Candelestine

With the Russo-Ukrainian War progressing into its third year, it's inevitably happened that there's been dropoff in English-language news coverage of it. Any sort of news coverage eventually exhausts part of its viewership, so news companies may wish to pivot away from coverage to something more fresh and engaging to their audiences.

There are, however, significant numbers of independent folks/small groups that compile and deliver the news from a wide variety of styles, approaches, and areas and degrees of expertise. If you have an interest in just staying abreast of the events, or understanding a particular event at a deeper level, these are some people you can check:

https://youtube.com/@DenysDavydov

Denys is a Ukrainian former airline pilot, living in Ukraine. He has a very generalist approach, delivering everything from frontline news to international political news relevant to Ukraine. He has a dry sense of humor, and his videos move along at a good clip.

https://youtube.com/@militaryandhistory

Torsten is a German military veteran and historian. He mainly focuses on events at the tactical level, movements in the front line and news concerning the soldiers, weapons and equipment in the fight. He delivers news in a colder, more impartial manner, not very propagandistic, despite vocally supporting Ukraine.

https://youtube.com/@anderspuck

Anders Puck Nielson is a Denmark-based military analyst. He publishes less frequently, and in a shorter format. Prefers to focus on the bigger-picture strategic view of the war. Drier and serious.

https://youtube.com/@EnforcerOfficial

The Enforcer covers pretty much everything pertaining to the war. It's a small team of people, delivering more colorful accounts, but with a respectable amount of due diligence in their reporting. Everything from hours-long streams to short-form clips on particular highlights, they are among the most prolific and dedicated.

https://youtube.com/@arturrehi

Artur is a former Estonian conscript, and tackles the news from a more light-hearted, former infantryman's perspective. Frequently travels and meets the soldiers themselves, does a fair amount on-the-ground style reporting. Recently got his Patreon deleted, he's just a good guy fighting for the safety of both Ukraine and his own country.

https://youtube.com/@VladVexlerChat

Vlad is a philosopher and former citizen of the USSR. Does extremely nuanced takes on the biggest-picture views of Russian thought and goals, in addition to covering global news at the political and ideological levels. This is his second channel, which features the bulk of his content.

https://youtube.com/@JakeBroe

Jake is a former US Air Force missileer, the guys responsible for our nukes, among other things. With a history background, he tends to cover the news at the political and strategic levels. One of the very best at explaining the American political system and how it pertains to support for Ukraine.

https://youtube.com/@Professor-Gerdes

Daren is a US professor, specializing in leadership structures. Does mostly short-form content where he breaks down individual events and applies that to the bigger picture of war progress. Also handles international politics.

https://youtube.com/@UkraineMatters

Georgij is a Dane that cares an awful lot about Ukraine. Produces a wide range of content, mainly covering front line movements and specific battlefield events, but also covers pretty much everything else, frequently from a more personal, human perspective.

https://youtube.com/@NatashasAdventures

Natasha is a Russian that somewhat recently fled Russia. She's more anti-Putin than anything else, and makes shorter-form content about what it's actually like to be a young Russian, and how a politically-active young Russian woman might think. Occasionally debunks Russian propaganda.

https://youtube.com/@SiliconCurtain

Jonathan is a British political activist and journalist. He conducts longform interviews of a very wide ranging variety of people, collecting all manner of different sorts of perspectives on the war. Has a general focus towards combating misinformation, but it really depends on his interview subject for the day.

https://youtube.com/@BattlesAndBeersWarStories

Last but not least, B&B collects accounts of individual Ukrainian soldiers, as well as soldiers fighting in other global conflicts, and delivers them in a straight-forward manner. Compiling primary sources for future posterity, he ensures the individual soldiers' stories will not be allowed to die with them.

As you can see, I wasn't kidding when I spoke of there being a lot, and coming from a very wide variety of perspectives. I'm neglecting to mention most of them, so please feel free to share any more in a reply. These are just some of the ones I personally check from time to time, and I tried to include people from a wide variety of countries and backgrounds that might be more interesting to any particular western lay-person.

This should never have been made. It sows divisiveness and wastes time for no concrete benefit. It will be difficult to moderate and won't even be fun to participate in.

Cross-posting this from the Science Communication community over on mander.

It's not directly politics, of course, but anyone political will probably immediately recognize its value, and even necessity.

Love how concisely he put everything down though, this is a quick read.

So, before I get started, I just want to firmly lay out my own personal support for Ukraine. I've been banned from lemmy.ml communities before just for saying Slava Ukraini. I do my utmost to assist the Ukrainian cause, from cheering their victories to talking to other Americans about the importance of the war there. I've picked my side, on purpose, and I'm at peace with it.

That said, I can't help but notice a slow shift in the tone of Russo-Ukrainian War information spaces that severely disturbs me.

The liberal west is based around a set of values. Freedom, mainly, that's the "liberty" at the heart of "liberal". Unless it's hurting someone else, everyone should, as much as we can manage, be free to do as they wish. This leads us to do things in a certain way, and it's "that way" that we use to look for and identify our friends.

Many people over the decades have tried to drag us down, paint us out to be just as bad as everyone else. While we certainly make mistakes, I think you have to look no further than our domestic strife and what each side is fighting for, to see that this love of freedom and life is still strong. Free speech, very important. Freedom to be gay, also very important. Liberty, freedom. Do as you wish, and leave other people that same freedom.

