Zoraptor

X files mythology episodes being rubbish is pretty ironic given how often it's the standalone episodes of most other US TV series with an overarching story which are rubbish filler, while it's reversed for X Files. I even liked the standalone eps in S10 as well (even Babylon, and the Were-Human episode was as good as any of their semi comic standalones from earlier seasons), but the arc eps were uniformly illogical, incoherent, poorly plotted etc etc. Partly it's because the real world had left the X files' plot behind- early X files largely lead public opinion on government conspiracies and the like, now it all just seems so tame. If there were to be more X files made (and I suspect there will be at some point, it's better as an occasional rather than regular series anyway at this point in its life cycle) they really need to either get rid of Chris Carter or force him to use someone else as an editor, the quality and tonal differences are more of a gulf between him and the others at this point.

Nothing practical has changed. The only concession DPRK got was the wargames thing, and that is as easily reversible as anything DPRK have done. If it had been a full military withdrawal then it would be different, but it wasn't, and drills can be reinstated quickly if needed. It's also perhaps the single most obvious sign of good faith that could be made. Politically it's a win for Trump since to a casual viewer it looks like his policy is working and (he hopes) looks like it's the G6 leaders, Iran etc who are the problem with international diplomacy rather than him. Everybody got a bit of a feel good feeling and some purely political pluses from the meeting, nobody got much practical at all. Expecting anything else was unrealistic though. The one critical aspect to that strategy is to have a credible threat beforehand though. For North Korea it was their huge arsenal of conventional and bio/ chemical weapons pointed at the south and the US troops there that bought them time to make nukes and long range rockets. Their strategy would not work for others, Venezuela for example cannot threaten the US in the same manner because, well, any threat made is not backed up by the ability to deliver. They'd either get laughed at or it would be used as a pretext for direct intervention. It does encourage nations threatened by the US to get deterrents as quickly as possible so the US will negotiate rather than invade, but that's been the consequence of US foreign policy in general since at least Iraq 2, reinforced further by Libya only being attacked after giving up its deterrent.

Nowadays I just read summaries of E3. Gaming is a big industry with lots of money involved, and that's made everything pretty predictable. You need the Codex E3 thread for that.

It would 100% be Trump deciding not to go rather than being kicked out, losing the US officially would near kill the G7 outright since it would then be EU, plus Japan and Canada. It would also make a mess for when Trump is gone, it would potentially be embarrassing to whoever comes next if they have to readmitted. OTOH Trump already looked like he didn't want to be there this year, and it seems very likely that things will get worse rather than better in that respect. He probably looks at Putin or Modi in Shanghai getting stylin' gold chains from Xi and wonders why he's spent time with people who pretty obviously loathe him.

Well at least the final G7 was entertaining, and it ends with Trump being as diplomatic as ever on twitter. Wonder where the G6 will be held next year.

New Command and Conquer announced!!!1!!!1one!! for mobile. Thanks EA!

Create a character via Witcher school/ trial of grasses and a setting before the Geralt trilogy (but maybe with some of the game's/ book's characters where appropriate eg Vesemir or a young Geralt) was certainly one rumour. Ciri was the other rumour, though IMO the first is more likely. Ciri has the advantage of being a main character in TW3 so people will immediately recognise her, but she is too powerful and did get an ending, albeit the witcher one could easily be used for a game set up. An earlier setting has far more flexibility and allows character customisation- but lacks the immediate hook of using an existing character.

Who wouldn't want a chip that has nearly the thermal density of space shuttle re-entry, cooled by something meant for large fish tanks and a kg of VRM with four dedicated fans? The Intel cooling solution by itself is probably more expensive than a Threadripper.

That's the problem with conspiracy theories, anything and everything becomes support for the theory. Even when Trump was threatening to directly attack Russia in Syria some people thought it was all a stunt to try and disprove collusion when all indications are that he had to be talked out of it by Mattis. Trump wants Russia there to distract from his isolation and so that people would shout at Putin rather than him. No need for any 'collusion'. Yeah, that's 100% true. They also did that knowing that some of those weapons were being supplied to Al Qaeda. The trouble is that despite that there's no evidence they supported ISIS as ISIS, they just supported a bunch of guys who fought alongside ISIS and later joined ISIS, as most of the eastern rebels ended up doing (if they didn't they were killed). It's easy enough to go from looking at the stupid policy of arming islamist militias that later joined ISIS and turning a blind eye to al Qaeda's front groups getting a bunch of your weapons to there being an underground railway of ISIS operatives coming into Europe to do western intelligence's bidding. The latter has no evidence for it though, it's pure conjecture. Probably of more practical importance than the G7 but with a lot less attention given to it because it's just minnows like India/ China/ Russia attending instead of global collossi like Canada, the UK and Italy (with apologies to Canada and Italy), and there's no Trump and associated dramas.

