Zoraptor

Endgame spoiler You can ctrl X, then add text then ctrl V to repaste the spoiler or quote box. Kludgey as though.

Finally got around to watching the Discovery season finale and it was about as ludicrous a mess as I expected (lol fighters, lol every ship not moving for more half the battle despite 'evasive pattern alpha delta alpaca pachyderm' being ordered, lol every minor character randomly turning up, lol Leland's massively fluctuating capabilities etc), but did mostly manage to entertain in between the doses of stupid. Can't help but think that Kurzman, like Abrams before, wasn't so much trying to do Star Trek as audition for doing Star Wars with some of what happened though. On the positive side, they surely have to be doing a Pike/ Enterprise spin off; but there's no way Ash can carry a Section 31 spin off, he's a weak character and him having anything to do with the Fed military is just plain ridiculous given his history. Watched the finale of Gotham as well. Liked the series a fair bit overall once it stopped taking itself seriously, despite the scripts not being overly great and the story arcs being, uh, a bit too comic like for my tastes the casting was just about spot on and it managed to be enjoyable- but the finale was weak. It really required a double episode for what they wanted to do, and they also ended up highlighting DC's arbitrary character use rules yet again which always makes me irrationally (or not) annoyed.

'Leader is about to flee!!!' is used every time there's a revolution. Sometimes it actually does happen like with Yanukovich but apart from Gadaffi and Libya they said the same thing about Assad and Saddam with neither actually fleeing. With Assad iirc they made the slightly ridiculous claim that his family had fled to the UK as well which would be near the last place they'd go. US has plenty of rare earths, it was just cheaper to get China to mine theirs. Which was, retrospectively, immensely stupid given how important they are in all sorts of technologies and how it's allowed China to have artificial export shortages whenever anyone threatens to compete with them. CNN loves a good intervention, even when it comes from Trump.

I'm not keen on the theory of the attempt being premature per that scenario- though it certainly appears well premature in practice. From the US perspective Guaido is not personally important as he has no personal power base to bring to the table; he's important because he is the 'legitimate' alternative to Maduro, and any Venezuelan can theoretically fill those shoes. From their perspective it doesn't really matter if Guaido is arrested or even killed, indeed him being killed would probably be a net positive in practice. Guaido's perspective would no doubt be different on his personal value though so I could see him launching an attempt early against US advice, if he felt personally threatened. But, and it's a big but, he's also got in and out of the country multiple times while under Maduro surveillance so he has alternatives, and contingency against arrest surely must have been planned for extensively. Indeed, despite basically launching a coup he has yet to be detained even now (so far as we yet know, I guess). That's why I tend to favour the suggestion that he got conned into acting too soon. If he feared arrest over much he'd probably be in Colombia or Peru rather than Venezuela in the first place.

There are only really two ways the naming can work, (1) they had nothing to do with anything and Bolton wanted to stoke internal tension andor get Maduro to panic or (2) they actually did talk to Guaido or the US but didn't do what was agreed when the time came and he's trying to drop them in it in revenge. I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if they agreed to act as a way to get Guaido to blow his load prematurely and also see who else might move that they've missed; especially if Maduro is getting Russian technical support. Guaido seemed pretty sure he'd have a lot more military support than he actually got, and him being strung along by the head of the armed forces would fit that pretty well, though so too would good old fashioned wishful thinking or scenario fulfillment. Wonder if they'll get 140dB Van Halen on loop.

But he's Young and Dynamic, therefore he must be effective! Just like Macron, Turdeau and Jacinda Ardern. The most striking thing to me about Guaido is how he physically resembles Barack Obama. Which is kind of ironic, given that Trump regards Obama as basically the antichrist. Realistically the crisis won't be over until Trump can declare victory. Much like Syria and Iran, if there isn't a politically acceptable military victory on the table economic throttling and asymmetric measures will be tried.