So, what I've been seeing that disturbs me so, is a slow shift in the tone of pro-Ukrainian voices towards a greater hopelessness and despair. A larger amount of censorship and banning here on Lemmy, but also in other places. A greater emphasis on the fear and violence of war, which is replacing and supplanting the admirable courage and hope that was so powerful in the initial days of the war.

I hate to say this, but it's starting to look from an outside perspective that ... maybe we were wrong, maybe the Ukrainians are not actually all that different from the Russians.

I personally refuse to believe this. I think the trials and horrors of war are simply wearing them down, and that's why I'm making this post.

I hope everyone remembers, we live in a hard reality, combating not just Russian influence, but our own domestic problems trying to turn us into another Russia. We cannot allow this to happen, and the first line of defense against it is found in our own courage, our own heart.

I would remind everyone that the most effective weapon the Russians have is their information warfare, that splits us from our countrymen and allies in good old fashioned divide-and-conquer. They can pretend to be us, they are smart enough to do this, and they can cleverly wreck our morale from within. We must fight this. What fights it is courage and freedom, two things that build morale in others, instead of tearing it down.

To quote a famous American: "Give me Liberty, or give me Death." Those are the options Patrick Henry considered. "Just do what it takes to survive." is not listed. This is the American heart, so strong it even gets turned against us in the form of domestic, American terrorism--Americans killing Americans. It's not perfect and it's not pretty. And, if anyone wants to join us from authoritarian control, they'll find that blood and suffering is involved to get to it, and does not disappear once you arrive. The rewards, though, of having a non-totalitarian ruler, are worth it.

Keep the faith my friends, long, gruelling wars with setbacks can still be won. We can someday see peace and freedom, it is possible. Just not for all Ukrainians. This is actual hard reality, accepting the unfairness of the world, and dying for it anyway.

Personally, I was losing hope myself, about 2 years ago. One single man actually turned that around for me. Zelensky, and his courage, and the powerful Ukrainian heart he seemed to awaken. Don't let the Russians drag his name through the mud, he doesn't deserve it. Don't let other Ukrainians act like orcs, they can do better. We must not be like the Russians, otherwise we deserve no better than the lives they get.

Slava Ukraini.

Been running this as my background listening for a couple weeks now, and have to admit, I am extremely impressed.

The day-by-day format really puts different parts of the war into perspective, and while he moves too quickly to go into much detail about anything specific, it ends up functioning as an entirely different form of overview from what you get in more traditional studies.

Super cool project overall.

The first of the three inscriptions said to be carved into the Temple of Apollo, where the Oracle of Delphi resided: Know Thyself.

While focusing heavily on the Norwegian Lemming, there's a lot of general Scandinavian taiga nature docu stuff here. Reindeer, moose, artic fox, etc.

It's a good one. But at any rate, we should clearly have an understanding of our namesake, I think.

I didn't know it at the time, but hours and hours of exposure to this theme during car rides would implant within me an innate appreciation for what video game music specifically tries to do, and the limitations it tries to do it within.

Which persists to this day.

Either you played the game or you haven't. It's the only one that has ever made me regularly let the opening cutscene play out when I fired the game up to play.

Not at first, but as the story dug its hooks into me, I'd let this song play out more and more often. The accompanying animated music video isn't bad either.

n/t

When first learning chess, you learn what the pieces do, then you learn the special moves, then you learn the importance of the center of the board, what pins and forks are, what developing pieces means, all that.

So often people forget there's a critical lesson to be learned somewhere in here, and that's that there's two styles of playing chess, and you need to learn both. Fast chess vs slow chess.

Fast chess is what you most often see video clips of, the clock is running low or they're just playing speed chess, and they move very quickly, using a lot of intuition and experience. People naturally want to play like this, because its more fun.

But, it's also much weaker. You also need to learn how to play slow chess. This is when you take your time and plot out a lot of your possible moves. Then you imagine you are your opponent, and you decide what you would do if you were playing that side. Then back to yourself, what would you do next?

You're peering into the future, plotting out the possibilities of the game, playing as both players as you do it. This takes a long time, but it is critical to learn, as it's much stronger than fast chess, and becomes necessarily particularly through the midgame. There is a reason the chess clock exists in the first place, after all, the more thought you apply to a given move, the stronger you can make it.

You have to learn both styles, and be able to flip fluidly from one style to the other, in order to become an intermediate chess player. This is important to remember.

Solid review of the game, pretty thoroughly captures what is so uniquely appealing about the it. Solid youtuber too, a bit underrated, sadly.

So, finally decided to pick the game up recently, and really enjoying it. But, I do have to admit, I'm a little rusty with shooters in general, and the scout role is pretty chaotic sometimes.

Anyone have advice/tips/reliable guides they prefer for the scout class specifically?

What kinds of things do scouts do, especially newbie ones, that kinda bug you? What are the things a really good scout does that marks them as a really good scout?

So far, I find myself focusing kinda heavily on combat just because it's an obvious thing I can do, and zipping behind a bug to blast it in the ass with a shotgun is really fun. I assume that's not really my #1 job though. I keep our cave lit up pretty reliably, but should I be doing more ... actual scouting I assume?