2077 is a given, only question is whether there will be anything playable or just another trailer, or hands off demo. There are a few rumours that they may have something else to announce as well (non Gwent).

If anything Rogue One is the most Lucas like of the Disney era, since it has similar core influences. At its heart the original trilogy was based on pulp stuff like Flash Gordon, and explicitly influenced by 7 Samurai, and Rogue One has a number of notable comparisons to both- older influences but they check out. It also had the most memeable dialogue of any Disney era movie, another thing Lucas was known for. That was a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one. In contrast the other sequels tended to be... unmemorable, dialogue wise, which in many ways is worse than being bad. It's not much like the prequels, but the prequels' influence was more classic Tragedy than pulp scifi and Kurosawa. Funnily enough the feedback I've seen for Solo from fans is far more positive than it was for either TFA or TLJ despite how it's been professionally rated as worse.

Last time I played it added some weapons, altered/ restored dialogues and some quests to parse better and restore cut content, and added a library (?) location that was cut. The plus version is WESP and team's vision of what was intended to be released by Troika, the bug fix only version is the version that was released, with bug fixes. Yeah, the GOG version is fine and works fine with widescreen and bugfixes etc- you may have been thinking of the steam version which is 'broken' by default. Unless they've fixed it recently, and being a steam/ activision double up I find that... unlikely.

Blue and grey were the main types, iirc. Blue is intrinsically dangerous since it will very readily break up into fibres; grey is safe for most in situ stuff and proximal applications but can be very bad in case of demolitions and the like, and demolitions are to practical purposes inevitable. My school had grey asbestos work benches in its science labs and they were perfectly safe, but when it comes time to getting rid of them it will be expensive since that's when you have the main risk of it breaking up.

Yep, positively Brucesque. .. Solo flopped because it had a stink about it (and greatly increased costs) from the reshoots/ director swaps, it was released after Infinity War and Deadpool 2, and TLJ was a divisive movie that a lot of the fanbase outright hated, and there was very little advertising for Solo. Being released six months rather than a year after TLJ did not help at all. The more subjective reasons are that while Solo was on paper a great idea for a fill in film- popular, mysterious, character in both sequels and original movies- in practice it was not since it had to recast the most iconic of Star Wars actors, and there was reduced need to fill in the details of Han's early life now since he's, well, dead. That makes it even easier to skip. Star Wars under Disney has been very poorly run, a movie a year is far too much unless you're going to do notably different styles- difficult with Star Wars since people have expectations- and they absolutely needed to have JJ do the whole sequel trilogy if he was doing the first. Now they have TLJ that threw out most of the dangling threads of TFA unceremoniously, and the guy who ran the first has to pick up and run with whatever he can salvage of his original vision- though given JJ's history with Mysteries® is worse resolution and planning wise than M Night Shylamwhamwollawollabingbang's that may not be so huge a shift. If you're going to have directors with opposed views like JJ and Johnson they have to be doing separate projects or you're going to get a mess. If you're going to do side projects they either have to be smaller scale and accept smaller box office potential, or have a direct hook to the other projects. There's no tension in Rogue One or Solo because you know the Death Star plans will be stolen and Han won't die, there would be no tension in an Obi Wan movie since he cannot die in it etc. The only mooted movie with potential tension is the Boba Fett one and that has other potential problems.

Veterans will be looked at for several reasons- they will have expertise and know about explosives, have less qualms about killing people and more tendency towards mental illness- but the main one is that a lot of the domestic terrorism in the US does come from veterans like Tim McVeigh and Terry Nicholls. If you're going to monitor people for terrorism it would be as foolish to exclude veterans just because they're veterans and it's politically inexpedient as it would be to exclude muslims because that's politically inexpedient. Not that I support dragnet monitoring at all, a person's own country is always the biggest threat to a person's liberty because you live there not North Korea or China or wherever, and erosion of liberties at home and government's granting themselves ever enhanced powers are far more than just a trifling concern. But using veteran as a criterion is not a grand conspiracy or anything else, it's based on both history and other genuine risk factors.

I suspect that Obsidian is too rich for Paradox's blood even at this point, pretty sure that despite their recent growth and being a publisher it would still more than double their employees. As for Chris's predictions, they haven't exactly got a 100% result rate. Has the senior staff member and lots of employees who were leaving imminently a month ago left yet? And that was about his safest statement, given a game has just shipped and people always leave after a game ships.

He is the foreign minister though, not the interior minister. Whatever's on youtube is meant for us dirty foreigners and we've already been corrupted by cat videos/ Untergang parodies/ numnut D list celebs gawking at suicide victims/ badly translated Star Wars movies or whatever people use youtube for nowadays.

Been playing Deadfire and... I like it, quite a lot. Far better in almost all respects than PoE1 was already.

