xzar_monty

For work-related reasons, I am currently going through an extremely interesting as-yet unpublished text concerning Ukraine's recent political history. I find it extremely heartening that the Ukrainians actually began to demonstrate in late November 2013 after Yanukovych refused to sign the deal with EU, made a volte-face and decided to throw his lot with Putin. The heartening thing was that it was the young people of Ukraine who felt the most betrayed: the president's decision meant that they would likely spend their most productive years in the same Ukraine that their parents had known, a Ukraine full of sovok, as they termed it: a country of lumbering economy, corrupt bureaucracy, doltish complacency and stagnation, all the negative vestiges of Soviet Union. So they went to protest. And it grew. And Moscow got angry. And then, eventually, we got to where we are now. But it was the young people of Ukraine who decided that they'd had enough. The enormously disheartening thing about this is that the young people of Russia could do the same, could have done for so many years: they could also want to get rid of the lumbering economy, corrupt bureaucracy, doltish complacency and stagnation, all the negative vestiges of Soviet Union. But they don't.

Not a fan of this channel at all and the "headlines" on the links are just terrible, but every once in a while there's someone interesting on. This time, a psychologist makes some interesting observations concerning Russian culture. This snippet is a brief but informative summary. (Btw, I'd like to know how the Middle East fares in this discussion.)

Interesting news from Russia: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-15/russia-discusses-return-to-capital-controls-to-stem-ruble-slump#xj4y7vzkg

OFF TOPIC and a tasteless comparison, but stuff like this tends to remind me of how, given enough games, you will always see marvelous long-shot goals even in Sunday Level football [soccer] tournaments -- someone just happens to connect really well with the ball. But you will never see goals like the one that Messi scored against Nigeria in the 2018 World Cup: taking three touches like that while running at that speed just takes too much skill. So yeah, a lucky shot.

Also, and this is a matter of taste, I find "fully 3D" to just completely suck in games like this. I mean, Deadfire looks gorgeous but NWN and NWN2 are just poor. Yes, I know they're old, but 3D graphics get extremely repetitive in a hurry, and after that there's nothing to them at all. Also, the 3D viewpoint completely destroys the sense of controlling a group of charcaters, for me.

So it's an achievement -- is that why you're asking? I certainly was not. It does look quite unlikely, given how close some of the courtesans are to the demons when the fight begins.

Yeah, I've heard about that. I'm not interested in that side of it; I can't imagine any of the items being crucial, and the XP is likely to be negligible. (There are far too many fights the game anyway, I'm happy to miss any that I can.)

Does it? You could be right. Anyway, I rested twice in the city and was able to avoid the assault on the inn.

You don't have to rest at the inn, just rest on the city map. For some strange reason, I started a new playthrough, and I just finished the Gray Garrison. I never had to deal with the attack on the inn, just like I didn't have to deal with it last time, only on my first playthrough. I agree that traveling to the inn to rest would be a nuisance and would probably lead you to having to do that battle.

Given the amount of prisoners released to fight in Ukraine, we're probably going to see quite a lot this in the future (see link). I've just read a psychiatrist's report where he states that although PTSD treatment tends to be insufficient just about everywhere, Russia is particularly bad in this respect, too, because 1) much of the time the problem is not even acknowledged, 2) the country has no real interest in even trying to help anyone, and 3) the deadly[*] combination of amphetamines and vodka is very common among veterans. The fact that many of them were murderers and rapists even before the war doesn't really help, either. So, appetitive aggression galore in Russia. [*] Deadly for the veteran himself and for the people around him. https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2023/08/karelian-mass-murder-suspect-fought-ukraine

@Gorth: California Dreamin' is a brilliant song in the sense that it manages to create an aching sense of nostalgia for something even if the song wasn't a part of your childhood / youth or even if there's no real content to this feeling of nostalgia. The evocative power is in the music itself, which is just a superb achievement for a pop song like that. Here's another song of the same calibre but with a different emotional content: even if you've never experienced the kind of separation and heartbreak described here, it's likely to make you a bit weepy (happens to me whenever I really listen to the track). Ha, the guitarist Steve Vai has said that he can't listen to it in public because he cries so much.

