Zoraptor

I'd say close to 80% of S1 TNG was bad, albeit that was right at the beginning. Probably not outright awful though, just kind of turgidly acted/ plotted and unmemorable.

Yeah, except Abe wasn't meeting with Rouhani, he was meeting with Khamenei instead. It's one thing to embarrass the (fairly weak) President knowing that the Supreme Leader and clerical establishment has your back; it's quite another embarrassing the Supreme Leader as well. And if we want to go historical precedent we don't need to go too far to find that for US casus belli being massively overegged- or simply fabricated. It also happens when the rumours were that arch hawk Bolton was goneburger.

They're definitively not the only group that close with the capability, of the Gulf countries I'd expect literally every single one to be able to have done it. Limpet mines are really simple and just about everyone has them, they aren't 'naval' mines but broader usage. Ironically, one of their more famous uses is blowing up Iranian scientists but they're also used extensively by special forces and the like for covert ops, sabotage, demolition etc. Any regional or visiting power- even including New Zealand, if we had a frigate there- could attach limpet mines to a ship, especially since they're delayed action so you don't have to be anywhere nearby when they explode.

Doing it to raise oil prices makes zero sense from Iran's perspective as their primary enemy- Saudi Arabia- sells about 3x as much oil as they do so would benefit 3x as much from raised prices. It makes a bit of sense in the context of trying to disrupt Saudi's oil trade when taken with the attack on the Saudi oil pipeline last week, but it still doesn't make much sense. There isn't much that can be said about it at the moment as there isn't even a coherent version of what happened yet. [Well, claims are now that it's limpet mines, supplied video is... not exactly convincing though]

That's definitely not as true as it used to be. A 4 core i7 holds its own still because of its 8 threads, but an older 4 thread i5 chokes pretty badly on many newer AAA titles even if it's a k model, and that is only going to get worse.

A 64 CU 5900 would have performance between a 2080 and 2080Ti if the scaling is good- and maybe Navi/ RDNA does not have the old 64 CU limit either, though I'd suspect it does personally. That card doesn't exist at the moment of course, but at least theoretically AMD should be competitive at the higher end again without marketing what is basically a defective/ low binned pro card like the Radeon VII. I'd suspect that the '6000' series/ Navi+/2/20/ Arcturus or whatever AMD ends up calling it is the one most likely to be genuinely competitive though, as it would presumably have a lot of the console developed improvements added (raytracing and memory improvements).

I broadly agree with you as a matter of personal opinion, but Trump has done a historically good job of blaming everyone else for things going wrong because people genuinely do believe he's an 'outsider' etc being blocked by the establishment. In an objective sense it's ridiculous, but people typically aren't objective. For a potential Trump supporting blue collar worker (or blue collar support of most of the new right type parties) the logic basically goes: I've lost my job, or my job is under threat Why? My job is obsolete and foreigners can do it cheaper, better just deal with it and move on OR Foreigners/ Immigrants are stealing my job! If you pick option 2, always appealing as it means your problem is someone else's fault, then Trump's tariffs etc look great as does his war on immigration; and all they ever really have to do is look good or better than the alternative. Any criticism or obstruction just reinforces that they shouldn't vote for the other side as they wouldn't do anything to help, quite the reverse. If given the choice between a palateable lie and an unpalateable truth people will often- usually- go for the palateable lie; especially so when the unpalateable truth is itself wrapped up in obvious falsehoods. Hillary could promise retraining or renewal etc all she wanted, but not all the old economy workers could be retrained for the 'new economy', there plain aren't that many new economy jobs- and everyone knows it. Without that the renewal will exclude a lot of people, and they know that too. Realistically, sure, the best Trump is doing is kicking the can further along the road on pretty much everything. But as above, people typically aren't objective about such things. There isn't really much point calling someone stupid for believing Trump, if you were a car assembler entering the workforce in 1986 and losing your job in 2016 you simply don't have much in the way of options other than to hope your old job or an equivalent comes back and you plain and simple didn't have the option of an ejob or whatever when entering the workforce as they didn't exist. Retrain as a web administrator or something per Hillary? I'm sure tech companies are crying out for 50 year olds entering a new field probably without any tertiary qualifications etc. When your future is grim and there's nothing you can do about it you cling to what you can, and you listen to the guy telling you it will all be OK in the end because... you don't really have another option.

