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Hmm, at the time, they had like 1/10th of their current drone fleet, less trained new recruits, and no F-16s. Even although it seems F-16s are not much of an power in this offensive move, I would asume, that it would end much worse for UA than today. Russia maybe had even more soldiers at borders at that time, as Avdiivka was still holding, and Russia was not outstretched in Donbass. And they definitely had few thousands of artilleries more to move around the frontline. Russia is lately losing 40 artilleries per day on average, so in a year, that’s more than 10k pieces in a year, which is significant firepower, which could end up any UA attempt in hours. Looks like all of the Russian Freedom Legion incursions were just a reconaissance for this large operation. There is absolute silence on UA side, all info is now only fromwhining on Russian Telegram, somwe will not see if this operation will be success or failure for few weeks minimum. The pace of breakthrough is for now, according to Russians, on par with Kharkiv Counter-Offensive in 2022.

Well, as these are mostly conscripts, they are most likely ethnic Russian who have been “parked” at places deemed most safe, and not from the ethnic minorities, about which no one cares in Russia, so their price might be much much higher on the PoW “market”. And there is a chance that this might spark some kind of ire among the more wealthy and more influential We’ll see in few days/weeks. Oh and this popped up, while browsing lates news I love Ukrainian sense of humor even in such a hard times.

I wanted to run a SC ranger and while they can shine against mobs, for single target they don't get a lot of tools except for crits. So I wondered how much does crit bring them with various ranged weapons? I suck at dealing with speed inversions, so the speeds are based on a 20 DEX ydwin with no armor penalty and Acina's Tricorn. All weapons are legendary with no other damage modifiers like might, sneak attack etc, only +25% from crits. Also I didn't factor in penetration. The weapons are: Frostseeker. crits cause AOE freeze/slashing damage. Attacking + recovery time = 3.7s on said character. Veilpiercer and Saint Omaku's Mercy: 50% chance to ignore recovery when scoring crits. I think there's a slight delay when firing another shot, so I'll use 1s if this triggers, and 3.7s if not. Current's Rush which has a 20% chance to trigger an AOE damage which can further trigger itself. It's not ideal when fighting single target but I just wonder how it performs. When dual wielded the total time is 2.5s on said character. Eccea's Arcane Blaster. This has nothing to do with crits, but IMO is a baseline for single target. I treat Fractured Bullet as an 1.25x multiplier. When dual wielded with Imbued Ammunition on it has total attack time of 3.8s. At 100% crit chance, average DPS are: 15 for Frostseeker 12.6 for warbows 11.84 for Current's Rush 11.54 for EAB At 50% crit chance: 9.79 for Frostseeker 9.1 for warbows 9.2 for Current's Rush 11.3 for EAB In practice, against bosses it's usually somewhere in between, probably closer to 50%. I think it's safe to say high crit chance itself does less than I expected. Because EAB mostly can't graze, if the character at least doesn't miss, picking SC ranger doesn't offer much compared to basically any class using EAB, if using ranged weapons, in single target scenario. Not considering pets because they tend to face penetration issues by endgame. Maybe they're better with some melee crit weapons.

