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No sir, I'm an electronics engineer by trade and education. But I did get 5 years of experience in water management and ecology plus a little CE working for the mostly great state of TN. The first step will be getting electrical power restored to the eastern part of the country. Ukraine has 15 nuclear power plants. Six are in the hands of the Russians and three are damaged and inoperable according to AP. I doubt the Russians will leave the six they control in working condition. But even if they did the majority of the power infrastructure is destroyed in the eastern part of the country. Towers, substations, lines are largely destroyed. Just as a comparison following Hurricane Maria 88% of Puerto Rico was without electrical power. The power generation capability was still mostly intact (with the notable exception of the Guajataca Dam) so it was lines, substations and towers that needed to be replaced. Restoration took a massive effort by FEMA, Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the Army Corps of Engineers, numerous US and Mexican based power companies and Co-Ops and the State of Florida, Georgia, and other state governments. It took two years before power was restored. Ukraine is likely much worse off. Power is the cornerstone on which all other endeavors rests. The next is fresh water. Heavy munitions use and shattered buildings, vehicles, industrial infrastructure and storage will have contaminated the soil. It's spring now. Snows are melting and runoff is reaching the natural water sources and aquifers so the water will be contaminated if it isn't already. I'd imagine the water treatment plants in the east are heavily damaged if not destroyed. So even when electricity has been restored this challenge must be confronted. Right now without water treatment there is no sewage and wastewater management so that is going to contribute to the problem and lead to disease outbreak an other miseries like pests and parasites. It's been two months. The people in the war zone are running out of everything. So humanitarian aid is needed immediately and a hell of a lot of it. Think of the effort that went in to the Berlin Airlift and multiply that by 20. Then there is the long term costs. Because of the demand placed by explosive growth in China there is world wide pressure on construction supplies like lumber and concrete. This was something we had to deal with in my last job. Add to that COVID labor shortages and supply is lagging demand by almost a year as of February last year. After Hurricane Maria the population of Puerto Rico declined by almost 12%. A lot of people moved to the US and stayed. There is absolutely no way to know how many people have fled Ukraine, been killed or deported/kidnapped by the Russians, but it's likely going to be a lot. And even after the war is over more will die from exposure, lack of medical services, etc. That will mean fewer hands to do the work. It also means the Ukrainian economy will be recovering for years because, like most European nations, it has a transactional economy that required consumers. The longer this goes on the worse it will get because the refugees in other nations will begin building new lives where they are and be unwilling to return to a shattered country where their homes and lives are gone. Like you said the devastation that will be left behind once hostilities cease is incalculable. It will require a multinational effort, trillions of dollars worth of relief and literally decades to rebuild. And likely none of it happens as long as Russia is still Russia and sitting right next door undermining the whole thing. And there is very little the rest of the world can do about that.

That's a bit optimistic, even for you.

A Rare Planetary Alignment Is About to Happen. Here's How You Can See It (sciencealert.com)

Elon Musk is trying to buy twitter to get people to stop posting this:

I'd say when pigs can fly, but sadly pigs actually can fly since 2011, so thanks Duke Nukem Forever, I guess.

On level design there is a catacomb dungeon under the capital a friend and I were crawling around in that does gaslight the player, as there is an identical corridor to one the player went through earlier with another flame-spewing trap at the end, and a room with a layout and textures identical to the boss rooms of other dungeons of the type is found in between those corridors but merely holds two normal enemies. Makes me shudder to think what a tabletop RPG campaign being DMed by Miyazaki for his friends must be like.

Updates : - Boar & Bear form : engagement bonus set to passive (so it stacks with active effects, as for Form of the Fearsome Brute) - Stag form carnage : reworked to an AoE triggered on Crit (including on main target) as Pet Stag companion (BPM made it works also on main target). => Base damage 10-18 Slash / Pierce, 9 PEN, 1.5 radius, scales as similar abilities (+5% multiplicative damages, +1 Acc, +0.25 PEN for each PL beyond 1). Why this change : I think the issue with "Barbarian style" carnage is that it is a bit pointless. It is much less focused than cat attack speed bonus, and more annoying, combo with few other abilities. I worked quite a bit on Barbarian to make carnage feels a bit like PoE1's (making Frenzy upgrades applies to Carnage hits, the making Interrupting blows working with BPM carnage crit). This, obviously, isn't easily doable with Druid Stag form. On the other side, I found this tweak for the stag pet : by working also on main target, it is an AoE passive, but also a Crit reliant damage ability vs main target. Crit fishing isn't easy with Stag pet nor with Stag form (except, well, entropy and some martial MC), but it is still much easier to build around (especially with a party) than a bit of raw damage around. Basically it is an extra Wildstrike Frenzy without extra property. Since it has to compete with things like Cat x1.33 attack speed, it has to be good enough. Finally Stag form working like Stag pet makes some sense.

