Zoraptor

I certainly wouldn't rate Into Darkness as good; but I had managed expectations so it was at least entertaining. Unfortunately, I simply found TMP... boring. Which is the one thing that will always mean I don't like a movie. I seldom like the standalone episodes of the same style either. If I were to do a rewatch I wouldn't skip it though, haven't seen it for ages and tastes change.

Watched The Boys. It was very good, though I found it a bit grating that every single one of the 'bad' superheroes we learned anything about kind of wanted to be an actual superhero but were held down by the corporate machine, except for Homelander- and even he was the way he was because of the corporates. Also Karl Urban's english accent was all over the place. Also watched The Terror. Good as well, but probably spent just too much time on build up- time on the ships, mostly- as opposed to pay off, and some of the ancillary threads like the ladies trying to organise a search expedition were pretty pointless in the greater scheme of things. Guess without that it would have been a complete sausage fest though. It also never really explained the main bad guy's appeal and how he was able to attract anyone; a complete novice caulker who hadn't been on a ship let alone an arctic expedition does not make a compelling alternative to someone, anyone, who has. Nevertheless, very well shot and excellently acted, and recommended with a few reservations. Currently watching The Expanse and The Magicians (because apparently I only watch series that start with a definite article nowadays). Haven't seen the later series of either. Two and a halfish Netflix season potentially and pending agreement from Tom Ellis- it's been successful enough that they're trying to add a season 6 too.

The only Star Trek movie I disliked was TMP. All the others (yeah, even Into Derpness) have their good points and were worth at least one watch. Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country I'd rate as genuinely excellent.

Isn't the Guardia Civil a literal paramilitary force, complete with fasces? Then again just about any overseas police force is paramilitary compared to here where they still don't regularly carry guns.

Originality is pretty far down the list of things any Star Wars offering has had. It's fundamentally a derivative series. Even the first movie was very heavily influenced by Kurosawa and Flash Gordon, at very least. ROTJ had a lot of issues apart from originality- ewoks, bad pacing, poor plotting to name a few. Rogue One was derivative, and in terms of contribution to continuity almost completely pointless but it was a fun movie with few obvious plot flaws and good pacing. It also had a good villain with memorable lines and one scene that comes close to any other scene in the series in terms of being iconic. That's enough to place it pretty high in rankings overall, and very high in the post Lucas hierarchy. Also has to be said, when they sort of tried to get away from the derivative you got The Last Jedi and Rian Johnson's expectation subversion; and a significant number of fans would have swapped that happily for 100 minutes of Wicket and Jar Jar getting into 'hilarious' hijinks instead.

Rogue One was good. Solo was a lot better than it's generally given credit for as well; it was just rather an unfortunate choice and rather unfortunate timing. They're pretty irrelevant though, Star Wars is 'judged' on how well the main sequence films are received and the sequel trilogy were... divisive. And in real world terms ended up underperforming expectations; so much so that they've gone from an annual release plan to no scheduled release even before covid19. OTOH, I do find reactions from disaffected fans hilarious, so I'm 50/50 on Kennedy, either way I win. A Taika Waititi Star Wars film might be a disaster, but at least it would almost certainly be an entertaining disaster. And it certainly wouldn't fail due to lack of passion.

LARPers invade Michigan State Capitol demanding Bethesda properly support Fallout 76 andor the quick release of Stalker 2. (I told everyone you'd look like you were in a cool post apoc street gang if you made your custom N95 from a bandana... yeah, might have been wrong there)

That Jared has been seizing supplies and doling them out for political and financial gain/ influence has not exactly been a secret. I wouldn't hold my breath for anything to come of it though, any more than I was holding my breath waiting for revelations from Epstein before he didn't kill himself. There will be a lot of very rich and well connected people who have made a lot of money out of this, many of whom will also be owners of the major media outlets tasked with reporting about it. To be blunt, people like Jeff Bezos- despite being theoretically a vociferous Trump opponent- won't be too keen on reporting this in the WaPo because a lot of the seized stuff will inevitably end up being sold on Amazon. If Trump loses the election Kushner will be the fall guy, but will probably be on a plane to Tel Aviv the next day. If Trump wins, not even that.

My Olduvai peeps would like to dispute this.

IIRC NYT and WaPo both give you a limited number of 'free' articles (5?) per month before enforcing a paywall. Fortunately, I never hit the limit because both papers are utter trash, and am never tempted to subscribe for the same reason. That was the lesson of the GFC too, though it doesn't seem to have been politically expedient to learn it. I don't particularly blame countries for throwing each other under the bus when it comes to covid-19 supplies and the like, if they have to (so definitely not exonerating China, who didn't have to leave their borders open) but it does expose how quickly the theoretical talk of european brotherhood gets unceremoniously thrown out the window whenever it's convenient. The response to both the current and that crisis show that the EU should never have progressed beyond a trading union. That part has always worked well, most of the ancillary political guff post Maastricht has been both unnecessary and counterproductive to the parts of the union that worked (though none of the political integration has done so much overt damage as the Euro has).

I dunno about that, sounds like something that could be tackled by a very small gun shooting very small bullets to me.

