Zoraptor

The trouble with both of Paradox's statements are that they are exactly what I'd expect them to say if the game was looking to be cancelled, but they didn't want to outright say it because the CEO/ CFO have upcoming earnings calls and don't want to answer difficult questions. What I'd expect if they were committed to release would be a very explicit and directed statement, what we've got has a lot of wiggle room. "We have started a collaboration with a new studio partner to finish work on the game [vtmb2]. This has been a difficult decision, but we are convinced that it is the right way forward to do the game justice" is designed to imply all the right things, without actually saying them. 'Collaboration with a new partner'; if it's actually a new lead dev why not just say that? So yeah, it isn't even a question only of them not naming the developer. Trouble is that phrase is exactly the sort of term you'd use if you had brought a consultant in to potentially shut down the project rather than work on it. Same with 'finish work on' and 'do the game justice'. Shutting it down is also finishing work on it, and if it is unsalvageable the obvious PR tack to take is that it wouldn't have done the game justice. In short, those statements are exactly the sort I'd expect to precede a later statement about how, sadly, they've come to the conclusion that the game cannot be released and meet their expectations of quality so has been shut down. I'll freely admit that my interpretation is a baldly negative one, but it's hard to cobble together much positive out of the VTMB2 development circus. The record of games successfully escaping development hell is poor, the record for games successfully changing developers half way through is also poor. Paradox management may be mostly phone app free to play veterans now, but they'll still know those basic realities and adages about throwing good money after bad.

I wouldn't be sure they have a replacement lined up. It's a hospital pass for whoever got/ gets it as taking over development half way through is notoriously difficult and the title's reputation is pretty much shot to pieces. Best damage mitigation for Paradox also would have been to name the replacement studio immediately. Despite what Paradox state publicly I would not be surprised if it was quietly canned further down the line and both remaining preorders got cancelled in a few weeks. Frankly their statement strikes me as damage control for an outright failed title, and I would not be surprised at all if Hardsuit has been off it for a while prior to the announcement.

IIRC BIOS has a formal 'economy mode' (not absolutely sure of the name) you can turn on which drops the set TDP from 105W with options down to laptop level draws. Pretty sure it's an AMD/ AGESA setting so supported by all boards.

Sounds more like YAL-1 (or its predecessor) than Star Wars, though that was well inside the last 20 years.

Birds of Prey flopped, but everything else Harley Quinn has been close to an unqualified success. OK, Suicide Squad was... uneven, but nearly everyone liked Quinn/ Robbie in it and at least in theory the main drawcards were Smith, and Leto's Joker. A scramble to produce some sort of antivillain, especially a female one, from Disney is not exactly surprising, nor is their attempts to do so being somewhat eye rolling since that has to be done within the family friendly framework. I suspect they really want a female equivalent to Loki rather than Harley Quinn though, so they can keep the hilarious villainy but avoid the decidedly non G certificate undercurrent of abuse that a HQ equivalent would bring.

Succession to a strongman is always difficult if it isn't hereditary. But in terms of a country's strength Russia and China under Putin and Xi are far stronger than under their predecessors, and they're both nationalist/ religious so long as you take China's 'communism' as a belief system. Of course for Russia it was a positively subterranean bar as Yeltsin's mouldering corpse would have been better than Yeltsin was since at least he couldn't actively ruin the country when dead as he did alive... I don't think we really need to look far beyond Goering's quote for reasons why nationalism is so popular among strongmen. but when it comes right down to it the strongmen in the example failed because... democracies convinced themselves that they were under threat, or knew better how to run those countries. In essence nationalism is the belief that your country is intrinsically better, and you can't get much more self righteous/ deluded about your country being better than believing your own press about being 'liberators' and the 'good guys' when in reality you've managed to completely and systematically asterisk up every country you've intervened in for the past 5? decades leaving every one worse than before you intervened. The cause and effect is the big question. But end of the day if you're going into a country, smashing all its institutions and then saying that the reason for the ensuing anarchy is because the country is fundamentally 'weak' you're ignoring a certain step in that chain and presuming the reason for that weakness is not the fact you've gone in and smashed everything.

