Exactly. Peterson taught psychology at a university (and even the quality of his lectures have been brought into question, but we’ll ignore that), and that somehow makes him an authority to talk about global warming and how all climate scientists are wrong because you can’t model something like that, it makes him an authority to talk about the nazis and how Hitler was actually guided by the people as he spoke only what they reacted positively to, he’s also an authority on economics when he says how the famine in the Soviet Union was caused by the communists killing all the smart and disciplined farmers, etc etc.

How can anyone seriously listen to a guy who said that women who complain about sexual harassment while wearing makeup are hypocrites is beyond me.

This is nice read on the topic: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve

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.

Imagine if he went to Korea

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 good example I heard once was concerning the tagelharpa. It’s an Estonian instrument, historically used in Estonian culture, however if you hear it you’ll probably think Vikings. The modern viking/pagan/neofolk music scene uses it prominently, and as it has a much broader reach than Estonian culture, this has lead (through no fault of the musicians I must add) to situations where many people think of it as a “viking” instrument, even though it never was. Thus, a piece of Estonian culture is widely appreciated as belonging to another culture, due to popular media influence.

I don’t know if this is really an example of cultural appropriation, but that example helped me grasp the concept (if it is a good example).

It’s not only that they sent communists to concetration camps, they opened the camps in the first place in order to have a place where to put them all

A Fortress Called Home by Seven Spires

If I had to single out a few, it would be Blackbraid from the US, Vermilia from Finland, and Praznina from Serbia. Vermilia and Praznina made up like 90% of my listening a few months ago.

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)

I used: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/home
https://www.kennys.ie/

Satisfied with both of them.

But nothing will replace BookDepository in my heart

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

I understood that when once we decided to stay longer and worked for 12h one day, and then spent the next morning un-fucking what we screwed up during those extra hours.

Or when I spent an hour debugging something late in the day, only to come in the morning and find the problem in 15 mins. At least in software development, effectiveness dramatically drops when you’re tired and it’s really not worth it killing yourself to do something 2h faster.

“Mother” by Maxim Gorky and “Escape from freedom” by Erich Fromm, sadly a very relevant book. There was a book fair in my country a few weeks ago, so I grabbed whatever I could find.

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