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Russia had a decent chance of being a 'liberal democracy' in 1992 and maybe even making it to one without the air quotes. Instead they got economic shock therapy that lead to two bankruptcies, and the incomparable incompetent sot Boris Yeltsin. Who may have been feted among western politicians but left office on the basis that the population would not be permitted to lynch him- and that's pretty much literally the one thing he asked- and whose democratic credentials internally were utterly ruined by the 1996 election. At that point what do you do, vote for ongoing disaster? Not likely. It's a real shame, if there had been even a moderate Marshall Plan type system in place for Russia the world would likely be a massively different- and better- place. There's a very significant point of view difference at play here between those who live in the US- where no doubt there were major differences between Presidents- and those outside where apart from Trump there's been a pretty consistent neocon/ neolib interventionist foreign policy and economic mindset at play since... Reagan, maybe? Certainly since Clinton. So something like Obamacare would have been a major point of difference for an American, but it meant little to nothing to anyone outside the US. They saw Obama having more or less the same external economic policy as Bush and- despite the rhetoric- an almost identical foreign policy too. Bombing Libya, arming the moderate beheaders in Syria, stepping up drone attacks everywhere, while not shutting down Guantanamo. Guy sure talked a good talk though compared to Bush. ('eats their own' is an overstatement. It's not like you got most of the conservative media going into a feeding frenzy against GWB; and similarly you might have the conservative media foaming about Obama, but not the liberal. Trump is the obvious outlier, but on some things they'd even unite on in praising him- eg bombing Syria. Better than Russian media, sure, but that's not exactly a high bar to pass now is it)

