Zoraptor

Pretty good article that, though a bit wordy. It would be asking a bit much to outright come out and say that MbS is a hubris riddled incompetent given the depth of influence of Saudi cash, but it nicely lays out how many hand grenades he's pulled the pin on simultaneously. In a way it's not really his fault, if you've never been told that your ideas are crap or thrown everyone whose said it into jail then it's very hard to work out why things aren't going as you intended. Worse, you tend to end up with people lying to you because they don't want to be gulaged. It's funny to see Trump outright gouging the guy as well. Just about anyone else and I'd decry it, but I admit to disliking MbS enough that seeing Trump telling him that he's a very naughty boy and needs to spend more money on american weapons (presumably including patriots which are about as dangerous to Saudis as the Houthi rockets they're fired at, should bite the bullet and buy Russian like the Turks) on live TV complete with props was highly amusing, and now he's hitting him up for cash to keep US troops in Syria as well.

Some people almost certainly do starve even after the big food shortage they had, though it's certainly massively overstated how many and how often in the western media. Doesn't matter whether you're a friendly journalist or not, you're simply not going to get to see people who are really short of food. It isn't in China's interests for DPRK to be destitute anyway, so it isn't. China (and Russia, to a far lesser extent) simply ignore sanctions when they want to as there are no independent monitors and what would anyone do anyway; so large amounts of oil etc still get through which would make a real difference if they didn't. Mainly though, DPRK is one of those countries which is always as dangerous or pathetic, as competent or incompetent as the current story needs it to be, and no matter how inconsistent its depiction is. If you want to minimise fears it's a starving country with old tech and no usable nukes plus rockets that explode unexpectedly all the time plus a spoilt cretin of a leader; if you want to up the fear it's got a million man army with 10k artillery pieces aimed at Seoul along with chemical and nuclear weapons plus a leader who's totally cray-cray.

Realistically, Park (?) getting done for corruption ended any practical US prospects of intervention. Her replacement is an order of magnitude more pro peace than she was. Kim's played a weak hand very well, there's a lot of "yeah but, his people are poor and starving and he's isolated!" type comments from politicians but he has to actually care about that enough for it to have an effect, and he doesn't. He cares about having sufficient deterrent to stop the US from invading him, and that he has. The crazy man posturing is absolutely calculated- similarly to some of Trump's posturing- to make him seem reasonable, now, once he's got what he wants.

Yeah, it won't be an IP issue on the game content, it will be: "Game Technology and Toolset © 2007 Obsidian Entertainment Inc." (from the MotB box hence 2007) which would be the problem. Even if Hasbro could give permission for a remake it should require Obsidian's permission to make engine alterations. They might be legally able to back port the content to Aurora or to another engine to end run any Obsidian permissions, but that seems extremely unlikely practically.

They did come to him, the concert was in Pyongyang though Kim was not expected to attend. Kim's only left DPRK once as leader and that was last week (to China). The visit was reciprocation for the cheer team the north sent to the Winter Olympics.

They did Arx Fatalis as their first game and it's definitely an RPG much like Ultima Underworld it was based on. Arx is not without its problems but a pretty good game overall. There's also Dark Messiah Might and Magic which had strong RPG elements (and was based on an RPG franchise). Otherwise their games have generally aped Looking Glass Games- Dishonoured was Thief and Prey was System Shock- and as with the LGS originals they were all RPGish games without actually being RPGs.

I'd prefer to see some actual Chinese do it. CDPR has been good at doing what they know, medievalesque lowish magic Poland, but that's it and that's a fair distance from ancient/ medieval China. And Bethesda... would probably make me long for Bioware's highly respectful and original take. Suppose Arkane might be OK, from the overall Beth stable, but even with them it would be a departure they just have a more varied portfolio.

Vega 20* cards have appeared in some Linux certification, so it looks liker there will be a Vega refresh this year despite it not being announced. That should at least help with efficiency, and that may indirectly help with decently clocked memory. Plus eth is collapsing, so maybe I'll be able to pick up an actual card some time for less than the current $1100 asking price. Ironically Vega has probably been one of the most successful chips ever despite its flaws thanks to mining, it's basically never been in stock since launch nearly a year ago. *AMD's naming conventions really are stupid, since they have Vega8, 11, 24 (Intel), 56, 64 as consumer products which are all based on Vega10 chips '14nm'; with Vega 20 being the 'tock' '7nm' die shrunk chip to Vega10's 'tick'. Ryzen naming is about as consistent.

[insert relevant Tropic Thunder quote] Though it does kind of sum up mid noughties Bioware that their 'unique' Chinese setting somehow results in a game even more generic than their forgotten realms (!), star wars (!!) or deliberately generic space opera game of equivalent era. Kindest thing I can say about JE is that it was mercifully short.

