xzar_monty

@Zoraptor, seems to me that any Evil is nearly always Stupid in the Owlcat games I've played (P:K and WotR). I don't try to play evil and very rarely choose any evil options, but most of the time they seem to be along the lines of "Die!" or "Nonsense! Die!". If I wanted to play a Machiavellian manipulator and create subtle schemes for world domination, it seems I'd be out of options. To be fair, much of the dialogue is silly, but the Evil options tend to seem the silliest.

Wow! Thanks. More common than civilian aircraft crashes, it seems to me, although I'm not sure. What are the reasons? Simply more take-offs and thus a larger number of potential crashes?

The Russian Su-34 crash from yesterday sounds like something exceedingly rare in other parts of the world, although I am not sure. Anyway, yet again: wow. Astonishing. Hit a Russian residential building, too. And in other news: Russian troops murder an Ukrainian conductor for refusing to take part in a concert in Kherson. What can you say. The most Russian part of the whole episode is that the concert was “intended by the occupiers to demonstrate the so-called ‘improvement of peaceful life’ in Kherson”. War is peace, murder is love. So no surprises here, at all: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/16/russian-troops-kill-ukrainian-musician-yuriy-kerpatenko-for-refusing-role-in-kherson-concert

I think I can see a slight difference in numbers between that and what @pmp10 claims.

Yep, it's the "Kill the Giants" message for me, too. Given that it seems to appear in so many early-gave saves, I suppose it's going to be fixed soon. Ha! See what an optimist I am.

I wonder how that compares to earlier eras in terms of percentages. There's probably a study on the topic somewhere.

Indeed. No way am I going to continue my game before I can load my save and have that Banner message not appear.

Thanks! So it's not just my game, then. The quest doesn't appear in my list, either, but I suppose that's because I'm not even in the part of the game where quests related to Drezen appear. The quest is far ahead of where I am.

That's almost certainly how it is. I think we can apply Stephen King's dictum on writing, when it comes to what can be taught. You can't make a good writer out of a bad writer. You can't make a great writer out of a good writer. You can't make a genius writer out of anyone. What you can do, however, is make a good writer out of an average writer, and that's a very useful thing to do and worth the effort both for the teacher and the student. I am also quite fond of the idea that great talent hits the target that others cannot hit, whereas genius hits the target that others couldn't even see. It captures the nature of genius: it expands the realm of what is regarded as possible or sometimes even existing.

Finland doesn't look good but 1) it is not in NATO yet and 2) it has an exceptionally long border with Russia. So it is one of those countries that constitute an exception of sorts.

Well, a certain percentage of people(*) fulfil the definition of genius. You can go through history and estimate which percentage of people have had access to education and opportunity, and start working from there, if you want. The numbers are not going to make you all that pleased. For instance, essentially all female genius has been lost throughout nearly all of human history. The United States, with its astonishing inequality, continues to waste an awful lot of genius all the time, although it is true that there are grants and whatnot for exceptionally gifted people -- but it is obvious that an awful lot of people like this remain unnoticed and in extraordinarily poor circumstances. The US of course attracts a great deal of talent from elsewhere, so this balances things quite a lot, but it's still a dreadful state of affairs. (I'm not saying the US is particularly bad, when compared to everywhere else, but it could be so much better if it wanted to. If it cared even a little bit.) (*) This division is not equal among peoples, though. For example, the Ashkenazi Jews are a remarkably intelligent group -- their average IQ is up to 15 points higher than that of just people in general. So the average Ashkenazi Jew is more intelligent than 85% of otherwise average people. This is, of course, a hotly contested topic. I have no personal opinion on it, so please don't read this as being for or against anything. BTW, I also don't care if they're socially awkward. That's perfectly fine. But being utter and complete a-holes is a different thing altogether. Sometimes even that, though, can be sort of forgiven or at least treated with some measure of understanding. A friend of mine is a professor of physics and he talks of a certain other physicist who he regards as an almost certain Nobel price winner in the making. This person is extraordinarily difficult to deal with -- he is, from his personal point of view, surrounded by people who take ages to understand the stuff that is really quite obvious to him, so he gets irritated by other people's stupidity all the time. I also figure he's really very lonely, as a human being, and can talk to almost no one on his own level.

There is nothing either socialist or capitalist in what I said. Economic theory doesn't enter into it at all.

Is there? My sense is that super rich people themselves are inclined to assume they are experts in everything. This is much more prevalent than the phenomenon you describe, in my view. Of course, this would have to be thoroughly studied, so I don't think either of us really knows.

