xzar_monty

Wow! Astonishing. Generally, I don't understand modern Austria. Kurz and the rest of recent Austrian politics just look so odd to me. There is no question I am not educated enough in the matter, but still, it's baffling.

This has been pretty big news in the north of Europe, not sure about how widely this has been reported elsewhere. Doesn't look too pleasant. Neither does the drone stuff in Norway. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63601266

Yep. And this, in my view, is one of the less enjoyable aspects of the game. There's plenty of stuff where your only option tends to be: die, figure out what you should have done, reload, try again. It would be a lot better if, instead of "die", you could "respond to the challenge", but often it is really quite difficult. I wonder if you agree.

This is a fairly random question mainly to people like @Gromnir who seem to know a heck of a lot about the game. Suppose that you play on Unfair difficulty. In Act 3, there's that quest where you have to kill the dragon with Greybor. This quest contains a wilderness encounter where you suddenly come across the dragon, it breathes at you and then flies away pretty soon after that. Now, since it's a wilderness encounter, you won't have any buffs on at the start. So, does your only chance of survival rely on having your protective spell caster getting a higher Initiative roll than the dragon? Seems to me that otherwise the dragon is just going to roast the heck out of you. I'm asking this because even on Core, that particular encounter seem excessively cruel in its design. Going to kill the dragon at the tower is a lot easier. The initial encounter is just cruelty, depending on the initiative roll.

Scorched-earth policy and wholesale killing of their own (in the sense of just letting them die when that is clearly what is going to happen) are staples of Russian warfare. I wonder if the Russian "Nas mnogo" is an intentional Biblical reference, to Mark 5:9. If so, it's very odd. I don't speak Russian and my Greek is poor, so I can't really comment on this with any expertise.

I think this attitude stems from a profound disappointment coupled with ignorance. Disappointment in one's own country: it is true that many things are handled awfully poorly in the US. There is no universal health care. Education can be terrible. The federal government is not run particularly well. Inequalty is rife. Etc. All of this can cause disillusionment and cynicism, which is understandable but not very helpful. When you're already disillusioned and cynical, and you don't know enough about Russia, or Saudi Arabia or some country like that, you can start thinking that "they're all the same". But they're not. Just study the very recent history of those countries. I wouldn't want to live in the US. But given a choice between Russia and the US, I mean, it's not even a question that you need to think about.

Are you familiar with the story of the lizards? There is a particularly silly conspiracy theory according to which the Earth is ruled by evil lizards. One such conspiracy theorist decided to expose this horrible cabal. After a thorough research on the topic, he concluded that the lizards were going to convene at a certain hotel somewhere. So, he went there on the appointed hour, prepared to show the world. Of course, there were no lizards there, not even a hint of them. His conclusion? "They knew I was coming. So they went elsewhere." I'm not commenting on the characters you mention, but the fact is that when you have a preset view, you can always fit the reality to it, instead of modifying your view according to what reality is. I think we are, in general, quite unclear about the manifold reasons as to why this happens (my understanding is that it's more a question of education than intelligence as such, but neither of those alone explains very much). It is very, very unfortunate and causes an awful lot of suffering.

The dilemma of the Russian TV host, very neatly captured. Caveat: I do not speak Russian, so if the subtitles are a joke, do tell me. (Reading up on the history of various totalitarian regimes. It's interesting to note how the Soviet Union differed from the others. For instance, in fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, as awful as they were, you could, as an ethnic native of those countries, be fairly certain of political and even personal safety if you chose to support the ruling ideology. But in the Soviet Union, nothing provided safety for quite a long time. The knock on the door could come at any time, for anyone, for any reason at all, and the people killed by their own numbered in the millions. This must have left huge, huge scars on the population -- ones that haven't been dealt with.)

This is quite incredible: "Former Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Security Minister and current DNR military commander Aleksandr Khodakovsky claimed on November 5 that Russian friendly fire may have caused up to 60% of total Russian losses since the end of Russian offensive operations in Mariupol in mid-May." I honestly don't believe the numbers are that high. They can't be. Source: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-november-5

Haha! Thanks. I've never bothered to check the Pathfinder rules as such, so I'm essentially playing this as if it were DD. Which leads to foolishness like this. Mea culpa!

Some pop music for a change. You'd be hard pressed to find a pop song that's more complex than this -- but it's amazing how effortlessly this flows. Superb songwriting.

Interesting! Not having tried those spells, I have no idea. On a general level, I agree that most spells tend to be less than useful. And some are really very useful. For instance, at a certain point in the game, the combo of Haste + Slow is just really very useful. I'm sure @Gromnir or someone can point to an even more useful combo at that point in the game, and fair enough, but in my games those two spells have been very useful indeed.

I don't know. But judging by the fact that Russian officials accuse Ukraine of a HIMARS strike against the dam in Kakhovka, Russians are about to destroy it. https://www.interfax.ru/russia/871207 https://t.me/rian_ru/184552 "Accuse your enemy of that which you are doing yourself" -- an old KGB adage.

