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An interesting tweet concerning non-combat related deaths of Russian soldiers in Ukraine. As stated, alcohol consumption in Russia, and the position of alcohol in Russian culture, is really something else, as the saying goes: apparently, excessive alcohol consumption may explain about half of all premature deaths in Russia[*]. [*] https://web.archive.org/web/20100115082640/http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/alcohol-blamed-for-half-of-russias-premature-deaths-453197.html

Yes, but so what, in terms of impactful action the US has its veto, so it's not dire. It shouldn't be absurd at this point given nations have held the presidency while droning, bombing or invading other countries. And they held it last year, and things went fine. Also really, speaking of "values of the UNSC", amusing.

I'm on my phone and it's too many steps to post a picture of my subs but I only have a few. I'm only subbed so that I can find it easily as I tend to YouTube with a purpose rather than browse. A guided meditation channel that has videos for kids because I meditate with my son. Keyrock's channel. No explanation needed. A STO channel. I still play it. RLM. Just so I don't have to search for it. Some channel that has a bunch of old Soviet films. Just for the holidays.

Today is 1 April. I don't know if the channel is good or not, I don't watch it a lot.

new lamplighters dev diary. HA! Good Fun! ps fixed... maybe. aside, devs says they ain't doing "camp," so am taking them at their word, but the characters sure sound and look to be humorously exaggerated while leaning heavy on the clichés. is accidental?

So I just killed Belranga and headed to Ukaizo, went through the forced rest, lost my boons, was sad, rested with consoled food in prep for practicing guardian fight, and saw this new boon: Shattering Screech: +5 Perception, 50% of Grazes converted to Hits Hmm. Sounds like "aware" but it looks permanent. I've never seen this before and couldn't find anything about it in wiki or googling it. I did "findgamedata shattering_screech" and it appears to be one of Belranga's abilities. Not initially sure how I picked it up. My character is a transcendent. Actually let's see...Belranga was surprisingly difficult this time because I have a couple mods installed (BPM and Deadly Deadfire), the second of which greatly increases Belranga's starting stats and I'm already on POTD upscaled. So by the time you kill enough little spiders so you can actually hit her, she crits every single attack because she's starting like 50 points higher than she's meant to. Deadly Deadfire Hardcore is like POTD upscaled upscaled, the monsters keep leveling up to like 8 levels beyond you. Anyway... So the strategy I settled on was stick Vela in starting corner, sneak to northeast corner, use enduring dance, then summon dichotomous souls over and over while staying as out of range, poking stray spiders with instruments of pain, until Belranga's will is around 150, then I start hitting her with Tenuous Grasp so she kills the spiders faster, once will is around 120 I debuff her with tenuous grasp and psychovampiric shield, then hit with pupper master. While dominated you can still beat her to death. So I'm guessing she used this ability while dominated, from the search results it looks like it's the one that gives her 4 stacks of concentration and makes the spiders "aware", but it isn't listed as "aware" for me though the stats are the same, and I didn't get the other stuff like concentration. I've seen this happen before with other enemy abilities, like the eoten chanters in Bekarna's Observatory, whose chants land on you if you flip them, but those chants are temporary unless you extend them. Shattering Screech appears to be permanent. Didn't even go away while resting. Anyone else run into this? I wonder what other abilities get erroneously transferred to the player character on alliance flip. I don't use the charm abilities much so there could be a lot of them. ------ It actually isn't permanent lol, I just assumed it was because it had no expiration, but it is treated as an inspiration like anything else. I guess if you wear Effigys Husk (incidentally the armor I am wearing) then it is permanent, though I have "Armor of Flesh" and not "Eyes of Blackstone".

curious, we mentioned another film score by sakamoto not long ago ... hesitate to mention, but thomas dolby and sakamoto were collaborators, which always had us wondering... ff to 2:53 if you don't feel the need to indulge almost four minutes o' quintessential 80's pop. HA! Good Fun!

The big washing machine cabal doesn't want you to know. I bought a fairly expensive washing machine 3-4 years ago (Miele) and although the initial experience was not that great (I won't get in to it, but basically I got a new unit in the end), no issues so far. Saying that, they do not offer a long warranty here (outside of rare promotions) and when I asked the technician why that is he told me there is no need because they last. I just laughed in his face and the answer I got eventually was that it's because the water is very hard in this region of Europe and it kills everything, also people do not do the proper maintenance to combat that. Basically you need to do a cleaning cycle with an anti-limescale solution every 3 months or use water softener tablets during the wash. I do that so I guess we will se how long it last. Also do not buy Bosch, everything I got from them failed in warranty. Built in oven, stove, small appliances I either exchanged or returned, the only thing that lasted was the dish washer we barely use. I didn't buy their top of the line models, but I also didn't go for the cheapest ones... For my place, I spent new car money on appliances so in 10 years I will see if I'm an idiot or if it payed for itself.

