robotsprinkles

[robotsprinkles]

that post that's like "what's wrong with joining the army to kill people ain't that the point" always reminds me of how a few years into the iraq war this volunteer american soldier gave an interview to the washington post where he said exactly that and candidly confessed to having already killed someone for fun but being disappointed by how easy and unexciting he felt it was, and a month later he planned and participated in a gang rape and massacre of a little girl and her family. average poor dumb kid from little old usa just trying to afford college

[robotsprinkles]

leftist men have so completely lost the plot on feminism that it now seems like a radical controversial opinion to simply state that men benefit from patriarchy

[robotsprinkles]

this reddit thread of living your silliest life is so so good

[robotsprinkles]

it's funny that the friend who asked me for help with that maths test thinks I seem responsible when I regularly just. don't eat until dinner (and occasionally wait until 8-11pm to eat it)

(not for any stupid dieting/weight loss/etc reasons. I'm just dumb as hell and forget or can't be bothered)

[robotsprinkles]

and we ended up bringing in a friend who did actually do the even more advanced maths unit for smart kids in year 12 to help so we could get everything done faster, and we still almost ran out of time on the test

so I have no idea how they expect people who failed high school to pass it (a sentiment shared by everyone in the call)

(Admittedly I did spend about ten minutes doing a question wrong because I was cooked from being sleep deprived and not having eaten the whole day (it was 8pm) and as stated the other guy spent the first half playing elden ring while helping)

why would you ask your kid to help your friend's kid pass their course and then threaten severe consequences if the kid fails their course

[robotsprinkles]

anyway, today the guy had an online test for the advanced maths unit, and I have no idea what the deal with it is

like some of the questions are the most basic crap which I learned in year 7-9, maybe year 10 at latest. ("what are the prime factors, lcm, and gcd of 60 and 96")

and then there's stuff I never learned and only know of, and stuff at least one of the other two people my friend asked for help hadn't done (complex numbers, base conversion, geometric sequence infinite sums, etc)

like you have

"find the prime factors and lcm of 60 and 96" "write sqrt(96) as a surd in its lowest form" "given a right triangle with a hypotenuse of 17cm and a known side of 57mm, find the length of the third side"

immediately followed by

"What base 10 number is written as 3201 in base 6" "How would 3201 in base 10 be written in base 6"

the other guy who was helping had never done bases before, and while I've learned them I haven't done any remotely complex maths in over four years, so I'd forgotten how to actually do it all properly and ended up doing whatever this is for the first one

10(base 6)=6(base 10) 100(base 6)=36(base 10) 1000(base 6)=216(base 10) 3201=216*3 + 36*2 +1 =648+72+1 =721

(for the second I had to open the mathsisfun page on base conversion which I didn't understand and proceeded to try to apply the steps to the question before comparing with wolframalpha, according to which I somehow got the right answer)

the whole test is like this. you have trivial, basic crap that we learned in year 7-9 which can be solved in your head in less than a minute and things that aren't hard so much as annoying right next to crap we never learned in high school* and the guy doing a maths-related (engineering?) degree only just learned this semester

*I learned the things the other guy didn't know (base conversions) and vice versa (complex numbers, geometric series and infinite sums)

why would you ask your kid to help your friend's kid pass their course and then threaten severe consequences if the kid fails their course

[robotsprinkles]

the guy apparently wants to be a physicist, and picked advanced maths as one of his units as a result

as mentioned above, advanced maths is apparently not required for him to choose physics. which would be fine if he was actually doing the work

but instead he's been pawning off all the work to my friend. who sucks at maths (and told the guy not to choose advanced maths for that reason)

so my friend's been asking me and one of his other friends to help him with it

why would you ask your kid to help your friend's kid pass their course and then threaten severe consequences if the kid fails their course

[robotsprinkles]

for context:

over this last semester, one of my friends has been "helping" a family friend with his course at his mother's behest

according to my friend, the family friend apparently failed high school and has issues with some kind of drug addiction

if I understand correctly, the course is one where upon passing, the student is allowed to choose any university course they want to do (including medicine, law, etc). the units they pick apparently have no bearing on the course they can choose

my friend's mother is forcing him to help this guy pass his course, and will apparently punish him in some way if the guy fails

in my friend's words, the guy has apparently been skipping most if not all his classes, and hasn't done 50-90% of his assignments, quizzes, and tests. so my friend's been having to do this guy's assignments and tests in his stead (on top of the assignments and whatnot for his own actual course that he's doing)

why would you ask your kid to help your friend's kid pass their course and then threaten severe consequences if the kid fails their course

[robotsprinkles]

why would you ask your kid to help your friend's kid pass their course and then threaten severe consequences if the kid fails their course

