xzar_monty

Indeed. But odd as it is, that is genuinely quite common (and of course Russia continues to hold "the West" responsible for essentially everything Russia itself has done wrong[*]). This is off-topic, but I find it extremely interesting that there genuinely are people whose temperamental makeup and lack of self-awareness reach such heights that they perceive the world as a place where they quite often come across people who positively beg to have a fist smashed right in their face, and so they themselves are positively not to blame for any aggression at all, ever. This description of a certain kind of sociopathy, by the way, comes straight from a (locally) well-known psychiatrist with a long experience of working in institutions for criminals. [*] Such a can of worms, that last word, but I left it there anyway.

Interesting trivia: there's a Russian fellow who covertly reports to the biggest newspaper in Scandinavia, and the other day he pointed out that many ordinary Russians are struggling badly because Russia produces no nails. Or screws. Not proper ones, anyway: the guy said that Russian-produced stuff like this can be used to build a bad doghouse or a poor barn, but nothing better. He's also in serious trouble with having to use Russian-produced paint, because it sucks. (People in the western parts of Russia used to get their paint from Finland, from companies such as Tikkurila who produce excellent paint.)

Hadn't seen it, thanks for the recommendation! He's very good, no question, but I wouldn't make any Buddy Rich comparisons: at least on this video, his touch is nowhere near Buddy Rich. I did enjoy the cross-sticking at around 2:07, and I suppose it was a deliberate nod to Buddy Rich (as are many other things). His touch is a lot less subtle than Buddy's, that's the main difference to me, and it's really obvious from the first bar. But yeah, he is very good! I wonder if you'd like this. Marvelous playing and singing. The composition is probably not the best, but there's plenty of joy in here. Also, a superb drum solo at the end. That one would be really hard to play. (No, I'm not even trying, it's above my level for sure.)

Hemingway was writing about what the Italians expressed about their willingness to fight; their actual willingness as displayed on the battlefield was a different matter altogether. I don't remember the piece I quoted all that well, but my sense is that Hemingway was quite scathing about how the Italians actually performed. But don't quote me on that. But a general criticism of Hemingway's factual correctness can obviously be made, and I've also made one myself.

I was somewhat amused by the wording: Tsokov "died heroically" during the attack. I wonder how that differs from simply dying, given that it's a missile strike on a hotel, which doesn't really imply a battle to display heroism in. In January 1936, Ernest Hemingway wrote a piece called Wings Always Over Africa for Esquire magazine. This is part of what he wrote: "An Italian soldier can be so fired up by propaganda that he will go to battle wanting only to die for Il Duce and convinced that it is better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep and, hit in the buttocks, the fleshy part of the thigh, or the calf of the leg, all comparatively painless wounds, he is capable of uttering the most noble sentiments and of saying, 'Duce I salute you Duce! I am happy to die for you, O Duce!' But hit in the belly, or if the bullet breaks a bone, or if it happens to hit a nerve he will say, 'Oh mamma mia!' and the Duce will be far from his thoughts. Malaria and dysentery are even less capable of arousing patriotic fervour and jaundice, as I recall it, which gives a man the sensation of having been kicked in the vicinity of the interstitial glands, produces almost no patriotic fervour at all." Indeed, even war poetry developed rather drastically from Rupert Brooke's The Soldier to Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est, with the former coming straight from the "died heroically" line of thought and the latter rather less so. But apparently the "died heroically" line is still going strong.

To quote David Foster Wallace and his great essay on Terminator 2: "Plot and character implausibilities are to be handled through distraction rather than resolved through explanation." (The essay, in a fairly uncomfortable layout, can be found at https://www.michaelfuchs.org/re/index.php?story=2010-03-01.)

I lost interest after No Prayer for the Dying was such a poor album and a huge disappointment after Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. I know a little about what they've done since the 1990s, but not a lot. Anyway, former pop star Rick Astley did something spectacular in Glastonbury by performing this classic song by The Smiths. There is a certain adolescent period where you're no longer comfortable at home but don't have a place of your own yet; feelings tend to run high, romance both beckons and frightens, you're prone to grandiosity and tragedy and everything except your own life may seem larger than life. This song captures that period perfectly; I can't think of anything that does it better -- the lyric is just superb. Brilliant pop composition, too.

