Zoraptor

Compared to pre Avdiivka the Russians are still gaining at twice the daily rate- and still taking 10k+ towns. Just not around Pokrovsk any more. Which is more because of Ukraine shifting forces (back) there than Russia moving theirs. It's also been Russian tactics to allow Ukraine to stabilise an area by transferring troops and instead attack the areas the troops have come from. Hence the new gains around Vuhledar, which lost a long term defender brigade to Pokrovsk. Same thing happened in Avdiivka too before it fell. As might be expected from Euromaidanpress Bruce's article is hopelessly optimistic. Even pro UA sources like liveuamap have Russian forces close to cutting off the Ukrainians near Korenovo, now. Ukraine lost a lot of their gains in Kursk due to rotating out their good formations for conscripts/ territorial brigades and it requires a fairly large dollop of positive thinking to think the conscripts are there to win where the elite troops failed. The supposed number of Russian soldiers along the border has actually dropped (!) by their estimates and their evidence for large scale transfers consists of 'elements' of two brigades. Even at full strength that's nowhere near 30k- and it's unlikely that the 1st Sloviansk Brigade is there in any meaningful way, at all, as it's a specifically- and OG- DPR formation.

3.5bn views, so statistically nearly half the world's population could have watched it on yt. (Personally, I genuinely like Blank Space)

True Swifties won't vote. They'll just leave a Blank Space. I'll get my coat.

They aren't being operated wholly by Ukraine. Which is fine*, if you can argue that they're only being operated in de jure Ukraine but becomes an act of war if they are used in what everybody accepts as being Russia proper. Pretty simple really. *for a certain definition of fine, eg you cannot take your specialists being targeted as an act of war either- and that has definitely happened multiple times. And in the more general sense, if the situation was reversed NATO would at minimum complain as vociferously as Russia about them supplying weapons to their enemies; and would definitively go the Article 5 route if Russian operated missiles hit their territory, even if it were Iranians or whoever primarily operating them.

Ukraine can certainly say that, though the situations are not equivalent*. Obviously that would also be a double edged sword for the west, since if that's an act of war supplying Abrams/ Leos/ Challies etc is as well. That would be fine for Ukraine though, since their only path to victory is escalatory and getting NATO directly involved. *Russia will be getting its satellite and AWACS type intelligence from Russia not Iran or DPRK, and it won't be Koreans or Iranians inputting target info or doing the maintenance as, to be blunt, the systems supplied are not very advanced- and mostly evolutions of soviet systems anyway. They're just supplying the systems, and that is long established to not be a direct act of war. Ukraine has neither satellites nor AWACS, they are getting that from NATO sources and per the Germans targeting info for Storm Shadow/SCALP is entered by Brits/ French (hence why won't send Taurus, as they don't want anyone on the ground) and the tech is wholly new to them. Now, you can argue that targeting occupied territories is fine, since that's NATO soldiers hitting Ukrainian territory from Ukrainian territory; but once they start being used on targets in Russia it is NATO targeting Russia by any reasonable definition of the term.

As always, anyone wondering about Russia's response to anything should ask themselves what their side's response would be in the same situation. Russia supplying and programming long range missiles and providing intelligence to the Taliban/ Iran/ Iraq/ Syria/ DPRK to target the west? The only difference would be that we'd convince ourselves that our invasion was justified, so any retaliation against us was escalatory and unjustified. Oh wait, that isn't really a difference, is it. And that isn't really even a rhetorical question. Russia invading NATO? Well, we all know what the plan was when it was the USSR. A nice series of radioactive craters across the Fulda Gap. But surely the Russians wouldn't nuke themselves just to take our NATO troops? Of course they would- though as with the NATO plan they wouldn't just be nuking themselves. Anything else is Magical Thinking. After all, what else are nukes for except to make the cost of an invasion prohibitive. Not really even a rhetorical question again there. Realistically, the only reason NATO would not be seeking regime change in the current conflict is that the alternatives are worse than Putin or so obviously unpopular/ seen as Quislings as to be impossible to install without the invasion that can't happen because of the nukes.