I believe, somewhere in our hearts, we are what we play. We don’t become angry half orcs slaughtering villagers or bold knights fighting for justice, but those ideas become part of our person. They swirl around in our heads like swarms of butterflies. I have been formed as much by games as I have by the events in my life. I played games as a child. Recess had tag, dodge ball, and kickball. At home, we would play the occasional board game. It wasn’t until my mom received the original grey Dungeons and Dragons boxed set as a gift in 1978 that games became a peculiar focus in my life. I was only nine years old at the time. I didn’t understand every word, but I understood enough to know I wanted to play. Wanting and doing are two different things and my nine-year-old self could not grasp every concept. That didn’t stop me from valiantly trying to construct modules. No one else had much interest and so I would fashion what, to my mind, were elaborate maps and imagined encounters for players who did not exist. Sometimes the idea of the game is as entertaining as the game itself. Sometimes, I think, the idea of the game *is* the game. In 1981, after I returned from Guam, my eldest brother brought over an Atari 800. Magic! Two-word text adventures were simply brilliant! Unlike my experiences living on a tropical island, there were plenty of kids in California who wanted to play games like Dungeons and Dragons and some of my friends would also come over to my house to play computer games. If solitary play fueled my imagination, including other players forced me to put that imagination to practical use in a game setting. Sharing a computer meant one person could be at the keyboard while the other one or two would be forced to stand in back yelling comments or barking orders. As I grew into my teens, Dungeons and Dragons became central to my life. I would hunt out modules to play with friends or, more often, simply read and imagine playing. There wasn’t enough time to play everything. One of my best friends liked to play, but his mother, a staunch evangelical Christian, was convinced that Dungeons and Dragons was Satanic, so we played Gamma World. However, soon after, her pastor proclaimed all RPGs were Satanic and it was difficult for him to play. I loved his mom, and she was very kind to me, but she gently explained that I should enjoy my life on earth because, as a Catholic, I was bound for hell. …And she was certain RPGs corrupted young minds! Lol Alas, I’d started drinking and smoking at 12 years old and much of my time was spent in callow and self-destructive behavior. If only the pull of games had been stronger, it may be that I would have been a much more useful member of society earlier in my life, but I was not. Turns out games hadn’t corrupted me, but I was still corrupted. The fault, as always, was my own. I was 17 when I graduated from high school and immediately joined the United States Navy. Far from being rare, it turned out a lot of my fellow sailors were gamers. I often wonder if I would have had even more chance to game if I’d been stationed on a ship. Not a lot of chance for other things shipboard. I was always land based, however, and mostly overseas. We did have some great computer games. One of my fellows overseas, an army grunt if I remember correctly, would use such creative names as Prelf for his elven priest and Dwight for his dwarven fighter. : Eldar’s shaking his head with a bemused smile icon : As it seems, some of us didn’t have our imaginations enriched by gaming, but what some lacked in imagination they returned back with practicality. Same manual, different lesson. When I returned home, basically bummed out and aimless, I wandered around a lot. I’ve had a variety of jobs ranging, in no particular order, from cashier to human resources for Longs Drugs, meter reader for the gas company, teacher at a parochial school, wedding photography salesman on the Las Vegas Strip, quality assurance for a video game, security guard, and registered nurse with a couple of others I’m probably forgetting. I’m currently a nurse practitioner. I’m done floating around in the ether, so this one is going to be my last. As you can tell, gaming has been more consistent than employment for me. Like a lot of gamers my age, there are particular computer games that were fundamental in my developing tastes. Zork would probably be the first and foremost. Fallout and Baldur’s Gate, of course. It’s now that I invoke Planescape Torment. What words exist that have not been said of PST, good, bad, or somewhere between? I won’t add to them here. It is for me what it is. I love the game. As an aside, my wife loved this T.V. show during the 1990s called The Pretender. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but just this year my wife found it again on some streaming service and we discovered the main character did the voice work for The Nameless One. During all this time, talking about games has been as important as playing them. I’ve spent considerably more time discussing PST than playing it. Same for all of my favorite games. I became part of the online community at Black Isle Studios and eventually, a bit before the place folded, I was a moderator. Sadly, I can’t remember the names of all the people there. One of the moderators at that time left a message on my answering machine, playing his guitar and singing a song. I don’t remember who it was, but I remember the song. That was some point after I’d dropped off the face of the earth for months. Being someone with a number of character flaws, I’m a bit of a wanderer by nature. As they say, I’m constantly pushing people away with one hand and pulling them closer with the other. Eventually, since everything was quickly going to a fire sale at Interplay, I signed up as a community member at Obsidian. I want to address particular Obsidian games since this is the Obsidian board and I’ve loved a number of Obsidian titles. I’m currently hundreds of hours into Grounded, for instance. I’ve spent thousands of hours enjoying Obsidian games, but I can’t go on without owning to a past of which I am ashamed. I don’t know who all is at Obsidian at this time. I sent word asking someone there to help me find work and he arranged to have me do quality assurance on Mask of the Betrayer. I tried my best to do a good job, but I was an utter failure. My personality defects were simply too great to put in quality work. I refuse to submit anything here without giving a nakedly truthful account. Ironically, Mask of the Betrayer was an excellent title. The story, the unfolding of every element, was so well done I always believed it should have been a stand-alone title outside of NWN2. After I worked on Mask of the Betrayer, I was bereft of hope. Not because of my work on MotB, but because it threw into stark relief how lacking in distinction I was as a human. I realized, with my degrees in history and classical studies, with my wife and varied job experiences, that I had done nothing to justify my existence, let alone distinguish it. I fell into abject despair and rarely left my house. I gained weight and eventually weighed over 400lbs. Even so, in all this, I gamed. Games were the last frayed strand of a rope to which I clung, and my grasp was starting to fail. The point of this isn’t my sad state. I have a private blog that serves perfectly well in order to flog myself. My point is that, in a pinch, I had games. Maybe you’ve all heard the story of the man who is falling from a cliff, clenching the roots of a tree. Looming on the cliff above, there is a ferocious tiger. Below him lie jagged rocks in the distance. The man, desperate and despairing, sees a berry on a bush growing from the side of the cliff. He takes the berry and eats it. Savoring the flavor, he thinks to himself, “I have tasted no berry sweeter than this.” Games. I’m clearly in a much better place now. I’m a professional and I help people in my practice. …But games. New Vegas. Pillars of Eternity 2. Mask of the Betrayer. Masterpieces. I have tasted no berries sweeter than these.

When using an invocation, a chanter will have to stop chanting, and even restarts chanting a few seconds afterwards. It's roughly when the recovery of the invocation is about to end, but there's no clear descriptions on it. I wonder if anyone knows exactly how it works? Does action speed matter? This means that timing an invocation has benefits or punishments. if I cast one when a phrase is about to end, I effectively lose more than 1 phrase. Casting an invocation right after a phrase ends instead costs a little more than half a phrase. It also means using 2-phrase-invocations as a skald isn't as good as 1.5x invocations.