Ryūichi Sakamoto. Popular music doesn't get much better than Forbidden Colours, his collaboration with David Sylvian.

All I see is "Server ip address could not be found". Now it's back. And interesting, pretty much everything here is designed to break within a decade to induce you into buying a new one.

You can check easily by seeing if it ends up in your watch history on the yt account. I'm pretty sure it does. I like watching this guy from time to time. Not very relevant for the EU folks but it's interesting to see what the people in the US use. Also like this guy. Found out some pretty great and new (for me) things, which I will for sure do if I ever get a house. Although I hear some things are even possible to do in a apartment.

Funny headline, I forget Ukraine is master of us all. I don't know why there's such a fuss over it, is a monthly rotation and I don't think they get any fancy powers or such and even if they did, the vetoes exist

Goats seems to be special to kids...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65146557 Irony much? I'm sure the UN security council will now get this special military operation in Ukraine sorted out in no time, to everybody's satisfaction... or not.

FF / soul blade is insanely good and should fir with your role-playing. Stats 14/8/3/19/13/18 I can provide a full build later, let me know if interested, but as soul blade you build focus really fast with FF and can use soul annihilation for massive damage. You cast psychovampiroc shield and borrowed instinct a lot. Many debuffs that will last a long time like secret horrors, phantom foes, mental binding, wild leech, etc. You do need the community patch for cipher to work properly with FF attack. You can't max INT with FF because it increases duration of forbidden curse. You can have up to about 13 base and use enlightened agony which boosts to 18 (which is enough to give decent buff length particularly since you crit a lot with the buff/debuffs like PVS and borrowed instinct) and gives -50% hostile effects on self. Combine with ring of solitary wanderer and maxed resolve to get forbidden curse down to under 2s.

Maybe not. I've played Divinity Original Sin 2 on console and it is nearly as easy to use as PC version. Theres usually like a tactical wheel and you can assign shortcuts to abilities on the D-pad. If PC version has controller support then that probably plays the same as PS5. I watched a bit of video on PS5 and it looks similar. One of the shoulder buttons leads to a tactical wheel when held, another to shortcuts. The rest of the controls are straightforward. Probably harder to micromanage but otherwise looked quite playable, particularly in turn based mode. Question to @andi255, are you playing turn based mode? I always assume people use RTWP because most of us old schoolers are used to it. If you're doing turn based FF may work a bit differently, let me know if you are

I guess one should be grateful they didn't shoot the family, then again they look fair-skinned

Ian's the best I forgot one of my newest subscriptions that I made, Sabaton History. Members of the band Sabaton (For you who don't know, a metal band that makes metal songs about historical events, mostly wars) and Indy Neidell go through the history behind their songs.

But it is - because lashes are multiplicative damage bonuses instead of the additive ones (for example the forbidden curse bonus - which is pretty high but still only additive). A lash takes all the damage that gets rolled into consideration (all additonal dmg bonuses, crits, overpenetration, forbidden fist curse etc.) and calculates the 15% based on that. While the additional damage bonuses only use the base dmg of the weapon (or ability, PL scaling counts as base dmg). A persistent 15% lash for rel. little investment is actually pretty awesome to have. If you can't use the Lightning Lash of Lightning Strikes then you should stick to Swift Strikes - but I assume that's what you meant in the first place. And yes, +5 DEX and an additional action speed bonus is a very good thing to have for only 1 point of Mortification. --- I would absolutely recommend the Community Patch. It's free and easy to "install" (aka copy a folder into the game folder). It's a mod that doesn't go crazy with wild and fantastical "improvements" but focuses to address some hickups and oversights of the original game and does that well imo. See the Forbidden FIst punch which doesn't generate focus in the original game and also doesn't work with some of the Monk's own abilities (clearly an oversight by the devs). The mod also has unique icons for every passive ability - which the vanilla game doesn't have due to time restrictions during development. The original game uses the same icons for a lot of totally different passive abilites. That can be confusing if you ask me. Me advertising that stuff has obviously nothing to do with the fact that I created those CP icons, ehehe... You can also individually trigger every change the CP does to the vanilla game by deleting or renaming some files in the mod folder. They are named in a way that it's easy to guess which file contains which individual modification. In addition to that the mod is even split in two parts (basic and extended). Edit: now I read the part with the PS5 - rofl sorry. :super-embarrased-emoji

Yes, it wasn't a crit build by any means. It was more about fast shooting speeds/short reloading time while still delivering hits reliably - so that White Flames do actually trigger (won't on misses). That way I could dish out the AoE healing while doing ranged damage on top. And with ranged weapons it's a lot easier to target the enemies with the lowest deflection - if you want to make sure to get the healing procs.