[robotsprinkles]

why do units in total war 3k require so much babysitting

I don't want it to be an autobattler, but when

heroes will sometimes just stop fighting after you use their abilities (and will seemingly always do so if the ability is used while they're attacking an enemy hero (at least with the abilities I tested))

heroes will sit there doing nothing like braindead idiots as the enemy hero attacks them if you don't tell them to attack said enemy hero, and end up dying without fighting back at all

ranged units which rally after breaking and retreating will just stand off to the side while facing away from the battle, spending the whole time kicking rocks even if there's an enemy unit right next to them, refusing to shoot them unless you order them to or the enemy unit walks into their field of view (this also applies to enemy units which approach ranged units from outside their field of view: the ranged units will refuse to shoot them even if the approaching unit is five meters away from them and there is literally no other enemy unit in proximity)

some heroes' abilities seem to really want to piss you off by rapidly flickering between usable and unusable while in combat so you need to waste 5-10 seconds spamclicking the ability before it actually activates

units will actively chase breaking enemy units off the battlefield after defeating/breaking them instead of attacking the enemy unit right next to the one they just broke, or remaining in formation (I think this can be dealt with by activating some sort of guard mode or something but if I'm not wrong that just results in the "your unit will stand there looking at the enemy unit next to the one they just broke until you tell them to attack" problem)

some units seem to occasionally just stop doing their queued actions halfway through the process

I kinda wish the game would make my units slightly less braindead and also let me set some things to go automatically

[robotsprinkles]

"Two Paid Ads And A Trans Girl's G-Rated Selfie" (tumblr, 2025)

[robotsprinkles]

new species of bed buge just dropped

[robotsprinkles]

[robotsprinkles]

on the one hand cs2 is pretty fun gameplay wise.

on the other hand its players are the worst. which I guess should be expected considering the premise/theme* and that it's just a reskinned csgo (a game which released in 2012). and considering it's a competitive game

[robotsprinkles]

gagging you with our red string of fate to shut you up for one fucking second

[robotsprinkles]

so one of my friends has been trying to get into transformers recently and asked for a list of things to watch/read/etc

and in the process of reading through comics and watching episodes of various shows I've been possessed with the urge to rant about the Thing that pisses me off whenever it happens in any transformers series

[robotsprinkles]

so waller gets given circe's "vision" of ilana starting ww3, and instead of doing any real due diligence, just. calls someone whose knowledge of circe is at best gained from interviewing/asking diana. and is realistically probably from acquiring records of what diana has said about circe and old texts/myths/etc (which for all anyone knows are incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated)

and proceeds to immediately jump to "we need to kill the princess right now"

instead of just. sending the team over with the same excuse they used in canon of "yeah we got intel that there's a threat to the princess' life" so they could gather intel on

whether ilana was even actually evil

if she was, what the details of her plan were

whether her plan required to be alive (in case she had a dead man's switch or agents who would carry it out in the event of her death)

of course, the above could again all be intentional on the part of the show so like. fine, it's acceptable.

but everything about nina's death is stupid

1: there was no good reason for her to be on the team.

waller says nina "might be able to help [flag] keep the rest of them in line" but nina's a complete pushover. at best she keeps the others in check by being likeable enough that they don't want to upset her too much, but even then that only really seems to be the case for the bride (whose only real insubordination was leaving for the necklace) and gi robot (who can be kept in check by saying "no, those aren't nazis"). so.

waller also more or less states that nina is more effective underwater, which made me think she'd be like the common meme idea of aquaman (where he's strong in water but gets kryptonited out of it). in reality she's basically just someone who can swim well and doesn't need scuba gear, but can't fight at all. so the most you can use her for is like. marine/aquatic scouting. in everything else she's a straight up liability

2: everything about the situation that causes her death is idiotic

the guards are incompetent and set up the worst perimeter possible. that nina was able to just walk into the pond/lake without anyone seeing her, despite there being guys all around the shore (who are for some reason all looking into the lake, instead of outwards from it), and multiple elevated positions which give a clear view of the entire area (also why the hell did they let ilana take a swim in the first place? like even considering she's the princess.)

there was no reason nina had to be the one to kill ilana, and she straight up shouldn't have been the one to do it. it didn't need to be her because the bride has guns, is strong enough to not need to worry about recoil, is accurate enough with an iron sights rifle/machine gun to hit a hand-sized target about the same distance away, and is clearly capable of leaping far enough fast enough to get close enough that arguments about pistols being less accurate/harder to aim with don't matter. phosphorus could also probably do it by just walking into the water and going super saiyan like he did against the tank: if he can go hot enough to vaporise the amount of steel he would have had to to go through the turret and hull (which is at least 2800C), walking into the water at that temperature — or instantly reaching that temperature after walking in — should immediately cause a massive explosion as a large part if not all of the lake turns into boiling vapour. the guards clearly aren't a threat to the bride or phosphorus, because they have stormtrooper aim (at least three of them manage to miss the bride while she's standing still despite firing multiple shots), and have crap armour that gets defeated by normal guns. phosphorus is also possibly immune to their weapons depending on what they are (if they're heat-based lasers or plasma he should probably be immune, if they're kinetic particle beams/energy bolts then it's up in the air)

basically, nina's cool but it's very clear she was put in the show specifically to be killed off. the only two characters she has any connection to are gi (who dies* in e3) and the bride (who's the only one who's actually affected by her death). she's completely useless to the team in any tactical sense, and the only one who has any development due to her is the bride (where the development mostly seems to amount to "sees nina as a friend")

on the one hand creature commandos is like. fine and I was mostly enjoying it up until that bit in the last episode

on the other hand. the final episode pissed me off