If Dany can survive fire under exceptional circumstances I couldn't see any reason why Jon could not also. Logically of course neither should but thematically it would fit as the same sort of rebirth Dany had. My presumption has always been that there is a White Walker leader of some sort in the books as well, though I'd certainly admit it's a presumption and I'd expect a slightly less tropey result to killing him than what we got in the show. End of the day though you do need to haves some way to reverse the invasion in the books as well, and the origin of the White Walkers in general as shown in the show is, imo, likely to be direct from Martin since a lot of the other stuff in the CotF plotline obviously comes from him (eg the origin of 'Hodor' seems extremely likely to be from George)

I trace the problems with the show back to them deciding to do 'proper' battles. There's a reason the battles are obfuscated in the books, and it's a good reason. Whispering Woods wasn't actually shown and the show was a whole lot better for it, if it were done now we'd have an entire episode dedicated to it- and probably a whole ep of over written maudlin set up- and that would be 20% of the season gone. Apart from the Blackwater I haven't liked a single large scale battle except as a spectacle and even then if you've seen one confused shaky cam culminating in Lead Character(s) being saved by plotforce multiple times you've seen them all. I actually suspect we got the book ending in the episode, as it uses several guns on mantlepieces from the book:

Apart from chugging along through AC: Odyssey I've also been playing Dawn of Man and Aven Colony for a bit of variation. TLDR, they're both good games that I'd recommend overall though they're certainly not classics. Dawn of Man takes a tribe from stone age to iron age with hunting, techs, farming and the like. Its main problems are that it's a bit repetitive- not much in the way of alternative strategies- and the difficulty is, overall, a bit too easy even on hardcore mode. The positives are that it's almost bug free, looks pretty good and is in a neglected time period; it was also enjoyable and held attention despite its flaws and that is the most important thing of course. The main annoyances/ flaws I found apart from there only being a few strategies were fighting enemies which was not exactly difficult but was very random in results- basically, combat tended to be decided by whether your army streamed piecemeal towards the enemy and got annihilated or their army streamed piecemeal towards yours instead- and keeping animals fed over winter. There was also a tendency for the AI to ignore even high priority tasks at times, important for feeding animals as you had to harvest/ store straw for them and even with the correct equipment and high priority given the AI would sometimes decide something else random was more important resulting in your animals starving. Which was more annoying than anything, my town in general never actually came close to starving in any game. Aven Colony is a fairly standard city building and resource management/ gathering game set on an alien planet more or less in the vein of Pharaoh or one of the other old Impression games, I'd think anyone liking them should like it too. It's well balanced (normal is way too easy, but there are multiple difficulty levels and even custom settings) with just enough competing priorities to keep things interesting without being annoying micromanagement, plus it looks pretty and I had no noticeable bugs at all. I don't really have any substantive complaints about it except as with DoM above there's a bit of a dearth of different strategies and cities tend to end up looking mostly the same- despite there being some theoretically significant differences in the ~10 campaign and 4 challenge maps available. It has an overall plot for the campaign which is eminently ignoreable without being actively bad, and a regional map that is for exploration and PoI investigation and which is kind of a half baked feature without being bad.

I'm definitely not a fan of its scaling, but I'm sympathetic because no other game seems to handle that issue particularly well. I'd also consider the game 'high effort' otherwise and it's on a time period I never thought I'd see featured in a mainstream game; so I'm willing to cut them some slack on other aspects. Objectively they probably should have made the game smaller, which would have helped with having higher density unique content (and less stupid proc gen quests) and potentially also help with balancing enemy levels/ character progression better.

In Odyssey you get a larger toolkit- specialist abilities and moves which are rather well thought out in general- but only up to a point, then you kind of get generic +1.5% damage/ resistance/ crit bonus type deal. Which felt a bit weird to me, like it was first designed for a level cap of 50 but they decided progression was too slow or the game too big plus people hate level caps so they sort of tacked a bunch of stuff on like extra mercenaries after what was obviously intended to be the top one, and bonus abilities that are 100% generic. Or maybe they did that because they thought it would work better with µtransactions. I'd say it does get easier as you go and you do feel some progression, but nowhere near as much as if there wasn't level scaling- and you also have to level up/ upgrade your gear as you go at traders for it to be easier. Practically, I followed the level estimates of quests and there was always a lot of stuff at my level so I must have been overleveled just by doing content as it became available; and only ran into one area that I was underleveled for (Boeotia, as I decided to go have a look at Plataea rather than do quests since I was close) and that was instadeath central. The issue really is that Odyssey is absolutely massive and it's extremely easy to miss lower level content, and if you came back to it when overleveled it would be ridiculous as some content in Witcher 3 ended up being if you happened to miss an area (and in W3 you also had the rather stupid situation where some low level quests were gated through higher level questlines). Doubt there really is a good solution for that type of open world game. One way you end up with no scaling and areas you miss end up being stupidly easy, other way you end up with everything feeling the same and no real progression. Nobody likes gating content unless it's done seamlessly and transparently; nobody likes level scaling but near everyone seems to like open world overall despite that.

