The part about the sonic cannon cannot be stressed enough. People were literally standing still in silence and our psychopathic overlord hit the crowded streets with a sonic cannon which could’ve very very easily created a stampede that would have led to thousdands of injuries and possibly even deaths. Honestly we were lucky that enough people managed to calm down and stop running after a few seconds.

I’d add Adrienne Cowan from Seven Spires and Melissa Bonny from Ad Infinitum to that list. But, as you said, in symphonic metal you’d be hard pressed to find a band without an amazing female vocalist.

I’m so used to seeing English everywhere that I actually have trouble navigating things like settings in my native Serbian.

That’s a tough question, I gave a more detailed answere here: https://slrpnk.net/comment/13457345

The opposition parties are not very popular, but the general idea is that we need to primarily get our institutions to actually function so that another Vucic doesn’t happen again, no matter who forms the government. Nobody really knows how this will play out exactly, since the students are vocal about the fact that they’re unaffiliated with any opposition or NGO, which is one of the reasons why they are so popular with the people. All major opposition parties rejected the idea of participating in any snap elections this year, and the students are asking for an expert transitional government to enable free elections. This is something most people support.

Yeah, someone made a joke about how our president is a master of diplomacy: he managed to build a bridge between Serbs and Croats (as we all despise him), and also make the US, Russia and China agree on something (all 3 have dismissed the student-led protests).

Not directly related to the anti-corruption protests, but Croats started boycotting their local supermarkets due to high prices, and the whole region soon followed suit. It’s honestly almost bizarre that while most of the world is looking bleak, the Balkans are now engaging in optimism and mutal support. This is the first time since I developed self-consciousness that I can say that Serbs are optimistic about the future, as many believe that this might very well be the end for the current regime, and that a new system with an emphasis on direct democracy will take its place.

A Fortress Called Home by Seven Spires

The Illiad was like the ancient Greek Bible because it was used to provide behavioural guidelines and views common to all Greeks. It was a text central to any Greek’s education. How does a leader act? Read the Illiad. How are battles waged? Read the Illiad. What is the relation between humans and gods? Read the Illiad.

Alexander the Great was known to carry a copy of the Illiad with him at all times, and many philosophers routinely used excerpts from it to illustrate their points. And people would reference it like we reference things from the Bible in the west (Judas, turn water into wine, cross to bear, turn the other cheek etc)

That was quite an elegant proof

Update: this has been popping in and out of my head ever since I saw it, and I started learning Rust yesterday. They have won.

Some C/C++ extension process once reduced my laptop to a crawl, and I couldn’t close VS Code, so I killed the process through the task manager, simple enough, right?

Long story short, I started smelling burning plastic and saw that, somehow, there was no VS Code process, but the extension had a separate process that was still running at full speed doing idk what. I almost burned myself when I picked up my laptop. So I’m not very happy when I see VS Code

I always say that the only reason they keep Skype alive is to make Teams appear good

Same, but with popcorn

Oooh, I didn’t think of that. “Eat all you want without gaining weight with this one simple trick”

I came here to mention her. She should be a case study on how to write believable, badass and strong characters

Though you really need the ability to stay calm and collected. I once tried to talk with a childhood friend who became a hardcore christian and nationalist in the meantime, and I just couldn’t believe the things I heard.

When I asked him why would the bible be a definitive source of whatever, he said “You can only have one truth, and if you live by the bible you know it to be true, so it is the truth”. There were so many things wrong with that line of thought, my brain received a ddos attack and had to reboot.

Same thing for homosexuals. He, in a very very creepy way I must say, told an entire story of how normal men who are sexual deviants eventually get tired of women because they need to do increasingly more sickening things, and then move on to men. That’s how men become gay.
How the hell do you reply to someone who just completely made up a story and believes in it? When I eventually asked how is the Netherlands not burning to the ground when they are tolerant, he actually said “Not yet”. So, if any Dutch person is reading this, better brace for gay armageddon or something. I just can’t figure out what to say to someone who literally spends 10 mins saying nothing. I eventually stopped interacting with him because I just don’t have the energy (this was just an example, I had dozens of interactions like that with him)

Or when a colleague said that the Ukranian civilians were happy when the Russians came to save them. My head temperature increased 10 degrees and I just turned around and left. You really need special skills to talk to people like that, which I sadly lack

Black metal as a genre. I could not believe that anyone seriously listened to that. It was either random noise or actually scary stuff (I am the black wizards actually scared me for some reason lol). But after enough exposure and playing Freezing moon myself, I actually got to enjoy it to the point where now I listend to black metal 80% of the time.

In the same vein, “Sons of Winter and Stars” by Wintersun was so unharmonized and terrible to me when I first listened to it, but after a few listens it became one of my favourite songs

I never heard about the tildeverse before, sounds really interesting. How does one choose which tilde to join, though? It seems to me like only cosmic.voyage has a specific theme, while the rest only differ in the OS running on the machine. Or are tildes just there to host your account, while all the interactions are done via irc?

arXiv doesn’t have peer review as far as I know

I read this in chief O’Brien’s voice

Seven Spires!!!

If an evil spirit cast a curse on me that I cannot listen to anything but Seven Spires, I wouldn’t be too bothered.

They’re a symphonic metal band, they released an amazing album this year “A Fortress Called Home”.