Dear all, I suppose some of you may have an early save game still in existence. Like, maybe from the Shield Maze or anywhere very early in the game. I wonder if one of you could load it and see what happens. My bug from Thursday persists. Here's the original comment on it, from earlier on in this thread: There was a small new update today or yesterday, and it messed up my savegame: I'm still in Kenabres doing the early quests like Blackwing Library and so on, and immediately upon loading my save the game tells me that I've just completed the quest Banner Over the Citadel, having killed the giants. I even went back to my first surviving savegame where I'm still in the Shield Maze, and the same thing pops up there, too. I get the XP and everything (I know this because I gain a level upon loading my save), but clearly something is broken.

Nice: there was a small new update today or yesterday, and it messed up my savegame: I'm still in Kenabres doing the early quests like Blackwing Library and so on, and immediately upon loading my save the game tells me that I've just completed the quest Banner Over the Citadel, having killed the giants. I even went back to my first surviving savegame where I'm still in the Shield Maze, and the same thing pops up there, too. I get the XP and everything (I know this because I gain a level upon loading my save), but clearly something is broken. I suppose there's nothing to do but wait for Owlcat to fix it; I suppose there's no easy practical way to revert to the previous patch.

Messianic thinking is part of the overall Russian approach in this conflict. It is important, for example, that Patriarch Kirill has given his blessing to the whole enterprise. Russia is not only an empire or a wannabe empire, but this sort of religious fanaticism is also quite prevalent in its upper echelons. Satanism is a perfectly rational enemy, from this standpoint. Plenty has been written about this messianism. One example: https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/2022-05-11/ty-article-opinion/.premium/putins-holy-war-the-messianic-myths-fueling-russias-assault-on-ukraine/00000180-d65b-d452-a1fa-d7ff0ad60000

This Twitter link doesn't work. However, if you change the final numer 1 to 0, it will work. I did not want to post the real link because the content is explosive (no death visible, though). The reason I post this is because I think this is the most difficult-to-believe instance I have seen so far. How can this happen? Where is the training? Are they blind? Seriously. If the moderators regard this post as inappropriate, simply delete it. In that case, mea culpa and apologies. https://twitter.com/auto_glam/status/1580289785050337281

Russia has released images of the truck. The truthfulness of the images becomes under question immediately. See thread. Numerous inconsistencies.

It's an encounter that is very very likely to destroy anyone who doesn't metagame, on the first try. Granted, there are fairly obvious signs in the dungeon saying that something nasty is close, but still. On what difficulty did you ultimately do it? I confess I came down from Core quite a bit.

Ahh, sorry about that. I was quoting a source in a language not familiar to almost anyone here. Here's Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-fsb-arrests-eight-crimea-bridge-blast-2022-10-12/

FSB has arrested eight people in connection with the bridge attack. Nationalities: Russian, Georgian, Ukrainian. Whether they have anything to do with it is anyone's guess. Russia says, for the moment, that explosives were hidden in the truck and then detonated on the bridge. Whether this implies that it was not a suicide mission cannot be determined from the wording I have read. But the sense I get was that apparently the driver wasn't aware and that the detonation was from distance -- but this is my intepretation from an ambiguous wording, which itself is a translation. I wish I spoke Russian.

The only thing I checked, by the way, was some security camera footage from behind the vehicles on the bridge. I checked it twice, and both times the immediate impression / sense I got was that the explosion was in front of the truck, not precisely where the truck was. Probably not true, though -- just a faulty impression. Another thought that crossed my mind was that boy, that one car surely was close and I hope they're all right. Probably can't hear very well, though.

Not only is Russia engaged in two types of "ethnic cleansing", i.e. destroying selected populations both home and abroad, it has also dedicated itself to destroying education both home and abroad. This looks quite devastating.

This struck me as odd to such an extent that I decided to pay some attention to it. Not odd in the sense that I don't believe what you say about the media you've watched, but odd in the sense that the picture you describe bears little relation to the media I expose myself to. (This, btw, is an excellent concrete example of a phenomenon that I've noticed in various ways throughout this war.) So, today, for instance, Helsingin Sanomat (Finnish language, apparently still the biggest newspaper in Scandinavia / Nordic countries) carries an article describing three explanatory theories in decreasing order of likelihood. The article quotes military personnel from various countries. The article lists the truck bomb theory as the most likely one (which, being no expert as I'm sure you'll agree by now, I also consider the most likely one), and this explanation itself contains the possibilities of remote activation or suicide mission. There is no shirking whatsoever around the subject of suicide mission or the way it is worded. I don't know where the BBC is going, but much of what I've seen in recent years makes me believe that it is one English-speaking media that gets very squeamish in precisely the way you describe, and it's impossible for me to see much good in it. I could say something contumelious about a culture that has more blind spots than it can even conceive of, but that wouldn't do much good, either. Anyway, while the desperate attemps you describe are indeed silly, there are good media out there, too.

Those three were the last I saw -- but I haven't seen any official notification from Armenia. We shall see soon.