How so? I'm on GOG also and I already play with the beta patch. I guess you are using Galaxy because I don't see the beta patch in the list of downloads. You have to use Galaxy to get the beta patch in the first place (by turning the beta channel on in 'More: settings') but don't have to use Galaxy after.

plus Xenonauts for free (pretty sure it's been a freebie before though) and more GOG connect games as well, supposedly. That the sale is starting tomorrow or the next day is pretty certain as there was no weekend sale this week. Then there will be the 10 year anniversary sale...

Andrew Lincoln leaving Walking Dead is probably ultimately due to what happened with Chandler Riggs getting the chop because AMC didn't want to pay him adult rates. If they're willing to pay Reedus 20 million they'd surely have offered Lincoln that to keep him, so it ain't the money. Lauren Cohen is supposedly going as well. It probably is the time for the show to end really, it's been run into the ground creatively and no Rick and no Carl leaves almost no room for any evolution which couldn't be done via a new show. Frankly, they haven't found replacements character wise for Glenn or Abraham yet, the idea of them trying to replace Rick, Maggie and Carl inside a season is not a pretty one. The main problem with FtWD is that it's so obviously the B show. Hence the nonsensical shift of Morgan to it, and the squandering of its premise as the interesting part of the unfolding zombie apocalypse- the collapse of society- happened off screen as they didn't want to spend the money to show it despite it supposedly being its reason for existence as a show. It's been better than the main show since late season 2 (specifically Travis going Jake the Muss on the two tourists who probably killed his son) but that's also coincided with the main show really showing its flaws.

They also brought a resolution to the UN today that garnered a grand total of one vote, their own, and they must have known that that was all it was going to get- and they spent ages lobbying for it and tried all sorts of procedural tricks as well. At this point the 'bad' diplomacy looks like it's 100% deliberate and intended to make the US look isolated. What was the resolution? Blaming Hamas and PIJ for Gaza violence. The US was also the only country to vote against the previous resolution.

They also brought a resolution to the UN today that garnered a grand total of one vote, their own, and they must have known that that was all it was going to get- and they spent ages lobbying for it and tried all sorts of procedural tricks as well. At this point the 'bad' diplomacy looks like it's 100% deliberate and intended to make the US look isolated.

They could reuse it, Civ IV was on gamebryo and it was isometric.

Jordan got 'stuck', the first 5-6 books came out near yearly, then the later ones took comparatively ages while the quality declined due to him having too many characters and having to move people around to get them into the positions he needed at the right times which left half the cast treading water plot wise at any given time but still getting chapters- near exactly the same problem Martin's Song of Ice and Fire has battled for the last decade, though at this point Martin's just taking the piss. Pretty sure the 'recap' type chapters were added to the later books to make sure existing readers remembered what happened 2+ years ago when the last book released rather than for new readers, but they definitely hindered the already glacial pacing even more. It wasn't so much he got "stuck" as he was technically dealing with a life-affecting disease, which actually did result in his death. That was one of the reasons the writing got slowed down by so much, he was dividing his time between actually writing the story, and making sure there were details and explanations for how the story should go if/when he died before completing it. Apparently, he did make a couple of raaather large spreadsheets detailing characters, arcs, appearances in previous books, plots and subplots they were involved in, etc. Along with copious notes on the world and cultures. Although he did get a wee bit irritated over fans who kept moaning about Matt being "missing" from most of one book - he was all "The previous book ended with a rather large wall falling on him and injuries resulting from it. I didn't think anyone would be that interested in large chapters involving Matt covered in bandages, laid in bed, sleeping and recovering and not doing anything actually story affecting." The disease slowed the actual writing down for sure- but it didn't result in less happening per book, which is what I mostly meant by him being 'stuck'. A book of their page number every two years is not something I would complain about and Jordan kept things well organised and had almost no outright editing mistakes despite the series size. However, the disease had nothing to do with the drop in amount of meaningful stuff happening per book which is what I meant by him being 'stuck'. It was not writer's block, and I doubt it is for Martin either, it's just the difficulty in getting people from place A to place B at time C without it becoming turgid prose for the sake of it. He knew the start and the end and had most of the main plots obviously plotted out ahead of time, but getting from the various points along the journey was the problem. If anything he probably planned too well, and had problems getting meaningful feeling filler in when needed, main symptom of that being the addition of lots of disposable characters; the Martin equivalent was the aborted five year gap between Storm of Swords and Feast For Crows where a lot of positioning stuff would happen 'off camera' to keep the rest trim. Not really any easy solution to it except to reduce the scale of the series. The Mat quote is actually a good indicator of the problem he had- too often he didn't leave X out of the book even if they had nothing meaningful to do, and that bloated it badly and when he did people didn't like it.