elglin

Давно не писал в открытую по-русски, но тема иммиграционная, поэтому почему бы и не.
Итак, власти этой нашей Германии придумали сабж, который позволяет въехать в Германию и год легально в ней искать работу и, найдя таковую, получить обычный рабочий вид на жительство.
По ссылке https://chancenkarte.com/en/ детали, а я сейчас вкратце.
Обязательная программа
Официальный документ о хотя бы двухлетнем послешкольном образовании. То есть хватит диплома колледжа, в девичестве техникума.
Документ о знании английского на уровне B2 (IELTS, TOEFL, etc.) или немецкого на уровне A1 (telc, Goethe).
Справка о наличии финансовых средств, в качестве которой принимается действующий трудовой договор на хотя бы полставки.
Произвольная программа
Надо по развесистой балльной системе набрать хотя бы шесть баллов. Примерные сценарии:
Достаточно обученный крот
За признанный в Германии диплом (https://anabin.kmk.org/cms/public/startseite) дают 4 очка. Собственно, при наличии оффера на нужную сумму это почти готовая Голубая Карта. Чтобы не набрать оставшиеся два пункта либо возрастом до 35 лет (2 очка) либо пятью годами работы из последних семи календарных (3 очка), надо очень креативно жить.
Достаточно молодой крот
Если диплом не признан, то при двух пунктах за возраст и трех - за опыт работы (что реально в возрасте под 30), можно набрать лишний пункт, к примеру, дефицитной областью (кто сказал ИТ), и таким образом выполнить произвольную программу, даже не зная ни слова по-немецки.
Достаточно немецкоговорящий крот
Это потому, что за каждый лишний уровень немецкого сверх А1 по модели CEFR дают по баллу - и так до трех. Так что тому, кто учил немецкий в школе и не весь его забыл, даже возраст более сорока не препятствие.

Today, I've played (for the third time already) as a replacement on one of the last boards in the club's second team. Depending on how it turns out, the last boards can be anywhere near 1800 (lost), 1600 (drew), or, as today, unrated but suspected to be about 1000.
In the words of Levy Rozman, that you're rated 1200 doesn't mean that you cannot play an extended sequence of moves at the 1800 level. It's just that at some point your brain short-circuits and you play a couple of moves at the 600 level. In fact, the game I lost - I lost it from +2 engine evaluation, while the game I drew (due to perpetual check) - I drew it from +1.5 and up the exchange.
Long story short, by move 26 I was up a pawn and +3, mostly due to the opponent very graciously playing right into my prep. But as my opponent wasn't a complete newbie, he knew the idea that allows people to save countless games: when behind, be aggressive and counterattack.
Well, I've overestimated his counterattack and opted, instead of maintaining the tension and the pressure on the position (which was the right thing to do according to the engine), to go for simplifications, because I thought that I'd gladly play a queen and bishop vs. queen and knight endgame being up a pawn. I also thought that I was escaping the perpetual check - eventually.
Wrong. Right after the exchanges, the engine immediately showed a dead even evaluation because, in fact, in the very same line I thought I've calculated, I did not escape the perpetual. Thus, between moves 29 and 32 my opponent had this or that opportunity of a perpetual. Whether he didn't see those, whether he (much as I) wrongly assumed that I was eventually escaping, or whether he thought his counterattack gave him good chances gobbling up my pawns - I'll never know. Within those moves, we also exchanged the light pieces, so it was a clean queen endgame.
I'm crap at endgames, especially queen endgames. They are also generally hard because queens have so much mobility, so situations where you may spend a dozen moves jockeying for a slightly better position are quite real - the engine analysis I've run at home suggested maneuvers I can't even begin to understand.
But as the saying goes, you don't need to run faster than the lion - you need to run faster than John. And as the subject saying goes, when you're playing someone at your level, but half your age, you tend to be a little less crap at the endgame.
So my opponent took the wrong pawn, and then made a suboptimal queen move... and the difference was that he didn't have any checks, while I did. Perhaps there was also the time factor - I had mere minutes on the clock, and he had almost a half-hour on me, so he may have been tempted to play quickly to get me into Zeitnot.
However, it was already move 35, and the move sequence, consisting mostly of checks with fork and pawn captures was easy to calculate. By move 41, I had only some 90 seconds... but it was the classical time control, which gives you the very generous 30 minutes if you survive the first 40 moves. And as it happened, move 41 was a pawn capture which not only left me up two pawns, but put my queen on the very same diagonal as one of my surviving pawns - which was a passer as well.
To be frank, although it was an absolutely won position, I couldn't have won it in 90 seconds, quite probably not in 900 as well. However, when you have 30 minutes, you can afford to spend a few of them to work out your endgame plan - and since it was an absolutely won position, it took me just seven minutes.
It may have been the question of endurance, as my opponent had to defend the entire game - an experience I can easily relate to, and a very unpleasant one. But much as the engine evaluation jumped from dead drawn at move 33 to +4 at move 41, it jumped to "mate in 23" by move 49, at which point my opponent resigned. Of course I wouldn't claim to see a mate from that far, but at that point the choices Black had were either to let the pawn promote, or to sacrifice a queen for that pawn (both outcomes leaving White up a queen with no stalemate shenanigans), or, which was the top engine line, to trade queens and a pair of pawns - which would leave White three pawns against one, i.e., a completely won pawn endgame even with imperfect play.
The result, however, had no impact whatsoever on the overall outcome, as the team won 5:2 on the remaining boards.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MaybeMagicMaybeMundane for an introduction to the concept.
Right now, many people (probably most) think that magic doesn't exist in our world. So there must be a perfectly mundane explanation for anything seemingly magical - it's quite probable though that you (or I, or even anyone) don't know it yet.
For a DnD player, the magic is very real. You've got your spellbooks etc. and you see occasionally the good old trusty Fireball spell. You know, a good old ball of fire appears on the mage's hand and flies to the impact point, everyone in 30 ft. radius rolls a Reflex save to get half instead of full Xd6 damage.
For a medieval person, or at least for a medieval person as we think he/she was (it's not like we can ask around), the question of magic was... less certain. A lot of things were quite mundanely explainable, some weren't.
Say, was the legendary Excalibur a magic sword, or was it by change an exceptionally well-made sword in an age when most swords were somewhat underwhelming? Was Achilles's armor magically impenetrable, or was it just a well-worked high-tin-content piece?
An interesting applied question is how can a GM, with judicious usage of concealed rolling, maintain uncertainty? Does this NPC weapon wield a weapon with magically enhanced damage, or is he just naturally rolling high damage? Is this pendant really cursed, or is the wearer plain unlucky with saving throw rolls? Does this armor piece have a magical enhancement, or do the enemies just roll too low to get past its regular DR?

