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Speaking of the cruel treatment of Russian prisoners of war: a Ukrainian representative has said that if it turns out everything is true, it will be dealt with, as it is not acceptable. Note the huge cultural difference to Russia: Russia will not admit to anything, and it lies about everything. In my estimate, it would be unheard of for Russia to acknowledge that a) their men might have done something wrong and that b) if so, they will be dealt with. After all, Lavrov still maintains the lie that Russia has not attacked Ukraine.

Then what would I read on this forum?

I disagree that preference to talk about the war that is going right now and for some people right here rather than war that is over for some time already and annoyance at near constant "But what about Iraq???" derails is double standards at all. Plus it can lead to further derails with things like "I see your Iraq and raise you Chechnya" etc. Anyway, while I'm ready to forever disagree with you on this and some other points such as how Russia is so, so, SO much worse than 'murica in every way possible, like, I don't think the States could be this horrible if they wanted to, I am aiming for your opinion, not your character. I'm sorry if I slipped here and there, this topic is literally close to home, will strive to use less personalized expressions in the future. P.S.: Russia is incomparably more horrible than the States. Always were, still are, possibly will be.

look, you are moderator so please calm down. Yes I jested that Russia is not in war because they did not declare war and them themselves are refusing to call it a war. In sentence right before it I condemned all atrocities caused by either side so I really don't see your point. Again you are projecting your frustrations on me for some reason. Edit: before you jump the gun, it was in next post

well lets be real, most sources in war are scatchy at best. A lot of them are propaganda for either side and winners usually will be painted as the righteous ones in the end. I have my subjective opinions about lot of things happening there but the main one is that Russians are trying to occupy sovereign nation (which I guess no-one argue is not true) and change their leadership as they did many time in past including my country and/or take over strategical or valuable territory. Another subjective hot take is they don't care about Russian population on those territories at all and are using them only as scapegoat to justify their intentions. That being demonstrated by basically jailing anyone who disagree with them in their own country for many years, not just recently. I also think that Russian jails seen more torture of opposition than what we would probably see on Ukraine side from even soldiers at war whose families are being shelled by same soldiers they are fighting against (depending on how long this war will last).

There isn't any context to remove because you didn't provide any. The statement that comment was in reference to was a gratuitous, unsourced and blanket insinuation that Iraqi civilian casualty figures aren't to be taken seriously because they could have been soldiers in disguise. An insinuation, rather than a clear assertion, so you could easily claim "that's not what I meant" when called on it, as you predictably have. Feel free to provide context and sources so we can have a nuanced and constructive discussion about it. No grandstanding -- just calling bull. I also like how you think my "obvious anti-Americanism" is of any relevance. Previously it was Russian apologism, was it? I wear my political leanings on my sleeve. Over the course of 15+ years of discussions here I've railed against the EU, the Soviet Union, China, Saudi Arabia and, of course, my own country. But it's my anti-Americanism that is unacceptable. Heh. Your exceptionalism is showing.

so you can sleep well. It just hit our mainstream media https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/zahranicni/ukrajina-video-rusti-zajatci-strileni-do-nohou-muceni-valka-rusko.A220328_103103_zahranicni_kha So I guess now you have to ask how fighting for Mariupol is displayed on Russian side now

@GorthHey we made it to the Rugby Sevens WC finals several times. Now the actual Rugby WC, that is a different story. In fact I suspect the FIFA Team USA could beat the Rugby Team USA.... in rugby! But our women's team could beat them both. In EITHER sport!

You don't even need to mention war now, people have been taken away and fined for holding signs saying "*** *****", "The 5th commandment: thou shalt not kill" and my personal favorite, "Fascism shall not pass", complete with the reason for fine being that, I kid you not, it discredits russian army.

Also works with only one pair if you cancel the jump mid-air (as soon as the circle appears at the target location - in this case in the water). You will still land in the water and will still have 2/rest uses left. Then give the boots to another party member and do the same. With the same trick you can sneak to/reach places with the whole party which otherwise would be impossible to do.

