Divine plywood

Due to everybody staying indoors private motoring have decreased. Air in the cities is much cleaner to breath and pollution rates have dropped significantly

Luckily nothing too major have yet been outright canceled, only postponed for later date. Concerts, theater plays and such... Though I had to re-arrage and -schedule whole bunch of work related stuff, social events and visits to friends/relatives. Same as everybody else. Irritating, but what can you do...

Parasite. Oscar for the best picture certainly went to the correct address this year

I like decorating, it's important that place that I call home actually looks and feels like one. I admire people who can decorate their home minimalistically and keep things neat and simple, but blank white walls aren't for me

I enjoy growing plants and vegetables. I guess I'm not too terrible at it since they seldom die under my care, though most of them don't flourish either.  

Just finished watching new mini-serie adaptation of Agatha Christie's 'ABC murders'. Not quite sure what to think about it. Since the original book and the tv film from the 90's are timeless and iconic, I don't really feel we needed a new take on the classic story. If it's not broken etc... As far as I remember, original plot was completely different so this didn't even feel like something Christie would have written. Not bad, but still bit of a let down in some areas

Though John Malkovich was superb in the main role, as always

"Perfetti sconosciuti" ("Perfect strangers"), an italian drama comedy from 2016. Excellent writing and acting!

Hallo, and welcome to the forums!  Great to see new people joining in even though tv show ended.

Have fun and enjoy your stay!

Cow brain goulash  Surprisingly tasty, but still disturbing

At first Disney/Pixar movie about elves sounded bit lazy and done to death on paper, but this could actually be worth of watching. Though I'm not huge fan of how Disney uses same (voice) actors over and over again. Tom Holland and Chris Pratt, oh where oh where I have heard those names before?...  

Still, trailer looked quite nifty. They had me at pet dragon and trash eating unicorns 

Hi and welcome!  Don't worry, you picked a perfect time to join in now when the season 9 is about to begin.

Have fun here in the forums and enjoy your stay!

What comes before or after said episode wasn't my point. All I'm saying is that family fighting against dementia could be maybe little too hardcore for this show

I don't see how an episode where character turns into a husk of her former self and forgets her grandchildren's names could fit in this cartoon. That is if we're talking about proper memory disorder and not just some cute memory loss gimmick.

I get what you're after here and while it might be interesting and even therapeutic if done right, I still have to slightly disagree here. While there are cases when cartoons have been able to address and pull off things like this successfully, I guess that our colorful ponies might not be up to this particular task. I mostly watch FiM as an "escape" from the everyday life, something cute and harmless. I watch this specific cartoon when I don't want to think about my death relatives, family members with memory disorders etc. (But that's just me of course)

If Granny would get severe dementia and started to forget names of her loved ones, it would feel little out of place, especially given that the show is about to end. I feel that this kind of matter should have more screentime than one or two episodes squeezed between other themes. Picture this: there's one bittersweet episode where Applebloom understands that her grandmother won't be there for her forever, but the previous and following episodes are about Pinkie eating too much cotton candy and Twi losing her marbles because of a missing library card... Idk, I just feel like some other show could address this important topic better than mlp.  But you're right, we could use more Granny Smith episodes

And sorry to hear about your family member

Hi Blade and warm welcome

In general I don't mind if athletes have different backrounds or roots than the majority of the country they reprecent. If they have citizenship, it should be the only thing that matters. Tone of one's skin or where their family originates from shouldn't be an issue.

However, there's always the "but"...

For some time now, certain countries like Bahrain, Qatar and Turkey have aggressively scouted for talented foreing sportsmen/women - most notably African runners from Kenya or Ethiopia - and straight up "bought" them to reprecent their new homelands in the international arenas. This isn't anything new, but the scale of things have gotten even bigger in the recent years. And it's not only the few rich arab states that are doing this. Many European countries have made some pretty shady deals in order to get top tier athletics under their colours. Sweden for example, hasted the handling of nationality process of Ethiopian runner Abeba Aregawi in 2012- conveniently just before Word championships of Athletics held in 2013... she never lived in Sweden, not before or after she was granted citizenship. To top that, she later gave positive results in doping tests  Saddly, few bad apples spoil the whole punch

Be it steroids or bought foreing athletics, cheating is still cheating. Politics are ruining sports for good.

