Zoraptor

Sacking Bolton by tweet is the least of the admin's faux pas and him going should make their foreign policy more coherent, not less. Indeed it would probably be more coherent if the next National Security Advisor were Bernie Sanders, given Bolton's hawkishness was way too much even for Pompeo and Bernie actually has more FP similarities to Trump. Bolton just ran around kicking anthills andor threatening to bomb people as if that by itself was a cohesive foreign policy, and he did so before they'd finished dealing with the previously kicked anthills. Pompeo/ Trump may be disliked by most foreign diplomats; but Bolton was actively loathed, didn't really work even as a 'bad cop' to make Trump/ Pompeo look more reasonable, and didn't have a single foreign policy success. Talking to the Taleban is fine. If you want peace you have to talk to your enemies; if not prepare to either have a perpetual war or to kill them all.

Mmmmmmm, yes. I'm not normally one to bask in the misfortune of others but I shall make an unrepentant exception for moustache man. So much so that I hope he gets appointed by the next administration, just so that he can be fired again.

$1- no typo, and 1 NZ dollar even- seems pretty cheap and significantly cheaper than it would ever be on steam. (MS Game pass, currently $1/ month in New Zealand. And I thought Origin Access was good value. People may cry buckets about subscription services- well, with one prominent exception that gets a pass for anything for some- but you can't beat them for their value proposition. Even if it's $1 month for a years subscription that's still extremely cheap.)

I suspect Corbyn is pretty keen on an election but the bulk of the rest of his party isn't. And it is a rare chance to humiliate the leader of his main rival party, end of the day most politicians are going to take that chance when offered before an election rather than taking the election without the ritual humiliation. Trouble being, of course, that many voters will be Single Issue when it comes to Brexit and assuming the Tories are the only big party to support leaving they will get all the Brexiteer votes while the remainers will be split. In a FPP system 40% of the vote is usually enough to win, and there could easily be 40% brexiteer vote.

I took the ISideWith quiz because I didn't have anything better to do for five minutes- and with the state of some US voting machines maybe I could end up voting, if I really wanted to. Watkins 98% Harris 93% Warren 92% Bernie 91% Biden 61% Trump 41% Not sure exactly how I got Biden so low- closer to Trump than the other Ds- with the others so high. Guess it's more evidence Biden is the real stealth Republican DINO candidate.

I had no technical issues with the GOG version of FEAR Platinum. I don't think they looked as nice on modern hardware as the original or FEAR 2 but they ran fine.

Haven't seen B&tB but I'd wager money Watson was at least a better singer than Russel Crowe- who actually does have singing experience- was in Les Mis.

So, Parliament in the UK is getting suspended until after the Brexit deadline, so there's one week of sitting left. Will there be a no confidence vote? Will Liz refuse to suspend parliament? One thing is for sure, lots of heads will be excitedly talking about it on BBC and ITV.

For sheer contrivance value none of those come close to comparing to Gollum falling into Mt Doom- highly dextrous guy gets his heart's desire, a ring which has some semi direct ability to influence circumstances/ its holder and first thing he does is fall into lava, the one thing that can destroy the ring and the one thing it would avoid at all costs. If that ending happened in something less well regarded and more consistently badly written like the SW sequels it would be utterly pilloried, especially if Space Don Henley and friends turned up ten minutes later to rescue the heroes from certain death. It gets forgiven in LOTR because the rest of the story is good enough to forgive its flaws. Similar sort of thing in Breaking Bad when Gus gets blown up and walks out of the room apparently unharmed, it's a highly unrealistic event in an otherwise highly 'realistic' (= maintaining verisimilitude) series which is forgiven because the rest of the series is good, and because it doesn't have long term consequences. Have the same thing happen in GoT S8 however and people would be screeching about it for years even if it ultimately had no impact on the story. In LOTR I'd generally agree, since they were established in The Hobbit (well, book wise; movie wise not so much). Besides, anyone with any sense knows that instead of flying the ring into Mt Doom on an Eagle it would be far more sensible to trebuchet it in. Even the physics agrees, if a trebuchet has the force necessary to fire a 90kg projectile 300m then it can, ipso facto, fire a 25g ring for a distance of ~1000km. Indeed, you might actually want to add a bit of extra weight.