Support for Trump hardening is hardly surprising. For a lot of Trump voters he's done- or tried to- everything, or at least enough that, they wanted him to. Immigration, counters to 'unfair' competition, SC judges, that sort of stuff. And if Trump is doing what you want him to then opposition from Democrats and the 'Deep State' doesn't make you question your choice, it reinforces it and means you are less likely to vote for them; thus you end up with people liking Trump more. Plus, the economy is doing well at least statistically, and that always helps. And unfortunately for Trump opponents things like the Mueller Report have not played all that well with those who aren't already convinced that Trump is satan- mostly due to the million gleeful press leaks, opinion pieces and analyses priming people for a far worse report than was received. That made it very easy to spin a merely bad report into a victory and put anyone saying otherwise into the Fake News folder and meant people had extensive Mueller fatigue.

Full announcement for Navi at E3. Not exactly earth shattering, but also not awful Not great, not terrible. 5700/XT with performance a bit above the 2060/70 respectively (and a fair few Gimpworks titles were benchmarked, not just Strange Brigade), pricing at 379/449USD so equivalent to or slightly below their nVidia competitor's formal pricing. No mention of raytracing, unlike the MS conference and Scarlett yesterday. Not much for people hoping for prices to be forced down on nVidia cards though, except perhaps the prospect of 5800/5900 later in the year.

Surprising few, the 16 core R9 3950X has been announced at E3: 3.5/4.7 base/ boost, 72MB cache, 105W TDP (lol), USD749. Not all that tempting at that price (I'll either get an 8 core, or go for a MB replacement and 12 core; around Christmas), and with those core numbers I suspect most users would be better off going threadripper for quad channel and more PCIe lanes. Be good for the epeen though. Quite a few benchmarks shown for the other 3000 series entries- plus specs etc for the APUs, 3400G has been beefed up a fair bit over the somewhat anaemic 2400G- which suggest they do out perform Intel chips in games now even in traditionally Intel favoured games like CSGO. Pinch of salt of course, given it was an AMD event.

Yawn? You mean you aren't as wildly enthusiastic for it as Bethesda's audience? That audience would make Kim Jong Un blush at its unwarranted adulation. Though the audience reaction isn't quite as funny as Bethesda probably managing to miss the boat on the latest online fad, again, and probably managing to do it twice with the same game.

He has done a lot of cyberpunkish movie projects (Matrix, Johnny Mnemonic, hmm, that semi animated wotsit and something else too?) but I think most people just like Keanu think he's excellent, recently for John Wick and more generally because he's lasted forever without being a typical Tom Cruise/ Brad Pitt type star.

Yeah, Trump is basically using the old negotiating tactic of demanding the highly unreasonable in the hope the other part will fold and accept an unreasonable deal as being a 'compromise', and in the belief that ratcheting up the pressure will force compliance. That doesn't really work well with international relations unless the other party is desperate or you have a very, very good idea of what their bottom lines are and are willing to work around them/ not rhetoric yourself into a corner. DPRK is a good example, I think about the only person who (seems to) believe that they'll give up their nukes is Donald Trump. It doesn't really matter what you threaten- or even what inducements you offer- if the other side simply will not budge because they see it as an existential issue. Same for the so called 'Deal of the Century' with Israel /Palestine. It doesn't matter what the Palestinians get in return when you've already gone over their existential red lines and made it clear you see them as the enemy.

You'd do better to say that there's no enmity between US partners and the US itself. That's not absolutely true of course, Turkey at this point is close to fundamentally disliking the US itself for example, but it is mostly so. Towards Trump there's massive enmity from pretty much everyone except the Saudis, Israel, and one or two European countries, like Poland, and Australia whose foreign policy for 75 years has been to ask the US where to jump and how high. You won't find foreign leaders stating their dislike publicly precisely because Trump is an erratic monomaniac who acts on whim and the belief that he can leverage the US's dominant position limitlessly and without consequence. Of those who like him Israel and Saudi only like him because he's so very easy for them to manipulate/ bribe. The problem with constantly threatening to or pulling out of treaties is that you fundamentally devalue any treaty you subsequently make and any negotiations that follow. Trump has got one major deal out of all of his tirades, NAFTA 2.0, and within a year he's threatening to tear it up because the US cannot control its borders. The default position is to call his bluff, and wait in the hope that Trump gets voted out next year. Yeah, Europe will talk about deals etc because Trump might not get voted out, but if you think their default hope isn't status quo ante after Biden or whoever get elected you're simply wrong.

