xzar_monty

I saw King Crimson close to 20 years ago, and they were indeed great. Adrian Belew is unlikely to come to Northern Europe anytime soon and I'm unlikely to travel to see him, but if the opportunity arises, of course I'll go. I once did a long interview with him; he's wonderfully articulate and extremely personable. I think the following is one of his best solo compositions. It started as several, in fact, but after failing to finish them satisfactorily he decided to put the best bits of each together. The result is excellent. Interesting tuning, too!

I would think that being vindicated like this is excellent in the long run, but surely the first year or so after launch must have been a harrowing disappointment -- and even more so because the developers must have known the game itself was wonderful.

Are you joking? I mean, did you seriously think it was isolated to towns like Bucha? Dear Bruce, it is the norm. I'm sorry, that was patronizing. But how could you have thought otherwise?

But even that is a world away from "Nothing's ever free". If the news on Iran is true, it is interesting in the sense that it demonstrates Russia's dearth of allies. Not particularly massive in any other sense, though.

Sorry for having no sense of humor, but an awful lot of the best stuff is. Ukraine has received huge amounts of support for free. Some of it from me, even, although of course not a lot. EDIT: Hmm. Apparently Iran does not recognize Russia's annexation of those four Ukrainian territories. Haven't seen this one from any really credible source. I wonder if it's true.

I decided to start a new game on the Enhanced Edition. A question: how do people handle the Shield Maze and other early areas on Unfair difficulty? What I mean is that there is hardly any room for failure / error / bad luck on the very early XP levels, and if your enemies are a lot stronger than you are and you generally don't have any equipment or tactical options to rely on, you're likely to be in trouble. I'm playing on Core, and even that's hard enough at the start. Do players on Unfair just reload an awful lot? Like, how do you deal with that Water Elemental on Unfair when you're at level 2? @Gromnir, any insight on this?

That's just so poor. Come on. I'm not sure where you're coming from, but the relationship between wealth and slavery doesn't work like that. EDIT: Apparently, about 700 000 people have left Russia since the mobilization began. The number of permanent departures cannot be determined (sort of obviously...). https://www.forbes.ru/society/478827-rossiu-posle-21-sentabra-pokinuli-okolo-700-000-grazdan

Let us not get ahead of ourselves, but there are some rather peculiar if not altogether proven signs out there.

Is the Kherson front really collapsing, is Russia really having a day as bad as that? Fingers crossed!

In the Sandman comic, one of the characters says to another, "If you ever want to speak again... shut up." It seems to me that you are completely unaware of or ignoring the severity of the situation, the relevance of sharing one's opinion and the position Musk is in. We, on this forum, are essentially anonymous usernames engaged in a debate that has no consequences, so sharing one's opinion here is perfectly all right. It's like a group of people making noise in a pub. Elon Musk is nothing like that, and the only things his suggestion demonstrate relate to his lack of human decency and sense of proportion. His opinion is completely uncalled for, he has no qualifications, no knowledge, nothing. Essentially all similar figures have understood that it's not their place to present detailed proposals for peace negotiations, but Musk has reached such a level of twáttiness that he is unable to understand this. I would suggest that Musk heed that Sandman character.

That's true, and coming from them, it's part of propaganda-related tactics. From Musk, though, it's improper in the extreme, not that he'd (likely) understand it or give a damn, even if he did understand. It's something of the equivalent of Madonna coming along and presenting to the world an in-her-opinion really smashing and boy-it's-gonna-work treatment schedule for Michael Schumacher. The relatives would want her to just go and look a double-barreled one in the eye. (Madonna wouldn't do any such thing, btw.) There's a school of thought that simple human decency is an old-fashioned and needless concept, but I'd argue that it's not.

The worrying side of this is that for Russia, both the absolute number and the ratio appears to be much higher than for Ukraine. About 80% of the 144 million people in Russia are ethnic Russians, so there are about 29 million non-Russians (ethnically). That's about 14.5 million non-Russian males. Out of those, a significant proportion are of the fighting age. Russia is most definitely willing to sacrifice every single one of them, and that's a lot of people.

According to Putin, Russia is at war against the collective West. That is what he said last Friday. Keep in mind, though, that Russia is not and has never been at war with Ukraine. I am currently engaged in a work project that has led me to some Pravda articles from the 1930s, before and during Stalin's Great Terror. I am both fascinated and stunned by how identical the tone is to what Putin is spewing today. The proclamations are characterized by an extremely odd combination of utter triumphalism and clinical paranoia(*). It's not often you see that. It seems likely that stuff like that may sound convincing to those already enhtralled by the same kind of thinking, but to anyone looking in from the outside it looks utterly childish and crazy. (*) Teeth-rattlingly stupid descriptions of Soviet military might interspersed with scaremongering about a secret group of poor farmhands and illiterate pigherders in rural Poltava designed to overthrow the Soviet government. As hard as it is to believe, this latter part is a genuine example.

No, it doesn't. There are significant degrees of difference. If you insist on ignoring them, that's fine, but they're still there. This is not to say that the US is somehow free of blemishes, even significant ones.

I must say it is particularly heartwarming to see such unfettered idealism during these difficult times. (I completely agree, btw!)

It seems to me that Bruce is fundamentally wrong because he persists in the idea that the current Russia has any interest in adhering to anything that it has put pen to paper about.

I agree that SpaceX, as an idea, was fascinating and admirable. The applications and attempts I've read about have looked somewhat different. Anyway, thanks, I see where you're coming from.

Why did you look up to him? I mean, what did he do to earn that kind of respect? He is yet another example of how excess attention and wealth tend to exacerbate human frailties: once you get to the point where you can indulge in all your puerile fantasies, your character is likely to suffer(*). There is a parallel to this in war, by the way: once you have helpless people utterly in your power, you get to indulge in all that is most despicable in you as a human being -- and thus we see an awful lot of needless cruelty. (*) David Gilmour once pointed out that it takes an extraordinarily strong psyche to not get derailed by rock star level attention. I've done long interviews with several of them, and the experience has been quite interesting.

I can't see an attempted genocide as a subject where trolling is a good idea. But it is true that there are people for whom everything is entertainment.

Quietly hilarious from Peskov: borders yet to be determined.

That's wonderful news!

@Gorth:

I wasn't able to find a difficulty level that was even remotely pleasing throughout. It was like listening to the Final Cut by Pink Floyd: the dynamic range is too wide, you have to keep adjusting the volume, which really sucks. With Deadfire, the difficulty curve was the strangest of all: the first isle contained a couple of extremely difficult battles (Gorecci Street, the Digsite), but after that there was essentially nothing even close to that difficulty. Very, very odd.

Russian losses apparently escalating, perhaps even significantly: https://twitter.com/ragnarbjartur/status/1576501025728364545/photo/1

Incidentally, the first time I saw that lady, I ended up not even realizing that the fight is difficult. I cast Slumber on her, and then did a coup the grace. The odds of that Slumber succeeding must have been 1/20, but it did succeed. What an odd piece of luck.