If you use Leap in the Bathhouse and jump into the water, you can get a free bath. Take that, Ganor.

On this issue I read somewhere a couple of points (from financial experts which I am certainly not). One, the contracts are already in force, so this would be a breech of the contracts which clearly specify the use of dollars or euros for the transactions. So any such requirement would effectively nullify existing contracts and new contracts would need to be negotiated. And two, European states don't have to buy rubles only from Russia's central bank. They can buy them from any source of rubles in the world, including countries such as India that may have rubles, as well as private financiers.

You should ask @Bartimaeus for his forum poster-busting eraser software. Never be subjected to disagreeable posts again!

Well the drawback for everybody else is nobody can block your response, regardless of how disagreeable your position may be. One expects a certain level of discretion from a moderator.

Oh yeah, 1943-1963, I was scrolling too fast! Works for me...time to make those fatcats pay!

Has there ever been a war where no war crimes were not committed? I suspect they are few and far between. In the end it's more a matter of intent (and extent).

over the pandemic, every time i've managed to upgrade a part of my computer i've been like "awww yeah, now to see how deadfire performs"

The excusing of atrocity by Ukrainian forces in this conflict specifically and "Western" forces historically generally. In this case it's an inversion of the usual, because usually the US (or an ally) takes the role of invader. Just come out and say you believe your enemies are ontologically evil and no act against them is wrong. It's more honest than trying to conform supposed principles to real life actions.

That's your subjective take, and that's fine. I could say exactly these same things about such sources as the NYT and the Guardian, which to me routinely come across as tabloids. The bottom line is this. For some in this forum (don't know if that includes you), they see news sources as either entirely credible or entirely not credible. It's a convenient mental heuristic that most people develop to make things easy for them by ONLY trusting a handful of sources they have subjectively decided are "good," while completely rejecting anything that comes from any other source. I don't see things that way. For me, with every single news source anywhere in the world, some of what they say may be true and some false. And it is up to me to sift through these news stories and separate the wheat from the chaff. That's why even though in general I don't consider the BBC, NYT, Guardian, and Bloomberg to be truthful or credible sources, I still went ahead and linked articles here from exactly those sources. Because sometimes even they can get something right.

Curious how's there is sovietistan in your list, but no russia, when putler pretty openly wants to mold it into new sovietistan. Unless you criticized sovietistan for being, I dunno, not enough of a corrupt, hypocritic, oppressive ****hole built on lies and fear?

No not at all, I condemn those actions fully. I am just pointing out that Russia is so cowardly they can't even declare war properly and I am asking question if rules of war in that case apply, thats all. Not sure what agenda you mean. I am also sure IF Ukraine 'win' they will punish such actions if proven true. Even Ukraine spokesmen stated that those will be punished. (albeit might be just some scapegoats) because they want to maintain their image in western eyes. I doubt you can say same for Russian side of things

I don't know what 'It' is but from speculations here I thought its about torture of russian POW (which itself is silly as there is no war there right?)

An officer who supports the war was also shut up for daring to suggest that people may be dying. It's beyond Orwell. Check it out:

It's amazing to find Russia apologists in a situation where the mere mention of war on the street can lead to you being taken away instantly, or the mere mention of things not being quite right can lead to a sentence of up to 15 years. I mean, if things are NOT very wrong, then why would bringing this stuff up be a problem for Russia or Putin? Russia's attitude is also evident in the way its embassies in its neighboring countries have specifically asked Russian nationals to report all negative treatment of or comments about Russians to their respective embassies.

