Zoraptor

Treat it like a puzzle game and it's OK. It's very much a matter of finding out what is coming and unashamedly gaming the system to your advantage or finding the 'trick' which makes that battle trivial. It's mechanistically awful with its magical and physical armour plus utterly useless initiative system and the game cheats blatantly in its combat design and how enemies behave so have no qualms about 'cheating' equally blatantly yourself, eg spam summons like it's the final battle of Baldur's Gate 1, because you can guarantee your enemies will do exactly the same back.

I've watched the first two episodes of TVWitcher and I like it so far well enough. Pacing definitely feels off- it alternates between feeling slow and far too rushed- plus some of the minor acting and set pieces really do feel rather Xenaish. I also don't like Cavill's "witcher voice" for some reason. But, it has the right feel and Jaskier is top notch. Knowing that the chronology is all over the place helps a fair bit as well, though I would certainly have guessed that it was from playing the games.

Well yeah, but oddly enough the current Boeing CEO Muilenburg is someone I have a decent amount of sympathy with. His handling of the 737MAX situation from a PR standpoint was pretty average to say the least; but he's actually a Boeing man and engineer and pretty much all the decisions that actually lead to the 737MAX disaster were made by the CEO previous to him who was a typical corporate raider MBA type and who, surprise surprise, decided cutting experienced but expensive people while outsourcing software to India and badly and unsafely redesigning an existing jet were great ideas because they were also cheap ideas, with no immediate drawbacks. He got to walk away with bonuses and an unblemished reputation, indeed the replacement CEO is one of his appointees and can be pretty much guaranteed to do all the things that grow shareholder value right up to the point your cost cutting kills 300 odd people and loses you contracts to NASA because your space capsule can't count time properly so won't go into the proper orbit. Every article blames MCAS for the crashes, but if the plane was designed properly MCAS would be irrelevant and unnecessary. You only need MCAS because the engines are too big and too close to the body which makes the design fundamentally unstable; and it was done that way because it was cheaper than designing a new plane that could cope with the bigger engines. Those sorts of decisions were made years ago.

Very, uh, atmospheric conditions for a cricket match in Australia. (Match abandoned with an Air Quality Index at 1100 due to bushfires- anything over 400 is considered to be extreme and potentially dangerous to health. How on earth anyone thought it was a good idea to start in those conditions I do not know)

Series X was definitely named deliberately for meme potential, nobody could do that accidentally. God knows what they would have come up with if Ballmer was still in charge.

I disliked TLJ enough that I have zero interest in going out of my way to watch RoS. I'm almost certain not to see it in cinema at all, and since I'm also unlikely to sub to Disney+ any time soon that probably means I'll be waiting until it's on plain old bog standard broadcast television in 2 years.

The really big missing site is, and I hate to say it, The Daily Mail. Which is of course crap, but is hugely popular. Straight after posting I see it is there, utterly typical. OTOH I think that excluding RT- and VoA/ RFE/RL too for that matter- is fair enough since they're more or less explicitly direct media/ propaganda wings of governments instead of 'independent media'. They aren't really expected to have editorial independence, unlike the BBC which while government funded is (supposed to be) wholly independent when it comes to reporting. Would get a bit complicated though, I'd pretty much have to exclude Al Jazeera Arabic as being Qatari propaganda but allow AJEnglish... I always suspect those sort of charts are made by mainstream media to pat themselves on the back for being 'fair, balanced, intelligent and impartial' as defined by (a) member(s) of the mainstream media themselves.

As a franchise SW still has a lot of potential, and not just to make Disney $$$. It desperately needs new and better leadership and a proper unifying vision though.

I reckon that would be a terrible idea though. It would play great to those who'd never vote for Trump anyway and just want cheap gotchas! but I could very easily see it backfiring spectacularly with the general public. The big talking point from the R side of the impeachment was about how it was a narrow political witch hunt, monkeying around with the process will just give them ammunition for that point of attack instead of being able to claim acquittal. And they'd hammer that, and point out that an impeachment largely based on Trump improperly playing politics to benefit his own position against a political rival was being used by the D side to, well, play politics to benefit their own position vs a rival. Not transferring the impeachment to the Senate for trial may not be strictly illegal unlike (at least potentially) strongarming a foreign power to investigate a domestic rival, but it also isn't what is expected or 'meant' to happen either. It's obviously a political process and equally obviously McConnell, Graham et alia will vote for acquittal in the Senate no matter what the evidence is. If they didn't want that end result they shouldn't have impeached. At the moment a reasonable and impartial observer probably thinks Trump is pretty sketchy, though maybe not sketchy enough to remove from office- and that's about the best that can be expected.

