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So is Half Life 3

Volourn

Good news everyone, Im down to 214.45 lb.! It turns out that simply not stuffing my face is working for me and doesnt require any physical effort on my part. HUZZAH!

Question was about ability to continue to fund the war. In perspective that US was able to run two wars that cost more, increase its spending in new warfare outside of those wars, do countless military and intelligence operations around globe for two decades and still grow its economy significantly. Meaning that west has ability to fund Ukraine for indefinitely with current level and it will have only minor impact in their economy in long run. More meaningful question would be is current level enough to give Ukraine actual fighting change or does it prolong inevitable result?

Piece from a very highly regarded academic that puts this very issue in great perspective: https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-could-be-an-inflection-point-eu-us-west-war-russia/

My best Stalker memory was doing the brain scorcher x lab for the first time. Atmospheric as anything, finished up with basically no ammo or medicine, but it would be fine since I'd killed everything behind me so could just stroll back out again. Good thing too, otherwise I'd be reduced to using harsh language. Turned the scorcher off, had a ten second feeling of Pride and Accomplishment that money can't buy then... hello, unholy hordes of Monolith. I must have killed about half of them with a silenced Makarov; never been so glad I'd played Thief previous.

BruceVC and his thoughts about unions and violently breaking up protests. "Unions ruin the economy." "Sometimes governments have no choice but to violently end strikes." "People on strike thought they were impervious to bullets so they got violent." and also "Affected shareholder values, so it was necessary to break up the strike." Nothing hasty about your judgement. Don't let the old posts fool you, just because BruceVC stopped using there and is now typing their all the time, it's still the same poster. I originally made a joke on their being a posessive pronoun. The Agent Smith showed up and asked me why I persist, and I had no real answer. I bet he'll come around the corner and will threaten to terminate this post too.

This is a fundamentally incorrect analysis in so many ways. The West can't intervene directly because of the likelihood of nuclear escalation. Ukraine had the resources to fight this war without Western aid, but having that aid has made the defense more effective. Getting the Ukraine army equipped and trained up to western standards won't happen overnight; it will probably take a year or more. Meanwhile, I'd expect the goal of the West is to create a stable outcome. If that means giving Russia a bloody nose so they think twice before invading again, then so be it. If it takes an extended guerrilla war lasting a decade, well that will be up to the two sides to resolve.

I so desperately want S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 to be good. The Metro games were pretty good as was Chernobylite, albeit a somewhat different type of game, but they all pale in comparison to how awesome Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat were. I just survived some nasty encounters and an anomaly. I have a sweet haul of valuables, but I'm moving at a snail's pace because I'm overloaded. I'm battered, very low on ammo, and I'm desperate to get back to Yanov Station. Suddenly, I hear the blowout off in the distance. I should probably drop some stuff and make a run for it, but I'm greedy. I can see Yanov Station in the distance, I think I can make it. Just my luck, here come 2 pseudodogs. Given time and ammo, not much of a threat. I'm critically low on both. I drop the first dog quickly with a couple shotgun blasts, but the second one is slippery. I'm making sure to always move toward Yanov Station as I desperately try to line up a shot with my shotgun and the last shell. I fire at point blank range and the dog drops, but not before it got a swipe on me. I make it inside Yanov Station with seconds to spare and about 30% health. Emergent stories like that stick with you.

Don't be ridiculous. Russia always has the option to just stop. There is no way this can ever be taken away from them. The reponsible party is Russia who disregarded everything and just went on and started the war. I wonder what your agenda is, making claims that are so utterly against reality. If your argument against this is that Putin would lose face, that doesn't make any sense, either. If he stops the war or loses it, he can simply claim victory. If anyone inside the country disputes that, these people will be jailed or outright killed. Remember, according to Russia, there is no war, and there haven't been any notable demonstrations against this blatant lie. All other lies will also be accepted.

Playing new Vegas because nothing else seems to scratch that itch. I feel like I always have at least 1 issue with mods. This time it's fingerless gloves, with the blue purple(im colorblind) fingers. It's minor but still annoying.

Chris Roberts did that when he got me to pay for the Wing Commander movie

Still will come out before Star Citizen.

And this has started to happen in Russia, there is growing discontent, a lot of pro-russian "telegramers" with hundreds of thousands of followers are already blaming Putin, and despite his assurance, how Russian economy and ruble is going strong, the people of Russia already know, that it is just a smelling heap of bull****, because they are already experiencing extreme inflation...

