Zoraptor

Eh, not really. Per terrorism people tend to forget that Ukraine packed an unsuspecting Azeri's truck full of explosives and blew him up, which was terrorism unless you define it as only being done by bad people to good people*. Otherwise, they've already claimed direct support of the rebels in Syria before. Which label is relevant depends on which Tuareg rebels it was. They had some genuine liberation types, but also got co-opted very hard by AQIM. And of course you can never be quite sure if they aren't the same people getting a 'brave patriot mujahedin fighting for freeeeedom <--> terrorist Al Qaeda oppressing and terrorising' switch via some TLA in Virginia whenever it's convenient. *one would be forgiven for thinking that's the crucial part of the definition given the Russia/ Israel dichotomy in coverage. Just imagine the reaction if Russia tortured an orthopaedic surgeon to death but for Israel... just ignore it and applaud.

Seems to be confirmed now (via non official channel, but not denied by Intel) that the damage is permanent once it occurs, and no microcode/ BIOS or other update will fix it.

I'd suspect so as well, and that wouldn't be true for many recent politicians. He's favoured a bit by having Trump as a comparison and so looking a lot more, hmm, normal in pretty much every respect but he seems to have done his best over a very long time period and despite a lot of stuff which would have given others serious issues. He's also one of the few US politicians who seemed pretty genuine rather than just sculpting everything for politics, though that may mean he was just better at sculpting than most. The only major criticism I can think of offhand for his presidency- beyond the institution/ systemic ones they all suffer from- was the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Which had a lot of mitigation given it was a Trump era deal and the failures that lead to that collapse started 20 years earlier but still, having the government not even last up until departure time was Bad even if it was likely inevitable whatever the schedule for leaving.

One hates to be that guy (or do I?) but Sulla actually did resign his Dictatorship too. After rewriting Rome's 'constitution' and slaughtering a bunch of people etc, but he did resign, and retired to his villa to, well, give Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Commodus and Elagobalus a few ideas for fun ways to pass the time before dying of liver failure; he was after all a well known Conservative politician. The issue wasn't really the office of Dictator, that just gave Sulla (et al) a facade of legality. His authority ultimately descended from the point of a pilum, not from the law. The root issue was that the Marian Reforms had changed the troops in the Roman Army from being small landowners loyal to Rome to being mercenaries loyal to their general. Which had to happen since said small landowners had basically been genocided by a string of impeccably bred incompetents feeding them to various hordes of wandering Germans. In an amazing coincidence a bunch of patricians got to own huge amounts of land after buying up parcels off destitute widows... Anyway, got to give Biden credit for calling it quits; tempered somewhat by it being easier if you're going to lose if you keep running.

The Russians can probably afford the wastage more though. One of those things which you could kind of see why they did it at the time- PR for the counteroffensive's failure, making sure Russian troops were tied down etc- but went on far too long and was far too static. Just sitting there having to supply everything across the Dnieper via boat... it's just dumb. You could probably achieve much the same with cross river hit and run raids, with a much less vulnerable/ static supply line. You can justify Anzio2 if you have the Allies resources and your enemy has 1944 Germany's, not so much if it's the reverse. Not cutting losses when needed has been Ukraine's #1 problem. If you have to withdraw you're going to take a morale/ PR hit, but it's less if you don't look like you've been throwing soldiers' lives away pointlessly, and you still have a bunch of soldiers alive that you can use more productively elsewhere. As always depends a lot on actual casualties and whether KI's translation is accurate for location. If the losses actually are >1000 dead and missing only in the village then it was an unmitigated disaster for Ukraine given they also claim Russian losses as 'only' ~1200. It seems unlikely less than 200 Ukrainians died in the river or in staging areas or in lancet/ UPMK/ artillery strikes on the west bank, and a 1:1 ratio is utterly unsustainable. (also has to be said belatedly, the UkrMoD still claims to be fighting on the east bank as of today and repelled five assaults. Presumably that's Krynky since they don't hold anywhere else on the east bank)

I'd stress I haven't played post update but supposedly they didn't fix many bugs, broke mods that did fix those bugs, introduced new bugs and those bugs it did fix were too often a bit half arsed eg stretching the UI to 'fix' ultrawide.