I though they did a pretty decent job of establishing force powers before they became plot relevant, most of the time, which is a pretty good defence against them being classic deus ex machina. eg Luke and the training drone foreshadows the Trench Run and Darth Vader and Obiwan establish that force users can sense each other. There's lots of plotforce moments though which don't really involve The Force as such- the Millenium Falcon breaking down near to Bespin where Lando just happens to be, Han finding Luke in the snowstorm on Hoth (potential force = deus ex machina there) and some more general plot issues too like the time it would take the MF to reach Bespin at sublight. Coincidences and even dei ex machinis aren't necessary indicative of bad storytelling anyway. The Eagles turned up very conveniently in both The Hobbit and LOTR (and the goblins clearly hadn't read apochryphal Napoleon quotes either and conveniently turned up just before the dwarves and elves came to blows); and Gollum just happening to grab the Ring and accidentally fall into Mt Doom was more convenient than anything I can think of Force related in any Star Wars. (slightly off topic for this thread but the TV series Legion poked fun at the deus ex machina concept by having a character literally build machines to act as plot devices/ plot drivers multiple times)

Yeah, jimmying the poll questions etc is pretty easy to do if you want to do it as just about nobody will check, and you can always fudge the weightings if needed too which even fewer people will check. It only really comes back to bite you if the result demonstrably ends up contradicting your polls like with Brexit or to an extent the last US Presidential race. Didn't Obama supposedly not have the most enthusiastic (non official) reaction to Biden running either? Something along the lines of "you know Joe, you don't have to do this...". Had a quick search, but not an easy query to narrow down.

Have to admit my initial reaction was that I'd missed a new Mass Effect game featuring Tali and Garrus' love child who was not a fan of daddy's fashion sense, and that Bioware was ignoring the lore since only Asari can be Banshees. I'm so out so touch with MP gaming I thought it was probably Anthem due to the seeming slight embarrassment and had to look up that it was Warframe.

None of that is really relevant though, at best it's an argument for Aegis Ashore not violating the 'spirit' of INF which is- at very best- a nebulous concept when it comes to international treaties. Fact is that the INF banned intermediate range missiles and their launchers from land deployment, and the Mk41 deployed to land is covered by that. The INF is prescriptive enough that both sides accused each other (with just cause; it is a prescriptive document) of technical violations due to land based testing of naval systems, dummy/ target missiles etc. There simply isn't a loophole the Mk41 can slip through as violation of the INF only required two basic things: (1) a launcher capable of firing banned missiles, which the Mk41 definitely can do, deployed on land and (2) said potentially infringing missiles to be available. A bit OT, but deployment of cruise missiles to an inland facility in Romania does make potential sense for certain scenarios. Montreux puts severe restrictions on US ships in the Black Sea, albeit those restrictions must ultimately be enforced by Turkey, a nominal US ally; and a inland site hundreds of km inside sovereign territory is a lot more 'safe' and secure than a few ships that can only be 12nm away from potential monitoring at any given time. Sure, if it's a general conflict it's irrelevant, but that certainly isn't the only scenario.

I did exclude here from that criticism, as I'm 100% certain we're all real and genuine people united only by our wholly amateur interest in great RPGs whose superb quality is only bettered by their tremendous value for money, fantastic production values, deep and involving storylines, easy to learn yet hard to master game systems and long term replayability.. ..but overall while I'm sure there are many many people who are genuinely excited I've seen an awful lot of "wow as I real and genuine person I find the low low subscription price of Disney+ coupled to exceptional and varied offerings from Marvel(TM), Star Wars(TM) and the core Disney(TM) business and back catalogue to be exceptional value and as a real and genuine person I shall certainly be giving Disney my business. And as a real and genuine person who cares deeply about everyone experiencing such great content at a bargain price I urge all fellow real and genuine people to subscribe to Disney+(TM) as well. I shall also be cancelling my Netflix subscription post haste as they have poor content and are too expensive!" type stuff as well. (to be fair the latter is pretty accurate, there's literally nothing on NZ Netflix that I would classify as must watch and they've just upped prices. OTOH Marvel TV and recent Star Wars doesn't give me much confidence in the key adultish Disney+ offerings either)

