappear unless you've pulled them into your civilization, most buildings become obsolete, units get reorganized in a rather dramatic way.
I get what they're trying to do, they're trying to balance the mid and late game to prevent snowballing.
The problem with the way they've done it is that as you progress towards the end of the second age, as a player you have very few incentives to actually build most improvements. Outpace the AI in research and culture, or outproduce them and lay waste to their big cities.
The settlement limit as you go into the second age also tends to penalize early expansion, another balancing measure. You find the "new world" but you can't just go ahead and do the massive landgrab because doing so comes with a set of penalties which you'll have to offset by building things that'll compensate and in turn stunt growth. As you approach the end of the second age that limit is raised drastically which I can only guess is to promote conquest at that point, since the existing factions on the other continent will tend to expand but not be powerful enough to stop you from steamrolling them.
It leaves you with the impression that ages are just designed to stunt growth and expansion and you're fairly confined unless you want to stack penalties. I got the impression the AI doesn't deal with the reset particularly well either, since some AI players which were fairly strong early on started faltering in the second age.
Finally, the ages mechanic comes with an end-age crisis, which rather than an interesting challenge turns into a bunch of busywork. In the second age the crisis I got was religion related, where you get to pick your poison and then deal with your choice. In my case I had a choice to invest into a lot of buildings to boost happiness as the AI sent out waves of missionaries to stamp out my religion, or just churn out missionaries. The latter was cheaper and didn't take up precious space.
> you need to spread improvements across tiles instead of building tall.
I have mixed feelings about this in the long game. It's nice to see cities sprawl out into districts/quarters, but at the same time you're trading resources for growth. Overbuilding is a nice mechanic, but in the end I feel that buildings becoming obsolete at the end of an age makes me not want to invest too much in certain buildings despite having a massive amount of production. A particular game I played I ended up with Rome next to the sea, which grew and grew until there was no room for expansion anymore until the end of the age. Maybe it'd have been better to have one or two more buildings in a district?
In Civ 6 I felt it was a neat feature with some nice gameplay mechanics, but in 7 I feel the mechanic has expanded so much that you're constantly weighing options trying to plan ahead that it weighs things down. Maybe I'll feel differently about it over time.
> I’m pretty happy with Civ VII, and I think popular opinion is 50-50 right now
Honestly, this is the first time I'm really on the fence about Civ. There's a lot of ideas in there that kind of work, but at the same time kind of don't work. If I were to summarize my sentiment in a single sentence: the motto "a civilization to stand the test of time" has been supplanted with the dread of looming impermanence whispering "this too will pass".
> There is nothing in the world that is as good as soundcloud was in 2012.
Around 2009-2010 the local scene was thriving with netlabels. Most of those netlabels were just a static HTML page with a list of releases, a ZIP file and an album cover. If you ended up at some event, you'd discover the netlabel and you'd look at their releases on their webpage. Soundcloud came at just the right time for me to become the Web 2.0 equivalent of the indie music scene. You'd discover an artist at some event, or via a netlabel release, and then find out what else they were doing and just keep up with them. If you were a musician it was just too convenient.
> It was as close as the world could practically get to copy-left, remix culture, and they threw it away because the founders lacked guts or vision or both
This is exactly what was happening locally. A few of those netlabels had releases under creative commons licenses, with artists encouraging people to remix their tracks, offering up stems for download and the whole scene thrived on some really neat remixes, which usually ended up on Soundcloud and you ended up discovering that remixer's original work in the process.
I think the tide turned when everyone started to just dump everything on soundcloud. At some point it became so popular that DJ mixes started to dominate feeds, people just started dumping other people's work on there and then not-quite-so-indie labels started using it for promotion. It was a matter of time before the rights holder collection agencies started smelling blood in the water and the first articles of "soundcloud is not paying royalties" appeared.
It's around that time that Soundcloud just became less and less useful to me. The local netlabels and indie scene ended up using Soundcloud less, opting for Twitter and other social media for promotion while releasing on Bandcamp. People who used to be very active there just reposted other people's releases until those fizzled out too. Over the course of a year or two it went from the place to discover exciting new music to the place nobody paid attention to.
> perhaps the fediverse has an opportunity to step in here… perhaps we just need a new crop of founders who believe in a world full of diverse musical culture
I honestly think it was lightning in a bottle, the right thing at the right time. The once diverse radio landscape had been dying for a while, with each station sounding the same and no longer catering to various subcultures, which often weren't very advertiser friendly. The variety of record stores were disappearing in favor of online distribution leaving only the really big chains who rarely bothered with promoting the new and unknown unless it came from a major label. With the record labels railing against online distribution at the time and various well known artists going off and directly releasing their music online, few really wanted to have anything to do with traditional labels.
I think the success of the local netlabels at the time came from all that which in turn at least locally fed into soundcloud being the missing link. I don't think you can really recreate all that, certainly not the momentum the copyleft licenses had. Adding the fediverse to it feels like just adding an extra set of hoops to jump through for discoverability.
With the Bandcamp situation I do feel it's time for something new and exciting, but it will coast on inertia for a while like Soundcloud did before becoming a shadow of its former self.