Fanatec Support has replied to me, and offered me a guide, where might be an issue with my wheel. And looks like, they were right. Probably during the shipping one of the cables got loose, and it stopped to working. So I am testing the wheel again, and was able to finish one more special event in Assetto Corsa on Gold

I lost my first teen in The Quarry, it was properly gruesome too. Abigail got decapitated, complete with excessive blood splatter and a nice close up of the severed head. I'm sad she's dead but the kill was AWESOME.

I completed Oblivion two nights ago, I spent about 240 hours on the game and it really was a worthwhile experience with mods changing the game from fun to superlative Maskars Overhaul really addresses all the initial design flaws like level scaling and then Ultimate Leveling makes exploring and questing meaningful because level advancement is based on XP and completion of quests and tasks and not just endless repetition of skills The game gets 80/100 on the globally respected " BruceVC game rating system " I also learnt how to properly mod this specific game and what mod managers to use. That took about 25 hours but I did waste some time by not following a logical troubleshooting approach Now I am having a break for a few days before I can decide on that question that all us gamers love ...what do I play next? So I am just having loads of fun in my modded RDR2 SP game, I have added some undead mods which adds zombies and undead camps to the maps. Its not working properly but I will fix that. After getting Oblivion working with all my mods I will never ever be daunted again by any game and any mod incompatibilities

Mine is very first underground with drippy walls and creaky flashing emergency light. Soldiers done, Invisible Mr. Cthulhu somehow done, found the stuff I needed to find, it seems I'm in a finish line, finally thank gods...well helllooooooo, babby's first Controller! Was some Amnesia Dark Descent levels brown pants experience. People always say CoP's better, more polished etc. but IMO it doesn't have a quarter of Shadow's atmosphere.

You've posted enough over the years to recognize a "pattern". Now how people interpret those patterns may vary. I'm sure there are at least 42 different opinions about what kind of person I am. But you come across as someone with an almost primordial fear, not of fire, but of anything that may hurt bottom lines on balance sheets, to the exclusion of all else. Somehow "the far left" has become your bogeyman and you see it everywhere, imagined or not ( because sometimes they *are* out to get you after all). That, and the obsession with BLM as the new Illuminati, which has reached a level where I'm sure it will be a forum meme for a long time still The above mindset affects a lot of posts about politics and social issues.... influencing the tone, nuances, choice of words, choice of real world examples, the direction you want a debate to head etc. It's fine to be opinionated though, Odin knows, I sure am But the conversations seems to always repeat themselves. You love the capitalist world and dislike anything that threatens to destabilize it (that is at least my impression from your posts). Some of us (that means myself and the voices in my head) are less enthusiastic about a number of aspects of western values and would love to see changes (anarchist on deck) in areas of responsibility and accountability. Especially the latter. To answer your original question, the use any agreeable answer to throw back at people and claim "BLM are criminals and people here agree with me"....

That is rich coming from the head of the worlds largest pedophile ring... the same guy who paid millions of dollars to get a child rapist out of jail and flown back to Rome so he could go free

No those examples are not the same as Putins War and Im surprised we still honestly debating this Russia invaded a sovereign country, their are many examples where wars end where an invading army is defeated or stops its invasion. The obvious solution to this Ukrainian crisis is Putin ends the war and pulls all Russian forces back within the borders of Russia. Thats the first step to end this war, its not simplistic at all because this will end the carnage

They've ignored my live blades for yeaaars.