Yes its the same as the reality of life living in Russia, Putin maintains its a proud and free society yet anyone who doesnt agree with the invasion of Ukraine is scum and a traitor So its to be expected that Russia will lie about anything negative around their military campaign in Ukraine But the lies do make me laugh still with how absurd they become, its not an invasion " its a special military operation " and how they get repeated by the Russian apologists

Some UK think tanks thoughts on the change of strategy... Russia's aim is slow and methodical capture of towns - military expert Dr Jack Watling, research fellow for land warfare at the London-based defence think tank the Royal United Services Institute, gives his latest assessment of Russia's movements inside Ukraine ... The Russians advanced along more axes than they could sustain in the first part of the conflict, and are now in a position where they can only resource one axis at a time. At the moment, their priority seems to be to defeat Ukrainian forces in the Donbas if they can. Once they finish in Mariupol, they're likely to reinforce the axis against Kharkiv to the north of the Donbas. And so the intent is very much a slow and methodical capture of towns one by one, he concludes. The link also has a map courtesy of the UK MoD dating 26/03 Short version, Ukraine didn't roll over and die when asked to, so now the strategy has changed to a slow (bloody and costly too) grind... https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-60890199 Also featuring a repeat story, that Zelensky is ready to consider the neutrality question, albeit not without a referendum.

The English players are currently discussing boycotting the WC because of Qatar's rather spotty human rights records... Nothing may come of it though, leaving it at discussing it.

I didn't seen anyone supporting war crimes in this thread. But it might have been removed

Prosper?

Know what I like about Diablo3 on PS4? That you can play with "yourself" by running the game three times with different "user accounts" on the same single device. So I can take my main chr. on account 1 and drag 1-3 other characters behind me to increase difficulty and drop rates, as well as easy in-game access to tons of mule chrs. on those other user accounts. Make as many user accounts as you want for endless and well organized mule accounts etc. The only other time I remember being able to do similar with a PC game was Borderlands 1, where I was able to alt-tab out of that game and click/start a 2nd running copy (on same PC) to then join/mule/drag a chr. around etc. I'm sure there were other PC games you could do that too but I didn't play (or just don't remember) them. Do PC games still let you do that sort of thing anymore, or has all the digital, online/account and drm measures = never...outside of maybe some indie games here and there? At any rate, I finally got past Greater Rift 70 last week and can get Primal Ancient items now. My main Necro is at Paragon Level 809. I don't use any "meta build" so my damage is still pretty low for the last difficulty (T16) but T15 is now pretty easy. Chance for Primals is all I wanted. The chance is really low, but I have gotten a few.

I think it's Epic exclusive for some months first, like BL3's release was, in case you weren't aware/cared. I'm mildly curious about it but yeah, I don't care about BL3 at all at this point - not sure I would even get excited about a BL4 - and my expectations would be low. But maybe we could check it next Xmas, when hubby usually feels like revisiting the series.

Well there are bounds. I think I mentioned that there is a manga (soon to be anime) based on the same authors' hentai that involves Shub-Niggurath. If ever find myself liking that, I will throw myself into a volcano. Let us know if it drives you insane.

Way to remove context so you can again grandstand against me. But given your obvious anti-Americanism, go ahead and count up all the Al Qaeda, Taliban, and ISIS killed by the US too. After all, they were "civilians" too, right?

Movie - I think I posted the trailer here, but I might have forgotten...

Yes, you think I'm a Russian shill ?

Beyond multiclassing with casters it might also be interesting to multiclass with a monk. With Swift Flurry and Heartbeat Drumming you might be able to instantly kill a lot of enemies using the assassin bonus and backstab bonus.

It's literally his job to be a shill. Plus, there's always the chance, however small, that he's genuinely excited for this stuff. I'm already in the acceptance stage of my Star Trek grief, that kind of stuff doesn't really bother me. I'm at peace with the fact that the Star Trek I loved is dead and never coming back. Whoever watches and enjoys Nu Trek can have it. I'm just here for the memes... And to derive perverse pleasure from Mike Stoklasa & Rich Evans getting increasingly exasperated as they try to make sense of these shows.

