Zoraptor

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.

I had a look at Origins since I've enjoyed Odyssey and hadn't realised it was set in Late Ptolemaic Egypt after Odyssey's Classical Greece, which seems weird given the previous games were all (?) in chronological order. I presume they shifted the era some time during production to include more recognisable names, but it seems a bit odd doing it that way around.

Trump's about as far from a details guy as you can get, I doubt he personally knows anything much about them or Assange except that they hurt Hillary in the election. I'm highly amused by your list, as in every example you had a case of the comprehension fails. You left earthquakes out, but if you still remember the Mercalli Scale exists my time has not been completely wasted. If your repayment of debt requires you to issue new loans to repay the old ones the debt is not being repaid, just the individual loans. The debt is rolled over, it is called in when repayment of the actual debt is demanded and new loans are not accepted to cover the old ones as they come due as at that point you have to repay actual principal instead of proroguing. That isn't inevitable and the debt is currently sustainable, but longer term if the US runs ~trillion dollar deficits p/a it will not be. A mortgage example would be fine as an analogy, if you paid the original mortgage by taking out a second one- exactly as with my credit card example. The situation with US debt is not a situation where monthly payments are made and in the end, freehold house equivalent, it's a situation where the owner gets progressively newer, larger mortgages to pay off the old one because the owner is spending more than they earn. Paying off a mortgage to get freehold only works as an equivalence if there is a surplus and debt is being paid down.

Heaps of shows have skipped weeks at the same time due to college basketball finals(?) Used to be due to ratings sweeps as well, but surely they're now anachronisms, surely. Certainly one of the top 13 episodes of season 2 so far.

Yes it is, if you stop buying up the new bonds to replace the old ones that line of credit is cancelled, you're no longer lending to that entity and the debt is called in since the principal has to be repaid in accordance with the loan contract. The individual loans making up that debt are not called in, but no more loans until the old ones are paid in full is 100% cancelling a line of credit and calling debt in, it just isn't demanding immediate repayment of that line of credit. It's not the same as cancelling a line of credit to an individual, but that's why a credit card analogy is an analogy, rather than a direct equivalent. "In the long term sure, when someone gets the balls to actually call in unsustainable US debt". You're 100% ignoring the "long term" part to talk about short term. Same thing you did with Russia in 2014 thinking they would go bankrupt, you looked at the short term effects and what would happen if Russia did literally nothing in response apart from spend cash in hand. As it stands they didn't do literally nothing- and still can pay off debt out of cash in hand even in 2019 5 years after you said they'd be bankrupt. If China called in US debt tomorrow- not exactly long term there, but whatever- it wouldn't matter much as the debt is not unsustainable, yet, it's the deficits generating that debt that are unsustainable, and that in the longer term. The US has no problem servicing debt at the moment. In the long term constant deficit spending that outstrips increases in ability to repay is unsustainable whether you're the US, Guatemala or Joe Bloggs because eventually people start worrying that you cannot repay and want to be repaid without issuing new debt, which is a problem if your repayment method involves taking out more debt. The entity most likely to stop issuing credit and demand actual repayment is China, as they're big enough too in both respects.

The only people saying that Assange weaponised wikileaks are people with a vested interest in him having weaponised it so he isn't a journalist any more. He basically got kicked from the Ecuadorian embassy for helping expose the corruption of the Ecuadorian President. Actually, kind of amusing seeing the US trying to extradite a journalist for doing their job given some earlier comments about how fantastic free speech protections are in the US. reimagine all you want, what you said were, "In the long term sure, when someone gets the balls to actually call in unsustainable US debt- in the full knowledge that the US would likely tell you to FOAD and a demand would likely implode the world economy you rely on." reimagine which, again, is a mischaracterization o' what can happen. No it isn't. You're just talking about what happens now as if that is what will happen forever and anon no matter what happens; I'm talking about what happens "in the long term" when the debt becomes "unsustainable". Your reading comprehension is, as always, simply dreadful. The US has had a decade of near trillion dollar deficits, if that continues the situation as it is now will only be applicable for a certain amount of time, until someone with clout, most likely China, calls the situation out. Refusal to roll over the debt by accepting new loans is calling in in a system where roll over is not just expected but required. If you are defaulting you're telling your creditors to FOAD, especially if you have the leverage the US has. US fixed term securities are only gilt edged so long as the US is solvent and can pay them back, ultimately due to being in sustained deficit by issuing new ones.