I'm glad that you ask actually this is why I take Enlightened Agony and work it out vs. my FF attack cycle time: Rule 1: Doesn't have Intellect Inspiration > Cast Enlightened Agony Rule 2: Doesn't have Dexterity Inspiration > Cast Swift Flurry Rule 3: Has an Intellect Inspiration > Use FF ability Under Swift Flurry + Enlightened Agony my FF ability total cycle time is 1.9s and the Curse lasts 1.7s. Everything works out on autopilot then and I only keep the hand on Invocations (which I could automate too but hey, I've gotta do something).

There's a really handy mod that adds additional AI conditions: https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/88?tab=description Unfortunately there's no condition for the Forbidden Fist curse specifically, as the mod seems to predate it. It still works just fine though as I personally use it. You could probably set the condition to be "Not affected by Damage over Time" and do it manually if you get affected by some other DoT.

maybe there's an advanced AI scripting mod that'll let you do this? In the past, I've just set it on a very short timer. (To be optimum, it has to be extremely short, because the AI commits to an action during recovery, so if the timer expires in the middle of a recovery, the AI will continue with an autoattack or something else)

We've got 3 air filters in our house (bedrooms and living room) and the cost of the filters is crazy. I had to give up drinking so that I could afford clean air.

Levolt room (700ish sq ft supposedly, if it was perfectly square and empty I guess) air filter unit: $161 Replacement filters, 2pk: $80 How often you'll have to replace the filter, even if you blow the loose dust off once or twice to extend them, depending on fan speed used/other factors: 2-4 months 😡😡🤬 in my old fart brain, such shouldn't be more than $15 for one considering how often needs replacement. But the one I bought a couple years ago seems to help allergies a lot - dust, particles in the air etc. So I grudgingly ordered another one. Found a somewhat cheaper 2pk of replacement filters ($50), maybe they'll be the same/work just fine. They are both going in my room in Sac. so I can have at least one allergy-free space. If I wanted to fill the whole house with them the annual cost would be stupid. I should have gone into the air filter replacement business.

speaking of sun & moon issues, most of the time I dual-wield sun & moon and use hunter's claw i get 2 stacks of hunter's claw, as might be reasonably expected from that. rarely though, i end up getting 3 stacks of hunter's claw, two from the sun & moon, and one from the off-hand weapon. i don't know why this happens and haven't yet been able to correlate it with anything. it'd be some nice subtle cheese if there was a consistent way to game it to get 3.

Alyssa Nakken makes history! https://www.mccoveychronicles.com/2022/4/12/23023181/mlb-news-san-francisco-giants-alyssa-nakken

Dawn of War was (a) great (source of memes). Battlefleet Gothic Armada too. Maybe I'm biased because it seems to be a franchise that produces a lot of coop games, but I like their approach with regards to licensing. I simply ignore all the shovelware made under the brand, and go for the few good bits, heh.

XD

is worth reading the follow-up post in the twitter link as it provides context. HA! Good Fun!

Sort of old news... but worth a watch for a Warhammer 40K 30K fan

Other than getting the rona earlier this year, I haven't been really sick in a while. I get some digestion issues and insomnia though. That's better than a cold at least. Today I went to work. I've been an independent contractor for a minute and I'm making about 50-100% more than I did as an employee. I'm going to make as much money as I can doing this over the summer and then look to getting a 9 to 5 outside of Houston specifically and maybe (hopefully?) Texas generally. It's time to run away from the hurricanes.

I'm playing Chinatown Detective Agency. I had never heard of this game before but I was in the mood for a point n click and this serendipitously popped up on Game Pass. The game plays like something halfway between Beneath a Steel Sky and Where in ****** is Carmen Sandiego? You are sometimes required to figure things out outside of the game, either from your own knowledge of history, geography, folklore, et cetera, or via Alt-Tabbing to a browser, using your phone, or whatever method of information gathering via internet. I mean, you could probably also phone a friend or go to the library, but the internet will likely be faster. Point is, you do detective work outside the game from clues found within the game.

There are other nations in the EU which get almost all of their gas from Russia too, just not in the overall volume that Germany does, so I guess... they're probably happily not the center of attention.

Feels weird seeing the whole world hating on Germany again. Personally I believe collapsing our economy / industry will help Russia more than Ukraine, but maybe I'm just biased.