Taika Waititi is directing an episode, so I'd expect at least some humour. I don't think he could do 100% serious under threat of anything. I think I'd be a lot more interested in Disney+ if it weren't for the obvious astroturfing going on (specifically elsewhere, not here). I'm getting pretty good at spotting templated "hello, fellow Disney fans" comments and they always make we want to do the exact opposite, on principle. They're also pretty clearly going to go for a more traditional approach to holding subscribers, ie weekly episode releases and staggered series instead of dumping the whole season at once. The Kenobi announcement was an unexpected occurrence, certainly, albeit pleasant; and is more evidence we've reached peaked meme.

We had this argument before and I suggested you go and actually read the INF Treaty then. It literally doesn't matter if the Mk41 is 'much more than just its launcher'. If it can launch intermediate range missiles like the tomahawk it was illegal to deploy on land whatever the context, because that's what the INF said. There simply isn't an exclusion for "doesn't have the right software" and similar situations. It's not exactly a revelation that the Mk41 can be used to fire tomahawks, all the test did was confirm that it can do so on land (duh) and thus was a banned launcher under INF and illegal to deploy in Aegis Ashore. And let's be brutally frank, if the situations were reversed and it was Russia deploying Aegis Ashore in Mexico we could 100% guarantee that would be regarded by the US as an infraction against INF. My opinion of INF is not particularly high as a document since it certainly does, technically, also apply to stuff it wasn't intended to- but it's that way specifically because it doesn't have exploitable loopholes for 'software not installed and we pinky promise not to deliver tomahawks' situations.

So, the US tested a land launched tomahawk missile on Tuesday after withdrawing from the INF Treaty which previously prohibited them and launchers capable of firing them. Not really news as such, except they used the same Mark 41 launcher for the test they insisted was INF compliant in Aegis Ashore. Nice of them to provide the proof they'd been abrogating the treaty for years, though one suspects the avalanche of media admitting Russia was right on the issue will be a trickle, if that. Not something that can be blamed on Trump either this time, Aegis Ashore was to all practical purposes Obama's child (albeit it was GWB's baby) so the practical collapse of this treaty can be put at Obama's feet even if Trump did the actual withdrawal.

But was there a countdown to the announcement of the trailer's trailer? If not, then the PR people simply weren't doing their job.

Yeah, IIRC they used/ the Israeli firm provided a BIOS resetter to allow more than 3 PIN attempts on the Florida (?) terrorist attacker's iPhone. The FBI then brute forced his PIN over a couple of days, which must have been a fun job for the most junior task force members. If Apple had complied with their demand or their encryption was broken the FBI could have reset the BIOS and given the phone a new PIN, getting instant access. It's essentially an intrinsic weakness that was exploited since Apple or whoever has to have a way to reset locked devices and that provides the point of attack. Indeed, the usual point of attack for any 'encryption break'- assuming it's actual secure encryption and hasn't been gimped by the NSA/ GCHQ etc and reasonable precaution like hashing and salting have been taken- is not the encryption itself but the end point where it's decrypted; via gaining access to the user's device by other means. The same Israeli firm provides software to various states to give them access to people's phones via forced installs pre sale or out and out trojans, generally for circumventing something like WhatsApp's encryption. Allegedly at least one of their products has been reverse engineered and is now used in out and out malware. Well, if you don't count helping Saudi Arabia find excuses to execute and torture dissenters as being malware in the first place.

