Zoraptor

I've never liked the 'bad games do not get reviewed' explanation for review inflation because sure it's usually cheap/ unknown games don't get reviewed, but it's also cheap/ unknown movies that don't get reviewed. Not like movie critics regularly watch and review the film equivalent of a steam Asset Flip game either. Ultimately the problem is that if you go by game reviews there has basically never been a bad big budget/ hyped/ important game, their scale starts at 7. For the less fortunate, it starts at maybe 5. That is not the case for film, they're far more likely to use the full scale, and to do so even if it's a big title. Also rather like the original games in the series. SoC and CS had, uh, one or two bugs at launch, it's fair to say, and CoP was not that much better. Indeed, the non modded experience for them has some... quirks to this day.

To be fair to Thomas-Greenfield if you're a UN ambassador for a permanent member you're pretty much always an automatic entry into the hypocrisy Olympics. And she did make sure it was her deputy rather than her that voted when the US was the sole veto on the Israel/ Paelstine ceasefire resolutions...

Ultimately, award shows are what credible industries like movies have, so gaming needs them in order to be a credible industry... (It's one of those situations where if you start off without credibility it's very hard to earn it, because the factors that cause the lack of credibility are self reinforcing- window dressing like awards showsis easy though (and awards shows are great for advertising). That's perhaps best illustrated by the general perception of game Criticism vs movie Criticism, of which gaming's review inflation is certainly a major symptom. One's serious business, the other, well, isn't; it's still largely seen as reviews of a kid's pastime done by people who Aren't Real Journalists. The self reinforcing consequence of that is that if you're a movie reviewer you're a lot more likely to be experienced and well known already, and there is an expectation that you can- and should- give bad marks to big movies. Correspondingly that gives high marks value, and the reviewer some protection from blowback. It's by no means perfect there; except when compared to the situation with games. From the pov of the biggest gaming industry stake holders- publishers- many of the factors that lead to the lack of credibility are net positives so not subject to change)

The issues with atacms/ himars vs Russian AD is saturation, from the Russian perspective. As with Israel or anywhere really, reloads take time and you cannot physically fire/ reload enough interceptors to reliably intercept big attacks- also unlike Israel their best and longest range systems are designed as anti aircraft primarily, it's the shorter range systems that are intended for anti missile roles. Saturation attacks will also tend to overcome jamming since 1 rocket with +/- 100m accuracy due to relying on INS is a lot more likely to miss statistically than multiple rockets with the same error. From the Ukrainian it's jamming, and that saturation attacks by their nature require a lot of launches and their launchers to be relatively close together to do the coordinated, uh, launches. HiMARS can carry one atacms each, and 'LoMARS' like the M270 still only two. As for the North Koreans so far as I can tell they're meant to be all disguised as Russians from Buryatia, constantly deserting (without reaching Ukrainian troops), hooked on pr0n and managing to blow themselves up comically with grenade launchers. While launching human wave attacks that leave no casualties? Ah, but at least one was genuinely captured, though the sneaky Russians clumsily photoshopped a DPRK passport into the picture to make people think it was fake! It's all because Putin is horribly embarrassed about Ukraine wasting its best troops on a town of 6000, you can tell how embarrassed he is by him pulling all his best troops to fight in Kursk. Best troops which, of course, include those 10k 100k pr0n addled unmotivated Wile E Coyote's from Pyongyang with hide and go seek skills that would put Garrett to shame. You don't need a degree in media criticism from Oxford, Cambridge and Hull Universities to poke a few holes in that, you just need to have retained some critical faculty beyond an Arsenal player never having committed a foul in the history of the club level. (ftr I of course said that there may well be some Koreans there, but they'd almost certainly be involved in stuff that was of benefit to, well, North Korea; like learning how to use drones effectively)

Oh yeah, the Russians are firing indiscriminately. Their low civilian casualty toll is because they are just terrible at hitting the civilians they're deliberately and maliciously aiming at. Sadly, the Israelis are even more terrible at missing the civilians they're precisely and humanely trying to avoid hitting during their humanitarian mission to give Palestinians an extended overseas holiday (or funeral). Which is funny because while Bruce is just trolling you do see people trying to say exactly that (minus the deliberate mickey taking aspects) and wondering why people think they're disingenuous shills.

