Zoraptor

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.

Not a bank heist but rescuing someone or something from a prison or vault, I think? My impressions of Fantastic Beasts were that the acting- and script actually- were pretty good, but the overall plot committed the absolute fundamental sin of being utterly forgettable. Having a decent script but awful plot is a hard combination to manage, but somehow they did it.

My suspicion is that Bartimaeus watched the 1st movie in the series rather than the second, as that's the only one I've seen and his description seems familiar. Then again, about the only thing I can remember about it is that Colin Farrel was channeling his character from Minority Report and that Eddie Redmayne did very well with not much to work with. I'd say I wasn't the target audience but I liked all the Harry Potter movies well enough, even the first two that were squarely aimed at kids.

I still remember nuChekov being criticised by people for his 'fake' Russian accent in the Star Trek reboot, and the actor was Russian.

Frostpunk is definitely worth it at 'only' 40% off. Dunno about sociopathic though, much like This War of Mine it's generally possible to avoid bad morality once you know what to expect (and you're likely to out and out lose at the start whatever your moral approach is when you don't know what to expect).

Sanderson shouldn't care too much, since he only wrote the last two (three?) books based on Robert Jordan's notes and his wife's input rather than wrote the whole thing. He isn't going to say that the changes are stupid and the show sucks though, even if it does. Sapkowski would be a better bet for that given his rather dismissive comments on the games, and even he seems keen enough on money to swallow his pride when he hasn't been stupid enough to accept a one off payment. The one strong rumour I've seen is that Moiraine is the 'PoV' character in the early episode(s), and that seems pretty sensible to me as she's a far better introduction to the world as a whole than any Two Rivers character. Since it's Current Year diversity casting is inevitable, but that's only an actual problem when it goes against verisimilitude. I'm not expecting much of anything from the WoT, LotR or Twitcher adaptions though to be honest. Kind of like how the quality of the fantasy movie renaissance peaked with FotR (ie the very first movie in the renaissance) I'm expecting GoT 1-4 to be by far the best of the TV fantasy series renaissance.

If that comment is directed at you I will eat my keyboard.

Why bother arguing? He hasn't even got the most basic facts right. GOG made a profit last year, because surprisingly enough despite having three quarters where it lost money there's one quarter which always has most of its sales volume. No doubt they'd like a bigger profit, but which company wouldn't.

The 70MB is (IIRC) 32MB per chiplet (Level 3) plus 6MB shared (Level 2)*. I presume the big cache is to help with the latency that has been a problem with Zen/+ and perhaps help with the high core count chips being a bit limited by things like dual channel memory. AMD's full computex announcement summary is here, for those interested in a bit more detail/ Epyc and the R5 chips that didn't get a formal announcement in the presentation. *Not sure how Intel gets 24.75MB but it will be in powers of two as well- somehow.

Exactly how different RDNA is from GCN is a bit of an open question up until we get a white paper but it won't be a complete departure from its predecessor. The 5700 is definitely Navi and there's decent presumed room in the specs for a 5800 and probably a 5900 later on. With no news on pricing and one benchmark it's difficult to evaluate how the 5700 will do. The Vega refresh was Vega 20 so consumer wise Radeon VII only. (nVidia's flagship is the 2080Ti, though it is ludicrously expensive compared to previous flagship cards)

Computex address is just wrapped up. Main Ryzen points: 15% IPC boost which is at the top end of realistic expectations 3700x/3800x 8/16 core/ thread SKUs at 65/105W 4.4/ 4.5 Ghz boost (higher TDP unit has higher base clock). 329 and 399USD RRPs 3900x 12/24 R9 SKU at 105W with 4.6 GHz and USD499 RRP. Probably not a great watch for Intel, that IPC boost should put Zen2 well ahead clock to clock and the 3900x is half their equivalent's price and TDP. If there's no voltage wall this time around a 5GHz overclock may well be feasible for AMD as well. There was some x570 news as well, but I wasn't really paying much attention to that (or Navi, though I did catch that it's not GCN again as was rumoured).

While I'd agree that there were a lot of abrupt about faces ironically I thought the source of that meme was 100% in character for Jaime- what he didn't like was pointless deaths, but he was more than willing to kill innocents or allow them to die, if there was a point to it. And he's been near entirely consistent about Cersei ultimately being the most important thing to him. If there's one example that demonstrates both it's him threatening to trebuchet Edmure's son into Riverrun if he doesn't surrender it- along with a spiel about how he'd 100% do it and that's how much he wants to get back to his sister's side. Aerys had already lost when he wanted to blow KL up so any more deaths would be pointless. But I'd fully expect him to throw the entirety of KL under the bus if he thought that he could get Cersei out (or have her win) in exchange, as that to him would not be pointless. On Jorah, there's nothing quite like a True Believer that gets disillusioned. He's not just in love with Dany because he has a weakness for blondes, she represents something more to him. It would be difficult to credibly have her fall off her pedestal so far as he's concerned, but not impossible. End of the day though he was working for bobby b initially so that he could get a pardon and return home; if Dany starts threatening to burn that home indiscriminately if they wouldn't kneel and some of the other stuff she spouted to Jon then he should start having second thoughts. I've got little confidence that Benioff & Weiss could pull it off competently though, certainly within the restrictions they set for themselves time wise.

Dany's heel turn was certainly foreshadowed pretty extensively, but yeah, like most of the late season plot points they did make an awful hash of explaining it. Seems like the biggest problem once the show outran the books was not the plot itself so much, but that they couldn't reference what the characters were actually thinking via their POV chapters and the narrative effectively switched from a directed POV (ie you knew what Cat/ Jon/ Jaime etc thought) to an indirect observational one* where things not directly said had to be inferred; and sometimes inferred on very sketchy evidence. Since I used the 'kingsmoot' scene earlier, some things fundamentally make no sense like Sansa declaring independence while Dorne and Asha remain loyal, but Grey Worm's attitude flip could be explained- especially if Jorah survived Winterfell in initial drafts as rumoured- by playing on the unfinished nature of Dany's Essos/ free the slaves mission and on whether Missandei would want him pointlessly dying in a fight against former allies. It would take some writing to do, and would need it all not to take place over about 5 minutes episode time, but it could be done. But as it stands he does a 180 completely without explanation. *Perhaps the best example would be the Arya/ Sansa 'conflict' in S7. It always felt more than a bit off in context of previous scheming and effectively could not happen in the books since they're both POV characters. I'd also say in retrospect they would have done far better to go with book POV character Arianne rather than the Sand Snakes, despite the problems with Dorne in the books.

If I had a beer with him I'd be hitting him up about why Commodus ended up his successor and why he was so awful. Aurelius may be an interesting bloke but his son was so bad* he got a portable toilet named after him. *probably, like Caligula, wasn't as bad as made out.