> I just want an IPv4/IPv6 proxy that does nothing other than delay, rate-limit, and/or drop packets.
About 15 years ago I needed to emulate a network over a satellite link. We had limited amount of time on the dish and it was a fairly costly affair. We had a small rack of hardware together with a bunch of measuring instruments that would be in the field for data acquisition. It would be sending back data home where it would be processed and then sent back into the field. The (limited) bandwidth reserved and the inherent latency on the link gave us some interesting issues to deal with, but it required a few iterations to get things working smoothly.
The rack had a Linux box which acted as a router (among other things), and while it was in the office we'd just hook it up via ethernet. So I used tc[0] on there to introduce a fixed latency on transmission and cap the outgoing bandwith to whatever was available on the link. I did the same on the homestation for outgoing traffic but there I just used an old box with two ethernet ports and set it up as a bridge.
For dropping packets I used iptables, and some other things.
It requires some familiarity with the LARTC[1], which isn't the most readable document, and how things work in Linux. It gave us exactly what we needed without having to pay for time on the dish for testing.
It's been over a decade and the details are extremely vague, but I'm sure that if you want to you could mark certain packets with netfilter and then delay those packets somehow, rather than just delay the entire network device. I remember that with iptables we used to mark packets from SSH in the mangle table and then use that mark with tc to give traffic marked priority on the outgoing device.
It's not exactly a proxy, but back in the day it worked for that specific use case.
> I feel powerless to both do anything (in a country that is neither of those two!) and to look away from the news and social media
I'd personally advise you to start looking away from social media and stop "doomscrolling". It's a negative feedback loop, where you're worried about the war, and you end up looking for information, which in turn worries you more about the war. I'm not telling you not to stay informed on current events, just to avoid compulsive information gathering and reinforcing that feedback loop.
I'd especially recommend avoiding social media for information, unless you have a reason to do so (family or friends in the region). Most information on social media is unreliable at best, and a lot of it serves as a way to spread disinformation and propaganda, and by design it also tends to amplify certain feelings. To give you an example, one of the posts on reddit that trended in r/all last week providing information on the war in Ukraine was from a car news site. Few people bothered to read more than the (altered) headline, and immediately jumped down into the comments section to cheer on their favorite team. If there was a social media bingo card, I'd've been a winner: unreliable source, unverified information, appeal to emotion, nobody read the content, enormous amount of engagement.
I'd honestly recommend to stick to a few reliable news sources you trust, and spread your intake of the news across a few fixed moments in the day. Turn off notifications, don't stay on top of a situation you can't affect change in. Be aware of the bias your news sources will have, and be aware that the media wants you to come back for more news and will also gladly ramp up the anxiety levels for that. Try to read the news as dispassionate as you can, and opt for long form rather than reactionary short form articles.
While there's nothing you can do about the war, perhaps there are ways you can do something positive in another place. Stay on top of situations where you can affect a change.
> News and reports today of Russian ICBMs and other nuclear forces being placed on high alert
While I'm not going to argue that this isn't a serious threat, the world today is no more at threat of global nuclear annihilation than it was yesterday or the day before. The actors have remained the same, the stockpiles have remained the same, and there is no real change in mutually assured destruction either. The best use of nuclear weapons in this conflict is to not use them at all, but remind everyone that you have them. Anything else will escalate the situation far more out of control than it already is. Unless someone has gone completely unhinged, they're well aware of this.
> Am I the only person affected similarly by events? How else have you been coping with it all?
A few years ago I came to the conclusion that the way I consumed news had drastically changed compared to how I did before. There's various technological and social reasons for it. For one, the decline of RSS has contributed to it, but more importantly the rise of social media, ubiquitous smartphones and constant internet connectivity contributed greatly to this.
There is a battle on your smartphone over your free time, with notifications, reminders and alerts. The web itself (even traditional news sites) is geared towards maximizing engagement, and to compete with various apps and other sites they too play on your sentiments, or entice you via clickbait. Social networks similarly will play on your sentiments in order to maximize the amount of time you spend on them.
By the end of the 2016 election and the years that followed, I got the feeling that everyone had dived in some terrible rabbit hole. While out for a drink, friends would be busy scrolling on their phones rather than having a conversation. I noticed that people around me who were far more contemplative in the past started to act far more reactionary than they would have in the past. The years in that period were a constant barrage of shitstorms, from one controversy to the next, I found it to be an assault on the senses. If there wasn't a controversy to be stirred, some nontroversy would fill the gap. I noticed myself and everyone doomscrolling, and noticed that the feeling of dread I had been experiencing was strongly linked to it.
I found it all so incredibly tiresome, so I tuned out from the daily churn. I put the smartphone away and started looking at the sources I was consuming and how I wasted my time by letting traditional and social media appeal to my sentiments. Just tune out of the continuous stream of updates and reactions, and start consuming long term and long form again. I don't mean by this that you should stay uninformed, or that you should become completely apathetic, but reduce the amount of time you spend in the immediate reactionary news cycle.
