xzar_monty

Sorry about the necro, but here's my experience of how these things felt when playing the game: After the first island, neither grazes nor crits ever seemed to matter at all. I didn't read the combat log much, so in fact they may have done, perhaps even a lot, but this was not conveyed to me in-game. Also, really high penetration didn't seem to matter at all, but low penetration most certainly did, a lot. This is neither praise nor criticism, just the sense I got when playing.

Here's a former superpower returned to action: out of shape, out of sorts, badly coordinated and utterly unprepared but still able to wreak immeasurable havoc in its apparent desire to ruin its reputation and destroy its legacy, thus essentially forcing anyone watching to hope that all this will be over as soon as possible. No parallels with anything in the world right now, of course.

@Gorth, this goes off topic for this thread, but here's a good example of how to conduct murders. This doesn't appear to be the way Russia operates. It's a grisly subject, but this is extremely interesting. Israel tends to be quite good. Again, just take a look at how ruthless Israel is and how little it apparently cares for any fallout. Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mabhouh Footage:

I absolutely don't underestimate them. You're right, they don't care much about fallout. They don't care about co-operating, either. One of the things that surfaced with Snowden's NSA leaks was that while Israel was very keen to get all the information it could from the US, it didn't really want to reciprocate. The US wasn't happy, of course. Apparently, Israel couldn't have cared less.

I wonder whether the two recent oligarchs killed with their families were high profile successes or murder-suicides out of absolute panic. But yes, Russia does have a great amount of failure in its past. Interestingly, so does Britain. (Well, any nation or culture that's been around for a while has failures, but Russia and Britain come to mind first when I think of high-profile failures. And heck, even Israel got a huge blemish from the Lillehammer affair.)

Senior Russian diplomat resigns: https://unwatch.org/exclusive-senior-russian-diplomat-at-u-n-defects/ His open letter:

Apparently, this classic 3 wounded to 1 killed ratio does not apply to the Russian army because a) wounded are left behind to die, b) medical care on the front is at an abysmal level. It's significantly worse than 3 to 1 with Russia, but the exact number is impossible to say. This bit of info comes again from a military expert.

A big reason for losses high up in the hierarchy is that the system is indeed extraordinaly hierarchical in the sense that initiative is positively discouraged, and in strong terms. Thus, when logistical or other problems occur, someone lower in the command chain is unwilling to make a choice, because it could be wrong and the consequences would be severe. Thus, someone from higher up the command chain will have to come over and solve the problem, which may mean long telephone calls, which may mean Ukrainians listening, which may mean sniper fire or missile strike. According to the military experts I've listened to, you don't get stuff like this in most modern armies, but the Russian army is different.

I hadn't even heard of either.

There was a period where his quality dropped, this is true. However, I don't buy into the editing argument at all: Stephen King wouldn't have wanted an editor like that, he's genuinely ambitious. I've got decades of experience with the publishing industry, and King's certainly counted among the "good guys" in terms of genuine literary ambition and drive, although I don't think anybody thinks he's always successful. This editing thing is really big, I'm not sure if a lot of people know about the extent of it. I mean, books don't just appear, they really are worked on for quite some time. Example: I'm currently working on a "superstar" memoir that's only coming out in November. But a whole lot of people are already going through the essentially finished manuscript, trying to make it as good as possible, checking and fixing. I wholeheartedly recommend that you read Under the Dome. Of these "new" books of his, it's certainly the best. It's very well written. The ending is a letdown, but surely everyone must know that from the start: he sets a scene that cannot be explained satisfactorily, and leaving it unexplained wouldn't work, either. But the yarn itself is excellent.

Yeah. When I said I'd be a harsh editor for him, one of the things I alluded to was that I'd cut down his literary elephantiasis. Very few of his long works really justify their size (Under the Dome does, and IT does for the most part, but stuff like The Stand certainly does not). Some of the short stuff is very good indeed. Jerusalem's Lot, for instance, is just great -- a marvelous little Cthulhu story from King. Funnily enough, it's clearly set in a different fictional universe from his novel 'Salem's Lot (which is also excellent).

No he's not. Mary Higgins Clark, for one, was more productive. Barbara Cartland was way more prodctive. James Patterson still is, but he doesn't really count because he's a collective working under one name. Joyce Carol Oates and King are very close to each other in terms of productivity -- they are also two remarkable writers in the sense that they are both very productive and (at their best) really quite good. This is rare. And just to remind people that there is a world outside the English-speaking one, writers like Ryoki Inoue and Corín Tellado are so much more productive than Stephen King that it's not even funny. And that's just two of them.

I haven't seen Cujo so I can't comment on that. King is a great but very uneven talent. He's written some excellent books, but overall I feel he's written too many books and he hasn't edited them well enough (heck, if I were his editor, I would be very harsh on some of the stuff he's got down in print). I don't think he's written anything particularly good since Under the Dome, which was very good indeed -- although you have to excuse him the blatantly artificial explanation to the whole setting in the first place. But then I don't think it could have been resolved properly anyway. King occupies an interesting place in American literature, as he's a "genre" writer whose devices are much more "literary" than those of many of his peers. He's obviously not a great American writer like Dickinson, Poe, Faulkner or Twain, but he's certainly good and the rancor he's received from people like Harold Bloom doesn't really look justified. (But then, neither is Bloom's rancor towards David Foster Wallace justified, it's just petty.)

We must remember the long history of this. You can ask Hungary (1956), Prague (1968) or Afganistan (1979?) what it was like to receive "help" from the Soviet Union. Few things are as lethal as Russian "help". At the moment, if you ask Russia, there is no war in Ukraine. And so on.

