xzar_monty

Both the Donbas and Crimea are going to be very difficult. So much history and ethnic identification / pride / what have you. The US is extraordinarily fortunate, among other things, in the fact that nobody has a real history with the place. Except, of course, those unfortunates who met Mr. Genocide and try to eke out a living these days.

Ok, thanks. The easiest thing to imagine about you is that you have learned to follow and can apply strict logical methodology, so biochemistry is no surprise. Speaking of biochemistry, just the other day I had a very small lightbulb moment when I recognized, through my current studies of Greek, that "laboratory" is quite literally just a "place of work". I hadn't thought of that before. (And "polemics" comes, interestingly enough, directly from war, as in Greek polemos = war. I cannot think of anything in any other language that refers to the Greek peace, irini, other than the given name Irene.)

Is your working life somehow connected to the vagaries of international trade, treaties and/or jurisprudence? Your take on these issues somehow suggests that it might. (Not that I in any way disagree with the manifold hypocrisies of the EU, mind you.)

Regill was around for the entirety of my trickster run. I was quite chaotic, a knife master, but not evil. I wonder what the triggers are. Btw, I learned that a knife master is not that much fun, in terms of loot: right at the start, you're already set for what you're looking for and what works for you, in terms of weapons. Takes a whole lotta fun out of it, I found.

The fact that it's the Security Council reminded me of the fact that for almost the entire 2000s, Russia has staunchly opposed various Security Council initiatives to better recognize and deal with sexual violence in conflicts. They have had a "Why are we even talking about stuff like this?" approach. It's awful -- but to be expected. (They have, luckily, been outvoted several times.)

That and potential legal hassle. Both can bring a company down on their own, of course.

Duran Duran wrote superb pop music, I mean just really effing brilliant, please don't put them down in any way. Along with the Pet Shop Boys, I would argue that Duran Duran is essentially as good as that kind of catchy pop can get. Just really really good (and musically clever!). As far as instrumentation is concerned, the bass is the most interesting thing to listen to in Duran Duran, though, you're right about that. You may have no interest in the following at all, and that's fine. But here's a classical composer listening and reacting to DD's biggest hit. I think it's delightful:

Yeah, I understand that. I remember when PoE first came out. I hit the level cap upon entering Twin Elms and felt like what the heck, why bother anymore. Once the DLCs came out, however, I learned that they increased the level cap, and so I started again. Obviously I reached the level cap again (although later), but at that point I was enjoying the story so much that I finished the game. Twin Elms is still quite poor, by the way. Just bad pacing. It exists in a time and a place in the story where most players (I strongly suspect) won't have any interest in exploring another town/city. Pacing is so important. Like, if you're directing a comedy film, you must make sure that you don't put the funniest scenes too close to one another, even if the story would suggest that that's how they appear.

Not to the extent that I would have ever even tried putting it on on either of my playthroughs. But this is related to another matter caused by excessive emphasis on balance: after a certain point in the game, gear ceases to matter, for the most part, because everything is essentially as good as everything else[*]. Goes for combat, too: after a certain level, there are no challenges anymore, even if the enemies come with three red skulls (were they skulls?) in their icon. (The fights that are really, really difficult are Gorecci Street, the Engwithian Digsite and the pirates on the waters before you're about lvl 7.) [*] For example, I completely stopped skipping and even trying new spellbooks, because they all just work, thanks. Never used potions other than healing, never used scrolls, never used traps, never used bombs. Never any need whatsoever. EDIT: Great game! No question about that. But this "balance" stuff war poorly implemented.

