Zoraptor

Coolest by a country mile was the Su-47, especially with the prototype's colour scheme. Backwings just look awesome even if they aren't really practical. There's a fairly well known plane rebuilder at the nearest aerodrome to where I live and they did mock attack runs on me during flight testing for one of their Mosquito rebuilds (I was spraying gorse and they obviously decided a red ute parked at the top of a hill made an obvious and safe target). Pretty memorable experience, but I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end if it were for real.

5 years. Intel is probably too big to fail even if it were seriously threatened, much like Boeing. The big medium term threat is if their 7nm gets delayed or runs into 10nm like problems, they've now acknowledged they'll be behind AMD for nearly the next two years which is bad enough. But they've had problems now with their last two processes, albeit the Broadwell pipecleaner was far less an issue than 10nm, and if they make it 3 in a row there will be serious questions about them maintaining their own fabs, let alone the sort of damage further delays could do to their most lucrative markets.

You've either got the wrong plane or the wrong definition of ground attack*. Su57 is the Russian F22 equivalent. And while P51 could be used in ground attack it was far more useful as a long range escort, and other planes were better at the task (eg off the top of my head, Typhoons for UK. Thunderbolts on the US side. And the Sturmovik for the Russians) I'd have difficulty putting the Warthog first though as it's never operated in genuinely contested airspace. The Stuka too looked great when it was in uncontested skies. *Though I really don't like wikipedias list, way too many listed that can be used but really aren't intended to be used as such.

They probably wish they could just overtly blame the NSA for the problem. I presume at some stage we're going to get books and articles about what's been going on at Intel in the same style as there have been about Boeing's decline. Certainly seems like Krzanich's tenure as CEO was a complete disaster on the technical side that they still haven't recovered from, even if it isn't significantly hurting their bottom line yet.

I doubt Biden would do anything near the more ludicrous Trump feats; I doubt Biden could do some of Trump's more outlandish feats if he wanted to. No hotels so no currying favour by staying at them, it's unlikely that Biden's son in law (does he even have one?) is going to be appointed to write a middle east peace plan while financing illegal settlements for one party to that peace plan and being massively in debt to Mr Bone Saw; as obvious examples. With Biden it would be the same old ways of taking legalised bungs to protect special interests, but that is hardly equivalent to Trump. Which I guess is why Trump's pushing the Hunter Biden/ Berisma thing so strongly, since that would potentially be a lot closer to Trump's behaviour. Funny thing is I actually rather like Joe Biden, but I have very little doubt he'll lose barring some major perturbation. He'd have been a better candidate than Hillary 4 years ago, and probably would have won then.

Yet another ceasefire in Syria. Looks like it's basically a Turkish surrender, Syria gets to keep every bit of reclaimed territory and the rebels effectively hand over everything south of the M4 too. Turkey gets literally none of the stuff they were demanding beforehand- no return to original Sochi lines, no M5, observation points still surrounded. Looks like another 6 month delay to the rebel loss rather than anything permanent. Pretty much everything is being done the same way as last time. Absolutely no lessons learnt whatsoever. Anyone with any enthusiasm is a BernieBro, who couldn't be bothered voting so don't matter, what are they going to do if Hillary Joe is picked vote Trump?, everything has been done perfectly above board, [candidate] is electable Bernie isn't, Bernie isn't even a proper Democrat and will run as an independent if he loses, and, of course, there is absolutely no anti Bern bias. I've seen two different D talking heads on BBC and AlJ run through exactly that set of talking points with barely concealed glee, which also happened last time too. At least Biden isn't actively disliked as much as Hillary was, but then he also wouldn't have the draw of being the first woman candidate. I find the emphasis on being 'electable' particularly stupid since electable for the Democrats always seems to mean run of the mill and inoffensive to party sensibilities. Every single candidate picked primarily for 'electability' has lost, because if you're labeling your candidate as 'electable' it's pretty much saying that there isn't anything better to say about them than that they can win. The successful D candidates of my lifetime- BClinton and Obama- were not the safe options, far from it, they were the ones with some ability to actively enthuse those who aren't apparatchniks. Every time they've gone for the safe candidate they've lost, and lost to extraordinarily flawed candidates like GWBush and Trump who at least had some ability to enthuse.

Oh no, you can most certainly romance the skellington in DOS2*. Not absolutely sure since it's been a while since I played and my memory is a bit shaky but I think you could romance every companion, at the same time. *+1 for DOS2 over Kingmaker, where's the Jaethal romance option Owlcat?