I can't see them going any other way than marriage to solve that problem, probably after some fake tension. I'd like to see the 'benign dictator' trope that Dany represents be subverted, but I cannot see them actually doing it. I'm kind of hoping that some of the set ups from the last two eps also get subverted. Can't help but think that a lot of the characters have neatly tied up story arcs and are there just to give emotional depth to the battle by dying. In contrast to most I'm not a fan of the last two eps- they were utterly predictable and, frankly, 95% fan service meet ups, but then I'm not a massive fan of the series overall.

The work ethic thing isn't really racist per se, it's more 'classist' than anything so Elitist is a far better term. 'Work ethic' has always been a phrase for complaining about poor people of whatever skin colour while making the complainer feel good about themselves. Here and in the UK 'Work Ethic' is used almost exclusively nowadays to complain about (typically white) locals being unwilling to work (lower than) minimum wage jobs with awful conditions and no job security- those jobs are typically filled by immigrants, thus they're considered to have better 'work ethic' despite coming from countries the old colonialists would have labelled as 'lazy'. Indeed, back when there was slavery, indentured labour, work houses and the like 'work ethic' was used to complain about the slaves and locals not being that keen on picking your coffee beans, opium, cotton, chopping sugar cane, laying your railways, operating your looms or whatever for no or minimal reward instead. 'No work ethic' was also an accusation leveled at Greece by Germany, which of course makes Germans feel good about putting the boot in. So it's also a particularly useful phrase due to the moral aspect of it, since it of course implies that if only the poor sods would get off their chuff and work hard they'd (have) succeed(ed) and their position is thus their fault- and, equally of course you are wonderful, just tremendous really for putting up with their laziness as much as you do and any discipline or complaining from you are done For Their Own Good. As a pillar of western success 'work ethic' is a load of rubbish- it should probably be replaced with 'moral imperative' or something similar which reflects reality better.

I've just about done a full 180 on Braga, it was very fashionable to blame him for all the problems with Voyager and Enterprise but he's done some decent stuff since. He's clearly not a televisual genius, but he certainly isn't the anti Midas he was painted as either. (Haven't seen the last Discovery episode yet, but I'm not expecting much. If it gets away with less than a quarter of the episode being pointless melodrama I'd count that as a blessing, but I won't be holding my breath.)

Assassin's Creed Unity is free to claim on Uplay for a week. That's the one set in Paris, so it features Notre Dame. I'm wondering if they might be able to sneak the new low cost HBM in- AMD would probably prefer that to GDDR6 since they're the patent holder and it would presumably be what they'd use in any APU type solutions they'd produce for themselves to sell. I suspect PS5 may be a bit too far into development to implement it, but it seems pretty compelling as a cost/ performance balance option if what Samsung has said is accurate.

If you don't like S1 of LoT you should consider giving S2 a try at least. S1 kind of falls into the trap of being too serious to be entertainingly camp, but also too camp to be taken seriously. Season 2 plays far more to the show's strengths- which is definitely being entertaining self aware cheese rather than compelling drama- and has far better antagonists.

Yeah, even just clock for clock Zen2 will be around 60% faster than Jaguar and it ought to clock higher watt for watt as well on 7nm. Something like a 64GB SSD integrated into the board with a traditional platter HD for bulk storage makes most sense to me. If it's fast enough they could also save on RAM requirements, maybe not for graphics but for CPU related tasks. IIRC GDDR6 isn't that great for most CPU functions as its latency is too high and the extra bandwidth isn't needed. AMD does have the ability to add HBM stacks (and presumably for PS/ XBOX, GDDR6) into its APUs so maybe they can add more traditional solid state storage in similarly to get the extra speed claimed.

There's a thread in Skeeter's Junkyard with a PS5 rumour video from a couple of months back, though iirc it was aimed more at its implications towards PC. I would not expect PS3 back compatibility. PS5 is basically an updated PS4 with similar AMD hardware, PS3 was of course Cell and completely different apart from being similarly multi core. The SSD thing is a bit weird. There almost no practical performance increase (big theoretical one, but practically very little) on PC from going from SATA SSD to NVMe/ PCIe SSD in gaming though there's a massive one going from platter HD to Solid State of any type- and sizable SSDs are still expensive. So I can't see how a better than NVMe SSD makes sense for PS5- unless it's really small and integrated directly into the system and used as a cache for the entire game.