In my view, Obsidian's excessive emphasis on "balance" in Poe and Deadfire is best exemplified by the fact that there's essentially no treasure or loot that makes you go "Wow!". Now, I don't know about everybody, but I would still sort of claim that this kind of thing is a big draw for a lot of people: it just feels good, for an adventurer, to find something that really helps you on your way. And yes, I understand the pitfalls of overpowered items or even items-that-are-so-much-better-than-the-rest-that-everybody-basically-regards-them-as-necessary. But still. Remember the pirate map in Deadfire? The one that you had to assemble from maybe four or five pieces collected from various foes in the game? That was a brilliant example of a letdown created by excessive emphasis on "balance". Because once you finally had that map and went to the location it described, you found... nothing that was worth squat.

Wow. Looking forward to an "I don't know, I was already drunk at the time" explanation from the CEO, or something. I applaud the owning up, though ("Honestly, it was deserved").

Apparently this spyware addition breaks EU law for "GDPR" -- don't know if that's true, though, I know almost nothing about this stuff. But if true, bad call from Owlcat.

Where would it be possible to witness some of this backlash?

@Sarex, thanks for the effort and for posting that info! My computer has heavy adblocking on so I hardly ever even see any ads, and I would never consider clicking on one no matter what, so I suppose the program would do nothing on my computer, provided that it works as stated. I'm not going to update anyway. Some of the language on that questions and answers page is downright hilarious, e.g. the last question: "Why is the weight of the patch so big?" I love that. No mockery intended: I'm certain to sound equally silly in several languages.

Odd, indeed. I wonder why they want to do it, and why they want to do it now. (No, no war-related Russkie conspiracy theories implied, although I'm not buying anything from Owlcat ever again.)

Yes, precisely this is the other side of the conundrum. I would argue that there are two points there that possibly aren't as definite as you make them sound, although there's no way for either of us to know it; i.e. whether a war is absolutely required and whether there's zero chance of it remaining conventional. Now, I wouldn't want to see anyone test either of those, mind you. To the extent that I have hope, I am placing it on something currently unexpected happening inside Russia. One less than encouraging fact about particularly nasty school bullies is that they will absolutely take every inch of psychological and other kind of space they are allowed, and they will not stop of their own accord. Russia, as we know, has persistently followed this same path for a very long time now, and it's the West who's been the softie and swallowed the bait and remained a fool for far too long -- France and Germany in particular are culpable here. It's got us into a place that is not very good at all.

An offensive that, sadly, doesn't appear to go all that well, especially in relation to what has been expected. So the main problem has been in the expectations, not in the offensive itself, I suppose, although obviously the offensive could have been more successful than it has been. Anyway, we obviously don't know what's going to happen, but I have an increasing sense[*] that "the West" is ultimately going to (have to) assist Ukraine far more than it has so far, and this will, in the end, serve to demonstrate that it would have been much more effective and much more life-saving to provide all that assistance right from the start. And that line of reasoning is going to be both annoying hindsight and vindication of the view, held by some right from the start, that Russia is only ever going to stop when it's comprehensively beaten, so it should have been beaten straight away. "The West" is going to look at this and think that whatever the cost of properly assisting Ukraine is, the cost of not doing that would be significantly higher and its results much worse because it would demonstrate the weakness of "the West" and the fact that Russia's chosen policy is successful and works and can be imitated by other countries. [*] To reiterate: I could be completely wrong.

Interesting tidbit concerning the ever-increasing militarization in Russia:

Double trochee. The English language strongly tends to be iambic, so a double trochee is likely to register as somehow significant or different ("so much cooler") even if you can't articulate why. Bent Spear, on the other hand, as a unit, is unbalanced and ends on an awkward diphthong-with-an-r. That's how I see it anyway -- and I fully agree that Broken Arrow sounds an awful lot better. (This is the kind of stuff that headline writers, of whom I am not one, spend their working hours doing.)