Calling it Baldur's Gate is fine. NWN was a MMO, then two SP(ish) games. Then an MMO again? So out of the loop with MMOs I'm not sure. Not like the IPLY BG3 was going to be a sequel either. Publishers love their brand recognition, and BG has brand recognition which hasn't yet been tainted much. This is most certainly the correct answer. Not a useful comparison for computer D&D unfortunately, whether TB or RT, though I wish it were.

No you aren't. Non taxpayers pay for healthcare in most countries with a universal system- though most normal treatments are considerably less expensive than in the US even at 'market' rates. Visitors are supposed to have either travel or medical insurance to protect them from medical costs.

Pathfinder Kingmaker still, and no real feeling of slowing down at all. Definitely a worthy successor to the Baldur's Gates in terms of boss fights, you either get your party wiped or wipe the floor with them. Fought some dudette that spammed destruction spells and I'm sure the AI scripting told her to target the PC preferentially just because a failed saving throw instantly meant she 'won' the fight via game over. So you hide the main character and she gets chunked in about twenty seconds after a couple of lucky criticals instead...

I've often- well, occasionally, if a bit bored and thinking vaguely on the subject of game combat systems- wondered if a WeGo system would work well for D&D type games. ie you do the planning for each character as if they were operating in a turn but the turns all execute/ resolve 'simultaneously'. In theory that would allow for the detailed planning possible in a TB system without the potential slowness involved in waiting for 20 rats to each take their turn crawling and mostly missing their 20 individually animated attacks. (The answer is probably it wouldn't work well for D&D, but I'd like to see someone try at some point. And yeah, in theory that is more or less what Infinity Engine RTwP was with the pause at round end option selected)

They are toy soldiers on a battle map, when in combat and in computer RPGs. In D&D overall though they're meant to be more than chess pieces, they are meant to have personalities and skills beyond that. You can't get a chaotic evil pawn that decides it would be fun to kill his own side's queen because she's a bit snooty, obviously has money, and tried to get him killed...

I think you'd also have to question how committed the Democratic Party is to getting out the youth vote for the nomination process though, as compared to older demos. It's all very well to blame youth, but if older voters are being actively courted and encouraged to turn up and they aren't it does make a difference too. As a strategy it's immensely short sighted and was a major problem last time in the presidential election when youth didn't turn out for the enthusiasm black hole that was Hillary Clinton, but it's not exactly surprising that a party establishment that wants to blame Russia, Bernie, anyone but themselves for losing last time will repeat the exact same mistakes again. Even with South Carolina being an open primary the focus would be on getting turn out from D party members who tend to be older, more little c conservative and intrinsically less prone to vote for Bernie. Overall I get the distinct impression that some of the more ludicrous talking heads on especially MSNBC are representative of mainstream capital P Party thinking- they'd expect and prefer 4 more years of Trump rather than a Sanders nomination. The great thing about suppressing the youth vote is that you always have someone to blame- those feckless zoomers who were far too busy doing ice box challenges and planking to vote as they're meant to for the awe inspiring, totally hip and not at all 1990s option of Bloomberg/ Clinton or whatever charisma singularity they favour.

Is that 3% mortality for infection or world population? Because most of the figures I've seen have a 8-10% mortality rate for those infected by Spanish Flu, with about a quarter of the world's population at the time being infected. The covid19 figures are for death rate of infected, so about 1/3 the rate of Spanish Flu rather than the same.

Kind of amusing watching the media spin the SC result as being the Berniepocalypse. Much as last time with Clinton and her winning in the south it's completely irrelevant to being a good candidate overall, since the only scenario in which the Dems win SC vs Trump is a landslide one where they win anyway. And Biden did atrociously in the states which they'll actually need to win to beat Trump. A brokered convention would be hilarious and cringe/ facepalm inducing, in equal measure.

What was his plot element on the prison island? Unlike all (?) the other P/NPCs I could only remember his plot starting on the 2nd island, which would have explained how someone who didn't play much would get the impression he had no plot compared to the others.

Amazing how much my view of Larian's environment system varies between the two DivOSs- first one, yes, nice overall if a bit overpowered/ silly in some cases; second one was either irrelevant or annoying. But their annoyance to you/ irrelevance to enemies in DivOS2 was largely due to the stupid armour system, which won't be the same in D&D*. So I'd be expecting more of the DivOS1 approach, and thus a net positive from the reactivity. *Epic gnolls with 25/25/25/25 fire/ acid/ cold/ electricity resistance incoming...

Turn based should be fine as long as there isn't massive amounts of pointless filler combat. It was fine in DivOS1 and the issues in DivOS2 weren't due to it being TB. Larian is also pretty good at designing unique feeling encounters via their environmental system, so even if you're fighting orcs or undead for the twentieth time it doesn't feel stale. If you have to stop every twenty seconds to fight a rat which crawls slowly across the screen for a few rounds while you crawl slowly towards it over the same few rounds then it takes your characters half a dozen rounds to hit so that the encounter takes ten minutes then that would be a problem, but I don't think we'll see that.

