xzar_monty

This is very interesting: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2022/10/24/the-remote-control-killers-behind-russias-cruise-missile-strikes-on-ukraine/

Fair enough. I think attaching emotions to the text makes it significantly weaker no matter what, if the intention is to make a point based on expertise. It gives the impression of pub talk, i.e. noise over signal. Like, for instance, @kanisathacomes across as someone whose points of view are based upon solid knowledge, because he keeps his language civil -- and this generates trust, even if I don't always share the views themselves. @pmp10: My sense was that it was something more solid than just "rumors". Also, I think they were / are aiming at 1M.

Sheesh. I went all the way to the Abyss with Aivu (in my aborted first playthrough) and never noticed. I do feel stupid now.

Quite possible! But I do think there's an important distinction to be made between technical proficiency and more general musical or songwriting skill. Look at Roger Waters: anyone can learn all his stuff very quickly, it's so easy to play. But who can write songs as good as his? Not a lot of people. Or think of Fogerty: his songs are ridiculously simple, but just try and write one as good as they are. I can't play most Dream Theater songs even though I'm a pretty good drummer -- I'm approximately at the Rush level, let's say. But they are not good songs, in my view, so I don't feel any great impetus to learn them, either.

Stuff like this is actually impossible to measure -- and Zoraptor makes a good point about Mandela, above. I suppose the classic case is the Vietnam war: it was very unpopular and led to huge protests. There are those who assert that these protests were very significant, and then there are those who say that they had no effect whatsoever; the US came back from the war only because it was becoming much too costly in terms of money, effort and casualties. Unfortunately, we cannot save-scum the universe so I don't think there's any way to determine the influence of the various possible factors.[*] Bono and the Edge weren't all that keen to perform in Kiev because they thought it might look a bit shabby, which I'd tend to agree with. However, Zelenskyi eventually persuaded them by stressing how important such a show of solidarity would be for the Ukrainians. So there's that, too: we look at these things from various perspectives. My stance on the former Yugoslavia conflict, for instance, was permanently and dramatically altered by actually going to work at a hospital where they operated on children with limbs and other body parts missing. [*] This last bit, btw, goes a long way to describing why the whole sciences of psychology and sociology are very problematic. We, as humans, are extremely good at coming up with credible-sounding narratives post factum, but demonstrating that they are actually true is a different thing altogether.

I wouldn't use words as harsh as "entitlement" or "whine" as you do, but it's tricky, I agree. Footballing legend Graeme Souness is one of those who have suggested that Ukraine should be in the World Cup despite not qualifying. However, he didn't say anything about kicking Iran out, his suggestion was to make one group of 5 countries to accommodate Ukraine.

Could be. Maybe there's no manpower to control fires, even if there's birdpower to down planes. [The bird explanation could be true, btw.]

Oh, all that's true, and especially the under reporting part sounds perfectly plausible. But my point was mostly along the lines of whether the fires have skyrocketed since the war started. That's unlikely to be environmental.

Without knowing the pre war numbers and their relation to the current numbers, I don't think it's worth leaping anywhere. There have been several huge forest fires in Russia, some of which you could smell well outside Russia, in the 2000s. These were widely reported, at least in the Nordic countries. Apart from them, however, I can't remember a single report concerning a fire in Russia -- but that can't be seen as proof of anything, in my view. Maybe fires like the ones we've recently seen reported have always been fairly commonplace; after all, building standards in Russia are awful, maintenance is likely to be poor and the amount of care people generally afford to their surroundings is close to nil. (Ever seen a roadside rest stop or even a "national park" in Russia? Thou shalt recognize it by the rubbish, general waste, toilet paper and enormous piles of shíte everywhere. Picture the exact opposite of Japan and you're almost on your way to getting there.) But if the incidence of fires has skyrocketed, I might at least hop a little, if not exactly leap. But we're unlikely to get the data, as I said.

Yeah -- as I said, we're unlikely to get the data. Personally, I find the fires much more interesting, because if the numbers have gone up a lot, it suggests sabotage and stuff like that, which is encouraging in the sense that it would seem to show there is some serious resistance inside Russia as well. Whether it's Russian resistance, Ukrainian resistance or some other non-Russian resistance is of course very hard to say unless people start coming up. (But then, more than 130 people have confessed to murdering Olof Palme, and I'm pretty sure not all of them did it.)

When Eddie Van Halen appeared on the scene in the late 1970s, he blew everyone away with much of what he did, and Eruption in particular. Not a lot of guitar players even understood what he was doing, and most of them certainly couldn't play it. These days, kids play Eruption for breakfast and then start practicing for real. But the vast majority of them don't, for some reason, write music that I find engaging or interesting. Here's a really good example: these guys are unbelievably good musicians, but the song is really simple (as a composition) and not very good. (The total lack of dynamics is particularly sad.) I find this somewhat odd and paradoxical, and to some extent it even bothers me. I'd like these guys to write better music. But: definitely worth checking out, if only for what this band can do, technically. [Guest artist Steve Vai is excluded from the comment above; he has done many interesting things, even if he's nowhere near my favorites as a guitarist.]

