Bartimaeus

More like my previous attempts at watching the draft have killed my excitement of watching them, so a word of warning that it might do the same for you, .

Trump also pardoned Scooter Libby, who was previously convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury...by a special counsel. We're getting the message loud and clear, Trump. Corruption is king, it would seem. Whatever they found through Cohen must've truly been terrible - the conversation went from Mueller and Trump planning to sit down for a deposition to Trump tearing that meeting up, calling Mueller's investigation an attack on the American people, pardoning a previous obstructer of justice, and reportedly setting him on creating his own Saturday Night Massacre.

Yeah, thanks for the insightful words. Still, I find the draft very exciting. Question is if I will have the endurance to get up at 4 am (and stay awake) and watch it all unfold. As someone who has attempted to watch it a few times before, I would strongly, strongly recommend against it. For me, it usually feels like my time is being very deliberately wasted by the network airing it through the non-stop and mindless chatter of its annoying talking heads. I literally get more excitement from just waiting to see the names pop up as they actually happen on either reddit or some kind of draft news feed. It doesn't help that it's split over several days, and they all take hours. Funner to read the analysis after the fact than wasting your time actually trying to suffer through the actual progamme proper.

Dez and Romo were gold together, but he has had trouble establishing the rapport with his new QB that you'd like to see out of your #1 WR. Definitely not worth the 14 million a year that he was getting when he had very mediocre #1 numbers. @Mannock: Yeah, that seems about right. Don't pay too much attention to "draft analysts" and the such - they aren't too bad at figuring out the needs of a given team, but the draft never, ever works out the way they think it will (and that's not really their fault, it's just that there's a lot of unpredictability with the way players fall and rise and teams have different drafting philosophies in regards to what positions they value most, or whether they want to draft purely for quality of player vs. need, etc.). Especially in regards to the Packers, who have been very difficult to gauge since Ted Thompson became our GM. With a new GM and in a rather unusually QB-heavy draft, it's very difficult to say what will happen.

Reports are saying that Trump is set on imminently firing both Attorney General Sessions and his deputy Rosenstein in an attempt to derail the Mueller investigation.

I'm not really in enough on college prospects to have any meaningful opinion on whom to draft. I think with Clay Matthews being on the last year of his contract (combined with his age and frequent nagging injuries), a top EDGE/pass rusher probably makes the most sense with our draft position and the way the draft is slated to fall because of all the QB picks that are likely to happen. I personally don't care for drafting CBs, because it seems like 99% of them need a couple of years to develop to be anything less than terrible, and I'm not sure we can afford to wait that long...which is kind of why I'm hoping we sign another mid-level veteran like Breaux or DRC, and punt the CB question another year. We may be waiting to see how the draft goes before deciding on that, though. Amentep: Yeah, I agree. It was sort of a joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Coast_bias

Yeah, Dallas is in the "central" timezone, or -1 compared to EST. The article I read said 8PM EST, though, which means 7PM CST, which seems about right for the entire country. East coast bias means it'll be pretty early for the West coast, but that's just how it works with a country that spans 3 timezones (...well, more if you count the non-contiguous states and territories). As for Kevin King...I've already had this discussion with other Packers fans who all seem to remember him playing better than I do. I only noticed him making a handful of good plays the entire year, and he ended up being rated very poorly by player analyzers like PFF and NFL1000 as one of the very worst CBs in the league last year (#115 out of 121 qualifying players on PFF - NFL1000 was a little kinder, ranking him 57/76 qualifying CBs). Though they are very obviously not perfect, either being even in the same ballpark means he was pretty terrible. I hope to see better things from our defense this next year.

We discussed it a few pages ago. Most of the people that saw it didn't care for it (besides like one guy, Orogun)...and I personally didn't see it all, especially after the RLM guys said it wasn't terrible, but just kind of dumb and poor.