Managed to beat all bosses in SIFU. I found 3rd and bosses to be massive difficulty spikes. Now trying to spare them, which proves more difficult than I expected - I am training to parry and deflect more, which I think will be good for my kung-fu. I really like the combat system, though I don’t think bosses work as well as mobs. They seem to be more of a test of particular gameplay system, than interesting challenge in themselves.

I mostly subscribe to Science channels like PBS Spacetime, Arvin Ash, Sabine Hossenfelder, Veritasium, The Science Asylum and Anton Petrov. Another channel I like a lot is Event Horizon, that has many interviews with scientists about astronomy, physics, search for alien life and artificial intelligence, among other things. The one below, about the Google language model, was particularly interesting, since it had some information I didn't see anywhere else:

I do subscribe to more than a dozen channels (just about, close to a dozen), only one of which is politics related TheJuiceMedia (that's the "Honest Government Ads" people) because I like the people, I like their message, I"m a patreon supporter and sometimes I even share their videos here on this forum AKIHITO YO****OMI because watching that guy creating art in almost real time in front of my eyes is just fascinating A number of hobby related channels (miniature wargaming and painting, with a focus on Horus Heresy and Kill Team) Outer Circle, Rift Forge Studio, Black Briar Gaming, Cult of Paint, The Cult of Crafting, Grimdark Gamers And some history related channels: Drachinifel (my second favourite channel after Juicemedia), HistoryMarche, Kings and Generals, Invicta, History Matters (awesome series of 3 minute videos explaining things you didn't know you didn't know) Besides that, using the search bar to check for things that just springs to mind.... Edit: Not going to list things like Microsoft Partner Source, MCP and similar as that will only be available to a minority of people with a very narrow focus for what they are looking for. Not a Youtube subscription as much as collections of Youtube links organized by topic on other sites

I've subscribed to around 200 channels, many are sister channels to a main channel, like Extra Credits and Extra History, Nightwish & Floor Jansen, Charismatic Voice/The Singing Hole, Tom Scott/Tom Scott plus, Hardware Unboxed/Monitors Unboxed et.c. Some storm chasers like Pecos Hank, Reed Timmer & Melanie Metz, some science channels such as SciShow, Kyle Hill, Vsauce, ScienceAlert, Engineering Explained, BBC Earth Lab. I've got a bunch of gaming channels, TotalBiscuit, Matt Barton, Spelrum, Jim Sterling, Liana K, Girlfriend Reviews, Noclip, Joseph Anderson, The Neon Arcade, AlexJordanVO, Luetin09 and Bricky, plus a few more. There's a couple of hardware channels like JayzTwoCents, Gamers Nexus, Linus Tech Tips and AdoredTV. Some firearms, weapons and military related ones like Forgotten Weapons, InrangeTV, TFB TV, Garand Thumb, Demolition Ranch, Skallagrim, Shadiversity (MACHICOLATIONS!), Kentucky Ballistics, Brandon Herrera, Tacticool Girlfriend, Perun, The Chieftain. And a few randoms like Ask a Mortician, Jonathan Pie, First we Feast, Steve1989MREinfo, Plainly Difficult, Bruva Alfabusa, Davie504, RoomieOfficial, ContraPoints, Viva la Dirt League, Juice Media, Tasting History, Nicole Johnsons Detour... And a whole metric shedload of different artists, singers and musicians. Oh, and DW News.

The only things I regularly might check up on are either well known/popular (Asmongold, that Pitch Meeting guy,etc) or stuff no one here would be interested in. And none of it would make me look smart or cultured. I mostly look for gaming, film/TV snippets and reviews, cats/animals, anything that might make me giggle.

