bugarup

It would not have been fine, as I think it's quite apparent now that Russia cannot - nor does it want to, or ever wanted in the first place - play nice with its neighbours. And judging by recent "NATO or no NATO" polls, Finland have not yet forgotten Talvisota as well. On slightly more bittersweet news, here's the ballsiest woman of Russia. Fingers crossed KGB filth do not disappear her.

I just had that not-so-pathetic Quasit fight. He hit Lann with insanity (no big deal because Lann was away and two floors down, thanks to mass dimension door being not so mass) and made half a party tired, but other than that he was occupied putting back his buffs that my Lich kept peeling off him. Little bugger didn't let me loot his corpse too until much later and much bloated. Lich spells are...something else. Selective Domain of the Hungry Flesh is a legal cheat, and there's one buff that makes green skulls with orange eyes float around you. So pretty. I think I'll make another Lich run sometime again, utilizing undead friends only. Chapter 4 is starting to seriously annoy me, though, even after I said f♦ck it to the gimmick and started just teleporting everywhere via toybox. Loading times quadrupled and there are a lot of loading screens, framerate is prolly in single digits and everyone in the city is either an arsehole, a liar, or both. Random weird bugs started to manifest, like all my level 6 spells got nullified after rest once and Woljif acting like a summon after we solved his family problems, which I sincerely hope is temporary because I bought him new shiny daggers that deal STR damage with each hit and he now deletes things via attribute drain. I think I'll go back to Chapter 3 with another party while I wait for the new patch to be patched (I've read it improves Chapter 4 performance quite a bit). Chapter 3 was good.

Someone should make a counter-offer to these guys to work as, say, Lidl cashiers. Might be a bit more stressful or so I heard, but with slimmer chance of workplace death.

Very interesting article on Russia and that festering pustule of lies and delusions that is ruling it: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/stephen-kotkin-putin-russia-ukraine-stalin

Plus in two months there's May 9, Russia's most sacrosanct holiday of victory over former best friend Nazi Germany. Its celebration is already as pompous as it was during Soviet era, and jingoism was getting through the roof lately too, so botoxic agent will absolutely want to have something to show off. Add White House's warning about possible chemical or bio weapon attack plus Russian propaganda's current spin about "bioweapon labs", add them talking about officially ditching European Council along with its pesky Convention on Human Rights (not that Russia ever paid heed to it, but official denouncement is another thing), so...yeah. I'm afraid we did not see the worst of him yet. P.S.: "According to Konashenkov, according to the documents, the American side planned to study pathogens in birds, bats and reptiles and the possibility of these animals carrying African swine fever and anthrax": https://ria.ru/20220310/biolaboratorii-1777416748.html (Official state news channel, can recommend for science fiction fans because it gives this bizarre feeling of peeking into parallel world)

Lithuania. We have a lot of...history...with Russia. Also, unfortunately, a border.

Realization that if you give in to psychotic degenerate murderer's blackmail, he will not stop there but keep coming and demanding more, can be a decent enough unifier sometimes.

Had my second funniest* fight yesterday, some 300-firebombs-per-round asshat picked a fight, had to reload due not having fire protection on, then got lucky with initiative and positioning, and the dude committed suicide by attack of opportunity in two rounds. *The funniest still is me exploding my entire party to death with some sort of chain reaction virulent bomb lich spell. Twice in a row, because "I'll just make it selective then". Froze my PC for, like 3 minutes too.

Congratulations to Russia for becoming the world leader in some field! Go Russia, I believe you can do even better! https://www.castellum.ai/russia-sanctions-dashboard

Yeah, no door problem with base game, not yet patched (waiting for new patches to fix things this patch broke, also mod updates). Chapter 3 for me was like Icewind Dale - good fun dungeoneering, minimal rudimentary storytelling. Definitely taking different parties through it again, but I will miss Lich spells very much. Speaking of Lich things, I've gotten quite fond of Zach the undead professor. "Student, why are you traipsing about demon infested wastelands when you have so many things to learn?! Don't use queen's banishment of you as an excuse for your laziness!" Reminds me a bit of that arrogant cyclops I defeated and then gave a job in Kingmaker. Maybe two hours into Chapter 4 and already hating its gimmick with a passion of ten thousand blue suns. Is there a thing I can toybox in to help with the bullsh†t other than a hundred of wands of dimension door, mass? The place itself is pretty, but basically just a Sigil rip-off with less interesting denizens. Also tanks PC performance something awful.

There's also Nikita Khrushchev's territorial redistribution in the sixties, but it would be even harder to pin that on Ukraine than pacts of Sovietistan's collapse. Although Gorth seems to think that "referendum" with Russian military present in Crimea was fair and square () and has this theory that Putler is an anime girl who only went criminally insane after mean girls of West kept blocking his heartfelt, earnest efforts to be accepted as part of the "West mean girls" club or something, so maybe things really look upside down from the distant Down Under. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Halfway into second season of "Stranger things". More Stephen King references than you can shake a roque mallet at, which is a good thing, but too much soap opera otherwise. Perpetually heightened emotions, people being oblivious, blase or just plain careless about cryptic sh†t happening, so much high school teen drama, bleh. The kids are alright though.

So I, uh, made a new friend: Keeps following me around, isn't doing much else, but then there are no enemies on the level no more. I'm a bit wary given his notorious reputation.