What I searched said that coverage will begin at 7PM EST on April 26th, but the first round actually starts at 8PM EST. I had mixed feelings about the Randall-Kizer trade. We didn't actually get any picks for the trade - we just swapped 4th round picks, IIRC. Randall was also actually our best CB last year, too, in a very CB-bereft team (also, he cost very little to keep, as he was still on his late 1st round rookie contract). Rumors also say that the coaches strongly recommended against drafting Randall to begin with, but our GM stubbornly did it anyways, and not only did it not work out, that entire draft was a bit of a disaster. Wouldn't be terribly shocked if the badness of that draft had a big hand in getting our GM replaced.

That's a new one.

​ That guy always seemed pretty darned sketchy, so I'm not terribly surprised he was proven to be a cheater.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-trolls-denied-syrian-gas-attackbefore-it-happened?ref=home ​ ​Russian troll accounts accuse Syrian rebels of the chemical attack being a false flag operation...weeks before it even happened?

​He was pretty widely (IIRC) considered a top ten talent before the draft, but there were rumors about character concerns, and it seems like a lot of teams did (and actually stuck to) their homework.

Yes, that does seem like the most likely possibility.

Someone mentioned Occam's Razor earlier - the explanation that requires the least amount of assumptions is probably that they simply got lucky.

Business Insider reports that Trump will warn Russia of where it plans to strike in advance. I believe Obama did the same thing - probably the right call, even if it sounds like it plays into Trump's Russia infatuation. Although Trump did criticize Obama for it on Twitter at the time, which is what makes it funny. BBC also reports that the OPCW agreed with the UK in its findings regarding the nerve agent assassination attempt.

nope, it's her and the deep state's fault that this is happening to begin with

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan calling it quits, will not seek re-election. Adds on to an already disastrous wave of retirements for the Republicans. Retirement tracker: https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/10/politics/house-retirement-tracker/index.html

The Red Letter Media guys got me excited for it with this video Yeah, that's one great. My favorite Star Wars video of theirs, though, is actually the utterly asinine "Vader's armor description" video that I cannot believe is a real thing. I cannot believe the patently ridiculous crap these authors have written about something that very obviously never needed any explanation. Some of this stuff just sounds like really, really bad fanfiction. or tl;dw: vader's every waking moment is a living hell

...The Solo movie? The one that looks like the worst one yet (excepting the prequels) that also had a media circus for its problems? ...Yeah, don't be too optimistic there.

Trump's reaction was amusing His threat to fire Mueller, not so much.

Trump's personal lawyer had his offices raided by the FBI in a no-knock raid, with all sorts of documents seized. Yikes. What in the world did they have that a judge felt comfortable signing off on raiding the president's lawyer? Will have to wait and see, but that is...bold, to say the least. ​ ​(e): According to Trump's lawyer's lawyer, it was at least party done on the basis of a referral made by Special Counsel Mueller.

...Honestly, a NWN sequel makes way, way more sense than a BG sequel ever would have.

I could forgive them for their aesthetics aging poorly - as most early 3D games have - but the real sin was in how it and NWN2 (and Dragon Age: Origins to a degree as well) played. They're so clunky. Screwing around with the camera all the bloody time is so miserable, especially whenever you're trying to switch between characters which is constantly resetting the camera, a movement system that feels like it's alternating between being on ice and being in a swamp, buttons that randomly don't fire or are sticky or slow to fire...and then the fact that you have so many buttons on top of it, many of them thrown into a horribly wonky right click radial menu...oh my word, it is so difficult to play either NWNs when it feels like I am just constantly fighting with the game's UI and controls. The IE games' perspectives, UIs, and controls are antiquated, but they work efficiently for the most part (with the major exception of having too many spells), especially if you master (or rebind) the Fx keys. No screwing around with the camera, either - one flat perspective is bliss in its simplicity in comparison. I was never able to get comfortable with either of the NWNs, even after years of playing them. (e): Also, it doesn't help that the combat systems in all the 3D games feel terribly slow-placed (...in addition to being mildly to moderately unresponsive in general). BG1 suffers from this as well for the first few levels, but not so much once you start hitting around level 4-5, and certainly not at all in BG2 - you butcher weaker mobs in seconds, and a group of stronger ones can butcher one of your characters in about the same time.

​RIP.