Zoraptor

Would probably drive a fair few people mad with its clunkiness (especially early on) but it's hands down the best RPG based on ~1400 Bohemia I have ever played.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has been formally announced: Jesus Christ be praised, a trailer has come to see us, god bless you trailer etc etc.

Finished the Fallout TV show. TLDR: not as good as the Amazon Marketing Blitz™ has it being, but still pretty good and gets a fairly strong recommendation from me. Mostly consistent with the games too- some issues with Fallout 1 especially, unsurprisingly it's less consistent with the west coast Fallouts than east coast given it's set near LA. I'll use nested spoilers for the big stuff

The trouble is that this is fundamentally a lose/ lose situation for Biden. If he's hard on Israel he'll lose votes, if he ignores Palestinians and Israeli war crimes he'll lose votes. There's very little at risk for Trump who can say what he likes on the issue; anyone pro Palestine or (unironic usage this time, to be clear) Rules Based Order or nuanced responses to international affairs is never going to vote for Trump anyway, and he isn't in power. In this case I don't think Biden has a smart play, from a purely political perspective, only bad and worse. (While a lot of people including myself would like Biden to make a Moral Play and actually use the US influence to, well, stop the starvation, collective punishment, destruction of educational institutions, deliberate targeting of health sites and workers, targeting of journalists, targeting of diplomatic structures, targeting of aid workers, targeting of civilian structures etc etc instead of mildly pontificating about it I struggle to think of a single time a US President has actually made a genuine Moral Play, ie (try and) do something because it's simply the right thing to do, knowing that it'll potentially hurt him politically)

David Axe forbes sites/blog is the source, so no it isn't a serious assessment. (actually not sure he's the ultimate source, but it's the title of his April 7? article. Either way, he's a clickbait merchant and his articles tend to be either 'the sky is falling' or 'everything is coming up Roses' with little in between)

Yep, should keep Netanyahu safely in power for another few months so Mission Accomplished from his pov whatever the result. Completely predictable, especially when the US made it obvious they'd back Israel under any circumstance.

Watched the first two Fallout episodes. As a big fan of the game series all the way back to its roots in 2008 and having played all of Fallout 3, 4, Shelter and 76* I am fairly pleased so far. Definitely looking forward to watching the rest of the episodes, and that is not as common as I'd like. TLDR: 1st episode is disjointed (it's a Prime TV show, after all), 2nd is a lot better. Probably comes about as close to capturing the mass market fallouts as anything could, and has some encouraging signs of 1/2/NV too. *I feel vaguely dirty typing that, but feel vaguely compelled after the number of "played all the games: 3,4 and 76!/ Captured Bethesda's genius!" that I have read.

Yeah, I actively avoid fps/ drone stuff too though I will generally watch non drone stuff if I think it will be interesting. I don't really care about gore/ death, personally, since it's obviously happening but... there are way, way too many people getting their jollies from fps or dropped drone footage and I really don't like associating with them even tacitly. Quite apart from Israel's policy of destroying all infrastructure so that civilians cannot take cell phone footage and cannot upload it there has also been a systematic policy from media to either actively or passively suppress Palestinians SM. Any combat footage --> 'terrorist' source, and passive footage 'cannot be verified'. Indeed, just about all the evidence of summary executions, torture and the like come from idiotic Israeli soldiers who are proud of themselves. That too is largely suppressed by media. Eh, I'd go out on a limb and say that article is of, hmm, limited accuracy. The only limitation either side has had for thermobarics on fps is weight and the munition generally being too heavy for a fps drone, eg the generic RPG-7 frag payload is 1/10 the weight of a RPG-7 thermobaric warhead. But there are some fps drones that will manage 2kg and there's at least one (43mm, for GM94 launcher) grenade that has a thermobaric variant in use by both sides that weighs 250g, only 60g more than a rpg-7 frag does. One suspects both sides have been using that fairly extensively but it simply hasn't been publicised.