what can you do, right? the history o' russia, china, north korea, syria and (fill in the blank with whichever nation you believe deserves to be in such illustrious company) is so inexorable enmeshed in corruption and blood, there just ain't a real solution. 'course you could say same for most any nation if you stretch the timeline back far enough, yes? england? france? sweden? any of 'em get off clean if we go back six hundred years? don't need to go back very far with germany, italy and japan, do we? as such, am not sure if shrugging the whole thing off as russians being russians is a compelling counter argument. the situation in russia is never gonna change if the people in russia in particular keep shrugging off change as impossible. being poisoned, imprisoned on trumped up embezzlement charges and possible murdered is okie dokie 'cause is russia and 'cause gorth has decided navalny were one o' the bad russians. if am misrepresenting, please clarify, 'cause anarchist or not, you gotta recognize what a precarious moral precipice 'pon which you are standing when you make such distinctions. and as much as we agree navalny's bigotry were rare mentioned by western leaders, you should see such is irrelevant insofar as deciding whether or not being poisoned, imprisoned and possible murdered were justified. clarification: as an anarchist, gorth don't trust the russian government, but the russian peoples, for the most part, like putin and all those things you dislike about navalny don't bother most russians-- is the reason navalny went to prison for embezzlement and not one o' the sins you mention. can't trust the russians and their six hundred year traditions? ok, now what? does gorth get to decide which russians is bad and deserve punishment. obviously as an anarchist there ain't gonna be a government solution. maybe gorth just don't care. as long as the bad guys he identifies suffer, then call it a win? am s'posing that works just as long as everybody everywhere agrees to adopt gorth's moral compass. am not gonna hold our breath waiting for that day. let's use a western example and since a poster improbable brought up trump. Gromnir is on record as being dubious 'bout the ny hush money case against trump. from as yet uncontroverted evidence, it would appear trump engaged in illegal behaviour multiple times as he paid stormy daniels but did not disclose those payments appropriate on his taxes or campaign contribution records. however, ny is trying to bring a case against trump for felony counts based on a rather novel bootstrapping approach; the individual charges against trump in ny is all misdemeanors. also, ordinary the fed would handle such a case given trump were running for national office, but they declined to do so reported 'cause they had no confidence that their primary witness, michael cohen, would benefit their case. of all the cases against trump, the ny hush money case looks weakest to us and am questioning its legitimacy. much like the mar-a-lago case, am thinking some o' the tv lawyering is giving the public false impressions... though in the mar-a-lago situation the media were underselling the threat to tump as 'posed to oversell. trump has done all kinda wrongs. his knowing misrepresentations 'bout covid led to hundreds o' thousands o' unnecessary deaths, and those numbers is from folks chosen by trump to serve on his covid advisory team... and am not even talking 'bout fauci. we would be here all day listing the unconstitutional and moral wrongs committed by trump which should make anybody who has ever uttered tds sans irony look like a complete yutz. trump deserves prison, but he ain't going to prison unless it can be proven to a jury o' his peers, and beyond a reasonable doubt, that he committed crimes. is our opinion that even if ny can prove their hush money case against trump, it ain't a case which shoulda' been brought. that said, there is plenty o' other folks with more legal cred than Gromnir who disagree with us and am happy to argue the merits o' prosecuting trump in ny for his porn star payoff. now suppose one o' the obsidian board liberals, bothered by our opinion on trump's ny case, starts pointing out how things work in russia and china. Gromnir complains 'bout the US media, but boardies ask us to imagine how chinese news papers would cover if somebody xi didn't like were being prosecuted. and btw, there is a whole lotta evidence trump is a russian stooge, so that makes all the russia whatbouting relevant somehow. were literal more than a dozen russian state-sponsored hackers who were convicted o' helping trump and the mueller report found considerable evidence o' collusion by the trump campaign insofar as russia in spite o' what bill barr convinced the maga faithful. is not difficult to find soundbites o' trump which make him look like a russian stooge. in russia, trump would be lucky to have any kinda sham trial, so our handwringing about the ny ag finessing the law a bit is so qq. etc. insofar as the hush money case is concerned, chinese newspaper coverage, the russian system o' justice, and trump being responsible for more than 100k covid dead is irrelevant. if trump goes to prison for the hush money case, Gromnir is gonna question whether such were a fair outcome. sounds ridiculous when you do same deflection and whatabouting, yes? heck, we didn't even work in the conspiracy theories. whatabouting and deflection from the usual suspects hereabout is so reflexive, most o' us don't even consider how silly such is. aside-- the mar-a-lago case remains the obvious no-brainer/dead-to-rights case trump is facing, but the judge in that case is utter incompetent and is dragging her feet at almost every opportunity. am literal unable to imagine a meaningful defense for trump in that case assuming the state proffered evidence is legit. contrary to conspiracy theorists, is improbable the feds engineered false recordings and made up testimony in their indictment if for no other reason than that such lies would be revealed easily during discovery. is near impossible for trump to claim evidence were planted after he called for a special master to return his seized property. a couple of trump's own attorneys has given testimony which incriminates the former President. there is audio recordings o' trump talking about documents he claimed in an affidavit were not in his possession. is also video tape o' his cronies moving boxes filled contemporaneous with the lawyer and fbi searches. is also the IT guy's testimony. etc. in any normal situation, the defendant in such a case woulda' tried for a plea deal, but if trump can win the election, the prosecution disappears... HA! Good Fun! ps a fun fact am having mentioned once before is that when the US Constitution were penned, felonies were, by definition, those crimes punishable by death. high crimes and misdemeanors were a bit less baffling in 1787. felony v. misdemeanor has changed a smidge over the years. even so, am thinking many people is shocked to learn that in the US, misdemeanor ≠ trivial. max time o' imprisonment for a misdemeanor in most US jurisdictions is one year.

2h30' video I really miss the old youtub days of max 10'

I completed Deadfire, it gets a solid 80/100 on the globally popular " BruceVC game rating system" and I know people are thinking " thats a very high score for this highly respected game rating system " and I will summarize why But I had a surprising end to the game, I was expecting an epic and final battle at Ukaizo like with Thaos and PoE1 and as I mentioned I prepared for this by getting my party to level 20. But because I had released the Water Dragon in a previous quest the Ukaizo guardian was automatically defeated by the Water Dragon....so no final epic battle, I was disappointed But in summary what I loved about the game and some of this I have already mentioned in previous posts Obsidian successfully created a new IP with lore and mechanics that works, this is a feat in itself and it should be recognized if you think about the popularity of D&D or Elder Scrolls The strategic nature of combat for hard battles is fantastic, its one of the main reasons why I play party based RPG The overall narrative and lore of the world is very thought provoking and you really end up thinking about who you should align with and what will the outcome be. But I cannot stress enough how important the Enhanced User Interface mod is so you become familiar with the lore and understand it. I used it a lot Deadfire is as close to open world as you can get with this type of game. You can sail to almost any island you want, explore any dungeon you want and face the consequences...brilliant risk vs reward outcomes and you feel motivated to explore and find new islands I enjoyed the crafting and how you can customize your character build and especially the abilities and spells at higher levels, they make a significant difference in combat Deadfire also provided some uncommon but appreciated features like the sailing mechanic and how naval combat works. I ended up just doing normal combat on the decks of the ships but there was the other option So excellent game and Im really disappointed there wont be a PoE3

Well, foreign policy remaining relatively static under previous administrations doesn't really reflect Trump's policy, if you can really call it as such. I mean, if you want more Russian and less US/Western influence, and I know some people who do*, then it's good for you but really Trump is too mercurial to have a policy beyond deferring to Russia and only caring about what you can do for him. *MiL has friends who want Russia to control Eastern Europe so they can LARP the good old days of the USSR

Replaying Dawn of War 2, finding Captain very difficult for me, although I beat it at that level of difficulty back in 2012. Now, the answer is they patched the game to be harder or I just suck. The answer is obviously the former.