Irrelevant, since i never said loans could be called in nor rolled over, only overall debt. You seem a bit confused by the two concepts, so I'll have another go at explaining for you. US government debt consists of lots of loans, mostly in the form of bonds. These cannot be called in, but money from the issue of new bonds is used to repay the old ones. Refusal to buy new bonds to replace the old ones results in the debt associated with those bonds being called in- it now has to be repaid, without issue of new loans from that lender (China)- whereas previously new loans/ bond purchases would be made rolling the debt over. Using a new loan to repay the old one means that overall debt does not decrease and is not repaid on its theoretical expiry, it's just reissued as new debt and rolled over; refusal to buy newly issued bonds however results in that debt actually having to be repaid; and more reliance on other lenders, higher interest rates due to reduced Confidence and if extreme enough complete collapse of the debt system and outright default. Same as the credit card example, overall debt wise it doesn't matter if you owe nothing to visa and mastercard and a lot to amex, and cycle through taking loans from each. New loans, but new loans covering the exact same debt (plus a bit each time). When one provider refuses to continue the debt is called and you have to repay- or find a way to continue rolling over with higher costs. It's not a particularly complicated idea. (Government) Loans don't get rolled over (in general, since there have been exceptions) but if you're running deficits the underlying debt absolutely does since you're paying off old loans with new ones.

Prism is also used to circumvent protections for countries' own citizens by using a 5 eyes partner to do the 'illegal' spying- which isn't 'illegal' if another country does it- as well. If the US wants some illegal spying done and doesn't want to risk being caught they'll just use CUKANZ (appropriate acronym too*) to do it. Fifty bucks says that US agencies can 'honestly' say that they never spied on the Trump campaign because they outsourced it to canucks, brits (almost certainly), ockers or kiwis. Don't really know why they bother, the head of the NSA can bald facedly lie repeatedly to congress with zero repercussions anyway... *Seven years of the UK insisting they weren't sitting outside the embassy to enforce an extradition, and half an hour after they get Assange the US makes them look like a itty bitty bitch. That is roll over debt. You're mistaking individual loans for the debt itself, the loans are repaid- otherwise you're in default- but the debt itself isn't and old loans are replaced wholesale, plus a bit, by new. You aren't rolling over the loan itself, but you are rolling over the debt associated with the loan e.g: if you always pay off your credit card with the credit from another credit card then you're rolling over debt and you never actually repay the principal. You do repay the loan associated with the credit card regularly, but not the debt itself. If you pay off your visa with your mastercard, then your mastercard with your amex, then your amex with your visa you're rolling the debt over as the debt itself does not decrease; and if one of them refuses to let you keep doing it you're in trouble because at that point you will have to (try) and repay actual principal.

As a connoisseur of passive aggressiveness I was amused by Iran naming US armed forces as terrorists in reciprocation. Refusing to roll over debt is the same as calling it in to all practical purposes since the system relies absolutely on Confidence and for constant deficit spending it ultimately relies on new loans to pay off old ones as they come due. Refusing to roll over makes other lenders less likely to lend, and if they do they want more interest on the loans. If a big enough player expresses No Confidence the system breaks. At this point the biggest player who could do that is China, but we're not close to that happening, yet. If you have permanent deficits in the trillion dollar range p/a the loans will dry up eventually even if you are the reserve currency, and when they do principal actually has to be repaid rather than kicked down the road. It's the nuclear option and will be bad for everyone, but permanently increasing debt on that scale is fundamentally unsustainable and basically a pyramid scheme. At some point people realise they won't ever actually get repaid, then the race is on to make sure you're first in line to get what you can. OTOH, if you can pay your loans and interest back from cash reserves you cannot be insolvent by definition. That's why it was so obvious that Russia would not go bankrupt in 2014 despite many 'experts' claiming they would, they could pay every rouble they owed off multiple times without borrowing a rouble more- indeed, they can still do the same in 2019.