They don't draft the young due to having the worst demographic crisis in the world. (Specifically, the population age 'pyramid' looks like a 13 year old boy's drawing of Pamela Anderson rather than a pyramid; death rate 15.2, birth rate... 8.6; no census since 2001 due to losing around 20% of its population in the 90s; and all that before the invasion. Essentially they're desperate to keep young workers alive and, well, breeding as much as possible while there are far more older people who will generate less tax and start claiming a pension sooner)

Meh, AP is still running interference for Israel- still got to have the obligatory reference to how everything was started by/ is justified by Oct 7- it's just very hard to run interference with something so very obviously a war crime beyond an implicit "it wouldn't have happened if Hamas didn't exist". Also a lot harder when those killed are mostly nice westerners rather than icky Palestinians. To put it in perspective, even Haaretz is running tougher articles than those AP blancmanges are. And Haaretz is actually subject to the Military Censor, AP just censors itself. The very definition of, to quote Bibi, "unintended", that. I often unintentionally do something three times in quick succession with deadly results. That's why I'm posting this from a high security prison/ insane asylum/ am a Major in the most moral army in the world. I'm very very sure Israel is utterly appalled and despondent that WCK has suspended operations and that wasn't the aim of the operation in the first place... yeah right, the only 'unintended' thing was there being people from friendly countries in the vehicles. Even then, not like those spineless jellies like Sunak Trudeau or Albanese will actually do anything about it apart from verbal diarrhoea about the tragedy of it all.

3 Body Problem being good isn't that much of a surprise. The parts of Game of Thrones B&W did as an adaptation of the books was excellent. While the ending does tend to retroactively stink up the series as a whole the praise they got for the adaptation part was justified. Since 3 Body Problem is also an adaptation it ought to be closer to GoT S1-4 quality than GoT S8. Plus, no Star Wars films on the horizon any more that they want to rush off to.

Ukraine doesn't invade Russia because this isn't Hearts of Iron IV, and wars aren't won on the battlefield of reddit and facebook. (Militarily the first attack was pointless but probably worth a try, the second was the kind of stupidity people accuse Russia of all the time, zerg rushing prepared defences for photo ops. That they got so few photo ops out of it is indicative of how very very badly it went. They're not really limited by any impositions from outside, everyone knows the troops involved are not majority Russian despite their name and both attacks featured western supplied equipment. They're limited mostly by being PR operations that have a high resource cost Should probably add, since it's key to why the whole thing is counterproductive: the advantage of 'forcing' Russia to station troops there is decidedly double edged because in reality it doesn't happen in a vacuum. What practically happens if Russia has lots of troops there? So does Ukraine. They have to, to guard against Russian invasion from their troop build up. So no net advantage)

No. There's a difference between being enforceable and binding. The wording and it coming from the UNSC makes it 100% binding, that's intrinsic, what it requires is a subsequent resolution for enforcement if (when) ignored. John Kirby is being dishonest when he says it isn't binding, because what he means is that the US will not support enforcement- which, of course, as a paid up member of the Rules Based Order he cannot actually say, lest people wonder why the US only wants enforcement of international law against its enemies, not its friends. Same situation with the ICJ. Its decisions are 100% binding, but it has no enforcement mechanism. That is meant to come from the UNSC.

I don't think anyone expects Israel to do anything different, nor for the US to do anything beyond theatrics if they don't. Their relations would have to get catastrophically worse- almost certainly unrealistically so- for them to allow a Chapter VII invoking resolution. It's still a binding resolution though, and under the, heh, Rules Based Order there is no higher authority. The incidences of resolutions being ignored- or interpreted creatively- doesn't actually change that, it just makes the system look farcical. Which is at least in theory something the west ought to be stridently against. In any case, pretty difficult to see how the wording is 'non-binding': 'Demands' doesn't leave much room for a non binding interpretation. You can still have John Kirby and press report it as being non binding, and have the US/ Israel ignore it as if it were, of course, but it very obviously is.

This time around all the RDK achieved was one selfie by an administration building. Otherwise their best confirmed footage was, what, a guy firing a dud RPG at a tank? Everything else was shot in Ukraine or embarrassing like the 'white flag' (neither white nor a flag, almost certainly a trench telescope) being 'waved' by Russians in a trench or them running over an AT mine with a tank while, heh, still in Ukraine. At least last time they took a bit of ground in between releasing footage of them larping in Pripyat. The imminent Orthodox/ Muslim civil war in Russia is unlikely to be kicked off by 4 Tajiks any more than the imminent race war in New Zealand got kicked off by one Australian shooting up two mosques. I'd doubt they're even going to do much for ISIS; they're not exactly the leading edge of the inghimasi sword and just seem kind of pathetic really. Alleged is fair enough since they haven't been convicted so are legally just accused of the crime, but in this case there's no reason to doubt that they've got the right people. The evidence is pretty conclusive. (You could fake it, technically, but... really, you'd have to get 4 people to shoot up a concert hall, leave and depart in the same car, and then get four identically dressed people caught hundreds of km away in the same car (or same model, with jiggered plates). You'd also need to get both Amaq and an ISIS telegram to post pictures of the same four people who were caught posing in front of the Seal of the Prophet and more. You'd also have to come up with a good reason for faking it. Clearly Russia would prefer for it to have been Ukrainian, or sponsored by them. If they were going to fake it you'd expect them to find, dunno, signed instructions from Budanov or Zelensky? Most they've got in that respect is that they were heading for the Ukrainian border)

"It's a non-binding resolution, so there is no impact at all on Israel and its ability to go after Hamas" -- John Kirby hmm, does John Kirby think they voted for (abstained from for the US) a General Assembly resolution...

The issue with the ISIS claim is that the attackers clearly aren't the usual Salafi nutbars. No suicide vests or fight to the death, at either point; no takbirs ('allahu akbar'); non halal beards/ clean shaven- indeed, seemingly wearing fake beards for the attack of all things- and they were definitively heading for Ukraine. Which was moronic since that's the most monitored border Russia has, as was not swapping cars or taking even the most rudimentary steps to avoid capture, but... there's effectively no doubt it was them. They may just have been dumb enough to do it for 10000 dollars promised by some random on telegram.

4 suspects supposedly caught in Bryansk oblast. Some decidedly odd details though.

That, or they're just conflating two unrelated things to try and create a particular narrative. Media reports consistently mention the warning, after all, but consistently do not mention the time limited/ imminent nature of it... Facts are the warning was from more than 2 weeks ago, for a potential attack (direct quote from the US embassy) "over the next 48 hours". Not open ended, and it's easily verifiable that the warning was not extended. Fact is that the same day an ISIS cell was eliminated by Russia. That this was acting on US intelligence is certainly an inference, but a pretty convincing one. And of course the direct John Kirby quote from the whitehouse press briefing about whether the two were related was, with just a tad of added emphasis by me: Until someone goes on the record to gainsay that, ie no 'anonymous source', there's really nothing more to say: the warning was for an imminent attack around March 7th, the same day Russia eliminated an ISIS cell, and the US Presidential spokesman thinks that warning and this attack are unrelated.

Khorasan, not Kazakhstan. It's still far more likely to be Wilayat Kavkaz (ie Caucasus, supposedly one gunman has been captured and is Ingush); ISIS Khorasan is... well, not consistently credible at best. Their shtick is claiming everything and anything to get attention. The American warning was for an imminent threat (next 48 hours), on March 7th, more than two weeks ago. That was also the day Russia took out an ISIS cell, so it's likely the intelligence was acted on. Want to check if there was a more recent warning? Be my guest, but spoiler, there wasn't. per below John Kirby, they had no specific information to share about this attack. Source is direct from - and I'm fairly confident this isn't a pro Russian source, but you never know, could be wrong- the US Presidential Website Whitehouse.gov. Not exactly brilliant reporting, but sadly unsurprising that Bruce would take it completely at face value and draw an incorrect conclusion.

Ajnad al Kavkaz is fighting for Ukraine, and they'd be one of the more likely groups to have carried it out. Not the likeliest though, that'd probably be a domestic/ semi domestic Viliyat Kavkaz (ISIS, and they have claimed it, for what that is worth) offshoot- though AaK were affiliated with them at one point via the predecessor Caucasus Emirate. There are a few others fighting for Ukraine who are lesser chances (eg Sheikh Mansur and Dyodar Dudayev btns), but AaK is the most extremist and was best buds with Al Qaeda in Syria/ Jabhat al Nusra as well, so aren't exactly averse to a bit terrorism.

Bruce doing his best to bring the full Hasbara experience to the forums. Typical French, complain that the resolution was too weak on Rafah and sound like they were extremely unhappy with it, but vote yes anyway.

And the random shelling of Belgorod. One of their more effective looking strikes, the HES especially looks pretty totalled. Also, some sort of terrorist attack at a Moscow concert hall though no indications it's linked to Ukraine. Probably predictable due to Biden wanting to be re-elected more than anything else. Gas prices influence votes, and it wasn't coincidence Biden went off to Saudi to ask for them to knock out the spigots before the midterms.

I can't remember any issues with resting/ healing but I didn't like the loot/ experience system being linked as there was just far too much trivial loot. Encased was clearly a very high effort game, though they'd equally obviously done certain things one way because that was different from how others had done them. Which would be great, if the old way wasn't done as it was for a good reason.

The last episode/ cliffhanger of Star Trek Strange New Worlds S2 was pretty close to/ derivative of Aliens and one of the 1st season (Ep9 "All Those Who Wander", apparently) pretty derivative of Alien; using Gorn instead of the Aliens. They were both good overall, or excellent for nuTrek.