I’m Don Draper in the elevator with that guy, the guy is 196 and I’m saying “I don’t think about you at all”

I literally don’t know what 196 is tbh

I haaaaate raw onion. Love cooked onion tho.

In lotr the orcs are more technologically advanced than the humans, it was part of the unintentional WWI allegory that was going on

Looking forward to the sequel this guy released right before shooting up a salon or something

Tifo Football on YouTube has some good tactical stuff, it might be a little more in depth than what you’re after. But they’ll put up videos after big games like “here is how team A beat team B and how their tactics achieved that”.

Depending on how much time you have, if you’re interested in formations there’s a good book called “inverting the pyramid” that’s about how modern formations came to be (the title comes from the fact that in the early days teams would have most of their guys further up the field and less defenders, and that has basically inverted over the years).

Formations in elite level football are super fluid in the modern game though. There’s a lot of content out there, depending on how much of a tactics nerd you want to become. That sort of granular analysis isn’t super interesting to me so I don’t have many recs.

I can give a quick run down of positions… this might take a while, haha.

Goalkeeper: pretty obvious, the person at the back with the gloves and weird coloured shirt who can use their hands. You might hear the term “sweeper keeper” a lot. Basically that is used to denote the “modern” style of goal keeper that comes and “sweeps” up behind the defence and is good with their feet, rather than the old school pure shot stopper. (A sweeper used to be a type of defender who would sit behind the defensive line to sweep up balls over the top and so on, now the trend is for the gk to do that job)

Defenders: you’re usually gonna see it described as a back 3 (or 5…) or a back 4. Back 4 is two “full backs” on the left and right, with two centre backs in the… centre. Full backs can also be “wing backs”, which is a more attacking full back who gets up the field much more to help attack. You usually see wing backs on either side of 3 centre backs (this is where the 3 at the back/back 5 including the wingbacks comes in). Centre backs used to just be big tough guys who could tackle and head the ball, but more and more the trend is for them to be good in possession too, to carry or pass the ball upfield (at the elite level this really goes for every position these days).

So to sum up the defenders you have fullbacks, wingbacks, centrebacks (aka centre halfs, a bit archaic now).

Midfield is where it gets complicated. For the sake of brevity I’ll try to keep it simple. As far as central midfield goes, you can have more defensively skilled guys who will sit in front of the defenders and win tackles/cut out passes etc, as well as start attacks if they’re good at carrying the ball or passing themselves. These are the defensive midfielders. Then you have true centre mids, which are weirdly kind of rare at the minute. You’ll also hear the term “box to box” midfielder. It’s because that’s where they do their business, between the boxes, winning that midfield battle for their team and setting up attacks. Then you have your attacking midfielders. The traditional centre attacking midfielder is a skilful guy who threads passes through to the strikers and knits attacks together, but now the role is super varied (if a team has one at all). Besides the CDM, CM, and CAM there’s also left and right midfielders, but they’re pretty rare to see at the top level these days because most teams don’t play a 4-4-2 formation. You’ll have attacking fullbacks or even wingbacks doing the job a wide midfielder used to do.

Oh also just to make things super fun and confusing for a newcomer, defensive midfielders also get called “sixes”, box-to-box mids get called “eights” and central attacking midfielders get called “tens” - however this often has nothing to do with what number the player is actually wearing because the way shirt numbers work has changed, but the short hand has stayed the same. You can also have more than one of each (lmao). Like a team might play a “midfield three” in a 4-3-3 that has two 6s and an 8 - or if they’re being more attacking a 6 and two 8s!

Then there’s the attackers/forwards. This sorta kinda includes the aforementioned central attacking midfielder AKA “number ten” from earlier, as you’d expect. In front of the number 10 you have…. The number 9 AKA the striker. The guy who sits at the tip of the spear whose main job is to score goals (except when it isn’t, but hey this is a simplified explanation here). The attackers on wide left and right are called wingers. Wingers (and full backs and right left mids) used to play on the same side as their dominant foot. So your right winger would be right footed. This was back when a lot of teams played with 2 strikers in a 4-4-2, so the right mids/wingers would be trying to cross into those guys. These days you see a lot of so-called “inverted wingers” who play on the OPPOSITE to the traditional side, trying to come inside and use that angle to shoot with their stronger foot, or play in teammates.