I guess the technical answer has to be no; it's the guy who played Jerome/ Jeremiah/ (Mr) J/ etc instead since they weren't allowed to use the name 'Joker' officially. Which was kind of hilarious when DC's licensing was so disorganised they had two Joker films in simultaneous development with two different actors playing the role... Did Jedi Academy have it on by default? I know JK2 had it, but you had to set a flag/ use a console command to turn it on.

To be fair to Lucas, he's done the vast majority of the editing in the SW films he's been involved in, and done so without taking official credit for it. Indeed, editing is the one part of film making Lucas seems to genuinely love and be excellent at. He's been responsible for a lot of unnecessary problems with SW, but he's also been responsible for salvaging some of his mistakes in the editing room.

Mon Calamari do look like squid- they just look like the head minus the tentacles. Hence the name calamari, since you eat the 'head' rather than the tentacles as calamari. George Lucas at his finest. He'd make most money from cons. And he'd probably be happy enough to be paid to say "it's a trap" a few dozen times at those. Then again, he's probably happy to do it amongst people who actually like Star Wars, doing it for someone who hates SW like Johnson, not so much. How do you delete another user's post in the new forum?

VtMB 2, I presume. (Fledgling Vampire)

I have a lot of dislike in DivOS2's combat- though I did like 1's a fair bit. And yeah, the encounter design itself was generally good and occasionally excellent, when it didn't also rely on cheap gotcha triggers like starting enemies with excess AP. I ended up enjoying DivOS2 combat mostly by treating it like a puzzle game instead of actual RPG combat. Find the solution, and it's trivial; up until that point it's impossible. Very glad they can't use the same system for BG3, the dual armour and initiative systems were plain bad ideas fixing something that could have been worked around successfully, and worse than the initial problem. Then again, one of the most common 'solutions' to combat in DOS2 was spamming summons, a solution that has a very strong pedigree in the Baldur's Gate games as well.

Tiberius was a decent emperor for most of his reign and in most respects- especially financially- and had a bit of an undeserved bad rep in popular media like 'I, Claudius' and from certain gossip monger ancient sources (hello, Suetonius). Most of his bad aspects were loaded into the last years of his reign when he was delegating to Sejanus and later Macro and most likely just wanted to retire. Same is true to a certain extent with Caligula as well, things like trying to make Incatatus a Consul were meant as calculated insults rather than serious suggestions, similarly, his 'Victory over Neptune' collection of sea shells was probably an insult to mutinous troops refusing to invade Britain. The monomania and profligacy are pretty well documented though. (If you want bad emperors probably Nero and Valentinian III take the cake, though for near completely different reasons)

They certainly complained about some content control aspects of NWN1. I'm less than convinced that was a main reason for Bioware dropping D&D though. If they were worried about content control doing a Star Wars game would also be an odd choice (though of course KOTOR was largely developed contemporaneously with NWN1). I think they primarily made the decision to go for original IP as that gave them more leverage with publishers and a greater share of profits. Hmm, on reflection the Planescape thing may have been people saying that a Planetscape Tournament sequel was impossible due to changes (end of the Blood War?) rather than Planescape itself being impossible- though WotC did let the trademark lapse for a bit before re-registering it.

I'd tend to think so as well, but 'software package' is certainly open to wider interpretation- the story text, characters etc are part of the software package, but should be excluded by the IP agreement. But WotC's licensing had been unusually and unintentionally... flexible, historically.

Finished the new content for Kingdom Come's new DLC and it was probably better than the other dlc combined (haven't finished BoB's content yet though). Definitely won't be to everyone's tastes but both bits add a lot of depth to the world.

There was Siege of Dragonspear (?) which was 2e, but was a special case I guess. They also dropped strong hints that a new Planescape game could be negotiated and that so far as I'm aware is discontinued/ defunct for later editions. WotC/ Hasbro, since Atari defaulted on their license deal nearly a decade ago. Though there is the possibility of Bioware owning some stuff as they were claiming copyright over the first two games (and presumably their unique characters and events) but then again the copyright database never seems to get updated unlike the trademark one. An indirect sequel would easily skirt any potential problems from that though.

Every once in a while there's a perfect match of character and actor, and Paul Darrow and Kerr Avon were one such match. Disproportionately influential in scifi, and still extremely quotable. I'll have to go back to my original avatar in memoriam, if I can find it.