Mostly dilettante type stuff like Kurzgesagt, Tom Scott, History Matters, Epic History, PBS Space Time. Other than that some WoW streamers, Forgotten Weapons and Russian language learning channels to round it out.

is a long list o' rich people who has gone to prison, including micheal cohen... and is worth mentioning cohen 'cause ny is gonna try and says cohen went to prison for trump. 'course convicting trump for the pr0n star hush-money is not as ez as a few pundits make it sound in part 'cause the system is rigged in favour o' defendants, as tough as that may be to believe for all the angry libs out there. european countries don't have anything like the exclusionary rule and the whole grand jury process itself went outta vogue for euros in the late 1700s. standards o' proof is much higher in the US compared to near all europe and asia. however, even in 2023, most juries assume cops is telling the truth which ain't a matter o' law but o' culture. etc. the reason(s) we got so many in prison here in the US is social, economic and cultural (and kinda unforgivable) but the US legal system is in fact far more defendant friendly than other western nations and democratic republics. however, is true you ain't getting a full and vigorous defense in the US unless you pay for it, so the rich do enjoy substantial benefits. heck kyle rittenhouse weren't wealthy but arguable one reason he stayed outta prison for his stoopid is 'cause his crowdfunding efforts resulted in a significant war chest for his criminal defense. regardless, if trump don't go to prison for pr0n star hush-money is gonna be less 'cause the rich get away with everything as 'posed to fact nobody has ever been successful convicted in ny for what the manhattan da is attempting to prosecute trump. the US Government went after john edwards for something similar in 2011 and they failed. ny faces a tougher challenge than US v. edwards, so... trump is a terrible person, but you don't go to prison for being terrible. our overcrowded prisons would have 100x as many people locked up if being terrible were enough to get you imprisoned. for those who loathe trump and want to see justice done, am recommending not holding your breath waiting for the guilty verdict from ny. the tax evasion thing is a real problem for trump if bragg went that way, but am just not confident trump ends up behind bars for hush-money payment reporting fails. edit: also is noteworthy the doj didn't choose to go after trump for the fed election/tax issues once 45 left office. am understanding the main hurdle for indictment were the fact the feds thought michael cohen were a terrible witness, and am gonna suggest that for a successful hush-money prosecution, cohen needs be better than terrible. also, as difficult as is gonna be to believe, from our pov the more significant legal news from today is not the hoopla regarding trump. dude. ... dude. "In its partial ruling in favor of Dominion, the court did determine statements made by Fox were statements of fact and were not statements of opinion." "The court also determined that Fox "cannot avail themselves of certain defenses like the neutral report and fair report privileges or the privilege for opinion"" furthermore, punitive damages were not excluded, which am thinking is nevertheless a tough mountain for dominion to climb but such damages is the kinda thing which could result in serious pain for fox and real changes to US journalism in general. fox reaction to today's dueling summary judgement rulings. HA! Good Fun!

Yep I can verify this can easily solo the game, BUT this combo requires community patch for focus generation to work correctly. I'd do a pure forbidden fist, you don't have to cast spells as often, and it doesn't require the community patch (though I'd recommend using it anyway). The main thing to note is with a forbidden fist using the forbidden fist attack causes "forbidden curse" to build up, so you have to have a pretty specific stat spread for you to be able to spam forbidden fist without damaging yourself. The relationship between intelligence (makes the curse longer, but also your buffs), dexterity (how fast you can spam forbidden fist), and resolve (reduces the curse duration) is a little tricky but once you get it right it is very easy. Basically you want 35 resolve or as close to that as you can get. It is actually doable with the right items, boons, and buffs, even without a steadfast inspiration (which soul blade could give you for +5 resolve). Check this thread for specifics and also an alternate multiclass build that would fulfill what you're looking for. Then your intelligence should be no higher than 13, in which case you can dump dexterity to 3. You will still attack once per 2s roughly with monk's swift flurry. Alternatively you can dump intelligence, which allows you to attack a little faster, but your buffs won't last very long. Then again only buffs a SC monk really needs is swift flurry and clarity of agony. Clarity of agony is important for reducing hostile effect duration by 50%. With 35 res, 13 INT, 3 dex, swift flurry, clarity of agony, ring of the solitary wanderer, two-weapon style, dual-wielding, and strand of favor (all available before halfway through the game) the curse lasts about 2s and you can attack every 2s so it is perfectly balanced. If you want to be extra safe dump dex to 3 and leave INT no higher than 10, gives you a little more room regarding getting your resolve to 35. You should note without the community patch forbidden fist does not benefit from dual wielding, so in that case you don't dump dex, the curse will last the same amount of time but with 3 dex you can only attack once per 2.8s or so (with robes or no armor, which you don't need), so you'd want dex a bit higher. You don't need much CON, PER should be high, can have might wherever really, don't need a lot because the FF attack has a +50% damage modifier and you get another +60% or so from transcendent suffering. Then you can make a very simple script to buff yourself with clarity of agony with a cooldown of however long it lasts for your character, cast swift flurry when you don't have the dexterity inspiration, and attack with forbidden fist. Three blocks. If you want another good alternative FF / unbroken, this is made by @Not So Clever Hound

Just fought the messenger. Shimmer Scale. Use the 50% reflection upgrade and Oblivion's Call chews him up. Can also do the combusting wounds stuff but this is definitely easier. ---- EDIT: After more testing I don't think shimmer scale works on Oblivion's Call after all. (See post below). My bad.