The short answer is that if you haven't watched it you aren't worth anything to them, and aren't until you do. Maybe you will eventually- but maybe you'll forget. Either way it does nothing for the company now. In the end they have to gauge success somehow and how many people are motivated to drop everything and watch is easy and gives you a quick answer when you've got to decide whether you want to spend another 200 million bucks or whatever. I tend to agree with Bartimaeus' complaints about the Netflix model, but it is understandable why it's a model. I'd also note that they weight binging very heavily for some reason, despite the opposite actually being an advantage. ie watch a series in a few days and you can cancel your sub, watch one more slowly and it's multiple months worth of subs but Netflix prefers the former for new releases. There's a definite irony there also when the bread and butter series for streaming tend to be, well, oldish ~syndicated types like The Office, Friends, Suits, Lost etc that people come back to watch multiple times rather than just the Bridgertons and Stranger Things. Especially so nowadays when the flagships all tend to be 8ish episodes, every two years. I doubt RoP is in danger of being cancelled* due to sunk cost. So much money has been spent buying the rights, setting everything up in NZ, stalling for 18 months due to covid (leasing every sound stage in Auckland over that time...) then moving everything to the UK that the actual filming costs are pretty minor. It's also the sort of thing where if it got cancelled managerial heads would have to roll. Amazon also didn't cancel Citadel, and hasn't cancelled Wheel of Time either. Yet, though it seems the most likely to go of the big budget failures. They've got a decent tolerance. cf The Acolyte getting cut pretty unceremoniously by Disney. *or maybe it's Chimp Crazy that is in danger of being cancelled? Don't think they ever made S2 of Tiger King after all.

Eh, I'd be skeptical based on previous events. I'm pretty skeptical that Iran is even sending Shaheds at this point as opposed to Russia using domestic production. (I always have a bit of a lol about those sorts of articles since you're never meant to remember all the other times they 'finally' sent them, according to multiple anonymous sources familiar with the intelligence. To whit: Reuters, February 22, 2024. Emphasis added. Note also that according to multiple anonymous sources the deal was actually worked out back in October 2022 (eg WaPo article October 16 2022), now nearly two years ago and more than a year prior to the "late last year" claim)

Dunno, there was a fair bit of talk about the Challenger getting whacked when the counteroffensive was in full swing. Hard to work out from the wording whether the US doesn't want to say the F16 was shot down by a Russian anti air/ air to air missile or whether they don't want to say that he was 'shot down' by being too close to an exploding cruise missile. Guess the inference from the talk about pilot training is the latter. Though as always if it doesn't have a name for the quote you've got to take it with salt anyway.

George Martin wrote a blogpost (warning, spoilers) about House of the Dragon S2 and (some of) its problems*. Got pulled almost immediately, hence the archive link. I thought it was actually quite tame on the detail side of things, the spice was in the more off the cuff/ general remarks, especially since Condel is meant to be running the Dunk and Egg spinoff as well. Despite that it was probably pulled for the S3 spoiler, albeit it's something that was in the book so shouldn't be a surprise. Also that was not the most egregious example of an unnecessary change having a poor story effect to my mind. *non spoiler mini review: biggest problem is still the same as it was in S1, they don't want to make either of the main women characters 'bad' which results in them being inconsistent, indecisive and vacillating all over the place. So instead of being 'bad' they (still) look weak. Second biggest problem is the awful pacing and obviously truncated ending, though at least there the blame may be with Zaslav's arbitrary budget cuts and/or the writers' strike.

If they're going to fire the air defence chief every time there's friendly fire they're going to go through a fair number of people. If it's for the overall poor response instead Zelensky should probably fire himself for shifting so much equipment to Kursk, a lot of which got hit in the first few days. Man, why does seemingly every western media outlet use ISW? Of the pro Ukr maps Deepstatemap is better- and is even mentioned in the article- and even liveuamap is better. OK, you might not want to use deepstate's captioning in a proper newspaper...

Encased had an absolute plethora of options, indeed it was perhaps the highest effort RPG in that respect I've played. Far better than any recent big name RPG, at least those without a preset protagonist. Shame a lot of effort also went into reinventing the wheel mechanics wise and it felt at times that they were changing the usual way of doing things even if the usual was better.

Looks pretty definite that the first F-16 has been lost by Ukraine, along with (more importantly, since there are fewer of them) its pilot. Exactly how is, uh, up in the air. Russians said in an air strike on his base, WSJ has a crash due to pilot error and CNN has it being due to drone debris*; while a couple of sources have it shot down by friendly fire. Also looks pretty grim for Ukraine west of Donetsk city where towns they'd have fought over for weeks or months earlier this year are falling in days. Not by any means a full on rout or collapse as some are claiming but there's zero chance of stopping Russia short of Pokrovsk itself now. *via an in air interception; amazingly that would give the Shahed/ Geran three air to air kills despite having zero in air combat capability.