Yeah, as I said, we're on the "losing side" and TB seems to be the way forward for games like this. It's yet another example of how the selection of games I'm playing continues to dwindle until there's essentially nothing left -- and indeed, in the past five years I have acquired less than five games. It may well be that in the next ten, I won't acquire any at all.

I fully agree. It's awful. If I want to play (any derivative of) chess, I'll just do that, I don't want any of it in my cRPGs. But apparently we're both on the "losing side" when it comes to real-time vs. turn-based approach in games like these. Nothing we can do about it, I suppose.

Thanks! Yeah, my question was poorly phrased; what I meant to ask was whether turn-based mode was the only option for combat. I was pretty certain of the answer, but I'm still a bit disappointed. I would've liked to play the game, but there's no way I'm going for anything exclusively turn-based.

I would say you are 100% correct, although to toot my own horn, I would be one of those people who'd definitely think that it was really quite difficult in the first place. I am reminded of something the formerly-great Portuguese football manager José Mourinho once said: "The same half-time speech given by two different managers is not the same half-time speech." He is absolutely right. Btw, although some people might think otherwise, those so-stupid-that-simply-seeing-one-of-them-may-occasionally-make-you-feel-ashamed-of-being-human headlines in really bad newspapers aren't exactly easy to write, either. You have to be pretty precise in the way you place emphasis and use the few syllables you've got space for, and there's something almost tragic about the fact that some people have really honed the skill of being hideously crass while maintaining brevity. Generally speaking, all writing that starts to veer away from plain ordinary language (whichever way you define it) starts to get pretty difficult to do well. I can write a bland generic pop lyric that scans and rhymes perfectly, and it doesn't take longer than five minutes, but coming up with anything that actually works is serious business. Deadfire did a pretty good job of capturing a certain half-lofty tone, although there were moments when it tried a bit too hard (like, in the first "pre-game" encounter, the aged dwarf could well have been just an old dwarf, and talking about rictus was a bit over the top). EDIT: @InsaneCommander: BG3 is still turn-based only, right?

Ha! I happened to start reading your comment without seeing the link below it, so my initial thought was that you were referring to Nicko McBrain of Iron Maiden. He's 71 and he basically can't cut it anymore: he has simplified the arrangments an awful lot and even then, he's in trouble with the tempos. Well, old age does catch up with every one of us, if we happen to be lucky. Here's a funny and sad link of the guitarist Adrian Smith getting mightily annoyed on stage the other day. I feel for him: you just try and play straight 16th notes over a tempo that's fluctuating as wildly as this. I suppose you could say that Mr. Smith is being a tad unprofessional, but it happens.

I mean, yeah. Even on Core, that water elemental is really difficult given how few options you have. (But it's optional, so not all that relevant to what @roguefrog said.) I'm trying to think of the most difficult encounter that I had before Playful Darkness, but I'm not sure what it would be. I'm not saying that nothing was difficult, only that nothing stood out as clearly so much more difficult than any of the others. Well, there's a demon encounter of some kind in Areelu's Lab, and I do remember now that that was really quite hard and required more than a few tries.

Wow! It's not the easiest fight by any means, I agree, but I didn't find it that difficult, either. I mean, there's a spell that can really help you grease your way out of that encounter. Also, I think Jeslyn is female, not that it matters. @Gromnir: I only came to BG after having played BG2, and I have to say that playing the games in that order, it wasn't easy to have much enthusiasm for BG. The amount of aimless-seeming walking around that you had to do on mostly empty maps was just... astonishing. BG2 had none of that. I suppose the dev team had received some fairly strong criticism and reacted accordingly. Brilliant, I'd say.

In a nutshell, it seems that the lawful choice is evil, and the evil choice is just stupid. In all games like this, I tend to play a chaotic character that leans slightly towards good but is often neutral and almost never evil. So, I was able to make choices that didn't seem completely idiotic, but boy oh boy the lawful and evil choices looked dumb.

Yeah, I'd have nothing against that, either. Some of the random encounters are asinine to the max: it's simply unfathomable that an experienced group of highly perceptive adventurers could suddenly find themselves surrounded by a group of ash giants who are all less than 30ft away, for instance. I mean, it just wouldn't happen no matter what. But most of the random encounters are a variation on that kind of theme.