I often feel this is a factor, more often among critics than the audience, but the audience is guilty of that no less. Games, books, movies, TV shows, it pretty much happens everywhere. It might also be a wrong impression, of course, because I often happen across entertainment that is rated highly and I wonder how that ever could have gotten the praise it did. I know my particular tastes are a little out there at times (or maybe often), and for some things I can at least understand their popularity in some way, for others, ah, no. It's a cheap and recent example I already talked about, but given with how well received Discovery is by professional critics, I really get the impression that there's just nobody who wants to be seen throwing in with the reactionary crowd just because they don't like a badly written and terribly directed show. Transformers is a really good example because the scenes with the focus on Megan Fox just "being sexy" stand out as much as the random dips into fanservice in some animes (hello Nanoha). Films and TV shows are generally more honest, if there's a whole lot of that sleaze in the film or in the show, it's marketed as such, and I guess when you turn on a late night movie called Bikini Jones and the Temple of Eros (no really, that's an actual Indiana Jones, ahm, erotica knockoff that exists) you know what you're getting. In a way that makes hentai films more honest than, again, say, Nanoha, which has probably the most extreme creepout "what the hell is happening now?" ecchi scene of all time. Well, and on TV there's always to option to pick a channel that doesn't have that type of content anyway. Plus, unlike with anime series, there's barely ever any chance that these movies would interest me from a thematical or plot standpoint - they usually have neither. With anime, as it so recently happened even as I watched the Tamayura OVA which is only 4 episodes of 15 minutes each, the scenes are sometimes even in material where it makes no sense and sometimes they're not - and I'm trying to be objective here - looking like the target audience would like these shots because they're badly made, out of place and not in any way visually enticing. Or maybe I'm wrong about that, who knows. I haven't posted anything about Tamayura yet, but hey, why not use the occasion. There's not much to say about it anyway, it's about four girls, nothing happens - which was the point why I tried it, by far and large - which isn't the problem. The voice direction is terrible (and keep in mind I'm so much more forgiving about this particular point than you are ), it sometimes looks like K-On! without the elements that made K-On! work for me in spite of the looks and it sometimes sounds like it too, mostly becaus the main character is voiced by Azusa from K-On!. There are random shots of the girls' legs all over the place, which also looks like an element taken from K-On!, but whereas K-On! did that for a reason, here it looks like misplaced and confusing fanservice that kind of isn't. It's baffling, and I have no idea how the hell Mr. Sato managed to direct the first one and a half seasons of my most favorite anime series of all time. Honestly, if I hadn't watched Utena I would have said that it all came down to having Ikuhara on the team, but hell, I mean, Utena... wasn't really problem free, was it? Hey, Miranda was made to be genetically perfect, so of course the camera magically focuses on her butt. It's phsysically impossible otherwise. Eh, okay, this is a joke from How I Met Your Mother. Anyway, about Miranda, yeah, don't ask me, I'm the wrong person to talk to. But yeah, Sailor Moon's occasional forays into showing girl's underwear is at least alwas framed properly. Maybe except for that SuperS episode that has Ami hanging off a trapeze for absolutely no reason other than to show us a nice upskirt shot of her. But that's SuperS, and SuperS is just all out terrible, and it has the circus girls, but well, that's circus outfits, so I'm not sure if I should blame them for it. The designs ARE from Naoko Takeuchi after all. Where were we? Oh, right Mass Effect 2, that was weird, but that game also has really, really weird fanboys. Someone here once posted that Tali must have good genes because she has such a big thigh gap. I think that was the same dolt who kept posting that BioWare made women in their games with male skulls for some nefarious "turn everyone into trans-f*g" SJW secret agenda, or something. I usually press "random" and then "next", assuming there is a "random" button. I might press it twice if I feel adventurous, but that's pretty much it. I usually don't play female characters unless they're the default, but I really don't care either way. Oh, don't I know that feeling. In SW:ToR there was this huge content patch that barely had any content in it. For me, I mean. In reality, it was a patch to introduce player housing and you could - in theory - spend hours upon hours setting up your home just the way you want it, and then invite other people. The only thing I used it for was to put a shop droid in a corner and my bank/storage access next to it. Finished it off with a trading terminal and every now and then the occasional trophy from a nightmare difficulty raid. All I got out of that patch was a separate teleportation button, because you could go to your home from anywhere in the galaxy, instantly, and then head to where you want next. It was a convenient place to go to instead of the regular fleet hub that suffered from the game's poor performance and net code. Every now and then I looked at other guild member's homes and felt a little pang of jealousy, I mean, the rooms were really decorated prettily and all that, but for me? Yeah, no. It had a checkpoint list of all decorations found, so it was something to obsess over, but that's really all it was. I get that. I don't identify with my character very well either way, that's not something I get from creating it. I often see people post about how they don't like fixed protagonist games, and I'm like, yeah, who cares. It's what happens in the game that makes or breaks my immersion, not whether I can play Billy Jean Someone and make sure her lips are a lighter shade of red and she has long, jet-black hair. Picking portraits is pretty much the same. Most of my Baldur's Gate characters were that fighter portrait with the bald head. Why? Because it was like the first, or one of the first ones, anyway. *shrug* If playing a girl when given the option works better for you, then hey, just do it. I generally pick male characters when given the chance for exactly the same reason. Although... I also couldn't tell you why. I don't think it really matters though. Heh, I don't have anything against generic fantasy settings, at least not usually, other than them feeling a little tired, but I think Gaia/Gaea was helped by having typical elements and atypical elements. If it had elves or dwarves, that would have been pretty... bad. Show went from me posting about it after the first episode(s) wondering "what is wrong with me, why don't I hate this?" to "why is this so good?" in the span of like, the first 8 or 9, episodes. It then turned out to make an episode that's basically about Hitomi going back to a day before she came to Gaea one of the best episodes in the show, and a really good episode overall in the history of all episodes, based on a premise that's a little tired already too. Still not sure how it managed to do that, but I'll take it. They did a pretty good job at making the characters from Earth look a bit different, not counting any of the animal-themed people of course. Allen was probably the most distracting, because he really looks like Touga with blonde hair, but with the release dates, it's probably better to say that Touga looks like Allen. I didn't find any of the characters inherently unappealing, but they're not my favorite designs either. As much as NGE's characters had some in-built fanservice, I do like how the show looked from start to finish. It also still has the distinction of producing scenes that were clearly meant as fanservice and yet still had a narrative or thematic function, even when it was Asuka.