Unpopular opinion : Booze sucks.

With my evil playthroughs i didnt accept all quest or sometimes i did accept but didnt finish since there was no resolution for my character in game so i had to roleplay one. I did playthroughs that resulted in evil actions (one we would consider evil) but were understandable. I played a hearth orlan slave stolen from glanfathan home in the dyrewood trying to find his way home. So he was mean, suspicious, manipulative, thieving to those he perceived as part of the culture that stole and enslaved him and he was appreciative, understanding, helpful to the glanfathans he made contact with. So it was a matter of perspective if the character was 'evil'. I dont like thinking those terms good, evil like dnd system and i think POE supported that. Here are some other characters i made. I did a wizard who lost his mother do to some disease and swore to find a way to conquer death at all cost (i based this character on dr frankenstein from penny dredful on netflix who didnt start evil but slowly justified more and more bad actions because of his goals). He traveled to dyrewood to learn about new science animancy to see if that would be the answer since his magic didnt work. In this framework, he can justify 'evil' acts as furthering his study or getting money to support his study and he can ignore pleas for help since they are irrelevant to his goals. This means i helped peoples sometimes because i thought they could further my knowledge or be useful and sometimes i would be cold, callus, and use the helpless. Like the animancer you find in Raedrics castle Osrya. She was trying to cure the hollowborn through study but used evil means to accomplish the goal. You see this alot with people having higher goals and think that the ends justify the means. I also did a berath priest judge dredd i am the law run. In many circumstances i did evil things because they were lawful. I basically forced myself to respect whatever law that city or area adhered to instead of my personal conception of law since i believed this is what my god berath wants. This gave rise to stuff like killing Kolsc and leaving gilded vale in hands of Raedric since he was rightful ruler but doing so mean that town continued to suffer. This one though did good stuff to so it was a mixed bag. To me evil is a matter of perspective for these characters. They believed what they were doing was right according to their ethos but their actions caused a lot of suffering and were evil from an outside modern observer but they didnt view themselves as evil and this made for more interesting characters instead of the usual i am just an evil prick give me all your money runs. Again with these playthroughs i didnt take or complete all quest. Some quest didnt fit my character and some after getting to a certain point my character didnt think completing them furthered any goal they had or there wasnt a resolution that matched my character so this also played into the roles for me. These characters help me roleplay more instead of power game or try for some completionist run and made my experience with the game more fun.

SBU has carried out dozens of these terrorist attacks in Donbass since 2014.

Not terribly familiar with his work...except that he was the main composer of 1987 film The Wings of Honneamise, whose oddball synth soundtrack I am fond of. Song you linked was great minus me predictably hating the vocals, whom I presume is this David Sylvian. I meant why did they execute him - obviously, that's way too kind, .

My original comment was that it doesn't make sense to get wound up over it. But given Ukraine complaints about things, I guess that overrides all. As for the US in Iraq (or Vietnam, USSR in Afghanistan, etc) I would be very surprised if any noticed or cared that much, relative to the things they were doing at the time.

Even the dogs make faces...

Curiously enough, the biggest hurdle to installing the RTX 4070 TI was not fiddling with the cables. The computer was built cleanly, all I had to do was to just plug a new cable in. Getting the RTX 3060 12GB out of the PCI-E slot on the other hand, that was a challenge. Good thing I have really long fingers, that chunky be quiet! Dark Rock Pro and some of Asus' heatsinks almost completely prevented me from reaching the unlock button for the latch in a way so I could apply enough pressure on it to unlock. Card draws - with unaltered settings - 140W in Hogwarts Legacy on Ultra (1080p, with DLSS). 60° GPU, 65° hotspot with the fans silently spinning at 30%, 1100 RPM at 2760 MHz GPU clock. Idle power draw of the card is less than 8W, what with my (gaming) PC only having one monitor. Playing something less demanding keeps the card in idle mode and it has zero fan spinning. Guess fiddling with the power target or voltages would yield even better results at barely any performance cost. Conclusion: Faster, less noise and pretty good power consumption. The card got a whole lot of hate for the MRSP, which I understand, and it could have a better memory interface (or rather, it could have come with 16GB memory, like the 4080), but for me and my aspirations to play games at 1080p, well, I'll be good for a while now.

"Why you enter this realm of decay and despair?" boomed the eldritch giant at the center of the Mausoleum. There was determination in the occultist's voice. "I seek the old knowledge!" he answered. The giant nodded and gave him a sad look. No one ever came looking for a quickie.