Give Iran (more) S400s, or maybe the Houthis have a breakthrough and develop some Qalat-P or P-800 Eaqiq Yumani anti ship systems? Or most likely nothing, this was an obvious post election play whatever the result, and has been baked into Russian thinking for months.

It's certainly no flop and sold well in absolute terms, but since Bethesda is (basically) a single team studio there's an inherent opportunity cost to spending 7 years on Starfield. ie making it meant they couldn't do other projects. So you're not just comparing its sales in absolute numbers, but comparing them relative to what sales of an alternative TES title would have been; and probably they would have been better in the short term, and certainly* would have had better longevity via word of mouth etc. Also, if it's 7 years per title as a new norm you'd be looking at 18 years between TES titles and then... 22 years between Fallouts? Even if it goes back to 5 years that's still 16 years and 18 years. That's a lot of time between drinks. You don't really want to rely on someone who played a game as a 13 year old buying a sequel as a 31 or 35 year old... *ok, not literally literally certainly certainly but just very, very likely.

Eh, publicly critiquing Harris wouldn't achieve anything. While you could argue that Clinton was the problem in 2016 so it might be important to state her mistakes to avoid repeating them it's a lot harder to make the same argument for Harris, given circumstances like her not even being the candidate for a decent portion of campaigning. Plus he's right, publicly sticking the knife in to someone you worked with when they fail is a crap thing to do. Most of the criticisms of 'Harris' that could be given would be more fairly directed at the overall leadership and party strategists anyway.

Reckon Starfield was a bit of a perfect storm. It was never going to have a good story or dialogue and was always going to use their shonky 20 year old engine, and even another TES would have had those two issues. Worse was, while it may have seemed like a good fit in theory it was intrinsically not a good fit for the 'Bethesda style' and made some of its limitations very obvious. Probably the worst though was that just about everyone would have preferred a TES* or Fallout title which meant that a decent subset of the target audience was predisposed against it and unwilling to cut it the slack they might have otherwise; that also meant no built in/ existing enthusiasm for modding. Perhaps as a result, marketing was also unusually tepid. *fair enough really, not personally a fan of the series but it's already 13 years since Skyrim, and a new game is not close. Best part of 20 years between titles of your flagship franchise is going to stretch people's patience in the best circumstances, if you're going to take 7 years doing a new franchise it'd better look the part.

Eh... that actually illustrates one of the core theoretical differences between Islam and Christianity. In many ways more so even than "render unto Caesar" vs not having an equivalent, though that has had more practical effect. If you're Christian you're- at least theoretically- meant to capital B Believe Revelations as being The Word including the arrival of the Great Dragon (? it's been a while) etc. Of course practically, much like God creating the earth, some people take it more literally and some less so. Islam doesn't really have an equivalent to Revelations' apocalypse, in the Koran. The apocalyptic stuff similar to Revelations is mostly from Hadiths which are... religious guidelines may be most accurate, and not necessarily seen as being canon. eg the Mahdi isn't Koranic except as a title for Mohammed and isn't included in half the Hadith collections, so his canonicity, uh, depends. Which is fortunate given how hard some of the prophecies would be to fulfill, now. (Selective usage of Hadiths was one of ISIS' favourite tactics for justifying themselves, since there are a lot of of them. Then again, not like there aren't Christians who take "love thy neighbour" and append an "except if they're ___" to it based on something Saul wrote, or even something in Leviticus. People gonna people, religion just makes them feel good about it)

Short version of The Apocalypse: The Antichrist arrives when Israel rebuilds The Temple after which there will be a big battle at Megiddo --> "Armageddon". After after which, to show how much Evangelicals really care about Jews, all the Jews can either convert or, well, go to hell. Plus lots of repetitive and contradictory imagery about Signs and Portents/ Enemies that allows for liberal interpretation. In short: Revelations should have been left as the ravings of a Qat addled hermit* who was a bit upset about the Flavians burning The Temple in 70AD or whatever. Always kind of funny to read The Bible assuming it was just written by people rather than being The Word. Big irony: muslims however are a definite death cult for believing the big battle will be at a random village in Syria (Dabiq) instead of a random village in Israel. Otherwise it's pretty similar** for their end times as well, maybe a bit more specific and anachronistic (eg taking 'Constantinople'). *might not have done any good of course. To whit: the Prosperity Gospel. Did you know that the rich man and the eye of a needle aphorism was actually literal and about a gate in Jerusalem, not about how being overly wealthy is bad? Actually, Jesus "Gordon Gecko" Christ thought accumulating wealth was, well, good and means that God loves you in particular! **iirc they're also Hadiths, so not 'full' canon.