As an aside of sorts: There are two kinds of puzzles in the game. First, there are the ones where you obviously see that you're supposed to be able to do something, like use a series of levers on a wall in the right order. And then there are the ones that aren't immediately obvious that reward you if you (happen to) do the right thing, like make it so that all the doors on a given dungeon level are either open or closed, for example. Your choice of words, "incredibly obnoxious", feels particularly apt. I tend to like puzzles. But I seriously wonder which percentage of players (a) takes the trouble to solve the puzzles of the first kind themselves, without consulting the net, and (b) even notices the hidden rewards of the second kind. Full disclosure: despite my like of puzzles, I don't even try the ones in this game. Seems to me that Owlcat is not a very good sport when it comes to creating puzzles.

Btw, I think it's interesting (but probably just a coincidence) that if you play both P:K and WotR using the companions designed by the developers, you're not going to get, in either game, a wizard capable of casting spells from the school of Necromancy. Both Octavia and Nenio have that as one of their prohibited schools. My D&D experience has led me to like Horrid Wilting, and it's a bit of a shame that I haven't really been able to use it in either game.

Interesting thread on the situation in Kherson.

The damp and some of the ceiling damage cannot be brand new. Otherwise it looks like there's been a demolition crew there. I don't know if you've seen videos of the places that the new Russian mobilized have been sent to, inside Russia. Some of the locations look absolutely terrifying, and the mobilized soldiers have indeed been terrified: not one working shower, every single toilet blocked, trash all over the place, beds unusable, etc. It's a lack of care taken almost to an extreme.

This, unfortunately, is not surprising. Very small news from Poland: a place rented for the needs of the Russian embassy is returned. Not in prime condition.

Haven't noticed or read of the same thing here, but don't take that as an indicator that it doesn't exist. It's quite unfortunate that the math of money tends to work that way, i.e. once the "game" goes on long enough, more and more money tends to end up in fewer and fewer hands, which in turn skews the whole system in ways such as this. Nobody has to do anything illegal or even immoral, but things can still get quite ugly. Getting from zero money to a reasonable income can be extremely difficult. But once you already have plenty of money, making plenty more generally isn't all that difficult if you're not foolish or carelessly rapacious. And yes, of course the societies themselves are different and give different starting points: I got a superb university education and paid zero money for it (without scholarships or anything, just by happening to live in the Nordic countries), whereas an equal of mine in the US would likely be in serious debt by the time they graduate. Which would be an awful starting point.

Change can be abrupt. Think slavery, the US, 1860 vs. 1870. A mere 10 years. There are plenty of other examples. This is more complex, of course, but change can be abrupt.

With a population of over 300M you're going to get everything, so to say "Americans" on the basis of this guy doesn't exactly sound kind.

I think there's two things, a special military operation in Ukraine, and a war against the West.

Now, not having been on the forums for very long, I cannot say whether your analysis is correct when it comes to this particular question and these particular people. But the more general human truth is that changing long-held beliefs and convictions can be extremely hard(*). As strange as it may sound, this can be a problem even in the realm of science. I mean, after all, it was Max Planck who said that the progress of science advanves one funeral at a time. Or more precisely: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” My (limited) understanding is that if you want to change a bad habit, for instance, you're likely to need at least six months or persistent daily practice. Never get discouraged at the start: it is going to take a long time, and it's good to know this. (*) Quite possibly even at the level of the physiology of the brain. I mean, memory and convictions are physical reality: synapses and engrams and all that, encoded and embedded in the brain. But this is conjecture, because we know so little about this stuff. But it's interesting how the brain holds the qualities of both rigidity and plasticity at the same time.

For me, the most interesting phenomenon is the Westerner who lives in a Western society and is extremely cynical about it, often expresses some measure of sympathy and understanding of anything that countries like Russia do and never fails to bring up the injustices of the West. A person like this isn't necessarily a troll, a conspiracy theorist or someone who has swallowed the propaganda. It can be something else as well. This baffles me somewhat. Now, I am not blind to the injustices of the West, which are indeed obvious and manifold. But to constantly bring them up in a discussion expressly dedicated to the Ukraine conflict is just odd, especially if there is a simultaneous dismissal or denial of what Russia is constantly doing. I have seen rather a lot of this during this conflict, in many places.

@BruceVC: Russia employs a huge army of trolls whose job is to produce this stuff on social media. It's quite an interesting phenomenon; there's a big "troll factory" in St. Petersburg, for instance. Of course it's also very sad: imagine having a job doing that. All the things you could do in your life and with your life... and you'd end up doing that. So soul-destroying (whether you believe in souls or not). As an extremely stark comparison: I'm now engaged in a fairly big work project concerning the Congolese gynecologist and fairly recent Nobel prize winner Denis Mukwege. It is uplifting just to know that there are people doing the stuff that he does, and get to know the history of it. It brings more sunlight into the world.