Zoraptor

Well yeah, everything is going swimmingly for Ukraine, according to Ukraine. Russia has definitely gone backwards in Kupiansk, but meh. I'm not a doom and gloomer claiming Ukraine is finished; they can generally hold areas they really want or need to, still. Just at the expense of other places- in this case Vovchansk, Siversk and Huliapole. And yes, Pokrovsk and Mirnograd. Really though, acritically repeating Ukraine's casualty claims is at this point extremely shonky reporting. At best. The latest body exchange via the red cross this week was 1003 Ukrainians to 26 Russians. Of course the actual ratio isn't 40:1 in Russia's favour but there really really isn't an explanation for that ratio- which has been pretty consistent for 18 months- which doesn't involve Ukraine either lying about retreating, or lying about the casualties it's inflicting/ receiving. Or both. The satellite imagery on the attack on the sub was also pretty conclusive that it was a clean miss. You can bet if it were a conclusive hit he'd have the satellite images in the article but it clearly hit the pier about 20m away from the sub. Still embarrassing, but if embarrassment was enough Ukraine would have won in 2022.

Their defence budget alone is meant to be ~60$bn, annually. Which sounds ridiculous and is, but may actually be an underestimate of the true cost. A 4 unit Patriot battery has around 400$mn (!) worth of pac-3s loaded (16 units/ launcher, 6mn per rocket. Not quite as bad as it sounds, it's 10 million for the old pac-2s, if you're Saudi Arabia). Firing them off once a week would be 20bn, alone; and Ukraine has more than one battery. Even if you go back to the cheapest pac-3 cost listed it's still ~13bn to fire one battery off weekly. That's partly why Europe has been so awful at ramping up actual production: it costs monumental amounts of money to make and run the fancy gear which everyone in the west has been conditioned to think is necessary. Then your 30mn euro shiny new Leo2 gets popped by a $300 drone using a $50 cold war era rpg warhead for everyone to see. The money overall pays everything from salaries for teachers- and soldiers- to generators to keep the lights running. The 'funny' thing is that 45bn p/a isn't even close to enough. It covers the theoretical budget deficit, but is only about 2/3 of the amount actually needed. And of course it's for two years. In two years time they'll need another 90bn.

Random gamers are probably about as accurate as Syrsky or Gerasimov to be honest. Yes, but that was all privately owned/ state company stuff. And was done reciprocally; eg the rather orwellian named company 'Securing Energy For Europe' was previously Gazprom Germany, seized by Germany, and nationalised. No one has seized actual governmental money- bonds and the like- and no one will. Indeed, while talking big about it, the UK has confirmed today that they won't either, and the amount they'd be risking is something like 1/10th what Belgium would be. The problem with 1 & 2 is that they really cannot work that way. You cannot legally seize the money; you can just freeze it. If you do seize it it will have to be returned, and with penalties. If they could, they'd do it, and all the hawkish people like Merz and von der Leyen would be willing to write out actual guarantees. That they won't guarantee it speaks volumes: they're keen on it, but only so long as someone else takes all the risk. It's not like Belgium is 'pro Russian' in any other respect; they don't want to do it because they know they'd be the on the hook for a hundred+ billion- and the EU, Germany, the UK and the Baltics wouldn't. The only place likely to have runs on their banks would be Belgium, when they inevitably have to find something like 25% of their entire GDP (plus penalties) to pay Russia back.

The Middle Earth games seem to sum up WBGames pretty well: the second game didn't perform as well as they wanted, and that was that. I'd guess the proximal reason for it is the abysmal performance of the DC live service game they had Rocksteady do which sank so badly I can't even remember its name offhand (Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League per wiki). You can kind of understand it; games now have ~the budget of a blockbuster movie, but take longer to make, for less return. Only takes one turkey- 200mn lost on it according to their filings- to make the whole thing look high risk low reward.

Probably not as much of a surprise as it could have been. It seems neither Netflix nor Paramount regard WB's games division as an asset, rather more as a liability, so it seems likely to be shut down or sold off if/ when WB is bought. They'd have got some cash from EGS to do it and most people who would pay decent money have it already.

That will buy a lot of gold toilets. Really though, doubt there could be anything which epitomised the EU leadership more than that funding saga. Weeks of being told that the sky would fall in if Belgium didn't unilaterally seize Russian money, with no guarantees from the EU or anyone else against the consequences of it*. Inevitably leading to fricking Belgium being compared to Hungary and Slovakia and what should be an embarrassing climbdown by the leadership labelled as yet another great victory. Now we can start the next cycle: how the 20th round of sanctions will bring Russia to her knees and how it's really really necessary to allow the executive to levy and maintain sanctions without having to have unanimity to protect against the unfettered radicalism and selfishness of those perfidious Belgians. Sorry, Hungarians and Slovaks. So easy to confuse the three. *which of course never happened even for literal literal Nazi Germany because seizing state funds is very obviously capital I Illegal under multiple agreements. That neither von der Leyen's EU itself nor any of its equally shouty constituents would do so when invited illustrates that they also knew perfectly well that was the case, and it was all performative. Because they want an excuse for yet more unpopular 'loans' that they must by this time suspect is never ever going to get repaid. In this case they couldn't blame Orban so instead blame Belgium. Literally literally one of the protoEU's first three members, lest we forget.

Naming things after himself is the closest Donald will get to Alexander the Great. Just wait until Blair suggests the new name for Gaza city... (Honestly kind of surprised Ukraine or Russia hasn't offered to name a town after him to curry favour. After all, Israel named one of their illegal settlements after him)

Stereotypically you'd expect Argentina to elect the descendant of a literal literal nazi who fled Germany as president instead of Chile.

The problem with the hobbit/ gandalf plotline is that you fundamentally cannot really do anything with it to justify the time spent. Gandalf ain't going to kill Sauron or the Balrog or whatever; and it's got no overlap so far with other events*. I have some sympathy for the mystery box aspect, silly as it was, because that was clearly mandated by Amazon because the algorithm told them it drove engagement. Wheel of Time had exactly the same issue. The only issues I have with Numenor and Lindon/ Grey Havens is the scale factor I described earlier- just not enough people there to make them feel real. Plus weedy evil numenorean is complete caricature. I do have another Celebrimbor complaint after watching another episode. Firstly, I'm not sure why Sauron even needs rings if he's already powerful enough to make an extremely prominent and powerful elf- Feanor's grandson, iirc- quite literally hallucinate that everything is fine. And secondly, at that level of control why not eliminate the root problem and make Celebrimbor hallucinate that the Dwarf Rings are all fine, or that actually humans deserve rings- or why not make Adar hallucinate stuff and prevent getting ganked originally; the possibilities are endless. As previous, the plot has to happen in order for, well, the plot to happen so Celebrimbor has to be deceived somehow; but the way it's being done introduces a lot of unnecessary problems. *given the current trajectory I have a sinking feeling we may get a hobbit baby towards the end, who grows up to be buddies with Deagol.

Fallout 1 even had multiple timers. Water chip one and the 'invasion' one. And of course both could be modified by other actions too. There's a worse example from the same game, ie chapter 6. Your very soul has been stolen! But %charname% has all the time in the world to go do (nearly) every single side quest you could have done in Chapter 2 as well as a few C6 specific ones before doing anything about it... You can justify not going after Imoen quickly quite easily, even for a non evil character. You're clearly not strong enough just after escaping and need more resources; which works for either a good or neutral alignment. It's probably more difficult to justify going after her at all, if you're evil or selfish neutral. "Idiot gets herself captured again immediately after escaping? Sounds like her problem, not mine". Bit harder to justify being slothful or even tardy in C6 though. Does also have to be said, I think, that when you do have an imminently critical issue as a plot driver so make tardiness have consequences you do get a lot of people complaining- eg the Spirit Meter in Mask of the Betrayer.

Rings of Power S2. 5? episodes in. Since it's free here for the time being, doubt I'd have paid for prime to watch it after S1. It's an absolutely massive improvement over S1, which lifts it to being ok, more or less, and I'm not regretting the time spent watching it which I- more or less- did for S1. I'm still going to complain a lot of course, but they are far more minor complaints at least and moderated a lot by the improvement shown. So it's still got the flaws of S1, but they're less prominent and mostly more... excusable, I guess. Many conversations still sound oddly circuitous but not bafflingly obtuse, there's still some feeling that everyone is a stage actor declaiming to the audience in front of static backdrops rather than being in a 'real' world but a lot less pronounced and less frequent (ie, the world feels a lot more lived in*), there's a load of slightly illogical minor drama for drama's sake** rather than it being basically all there was and you still find it difficult to credit the elves as being thousands of years old when Elrond and Galadriel act like they're teenage siblings half the time. The pacing is also still off a bit too due to too many threads- Eregion, Khazad-dum, Lindon, Numenor, Pelargir, (Adar/orcs); and the still not very good at all and extremely pointless seeming Gandalf and hobbits odyssey. Despite the number of threads a lot of things feel like they're happening far too quickly because there's too little time for things to develop. But it is, at least, reasonably engaging. Overall, if it continues the trajectory from S1-->S2 then S3 should be really rather good. *though it is still quite bad, which it really ought not to be. Spend millions on CGI, don't spend a relative pittance on extras to make the world feel like it has actual people in it is a baffling decision. **big exclusion: Celebrimbor acting like he got pithed between scenes specifically to up the drama..

Can't agree with that. There have been a lot of complaints- including in that article- about people being forced to go straight into combat after short training and the low life expectancy that brings. Or at least, there is the strong perception that that happens, which is probably more important than the objective reality in this case. And a fair few complaints at various times that even skilled/ specialist personnel are being forced into front line positions due to manpower shortages. End of the day if the majority were going into drone units or logistics or other 'cushy' jobs- or if that were the perception- they'd have a lot less problem with desertion in the first place. Not sure they can legally. Or if it was ever intended as a practical suggestion as opposed to a sort of 'aspirational' idea intended to put pressure on Russia and pander to anti immigration types. Don't think it really worked at all in either respect if it was.

The most surprising thing is the low incidence of violence towards recruiters. You'd think that a lot of the deserters at least would be armed even if the ones who were 'just' draft dodgers weren't. Similarly, only heard of one incident of fragging at a training center. Though I guess in both cases it'd be the sort of thing people would want to keep under wraps.

While the Houthis have not (mostly) been attacking shipping in international waters they have been attacking shipping in other country's territorial waters- mostly Djibouti and Eritrea- since shipping tends to hug the non Yemeni side of the Bab el Mandeb. Out of context that would usually be seen as being 'worse' than using international waters; but that does require ignoring any context. Of course outrage about those sorts of acts is highly selective. Unless, perchance, I missed Bruce's condemnation of Ukraine's recent attacks on neutral oil tankers in Turkey's territorial waters? I suspect I didn't though.

The Japanese PM is a pretty strident traditionalist and nationalist and for Japan there isn't much more traditional and nation defining than war with China. China is unlikely to do anything so long as she thinks that Taiwan will inevitably return peacefully or in a Crimea like low bloodshed manner.