Again, no one has suggested war guilt is ever going to be admitted, so I don't know why you're going on about that. Withdrawal can be described as "victory". Financial reparations can be explained in any number of ways. As for the limits to what can be spun: there are limits but they are pretty out there. Spinning that the atrocities in Bucha either didn't happen or were staged or were committed by the Ukrainian nazis was easy, there has been no great opposition to that. Thus, spinning that the mission has been accomplished and Russia has won sounds perfectly reasonable to me. It is going to be accepted, I don't think there's any question about this. Even if the facts are that Russia retreats in defeat after extraordinarily big losses to its military. Of course we don't know if Russia is going to lose and retreat, but should that happen, it's easy to spin it as a resounding victory. Alternate realities are a reality. Look at North Korea: that's the direction Russia is heading. It's not there yet, but that's the way it's going. No opposition, no political parties deserving the title, no proper press, etc.

Btw, the alternate version of The Shining is also very good. Highly recommended.

Carrie is really good, I'm actually not sure which one's better, the movie or the book. The Shining is excellent as a movie, but it's not the book, i.e. the story has been changed around quite a bit. But it's an excellent movie, no question. The Shawshank Redemption is an interesting case, as it exemplifies several problems that the vast majority of American movies of certain type tend to have. The movie is ok-to-good, and the acting is excellent-to-superb, but there are serious problems: the story has received some Hollywood treatment of the evil-loses-and-goodies-win variety (of course the warden has to die, of course the friends have to meet outside the prison in the end, although neither of these exist in the Stephen King original, etc.) and it also follows the age-old American movie wisdom of "violence always works, so let's show an awful lot of it". This violence thing seriously detracts from the movie's potential power. There is no question that prisons are brutal places, but this brutality and oppressiveness could have been conveyed with a couple of effective scenes that create an atmosphere, but instead we get one beating after another. And where have we seen that before? In every American movie of this type made before. (Just look at how powerfully Stephen King handles this question of violence in his original story.) I think Peter Jackson's The Hobbit (the first part, the only one I saw) put me off movie adaptations for the rest of my life. I mean, it was awful beyond description(*). So yes, the written versions of just about everything are generally superior. (*) It has to be said there were great difficulties with the story in the first place. Like, among the dwarves, essentially only Thorin has a personality in the book, the rest just tag along. But you can't have people just tagging along in the movie, because the viewer is going to actually see them, whereas in the book the reader can easily ignore them. However, Jackson butchered the whole thing nevertheless.

But you misread Snyder. Putin has an out even if he doesn't admit defeat. Of course he will never admit defeat. He will claim victory even if he loses. The press will be behind him, as it is now. Anyone who stands against that will be in trouble. And yes, there is the possibility of the political system becoming unstable. But that possibility is there already, right now.

Boy I didn't know it was going to be that big on the forum!

@kanisathamay be interested in a 17-point thread by Timothy Snyder on the question of giving Putin an "out". Snyder's point is that Putin always has it, as he is a dictator. As far as "changing the subject" (quoting Snyder) is concerned, we have a very recent example of this. The president of Finland had a telephone conversation with Putin. Putin argued that Russia has to "liberate" the east of Ukraine from the nazis. President Niinistö countered by saying that what about Kyiv, then, why was Kyiv attacked, it has nothing to do with the east of Ukraine. The journalists gathered around Niinistö were very keen to hear how Putin responded to this. "He said nothing. Nothing at all", Niinistö told them. "And then he changed the subject."

I am not uncertain about Russia's war crimes or military failures, either. I don't see any reason to doubt them, given the overwhelming evidence. However, every individual story has the potential to raise questions about whether it's true or not. Questions about Putin's health or Shoigu's heart attack(s), for instance, are very much in the air.

This is true. There is a certain "small world" phenomenon going on, i.e. papers using each other as sources and thus both inadvertently and deliberately creating a veneer of credibility. (David Lodge's superb novel Small World is depiction of certain academics justifying and enabling their existence essentially by quoting, commenting on and referring to each other's work, without any connection to the wider world.) The situation with the press is getting both better and worse, and it's hard to know what to do or sometimes even think about it. For instance, The Guardian is head and shoulders above quite a few English rags, but then The Guardian itself has sunk into political correctness to such an extent that it's become an utter embarrassment in many ways; very hard to read.

Wrong thread for this, but in case you're interested, you might want to check Oded Galor's brand new book The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality. It delves deeper into this and other questions and is, in my view, recommended reading.

Off field, yes, but I'll continue for just a little longer. I used to have a rule whereby any printed media that ever uses exclamation marks on its front page is to be ignored forever. There used to be quite a few of those in the UK. Also, the Sun, on its own, has committed so many journalistic "sins" that it's definitely to be ignored forever. Btw, speaking of high school, I think it's wonderful that the Sun caters to its readers to the extent that it's prepared to "dumb down" its language even when it quotes people. There's a (linguistically) famous example from 1985 when a member of the royal family commented on an unpleasant event, saying, "I shall have to live with it". The Sun quoted her as saying, "I will have to live with it". That's delightful.

Here's an interesting juxtaposition suggesting that Russia's understanding of its capacities has taken a step towards realism. First, we have the president of Finland commenting on how Putin's strong demands made late in 2021 were an important factor in Finland's decision to apply for NATO membership: https://yle.fi/news/3-12446141 Second, we have Lavrov saying how Finland and Sweden joining NATO makes no big difference: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-lavrov-says-finland-sweden-joining-nato-makes-no-big-difference-2022-05-17/ If this means that Lavrov is essentially saying, "Well, we can't do anything", then that's quite different from Putin's earlier message of, "You can't join NATO".