As you can see, with all these positional variants coaches have a lot of options, but they can only pick 10 outfield players. This is where all the different formations come from. For example a 3-4-3 will have the wide play provided by the wingbacks (the outer two of the “four”) while the wingers will likely be inverted (the outer two of the front 3) so those wingbacks have space to work with out wide.

As for how to figure out if a team is doing well when they’re not actively scoring… are they having a lot of shots on target? Forcing the opposing keeper to make a lot of saves? Do they have the majority of the ball possession? Are they stringing a lot of passes together and putting together nice attacking moves? Is the game being played primarily in the opposition half rather than their side of the field? Those are all signs a team is on top and playing well.

Really I could take about this shit for hours because it’s fun for me, but I might just be telling you stuff you already know! Haha

But could I reserve it as a surprise 👀

What if I want it to be a secret special surprise

Oh I thought we had to apply to have a mega, anyone can just post it?

I really don’t think so lol. The first five minutes of RoS is all the characters saying “hey the last movie didn’t happen, palpatine’s back, time to go on a quest for the 7 maguffins”. It’s not like JJ followed up any of the stuff TLJ was railroading the plot towards.

It wasn’t “good”, it’s blockbuster slop. I didn’t mind some of its ideas though, trying to take Star Wars away from “hey everything important that happens in this galaxy with a trillion trillion beings living in it revolves around this one family”. And then the 3rd sequel shat on that from a great height lol.

There was some cool looking stuff. The hoth remix with the red salt was cool. When the admiral blows up the whole fleet is cool. The lightsaber blowing up. I even thought the sequence where Luke “comes back” was kinda dope. However it also had some terrible action stuff like the horse race scene or whatever. And the plot was a contrived afterthought.

all that being said the sequels taken as a whole are a disgrace and this makes up a third of that disgrace so it’s hard to say it’s good, lol. It’s better than RoS by an order of magnitude, but that is literally one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.

Rabbit without a face remix

Haitian rev? It opens up avenues to compare and contrast with the French and maybe even American revs, the French doing their bourgeois revolution then immediately turning round and trying to keep the Haitians as slaves and slapping them with “reparations” for successfully freeing themselves.

(Edit: bonus of this is nobody can come back at you calling you a dirty commie or mark you down because you call out the US for teaming up with nazis in Central America or whatever. Nobody is gonna say “umm actually the Haitians should’ve stayed as slaves”)

And not even that, really. He thought it sucked they were fighting each other

I don’t know who this is :chad:

This guy are sick

“First they came for the Twitter shitlibs, and I did not speak out, because I hated those assholes”

17 screenshots of text and never answers or even considers the key question. We all know why China pivoted toward capitalist development, the question is when or if it will ever pivot back.

2nd screenshot:

you can only…. If you already have developed industry

China has a well developed industrial economy. It’s been developing for half a century and has no sign of stopping. How developed does it need to be before you stop doing capitalism? How long will it take?

The first four screens aren’t exactly new information. It’s the justification used by the USSR in enacting the NEP. Y’know, the NEP that lasted less than a decade? China is well into the 4th decade of marketisation and there are no indications that it’s likely to change anytime soon - private ownership and inequality are expanding in China, not contracting.

The second half of the post, sure, I don’t think China is imperialist either (yet?). But the first half of the post is just a lot of words for “we’re building productive forces bro trust us bro we’re doing communism any second now bro” which is an argument we’ve all heard a thousand times.

Eastern front of WWII was pretty scary for the fash :wholesome:

Imagine tweeting “i I have no empathy” and taking 46 words to do it

I really wish this game was better. Got very repetitive and shallow very quickly and the RPG elements weren’t amazing. I really like that they went so openly anti-capitalist, even that’s presented in a pretty low-hanging-fruit “every single capitalist operator is extremely blatantly evil” kind of a way

Most self-identified leftists have critiques of the late USSR and the revisionist CPSU as well though, I think that’s more compatible with our worldview than stating things like “the Chinese revolution hadn’t actually done anything to change the old structures of power in China” :agony-turbo:

Honestly impressive when artists can do that. I saw the cure three or four years ago, Robert Smith sounds exactly like he did in the 80s. Meanwhile I saw Oasis like fifteen years ago and Liam Gallagher already sounded like shit lol

Tbf she’s like 1,000 years old I’m surprised she can muster up the energy to verbalise

I assumed the title implied 5am to 9pm lmao

There is a lot of controversy around “Lenin’s last testament” which you mention. Besides, as much as I enjoy Lenin why should he get to arbitrarily pick his successor in between having strokes lol.