You should be familiar with the Modding Basic Concepts tutorial before following this one. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to add a new icon for a custom ability or item in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. You must have Deadfire version 2.0.0 or later to use this functionality. I've already created game data objects for two custom items, and I've created two PNG icons for each: a small 42x42 icon, which will be used to show the item in an inventory slot, and a large 100x100 icon, which will be used to show the item when it's being dragged, and in the detailed inspection window. Items require both icons, but abilities only need the small 42x42 icon. To allow the game to load my large icon, all I have to do is put it in my mod folder at "/gui/icons/items". I can then reference it in the IconTextureLarge property of my item's game data. Small icons work a little differently. They need to be packed into an atlas, which is a single image file that has multiple images in it. The free tool SpriteSheetPacker can build an atlas for you from your collection of small icon images. Download SpriteSheetPacker and run it. Select "Add Images" and find all the small icon images you want to include in your mod. Click the "..." next to "Output Image". Browse to your mod folder. Create a new folder in it called "atlases". In this folder, save the image as "ItemIcons.png". If you were adding abilities, the icons for those would need to be in a separate atlas, also in this folder, called "SpellAbilityIcons.png". Ensure "Generate Map?" is enabled. Now click "Build Sprite Sheet". This will create the atlas image, and also a file called "ItemIcons.txt", which tells the game about each separate icon in the atlas. Finally, I can add a reference to the small icon in the IconTextureSmall property of my item's game data. Because the icon is in an atlas, this only needs the name of the sprite. It doesn't need any directory information. That's it. My new item now has custom icons to use in-game. If you need some great-looking, stylistically-matching icon images for your items and abilities, you can use the ones from the first Pillars of Eternity: PoE 1 Icon Resource at Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Nexus - Mods and Community PoE 1 Item Sketches at Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Nexus - Mods and Community

Played some demos from the Summer Fest. SCP: Secret Files - It's... a walking simulator. Sometimes you press E. There's one whole puzzle and two chase scenes. Not even an inventory. It's obviously a low-budget title, for better or worse. SIGNALIS - A game harkening back to the old Resident Evil games, you play an android? on a crashed exploration vessel. It's more Japanese-style horror than Western but the demo ends with you picking up a copy of The King in Yellow. Agent 64 - A throwback to Goldeneye 64. It's simple, it's intentionally janky and rather neat. Selaco - A retro-shooter made in GZDoom. It's one of those kind of games that's made by adrenaline junkies who've exclusively been playing Doom mods for the past ~30 years, so it's super fast, you die in a couple hits, there's secrets everywhere, but it's cool. I've heard it compared to F.E.A.R. and I feel it's apt. Kind of like a tactical shooter but you're also a bit superpowered. It also promises to have a story but the demo barely hinted at things. Again, combat is brutal partially because of hard to see enemies but I had fun. Old Skies - The newest WadjetEye Games adventure game about a time travel tourist agency? I wasn't blown away by the puzzles or the writing in the demo, but the premise is interesting enough. And of course MORAL CHOICES.

The thing is that is not that far from the truth, the good ones rarely stay in India. They usually work until they get a CV good enough to get a visa to the US or Canada. That is happening to my employer as we speak and seeing as how they don't care about abusing them I imagine it will happen to the rest of the team from India. Although they are pivoting to the EU for their workforce now. My previous employer, also from the US, imported so many people from India on a work visa, that at one point their head dev was an Indian (still is probably). The employer is a very large and wealthy, to give you perspective. Although I think they mostly hired Indians as no one else from the US wanted to work in Florida... Edit: Also there is cheap Indian labor and then there is CHEAP Indian labor.

They announced, that they ran out of their own pre-war stock of soviet era shells. They still have hefty stock of them from Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Baltics, Romania and Bulgaria. And they are stockpiling on NATO standard ammunition day by day.

I think our approach is a couple of pickup trucks driving around Mumbai.

Summers in Cpt I find very hot and some days its uncomfortably hot with average temperatures being about 84-89 Fahrenheit. But its not hot every day which is nice. We are now in Winter and today is the coldest day of the year so far, 53F in the daytime But I dont mind the cold, I dont really feel it. Its the heat that bothers me. I normally go for my walk when the sun rises which is now at 7:40 am and the temperature is 48F

Im currently playing: Star Trek Fleet Command Hawk: Freedom Squad Clash of Clans Boom Beach Diablo Immortal

Not sure I ran into that situation. Unless it is in the end armageddon phase which I found tedious, so I quit. Especially after the tedious Paradise Beach railroad. Scripted scenes that take over gameplay have never been an elegant or fun idea. We put up with them as sometimes story bits have to be given to the player and sometimes things have to happen within the game environment. But making the whole ending just one long script that the player has to pretend they are playing, when stripped of bare essentials like movement controls? It's like the cute friend I had at school of architecture who I had to explain to that buildings have walls. That just because its a summer home and you'll only go with good weather, furniture still will get ruined by bad weather the time of the year you aren't there. The difference, she learned these things before opening her firm and is apparently now pretty good at what she does and successful. These devs (and that is Gamedec, Encased etc etc) seem to all be working in a complete vacuum as if no game had existed before theirs and everything they decide is God's gift to gamers instead of bad ideas we have known to be bad ideas for over a decade.