It appears that there is quite a possibility for an enterprising GM to do just that - with some concealed rolling, of course, and a careful selection of spells involved. That is, the spell effect is involved from a purely mechanical Doylian perspective; however, from the Watsonian point of view, the observed effect cannot be distinguished from a stroke of luck.

As far as I remember an article I once read, Tolkien originally set out to write a Norse-like mythology which he felt the English culture lacked. It all turned out completely different, of course.
A certain Mr. Sapkowski expanded his short story collection to a fantasy saga, in a large part, due to a lack of a fantasy saga in contemporary Polish literature. Long before the forgettable Netflix series and even long before the acclaimed video game series, this saga was well-known and well-liked in Eastern Europe.

What if Geoffrey of Monmouth, being sick and tired of the Matter of France, found a distinct lack of the Matter of Britain and decided it was his task to fill that void? If not with blackjack and hookers, then with knights and ladies?
If it were so, he was no less, if not more, successful, than the aforementioned acclaimed authors whom he predates by almost a millennium. And we cannot really blame him for the fact that generations of historians used his writings as the authoritative source - that would be akin to blaming Bernard Cornwell for taking liberties with the Peninsular campaigns which, historically, never saw a certain Sharpe make quite a career.

Ich habe nichts besonders interessantes, übers Jahr 2022 zu schreiben, fast nichts gutes auch. Doch gab es unbedingt etwas gutes darin, und dafür bin ich dankbar.
Einen guten Rutsch ins Jahr 2023!

...is, of course, naming the variables.

Case in point, King Charles III, but in Russian. In English, of course, Charles, Prince of Wales, became Charles III, King of, well, United Kingdom and lots of other places which I don't have to remember as I'm not his subject.
In Russian, however, Prince Charles became King "Karl". A bunch of dimwits ran with that as "he changed his name, he was Charles and now he's Karl". A bunch of other dimwits ran with the story "Oh those idiot Russians who rename people when they become kings and queens" - I leave it up to the reader to decide, which of those bunches is more asinine.

In fact, it's purely a naming convention. Of course while the French had quite a few kings Louis and several kings Henry, they most certainly don't name them "Ludovicques" or, perish the thought, "Guinriche". William the Conqueror, too, was likely never called "Wilgelm".
Still, not really sure when that convention arose in Russian historical literature, but it became an established convention that kings and queens were named "based" on the Latin spelling of their names, even in cases when it sounded nowhere near the real enunciation. That extended beyond the strictly royal line to people like Charles Valois, brother of Philippe IV. So, while Charles Windsor was still the Prince of Wales, he wasn't the subject of that convention, but now, as a king, he pretty much is. End of story.
Of course, one could say that this convention is pretty dumb, and it quite probably is. However, as many practical programmers (the kind who write code instead of waging flame wars) know, following a bad naming convention already established in a codebase is preferable to having two naming conventions within it. An even better option, of course, would be to refactor the code to a good convention; however, it's quite often impractical even in the case of a codebase.
Therefore, until some kind of naming authority (Now where's the Russian Academy of Sciences when it's needed) decides to alter the convention, "es bleibt immer so wie es ist". Of course, this doesn't preclude me from continuing to call him Charles in private. Certainly not a case of lese majeste.

On a side note, there was quite some speculation in the mid-2010s on which royal name Charles would eventually take, and people were more of the thought that he'd become George VII, as both previous Kings Charles left a pretty questionable legacy. So he actually did have an option of renaming himself - he just chose not to.