Apparently Ukraine managed to do some damage last night:

Well, their last show was in 2016, but they did finish that one with the same song, yes. I think it has been the closing song for much of the time since its release, which is kind of logical when you think about it: it's one of their best songs, and given that it has the cannons, you can't really have it in any other place in the set. What would you follow it with?

AC/DC is a band that has superb intros (Hells Bells, For Those About To Rock, Thunderstruck, and so on for quite some time) but whose songs themselves I often find a little boring: after the intro, so little tends to happen. Gotta admire their amazing groove, though. One of those groups that I more respect than like, if you know what I mean.

They have not been completely assimilated, but the Karelians, Komi, Udmurts and Mari are not doing particularly well, from what I understand, and neither are their languages. Colonial policies are still going fairly strong, and Russia has also had little interest in rebuilding anything that suffered damage in WW2 -- but of course that was only about 80 years ago, surely you can't get expect them to have started yet. As for Russia and corruption: from my understanding, you are indeed quite correct -- Russia's biggest fear around Ukraine is that it manages to free itself from both corruption and Russian influence to a significant extent, thus demonstrating to Russians that a different, better way of living is indeed possible. According to the historian Timothy Snyder, Russia's main export is corruption, and because Russia doesn't have much ability to make itself stronger or more stable, it concentrates its energy on trying to make everybody else weaker and more unstable. (Here's one of existence's bitter ironies: breaking things down is nearly always so much easier than building or even maintaining them.) I can't see the Karelia situation changing, by the way. There was this pipe dream of getting it back, but I don't think it was ever anything more than that, realistically speaking. For many passionate Russians, of course, anything that was ever Russian is always Russian, so the whole of Finland is still regarded as belonging to Russia, which is something that president Mauno Koivisto also emphasizes in his book The Idea of Russia (link above, somewhere quite near). In terms of nature, by the way, Karelia is quite distinct from much of Finland (as are the Baltic countries immediately to the south), so it could be an extraordinarily beautiful and fertile area if it was cared for by some country other than Russia. Not that I'm a fan of Finland's forestry policies, mind you: some of them are downright hideous.

Yeah, something like that. Brian Johnson is another good example of the same. I mean, you just go and try to pull off a good karaoke rendition of the song linked below. Lead vocals start at about 1:04. My throat gives up before the first line is over.

Patrushev is apparently trying to re-brand Finland as a genuine enemy of Russia. Interesting to see how this one works out and how much of an influence he still has. For those who don't know, the back and forth between the Finnish and Russian side of Karelia had been fairly strong until the war began, and the relations between Russians and Finns were pretty good, for the most part, around that area (southeastern Finland and the Russian parts adjacent to that). It seems Patrushev really wants to change that. His "ten Western terrorist plots" sounds like something out of a madman's fiction, which, come to think of it, it may well be. https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2023/08/ten-western-terrorist-plots-against-karelia-over-last-half-year-says-russian

Udo had such a nasty voice! I wonder how it's held up.

Another good example of this is racism and the idea that only white people are racist. You only need to look at Japan to totally disprove this nonsense, but of course it exists pretty much everywhere else, too. Despite all evidence, I have come across some people who honestly claim that it is impossible for a white person to be racially discriminated against.

