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Please don't tell me only Nordic people get the joke

@Gorth: Now that we got into talking about good neighbours, you may be interested to know that both a gas pipeline and a communications cable between Finland and Estonia (underwater, that is) have been damaged. The Finnish government will hold a press conference about this in two hours. This is not taken to be accidental in any way whatsoever. Given the neighbours that we've got, I'm pretty certain, as I'm sure you are as well, that the culprit has to be Sweden.

desperation? the gop doesn't have a platform at present. they are a party of outrage and grievance. current republicans is not for anything, but they are against a whole lot. it is much easier to be against something than it is to come up with plans to fix problems which has persisted and become worse over decades of time. implementing those solutions successful is even more difficult and politically hazardous. the thing is, since at least ww2, americans has demanded results far more than they has been concerned with ideology or political performance theatre. sure, maybe you get elected on impossible promises, but if you don't deliver, americans will turn on you... fast. however, in 2023, the republican party leader is a demagogue, something aberrational in US politics for a long time. counter-intuitive and unreasonable the working class doesn't even expect results. they want the gop to fight the authoritarian dems, crt, the rainbow flag and mask recommendations. trying to figure out the crazy o' the gop is less difficult if you recognize that their goal is to look like they are fighting. is kinda bizarre, but fixing working class problems actual hurts the gop. the only reason the gop appeals to the working class is 'cause those folks is suffering and are angry, so a nonsense platform o' outrage and grievance is effective. HA! Good Fun!

I was told if I did hire max frigates, all those msg's etc. would stop. So I did. Turns out max is 30. I now have a fleet. Plus once again I was delighted that I could "board" every single frigate, walk all over on the outsides, look inside. There isn't much point to it but virtual tourism (if they come back damaged from an expedition, there *is* a go-there and click stuff to repair them element) but it's impressive/fun and grand tourism. I've decided this game is an amusement park, with sandbox elements.

Shadow Tactics. A stealth tactical game in the Edo (?)/Japanese setting. Played a few missions, really nice in all aspects for the genre (e.g. no story choices or character customisation), except the lack of pausing.

Finland's northern neighbor is our Nato partner Norway In south we have our Nato partner Estonia In west there is unallied Sweden In east, there is great yellow and we don't talk about it Also every nation except Sweden (and yellow, which we don't talk about) around Baltic sea are members of Nato So it has to be Sweden

It is a big deal. An active sitting president showed up at a picket line. That gives the UAW a tremendous card (maybe not a trump card) in negotiations. This whole statement seems dismissive of the picket line as an important part of the labor rights process. If you have been sitting on the picket line for a month and the President of the country shows up in support, it's a pretty big deal to you.

https://bnn.network/world/israel/chechen-leader-kadyrov-proposes-peacekeeping-mission-in-palestine-amid-arab-israeli-conflict/

@Gorth: Seen this?

In some sense, yes, probably no better. But in terms of dependability and lack of arbitrary cruelty, such as rape and slaughter of parents / children in front of their children / parents, Sweden was an awful lot better. So, even two subjugating powers can be wildly different, culturally. And once the powers have become other than subjugating powers: well, just make a guess as to which neighbour has been more dependable in everything in the past 70 years. Russia is a terrible, terrible country. (Also, in the 1980s, the mighty Soviet Union was just a pitiful country. Oh the Finnish youths who went there as hockey players and got some rubles and were extremely happy about it and then found out to their utter astonishment that in the mighty Moscow there was nothing worthwhile they could buy with their money. Seriously, nothing. What that aroused, more than anything, was pity.)

Anno: Mutationem (not the strategy) Not sure why, but there were a lot of crosses:

"There are many like it, but this one is mine." ...finding a system that had the right fleets pop, and then the reload-grind to get the specific freighter to be actually offered, plus as over a B class was long. I got impatient re: an "S" class and settled on an "A" class. ...there are some much more unique/kewl freighters in the game I think, but I would guess they are hard to find/get. ...looks like you can build a huge modular-room base on the thing (red-lined squares in pic below are player-placed). To the point it would get annoying to run around in. But I hear getting the freighter modules/currency to unlock more/all the modular rooms/thingies for it are a serious PITA. I probably won't bother. In fact, I probably won't use it, since I'm not interested in quests/combat etc, altho who knows. But I had to have the ST/SW combo one. And now I know what they're like.

Another Next Fest on Steam which means a bunch more demos. First up Ghostrunner 2. I never played the first game but it's a first person game with a focus on mobility where you play a cyberpunk ninja. Everything 1 shot kills you so it's all about being fast and precise. There were some HARDCORE stutters in what otherwise ran great. It's a demo so I don't expect it to be well optimized.

Gorilla arms + berserk might be OP. I am straight up wrecking everybody and I'm playing on hard difficulty.

