xzar_monty

Yesterday, a Finnair flight had to return to Helsinki because it couldn't land in Tartu because of some serious GPS jamming. Russia has been doing this near its borders for quite a while now.

What I find especially interesting is that Quiet Riot's versions of both Noize and Mama Weer All Crazee Now are a lot better than the originals. It's not very often that that happens. It has to be said, though, that all the Led Zeppelin songs on their first album that are not originals (i.e. every single track except Good Times Bad Times, no matter what the album credits say) are better than the originals. But that's definitely a major exception.

Interesting that from what I've read, "voicing every character in the game" appears to be either a feature that doesn't particularly impress players or seems like a downright mistake (for me, it's a mistake, because it seems obvious that it constrained the writing too much and too early), and the fact that "Sawyer was blocked from cutting a major feature" (assuming it's naval combat, which I'm pretty sure it was) looks like a big mistake to an awful lot of players (in my view, all time spent on this feature was time wasted). So, "Obsidian", whoever that happens to mean exactly, seems to have made two big mistakes or at least two choices that made very little positive difference in the game, and Sawyer knew it and just had to soldier on with it.

Would you say that book 6 is, in general, at the same level with book 1? If not, would you say that there's a specific spot where the quality starts to get worse? I'm curious about this because it seems to me that very few books that eventually turn into series can maintain their quality. For the record, I have only read book 1 and liked it, but not enough to continue with book 2.

Incidentally, this is not a new phenomenon. Medically / psychologically, it is profoundly disturbing. For a historical example, read Don Quixote, the first part of which was published in 1605. It is a brilliant study of a person who is neither stupid nor uneducated but who happens to possess a black spot in his thinking that no amount of fact or logical reasoning can cure. And yes, of course I know Don Quixote is a fictional character -- but the phenomenon is very real, and Cervantes treats it magnificently well.

Lamentable, yes, but I would argue that it was not a sign of the times. The history of the press is not a particularly edifying subject to study. Oh and @BruceVC: I rarely visit the CNN website and never watch it, so I can't comment on that at all. The BBC I am not especially suspicious about, but it does have its share of even fairly recent crises, so it's not as if it's a paragon of journalism. (And I never watch the BBC, either.)

Our equivalent of the BBC is decent enough most of the time, and our biggest newspaper isn't too bad. I have worked in the printed press, starting from the 1980s, and have, in my view, a decent combination of trust in and scepticism of it.

There can be a whole lot of reasons, and you have one good answer to your question right above this post. Your question implies that "one war" and "another war" are comparable, but it isn't necessarily so: there is a potential fault in the comparison you are making. Untrustworthy sources aren't always untrustworthy, either. I would not trust, say, the Daily Mail, but if I happened to walk past a newsstand and Daily Mail was reporting that the Pope is dead, I would believe it. You can't really overstate the importance of context.

Your question is unanswerable because it relies on the premise that "most people will believe what comes from Hamas but question what we hear from Ukraine" which is completely unproven. You will have to demonstrate the veracity of that premise first, until then the question itself makes no sense. What is "most people"? Most people where? In the world? Most, by definition, is over 50%, so do you mean it has been demonstrated that over 4 billion people believe and question things according to what you just typed there? I don't mean to deliberately punch holes in what you're doing, but you really do have to ask better questions.

You're not wrong as such, but I would qualify that last sentence by adding "English-speaking" right before the word "media". Or, possibly, "international" -- although the word international is somewhat nebulous in this context. But anyway, not all media, not in all countries. Israel's atrocities do get plenty of coverage around here, for instance.

Israel really, really, really does not want the world to become any more aware of its horrendous brutality than it already is. I am not all that well aware of the history of Hamas, in terms of its publicity policies, but I would assume that it does not agree with the idea that any publicity is good publicity, quite the contrary.

A tiny bit of pointing out the obvious there, in that the relevant technology has either been non-existent or not in use in nearly all previous conflicts. You can expect there to be even more coverage of that kind in future wars. (This reminds me of how the sculpting of the finish line photo of the 100 meters dash in the 40BC Olympics was only finished in 37BC, so the two fastest guys really had to wait to find out who won.)

Yesterday I made Baingan Bharta (with peas) for the first time, and it turned out much, much better than I'd expected. I highly recommend this to anyone who likes cooking, as it's not all that difficult if you've got at least some experience of cooking in general, and do not get jittery about roasting eggplants.

I've got hardly any DVDs but more than hundreds of CDs, I have to say. And while at work in my office I listen to them practically every day, although it's nothing but classical these days, basically -- so an awful lot of stuff is just lying around, quite literally collecting dust. Speaking of dust: Tori Amos was superb at her best. I remember weeping like crazy upon hearing this for the first time. It was just so beautiful. Her lyrics rarely add up to a coherent whole, but there are some masterful lines -- here she's brilliantly evoking memories and the sense of transient but life-transforming moments, whatever they may be for the listener.

How wonderful that someone really did it! I mean, wonderful in the context of famous metaphors becoming a kind of reality, not in the context of energy politics.