Funnily enough they're trying desperately to bring in armed police here by stealth, at exactly the same time they're buying back newly banned firearms- 2 days to go, less than 1/3 bought back despite increasingly strident "but you have to, it's the law!" adverts from the popo. It's by stealth because arming the police is spectacularly unpopular with pretty much everyone including a large subset of the rank and file police themselves, and even anti gun people are at best bemused by the ham fistedness of the timing.

Won't post screenshots, as I've uninstalled most games. I'll put the focus on 2019 release games since I've actually played some, with a couple of honourable mentions for other games played in 2019. Metro Exodus I've been pretty negative about it elsewhere so I'll focus a bit more on the positives here. It's certainly pretty but was almost completely smooth, nearly bug free, the gunplay is good too and well written enough that I can actually identify pretty much the entire crew. The stealth gameplay is worse than Thief certainly, but equally certainly not actively bad as it too often is in other games and works pretty logically. While I prefer a 'proper' open world system like Stalker(s) and their open world sections are a bit too small for my tastes they've done a good job with the environment. They are Billions I bought this mostly because I liked Lords of Xulima and it was the same devs, but it's a pretty good game on its own merits. It's a very typical 'survival' builder though, you're likely to lose the first playthrough of any level since you don't know what is coming or where the resources are or just where best or how much defence to invest in but will usually fly through a second with lessons learned. Dawn of Man A good time killer builder game probably best compared to Banished, and prehistoric man is an interesting and little covered time period. It's pretty well balanced and still being actively added to, if there's one major criticism it's that- much like I found with Banished- you tend to end up playing every game the same way which reduces replayability. The Outer Worlds Yeah, it's good, though not the 2nd coming. Think I described it as being a sort of archetypal 8/10 game and I'd stick with that. Doesn't really do anything superbly but at the same time doesn't do anything badly either. I had horrendous level loading crashes but it was still an easy game to finish. And Honourable mentions for non 2019 games played this year Prey (2017) A worthy successor to System Shock (2) and while I thought it dropped the ball a bit in the latter third of the game- ultimately too much backtracking and too little enemy variation- it would come very close to being a top 10 game of all time for me despite that. Frostpunk A builder that oozes atmosphere, interesting setting and is well designed and balanced. Rather like This War of Mine it has some... false/ gamey feeling moral choices and some well thought out ones. And rather like They are Billions you will stuff up the first playthrough of a scenario most of the time and it's a lot easier once you know what is coming; but as a 'flaw' that's hardly limited to those two games. Egypt: Old Kingdom Bit of an odd one for me but I really enjoyed this and found it almost infinitely replayable. Certainly not a typical strategy builder like Pharaoh or Children of the Nile and it feels rather like a directish adaptation of a board game or a FB/ Flash game but I love ancient Egypt and the simplistic feeling gameplay gave surprising depth. Probably a bit too deterministic for my liking overall (ie doesn't matter how well you're running your empire, it will fall apart when scripted to) but that's just the game's style. I also enjoyed the previous game in the series. Atom RPG Very much a direct Fallout spiritual successor, considerably more so than TOW. Not as memorable or gripping as Fallout and has some of its flaws too (hello clunky pop culture references) but it's clearly a labour of love. Assassins Creed Odyssey which I'm not 100% sure I played this year rather than last, but I'm adding it because I loved the atmosphere and I really do have to go back and finish it if only because I suspect I'll be sticking a knife through Cleon sometime. I also never thought I'd see a AAA game where history is (more or less) respected and I'd fully believe the writers had actually read Thucydides rather than just trawled wikipedia. Surviving Mars Last but not least, another flawed but enjoyable strategy builder. I could write an awful lot about this game's flaws but I did enjoy playing it a lot so won't except for the main one- lack of challenge and content in the later game. It must have been awfully, er, barren content wise without before terraforming was added since most of that takes place in the later parts. I'd also have to note that it's likely my most played game by time is actually Stardew Valley, probably for the 2nd year in a row.