Queen Beryl is literally what I thought of every time it happened. Yeah, you just keep spinning your Life Day orb while doin' absolutely nothing of use, queenie... It's difficult for me to even imagine anybody who didn't watch the original show starting with and somehow enjoying the films for them to be able to go back and check out the show. I guess you might be right in regards to the popularity/"you have to watch and like this" factor, though. Live-action is also different because...well, how often do you see shots in live-action shows where the camera zooms in or cuts away to just a character's chest or butt? In anime shows, it's not a totally irregular occurrence, and it's really freaking disruptive, particularly when it lingers for several seconds at a time and particularly when there's no in-show justification for it. Sure, it might happen in certain types of lower budget movies that I've never seen (...as well as Transformers, where it really is just as bad or even worse than any anime), but shows that actually aired on television? A live-action show with "fan service" might have a lady wearing a ridiculous and overly sexualized outfit, but if the scene at least keeps trucking along like it should... A momentary glimpse of unitard during a fight in Sailor Moon versus mashed potatoes Miranda and her barf-worthy butt being inexplicably placed directly in front of the camera in the middle of an important conversation in Mass Effect 2 feels like all the difference in the world. I still don't love the former, but at least it's not getting my face caved in with a sledgehammer like the latter. There are different levels to these things, and anime has a history of casually going to an extreme that I remain very uncomfortable with. I must admit, I've never known exactly how to feel about that sentiment regarding MMOs and female characters - obviously, the troglodyte way in which it is expressed is pretty reprehensible, but then I have to consider the case of my own self. I always play as a female character in games where you have to design your own character. Why? I usually don't even design my character: in games like Dark Souls, I always go with one of the available presets while just changing the hair style/color, and that's it. If there isn't a preset to choose from, I either sit there and agonize or I just straight up uninstall the game. I don't "sit there and agonize" because I'm going back and forth on what I want, or because I'm testing out stuff. No sir, I so utterly loathe making those kinds of decisions entirely that it inhibits me from doing anything at all, because nothing about the visual or creative design of a character really comes to me naturally and I don't have any kind of idea of what I even want, so I don't even know where or how to start. So why always female if I don't even really care what my character looks like? I'm not entirely sure. I know I was mad when I played Dark Souls 2 and they got rid of the particular passive character voice (grunts/yells/screams/yelps) that I used for DS1...and I was happy when they actually brought back that voice for DS3. On some level, I feel more comfortable playing (or identifying with?) a girl than I do a guy, but I don't understand the specifics...though it's certainly not because "I want to look at a girl's butt the entire game", I can tell you that. My biggest issue with the look of Escaflowne is the generic-ish anime fantasy aesthetic, particularly in relation to Gaea and its characters. Obviously, I made my peace with it to some degree, but boy, there were some scenes where I would pause it and be like "...how can I like this when I've immediately spurned so many other anime fantasy shows?" purely because of the way the show looked, . Funnily, HoonDing said Hitomi was unbearably ugly, but it was actually pretty much everyone else that this problem applied to for me because she and the other Earth characters had a little bit of a different style going on in comparison to the Gaea world/characters.