The next gen version of FO4 was a free update, and has replaced the old version everywhere (except GOG, and maybe roll back option on Steam?). Many people felt ripped off at 0$, if they'd tried charging for it the reaction would have been... grim.

Probably difficult to tell how widespread it is when one of (the?) most common errors for gaming rigs made it look like a video card issue. Very interesting that the issue happens even when locked to 125W by server MBs.

Yeah, that doesn't look faked. Never much realistic chance it was, despite how much some may have wanted it to be. Not what an already highly charged situation needed, at all.

I've only used gamepass with free months, and for that it was great value. We got a cool 32% increase to monthly cost to nearly 30 bucks. Wouldn't effect me much anyway since I only ever sub to services for a month at a time but it will be interesting to see at what point the ubiquitous subscriber network price hikes become unsustainable.

Kind of interesting that we also got 'Vice President Trump' from Biden today as well. If his only issue was mixing up friends' and enemies' names it'd all be a bit of a laugh.

Introducing Zelensky as Putin is a fairly significant gaffe worthy of some sort of coverage. Maybe not 6+ breaking newsbits worth though.

Gothic remake was not done by PB but by 'Alkimia Interactive'. And to paraphrase the great philosopher Ron Paul: it's still happening (so far as we know and though many may wish it wasn't). Indeed, Embracer tried to sell/ spin off PB along with Risen and Elex, but not Gothic.

Don't know if proportional representation would work that well in the UK, certainly not MMP type. It'd probably just result in the libdems getting eviscerated for (not) going into coalition with the wrong people like always happens to the centre party here. They've barely recovered from Clegg's decision and there would be even more pressure to choose under MMP. And it's unfortunately unlikely politicians would ever go for something actually decent like multi member STV since it weakens parties, unlike MMP. In most other circumstances 34% would be a dismal result for Labour and they must still be concerned about the number of people in their traditional heartland who have not come back. It's likely the tories can get a lot of the reform vote back but it may be permanently lost to a Labour party that isn't even chardonnay socialist any more.

Unsurprisingly the Tories have lost the election in Britain. Moderate lols at both Farage and Corbyn winning, and Truss losing. Big lols at Keir Starmer being described as 'left wing' when he's the dictionary definition of milquetoast moderate. Guess at least Rishi Sunak can console himself with the thought that he's still richer than his head of state.

I wish the guy who insisted Russia wouldn't use nukes even if the US nuked Moscow was still around. Or the guy who insisted that Russia's nukes wouldn't work, even if they tried to use them. Would make for an interesting argument.

For a bit of balance, there were a few places where I thought Rowling fell down when it came to planning and related matters, all towards the end of the series. The revelation of horcruxes seemed to be rather... not exactly abrupt, but it kind of needed more fleshing out earlier so that you don't just get a big expositionary sequence from Slughorn. It was clearly planned, but the execution was not great. Similarly and worse while the Deathly Hallows were introduced individually early on their significance mostly seemed to be a way to drive the plot of the book (movie). If someone told me that Rowling had picked them semi randomly because she was having difficulty getting people where she wanted them to be organically I'd have certainly believed that, with the possible exception of the wand (and even then the 'rule' its significance relied on was ?new? to DH? very iirc).

The 'Kharkov offensive' was clearly never intended to actually take Kharkov. All sources including western/ pro Ukrainian agreed that Russia was only utilising a small fraction of its available forces, and that hasn't changed. The WW3 thing isn't hyperbole. Can't get much closer to WW3 than Russian troops massing on the outskirts of New York.

For Lupin, Snape had a very easy way to get him killed (or killing him) had he wanted to since he was making the potion that stopped him from transforming. But the one time it failed it was Lupin's fault, for not drinking it. The issue with Sirius was a bit more than a mere childhood quarrel. Apart from anything else Sirius actively tried to get Snape killed as students and tried to use his supposed friend Lupin to do it in a deniable way. That's how Snape knew Lupin was a werewolf. Under those circumstances- plus him being convicted of effectively killing Lily Potter, though I don't think we knew the significance of that at the time- it's unlikely anything short of God Himself proclaiming Sirius innocent would be enough.