Indeed. Hunting bow is better than all of the weapons listed for single target, as long as the extra (effectively) -10 ACC doesn't result in grazes and penetration isn't a problem. For the warbows if there's a second target to trigger Driving Flight, I guess Frostseeker and Current's Rush also improves drastically, hard to know the exact numbers though.

Have a week off work, so enjoying doing a whole lot of nothing. Will have to go teach neighbour how to secure a flag (once I learn), his damn flag ends up in my yard every other day

Seems like the concern of the US is just Russian disinfo again. From what I understand, what US guys really said (Kirby IIRC), is that the usage of US stuff on a Russian soil inside a perimeter is still valid. They did not breach more than 100kms. Yet The rumours says, that UA has already taken more than 300 PoWs in two days of the Special Military Operation to protect Ukrainian speaking minorities living in Russia.

Botswana ratified the peace summint memorandum a day after “Mali diplomatic incident” . Seems like it affects the “Global South” as much as bombing children hospitals afects Nestle doing business in Russia and the Kursk, well, this is becoming very juicy. Russian milbloggers have confirmed operational encirclement of Sudzha, which means approx 15 kms in a day, or in other numbers, 2 months and 20k of casualties of Russian Advance in Pokrovsk Direction, after the fall of Avdiivka

Yes but the point is countries like Niger and Mali dont represent the views of the " global south " which is sometimes used in a type of generalised and selective way. For example here is an AJ article that also seems to think Niger and Mali have significance in the " global south " https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/7/russia-accuses-ukraine-of-opening-african-front-as-niger-cuts-kyiv-ties#:~:text=The claim by Moscow followed,West to turn to Russia. "The spat is viewed as a significant hit to Ukraine’s efforts to win global support as it defends itself against Russia’s invasion, and, in particular, to broaden its appeal in the Global South." But what does the global south represent? Its definitely not suppose to be about military coups overthrowing democratically elected governments and then these same states being suspended from the AU because of these coups And of course these countries would align with Russia because they know there wont be any condemnation around the undemocratic way they have seized power and will stay in power. All these military leaders in these coups said they would restore democratic rule at a certain date and both Mali and Burkina Faso lied and backtracked on that initial commitment and I guarantee you Niger will do the same thing https://apnews.com/article/mali-presidential-election-coup-democracy-fecca4add800eeec12ea2fab14dd2209 https://issafrica.org/iss-today/burkina-faso-progress-and-problems-after-two-years-of-transition

Started again with Rogue Trader. Tried to see if there is an optimal way of doing the first chapter. In Dragon Age Origins, the optimal play was to not finish areas, but to hop back and forth to unlock always just enough to get a better outcome somewhere else. (Mainly to help the possessed child) Rogue Trader it turns out locks in where you have gone first on arrival. Land, take off, go somewhere else and do that first will still act as if you spent time in the first option. At the same time, minor flavour items will react to the actual order you did things, referencing that npcs are dead even though in the grand scheme the game state of the location thinks you haven't been to where you'd kill those NPCs.

Skyrim. It appears that you can get pets now. Well so my mage did find one. Looks like a something born out of love between a spider and a mantis, sounds like a tank when walking. Which is kind of grating especially when you try to sneak, but as soon as I found out it messes with enemy pathfinding I'm more than happy to tolerate it in exchange for draugrs doing nothing but very intense eye contact while I pelt them from behind of my spider-mantis mini tank. Elsewhere in Skyrim, I went werewolf. They have their own skill tree and everything now. So I went on some official Companion Guild quest, turned the wolf on, cleared the dungeon, gained a few perks, cool, but it would be pity to let the wolf timer expire without doing some more maulin', I thought. Could come back for loot later, I thought. ...probably half a map later I'm still a wolf. See, wolf timer gets prolonged every time you eat someone and I've forgotten just how many bandits and necromancers are there everywhere in Skyrim. Eventually it should expire some day because I avoid towns and undead are inedible, but I'm keeping the wolf on out of sporting interest now - I want to see that trail of destruction on the map. When I'm allowed to use it again, because werewolves cannot read maps. I do hope my companion is okay, I lost him, like, 30 dungeons ago.

Here is the completed video for anyone interested! Thank you so much for your thoughtful critique, y'all saved me from making some embarrassing mistakes! Special thanks to Thelee recording a discussion with me which is included at the end of the video. Here is the link:

Wonder if they had done this last year how that would have gone (assuming they could have gotten the US to be ok with their kit being used) Same old story on other fronts, at least.

Booking dot com is pressuring hotels to raise commission to 25% In 2015 it was 10% with the option to do 15% for increased visibility. Then 15% became the standard and you had to give 20% to enter the genius program of select hotels pushed to good customers. Then they changed the genius program, while keeping the name, removing all benefits for the hotels, but hey, if you reduce the commission, we'll drop you to page 20. But customers are happy paying a quarter of their travel costs to parasitic sites. Why would gaming be different?