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Another interesting example of how bad western media has got at regurgitating state propaganda: Ursula von der Leyen's plane hit by GPS incident. Plus dozens of other articles. Number of articles citing flightradar24's statement that it didn't happen: zero. Number of articles that had been corrected: zero. Fact checkers that had checked the facts: zero. Note that the plane's transponder includes GPS consistency values, so it indicates there was no spoofing as well as no appreciable interference. While there certainly is GPS interference close to the Russian border central Bulgaria isn't close to it by any stretch. The whole incident appears to have been quite literally made up then published without asking anyone who could refute it about it. Expectation that the record will ever be corrected: also zero.

Honest Government Ads take on Norway...

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/international-trade/bessent-warns-of-us-embarrassment-if-tariffs-ruled-illegal Not the greatest argument when discussing legality of something, that to reverse course if it's illegal would be embarrassing. As if these mother****ers are capable of shame or embarrassment

Well, as someone who I know said, "It's game about vampires, it's supposed to suck."

At last, I made something that isn't huge and doesn't look terrible, that I could live with as regular "main" use. And it still has 8 interior "workstation" ability if I want, plus good maneuverability and huge warp distance stats (the two I care about). So, yay? Maybe I'm getting the hang of how to use all these stupid parts. Course I'm still gonna obsessively fiddle with new/other designs for a while, before I get bored.

Now for something completely random...

As some of you may already know, certain items such as Lover's Embrace can grant you Frenzy which stacks with the Barbarian's standard class ability Frenzy. To clarify, while the Might and Constitution inspirations from multiple Frenzies do not stack, the action speed bonus from the item-derived form of Frenzy does stack with the action speed bonus from the Barbarian class-derived form of Frenzy. I decided to test if multiple instances of Frenzy from items would then stack with each other and standard Frenzy. I tested the following items which can grant Frenzy (not sure if I missed any other source of Frenzy from items): Lover's Embrace (on crit against male or female targets, depending on enchantment chosen) Amra (25% chance on kill, additional 1% upon receiving damage) Crimson Panoply (50% chance upon being crit, limited to 1 per encounter) Here are the results and some interesting findings. It appears that only 3 instances of Frenzy can stack with each other: the Barbarian class ability Frenzy, the Frenzy from the Crimson Panoply, and the Frenzy from either Lover's Embrace or Amra but not both at the same time. Amra and Lover's Embrace appear to simply override each other and reset the duration of each other's Frenzy, so there might be some hard coded limit on Frenzy coming from weapons or weapon attacks. (Side note: because Amra is a two-handed variant of a battle axe, I used a Black Jacket/Barbarian as my test character so I could instantly swap weapon sets between Amra and Lover's Embrace which made it easier to test concurrent Frenzies without any duration being wasted on swap recovery). Another thing to note is that I took the Uncontrolled Rage enchantment on Crimson Panoply which upgrades its version of Frenzy to Blood Frenzy while I took Spirit Frenzy as an ability on my Barbarian -- I only mention this because I'm not sure if the fact that I took "separate" Frenzy upgrade paths on my character and armor is what allowed them to stack or not. Also, while doing my testing, I was focused mostly on Amra's on-kill procs of Frenzy and it was hard to notice if the 1% chance to proc Frenzy from receiving damage ever procced during my test. I'm trying to remember from previous experience with using Amra, but I believe that the Frenzy from the Unstable Temper proc just refreshes Amra's Frenzy duration and isn't another instance of Frenzy on top of Amra's on-kill Frenzy proc. In which case, I believe it would be subject to the hard coded Frenzy from weapon limit, i.e. I don't think Frenzy from Amra's Unstable Temper would stack with Frenzy coming from Lover's Embrace. Finally, be forewarned that the deflection malus from multiple Frenzies will also stack this way which can be a rather steep penalty for all the action bonus.

