Zoraptor

"If you're mean to us we'll shoot ourself in the other foot as well!" The relatively small war in Yemen already has Saudi going through its reserves quickly. Whatever threats they have would hurt themselves more than their target especially if they have multiple targets. Sit tight until it blows over and splash out a bit of money to influencers and interference runners.

According to the box Obsidian owns the copyright to NWN2's engine and tools so they'd either need to back port it or get Obsidian's permission, that's where the "can't touch it" comes from. The engines for their other remasters have all been © Bioware. They probably would otherwise, not much left to remaster and they seem to have bailed on their original project game.

They released a game after Dead State ('Panic at Multiverse High'). IIRC its sales numbers made Dead State's look GTAV class though. Realistically, Dead State was never going to sell massively and a lot of its sales being 'preloaded' via kickstarter made them look worse. The Age of Decadence model of more realistic expectations was a better model in the long term than the more big name team kickstarters. I really liked Dead State as well, it had some pretty serious flaws but also had a huge amount of potential to build on.

If we know about it, MS will know about it. And as a major console maker the chances of MS having seen Indiana/ Outer Worlds/ Untitled Caiyarsky Game is pretty high even early in its development. Outer Worlds is definitively an Obsidian trademark, not Take 2/ Private Division. Word Mark THE OUTER WORLDS Goods and Services IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Entertainment services, namely, providing online games in the nature of video games; Entertainment services, namely, providing a website featuring computer games and video games that are played online; Entertainment services, namely, providing a website featuring non-downloadable news, information, tips, hints, contests, computer interface themes, enhancements in the nature of loot boxes for use within an online computer and video game service, additional features for an online computer and video game service, and additional content for an online computer and video game service, audio-visual content, music, films, videos, ongoing television programs, animated series, and other multimedia materials, all in the field of computer games and video games; providing information, news and commentary in the field of computer games and video games Standard Characters Claimed Mark Drawing Code (4) STANDARD CHARACTER MARK Serial Number 87769046 Filing Date January 24, 2018 Current Basis 1B Original Filing Basis 1B Published for Opposition October 2, 2018 Owner (APPLICANT) Obsidian Entertainment, Inc. CORPORATION CALIFORNIA 100 Spectrum Center Drive., Suite 200 Irvine CALIFORNIA 92618 Attorney of Record Jonathan Pearce Type of Mark SERVICE MARK Register PRINCIPAL Live/Dead Indicator LIVE (I bet a shiny dollar that the forum software borks the formatting on that despite the supposed wysiwyg. And I'm a dollar richer)

Yeah, I'd be almost entirely sure the plan wasn't close to what actually went down in this case. I have a low opinion of both Saudi capabilities and their moral fibre, for want of a better term, but I cannot credit even them having the hubris required to plan to kill a US based journalist in such a undeniable way in a country that has poor relations with them and where the fallout could not be controlled nor plausible deniability established. Turkey and Qatar will use this to try and drive a wedge between Saudi and everyone else and Turkey doing the investigation allows them to drip feed damaging information and plant supposition and propaganda as well, and it certainly appears that most people believe it was intended as an outright hit squad thanks to Turkish sourced information and rumours of bonesaws and the like. The mafia allegedly did asterisk up killing Castro numerous times, albeit subcontracted by the CIA. I wouldn't have any particular difficulty believing that criminal organisations do snatches or assassinations better than most spy agencies, they certainly have more practice at it.

Rumour is they botched the planned kidnapping spectacularly possibly due to an adverse reaction to a sedative, and the numbers were to try for a snatch job if he didn't end up going to the embassy (also why they were booked for 4 days stay). If doing a public kidnapping you need a lot more people than at an embassy as you need lookouts, disruptors/ crowd control, a vehicle change or two etc. He'd then have appeared on Saudi TV after a few days and 'voluntarily' state that he'd 'voluntarily' agreed to go back to Saudi, providing plausible deniability to any accusations of kidnap. Since he's dead they cannot do that and there isn't really a plan B available, especially since Turkey and them were at loggerheads even prior over just about everything. In general I think people have a massive over belief in the competence of spy agencies. Mossad (twice) and the French DGSE who both have very good reps for example got rumbled by those doyens of counterespionage, the, uh, New Zealand Police Force. MI6 had most of their covert Russian operatives photographed chatting to a rock, and the CIA and 'KGB' have had multiple failures both Cold War and present. The most capable spies are probably China's, and somewhat surprisingly, North Korea's.