Incidentally, here's a telling anecdote from a "classic"[*] book on Russia by the former Finnish president Mauno Koivisto. He recounts how he visited a museum in Russia and was told of the atrocities that the Tatars had committed. Being somewhat knowledgeable on the subject, Koivisto got frustrated and asked his guide about the Tatars' view on the same question. "We do not know that", was the guide's reply. No interest from Russians in other nationalities living in Russia. (Btw, not unique, this.) [*] I want the word "classic" to really mean something and thus be reserved to very few works. So I would not call it classic myself, although I have read it and it's good. For more info (in English, too!) check out this link: https://www.sttinfo.fi/tiedote/mauno-koivistos-classic-book-on-russia-due-for-first-publication-in-english?publisherId=2326&releaseId=69968904

Indeed. I'd love to know the percentages of Russians who buy and don't buy the nation's official rhetoric. I mean the real percentages, not what people tell when asked. But of course I'm not going to know. I recently read an analysis by a Finnish specialist on Russia; she pointed out that even after 30 years of being fairly free to travel abroad, the Big Misconception in Russia is that every country is like Russia, i.e. corrupt to the hilt, hence why bother trying to change anything. Not certain of the extent to which is true, and it has to be said that not all that many Russians travel abroad or even have a passport.

More than to cause panic I'd say they were there just to give Poland the finger. I also agree with your second point: seriously doubt they dropped anyone off. This is a fairly common Russian strategy: Russian airplanes breach Finnish and Swedish airspace with some regularity, just to remind everyone that Russia doesn't give a damn and is a big bad wolf. Every time Finland or Sweden remind Russia that it would do well to keep its airplanes in its own airspace, Russia the aggressor immediately becomes Russia the victim. You can't get more childish than that, I'd say.

I remember when you were at a rather early stage in the game, playing an Angel, and wondering about Camellia, perhaps even as a possible romance interest (though I'm not sure about the last part). I don't know what your expectations were, but I'm pretty sure Camellia didn't turn out to be the kind of person an Angel would happily go for a hot chocolate and a cookie with.

Gotta say Russia is steadfast indeed in its use of "special military operation" instead of "war". If it was at all possible, someone might even suggest that Ukraine could join NATO right now because by Russia's own definition, it is not a nation currently at war.

Indeed, a good read, thank you for the link. The tendency to sympathise with Russia has an interesting precedent in the 9/11 terrorist attack, after which some left-leaning intellectuals such as Edward Said and Noam Chomsky were surprisingly incapable of admitting that it was an atrocious act indeed, and instead they went to great lengths in describing how awful some American policies had been and were (in itself a correct claim) and that such an attack on civilians was ultimately, sort of, let's face it, how should we put it, entirely justified and right. Christopher Hitchens wrote about this sort of spinelessness rather scathingly and well almost immediately after Said, Chomsky et al. had come out with their anti-American and pro-terrorist points. This phenomenon has quite a lot to do with the hierarchies that people have in their thinking. I've said it before put I suppose it may bear repeating: almost all people want justice to be done, but if they are faced with a choice of either furthering justice or keeping a friend out of trouble, they tend to (i.e. over 50% will choose to) go for the latter option, at the cost of justice, even at a terrible cost. So while we value justice, we value friends more. A similar phenomenon applies here: "America" or "the West" are very easy epitomes of certain kind of evil, because they definitely and clearly are up to all kinds of questionable things in the world -- but for the most part, people in the West will still tend to side with America or the West when it's a question of choice between that and, let's say, Russia. (I would never ever want to live in America but faced with a choice between that and Russia, there's just no question which one I'd choose.) But there's a certain group of people who sort of vacillate inbetween: in daily life, America and the West represent evil, and when Russia (or some other entity not from the West) gets up to something utterly dreadful, they start to come up with excuses about how, surely, the West must also be to blame, and so on. This group is quite distinct from those who overtly and consistently support Russia all the time. One good example is the question of NATO expansion, such as it is. NATO doesn't really intend to expand. NATO gets new members because various countries feel threatened enough by Russia so that they wish to get some extra protection, and that's why they apply for membership. Russia, of course, steadfastly refuses to see this. One other thing (among many many many many) that Russia steadfastly refuses to see is that as a sovereign nation, Ukraine gets to do whatever it wants to (within international law), so whether it chooses to apply for NATO membership is none of Russia's business, in the same way that it's none of my business whatsoever whether my neighbor wants to join the Labor Union or Amnesty International or any of those groups probably still going strong in Judea. If I start whining about it, it almost certainly indicates that I have a problem.