I'd disagree, but it doesn't really matter if it is or isn't anyway. Obviously a lot of people enjoy it, and if they enjoy it that's fine with me whatever I think of its quality. But even though it wasn't me making the original comparison I'd say that a comparison of obsessive Twilight fans to obsessive Bioware fans is certainly a comparison that has merit, because a lot of those fans get the same type of enjoyment out of both. There was a fair bit of crazy around before ME2, though that is definitely the high water mark and the time at which it became the (stereotypical) Bioware fan's distinctive trait. It's very much a result of Bioware's development system of NPCs up to ME2 which culminated in a game which was, essentially, NPC recruitment and loyalty missions stitched together by a haphazard main plot which ended up with you fighting a ludicrous Terminator Reaper hybrid made of soylent greened people. There wasn't much crazy at all for BG1 because the NPCs were very basic cyphers with a dozen lines each, a bit for BG2 as the NPCs developed more and so on as the system progressed and especially as the idea of romances progressed. They're not so much nerd porn as variable quality relationship simulator porn. Bioware definitely played for this, indeed they actively developed character archetypes that were the same through multiple games because of it- the Anomen (Carth/ Sky/ notAshley) archetype of whiny damaged love interest, the Korgan (Canderous/ Black Whirlwind/ Wrex) amoral mercenary, the vulnerable love interest, the tough love interest etc etc. I liked DAO a lot, but there was definitely some obsessive behaviour around Morrigan/ Leliana/ Alastair even though they'd toned down the biostereotypes a bit. OTOH, Inquisition and Andromeda both came across as if they'd written their characters based on a list of traits written on a whiteboard that they thought would appeal to different subsets of fans instead of writing them as 'real' people.

Back when the Bioware forums existed it would be very, very easy to point to equivalences to Twilight class fandom especially in the Mass Effect fandom (eg Talimancers and the infamous sweat analysis). Later Bioware games' NPCs were almost entirely service for various subgroups of obsessed fans so much so that I'm not at all sure it would count as an unpopular opinion.

Finally saw the trailer having spent the 10 seconds required duckduckgoing. Skipped some bits because 20 odd minutes but it was OK I guess. Glad it's a tentacle ship wreck this time, that changes things up from the bog standard water ship wreck significantly. Don't care about the graphics as I wouldn't be buying the game for them, don't really care about some of the gameplay oddities and departures either. It looks very much and sounds a bit like DivOS 3, but expecting anything else is unrealistic. The major problem with DivOS2 was the stupid late development tinkering with sequence and physical/ magical barriers, and hopefully being D&D that cannot happen here anyway.

Hmm, so what I get from the screenshots is that you're on a ship at some point, hear voices and have to build a party out of the people on the ship? That's pretty much exactly how DivOS2 started. (Highly amused that the trailer embedded in the previous page is age restricted, when I can go and watch real people getting blown up on youtube with nary a care)

That bombing was near 100% Russian not Syrian as the Turks are saying, as have most of the previous attacks targeting the Turks. Turks just say it's Syrian government as that's better to sell and they can then claim to have killed eleventy billion in retaliation. Technically the Syrians do have the capacity to do precision strikes at night, but it is very very limited. Indeed, there are only two (both suspected not acknowledged) uses of precision munitions by the Syrians in the entire civil war- the 2014 strike that killed Ahrar ash Sham's leadership and the 2016 strike that killed Zahran Alloush the leader of Jaish al Islam. As per the Military thread, it comes after the Turks again tried to shoot down a Russian jet with a Stinger, which lead to them getting bombed by Russia last time as well. The plan seems to be to leverage European NATO into supporting Erdogan by threatening to flood Europe with refugees again.

Khalid had the double whammy of being whiny and having rubbish stats. Jaheira was OK though. Pretty much every BG2 party I ever had included Edwin, Viconia and Jan as I found them most entertaining and least annoying.

At least 22 Turkish soldiers killed after some bright spark decided to try shooting down a Russian plane with a Stinger again. The 22 is a confirmed official figure, apparently the HQ for Turkey's whole Idlib operation may have been hit with up to 100 total casualties. It also looks like Turkey may be trying to leverage an Article 5 response from NATO- which should not apply as Article 5 is for mutual self defence, and cannot be used if you're invading someone else. While not absolutely confirmed it's been reported by both Reuters and Al Jazeera that Turkey will allow all refugees to transit Turkey again into Europe in the hope of forcing the hand of Euro/ NATO countries- especially Greece- to support them.