That project would be the most likely reason for any MS purchase, so they'd have to buy Take 2 out of their contract as well, presumably. That's the main reason I'm pretty skeptical about the rumours- apart from a resetera random and kotaku as sources not exactly being of ironclad reliability. I can't really think of any other reason MS would be interested apart from Project Indiana/ Outer Worlds.

Didn't want it to leak or thought she might change her mind would be the obvious reasons. I don't think it was that much of a surprise though, UN ambassador for the Trump Admin must be about the most thankless task in politics and she has been forced- presumably, since she must have had a good idea how the wind was blowing- into some pretty stupid and embarrassing situations there. Getting caught begging countries for supporting votes and worse, failing, is pretty untenable and must have been personally difficult especially if any advice to withdraw rather than force a vote was ignored.

AMD certainly offers a more value for money long term upgrade proposition with Zen 2 still coming, plus their aggressiveness of pricing is way beyond Intel's in general. Counterintuitively though at the moment Intel has probably encouraged more upgrades- if you bought a mid range or above Ryzen at launch (1600 or greater) there's little reason to upgrade to either new Intel or AMD offerings (yet), if you own a year+ old i5 you're likely to already be getting limits from their 4 threads, and even if you bought an i7 you could now get double the cores/ threads from AMD or Intel. But yeah, Intel's 10nm problems have resulted in 4 'generations' of Skylake with no IPC improvement. All the IPC improvements were set for 10nm designs which still aren't able to be produced.

Intel has launched their new i9- for the low cost of one kidney*. Wouldn't normally be relevant for here, but... Not like the other two points are exactly stellar either. 9570 was as mainstream as the 9900k, and soldering is returning something that should never have gone from the top end. *here you could buy 2x 2700x or a threadripper and MB (albeit a cheap one) for the same price.

Never said he did, it's the Polish author who made a stupid deal for the rights to his IP. Meanwhile Lucas made a steal selling the rights to his numerous times. They both have an unfortunate lack of quality with their later works. George Lucas's big plus was that he didn't sell the rights to his works though, until DIsney, and if anything he tended to the micromanagement side of contracts etc. So every time someone bought a Boba Fett action figure it was Lucas getting the money, not Fox, and he could renegotiate everything including future movies from a position of strength. If anything Sapkowski is like the Fox execs who were so sure that Star Wars would fail that they didn't even bother doing a proper deal for it. Plus, even the worst of Lucas's movies were better than most and far more successful than almost all SW licensed products. Maybe a few people bought the movies because of KOTOR, but it was way disproportionately the reverse situation of people buying the licensed game product due to the movies. For Twitcher it's the exact reverse outside of eastern Europe. There isn't really a readily available equivalent situation to the one Sapkowski finds himself in because most people aren't as, well, stupid as he was and in most places you don't get a second bite of the cherry as he's trying for. If the games failed he wouldn't return the lump sum, and he's been an idiot retrospectively but most importantly by his own choice with no trickery involved. There's no point even offering a lump sum payment if the rights' holder can just go back and relitigate later if it does better than expected, everyone would take a lump sum secure in the knowledge that they can go back and demand a percentage later. He made a calculated bet that the games would fail, and lost. This situation is exactly what limited term deals and percentages are insurance against and he seemingly ignored both.

I thought the true ending of Stalker SOC was a fairly 'happy' ending, though the alternatives definitely weren't. Clear Sky on the other hand must have been about the most negative ending ever in a game, though I guess FEAR 2 comes close and with The Nameless One being disqualified by dint of being a knob and just getting what he signed up for. Dead Space and FEAR (1) and even System Shock 2 would probably qualify as well, though they're more sequel hooks than genuinely negative endings. Technically the ending of NWN2 would qualify as well, can't get more non happy than rocks fall, everyone dies...

The official grading(s) of academics used for things like performance reviews always are pretty one note- mostly because that is easy to do; and there's a dislike of publication grading other than a few at the very top like Nature. Objectively there really isn't much else to gauge apart from publications (volume of work) and citations (significance of work). It's a pretty rubbish system prone to being gamed, but try coming up with a better one that is actually workable and you'll find there isn't one.