Think I might be finished with Metro Exodus. It's a game I should like a lot in theory given how much I like StalkerSoC/ CoP and even the much maligned Clear Skies and even though I tend to dislike straight out shooters, but... dunno. You're kind of forced into stealth gameplay quite often which is theoretically fine since I liked Thief but it simply isn't as good at it as Thief was, the open areas are theoretically an improvement but practically tend towards being just wider corridors than 2033, the objectives are sometimes far too opaque and there isn't quite enough variation, atmosphere or story to keep me interested. I'd probably have soldiered on through but (and it's a bit of a rant since it's a pet peeve of mine)...

Yeah, I mean what exactly do people think Half Life 2 was, other than a Steam exclusive designed to force people including those who bought retail to use Valve's new online game launcher? What was the last Valve game that didn't require Steam? Sheesh, they've trojaned steam into their pre steam products as well, imagine the reaction if suddenly Dragon Age Origins required Origin or CiVI suddenly required Rockstar Launcher to get updates. People reward Valve for being first with the exclusivity and forcing them to use Steam first when- in reality- if you really hate exclusivity instead of just exclusivity that isn't Steam exclusivity you should hate Valve above all others for introducing, pioneering and popularising the concept in PC gaming... brand loyalty: it's a hell of a drug. OTOH and more on topic, nice to see DLC actually confirmed. I'm not a 100% convinced fan of TOW as it exists now and I played on gamepass so am not likely to be buying dlc there for obvious reasons but TOW's got a very good base to build on for sequels or DLC.

Have to admit I wasn't that impressed with Watchmen. It's always been something I've liked the idea behind more than the actual implementation, but when it comes to the TV show... I just really don't like narrative determinism ("this had to happen because it had to happen") much at all and by its nature there's a lot of that.

I would have said TLJ since Rian Johnson obviously hated Star Wars; but then again no one hates Star Wars like Star Wars fans.

Purchasing Power Parity. It's a measure of what can practically be bought with the economic activity and takes food/ house prices and the like into account so places with cheap food and housing do better; and in most cases it's the best measure to use for that reason- after all someone in China doesn't have to buy a house or food in, say, the UK, Australia or the US they buy in China itself. GDP nominal/ gross is a raw figure of economic activity that doesn't take purchasing power into account. The per person measure used for both nominal and PPP measures is 'per capita GDP'.

That video is using GDP/ capita PPP though- or at least the thumbnail is using that, and I ain't actually going to watch it- where China is still a stunning 20ish places behind relative powerhouse Kazakhstan and battling it out with African behemoth Botswana in the 70s. Having said that, GDP in any form is and always has been an extremely limited measure for determining economic power

Bit more than that. Too few overworked and poorly paid doctors/ nurses and general staff with too little equipment and not enough beds not just make everything slower, it leads to mistakes and worse results when you do get treated; plus a lot of talented staff will leave for greener- better paid- pastures overseas. Constant complaints also lead to lower morale and a perception that the whole system is imploding even if it still (mostly) works. Taking longer in a queue is pretty important in medical care, if that queue is for a Specialist appointment or an important treatment. If you notice a lump and it takes 3 months to see an Oncologist and he wishes he could have seen it 6 weeks earlier when it was still treatable...

They aren't fascinated with Russia though- indeed the country itself is almost totally irrelevant- they're fascinated with Putin himself and, effectively, want a scenario with (idealised) US President Putin, ie an effective leader who 'gets stuff done', isn't particularly bothered with the niceties and doesn't take any crap from anyone while doing it. They don't care about Russia having a bewildering array of minorities or about Chechnya because they don't know about that, and if they did they still wouldn't care. They care that Putin took a disintegrating bankrupt nation that was heading seemingly irremediably towards irrelevance- which is how they view the future of the US if things don't change- back to the diplomatic and geopolitical high table, and they aren't bothered by how he did it.