Sands of Aura. Slowly progressing through the game, should be past 50%, unless there is another world map/new locations opening up. The game is fine, I suppose, not counting the top-down-ish camera angle. There are some character customisation, reasonably interesting equipment and their upgrades, some quests with light branching, etc. The story and writing are not exactly engaging*, but serviceable. The absence of stamina is welcome and the spell-like abilities are generally decent (e.g. teleporting behind a foe on hit). I think that there is some synergy between equipment, runes, and spells, but considering the upgrade costs, I am going to continue to use the starting swords and the armour set from the first non-tutorial area. Some of bosses are rather interesting, some are infuriating for wrong reasons. In particular, Einar and his ice ball bullet-hell attacks. After the first attempt, I improved my equipment quite a lot and just face-tanked the attacks. I don't understand how could one dodge the wall-piercing ice (the balls clipped through any obstacles), while also being pushed by invisible wind. * In terms of bugs, I got stuck between boxes and could not get out (quitting did not help, so had to get back to the "bonfire") only once. --- If anyone played, is King's Bounty II any good? Seeing a 90% discount this early is slightly suspicious (bugs?).

I'm at the point in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth where I'm starting to get my characters into their final jobs. Compared to the previous game, it's much easier to kit out your characters exactly how you want them because they made the skill inheritance system a lot more open. In Yakuza: Like a Dragon you could inherit skills from jobs you were no longer actively using, as you can with many JRPGs that use the job system. However, in Y:LaD only a few of the skills were eligible to be inherited whereas in LaD:IW you can inherit pretty much any skill with one restriction. You can only inherit one Essence and only once you unlock the 6th and final inheritance slot. Essences are the strongest skills in the game, every job gets 2 of them, one at level 22 or 24 and another at level 30. I have all my characters rotate through a variety of jobs with the intention of getting a good variety of skills to inherit from. I want every character to have at least 1 heal, preferably an area heal, and I want 2 of my characters in each team (you have 2 teams, the Hawaii team and the Japan team, each team can have up to 4 characters at a time) to have a revive skill. Beyond that, I try to have a grapple skill on every character (grapple breaks guard). It's also useful to have a variety of different attack types to get around resistances/exploit weaknesses. The first character I've settled on a final build for is Saeko, who's on the Japan team. She's going to be the pure caster on that team, effectively a druid type of character. With that in mind, I've settled on Geodancer, which is the most druid-esque female job (every character has their own unique job that only they can use, the rest of the jobs are divided into male and female jobs, they more or less cover all the standard archetypes). Geodancer has super high magic power which will serve me well both healing and dishing out magic damage. She will be very much a glass cannon, though. I'm fairly confident I'm going with Host for Ichiban (Hawaii team) as the final job. He'll play a similar role to Saeko, the main healer, but less of a focus on magic damage and more on buffs and debuffs. More of a bard type role, I guess. I'm not 100% locked into that yet, but I think that's the way I'm going to go. The rest of the team is still in flux. My current leanings are: Hawaii Team: Ichiban - Healer/Support, Adachi - Tank, Chitose - DPS, Tomi - Jack of all trades. Japan: Kiryu - Tank, Seonhee - DPS, Nanba - Healer/Support, Saeko - Healer/DPS, Zhao - Benchwarmer, not sure where I'm going with him yet.

Suggestion: add water droplets to spider webs, just like in the natural world. It would be really cool!

No, not really. The idea that Reagan is the same as Bush is the same as Clinton is the same as W Bush is the same as Obama is the same as Trump is the same as Biden is not going hold up under scrutiny. And again, the criticism of all of these guys is non-stop. The western media eats theie own. What does the Russia media do?

I wouldn't normally be concerned with deleting .log files on a personal computer, since by their nature they are just .log files, but those are awfully large for just .log files, and your system seems to be making them pretty fast-like. Might want to try to track down what the heck is generating them (maybe via Process Explorer if you can catch it in the act) and repeatedly stab it with a knife.