The skills all increase with abilities and weapons of their associated stats, the perks are pretty good at telling you what you need to use to gain experience. Shinobi you get for using assault rifles, SMGs and blades, Solo for blunt weapons, LMGs and shotguns, Engineer for doing things with technical ability and grenades, Netrunner for hacking and the access point minigame and Headhunter for killing with sniper rifles, pistols, revolvers and throwing knives. Then there's some overlap. Tech weapons give you experience for their respective skill as well as Engineer, while smart weapons give experience for their associated stat as well as Netrunner. No need to worry about skills too much, they come while playing the game anyway. Getting them all to the extra perk point threshold is fairly pointless in my experience. Plenty of perk points and no real synergy between the trees outside of picking supporting perks. Trick out Technical Ability and your weapon category of choice and you're good. That all said, throwing knives are ridiculously powerful, and they're really fun. Just use them.

as a cleric, the separatist is able to choose a domain which is not part o' their deity's portfolio, but they suffer a level and attribute penalty when using domain related benefits. so, as a priest o' abadar you could choose nobility as well as madness, a domain which would otherwise be verboten for those followers o' the master of the first vault. in wotr, clerics o' abadar pick two domains from the following: nobility, law, protection, earth and travel. no madness. no community, no *insert whatever you think is a powerful and groovy domain here*. the downside for choosing the separatist domain means you take the negative attribute and level modifiers when using the second domain.... and you lose access to the deity favored weapon benefit. in pnp, the separatist is an extreme useful archetype... if you are able to convince your dm the second domain makes sense in the context o' your character. try and explain why your separatist priest o' gorum should get access to animal (feather) is possible, but... the wotc impossible domain powha makes the separatist kinda pointless. there is no penalties involved in adding an impossible domain to your mythic priest and you may choose multiple such impossible domains. the thing is, the through the ashes and lord of nothing characters don't get mythic powhaz. HA! Good Fun!

This was another good season. And I agree with what you said above.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/israel-war-hamas-terrorism-ukraine-russia/675590/ Not sure we're really headed for an era of open brutality. Not sure we left it all that much really

Apparently there's a hard limit of something like 450ish "claimed bases" you can create in NMS - the base list won't show/activate the base-computers after that. If you delete some, then go back to that base computer you can active them, but... .....noooooo, my plans for multiple universe/all solar systems conquest are thwarted! ....just kidding. I have no desire to make 13 quintillion bases or whatever. I have been trying to fly toward the center of the current Universe, although from all I've read, moving Galaxies doesn't seem particularly worthwhile/not a reason. Still, I wanna manually (vs. being warped there via quest or something) reach the Center just once.

OMG That gave me Biggus Dickus vibes!

I don't know how any of this is going to end, but it is very interesting to note how open Russia has been about its plans. For instance, shortly after the start of the war, Peskov pointed out that if Viktor Medvedchuk's policies had been allowed to foster in Ukraine, there would have been no special operation. Well, Medvedchuk received an awful lot of money from the Kremlin for his project of providing Ukraine with full-on Russian propaganda with the intention of keeping Ukraine very firmly in Russia's grasp, Belarus-style. This was what Russia was prepared to accept as Ukraine's position. When the project failed, thanks to some rather drastic decisions from Ukraine's leaders, Russia went to war. So, in effect, Russia was and is not prepared to accept the existence of Ukraine as a sovereign country who makes its own decisions. It's either subservience or destruction for Ukraine, as far as Russia is concerned. And Russia was and is very open about this. All talk about diplomacy as a tool to prevent this war is essentially nonsense, given the perimeters of what Russia was prepared to accept. The war in Ukraine is manifestly not a failure of diplomacy. (Heck, that's the tragic truth of why you need an army in the first place: if your opponent is not prepared to talk about things rationally and simply attacks you, diplomacy is a worthless tool and what you need to do is bring the opponent down, physically. Taking this to an individual level, this is the same reason why it's probably a good idea to be able to hurt someone very badly, as unpleasant as that is, because you may need to, one day.) And yes, the recent developments in Slovakia: man, oh man, that's depressing.

Australian morning shows on TV are... something

Yeah, pretty much this. There is no "NATO expansion", there's just "countries close to Russia trying to get as much safety as possible by desperately wanting to join NATO". (Finland was an exception for a long time, and Finland's policy can be criticized, even in very strong terms. And has been, lemmetellya.)

the car park part is far too long player should reach the market far sooner and get a few very short side quest in it

I sometimes wonder how some of my all time favourite games would have fared They are exclusively on the C64 or Amiga though, they probably missed the bus so to speak

Yeah, it doesn't seem to matter if the very little that Republicans want to do (and there really is not much they seem to want to specifically accomplish, which is not surprising for a party that does not currently have any clearly defined platform besides some "we hate x, y, and z" bullet points...and also we love guns) is actually completely counterproductive to helping the people suffering the most, the point is to make those voters identify with you and have them feel like they belong and that their grievances are legitimate and perhaps that they even accomplished something important by voting you in. Whether they believe genuine problems will be solved, or if it's just stemming the tide of evil, hurting the "right" people, ending 'wokeness' or some other kind of lunacy - it doesn't really matter, not so long as they tie feeling better about their life and the state of the world to their side winning. That's a very strong and rather intangible feeling that's hard to quantify or argue against, so no surprise that there's not a lot of movement among the believers no matter how objectively laughable the results were under Trump and Republicans.