Could it be because you had [such high / somehow definite] expectations in the first place? I'm not trying to be glib. For instance, I wonder how your experience with PoE compares to your experiences of expectation -> disappointement with movies, books, albums, whatever. It could also be a question of age, especially if you are (like me) one of the people who fell in love with games such as BG2. It's essentially impossible to experience that thrill again with so many years of life inbetween. As for me, I thoroughly enjoyed both PoE and Deadfire but could criticize a whole lot of things in both games (hah, and I've even worked as a critic for quite a while, starting from 1988). I didn't adore either of those titles as much as I once adored BG2, but I think they're both slightly better than P:K and WotR, which are also both good but just terribly written, story- and dialogue-wise, and contain an awful lot of bad design, as well described on this very thread. (Indeed, it possibly even bothers me a little to realize that although there's so much wrong with P:K and WotR, they're still actually good.)

Indeed. A clever ploy, that: to suggest that there's so much we're not being told. For a conspiratorial soul, that suggestion is nearly always there, as there's nearly always the possibility of something not being told.[*] Should we cue the Twilight Zone theme now? To say that "the US dropped a nuke on Greeland" would imply that the US did it on purpose and what happened was that the bomb was intentionally let go/fly from an airplane or equivalent, which, as you well know but didn't say, was not what happened. [*] I remember when I told an acquaintance of mine that so many of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks had been preserved and that they contain a fair bit of interesting experiments and sort-of scientific speculation. His instant reply: "And just think of all the notebooks that have been destroyed and all the knowledge that has been lost!" My response to that, which I left unsaid, would not have been very kind.

Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins; the second part of his memoirs. The name refers both to Shakespeare (obviously) and Carl Sagan's rather wonderful book on science. Dawkins is a good writer, although I agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson in that his confrontational style is not optimal for delivering the message he intends. Interestingly, Dawkins acknowledges the problem in this very book, but I don't think he really gets it, because I haven't noticed anything changing. For someone who's read Dawkins's earlier, more scientific works, the memoir is likely to appear a bit repetitive, because in going through what he has done in his life he will obviously talk about some of the content of what he has written. I didn't mind. What I did mind, a bit, was his all-too-frequent use of hyperbole to describe various people in his life. I don't deny that they are surely intelligent and capable, being famous scientists, Nobel prize winners and so on, but the superlatives do get a bit heavy no matter how justified they ostensibly are. Anyway, a good book, and I would recommend it. Dawkins clearly has a great love for poetry, and his taste appears quite refined, too.

I don't either, at the moment, but looking at the arc of history and the things that have changed in the past, say, 200 years, gives me some hope that as flawed as the system now is, it is likely a step in a good direction. Not enough of a step, for sure, but at least a step. I am not naive enough to suppose that the problems you describe are ever going to vanish, but I would like to think that some things are going to get significantly better (even if the current rise of authoritarianism in surprisingly many places might leave you thinking otherwise). I suppose international law, as a concept, would work quite well if there was an even more powerful entity outside the international community to exert power on it, but of course there isn't going to be one. It seems to me that what happens on the individual level is sort of duplicated on the international level. In other words, individual humans are like this: nearly all of us want justice to be done, but if we are faced with a choice between justice being done and someone dear to us not landing into trouble, studies indicate that more than half of us will choose the latter option. The most recent reference to this phenomenon that I read picked the harrowing case of Larry Nassar as a prime example: he got to keep up with what he was doing for so long because his buddies didn't want him to get in trouble. And moving from the level of the individual to the level of the international, the same problem persists, although in a slightly different way. There is a hierarchy of values, and whether various entities want justice to be done depends on the amount of power they hold and/or their relationship with the entity that justice would be served upon.

Yeah, the discrepancies are staggering. Despite all that, I would still like to think that the ICC has at least some merit because it has managed to hold accountable some individuals who wouldn't have been held accountable otherwise; Batumike and Kokodikoko come to mind. And yes, I know the colour of their skin.

I don't wish to point my finger at the SA government specifically because this is phenomenon we see quite often, but the fact remains that the SA government is perfectly illustrating an extraordinarily cynical principle, namely that of "We strongly believe in this and we wish to be a member of this except if it would actually matter; in that case we want to bail out straight away."