I ended up catching the 'highlights' of the debate. Far worse than I imagined in some ways, in others almost exactly as expected. I mentioned Mr Bean previous, and watching that I far too often had 'Bean cringe' where vicarious embarrassment* made me want to hide behind the couch. Managing to pick one candidate that lost to Trump was astounding, and it looks like the Democrats have somehow contrived to do it twice. It's certainly not that that was a vote winning performance for Trump- if his opponent was a pot plant we might be getting President Cyclamen next January based on his performance- but that had to be hugely demoralising for the democrats, especially anyone considering holding their nose to vote for a candidate they don't really like or want. It may still be possible to generate enough antienthusiasm for Trump to get the vote out but it's going to be far more difficult to have enthusiasm for Biden. There doesn't seem to be much self reflection in the Democrat hierarchy about how they got here either, much the same as blaming Berniebros and anything/ anyone else for Hillary losing. I actually agree with Bruce, this was not a surprise to anyone except perhaps Democrat bigwigs living in their self reinforcing circle. That was a terminal performance, there is nothing that can be done to fix it. The only hope is that Trump contrives to do worse. *at times it was far worse than embarrassment, it was far closer to pity. As one of the people the BBC interviewed for their report said, at times it just felt cruel and a bit sad.

Looked it up on that font of all knowledge wikipedia and have no recollection of having watched it. Which would be odd given the amount of extremely average scifi I've watched over the years. Speaking of which, I watched two more episodes of Discovery without any major gripes. Also without any major reasons for praise except for the lack of negatives. They're both rather contrived, but meh, so's Darmok or The Inner Light if you want them to be. No doubt some will hate the time travel though, and that did have one glaring omission..

I missed the debate completely. Not sure I really want to catch up from the descriptions. The weird thing is that he wasn't that far off. People were researching sunlight (UV) treatments and using lavage at least as a treatment at the time. (Very little chance Trump was thinking of that though. Very little. And as with his shilling of horse dewormer, dangerous to say even if he had been that extensively briefed) Hard to get away from Trump being real when it comes to him being funny. You can laugh at easily mockable characters like Mr Bean as is, but if you had to potentially deal with a very real President Bean it would not be funny. A fictional Trump... well he'd probably be thought of as being a US Alan B'stard, more a unrealistic overdone caricature than mockable per se. (Of course Tory politicians somehow managed to make Mr B'stard look toned down and reserved over the next 30 years, ho hum)

Yeah, can't really agree there. One of the things that Rowling did very well (all imo and ymmv, of course) was to illustrate the difference between someone being merely 'mean' and being 'evil'. Snape was mean, vindictive, grumpy etc, but we never saw him do anything evil- similarly, we saw Draco do a lot of 'mean' stuff but when he had the option to do something actually 'evil' he didn't. And Snape was counterspelling Quirrel as far back as the Philosopher's Stone. That isn't proof absolute of her always having a specific plan, but he was clearly always intended to be set up as an antagonist rather than a villain. It would be pretty difficult and almost certainly more clumsy to have set everything up in the first few books. That is probably the biggest issue. Other similar(ish) series like Wheel of Time or Song of Ice and Fire use the same limited 3rd person perspective, but have multiple people's perspectives rather than one* which allows for more nuance; and whatever else HP is a ~teenage schoolboy. So in ASoIaF you start off with Jaime obviously being the bad guy (and he is one of course, he's just not the worst guy) because you see everything from Eddard's or Catelyn's perspective, but once you start getting Jaime's viewpoint you can at least understand him more. That isn't really an option available to Rowling even if she'd gone the multiple pov route due to Dumbledore and Snape simply knowing too much, but she does at least repeatedly have Dumbledore saying how much he trusts Snape, which is fairly close. *I have noticed some people have difficulty with those perspectives clashing and thinking it makes the writing inconsistent; I've always kind of wondered if it's due to Harry Potter despite there clearly being times when Harry is wrong about something that he strongly believes via his own perspective.

Watching the Slovenia-England game almost put me back to sleep.

Pretty skeptical about that- it was reported yesterday without any actual evidence and there's been basically nothing since. Fighterbomber was one of the main sources and while their reliability for Russian losses is good their record for losses inflicted by Russia is nowhere near as good.