It's one of a metal's ductility functions, iirc. Can't remember which, I didn't like physical chemistry/ material science much. Can't imagine you'd need to know the details for any practical applications, but chemically speaking that's all incorrect I'm afraid. I suspect you've misremembered some of the stuff on ductility/ malleability. There aren't really any rules for stability vs melting point, but there are some guidelines for other relationships like ability to make good wires and ability to conduct well being linked to having a medium MP (that the three best conductors in silver, gold and copper all make good wires and have MPs around 1000C is not coincidental).

He's been the best part of the season, and without the advantage Captain Malfoy had of being a more interesting character type. There would be a lot worse ideas for a spinoff.

I could very easily see a situation such as: (1) DICE tells EA that Frostbite can be used for all sorts of games and (2) Bioware says they're happy to use it and shouldn't have any problems developing DAI on it; only after that does (3) EA decide Frostbite should be used as a policy/ preference because even their RPG studio says it should be ok for them.

No I claim they're right because they're experts and you provided no evidence they were wrong. s/a is fundamentally faster firing than manual. That's... why it exists. Otherwise everyone would just use manual action or full auto. If you're firing from a helicopter at $1000 an hour you don't want to be mucking around with a bolt or lever every shot since, well, it's dangerous and rate of fire counts. If you'd bothered reading replies you'd know that, but you're obsessed with you bulls eyeing womp rats with your t14 being the epitome of shooting challenges. So no, no appeal to authority fallacy because there's no fallacy there. Your experts' argument that Russia would go bankrupt while still having enough money to pay off all its debts always was moronic and was the equivalent of saying someone would go bankrupt when they ran out of money in their wallet. All the sanctions that were meant to do plus more and they can still pay off all their debt from cash five years later. And yes, if you refuse to issue new loans to cover old ones that is calling in debt. Still true, I just got bored of repeating myself.

I'd agree in general, but I wouldn't put the engine near top of the problems- it doesn't really explain why Andromeda was worse than DAI despite coming after. Yeah, Andromeda's main problem was clearly bad project management more than anything, they had more than enough time if they used it well. It's a massive game (as is DAI), but there isn't enough to hold interest. The fps gameplay is actually pretty good but it's hard to see how the RPG systems would have worked well on any other engine either, they're kind of disjointed in a way that suggests people were developing systems and even planetary narrative in isolation; and the characters, plot and antagonists being so poor is 100% not due to the engine. Plus despite Andromeda following DAI and theoretically having extra time to work out any kinks DAI was a far more consistent end product. Bad project management seems to have be Bioware's ongoing problem too given Anthem and DA4 clearly have had or are having a lot of problems too with development being rebooted. Supposedly they weren't forced to use Frostbite. ISTR they had to use the same engine for DAI and Andromeda but it didn't have to be Frostbite.

In order to be an Appeal to Authority fallacy it has to actually be a fallacy- stating that experts must be right in the face of evidence proving otherwise; just because they're experts. I showed that Russia could pay off its debt in cash, that fundamentally counters an assertion of imminent bankruptcy since bankruptcy involves having debts that cannot be paid off, and ultimately I was correct and your experts wrong. You plinking the odd squirrel in the Dakotas isn't evidence of anything except your own hubris given that the similarities between the Dakotas and NZ consist of, basically, being on the same planet.

A link to a google search. At least find an actual definition. If you are rolling over debt and someone refuses to issue the new loans you need to repay it then they are calling in that debt. It is an immediate demand for payment of principal, because they are no longer allowing you to roll it over- issue new bonds to cover the old ones' repayment- any more and you have to actually repay them instead of kicking them down the road. And you're still talking about the situation now as if that will be the situation forever. You admit yourself it won't be, but then go back to arguing about today again, as that's the only way your argument makes sense. Unfortunately you only picked up the words Appeal to Authority, not the meaning. With Russia going bankrupt I provided hard figures and reasoning as to why your experts were wrong and your response was 'but my experts'. Ultimately, I was proven correct and they weren't. Here all the experts- DoC, MPI, NZP, PM, Police Minister, Federated Farmers, Fish and Game etc- agreed that s/a guns are necessary for pest control and the only expert opinion or data you've cited against that is your own, gained 6500 miles away.