Ooh, this sounds like a ton of fun!  Count me in

3 hours ago, PCutter said:

I seriously wonder, is reviewing entertainment really supposed to be a legitimate career, other than those professional movie critics?

Don't they have other things to attend to like having real jobs, paying bills, getting groceries etc.? 

Because I myself have no time for these things because I have a business to run, and I have no interest in reviewing anything ever. (And I realize this topic may sound idiotic to certain people here)

As I see it, 'legitimate career' can be anything that provides you, pays the bills and gets food on your table. As long as you get money out of it, it can be seen as a work/job/career. There are people who make a living by taking selfies(!?) or making videos of how they unbox things(!!??). It's weird, but apparently there are market for entertainment like this... As in many cases, "hate the game, not the player". I personally value "real" old school professions like teacher, factory worker, cleaner etc. more than youtube critics and such, but if someone can turn it into a profitable business, that's cool by me.

In some cases, youtube content creators can be like entrepreneurs or remote workers. They don't necessarily have a traditional nine-to-five jobs, but that doesn't mean that some of them wouldn't dedicate huge amount of time and care into their videos. Not all of them, of course...

It's also worth remembering that artists, writers, musicians, athletics and the rest can equally be seen as similar freeloaders. They don't necessarily produce any physical goods that other people need, but I guess that's one of the definitions for entertainment and art...

I have travelled by plane total 8 times in my years and I think that have been enough for the rest of my life. First couple times were exciting experiences -especially taking off and landing - but more I got used to flying, more trivial it started to feel. To be honest, airplanes are just flying versions of crowded tourist busses. Can't say that I would really enjoy flying too much. Seats are often trash, most of the time all there's to watch is just plain field of clouds down bellow, air pressure and canned, recycled air gives you headaches... list goes on and on

Plus, pollution caused by air traveling is something I really don't wan't to be part of. I if want to travel abroad in the future, I'm more than happy to hop on a train. Flying is fast, but it has way too many downsides. I'm happy that I don't have any far-away relatives and that I don't have to do any long distance business trips in my job.

Congratulation for the Team Moon! It was a tight match but in the end the results were pretty obvious.

We did good Ponyville, we did good

John Irwing's 'Setting free the bears'

Pony of Shadows? That's cute.

But why settle for some lousy copy, when you can choose the original?

Shoot, I had completely forgot that this match was on this week  Good thing I didn't miss out the voting entirely Let's do this Team Ponyville!

I should be working right now and definitely not checking out every two minutes how imaginary ponies' fantasy football tournament is going on...

GO PONYVILLE! TIME TO PUT YOUR GAME FACE ON!

Hi and welcome to the forums  

Hopefully you'll enjoy your time here and while doing so, will also meet like-minded people and make some new friends!

Collectivism doesn't just mean some big brother dystopia or dictotorship that smothers all individuality. At it's core collectivism "is a cultural value that is characterized by emphasis on cohesiveness among individuals and prioritization of the group over self". So basically, "don't be a selfish dick and learn to share with others". Western democracy is form of collectivism same as Nordic welfare states. That doesn't sound so bad now does it? Yes, Soviet Union and some crazy-ass cult can also be seen falling under the same hypernym, but often those kind of communities are eveything but egalitarian or collective. As we know, Soviet union was anything but communistic, far from it. That's just a theoretical term for a utopistic version of reality. Same goes for all the other 'big terms'. There are no time or place where pure collectivism/individualism would have occured, there are no absolute black or white, only limitless variations of grey. 

Saying that collectivistic systems/cultures/groups would view individualism as a pure evil is bit overstating. These two can and do excist simultaniously. Selfisness and lack of emphaty, rather than individuality are the key issues here. Freedom of thinking isn't inherently against collectivism

It's funny that people who bash collectivism are more than happy to use public services such as libraries but whenever they have to pay taxes to fund said amenities, they start to rage how society should be 100% individualistic. Police and national army, as well as any legislation that protects consumer's rights against companies or other individuals is form of collectivism.