To piggyback on this post for another recommendation/request not related to QOL: ticks and assassin bugs would be a really cool addition for new yard inhabitants.

Yeah, I like analysts like Michta who think big and can see the big strategic picture. His overall geopolitical conclusion is absolutely correct. The war in Ukraine is ultimately not just about the future of Ukraine. It is very much also about the future of Europe.

Wait, who says that? I mean, I like CoP better, but I've always thought I was very much in the minority. Plus, it's well known that I'm a weirdo with questionable taste. I mean, I like FMV games for God's sake. AFAIK SoC is still the gold standard. Even I will admit that there's nothing as tense in CoP as going into X-18 in SoC... Or the first journey to Bloodsucker Village, watching Murk's crew get killed.

Maybe with the exception of Mass Effect? I'd have said it had the absolute classic Bioware "I'm going to eat your liver, I will do it publicly, and I don't care if anyone knows it" type facial expressions. And I'm not even talking 'my face is tired' Andromeda either. Shepard_smile.jpg is perhaps the classic meme creepy game expression.

I really liked and appreciated the attention and support MS gave to their Stalker 2 Ukrainian colleagues. A very nice tribute.

Stalker2 got an update during todays XBOX's extended showase (otherwiseit was devs talking more about projects shown two days ago - nothing that stand out to me). There is this potentially upsetting dev diary: And what I think is an opening cutscene: On steam game is listed for Decemeber 2023 release.

I do find it weirdly hilarious that the measuring stick for whether or not someone lied appears to be... if they admitted that they indeed lied hahaha.

Starfield looks like Star Citizen without the crowd funding and decade of questionable development, but with a dwemer ruin on every planet that falmer have tunneled into, and a quest sending you into a draugr infected tomb. Jumping to Lightspeed will trigger random events, but since there will be very few of them, jumping to Lightspeed will be pretty much a guarantee that the target system will have all vendor NPC eaten by space vampires before you manage to even land. PC players will fall back to the old habit of fixing everything through consol.

Started Dragon's Dogma, Japanese console action RPG that wants to be Eurojank. Made myself a pawn (a supporting companion of sorts) who accidentally looks a lot like company's system administrator (but with pink hair) and it makes for amusing but also uncanny experience. I think I'll dump him for someone else soon.

The Quarry is pretty great. I'm probably roughly halfway through the game. The prologue gives you a tease of what's out there and a small taste of tension, then the game chills out for a good while as it introduces the 7 teens. This very much works in the game's favor. One of the problems a lot of slasher movies face is that there's not enough time in 90 minutes to really get to know all of the characters AND have plenty of chasing and hiding and killing. What typically winds up happening is that I only care about 1 or 2 of them. So when the other characters are facing potential death, the moment is not nearly as tense and emotional as it would have been had I grown attached to them. The Quarry has a lot more than 90 minutes to work with and it puts that extra time to good use. I got to spend a generous amount of time getting to know all 7 of the teens. So now that my choices, actions, and performance on QTEs could be the difference between them living or dying, it's extremely tense because I give a **** about all 7 of them. So far nobody is flat out dead, but I highly doubt I'm saving all of them on this first playthrough. Several of them are now injured and bloody. I've made a couple of choices that I think will come back to haunt me, though I can't be sure yet. The timing on the QTEs is pretty generous but I have screwed a few of them up, so that's not helping matters either. The game gives you 3 mulligans that you can use if someone dies. I've not used any yet, but, from what I've read, it takes you back to the choice or action that ultimately caused that teen to die, and that could be several chapters back. I want to save them all, but my top priority is saving Kaitlyn, so I'm always going to hold on to a mulligan just for her.

NO! SIZE DOESN'T MATTER! IT'S HOW YOU USE IT!

Those two very well summarize my feelings on the matter: In my opinion, in Elder Scrolls 3, 5 and Fallout3 (those are games I played) Bethesda wasn't able to create a game space worth exploring. I can't imagine how they can create multiple planets, not to mention 1000 that wouldn't bore me after an evening or two. I have played some overly big games - like Elite Dangerous, or recently (and currently on a halt) Elden Ring... but those games were fun to play. Starfield looks very janky, and this is some of the clunkiest dogfighting I have seen.

And Another Giveaway on GOG today. Shantae and the Pirate's Curse. https://www.gog.com/en/news/claim_your_copy_of_shantae_and_the_pirates_curse