The terraforming goes a lot faster if you do some of the special terraforming planetary missions.

We're up to.. "Ah yes, most certainly. When I mentioned we could put them on the priority list for PPE, they were so willing it was almost pathetic." or maybe "Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches. Let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to save them." ..in the Deus Ex opening cinematic, I think. Which is probably closer to documentary than satire at this point, about the only thing he seems to be doing at the moment is stealing everyone else's PPE orders for some sort of massive federal stockpile.

The droid planet was scrapped early, and it really shows. There simply wasn't much to restore, and the gaps and jumps are just too big. It's an interesting attempt which doesn't really work out.

At one point everyone was selling 'fraudulent' tests, even now the best kits aren't all that accurate (bit more than 90%, iirc). Theoretically both antibody and PCR kits should be accurate, practically they aren't. Having said that, there's a shed load of stock manipulation going on with claims of miracle cures. Maybe Donald can suggest Tulip Bulbs as a treatment next, for some fun historicity. Both of Trump's suggested treatments actually do have some sort of precedent or sense behind them ("lavage" has been a treatment for damaged lungs for ages, albeit the 'disinfectant' used is plain old saline), the problem is the way he suggested them and he's made clear by calling it sarcasm that he didn't mean a sensible treatment when he suggested them.

Yeah, it seems unlikely at least from the outside that the US federal government could undersell the death toll, unless they had collusion with the individual States. OTOH I'd strongly suspect some States would only be including deaths which can definitively be attributed to covid19 in their figures, especially if they don't want to have or want to leave a lockdown type situation; or aren't in a situation where they're able to include them yet. Places like New York or the UK/ France got very large jumps in their tolls once they started including deaths outside hospitals; at home or in aged care facilities. Also, deaths tend to lag infection rates significantly. Many of those dying today caught the disease 2-3 weeks ago so death rates tend to lag infection rates by 2-3 weeks. The US as a whole also has several advantages- generally younger population, and lower overall population density- than the heavily suffering European countries. At this point I don't think the US death rate is suspiciously low.

The problem with voting for a bad option instead of a worse one is that the only thing the people putting up the bad option care about is that enough people think the other guy is worse. You end up perpetuating the cycle which sees the two bad options in the first place. It's quite something to say that the options for US voters will be a decrepit dementia addled probable sex offender with multiple political skeletons in his closet- and the other option is Donald Trump. This discussion is probably better suited for the Politics thread rather than here though. In covid19 news; WHO says there's no evidence that surviving infection confers immunity. It's pretty likely that that's a statement like their 'no evidence of human to human transmission [yet]' one where they do find some sort of immunity after further study. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's pretty short term immunity though given how the common cold coronavirus behaves. If it doesn't though then it's bad news for vaccines as well, since they rely on priming the human immune system. There's also the possibility of it going 'dormant'/ hiding in DNA, like chickenpox or HIV.

So I'm playing XCOM (recent one, not UFO Defence) and I'm enjoying the game itself well enough. I'm not keen on some gameplay things like aliens getting a 'free' move when spotted at all- only reason I can think of for it since aliens are pretty good at using cover otherwise is console memory limits- otoh it's recognisably xcom and I've always loved the strategy/ tactical layer mix in them and Jagged Alliance. But that UI- sometimes you use the mouse to select/ confirm, sometimes you have to use the keyboard to do the same thing; sometimes both in the same UI element. Click through of interface elements in the tactical screen means you do stuff you don't intend to, typically opening doors. And it has a very annoying unresolved issue with ultrawide where you can choose having the UI elements misaligned or having the movement of your squad members not correspond to where the mouse cursor is placed. OK, the last probably isn't solely console related but the rest must be, surely. How could the people who made the seemingly infinitely scalable and perennially working CivIV come up with that abject mess?

It's nice to see such optimism! George Martin said that if he hadn't finished writing the next book by the time he came to New Zealand this year we could lock him up at the old sulphur mine on White Island until he finished. Of course, White Island happens to be a volcano and erupted killing a bunch of people, so no one's going there any time soon. And now there's coronavirus so he couldn't even get to the country to be imprisoned on White Island anyway. We are never getting another book, the whole thing is cursed. There's probably passages in Nostradamus and Revelations talking about the Winds of Winter.

Bit of a better/ more relevant illustration: the vaccine undergoing trials in the UK at the moment is sarscov2 antigens (proteins) engineered onto a benign virus in order to promote an immune response. Indeed, the antigen chosen is the spike protein the video found so suspicious. Oh dear, he's endorsed flushing your lungs with plain old detergent instead I'm afraid.

The US navy is in the SCS very regularly. They even toodle past China's self proclaimed island bases regularly, and US planes fly through China's ADIZ very regularly. Occasionally you get incidents over it like the mid air collision off Hainan (?) some years ago, but generally it's a big nothingburger. The US tends to ignore others' self proclaimed territorial waters, and always has. (The only unusual thing is that the US has two carriers in the nearby region effectively out of action due to coronavirus. 99% of the time fleet movements aren't any sort of prelude to war, they're just rotating assets.)