I am through the mines in Vampire: Redemption and on my first mission as a vampire into the Capadocian haven. I fight the UI/gameplay more than the enemies.

That isn't quite the problem, since opposition is allowed to exist, it's not North Korea. The opposition is a lot more restricted than in most liberal democracies though, certainly. That problem is more, at least from the western perspective, that there's very little pro western sentiment at any level and the practical Putin alternatives are: Medvedev or similar from United Russia, Zyuganov's ossified non corpse from the commies, Mironov who's basically a CCP style State Capitalist, or Zhiro's ossified actual corpse from the Liberals. The only one of those who isn't stridently revanchist is Mironov, who is a bit more moderately revanchist. The liberal, pro west party that Gorth mentioned (Yabloko) cannot even pass the 5% threshold- less than 2% vote in 2021- and doesn't on western polling data either. While the commies and LDPR are seen as controlled opposition they supported the 2012 protests extensively, hence all the soviet and Russian Imperial flags being waved at them. Navalny wasn't tolerated since he was seen as a western stooge. Certainly his coverage in the west was disproportionate to his highest poll rating from western agencies of around 5% which might, barely have scraped his party into the duma. Both the commies and LDPR regularly get 3-4x that vote each, but are stridently anti west so don't count as opposition. Ultimately, the problem for any western liberal politician in Russia is not Putin, but Yeltsin and, well, the west in general. You're not going to get a nice liberal pro free market pro europe pro west non revanchist out of the margin of error while peddling racial stereotypes, talking about breaking up their country and actively supplying arms and intelligence to kill their countrymen. Obviously I'd agree with that, personally. The disclaimer was more to avoid the- inevitable, as it turned out, ho hum- accusations of them being irrelevant since they aren't politicians while Navalny (/Trump/ Kennedy) are/ were.

There has been a lot of drama at ZAUM for a while now, with key creators behind Disco getting fired from company and accusations being thrown back and forth between the fires three and the management. If you want to know more:

Hey I still have one of those pants!

I don't think we should confuse the concern over a lack of opposition to Putin with support for said opposition. The problem is opposition is not allowed to exist in Russia. That is major component of tyranny. I doubt many in the west would prefer Navalny or the Wagner group chief guy. Alternatively, I'd guess a fair amount of people are depressed by the Presidential candidates this year. But at least there is a choice, and there is an open debate, and there is open criticism, and there is an end date to their terms.

He was groundbreakingly good. Here's an interesting thing about Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic: it's not quite in any normal tuning, it's slightly above D major but below D sharp / E flat. Its duration, as a single, is 3:58. My guess is that the recording was sped up ever so slightly so that the single would fit under the magical 4 minute duration. (Kiss might have done the same with Tears Are Falling.)

For reference, I am a lizard.

Soulmask demo: It's a survival game, you swing your axe at trees and you build stuff. The game does look really nice. I was worried because the character creation screen was all types of stripped down, janky, and really low res, but once I got into actual gameplay, it looks great. Plus it's got capybaras and tapirs. Another nice touch is that you are actually wet after going in the water. I feel like this is something I shouldn't have to mention in 2024, but the amount of games, including AAA releases, still coming out where there are no wet effects, your character is just instantly dry after swimming, is downright embarrassing. It will take more than just pretty graphics to join Conan Exiles, and to a lesser degree Valheim, as the only survival games I've liked, though, and I haven't seen anything in the demo yet to make this more than just swinging an axe at trees. I haven't gotten any story so far. Side-note: No capybaras were harmed in the playing of this demo. I'm not about to kill them for meat. I did kill a couple of wild dogs, but they attacked me first.

Some brilliant quotes "Pegging isn't new for me friendo... but it is for Disney" & "I am the Messiah, I... am... Marvel Jesus!..." I never saw the second Deadpool movie, but I loved the first one. Comedy according to my own tastes

More Vampire Redemption. To quote the Clash: I fought the UI And the UI won I tried to click things But clicked none I fought the UI The UI won

Yeah, I'd never advocate for skimping on the PSU, indeed I'd consider it the one component where you should never skimp on reliability at least, I do wish I'd paid the few dollars extra for 750W over 550W though as the added flexibility would have been good. I knew perfectly well that that Macron PSU was garbage* and never taxed it even slightly (probably max of 1/3 of the on the box load). *apparently, having looked it up, I was... completely wrong. While it's an old and inefficient design it's actually very reliable. Looks like I owe Macron an apology.