Well, some are trying to "take care" of some... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/13/stop-matching-lone-female-ukraine-refugees-with-single-men-uk-told

USA has those hundreds of billions of Russian money they froze to give Ukraine

@Not So Clever Hound , how do you set up the AI to use the FF attack once the curse expires? Is this possible? I don't see how to set this condition in the AI. When I've tried doing this in the past, my FF monks stack the curse repeatedly, which obviously is something to be avoided.

So why don't they take care of the Ukrainian refugees for a start?

Yeah, better hush hush 😛

Pretty sure its a reference to the glam metal band Dokken whose biggest hits in the US IIRC correspond to the 1983-1988 period, so it fits in with the Masters of the Universe / Thundercats era. There was a phrase at the time if you were going to rock out (not necessarily even musically) that you were "rockin' like Dokken*". So "rokken-like-Dökken" just changes the spelling of Rockin' to match Dokken and would be a more elaborate way to say "it's rockin'" or, you know, exciting and good. *I'm not sure Dokken is actually supposed to be pronounced correctly to rhyme with rockin'. Anyhow I do know people at the time did pronounce Dokken to rhyme with Rockin, because I've heard people say they were Rockin' like Dokken before.

"MythForce’s early access launch will include four playable heroes (apparently the ones in the trailer) in a rokken-like-Dökken first episode titled Bastion of the Beastlord. “Players can brave the dungeon alone or join forces with friends in online co-op mode for up to four people,” Beamdog said."

I didn't know we were talking about good games.

no fans of Shadow of the Horned Rat or Dark Omen? for shame

Uh oh, now he is going to buy the Obsidian forums.

Here's how Bass surprised former NPB teammate Ohtani Very cool story

There have been a billion games where you play as one legion or another of the boring space marines. Where's my Evil Sunz combat racing game? Seriously, can we get basically Twisted Metal but 40K? Obviously I'm playing Evil Sunz because the red uns go faster.

As I see it, Poles had some kind of military training near the Ukrainian borders and during the lunch break, they decided to left the keys in the starters, considering being safe, but unfortunately, they did not get a memo, that on the other side of the border, the Ukrainian 1st Tractor division has an exercise as well, and probably some of their farmers just could not resist

I would consider this still as a false info. It was presented mainly by Kadyrovs, and their authenticity is pretty dubious... From their TikToks, the count of their PoW has been counted to apporx 50. Also Ukrainian MoD claims, that this is no true. My own guess would be, it is more than 50 soldiers, because some of them definitely surrendered due to no ammunition, but 1000 is a blatant Russian lie, like most of their statements in the last 105 years NextaTV report on this: Speaking about the breakthrough operation, it looks like it was successful. Not sure how many other units have tried to join them, but few hundreds of them are allegedly now with Azov. Google Translate of the tweet: In Mariupol, a unit of the 36th Independent Marine Brigade - Rear Admiral Belinsky, managed to get out of the enemy's siege and unite with the Azov Regiment. Several hundred Marines managed to get out, including the wounded. UA Insider

Spending this week pushing to pack "everything" - get it done. Won't take it all up now, but don't have to think about it anymore. ---old Xmas cards: realized one of my cousins looks a lot like (the older) Geena Davis. ---it's amazing how much the digital/net age has altered my perception of "what needs to be kept." ---houses feel a lot bigger when there is little in them ---box of my old journals from age 11-early20's. Y'know in the movie Seven, the villain's notebooks full of small cramped writings? Yeah, that's what they look like. Thankfully I didn't turn out to be a serial killer. So seems like, unless hubby's remote work stuff doesn't work out/he doesn't like that situation (or we win the Lottery) we've finally committed to which house to be in, at least for a few years. Goodbye postage-stamp house. We didn't especially love you, but you worked well for many years/served us well.

I hate that too. I just bought a pair of jeans yesterday and the watch pocket is so big it could probably hold my phone if it wasnt in a case.

so much Elden Ring talk makes me want to share my screenies

I guess a non-godlike druid/priest bathing in is own maelstrom under BDD whiile wearing the helmet adding %lash with elec damage received should quickly reach stupid lvl of damage....

Y'know, I don't think I've posted here since we got our cat!

This is a recap of the race my wife and I did Saturday. It went pretty similar for me, except I was much slower at everything.