Zoraptor

Didn't Musk do exactly the same thing with Twitter? Quite apart from the procedural mess around buying it in the first place. Does make you wonder how he got so much money in the first place when he seems to be trying to alienate both Twitter and Tesla's userbase simultaneously. Otherwise yeah, meme department makes meme mistake; and we'd better get used to it as there will only be more coming.

I'd have said the most likely outcome of inviting Russia was them not turning up for the first meeting, which would have been even better for Ukrainian and Euro feelings of righteousness. They probably would have for the second though. As it was the results there were hardly lent credibility when a sizeable number of the hand picked participants refused to sign the communiqué precisely because Russia wasn't there (or didn't turn up to it). There's limited practical utility in preaching only to the converted in order to convince oneself of one's moral superiority. It really isn't a peace conference if there's both no prospect of it resulting in peace and it does nothing to progress towards it, that's just one side making demands to an audience- and that's true whether it's Russia or Ukraine missing from the negotiations. In any case lending legitimacy to claims is something which is always said about negotiations. Said it for Hamas, said it for the IRA, said it for the Taleban, and others; and for far more minor issues than the current one. For practical matters there was always going to be a negotiated settlement unless you Believed the constant barrage of pipe dream fantasies about Russia's imminent collapse- which, it seems, rather a lot of European leaders did. In that scenario by far the most important factor is not making Euros feel righteous, it's that Ukraine would have been in a far better position for negotiations then as opposed to negotiations now.

At the moment the only one who isn't visibly losing it is Putin. Trump being Trump, some ludicrous comments and headless chook behaviour from the Europeans (particularly frustrating, not like they had 3 months to prepare for Trump and had Afghanistan as a blueprint for what to expect), Zelensky all over the place. Which is, at least, highly understandable. I'm also slightly annoyed- but not surprised- by the outraeg!!!11!! about Zelensky being excluded from the talks and selective memory being applied. Talks without Ukraine are exactly as useful as talks without Russia. And lest we forget- since it seems most journalists have- there were multiple talks held without Russia resulting in a succession of peace plans from Zelensky that were unrealistic, then, and even less realistic now.

Don't think I'd ever describe using something as open to very obvious abuse as blanket preemptive pardons as 'smart'*, that's a step too far. We are, most likely, going to now enter a cycle of outgoing administrations issuing preemptive blanket pardons for the term of their administration as a matter of course when there's a change of party involved. I'd save a bit of snark for the 'Robust Republic' types as well. If you've got nebulously defined/ limited powers that are open to abuse like pardons and EOs that is absolutely a systemic failure, which was always going to become a problem. There's limited utility talking about how things should work or were envisaged to work if the practicality is different. *necessary, ok, in this specific case that is hard to dispute given Trump's personality. But it's a can of worms opened nevertheless.

Seems entirely appropriate that DOGE has meme level security.

Seems likely. Though if anything has changed recently NWN2 wise or they've just got around to progressing the EE enough for us to hear about it is an open question. Aspyr was doing a KOTOR remaster(?) so simply may not have had the ability to do NWN2 but not the time. I don't think Atari have been listed as publisher on any D&D CRPG for a couple of years at least which implies they lost the rights then.

In a word yes, though it'd depend of course on the request and specific situation. (Fundamentally, shifting the focus to US v China and parking US v Russia alters the balance of leverage for Russia <--> China as well, which certainly favours China markedly at the moment. Russia, now, would have difficulty refusing any half way reasonable Chinese request or agreement offer and, if it hurt the west, likely wouldn't particularly want to anyway. It'd still be highly unlikely Russia would go out of its way to help any anti Chinese western efforts, given recent history and with a realistic 'normalisation' to the US. If the US asked them to, say, close their borders to Chinese goods they wouldn't under any reasonable scenario. But you could certainly expect them to extract a price from China much as China has from Russia, and could get them to up the price by offering sanctions relief or release of currency reserves. Neither of those could be offered under a more Bidenesque approach)