Yep, it isn't polling in the western sense. The policies they change and pay attention to are things like the price of pork or rice and whether people think they're too expensive, and any other simmering economic tensions since it's far more likely that they'll get significant regime threatening dissent due to economic reasons. Taiwan/ HK/ Xinjiang are more prestige problems after the century of shame, not existential threats. Their only existential threat is when the majority Han starts protesting because they're hungry or not getting the life improvements they expected. Pretty similar for Russia too, Putin will change policies to please his voting base, those who fundamentally want a different approach can't be appeased but are also a small minority overall, so can be simply suppressed instead.

We do know why in the general sense, but we don't in the specific, for individuals. Usually it's because antibodies are built/ spliced together (in an unusual variable manner) but from set genetic blueprints as all proteins in our bodies are, and while that blueprint is large and varied if you're unlucky that blueprint may not contain the parts that are needed for a specific infection, and a lot of antibody generation is kind of random rather than directed so it takes more/less time to get to the right place for different people based, essentially, on luck. Probably the best analogy is having to build a specific shape with a set of lego where you can't directly observe and choose the pieces you have. If you need a 16x1 piece and don't have it then you're going to have to make do with two 8x1 joined together and hope that still works well enough, and you have to hope that the handful of pieces that you pull out of the bag actually contains the 16x1 relatively quickly. Then if you get infected again you have to remember how you made the right shape, and if it wasn't quite right or you can't build it quickly enough- or the pathogen has mutated enough for the shape needed to have changed- you can get infected again. If you're really unlucky the shape for detection is found, but the shape for proper effect against the pathogen isn't, and then you can get an uncontrolled feedback loop (cytokine storm). Since antibodies are spliced out of DNA in a unique and complicated manner it's difficult to analyse what if any combinations are missing for specific people because you can't simply read through the genes in phase as you'd (generally) do for other proteins.

You invest because there's zero input costs since wind and sun is free, with the knowledge that if you don't have wind or sun you need something else or some way to store the power excess from the renewables. Coal/ nuclear/ gas all cost ongoing money to supply and in nuclear's gas remove the fuel required. Then you have the question of what is 'less faulty'. Everyone knows what the limitations of renewables are- solar needs sun, wind needs wind, hydro needs water and a gradient etc- and the 'reliable' back stop of natural gas option was itself unreliable in this case due to, well, needing natural gas. Coal needs coal and if you don't have a ready supply then is expensive when gas is right there, nuclear costs a massive amount for initial expense and tends to supply GW levels so if you don't have the habitual demand rapidly becomes a white elephant that can't make back its investment.

Everything from earthquakes to covid to winter storms to Erdogan personally claiming to have ordered that Russian jet to be shot down is obviously Fetullah Gulen's fault though, he doesn't need to actually blame him specifically any more. Stub your toe? Gulen. Weevils in your flour? Gulen. Rain on your wedding day? Gulen. Green lights when you're already late? Gulen. OTOH if Trump had somehow managed to wangle his way back to the presidency Erdogan would probably be claiming MAGA Shaman as Turkish due to Tengrism- while simultaneously courting the domestic Islamic vote.

Breaking news: the Capitol riots were influenced by Kurdish revolutionaries, according to world renowned geopolitical analyst Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Normally I'd hesitate to post anything Memri related since it's an Israeli psy-op that deliberately mistranslates a lot of the time to make people look more stupid or obnoxious than they are, but in this case it's what he actually said. The idea of MAGA types being influenced by massively left wing anarcho-collectivist Kurds is an interesting take, to say the least.

You're not saying the same thing. 1) 'Strain' on natgas supply was not the problem, it physically freezing and reducing supply was. Even if wind power had been at 100% nominal power- which no one should be relying on- it would not and could not make up that difference. Wind power only reduced first, it had no influence on natgas power dropping. They wouldn't have had Scotty shouting down the lines about not being able to give it more or his natgas plant'll blow cap'n, they'd know it can produce x MW of power- and you cannot run the turbines out of spec. 2) a,b are conflation, at best. You can make the exact reverse argument- renewables only 'failed' because the natgas electricity that was meant to balance loads failed to materialise- to blame natgas instead. Indeed, since it's well known that supply from wind and solar especially are intermittent natgas and other spot energies are fundamentally intended to smooth out and increase/ decrease (maintain) supply as renewables come on/offline; ie such an argument actually shows that it was natgas that failed. (c) is the ultimate reason for natgas electricity failing. They aren't grid infrastructure technically, the grid infrastructure isn't energy production but the lines and transformers that move the energy*. I'd suspect rather a lot of that failed too due to ice on lines and possibly even transformers freezing**. But that had nothing to do with renewables, since natgas was also effected, and it was the one that was meant to be able to step up output for balancing purposes. If natgas power had been maintained or risen the shortage could probably have been largely mitigated to relatively short lived rolling black outs, in general, and probably more general blackouts in rural areas as lines physically failed. *eg we have a ~600MW hydro power plant here that is unconnected to the grid as it produces power exclusively for an aluminium smelter. Which is great, since Comalco loves to threaten to shut down that smelter immediately before elections as an attempt to gouge better prices from its supplier. **which shouldn't happen if they have current since transforming generates a decent amount of heat (indeed, failure to remove the heat is a frequent cause of failure), but does happen if they're not supplied with power.