I have a Strange Brigade steam key to give away if anyone wants it. Drop me a PM if so. (Since it's a newish game I'll give it a day or so and ballot if multiple people want it rather than 1st come 1st served. Sorry, no Single Purpose Accounts)

It's a bit of a surprise Vic2 isn't there already since it was the last of their 'classic' games not tied to steam. There are meant to be a fair few 'big' releases (Bioshocks, Onlivion etc) coming in this sale, but a lot of them have been rumoured for ages so may or may not actually turn up

Well maybe, though a lot of rapists get plenty of consensual sex as well, but... he certainly ain't 'self confessed' as an incel or a rapist by any stretch. His self confession was that he overstated his experience to others but was quietly proud to be a virgin- which would be voluntarily celibate or volcel, if such a term existed. He did say he had and has a lot of female friends, but that's not exactly diagnostic of anything except having a lot of female friends.

That's understandable though. One of the points of cross examining- same as for anyone who gets cross examines in an antagonistic setting- is to get the witness/ suspect to make inconsistent statements. They may be perfectly innocent inconsistent statements but the idea is to get him demonstrably 'lying' at which point you can call into question the rest of their testimony. Sticking as close as possible to prepared answers is the absolute best policy to follow. People have a natural instinct to embellish stories and fill in gaps, and that isn't a great policy when you're being put under the microscope (see Hillary under sniper fire, or Brian Williams being shot at in helicopters as prominent examples; and they weren't under oath). I rather zoned out at all his religious stuff but isn't he a self confessed high school 'volcel' instead of incel?

To an extent you can blame Google for that. Youtube monetisation favours one 10 minute plus video over lots of little ones, so you get 10 minute plus videos.

Thronebreaker is meant to have a good, 'proper' story, you just resolve stuff with the card battles instead of rhythm games like TW1 and mouse 1 or roll spam like the other two. So not at all like the previous main branch witcher games except potentially story wise, unless you're playing with the mod that already turns all the combat into Gwent battles... Also, GOG exclusive on PC. I'd buy it just for the lols the reaction to that has brought to some quarters.

Haha no. China doesn't, by and large, go around semi randomly invading people on the other side of the world- just their neighbours- but they 100% indulge in every other sort of interference the US does. Just about everything I've ever seen Graham related has been a bit rich. But yes, assuming Kavanaigh is innocent the Republican senators certainly aren't an injured party when they blatantly played for time last time around, and IIRC for considerably longer and with less justification.

I'd be pretty reticent about taking anything Wardell related at face value anyway as he's a bit of a bête noire of the popular gaming press. If he made a post saying that he loved puppies Polygon would write an article asking why Wardell obviously hates kittens, bunnies and hamsters. He's definitely a bit of a knob, highly opinionated, and his personal politics are a fair distance from mine but the last accusation against him that got tested in court was a pretty comprehensive win for him including a mandated apology.

He's probably talking about them targeting swing states' products with their counter sanctions, which is definitely happening and which the EU is doing as well to a lesser extent with their response to the steel/ aluminium tarriffs. If China wasn't interfering in other ways I'd be amazed though.

It's a horrible affair, as far as I hear she comes in to the story in the later books and he doesn't really redeem himself. Can't remember if he got her pregnant or not, but I know I was even gladder for having dropped it. Of course she got pregnant. He also got his daughter indirectly killed in the 2nd book, and the woman he raped died saving his life in the 3rd book. He does get substantial character growth and ends up saving the world twice though, so there is that. I really liked the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant because he's pretty much exactly what you'd actually get dropping a random(ish) person into a fantasy land- imagine the average xbox kiddie being dropped into one, they'd make Xue from Outcast look saintly- more so when they're obligated to be constantly under control in the real world and think they're hallucinating. It's also a series very much built on allegory, and from that sense the rape was narratively essential as a parallel. The prose though certainly crosses well into over stylised territory fairly frequently. It is kind of funny though, because nowadays a lot of people go far beyond tolerating a(n initially) villain protagonist and actively sympathise with the Walter Whites and Tony Sopranos.

Flawless code? That depends on whether quantum mechanics and relativity are intentional. You'd also never in a million years deliberately design bellows system lungs for your favourite creation having designed the far more efficient parabronchial system in birds beforehand. Checkmate, theists.

I'm not ignoring it as Hannibal was undoubted a superb tactician, I just didn't mention them as they weren't relevant. (I am highly skeptical of some parts of the battle narrative though due to Livy and Polybius both being more than a touch prone to spreading what might now be referred to as 'fake news'. Paullus was almost certainly not blameless- his family was immensely powerful however- and the supposed cavalry ruse in Livy involving a fake surrender doesn't work well timing wise and I suspect exists to give a reason for the terrible cavalry performance blaming perfidy instead of them just being atrocious/ cowardly since a lot of prominent Romans escaped in said cavalry. That it was one of if not the single most complete victories of all time cannot really be doubted whatever the exact details)