Nothing wrong with the Daily Mail. Speak to the information provided, not your personal view of the source. In Iraq, under Hussein's orders, thousands of Iraqi troops deliberately switched to civilian clothing and merged with the civilian population while attacking US forces. No credible effort was ever made by those who were supposedly counting civilian deaths to verify whether a person in civilian clothing was in fact a civilian. In Ukraine, the Ukrainian figure of ~4,000 civilians killed is the officially documented number thus far. One cannot obtain a complete figure of those deaths, including people in mass graves, bodies still inside bombed buildings, and people 'disappeared' by those humanitarian Russians, until well after the war ends AND independent sources have complete and unfettered access to all of Ukrainian territory. At that point the numbers will surely be in the tens of thousands minimum.

Oh, that is much different.

Wedged in one more episode of The Vision of Escaflowne. Van gets rescued and Merle is overjoyed, jumps on him and starts licking his face, because she's a cat girl. Once again, instead of being annoyed, I kinda smiled seeing that. I don't know what it is about this particular anime, but I guess it helps that Merle isn't just a cat-eared excuse for fanservice, and she doesn't add -nyan to every setence. After going into tihs pretty much blind, looking at the writing team, I noticed some familiar names. Shōji Kawamori, Akihiko Inari and Ryota Yamaguchi. Shōji Kawamori is, assuming anyone doesn't know, the person behind Macross and the Diaclone toy line design, works which were adapted into Robotech and Hasbro's Transformers (the first Optimus Prime design is from Shōji Kawamori, it's fairly safe to say that without him, there'd be no transforming mechs as we know them - for better or worse, I mean... we'd also not have those terrible Michael Bay films). Akihiko Inari went on to be on the writing team for the universally acclaimed and beloved by @KP wants Blue Velvet's Cowboy Bebop and eh, Ryota Yamaguchi is one of the writers of Sailor Stars, specifically the one who wrote the episode where Usagi and Seiya end up alone at her family's house and all sorts of hijinks begins, and the person who wrote most of the super silly Nanami episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena, including the cow transformation one. I guess that can serve as an excuse why I like it.

Actually, I was looking for the possibility to switch the weapon's set when paralysed (to shut down the effect) and I also watched fot automatic effects , in this topic https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/126636-paralysed-and-stunned/ Using an arquebuse (high damages) with the modal (+20acc) without any Attack and Reload time is nice, I thought about that when you spoke about Beetle Shell few post ago.

I won’t be more thoughtful than the very knowledgeable people who tackled your question already but i would like to just mention that you don’t have to dump stats on a bloodmage. Neutral everything with a particular focus on Dex, Per, and Int and you will rock. Distribute your points evenly across all stats is also very viable. You can min/max, sure… but having done more playthroughs than I should with all kinds of blood mage stat configurations… it matters little. What matters is how you want to play it.

I spent last night dealing with my daughter's teenage angst. She has been pretty stressed about school. She missed a couple days a week ago and has been trying to make up a bunch of tests. My daughter has dyslexia and often has to put in twice the work and time to be successful in certain subjects. Apparently she got caught cheating on her Biology test. Now she actually has a special learning plan that allows her to use a notecard with vocabulary when taking tests. This is because of the dyslexia, but it doesn't give her the definitions. She was caught using some slides that has both. She doesn't deny it. She took a shortcut. I told her she needs to apologize and we went over how to approach that situation. She has some other issues with the teacher. Apparently she doesn't like the way he uses the word retard. I'm like, is it in a biological setting? I told her I'm not going to get into how this guy teaches, but she is in the wrong in this situation and needs to be humble and apologetic. We will see, she is stubborn. Parenting isn't always easy.

I like the stats that @Not So Clever Hound recommended for his Bleeding Arcanist build. It features high PER and INT, slightly high CON and DEX, and slightly low (but not dumped) STR and RES. It worked very well on my SC bloodmage game.

I don’t think we will be a Watcher, and I disagree that Watcher identity has been key to Eora’s appeal. While our role as a Watcher was key to PoE1 narrative, I didn’t feel that way in PoE2 - our identity was surpassed by Herald of Berath identity - and sure, while being a Watcher has been use as a plot device I feel it’s role could have been replaced by any other plot convenient excuse.