Zoraptor

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.

Pretty sure you can blame the BBC for that at least.

Just do what Vancouver (?) did and slap a tax on unoccupied houses which makes it economic to have tenants instead of rely solely on house price inflation. Good lord, these impeachment speeches are interminable. Cicero these guys most definitely are not.

The big issue with Venezuela's oil industry is that its oil is heavy and sour and intrinsically lower value/ hard to process, and the US embargoed items essential for maintenance. Chavez sacking some workers makes a lovely narrative, since it was 'commie' Chavez sacking brave striking workers, but if that was the case it took a very long time and plummeting prices to have an effect. It's a very 90s Iraq dichotomy, if you argue that people are in poverty because of sanctions then the argument is that sanctions have no effect and it's all Saddam/ Maduro's/ their economic system's fault and if they just left everything would be rosy, like it is in Iraq, Honduras, Kosovo or Libya currently; OTOH if you're arguing that sanctions have no effect and the people implementing them are incompetent then suddenly all the economic troubles have their root in sanctions. They key thing is, of course, to switch between the two in the same interview and get Madeleine Albright to say for posterity that 500k dead kids from sanctions is perfectly acceptable on camera. Their main problem is that they can only produce oil very inefficiently because they cannot replace specialist parts, and customers at full price are hard to find because the US will sanction those dealing with them. Then, people wonder why Iran wants nuclear power...

True, and that's why the better options would be better, but there would also be less selective pressure for those mutations- and typically the selective pressure is against more severe symptoms as the aim of the virus is to spread, and the best way to spread is for its host to be walking around coughing rather than dead. IIRC while the SA variant is more likely to spread it appears to be somewhat less dangerous on a per case basis as it does so.

The overall infection rate doesn't matter too much though. Said it before, but if sars-cov-2 were reduced to causing 'common cold' like symptoms as its cousins do then no one would be worrying about it overly; and a 50-80% reduction in severe cases means 50-80% less hospitalisations and deaths which is the most important measure of its effect. You'd still want to use a better vaccine if it were available though, and AZ's vaccine was already relatively low efficiency.

South Africa has paused the rollout of its AstraZeneca vaccines due to low effectiveness against mild/ moderate covid. Most of the vaccines aren't as effective against mild covid, but have very good effectiveness at preventing severe cases, so it isn't necessarily as bad a finding as it looks.

No mention of SimpLord69? Not a well researched article. I think those guys just like the stock. $GME

Since there was some discussion about whether food prices had risen a week or so ago. The answer from the UN at least is that yes, they have been.

Almost all castles have a ditch or a moat, or are on top of a promontory/ hill. It's just about the most basic- and earliest- defensive measure there is; indeed one of the best ways to find sizeable early human settlements is to look for the ditches/ ramparts that were often built around them. Once you're getting to the level of city walls it becomes a bit more difficult due to scale*, but for forts and castles it would have been unusual not to have one. *kind of, Hadrian's Wall had 2 ditches and 2 ramparts (excluding the wall itself) for much of its ~120km length, but then it was also garrisoned by a lot of legionnaires who needed to be kept busy and would be paid anyway.

Miranda butt shots were utter cringe even back in ye olde times, and won't be missed. Retrospectively hilarious how inordinately proud they were of having body scanned Yvonne Strahovski given where Bioware is now- plus cutting the Jack romance for femshep because they were worried about Fox News of all people...

Not sure I agree with him on the trenches for the specific Game of Thrones situation shown, since by that point the ground would have been frozen absolutely solid. While Winterfell should have had extensive defences of that type already, if it didn't digging a ditch in the middle of winter is non trivial and require a lot of pickaxes and the like, would potentially be easy to walk over or around if incomplete, and would tire your army out when you want them fresh. In the scale of tactical dumb in GoT where forgetting your enemy has a fleet is a 11/10 on the dumb scale and ignoring the plan and charging the entire enemy army solo because Rickon can only run in straight lines is a 8/10 not digging ditches in frozen ground is probably about a 4/10, in the worst case scenario. Indeed, you could justify it wholesale if there's very shallow soil there. But then the rest of the Battle of Winterfell is entirely style over substance, so the overall rating is fine. As touched on briefly in the video, one of my 'favourite' things about Braveheart is how Mel Gibson managed to be so spectacularly racist... towards the Scots. They definitely had different tactics from the English historically and- to an extent- different arms (eg Schiltrons), but they were otherwise as developed as England was at the time, not some rag tag barely civilised mess that looks more like a Roman description of a Pictish raiding party. And William Wallace was minor nobility, he'd have looked like any other knight. Bit different for the Highlanders, but the big majority were lowlanders.

That article is a year old, and assumes a managed succession. A lot can change in a year, after all a few months ago Putin had Parkinson's and was going to resign in, uh, January 2021. There isn't a candidate that would be good for Russia and acceptable to the west, because fundamentally what the west wants is someone who will put western interests first, and those interests often run counter to what is best for Russia. Easy to forget, but Putin himself started off as acceptable to the west and only became a problem later.

Novichok definitely isn't uniquely Russian, it was just made there first, much as VX isn't uniquely American or BX uniquely British. It's more difficult to make than most nerve agents (most of which are trivial to make if you can get the precursors, literally mix in a bucket simple in some cases, but more difficult to stabilise) but any decent state agency from a mid range or above country could make it, though the USSR is the only one known to have made it. That's a point Boris Johnson (then Foreign Secretary) got publicly corrected on by Porton Down when he claimed Novichok was intrinsically Russian. The two questions are why they'd bother killing Navalny instead of, say, reinstating his suspended sentence on some pretext as they just did, and if they used Novichok why they'd let him go to Germany instead of keeping him in Russia. The latter in particular would require the monumental stupids to have afflicted someone, and if there's one thing Putin isn't it's monumentally stupid. There's nothing literally impossible about it though, which is better than some CW scenarios from the past few years.

Republicans won't do anything about Trump while there's a threat of a Trump Party forming, as it would cannabalise their support. Which is probably why there's talk of a Trump Party, most effective way to shore up support/ protection for Trump. On the broader question, there was never any chance for conviction in the Senate when only 10 Repubs voted for impeachment in the House. They may get a few more Senate votes than the 2 you'd expect proportionally going from 400+ to 100, but Trump not being in office and having had his term expire rather than resigning to avoid impeachment makes for a very easy out.