Fairly sure I'd heard similar. I think it was DGaider? on his blog or in an interview saying that they'd developed the setting prior to DAO via pnp rpg or similar? Can't find a reference with a quick search so can't be certain I'm not mixing it up with something else though.

It doesn't come with a prescriptive description of what the obligations actually are, practically, but the obligation to collective defence is explicit in article 5, to whit: "The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.." Exactly what the response would be is non prescriptive for good reason; an armed attack could consist of anything from an errant rocket from Ukraine hitting Poland to most of the North Atlantic going more radioactive than an Imagine Dragons number 1 and anything in between. As with most such treaties the obligations, implications and wording are open to extremely liberal interpretation and have been multiple times previous. The whole of Article 1 will sound like a bad joke to much of the world given the west's collective record when it comes to peaceful solutions and not threatening military action for example.

Brought to you by the same legal system that holds Iran responsible for the 9/11 attacks too.

Could get another Syria like situation where branches of the US government are fighting each other by proxy. US military bombing the cartels, ATF arming them...

Joining NATO was wildly popular among Ukrainian politicians, and they're the ones who really count. Whatever the popular sentiment the list of Presidents of Ukraine who opposed joining NATO since 2000 only has one name on it: Yanukovich. Kuchma, Yuchenko, (Yatsenyuk), Poroshenko and Zelensky all supported it along with pretty much all the President adjacent types like Tymoshenko.

That definitely wasn't just a US thing. At very least our government got blamed for inflation/ cost of living, the British and the French ones too and all lost elections in large part due to it. Pretty difficult to win elections when most people have had their disposable income cut by half.

Wonder when the Democrats are going to work out that trotting out the Liz Cheneys of the world isn't going to get them votes and may actually cost them some- and definitely will cost them enthusiasm among those who should be voting for them. Yeah, never, since the leadership prefers ludicrous neocons to their own supporters. Or that not being Trump isn't really an actual strategy. At least the last one isn't likely to be in play in 2028. Still think Harris was a decent enough candidate hamstrung by bad party policy and strategy plus no one being willing to have the Difficult Conversation with Biden a year ago; though she's certainly done a lot worse than I expected. At least I'm not a professional pundit, a lot of them should be re examining their career choices, again. Another relevant TPM quote about Trump's Presidency

From the outside* Harris seemed a far better candidate than ClintonH and to make a pretty good fist of it. Definitely hamstrung by the shorter lead in, and not having a primary. Don't think being a woman was the deciding factor for either, assuming Harris does lose- I mean, if ClintonH had won in 2008 and Obama lost in 2016 we might be saying the deciding factor was skin colour instead of lack of Y chromosomes. The biggest issue on the Democrat side was that their leadership didn't seem to learn anything from 2016 and just decided they lost because of sexism and berniebros rather than anything to do with them. That's typified by going all in on Biden who was obviously having difficulties that were... unlikely to be lessened by campaigning. The biggest factor overall is that Trump is a terrible candidate in the orthodox sense, but manages to turn that into a bonus when campaigning. Or at least when campaigning as a non incumbent, bit difficult to be an 'outsider' when you're president. People also don't really realise how effective his speeches are because the political/ media etc classes- and most people here- tend to be taught to write/ speak a particular way which is not how you actually think the relevant thoughts you're expressing. Trump speaks a lot more how people naturally think, with a load of digressions and odd elipses as things come to mind. Which seems terrible to pundits and speech writers, but to a lot of people it's a communication style that instants connects because it is the way they think. *just take everything with that disclaimer so I don't have to type it every time

The final results take two weeks here because of Special Votes, which we have a lot of (more than 25% of total). That's people voting out of electorate, from overseas, registered too late; and we also allow on day registration. All of those have to be manually checked, and generally skew enough to change the result by a couple of seats since specials always bias Left, which has been significant in a 120 (ish, often have overhangs from Maori Party winning electorates disproportionately) seat parliament. Last election despite being a 'landslide' the specials meant three parties were needed for a coalition rather than two.