The situation in Ukraine is indeed concerning, but focusing less on the now, the fast react quotes, the immediate developments, in a situation you have no control over will remove a lot of the feeling of impending doom and dread.
I prefer working from home. On a good day the commute to work is an hour, plus an hour back. Rain? Snow? Accident? Add more time to that. Snow/rain + Accident? Forget about being home before 8PM. That's just the commute though. Traffic over the years has gotten much worse, I used to do the same commute in 40 minutes on a good day.
The office itself is another matter. Like most offices, mine is an open plan office, so continuous noise, constantly people talking, phones and the works, and that's not counting casual interruptions. There's days where I arrive at the office, some people see my face, and I know in advance they'll drop by one after another to "talk".
I take countermeasures for the noise. I work with noise suppressing headphones on, playing some music that gets me "in the zone". A large chunk of my work requires long periods of concentration, so with some downtempo music I hardly hear the guy in the desk next to me shout on the phone about god knows what.
The interruptions are what gets me most. Just as you're "in the zone" working on an interesting problem, that guy who saw your face in the morning decides to come by to have a chat. They've got a problem they want your opinion on, which for the most part is okay, or they want to have a short pre-meeting to prep an actual meeting which is almost guaranteed to be a waste of time. The problem is that you get pulled out of "the zone", and you need a few minutes to get back in there and get back to your line of thinking. There's days where the interruptions are almost continuous. A coworker once joked I should setup a system with tickets at my desk, like at a butchers shop in the '80s, so you can call a number for the next person to step up. There have been days in the office, where I have done very little except for getting in the zone, being interrupted, having to find the zone again, and being interrupted.
There's a hurdle now with WFH for the real time wasters, the useless pre-meetings have all but disappeared except in the cases where there's a problem that actually requires an in-depth discussion beforehand, which I suppose would be "useful" pre-meeting. I've also noticed that the casual problem solving discussions have become more well thought out in most cases, because for some reason people seem to think more about the problem before asking my opinion, so I'm quite pleased with that.
We keep the teams together via an informal coffee break twice a week. It's basically a lunchbreak where someone plans a half hour meeting, invites a bunch of people and you talk about whatever you want to talk about. The topics vary: sports, news, entertainment, rumors, sometimes just talking shop. The coffee breaks at the office tended to sometimes lead to interesting conversations and ideas. I suppose that if I were to miss something, those conversations during the random coffee break would be it.
The commute disappearing has given me a lot of time to spend on something useful. Sometimes that's more work, most of the time that's spent on myself and the people around me. In general I'm happier nowadays, gained some time to exercise, spend more time with loved ones, and in general things feel less rushed than they did before. Having more time on weekdays has made the weekends less busy.
For work-home separation I have a ritual. I have a small office setup at home, desk, comfy chair, monitor and something to play music on. Every morning I make myself a thermos of coffee, walk into my office and close the door, grab my laptop from my bag and set it up, and start working. At the end of the day, I put the laptop back in the bag, clean up the desk, grab my thermos and wash it out in the kitchen. It creates a mental boundary, a moment in time where "home ends, work begins" and "work ends, home begins".
I've been to the office once this year, which was a matter of necessity to physically deliver something. I have zero intention of going back to the office multiple times a week. Company policy has changed and WFH will remain the way it is now, but if it changes back to the way it was, I will likely start looking for other opportunities. I won't mind going to the office every now and then, for example once a week on average, but I don't intend on doing that commute again every day.
There's some thing that are less convenient with WFH, but for the most part, the benefits have largely outweighed the detriments.
If you mean TUI wise as in curses, nearly all of them.
Command line parameters however, there are so many examples. Tar, unrar and unzip take the cake, all in the same category of tools. "unrar x" whatever it is, I always have to look it up. dd because of the way its parameters are specified: dd if=/dev/zero of=foo.bar bs=4096 count=1024 . It's all historical and I can live with it, but many of them at least have the saving grace that they have excellent manpages or you've used them so often it becomes second nature.
There should be a special place in hell for tools that combine short and long style command line options with a single dash. Like "foo -b a -r -baz 123" with "-baz" being a single option, because I will automatically add an extra dash there out of habit.
Coworkers discovering ncurses or some library around it tend to go on a TUI frenzy for a while, and it inevitably ends up being some convoluted mess nobody wants to use. I'll admit there's a few indispensable curses based tools, for instance top (and some variants along that line), but they're far and few in between. At most dialog comes to mind for dealing with prompts for end users, but I personally abhor it in anything but a setup or installation context.
Those very same coworkers also make tools with indecipherable command line options, often because they don't know the language they're working in has a standardized option parser library or module.
> best
I don't remember which tool it was, it could be "crm" (for failover, think like heartbeat and pacemaker) but I might be mistaken. It's been years since I've used it. The command line had options like so:
But the best part was, if you just started the tool without any options, it'd drop you into a pseudo-shell. It'd show you a blank prompt ending in ">". If you then typed "section" you'd end up with a "section>" prompt.
I remember for what I was doing with it, it felt really intuitive. At any point I could type "help section" and it'd list the available actions for that section, together with short example.
I've forgotten the real syntax, but you'd have commands like: