Zoraptor

It's the old chestnut that anything I/ we do is fine, because we have the best motives and justifications; and anything they do is awful, because they have the worst justifications and motives. Attacking or seizing ships in Hormuz is terrorism (though of course, so is breaking a bank's windows, at least in the UK. Not charged under terrorism, but that latter day Judge Jeffries Philip Parry wants to sentence them under it. Here's hoping he ends up in the Tower of London for his own protection like the historical Judge Jeffries) unless we're the ones doing it. At least I get a giggle out of all the outrage from people who never thought their tactics would be used against them by anyone. Hubris or stupidity, hard to tell really. Going to be hilarious when Ukraine brings their complaints about Russia shutting down Odessa and sinking their merchantmen to the UNSC. The 'grain truce' may not have been renewed, but it was still honoured up until a couple of weeks ago, now Ukraine's harvest is rotting in fields since there isn't anywhere to put it. Kind of appropriate that the Euros are going to end up footing an even larger bill to keep the lights on in Ukraine, just a shame it won't be the Ursula's, Friedrich's and Emmanuel's who are actually paying.

There might have been the slightest smidge, soupcon, iota/ the merest suggestion of sarcasm in referring to NATO as purely defensive. (Iran isn't going to send troops and Ukraine is probably out of range of its missiles anyway, which leaves firing missiles from Russian territory. Looks like Ukraine didn't get the reaction they wanted anyway, since their FM has phoned Iran to apologise. A very... Ukrainian apology, but still)

I'd suspect they're after Israeli help, rather than US. The US patently doesn't want a resumption in fighting with Iran while Israel patently does. NATO won't respond. NATO can't respond. It's a Purely Defensive Alliance, isn't a threat to anyone who doesn't attack it, and Ukraine isn't a member. I'm sure Mark Rutte/ Jens Stoltenberg etc etc wouldn't lie to us about that.

Tariffs are one of the things where I'd suspect the timing is purely coincidental. His temporary tariffs are expiring, so he needs to replace them with something at least theoretically permanent. (Though of course it's hard not to see these 'new' ones as being a spurious way to reapply the old ones, because that is very obviously exactly what they are. Which no doubt will last until the next successful legal challenge, at which time another set of 'new' tariffs with a different spurious reason- IP infringement, maybe?- will be trotted out)

Officially, the US doesn't even accept that Israel has nukes. (It's far more likely that Saudi just buys Pakistani warheads for their DF3s, if push came to shove. They did after all finance the Pakistani nuclear weapons program by most accounts. But yes, the US attitude to Saudi ambitions is probably best summed up by the fact that very few people know that Saudi has a stockpile of nuclear capable missiles- DF3s aren't much use for anything else other than nuclear given their lack of accuracy)

Reminder: Iran has been 'months' away from getting nukes for a decent bit more than 300 (three hundred, 3x10^2, 100101100 binary) months now. For a fair bit it's been weeks (about 1300 of them since the first claim) or even days (call it a generous 10k) The claims are not just old enough to be having sex and getting drunk; they'd be out of uni, have a career, maybe even children and a mortgage. At this point, it really is a claim that appeals to those lacking two brain cells to rub together.

Wiki says it was turn based, and that's what I remember as well. Marketing thing I think, where they wanted to imply its combat was more like Baldur's Gate's 'real time'/ simultaneous turn based system, since it was the big seller.

I suspect many in the Trump Admin unironically blame Iran for 9/11, not Saudi. The rest are happy to turn a blind eye for some pecuniary advantage.

Bab al Mandeb is the strait between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, so you can't get to/ from Suez without transiting it. Technically, they've said they're shutting it to Saudi shipping only rather than in general due to Saudi rather blatantly breaking a truce so it isn't- at least in theory- directly related to Trump's war on Iran. In practice... well, the biggest alternative way to pump Saudi crude to avoid Hormuz is a plump and rather tempting terminal a few hundred km from Yemen.

Would have been a travesty if Argentina had won that in all respects. They can certainly play, but their game plan was about as negative in every meaning of the term as it's possible to get all tournament (until they go behind). Summed up best by Messi trying to get that Rowlf looking Spaniard sent off for 'covering his mouth'; quite an achievement given how well the sending off reaction otherwise summed things up. Equally petulant and pathetic post whistle. Couldn't have been a clearer contrast to the Eng-Fra game in terms of either entertainment nor spirit of the game- well, Spain kept their tempers extremely well given the constant provocation. That's the problem with deciding not to punish obvious rule breaking like the Malvinas stuff, all you're telling them is that they can get away with anything if punishment looks like it might be embarrassing to fifa.

First half Agincourt, second looking very much like Castillon for a while there.

Bethesda has officially confirmed a bunch of stuff that was unofficially already known. Most relevant for here: Obsidian is 100% working on a Fallout game, and there will be a remaster of FONV. Also FO5 is in preproduction, given it's Bethesda and what happened with TES6's announcement that may mean it doesn't even have a lead designer and is a decade away. Vaguely lol: not sure how great it looks saying Skyrim had 65mn sales, F4 35mn and Starfield 17mn. That's a bit of a drop off.

Deciding to Turtle after scoring might have been a justifiable decision if we hadn't had the Egypt match earlier. As it was, England got what was deserved. Not overly great from England's leadership group.

Thank the lord someone scored. Up to that point the game was making me sympathise with a certain Event Horizon character's attitude to sight. It was the penalty reversal via VAR in England's game against Norway. Completely correct decision, not just because it made the English fans squeal. You're allowed to protect the ball, but Spence deliberately put himself in a position where he couldn't play it, in order to get in the defender's way and draw the penalty.

He'd never have made it if he'd remained Nigel Neill. Don't think he ever quite got the awards recognition many others did because he was very good at not appearing to be acting. That was also why he had such a good range; his roles in Reilly Ace of Spies and Hunt for the Wilderpeople could hardly be more different, and similarly for Event Horizon and A Cry in the Dark. Bit of a national tragedy here, you really couldn't find anyone (eh, except central Otago property developers and who cares about those leeches) with a bad word to say about him.

Definitely weren't robbed. England were marginally better overall; you just suspect that everyone who isn't English (or Bruce) really wanted Norway to win. Unlike France and to an extent Spain England do not look anything like champions in waiting though. Good enough game in the end, but man that first quarter was a snooze fest. Both the goal and penalty reversals were the correct decisions as much as they may have outraged and appalled each set of fans.

Worse than that, it wasn't even the IDF initially but armed Settlers.

Beyond reason, post Starfield for sure. If that'd sold as hoped you could justify the profligacy with TES and Fallout. As it was it didn't sell as well as expected and had a poor fan and relatively poor critical reaction. A bit of a boot up the backside is more than justified. It is, really. Bringing in a moderate amount of money reliably with low overheads- and they should be low, download bandwidth is cheap as is shared MP infrastructure- is a perfect example of low risk. It should be a licence to print money; though maybe not as much money as they'd like. Kind of sums things up when 30mn subs isn't enough. That's 300mn/ month and 3.6bn p/a if everyone was on the basic plan. Each month every month, each year, every year. You'd think that would be enough, really. The irony when it comes to risk is that, say, a 20mn Fallout strategy game would be high risk, but a 500mn Fallout RPG could be seen as lower risk. In reality, it's obvious that the higher priced one is far more risky. (They clearly wanted a Netflix style defaultism for gamepass where people have the sub and don't seem to cancel no matter how many times the service is degraded and prices go up; and indeed sub numbers in total only ever seem to go up. For some reason, despite Netflix being, to be blunt, absolute rubbish. That approach only seems to work for Netflix, everyone else including MS tends to have a somewhat different experience where expectations of massive profits have not been realised)

An RPG (or whatever Fallout 4 was meant to be) every 2 years* would be barely practical, one suspects, given current dev cycles even if you had two Fallout only teams. And yeah, at that rate it'd inevitably stagnate even more. OTOH, it's been... 10 years since F4 now? That's way too long the other way. And as I said last time it came up; it's hard to justify having nothing tying into the success of TV series and nothing on the horizon either (except a pretty minor tie in in F76). *There is plenty of scope to do stuff which could keep Fallout fresh even at that release rate, at least for a while- settings outside NA, having a party based game, strategy game etc. Probably don't fit well with the new approach at MS though which looks like absolute minimum risk.

Killing off an in house department to use an outside contractor instead is probably the purest double distilled MBA nonsense you can get. It looks great on a balance sheet, at least short term. What does Bethesda need two in house engines for anyway, they can use Creation to make the next Quake*. It's good enough for TES, after all. Fixing numbers on spreadsheets with no knowledge of or care about what they mean long term- or even what their immediate practical implementation means- is absolutely what should be expected of management as their only care is to get one set of numbers to go up, and another to go down. Implementation is a problem for lower level managers, and long term effects don't matter since they aren't a metric for you annual bonus. That the claims that the restructure were targeting '13 layers of management' or whatever were rubbish is utterly unsurprising. *as hilarious and management disconnected as it would be forcing them to use Gamebryo_Iteration++ for a Quake or Doom, it'd almost certainly be UE. Which would be, to quote the great Canadian philosopher Alanis Morisette, ironic.

Ramesses more like Ramessi, am i rite? Writing was literally on the wall for 3000 years. I'd laugh if Infantino finally got brought down by associating with Trump. Not much chance though.

Those defensive errors were awful. Hard to see them making a difference to the overall result since Belgium was comfortably better anyway but they were nails in the coffin. You wouldn't have thought that it was the same US side on attack that put a very easy 4 past a Paraguay defence that had been excellent otherwise either. Not sure that Trump's intervention did them any favours at all.

Funnily enough 'typical knock out football' was one of the euphemisms the commentators used. Along with other classics like 'possession based game' and 'tactical struggle'. I'm not sure they cranked out a 'one for the purists' but they must have come close. Probably wasn't that bad, objectively, and may have had something to do with me not caring at all who won. The only other game I found genuinely boring in the tournament I switched off at half time, which was not a good choice since all hell broke loose in the second half.

The most entertaining thing about Spain Portugal was the commentators trying to come up with ways to avoid using the word 'boring'.

Worse, a suit who spells their name in ALL CAPS. That's two red flags. (The whole thing kind of sums up xbox's history, really. Bad combination of half assedly throwing money at it, fad chasing and never having any sort of unified and consistent vision. Followed by trying to rationalise everything, badly. It's always a classic when one exec spends a lot of money acquiring studios, then the next spends a lot of money deacquiring them. Really, the whole thing can be summed up just about perfectly by what's happened to Gamepass over the past year or so. Decide it's the future and put everything on there; decide it's cannibalising sales of new games and jack up prices, wonder why subscription numbers tumble. You shouldn't need an MBA to foresee either, and you kind of have to pick one approach and accept either somewhat reduced direct sales or somewhat reduced subs to gamepass. As it stands you get the bad publicity of having poor sales performance and the bad publicity of jacking up gamepass' price and the bad publicity of then having to reduce the price again. xbox has just not been a very well run project from its inception)