There was also 'never any mandate' to use Frostbite for Andromeda or for DA2 to have such a short development cycle. And Bioware did exactly what it wanted with Anthem too! (Funny thing being that just makes both sets of execs dumb; the Bioware ones for consistently making bad decisions, the EA ones for not intervening in the bad decision making. At least EA execs imposing the bad decisions could have the Bioware ones being competent but overruled)

The Inquisition actually ran through to the 1830s though, and was very very active around the time of the reformation. Despite the Templars being (mostly) suppressed and the Holy Land lost the church still had a bunch of military religious orders* extant during the reformation and founded the Soldiers of Christ- ie Jesuits- in 1540. The brutal suppression of native belief in the colonies was directly contemporary with the reformation too, but generally doesn't get talked about so much because, well, nobody now or then cared about it as much as Europe. *bit of a, uh, double edged sword when the Teutonic Knights (mostly) switched sides of course. Always an interesting 'what if' to speculate what happens if you didn't get Prussia founded on the Teutonic Order's legacy of militarism and genocide. Evidence certainly suggests people will always find a handy excuse to fight each other and religion isn't the problem. Ultimately Henry had a point. He should not really have been allowed to marry Catherine of Aragon under church doctrine since she was married to his deceased brother which would make it technical incest. If you grant an Indulgence for one you can grant one for the other too. And every ruler had a point about the enormous tracts of land that were accumulated, and still being accumulated, by the church and returned nothing to the crown and very little to the people they were meant to be helping.

Yeah, I think the Arians, Gnostics, Nestorians, Paulicians, Cathars, Lollards and Hussites might dispute that. So to the Nahuatl, Inti etc. Might, if there were any left after the Catholics killed or force converted them all... Main difference between those and the Protestants were that the Protestants didn't lose. (Indeed, it's stretched on occasion to very recently- see the enthusiasm with which Franco's death squads were supported by the Spanish catholic church less than a century ago or the Maronite Church and the Phalange in Lebanon. Definitely got a lot more rare since ~1650, thankfully, and plenty of recent counter examples of the church actually opposing what they would previously have supported such as Pinochet the pedant in me forces an edit because, technically, the Hussites didn't exactly lose either)

I'm not sure the average Telegraph reader hates education per se- their experience at Eton/ Rugby/ Harrow then OxBridge was simply tremendous after all- they just tend to think that Britain's colonialism was a glorious Mission to Civilise and that should be obvious to the properly educated. Just look at that Sunak chap, got the opportunity to make the most of himself by marrying a billionaire heiress; wouldn't have happened if he was back home worshiping cows. (Though the average Telegraph reader probably doesn't read the website as that internet thing is a bit new fangled and wasn't decently invented by the english, like paper and printing)

I'd be skeptical of anything reported in the Israeli press, based on something claimed by a TV company run by a prominent Phalangist family. Funny thing, Hezbollah people have this really weird tendency to talk to Israeli and non Shia Lebanese media and say exactly what said media wants them to say. It's almost like they aren't actually talking to real Hezbollah people... And for anyone wondering, yes, the Lebanese Phalange named themselves and modeled themselves after Franco's Spanish Falange, and are, literally literally, fascists who want to Make Lebanon Christian Again. Which is why they got on so well with Begin and Shamir's Israel. They were responsible- along with another former Israeli PM, Ariel Sharon, and the IDF- for the judicially proven to be genocidal Sabra and Shatila massacre, among many other atrocities. Far from alone in perpetuating atrocities of course, but theirs tended to be the largest and most memorable ones targeting civilians. Though as with their moral compatriots Al Qaeda in Syria they prefer to be known by a different name now, so as not to offend tender western sensibilities (--> 'Kataeb').