Their ideological differences aside, by all accounts Trotsky was and always had been a huge asshole with a superiority complex (not to say he wasn’t actually a very intelligent guy, but y’know how some people are assholes about it?), and Stalin was just better at schmoozing people. So when it came down to it, he was better at politicking his way into power, while Trotsky would alienate people.

Now, after Trotsky was no longer involved in running the USSR, my personal thought are that he basically just became dogmatically against whatever was happening in Russia under Stalin, because of personal grievance. And keep in mind that it’s much easier to sit on the sidelines, criticising everything, than to be involved in the actual running of a nation trying to establish socialism for the first time.

There’s also a materialist argument to be made that if the power struggle had gone the other way, and Stalin got exiled, things in the USSR would have gone pretty similarly under Trotsky - or that someone else would have taken over earlier than 1953, because, again, everyone personally thought Trotsky was an asshole who was annoying to work with, lol.

This isn’t to say everything Trotsky ever did is poison, and that he should be completely disregarded. He has some good writings, and we’re talking about a guy who led the Petrograd Soviet and then the Red Army during the civil war. He was definitely smart and a true revolutionary. But I think after his ousting from power he became very embittered (perhaps understandably), and became the kind of socialist we criticise today, sitting on the sidelines in a capitalist country and constantly attacking AES.

TROTSKYISTS on the other hand are pretty insufferable lmao, because you can pretty much discard the first half of my previous paragraph, and just apply the second half to them.

Absolute own. Jacobin sucks, look at that flaming shitheap of an article Amber got printed in there the other day lol.

We’re weird here in Australia, a loooooot of suburban places will only have pavement (“sidewalk”) on one side of the street. And it’s like, cool I have to zig zag from side to side if I don’t wanna walk in dirt (or someone’s literal front garden, we don’t really do picket fences here) half the time I’m walking (this is Australia we don’t have grass we have dirt)

The state killed them all

Thesis: black flag

Antithesis: red flag

Synthesis: :af-heart:

Ehh, I’m kinda partial to the “our flag is red for the blood of our martyred comrades” thing

I’m not an an anarchist but I challenge the premise of the question, I think it’s pretty clear there have been plenty of anarchist groups throughout history “willing to get their hands dirty”. Anarchists aren’t hippies lol.

It’s an infantile disorder tbf

They already ruined the term “social democratic”, isn’t that enough? Lenin would be spinning in his grave, if we hadn’t turned him into a freaky madame tussauds attraction

For sure. Also someone else would’ve just invented it

Apparently the inventor of the loudspeaker regretted his invention after seeing the Nazis use it at Nuremberg

C’mon comrades, show solidarity, choose they/them if you don’t want random internet people knowing your gender.

Also, please please make sure your titles make it explicitly clear when it’s a picture of some chud lying there with his face blown off, I wanna make sure I don’t miss that kind of content.

I’m by no means a mentally healthy individual myself, but I’m coming around to the idea that current mental health practice is mainly concerned with making sure we all stay productive worker bees under capitalism. Feel alienated? Your brain chemistry is off. Feel like nothing means anything and it’s all pointless? That’s not because of the mode of production, YOU are the problem, time to fix your brain!

I dunno man. Antidepressants saved my life, but I find myself questioning the way our society treats these diseases more and more.

TV: cops and lawyers are good bro I swear

Movies/Video Games: AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!!!

Haha, I like em, and maybe they were influential or whatever, but they have a lot of garbage in their catalogue for sure. The white album for example could easily be cut in half, didn’t need to be a double album.

I think Rubber Soul is their best album, after that a lot of their stuff went way too far up its own ass, I don’t need to listen to a bunch of white dudes playing the sitar tbh.

Also my “hot take” (and amongst a certain crowd it is definitely a hot take) is that the Rolling Stones are better than Beatles - sure the Beatles were better for like, four years in the 60s, but the stones have another 50 years of material after that. The stones didn’t even release some of their best albums until after the Beatles were broken up. So over the course of their whole output I much prefer the stones.

Haha, I’ve wasted quite a few hours watching LPL, it’s what makes me so concerned about this topic. I find his videos oddly soothing.