That last one is tradition dating back to 1984- Elite had slaves that you couldn't tell were slaves until you picked them up at which point it was jettison them, or have contraband. They also had the ability to capture escape pods and get slaves which was a pretty nice (well, 'nice') touch for 1984.

Or for those who only read the headlines, 142 total diplomats expelled plus quite a few more Brits to reduce their diplomatic staffing to the same levels as those of Russia in the UK. The number of extra Brits isn't anywhere near the 755 extra americans kicked last time, but it adds considerably to the 23 formally expelled. We ain't kicked any Russians because they don't have any spies here, which generated some amusing headlines overseas. More realistically, we didn't kick anyone because when French agents outright murdered an NZ citizen Thatcher told us to harden up and endorsed French sanctions on us, and memories for such things are rather long here especially in the Labour Party.

You even got the etymology of it.

7/8ths of the world's countries did not join Britain in expelling Russian diplomats, how do people think the UK will handle their diplomatic isolation?

And the guy supposedly had presidential aspirations too. That idea was pretty funny even before the CA scandal, though maybe not as funny as before Trump was elected.

Ask a rhetorical question; get a non rhetorical answer. Indeed, Kaffir Limes are still called Kaffir Limes even in South Africa. I do have to admit I find kafir/ kuffar* being pretty common and unredacted in Arabic language videos on the beeb rather ironic given how they refer to the Afrikaans version, as its connotations are scarcely better in its usual context there. (kuffar/ kafir = 'unbeliever' in Arabic, though considerably more perjorative than merely 'unbeliever' is in English; it's the sort of thing ISIS would call a Yezidi to justify the genocide and rape. It's the original source for both the racist term and the lime variety)

They'd probably imprison Malema for bad words if they could, he was kicked from the ANC for singing the old farmer killer song. Too many militant followers for him though. I wonder if the Beeb refers to Kaffir Limes as [redacted racial slur] Limes on their recipe pages. Though given their name comes direct from Arabic rather than Arabic via Afrikaans they might have to call them [redacted religious slur] Limes instead.

I thought he was Albanian and dead. And a dirty commie. At least Djuric will likely be returned with all his organs intact, that's pretty rare for when Serbs are kidnapped in Kosovo.

Expulsions are always political and they're always reciprocated, asking where to close is just trolling and nothing else. Russian embassies troll very frequently, admittedly it's extremely easy for them to do so considering how eminently triggerable and credulous the average westerner is. Only question is whether the reciprocation will be absolute equivalence or proportionate- and proportionate would be worse. The UK expelling 23 Russians was 40% of their staff, Russia expelling 23 Brits was considerably less than 40% of theirs. Most countries (including the US) have way more diplomats in Russia than the reverse, hence Russia expelling 755 (!) US diplomats last time to bring the numbers back to even. One would not want to speculate on why there are so many more diplomats in Russia than the reverse, but I'm sure it's 100% innocent and none of them carry out activities outside their station. The only surprising thing is the attempt to do expulsions from the UN by the US, which is on extremely dodgy footing. Time to move the UN to Switzerland or make its territory fully non national.

Hell, even crypto investments are more profitable than investing in a business that produces something and employs people. That's not really a change though, except in method- while the crypto craze uses modern methods it's still at its base Tulip Madness and similar to every other bubble, underpinned by the willingness of people to pay an even more ridiculous price for something than the previous buyer. I don't think anyone really believed that a tulip bulb was worth $40k each or whatever the peak price was, even if theoretically you got a physical bulb instead of some ephemeral 1s and 0s. The modern funny money banking/ share market/ derivative etc tools though, absolutely. Most of them take things that used to enable normal people to make money as well and turn them into the preserve of the elites, usually to the detriment of the normal people. A standard human share trader not only has a far harder time of it than some automated algorythm making trades every 5ms but will often be actively manipulated by them.

What's Ronald Dumsfeld, chopped liver? No coincidence that Mohamed bin Salman is in the US at the moment and an arch anti Iran hawk gets appointed. Best case scenario for Iran is Saudi gets militarily involved, given MBS's military genius they'd be in Riyadh in a month- dude even manages to get planes shot down by air to air missiles when fighting a foe who has literally no operative air force.

There is only one solution to the Russian problem, bomb Iran. Yep, Bolton never met a problem that couldn't be solved by bombing someone, preferably Iran. It will be 'fun' to see if the rest of the west contorts itself to support it or if it causes an actual split like Iraq did, but either way Bolton never met a foreign affairs problem that couldn't be bombed out of existence. Well, except Afghanistan and Iraq but they totally would have worked if people had just listened to him and upped the bombing until it worked.