It's far simpler to just get a bunch of people to say that the game is being review bombed and get the rating manually (or 'manually') curated by removing all the zeroes. Indeed, that's what happens fairly often eg to Rings of Power on IMDB* and various games on Steam. *purely coincidental who owns that site, of course

There does come a point where the balance shifts and you have to accept that some of the outrageous things he says are what he actually wants and intends to get- or at least, that you have to take the threats/ statements seriously. And at that point it isn't him living rent free in your head any more, it's real concern that he might actually try invading Greenland/ Canada/ Panama or ethnically cleansing Gaza- or 'sell out' Ukraine. But none of the Ukraine stuff should be a surprise, Trump's position was signposted extensively and there's a pretty direct precedent in what happened in Afghanistan where negotiations almost exclusively took place between the US and Taleban without Afghan government involvement. That Europe in particular seems to have made zero preparations is an indictment on their historically incompetent leadership (well, short term history, not like von der Leyen is literally Hitler) coupled to wishful thinking on pretty much every single aspect of everything. If you want to target China, as Trump obviously does, you need to have Russia if not on side then at least not as an enemy, and that's basic geographical fact.

At this point I think it's safe to say it's Hasbro/ WOTC that's the root of the issue. One issue with games rights/ developers might be a coincidence but they've had issues with Interplay/ BIS, Bioware, Atari, Obsidian and Larian- just off the top of my head, limited to D&D and with me not paying much attention. They just don't seem to be very good at all at anything computer game related and when there's a success it's despite them.

Bad PR for Israel: not with the press coverage we're all getting. Israel raping an orthopaedic surgeon to death- who was kidnapped every bit as much as any Israeli hostage was- with a broomhandle doesn't even rate a mention while skinny hostages is literally the end of the world. But starving Palestinian babies... that's fine because some people voted for Hamas 17 years ago. The biggest death toll caused by Israel's creation is still the Lebanese Civil War. Unless Israel managed to kill more than 150k Palestinians, which is a possibility considering Israel's obvious strategy was to kill anyone counting so the toll stalled out despite the attacks never letting up.

Looks like a NWN2: Enhanced Edition is happening, developed by Aspyr.

Someone in Ukraine must have looked at an overview of why Trump wants to annex Greenland and made sure to mention rare earths repeatedly. The best thing about that play is that it was a Biden era agreement that Ukraine shelved for months so as to pad Trump's ego. Not sure it's worked given some of his other recent comments like "they may be Russian some day" (Trump's 500bn dollars worth of rare earth reserves would supply US imports for, uh, 2500 (two thousand five hundred) years at the current rate of just under 200mn p/a. Which actually dropped from 2022 numbers. But I also can't find a single independent source of Ukraine having any proven r/e reserves, at all. And of course the 'funny' thing about it is that their proven reserves of other minerals are disproportionately- and pretty massively so- in the Donbass, which realistically they aren't getting back)

Don't think it's that they're outraged over that per se, even indirectly. It's that being pro US so often meant being pro previous administration and pro US foreign policy orthodoxy both of which are things they hate- most would have no problem supporting Iranian opposition media so long as it was in Farsi and only anti Iran (or, given their bias and general lack of self awareness, was pro Trump). The perception that it was a soft money pro Democrat Party and Liberal Agenda* slush fund was reinforced by how much of the media aimed at [countryname] was written in english, and thus obviously aimed at, well, english speakers. The more pragmatic and realpolitik sorts may also be a bit miffed that the claims of independent media being foreign agents made by adversaries have now been proven correct despite all the repeated claims to the contrary. Makes it a lot harder to paint the Georgian foreign agent law for example as being a blatant threat to independent journalism when their accusations that the media aren't independent but are being funded from overseas are now shown to be largely accurate. *le sigh, but it is the sort of term they'd use to describe it

I did, and I certainly did a far better job of it given I didn't make a sweeping unreferenced generalisation but a not so sweeping, referenced, one. Serves me right for not adding 'or an irrelevant citation' to my previous post as I meant to though. BBC Media Action isn't media itself, as the press release notes.