Best way to make sure Scotland leaves is to include the rest of the UK in a vote. Realistically with a big Tory majority they can laugh at any SNP demands, and laugh at anything Ireland related too. Boris could even tear up his proposed agreement if he wanted to, since he's effectively purged the pro EU wing of his party. Conservatives were always likely to win because it was essentially a single issue election and the remain vote was splintered which is a disaster in a first past the post system. Even if the support for remain/ leave had not just reversed from the referendum result but gone a bit further 45% committed to leave will beat 55% remainers in an election if the remainers are split between multiple parties. It would have been a second referendum, but Labour was always on a hiding to nothing given the split between the cryptoTory centrist Blairites who are hard core remainers and the more traditional Labour voter in the north who voted to leave and largely switched to the Tories based on that single issue. They had to try and placate both and failed to appeal to either.

Exit polls in the UK predicting a landslide Tory victory. After the bad polling last time I would be taking that with a decent grain of salt though. It was certainly uniquely stupid to have asked for a quid pro quo on a monitored call then follow it up with his personal attorney. In terms of actual effect it was pretty minimal- most US military aid to Ukraine including high profile items like Javelins sits in a warehouse unused- and accusations such as it endangering the vital national interests of the US are, charitably, hyperbolic but in terms of being provable it's basically there. If we did take a broader interpretation to include benefits to donors as well as direct personal benefits it wouldn't even be Trump's worse case in terms of morality or practical effect.

The difference between Clinton/ Yeltsin and Trump/ Zelensky is that Clinton was not asking Yeltsin to dig up dirt on Dole. US foreign policy doing favours for powerful companies has been so widespread it's coined a descriptor for countries of a whole geographic region- 'Banana Republic'- if US presidents were impeached for that there really would have been an impeachment per semi modern President. And given how much current US foreign policy is about pushing Raytheon/ Boeing/ Lockheed etc weapons quite possibly an impeachment per month. Frankly, the US would have interfered anyway, the chance to permanently break Russia via that vodka soaked sot and imbecile Yeltsin was simply too great. The problem with the Washington Times publicising US interference in 1996* was much the same problem people have with Trump outright saying he's staying in Syria to take their oil- you're not meant to say that sort of thing otherwise you face more resistance next time you want to do something similar. Yeltsin being reelected is meant to be the Russian people expressing their new democratic rights to freely elect their favoured candidate rather than an incompetent drunkard bribing his way to victory via IMF loans, overseas interference, overspending the spending cap by 1000 times and in places literal ballot stuffing. *before the election was over; once finished it was fine to crow about how it was 'the yanks wot won it for him', in a perfectly legal way and unimpugnable way, per Time.

As the publisher 2k is, technically, killing Battleborn rather than Gearbox. For the latter, buying from somewhere that gives you offline installers has always been the best option- and if you don't, don't spend more than you're prepared to lose. You could also imagine all the people who buy extremely expensive DRMed products like Tractors at 250k a pop which can only be used at the sufferance of John Deere and friends for their entire lifetime...

Steel and food production are also both genuine strategic assets, though not so much coal any more. Food is also a very good 'leverage' commodity for international use via USAID and to influence pricing overseas. There's plenty of good arguments for maintaining both above what pure market forces would require/ allow. I'd say that the main change for US farming under Trump is how much it's been targeted as a sector by retaliation for Trump's various trade wars largely because it is seen as a Trump voting bloc. Trump is exactly the sort of guy who will take that personally and has always said the idea is to use tariff money to prop up sectors that are being 'unfairly' targeted. And to be fair to him, China's modus operandi for 20 years definitely has been to flood a market with cheap goods, drive out competition then raise prices and drop quality as soon as there's no competition left (and if competition picks up again due to crap prices and quality, repeat step 1). For most agricultural products they simply aren't capable of flooding the market of course due to their huge population; not so much for steel.

Week to week releases are probably going to be more common on streaming platforms as there get to be more streaming platforms. They will want you to stay signed up continuously, but there will only be so much you'll want to watch and so much money to spend on services overall. If you have to watch The Mandalorian week to week Disney will get three months (or whatever) minimum of subs from you; if they drop all the eps at once they'll get one. I'll probably get PrimeVideo* for The Expanse next year, watch The Boys and maybe The Back Episodes of The Grand Tour; then cancel it after a month. Depending on what intro offers they have at the time it might not even cost me a cent to do so. OTOH, weekly releases and I'd have to be subbed for 3 months, and at that point I might as well take advantage of their 6 month promo offer which is like getting 3 extra months for free... *We don't have an NZ native Amazon, so there's no bundling with Prime itself unless you have lots of relatives overseas.