That is more or less what Hillary tried to do last time- when she was running for nomination she aimed for the centre of the Democrat party to get the nomination and was more left than many of her previously established political positions; when running as the nominee she aimed more for the centre of the electorate (and to the right end of the D party spectrum), or at least the part of the electorate that would at least consider voting for her. That is historically what most candidates do in Presidential races in the US or elsewhere, the main exceptions tend to be the 'inspirational' candidates- Reagan, Obama, Trump recently in the US. It also has something to do with how the 'analysts' function, and how social media functions. It may be surprising given the weight their opinions are given but most analysts aren't experts, and their analysis tends to be extraordinarily simplistic. Someone who doesn't support western orthodoxy on Syria gets flagged as a 'Russian Bot', then if they support Gabbard because of her stance on Syria (and hence follow/ retweet/ like her on social media) it's support from bots, not support from actual people who agree with her stance on Syria. Because why would anyone disagree with with the highly successful western orthodoxy in the ME, except if they were being paid... And of course being social media you tend to get the web effect of people with similar views being exposed to her by other people with similar views; who then get flagged as 'russian bots' by 'analysts' for holding those views and having/ following 'bot' friends, and the number of Gabbard supporting 'bots' increases too. It's a circularised self supporting argument that collapses if you remove the one strut it rests on. Since that 'analysis' suits the media and the D establishment and self proclaimed analysts can be used to say pretty much whatever is wanted in any given situation- and because few analysts will disclose their actual methods- no one looks deeper. She certainly gets exposure from RT and the like because they like her stance on Syria, but the number of americans willing to be influenced by russian state media is unlikely to be high. And frankly, she does well in trends and the like after debates in part because she stands out, hasn't had the exposure and is pretty (the other thing that analysts say, though for obvious reasons they do so from behind their hands most of the time). Bernie would probably be the Russians actual choice from the D field since Gabbard is realistically a VP pick (not likely) or cabinet rather than nominee.

Can't say I care either so long as it's consistent. I imagined them being a bit more 'Meditteranean' than the castings but so long as Rand looks noticeably different from the rest of the Two Rivers folks- which the guy does- I don't see any reason for complaint. I have to admit than I am kind of hoping Billy Zane gets to be Ishamael again, he was certainly good for a giggle in the pilot.

I'm about 90% sure there was a 'resolve attack' or rest to a specific time type button on PC where you'd wait until the attack happened. The Keep management part of the game wasn't great but I didn't find it actively annoying and I certainly would have found it annoying if it was as described. (Worst aspect for me- apart from the main game being over long and a bit of a chore- was hitting the level cap with about 25% of the game to go. Hitting the cap in the endgame is marginally annoying but overall fine, but I hit the cap about half way (?) through the first part of the expansion...)

Bismark took advantage of a pop up event so he didn't need a CB. The tanker getting released was near inevitable in the circumstances because, having induced the seizure in the first place when Britain wanted help protecting their tankers the US told then to FOAD and that they wouldn't get reciprocal help (without most likely refuting the JCPOA and formally joining the anti Iran coalition). Perhaps the funniest part is that the 'agreement' for the Grace I not to go to Syria will get end run by simple expedient of... changing ownership and renaming the ship to something other than Grace I. Geopolitically the most interesting part was the Brits mentioning but otherwise ignoring the US request to hand it over to them (probably as 'reparations' for Iran's- non existent- role in 9/11), which suggests more than a little resentment over how the situation played out and the lack of US support.

Yeah but to be fair all Dead Island 2's initial announcement hype got totally drowned out by World War 2 breaking out a couple of weeks later so they kind of had to reannounce it. And for something different; King's Bounty 2 has been officially announced. The announcement trailer is kind of generic (OK, it's about as generic as you could get if you set out to be generic) so I won't bother posting it, but I did enjoy the previous games even when the concept was being run into the ground post Armoured Princess. If my eyes didn't deceive me there will be console versions (and GOG) too, I'd think its style would go down pretty well with some console fans.

Have they even started shooting the Avatar sequels yet? I'm halfway convinced the whole thing is a scam so Jim Cameron could buy a house next to Sir Peter Jackson and visit Weta Workshop whenever he wants.