It was never going to and will not happen, of course, but I think the game would be twice as good as it now is if half the battles were removed. Having a city absolutely full of fighting is fair enough if it's Drezen and you have to take it back from the demons, but to then make most areas Drezen-like in the amount of fighting you have to do is simply a bad idea, in my opinion. PoE suffered from the same disease with most outdoor areas being full of enemies (that gave you essentially no XP and rarely any loot, either!) but this problem was marvelously well fixed for Deadfire. So, WotR with all the boss fights and other major fights intact but with all other battling cut by half... now that would be great. As for the difficulty: I was on Core up until the Abyss (except for Playful Darkness, which I did on Story mode after a number of miserably failed attempts), but I found myself turning the difficulty down quite a bit after a few battles in the Abyss. They were too annoying (in an annoying way), and I was also getting annoyed by the fighting in general (see above). It's an interesting game in the sense that it has more flaws than you can point at but it's still pretty damn good, which is rare indeed.

I should have included a caveat regarding body type, so fair enough. In other words, if your build is more towards the Xherdan Shaqiri type (broad torso, short limbs), then the suggestion stands, but if you're more like Stephen Merchant (lanky with long limbs), then best aim for something significantly less. I know a Shaqiri-type short guy who benched more than his bodyweight the first time he ever tried the bench press, which seems incredibly unfair to me, in a funny way, having myself spent a fair bit of time getting up to my bodyweight. (He was fit enough to begin with but not any kind of athlete at all.)

Not impressed by that, I'd say, especially because 40 push-ups sound so meaningless: nearly everyone would have to train specifically for that, but there's just no point. After being able to do, say, 25 push-ups, you're not going to gain anything meaningful from being able to do more. It would be much wiser and a better use of your time to work on your bench press instead and try to get that up to about twice your bodyweight. Not that there's anything wrong with being able to do that many, but training up to that just makes no sense. See? Here's an insanely strong woman that I've trained with and learned a lot from. But she doesn't do 40 push-ups because training up to that wouldn't make sense. However, her strength and physical health is something quite unbelievable.

No need to do cardio for upper body strength. It's not a waste of time, all things considered, but it has (essentially) nothing to do with this. Unless you mean general cardiovascular health instead of good cardiovascular fitness. I'd say he did a total of zero reps in that video. When you do push-ups, you push yourself all the way up until your arms are straight. Likewise, in chin-ups, you lower yourself down all the way until your arms are straight. Otherwise, the rep doesn't count. His age probably has quite a lot to do with it. I'm older than @Keyrock and I'm pretty strong, but there's no question my stamina has gone down and my recovery times have increased like you wouldn't believe.

Just glimpsed through a new report written by a correspondent in China. Two new things for me, the first of which I hadn't even thought of: 1) China is really quite worried about any potential lack of stability in Russia, and did not like Prigozhin's little party trick at all, 2) People within the Chinese army are quite frustrated with Russia and absolutely shocked by how poor the Russian army has turned out to be -- and, by extension, there is now a growing worry about how good the Chinese army actually is.

That's sad to hear. Quite frankly, I wouldn't count on a revolution anytime, no matter what. The passivization (sorry) of the people has gone on for so long and has been so effective. Btw, for anyone interested, A People's Tragedy -- The Russian Revolution by the historian Orlando Figes could provide some pertinent and horrifying reading.

I do think it's credible, although you didn't ask me. Apparently, though, there's also this, whether it has meaning or not:

I don't drive[*] but I get your point. [*] True story: the only time in my life that I've driven a car was in New Zealand, when I was in car with a woman I'd only met a couple of hours earlier. Upon learning that my driving experience was at zero, she promptly stopped the vehicle and made me drive for a while (we were on a secluded country road near Motueka). It immediately struck me that something interesting might happen if I told her that I'd never had sex before, either, but since I was going to have to get along with her for at least two weeks, I couldn't really risk it, even as a joke.

Btw, didn't Kreml spokesman Peskov make proud noises about his son serving with Wagner? I wonder how likely that is to become a problem for daddy Peskov.