We should be fair to Boeing's incompetence, they managed to design a plane with a single fundamental problem- wanting to fly itself into the ground- and find multiple points of failure (attitude indicators, pitot tubes, software) that could manifest it, rather than just one; and paywalled one preventative measure. There are always single points of failure in an electrical grid unless you're designing with massive redundancy, and fundamentally even then you will still have a hard upper limit at some point at very least. Economically the push will always be to supply just enough power to meet demand because anything else is expensive and the power is potentially 'wasted', hence all the work on things like thermal storage (eg sodium 'batteries') for solar. Somewhere like New Zealand has a natural advantage due to having lots of hydro power for load balancing near instantly, but even here a problem with something like the HVDC line could see the North Island in trouble, despite there being 2 cables rather than one because those cables are high hundreds of km long and extremely expensive. A transformer/ cable issue (with redundant capacity in theory, point of failure was deferring maintenance on 2 cables which both failed) 23 years ago led to major power outages in Auckland for 5 weeks and the 2003 New York+ blackout was infamously caused by a load sharing failure cascade due to a software error. I certainly wouldn't blame people in general for not being prepared for something highly unusual, but I do think it has to be pointed out that by and large people don't die of exposure/ hypothermia when they have access to hot food/ drink, which a gas cooker does provide. Though of course you also have the problem of carbon monoxide poisoning if you overdo it.

Good old Recep Tayyip Erdogan going a bit mental at everyone having completely asterisked up a hostage rescue operation*. It's everyone's fault apart from his, especially his domestic Kurdish political enemies and the US. Probably Gulen, Israel, Iraq, students, gays, Syrian refugees, Greece, Armenia and Iran too. Coincidentally Turkey's economy is going down the gurgler as the funny money fiscal policy and building bubble burst, and he's getting publicly bent over by China over vaccine supply and being forced to abandon support for the Uighurs, not exactly a great look for someone who has tried to make themself the poster child for pan Turkism (despite Erdogan being ethnic Georgian, not Turkic, himself). Ultimately that's the problem with using military adventurism to boost popularity artificially- it's temporary, so you have to do it semi constantly with diminishing returns; and if things don't work out as you want it has the reverse effect and you lose popularity. He'll probably try and ban the domestic Kurdish party soon, though overall that shouldn't have too much effect since HDP voters will 99% go for CHP over the pro Erdogan alternatives. *while the headline says the victims were civilians, as claimed by Turkey, they were definitely non civilian police and army personnel. And there are a lot of rumours that the hostages were not executed but died either in a drone strike or during fighting. After all they had been held long term without execution prior to this.

Since Kurzmann/ ST came up in the movies thread I feel compelled to say that the penultimate episode of Discovery S3 seems to have finally killed off my ability to watch. It sits there in my Netflix queue, forlorn and alone, waiting to disappear into the rubbish bin of half watched shows. I wonder how Clarice is. Surely not a generic procedural that might as well use the initialism Clarice Starling Investigates, surely not.