WOW! He was there for like 5 minutes for a photo op. Whooptie ****ing do! What a hero! Yeah, the authoritarians still occasionally pay lip service to the values they used to represent decades ago, still pretend like they care about the working class, but their actions paint a very different picture.

Hmm... yes, this'll fit nicely. Muse - Knights of cydonia cover by El Estepario Siberiano. Crazy good drummer.

There needs to happen miracle, in order to avoid absolute tragedy. But I am not sure that such miracle is showing up. Israel's current government is hardcore zionists and they got in power by promising security, but now deadliest attack in Israel's modern history has happened and it targeted primary civilians. So they most likely use more harsher methods than needed in order to save their faces. Gaza has been controlled by Hamas now for 16 years, and they are extremist whose main goal is destruction of Israel and killing all the jews. So there is high likelihood that they will pour more fuel in the flames. And forces that could put some restrictions in conflict have their own issues that hinder quite lot how much effort they will put in UN has failed for long time get any meaningful resolutions because there never seems to be any unity in world anymore Ukraine war has eaten lot of resources and will to prevent conflicts. In many European countries far right parties that most likely will not put any effort to prevent mass killing of Muslims, have won most recent elections. USA is divided and its governance is paralyzed and they usually by default support anything that Israel does. Iran is flexing its muscles when no one is looking because of other conflicts. Russia and China have their own agendas that benefit from conflict that draws world eyes aways from them. Turkey wants to be leader of muslim world, but also has its own internal issues and they usually don't want vex USA in Israel questions. Saudi Arabia does not have much love towards Palestine as they are too chummy with Iran So we can only hope that extremist leaderships of Israel and Palestine will see reason even though they have seek destruction of each other for long time.

Crazy how many people say the attack was justified because Israel is bad.

my ears, man all the audio is straight up dumped into the left side and it is badly clipping, but...but on the other hand, there is no piano music 6/10, would prefer if they were less technically incompetent at making trailers (e) Wait, this wasn't an official trailer, just some rando who made a clip. Okay, I guess I can't put the blame on the people working on the show for that. Still, if the guy that made/uploaded the clip doesn't have a good explanation for why it's so bad, off with their head and all that.

Color me interested.

NMS Sky - along with not really needing complex bases for functionality (not yet anyway), another reason it doesn't appeal to my personal obsessive nature is ... I've become so used to 7 Day's structural integrity building rule concepts that the whole modular room building stuff just isn't very engaging even if you can make kewl things visually. I suppose it's a little bit like FO4 style. I've been wanting to put mini-bases above ground now, because if you don't, eventually you may find rocks/bushes growing in the middle of it as stuff like that respawns close to, but not exactly, the same spots. There are pole foundation pieces, but I can't figure out how to place them at height, they always start at ground level if you try to place one first. But I was able to place the "square room" module ... in mid-air. Just floating in space. Then the foundation would "snap" underneath it and spawn legs. Ok then.

Finished Anno: Mutationem. It is an action-adventure in the cyberpunk setting. The story follows Ann Flores, a security agency employee with a life-threatening medical condition, and her trusted friend, Ayane Misuno, in their search for Ann’s lost brother. During the investigation they stumble upon a larger conspiracy. Overall, the gameplay was fine, the story was ridiculous. Review:

Did the Swarm (respecced to kineticist and it was the most broken thing ever I saw in this game). Kind of meh, has nothing on MOTB evil ending. Loaded the save before to continue with Azata, now Charname is swarmed by butterflies and locusts. Azata is truly all-accepting.

Of note is that Cesar E. Chavez, nominally a liberal icon, took a hardline stance on immigration who didn't shy away from using pejoratives typically associated with the MAGA crowd for his brethren across the border. The reasons I feel are beautifully elucidated in this video from Evan Hadfield:

That's some deja vu. i'll just repeat what I wrote 2 years ago: If russia wouldn't be such a huge **** to all its neighbors, maybe they wouldn't feel the need to join NATO.

Next demo, The Inquisitor. You play an inquisitor investigating a vampire sighting in an alternate history where Jesus got all types of vengeful. It looks like a PS3 game. And runs like complete ass. They have a lot of optimization work to do. Still, y'all know how I love my Eurojank. This could be right up my alley.

Well, would rate 5/10. Vivid Strike! clearly still has the best bullying revenge scene. Crunch.