CDPR has released their 2017 financial results. Which are fairly interesting, for financial results, EA etc tend to be staid and boring as anything. Wouldn't see them having a random scantily clad female elf on a quarter of their pages. Most interesting stuff is Witcher series topping 33 million copies, PS4 being the top platform for TW3 by a decent margin (and xbox1 last by far) and GOG's profit more than doubling over 2016. TW3 is still selling a shed load of copies as well.

Intel has also iirc never actually paid any fines, they're still tied up in appeals. Really though, what can they do? While they wait for any action to come to court any competitor who signs up is getting the preferential stock, early access to samples, support etc while they aren't- and even if ASUS/ MSI/ GB showed solidarity with each other and refused there are still all the nVidia exclusive brands that wouldn't; EVGA, Zotak etc. That potentially means no day 1 cards for resisters, unreliable cards, all for an indeterminate length of time, and at worst you end up like XFX or BFG and cannot make nVidia cards at all. When that's ~75% of your AIB business that's a massive deal even if you make motherboards and other parts as well. Best they can do is what ASUS's owner is doing- have a separate sibling brand make AMD cards without restrictions, hence ASRock getting into the AIB business; or what GB is doing and use passive aggressive generic gaming 'branding' (which nVidia literally cannot stop, since it is generic; but also isn't actual branding, since it's generic and cannot be trademarked). If there's going to be legal action it has to come from AMD or regulators.

So, rumours started about 2 weeks ago of nVidia offering a new 'incentive' program to its Add In Board/ 3rd party manufacturers whereby nVidia co-opts their graphic card gaming brands (MSI Gaming X, Gigabyte Aorus, Asus Republic of Gamers etc) as exclusively nVidia in return for, well, basically the manufacturer getting timely stock, preparatory samples, shout outs and support from nVidia etc. With the strong implication being that if you don't sign up then said samples and stock, support etc will go to those who do sign up. This was largely met with a wall of silence and a rather Orwellian blog post response from nVidia that features the word 'transparency' 5 times without actually saying anything, and is so transparent they haven't said anything else and have a strict NDA so nobody else can talk. It should, perhaps, also be noted what happened to XFX when they had the temerity to start making AMD video cards- no more nVidia support for you! And eventually, no more nVidia cards at all. Bit of a Chilling Effect for anyone thinking of resisting the GPP. Anyway, fast forward two weeks and what do we find? No more Aorus AMD cards, no more Gaming X AMD cards, no more ROG AMD cards. Indeed, we have the rather amusing sight of Gigabyte claiming their "Gaming Box" is not branded Aorus because... it isn't for gaming (in german, relevant part as my best attempt "Computerbase has contacted Gigabyte as to why their new 'gaming box' Radeon RX580 lacks the "Aorus" branding. The maker replied that the focus of the product was not on gaming. However their marketing for the product claims "Turn your Ultrabook to gaming platform[sic]" and "Upgrade your game experience".) So, why is that a big deal? Basically, idiots people pay lots of money for the 'Gaming' brand name even if the product is identical, and nVidia is (almost certainly illegally, asterisk equivocation) co-opting their brands for its own use. This is massively anti-competitive since AMD is locked out of gaming brands for discrete graphics cards from most of the big AIB makers and it also targets the new Intel/ AMD processors/ iGPUs* which will not be able to be branded as 'Aorus/ ROG' etc in notebooks. That's a big deal for everyone, since if there's no competition nVidia can and absolutely will gouge worse than RAM manufacturers currently are- and at least there are three of them. And if they're strong arming partners when there is competition it will be orders of magnitude worse when there's literally no alternative. (Note, I freely admit that nVidia is one of the few companies that I outright loathe so I'm far from unbiased, but it is for these sort of reasons. There will be far more 3.5/4 1060 3gb/ 6gb and similar shenanigans when there ain't no competition) *and allegedly there's a 'full' AMD Ryzen 'APU' coming with equivalent to 580 performance based on the xbox1x gpu as well, but it ain't announced.

virumor is meming again, she's the Prosecutor General of Sevastopol (or Crimea in general, I forget which), and is most famous for looking like a real life anime tsundere (or summat, I'm not fluent in weeaboo) so has an enormous and semi random fan club. And yeah, Medvedev would be successor formally, but he was largely picked by Putin as not being a threat and not because of his competency- not that he's a complete idiot but he almost completely lacks Putin's gravitas and would almost certainly be a lame duck. Yeah, while that wouldn't help anyone's credibility he certainly couldn't even be called a high functioning alcoholic. Yeltsin is one of the very few recent leaders about whom I cannot think of a single positive; and he's completely destroyed the concept of 'western liberalism' in Russia for at least a generation which is a definite shame. Not entirely his fault to be sure, but not that far off it.