I'm not really sure why they'd want to distract from the offensive at this point. Whether or not it's actually going great on the ground it's certainly going great on twitter/ facebook/ reddit and in (most) news media. Personally, I wonder if they got wind that Russia was going to take another run at getting a UN investigation going. The reason the western countries gave for rejecting that in March 2023 was basically the old canard of complementarity; ie that western investigators were already investigating, and their investigations are intrinsically Enough. It's the sort of thing where a veto looks awful but a wait and see looks far less so, but eventually you do have to actually put something on the table. Indeed, there's a certain amount of amusement to be had reading back over the comments made at the time when- at least supposedly*- many of the countries making them knew who was behind it and had since before it happened. Including Germany, who needed an extra 16 months investigation from then and just shy of 24 in total to confirm what they, supposedly, already knew. *I'm extremely skeptical about the details of the WSJ article for multiple reasons and don't take it particularly seriously, but that is what its implications actually are.

He didn't 'flee the law', he was here perfectly legally as a resident, and well before being charged. Which he probably shouldn't have been given he has a conviction in Germany, but our good character test mostly consists of how big your cheque book is.

I'd be very skeptical of all the information coming out on nordstream. Pointing solely to Zaluzhny doing a rogue op when he's conveniently fired is, well, convenient. As for people who are facing criminal charges giving interviews to the WSJ... lol. Mostly though, and as always it's the stuff you're meant to forget as soon as it becomes inconvenient. To whit, current story is: Denmark: Multiple 100s of kgs of explosives used. Sweden: 50m of pipeline destroyed with a 250m debris field. Hmm. Also kind of funny if the CIA told them not to do it given the responses. Especially since the article says specifically that Germany was informed.

Apparently German authorities have issued an arrest warrant in the Nordstream bombings for a certain- and I swear I'm not making this up- "Volodymyr Z".

Don't think the NSA would bother when they have PSP (and IME for Intel; and Pluton on newer MBs for overkill) already. (I'm always mildly suspicious when what we're told are 'essential security features' for us are, for some mysterious reason, excluded from or disabled for products supplied to the US government...)

Well... thing is, tobacco is awful. It's the Adolf Hitler of legal substances available without prescription or (much) other controls. Vaping may be the Idi Amin of legally available substances, or, it may not be. Either way, it's still going to be better than tobacco. That doesn't mean I'm a big fan of the big man from Uganda or his electronic puff pipe equivalent, it's just that if you're looking for things worse than tobacco it's meth, crack, heroin type things which are all illegal. In terms of alcohol, if you assume everyone is going to use that responsibly then you have to assume everyone is going to vape responsibly. In reality, you get alcoholics, you get pregnant women drinking, you get drunk drivers, you get drunken brawls and you get all the other negative stuff- including cancers and the like- as well.

Second IAEA statement on the ZNPP fire has been released. TLDR; definitely a fire inside the cooling tower with burnt plastic mesh etc, some evidence of structural damage (eg concrete chips) but no evidence so far of cause for either.

Vaping is far less bad for you than smoking tobacco is for sure, which is why it's used for quitting smoking. It's almost certainly less bad for you than, say, alcohol as well.

The tower itself isn't, but there is plenty of stuff inside it that will cheerfully burn eg fillers. There are UN and IAEA people on the ground, so we'll probably get something out of them beyond their initial statement. (for anyone wondering: it's a cooling tower so the whole idea is to exchange heat rapidly. That needs a high surface area to volume ratio for the water being cooled. They do that with plastic/ synthetics* since concrete is terrible-it's a heat insulator let alone its other physical characteristics- and steel and other metals are expensive, and their reliability goes down massively as they get thinned, ie they corrode more quickly and their structural strength degrades. Normally of course it wouldn't be all that flammable anyway, since it'd be full of water, but it isn't operational. And the cooling tower is when it comes down to it a big chimney designed to draw air up itself. Start a fire and it'll still do its job, of drawing air up... *see here at bottom of page)

And, to be completely uncontroversial, Taiwan's two golds as well? (The eligibility rules for what constitutes a country for Olympic purposes are really weird. OK, so you probably don't want RoChina athletes being forced to compete as PRChinese or Palestinian being forced to compete as Israeli (or vice versa) or refugees being forced to compete for the countries they're refugees from but... Puerto Rico? Guam? American Samoa? Hong Kong? England/ Scotland/ Wales as GB, but Northern Irish compete as Ireland*; and the British Virgin Islands compete separately? *happens in rugby too, hence the Irish team's 'national anthem' being Ireland's Call in rugby rather than Amhrán na bhFiann)

#1 suggestion for future Olympic Games: have a unified West Indies team like in cricket. I feel that St Lucia and Dominica in particular would benefit from this arrangement. This suggestion has nothing to do with the per capita medal table and I would stridently refute any implication that it does.

Can't be worse than what they did to her in Rings of Power.