Dunno, most of the defensive 'requirements' in Kingmaker seemed pretty sensible to me. If you're fighting undead make sure you have death ward and restoration, if you're fighting stuff that poisons have poison resistance etc. It's way more of a all buffs all the time game compared to the BGs but then BG spells were largely cheese fests with different balance issues like the aforementioned summoning. And again, I'd suggest there's a lot of rose tinted on the Baldur's Gate side. BG2 Beholders and illithids? The liches with Imprisonment? All instant gameover or as good as if you fail a save, if you even got a save. It's just that everyone knows how to counter those because they're for a 20 year old game, so people go get the Shield of Reflection first etc. I'd criticise Kingmaker for being too... random in its macro level results (ie for difficult encounters I'd often lose terribly, then retry and win trivially next time using exactly the same tactics) for combat, but that was exactly the same in BG1/2 where often the combat was decided by who got off [mass status effect] spell first and who failed saves in the first 2 rounds. For higher levels, who gets the enemy mages via Breach or whatever. That's just how D&D type combat is, any encounter is trivial with a lucky throw or two, and most encounters can be difficult with the reverse. Kingmaker definitely suffered from a decent dollop of game system opaqueness though, no doubt about it. More generally, I rather liked most of the kingdom management aspects, though they should definitely be optional (as they are, by setting). It's definitely underdone on the matter of visible consequences/ results with a few exceptions though. The main mechanical complaint is that you can't abort a project involving the PC if something comes up, and the timings for the big events usually started events before their 'due' date which could lead to 2 weeks of pop ups telling you about drunk giants running amok or whatever. Otherwise my main complaint would be not enough options for all the positions, which is pretty minor.

I think you're regarding BG1 with a fair bit of the rose tinted there. You tend to forget all the the times you got wiped by kobolds in the Nashkel mines with their ludicrous crit dealing bows shooting your mages and thiefs or when you stumbled into an Ogre who gibbed everyone in 3 rounds just outside Candlekeep because it's been 23 years and you know what is coming. Or that literally every in game problem could be solved by, well, summoning allies, then summoning more allies and summoning more again. Kingmaker is a game where you absolutely should ignore any hard encounter and come back to it later. Unfortunately modern gaming has conditioned people to believe that that is bad design and you should be able to win everything first attempt and do everything in any order. That is of course why we have level scaling, it's also why you have games like Oblivion where you not only can win with a lvl 2 character but it's actively easier to do so with one. Give me unforgiving pull yourself up by your bootstraps you pathetic loser and git gud old school any day instead of the gaming equivalent of mummy delivering me chicken tendies and telling me how special I am for beating a daedric lord who's been level scaled down to gobbo class.

Would still be too slow to use Stadia without lag.

Shoot a man on 5th Avenue, I could. Be fired, I would not be. While true, if you reversed the positions and looked at liberals who compare conservatives to nazis they certainly don't get fired for it. If they did the unemployment rate in the US would skyrocket.

As Elerond mentioned, the cost of administration of benefits is ludicrous. Cut that out and there's a big saving. Last time I checked it literally literally cost more to investigate benefit fraud here than was saved by detecting it, for example. You do have to have the investigations as you there would be more fraud if there was no chance of being caught, but still, nett loss per investigation suggests better alternatives should be looked at.

"Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people. But they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie game about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad" Be interesting to see if the game starts with some neanderthal from the 82nd using a .50 cal for crowd control, somehow I doubt it.

Not really news, I haven't seen anything that wasn't general knowledge at the time or soon after. I know a lot of people regarded him as a bit of a girl power male feminist, but to be honest he had some pretty... odd stuff going on even without retrospect- Angel stalking Buffy when she was 13, the Spike S6 thing, a lot of Xander's stuff, Wesley's slave girl in the closet not to mention that the whole premise of Dollhouse was extraordinarily creepy. Lots of fetishisation going on there. That Buffy in particular was a toxic set was a pretty open secret even before Emma Caulfield asked for Anya to be killed off. For the most recent stuff, while I don't doubt that Whedon was an utter knob to Charisma Carpenter the decision to fire her was ultimately because WB mandated that James Marsters be brought in for Angel S5 along with another budget cut, and Cordelia was the only character that could be written out to make way for him.

Yeah, though we might not want too many similarities to Spanish Flu since its first major mutation caused most of its death toll, albeit indirectly.

The Watership Down movie was renowned for giving kids nightmares, the TV series is renowned for giving them to adults.

2 days into the trial and I'm approaching the point where I wish those Trumpists had gone full Gaiseric on not just the Capitol, but Washington in general. If the CIA ever gets sick of blasting Nickleback on repeat at people at its black sites they could get an even better effect with these speeches.