Also, another military plane crash into a civilian building (in Siberia, Russia). We're unlikely to get the data, but I would love to see a) the incidence of fires in Russia before and after the war began, and b) the incidence of (military) plane crashes before and after the war began. The latter number would be more difficult to analyse, because there are quite certainly many more military flights now than before the war, but it might be telling anyway. The incidence of these fires would be particularly fascinating. Have they doubled? Tripled? What? Not changed? Later, EDIT: here's an example of what Russian TV can be like. This is the kind of the stuff that the state-funded RT shows. It is quite something.

Funny: I find myself fairly annoyed that the "Banner over the Citadel" bug persists. I would've had some time to play the game today (definitely not a given like it was 30 years ago), but I don't want to endanger the whole run when just loading my save game presents me with an obvious bug.

This is more of a general comment but also pertinent to what you say here. Now, you write with the intent of giving the impression of being an expert on things. But your language and your terrible choice of references (zerohedge for god's sake) don't exactly look convincing. So the question rises: if this guy's an expert on this stuff, why does he use language like that and why does he rely on frankly awful sources? Why would a genuine expert ever do that, even on a meaningless internet forum? Of course, you may be right in your assessments.

Dang. New patch out today but the corrupted save game bug remains: I still get the "Killed the Giants" message when I load my save game (and I also get XP), even though I'm still in Kenabres. I get the same message even if I load an even earlier save where I'm still in the Shield Maze.

If you want to add to the list of interesting things, you should know that drones have been spotted near critical infrastructure in Finland.

Russian television as happy as ever: Also, very hard to say if this is good news (Russia retreating) or bad news (Russia is preparing for some kind of Big Nasty Strike) or both or neither.

Interesting news but poor writing, in my view. Or perhaps they expect the reader to know quite a lot. Here's what I don't think the article makes quite clear: does Russia only have one of these systems and has it lost it now (sounds odd), or did it just happen to lose one of many? The headline and the first sentence would suggest there was ever only one of them.

Not content with the gall of holding referenda on the territory of another sovereign nation (!), Putin has now declared martial law on the four supposedly-annexed areas. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-declares-martial-law-four-unilaterally-annexed-regions-ukraine-2022-10-19/?fbclid=IwAR3wRs9H7L-zMPx8r8CcJ4ExUTEyZ3TYM1AlmgQKtmQjnp-IgqxwlEBEu80

I read some interesting comments by Margarita Zavadskaya who is dedicated to the study of Russian government and politics. Some of her points: - Russia's current constitution (from 1993) essentially ensures that the president can bypass all other elements of government that ostensibly make decisions. So, the biggest problem in Russian politics is that if someone unstable or unhinged happens to rise to power, the system can do absolutely nothing about it. There are no controls. (So, as pointed out by other people, the Duma is mostly for show: none of the Russian parties have any meaning.) - Were things to change, we have no idea what the political map in Russia would look like. No one knows how much support the various political ideologies and ideas have. - Most Russians are not nationalists, they are imperialists. - One of the strongest government-opposing phenomena in Russia today is the feminist anti-war movement.[*] - The liberals in Russia live mostly in big cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, and it's precisely them who are currently fleeing the country. [*] "One of the strongest" probably still means "not strong at all".

Just to indulge in a silly analogy of sorts: what we're discussing here is whether Owlcat is producing the cRPG equivalent of wrestling of the Hulk Hogan variety and whether a significant proportion of its customers represent that possibly fictitious[*] part of the audience that doesn't realize it's all a show and a joke. I don't know. But in my view it doesn't really matter, because the storytelling and characters are still silly, no matter what the Owlcat take on them actually is. It's like that old chestnut about "true stories" and their meaninglessness: if you're watching a rubbish movie and someone comes up to you and says, "This is a true story, you know", it doesn't make it any better. However, I do enjoy playing the game -- once that silly new bug gets fixed. [*] Here in the almost absolute north of Europe, there at least used to be a fairly widespread assumption that "some Americans are so stupid they think their wrestling is for real". I have no idea whether this was ever true. I suppose some Americans would know.

@majestic, so where was this?

Interesting! All I know about is the azata, for which I agree with what you say. But if all the others are the same, then it does raise some eyebrows over here at least. Btw, if the writing really is intended to mock the player, then I'd say that's a bit... mean. But of course we're still in the realm of games, so it's not that sinister. (The Finnish poet Paavo Haavikko once wrote how "Parody has become impossible / They're doing it themselves". This is an extremely pithy observation, in my view, and I couldn't help but think about it when looking at someone like Boris Johnson, for example. You couldn't really make a parody of him, he himself was already a parody of a politician.)

I understand this but cannot help noticing that if the plane crashes or cannot even take off, it won't be able to do its military job, so safety should be paramount here, too. I know that you're aware of this, and I'm not trying to nitpick, but there's a bit of a logic problem in the priorities -- which, strangely enough, is both understandable and weird.

I agree that many Lawful choices do indeed seem rather Evil in WotR, at least. Actually, my preferred way of playing is somewhere around Chaotic Neutral / Neutral / Chaotic Good, depending on the options I'm given. As for the writing chops, they are indeed lacking and their characters certainly don't feel like people. It's really unfortunate that this side of their games is as bad as it is, because everything would be much more enjoyable if there was at least an attempt made to create more believable and "round" characters. I've said if before but I sometimes wonder whether everything is intended as a joke or parody, because the character writing really is something. But if there's one thing it most certainly does, it really makes you better appreciate this side of PoE and Deadfire -- or even BG2!