That's one good looking merchandise, but the red thing with CDs on the right thwarts the view. You should post another picture without it.

France and Poland had pretty famous insurgencies during the World War 2. Seem to be doing fine in the West.

I think that at least a part of it can be explained by choice between accepting the truth and realizing you suddenly are a citizen of twenty-first century's nazi Germany, and nobody wants to one day wake up as a nazi German, least of all a russian. A very, VERY big part of soviet identity that's been inherited by post-soviet russia is its victory over the third reich. So big in fact, that soviets appropriated a large chunk of Second World War, called it Great Patriotic War and they did it not only because they wanted to avoid the uncomfortable truth of stalin's russia and hitler's germany being bosom buddies before hitler backstabbed his mustachioed comrade by attacking Sovietistan mere months before its own planned attack on Germany, or because they wanted to minimize the role of Western Allies, but because nazi germany left a truly abysmal trail of atrocities as it went in and then got pushed back, much crueler than what it did on its Western front, and victory over such a monstrosity naturally made people feel accomplished and proud. Also, that's exactly the reason why russian propaganda keep throwing nazi and fascism terms like confetti right now - to trigger those decades of conditioning. Also2 that's why I keep my fingers crossed that cognitive dissonance keeps at least part of russian soldiers unmotivated, because nazi crimes did not differentiate between russia, Ukraine and belarus, and now when russian soldiers go to Ukraine and receive orders to bomb civilian objects...well, for anyone half-decent and with half-a-brain it should cause certain parallels.

Mayor of recently occupied Kherson informs that the occupant army brought about ~60-80 agitators for Crimea to pose with Russian army as "Khersonians tearfully thanking their "liberators" for propaganda cameras: https://t.me/khersonskaODA/48 I probably ruined a post from comrade yellow with this. Oops.

"Those evil nazi Ukrainians raised exaggerated alarms because of mere administrative building fire in the big nuclear plant! The nerve of these guys, amirite? How dare they discredit glorious Russian army, the most peace loving army in the world!" - some dumbass tankie somewhere Meanwhile, the most peace loving country's in the world "Parliament" just fully approved the law criminalizing, well, saying anything different than official state propaganda: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-duma-false-news-war-law-invasion/31734629.html Up to fifteen years for "false news". Like for murder. The only thing this law needs now is the signature of septic tank in human form...oh, pardon me, comrade yellow, didn't see you there. Ahem. " The glorious peacekeeper, the sole saviour of the world from putrescent miasma emanating from decadent USA and its nazi fascist allies, may his botox reserve stay bottomless forever!"

I'm not, because when did they not play the blame game? "It's Ukraine's fault we invaded them because they were going to attack us so it was all self-defense!", "We are threatening to nuke the globe because some American official said mean things about us!" Like, of course this justifies everything you did, Russian warship, and port of Fornicate-Yourself is that a way.

Georgia is European too, as well as Armenia and Azerbaijan, all Caucasians. And according to ol' Soviet definition of races, they, along with yes, Chechens and also Turks, Iranians, Iraqi, Syrians, Indians and other "brown people", are classified as "Europoid race" aka whitest whiteys that ever whited. Race theories are interesting like that. Also, is comrade yellow's tankie arse aware just how proudly racist his adored Russians very often are?

Whiffs of whataboutism are a bit in odds with your usual analytical approach, Zooraptor. Also, I think the situation when countries care much more about what happens right next to their border than what's going on across a continent and a half can be explained in different terms than "racism", which nowadays gets applied so broadly it starts to approach generic and therefore weightless Internet insult territory.

Find a guy named SInful SInew, poses as a wounded crusader on location called Crimson Dust, bit SW from Drezen. Buff like there's no tomorrow as he's one of those "do him in the first round before he does you", reap 10K+ XP.

in somewhat related news, Russian official media and its watchdog forbids to use word "war" when talking about Russia's invasion in Ukraine, insisting the correct term is "special operation". Russian denizens of the 'net discuss merits of Lev Tolstoy's famous novel "Special operation and peace" and argue which part of "Star special operations" saga is the best.

So it appears that Khuilostan was so certain about its victory it scheduled the following propaganda piece for 26th of February and forgot to take it out for a brief while. Google translate does a decent enough job. https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20220226/rossiya-1775162336.html @Pidesco, he's quoting Khuilostan state media. Decide for yourself how much do you want to trust it.

I've been reading anti-Putin Russian media and their version of why Russia attacked Ukraine with old rust buckets as opposed to what it shows in military parades is simple yet plausible - corruption. Like, everyone there knew that a big part of defense money "were going to deposit as new fat rolls on faces of generals", but appears they didn't anticipate just how big. Anyway, even if so, those parade machines do exist, and even if 4000+ soldiers were killed, there are 100K more and not all of them are cooks, drivers and unmotivated 20yr old conscripts so nothing is set yet. Still, hype balloon has absolutely been popped and I hope the thought of buying into it will make certain decision making people very angry. Also, Lexx, even if news will be slowing down, the fact itself that Europe has a new Hitler will be a bit harder to un-remember. Not to mention re-allocation of defense budgets and sh†t. Did you guys notice technology spurt we had since Cold War was over? Wel...yeah.