I'm not going to watch a 54 minute video. Turns out I might listen to (most of) it while I do other things though. TLDR; the science is not all that compelling. The video is rather like the presentation of evidence for WMD in Iraq from old asterisks Cheney; you can make it seem compelling by removing every bit of equivocation or counter evidence. It still may have come from a lab, but it isn't anywhere near proven. 1) No full tracing of origin is to be expected. In the early stages you're looking only at data only from cases serious enough to have been treated in hospital for pneumonia, which make up a small number of covid19 cases. Non severe cases would be treated as if it were flu or the cold, ie stay home for a bit or tough it out, forget about it a week later. Since only a small proportion require hospitalisation you'd have the large majority of cases being silent ones making tracing extremely hard. 2) Assuming an animal origin bats are probably the ultimate source, but may not be the proximal source. 3) 100% gene sequence similarity may mean that it's under very strong selective pressure, ie the env protein and virus simply won't function properly with significant alterations. There's a reason we still share 50% of our genes with bananas, as an illustration. 4) Natural strains don't infect humans but it has the spike protein of SARS (1) which did, therefore... what? SARS did infect humans, it just had very low transmission rates. 'Natural' animal viruses most definitively do infect humans from time to time- if they want to leave out SARS because sinophobia there's also near relative MERS (ex camellids) or the less related SIV which seems to have crossed into humans at least 11 (!) times in the creation of HIV. Or Ebola/ Marburg. All of which are ssRNA viruses. 5) No, bat coronavirus having spike proteins that can infect humans does not mean there's no intermediate host full stop, it means there doesn't have to be an intermediate host. 6) Meta: isn't it nice of the Chinese to have left all these breadcrumbs, and in articles to journals like Nature or Science to boot. 7) Yes, amazingly scientists do build viruses out of bits of other viruses to test what they do and have done for rather a long time. It's even a suggested (approved now?) mechanism for gene therapy in humans. cool) No, that does not mean that sarscov2 is artificial. Classic non sequitor, we show this and that, therefore you can draw a conclusion that does not actually follow the data gained from this or that. You've already admitted that SARS1 infected humans and working in mice != working in humans. 9) My god, they experimented on mice! And planned to on primates! In a research lab! I'm, uh, flabbergasted at this, er, revelation. What next, some poor innocent fruitflies or a big toad? 10) Retrovirus that infects humans has similarity to another retrovirus that infects humans, that's... not exactly surprising. 11) Suspicious that the lab kept quiet- but I'd bet it would also be 'suspicious' if they said anything too. 12) And we're off into direct sinophobia not related to the coronavirus which I can't be bothered listening to for 15 minutes. Sheesh, I think the Chinese government are complete garbage but anyone naive enough to think that the US government isn't doing exactly the same sort of biological experiments is naive, and didn't watch the same video 5 minutes earlier.

Less life threatening but there's also foot lesions showing up as a symptom, especially in younger and otherwise asymptomatic cases. That would more typically be seen in something like chickenpox. That would be the use case that seems most likely from its current uses, certainly, but even there the troubles with using it are multiple. Fundamentally, not many young people are badly effected, so there's little need for a preventative at this point. If things get bad with the young they seem to get bad very suddenly, but hydroxychloroquine is used to treat slow acting chronic autoimmune problems like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, not a very rapidly accumulating positive feedback loop. HCQ is an immunosuppressant so is potentially of use against the immune system freaking out, but you don't really want to give immunosuppressants to people who would otherwise very likely clear the infection quickly as you raise the chance of the infection lingering and potentially doing more direct damage itself, let alone any potential side effects of HCQ itself. And as above it does treat chronic autoimmune problems, specifically cases where the immune system attacks its own host (more or less) directly, whereas a cytokine storm is a very acute runaway positive feedback loop aimed at least in covid19 or 'Spanish' flu type cases at attacking a genuine invader- so while they are both problems with the immune system the mechanisms by which the problems occur are significantly different. I almost mentioned that as a potential use, but decided it was simply too marginal a possibility and would be functionally misleading. That probably was the thought behind it being mentioned in the first place- end of the day though treatments based either on existing antivirals or existing methods of treating more similar secondary effects are more likely to be useful. It does have to be said that Trump did not pull its name out of the blue and it was suggested and has been tested as a treatment by actual doctors. If it weren't for Trump trying to hype it as a miracle cure it would be in a 'worth a try, I guess' sort of category; unfortunately it seems to have been used mostly so Trump can claim that everything will be all right real soon now, trust him.

Yeah, you aren't going to give an experimental hail mary treatment to non severe cases. But even with that proviso the results and others like it still aren't good for it as a treatment. Trouble with the hype for hydroxychloroquine has always been that's unlike some of the other hyped possibilities (like anti HIV drugs; whose target is an RNA virus like sarscovfefe too SARS-CoV2 is as well) there's absolutely no intrinsic reason why an anti malarial should be effective as an anti viral agent, especially against a virus that uses RNA. Even though the results for it are intrinsically biased they are enough to show it isn't reliably a cure, let alone a miracle cure that will stop the virus in its tracks.

US wholesale oil prices suffer a ~300% (no typo) drop over the course of a day. In theory at least they will now pay you 30 odd dollars per barrel, to take it away.