I did some further testing to confirm some of the things I was unsure of during my initial test. Here's some clarifications: Blood Frenzy from the Crimson Panoply armor does not stack with Blood Frenzy when taken as a Barbarian ability upgrade. Based on the fact that Crimson Panoply's Blood Frenzy does stack with a Barbarian character who has the Spirit Frenzy upgrade from my initial test, it appears you might have to take a different variant of Frenzy on your Barbarian character in order for it to stack with the Frenzy coming from the armor. I'm not sure if that means you can just not take the Uncontrolled Rage enchantment on Crimson Panoply so it stays as standard Frenzy which might stack with any of the Frenzy upgrades as a character ability, or if taking Uncontrolled Rage on Crimson Panoply would stack with Blood Storm on a single-class Barbarian. Just to summarize and limit my conclusions to what I actually tested, Blood Frenzy from Crimson Panoply does not stack with a Barbarian using the Blood Frenzy ability but does stack with a Barbarian using the Spirit Frenzy ability. As for Amra, I did actually test and made sure to proc its Unstable Temper enchantment (1% chance to proc Frenzy upon receiving damage) this time. While Frenzy was active from this proc, I killed an enemy and procced Amra's Temper enchantment (25% chance to proc Frenzy on kills). All it did was reset the duration of the Frenzy from Amra, so it appears that these separate Frenzy procs from this weapon can't stack with each other. So I only tested this with Deleterious Alacrity of Motion and it appears the action speed bonus from item-granted Frenzy does stack with this spell's action speed bonus. I tested this with a Wizard using Amra and proccing Frenzy off a kill and then casting DAoM. I also made sure to hit my Wizard with Crippling Strike from a Rogue party member in order to Hobble/cancel out the Swift inspiration of DAoM because I wanted to isolate only the action speed bonus component of this spell, and not the action speed coming from a Dexterity inspiration. Thanks for looking into the code. I'm not very sure what all of this could possibly mean. I think there must be something more to it beyond these Frenzy items not being technically coded as the same as Frenzy. The fact that the action speed bonus from item-granted Frenzy stacks not only with Frenzy but other action speed bonus is quite unusual, when normally the greater action speed bonus overwrites the lesser action speed bonus. I know the stacking rules can be quite shaky sometimes in this game however. My complete speculation is that this might be some kind of holdover from POE1's code where bonuses from gear equipped in the weapon slot could further stack with anything regardless of "normal" stacking conventions.

Some technical notes to this are that: Frenzy abilities from classes have the special code component attached to them: SpecialGenericAbilityType": "Frenzy" The documentation (https://eternity.obsidian.net/game-data-formats/enumerations) shows this in the SpecialGenericAbilityType section as meaning: Does nothing other than identify this ability as Frenzy. Lover's Quarrel does not have this special identifier. Maybe it actually does mean something?

Finished and utterly beaten Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Strong recommendation from me - the story is very very good. Good, well written chracters, story starts with an engaging hook and builds to something special. Gameplay is solid - for a jRPG I actually enjoyed it. There is enough variety to enemies, and active systems (mainly dodge and parry to avoid damage, build action points for your turn, and counter) keeps one engaged. Quite a decent amount of side content with some chunky optional dungeons meant to be done after the main story is complete. And while it is mostly what one would expect, for some reason they also have a 3 stage Malenia-style style boss which moves the game further from Final Fantasy or Persona and closer to Sekiro. I won't spoil any of his bull****, but let's just say it extended my playtime by a couple of hours. Anyway, it seems Veilguard was just dropped unto GamePass, so I will probably see what it is about next. Though after E33, new-Bioware writing might be extra hard to stomach. Perhaps, I will wait for Silksong as a palat cleanser.

Trying the Terror from the Void mod for Phoenix Point. I don't think I'll last long enough to see if any of the changes/additions from the mod are any good. The changes to classes and skill trees gets a meh - whatever rating on the internationally recognised melkathi scale*. The non-vanilla human enemies, where every group of scavengers, every squad of jericho troops, has a leader granting an ability to their team, and they all have cringeworthy squad names gets a please go back to writing Harry Potter fanfiction rating. Adding npcs to staff the initial base instead of having everything AI run, gets a thumbs up. But is that enough to get me to care? * often described as a jaded, grimdark version of the popular BruceVC game rating system. Just from the perspective that people are useless amateurs until proven otherwise.

Functionally it's useless - vs simply sticking to a normal ship (no living area so no "storage/workstation" space) - but hey, it's small. Haha. It's taking advantage of overlapping, separate creation/edit stations - a sort of unintended simple glitch I suppose - you can't do this and save the design/edit, normally.

Who needs Unreal Engine 5 if you've got true artists? #Dishonored #UnrealEngine3 #RipViktorAntonov