Zoraptor

Early Iraqi election results don't look good for the US either- Moqtada al Sadr leading and the head of the PMU Al Ameri and Abadi fighting over second. Probably not as good for Iran as they might have hoped though, Sadr still holds a grudge for them over not supporting him vs the US, though the PMU leader is pretty proxy like. Still, the grudge Sadr holds against Iran is nothing compared to the one he holds against the US even a decade+ after the Mehdi Army, and Al Ameri doing well is even worse since he's the closest to a direct Iranian proxy in the race. Sad for Abadi if he doesn't make it, he managed the juggling act better than anyone else has since Saddam (who'd just shoot anyone who noticed if he dropped any balls) and probably ought to be regarded as a near Churchillian* figure right down to potentially losing an election after winning the war. *stereotype Churchill, not reality Churchill of course.

I'm sure it is easy (or easier, at least, as we're habitual RPG players) since just about everyone is saying that. I'm just speculating on the reasons why it's easier, ie lots of complaints about combat and difficulty in the first game, and its low completion rate.

It's also a six month old article reinvigorated now because Donny took a dumpikins on international relations again so some PR firm wants a way to slander everyone who disagrees with him. The Politico article it's based on reads like a tin foil conspiracy where everyone except the US and a couple of its client states is involved in the scheme from the usual rogue gallery to Europe and Africa and the author is outraged! outraged! that anyone might have a foreign policy independent of the US or that Iran and Lebanon had the sheer temerity to place their countries near US bases. It's exactly the sort of article that makes me want to reach through my monitor and give the author an atomic wedgie for his troubles, and for wasting my time reading that overly long load of tosh and old cobblers; starting from the conclusion and working back from it is exactly the sort of approach which got US soldiers blown up in Iraq in the first place Mr Meyer. The NYP article on in contrast is at least brief and doesn't repeat itself a dozen times even though it's been Murdoched, as expected.

I didn't find the combat in PoE1 particularly hard, but there was just so much of it and 90% of the time (or it felt like it) you got nothing more than slightly meaningful from it as you'd already maxed the xp and the loot was ultra generic. I think I got roflstomped by Raedric first try then went back later and crushed him easily so I will say this for PoE1, though it didn't feel like your characters were improving much each level practically they were. While I'm not playing PoE2 the lowish difficulty seems to be a common observation. I presume that's from feedback and an attempt to get more people to actually finish the game.

95% of paywalls (including that one) can be bypassed with noscript, private window or clearing cookies. That article is... lol, and in a good way. Not what Bruce meant to link to, I suspect That is literally the lead, I'm not making that up, honestly. To be fair, digging deeper involves sophisticated techniques not available to most journos like, well, google searches, google earth, making phone calls etc instead of just repeating the good oil some dude in the pentagon gave you and waiting for your resultant pulitzer to arrive. Syrian nuclear centrifuges: Iranian centrifuge site: DPRK 'nuclear site' Not a bad reference for the next time someone tells me that leaks from 'unnamed official' are 100% accurate, ta Bruce.

You can make your own, it's very easy since it's just vodka, sugar, lemons as the three essential ingredients. It's also the easiest way to get the right taste for you if you're having difficulty, since you can vary amount of lemon and sugar and any additions you might like such as cloves. Then again I like a strong tasting and fairly sour limoncello so my options are limited if I'm not willing to make it myself. The only commercial limoncellos here are imported Italian ones I've never tried and local ones which won't be available internationally unfortunately.

If you took possession of the keep and explored the weird statue levels, you are pretty caught up on the story, I think. Although I'm playing through again because I didn't like my character and never really did White March. White March is better than the main game as it's far better focused, but you can expect to hit the level cap only about half way through it, which is a shame. I'm holding off on Deadfire until a couple of patches have dropped. I didn't have any particular attachment to my character but I'd like to import anyway and that seems to be fundamentally broken at the moment. Plus I have both Andromeda (which is OK but clearly will get boring much as DAI did) and DivOS2 (way better than 1st play through; still deeply flawed) on the go.

The missiles were fired by 174th (?) Brigade, Syrian Arab Army, they even filmed themselves firing them in response to Israeli tank and artillery fire from the Golan. The Israeli military also said it was a pre-planned attack, and since Bibi landed 20 minutes before it was launched it was pretty obvious he went to Russia to ask Putin for permission for it, so it was coming days ago. Won't stop the media from reporting it as an Iranian attack starting the whole thing of course, even though they were all reporting an Israeli attack literally yesterday as well which they have forgotten about. For a country that supposedly wiped out half of Syria's air defences in February Israel seems inordinately proud of getting a single pantsir as well. And for those saying that you can't shoot down missiles, this time they clearly got at least one SpikeNLOS which weighs less than a sixth of the tomahawk's warhead alone.

Yeah, that's yet another thing the Brits can be blamed for. Arguably it's worse by any measure. Except for using the dollar and buying lots of expensive US made military toys for the shoeless Houthis to blow up while videoing themselves. Albeit some bloke in a bathrobe with two teeth and flip flops blowing up an Abrams with a 60s era malyutka isn't exactly a great sales pitch when trying to convince anyone else to buy. I guess at least Trump metaphorically set it on fire rather than figuratively, but then he's also the President and Rouhani/ Khamenei weren't doing it, just the Iranian equivalent of deep south Republicans. Certainly a guy with orange spray on tan, day glo hairpiece and a speech impediment theatrically signing a piece of paper while a rapt crowd of his followers applaud after threatening his friends for sticking to the deal is not exactly in the course outline from either diplomacy101 or subtlety101.

Oh yeah, the beta was backer tier based wasn't it, and I didn't back at a high enough tier. What a numpty. I presume that anything related to the game distribution is publisher controlled as that is sort of the point of them, to free Obsidian up from the administrative stuff. Then again Deadfire's publisher/ distributor has been so low key I can't even remember who it is.

Presumably that depends on the publisher. They didn't have the beta or the scavenger hunt stuff on GOG either. That's pretty much always the best way. Galaxy downloads used to be massive compared to direct or downloader files as well which made it doubly bad since they downloaded expanded files rather than compressed for some reason, but that at least has been fixed.

The Chinese say differently though, and that he's watching it closely, per Bloomberg: That's very likely to be DPRK conveying their response unofficially, given that Kim met Xi only a day or so ago and the guy is still a Chinese diplomat, even if not still their ambassador. It's certainly the official Chinese position on how Kim views it, though they aren't exactly a disinterested party it's unlikely they'd lie. The biggest factor is probably how Kim views the breakdown of the previous Clinton era US/ ROK/ DPRK agreement though, and whether their- not entirely unjustified- official position that the US instead of them reneged on it is shared at the personal level. Certainly if the talks break down it's nice for Kim to be able to point to any previous unilateral withdrawals as justification, especially with Trump so unpopular.

They haven't violated it at all- the IAEA said that there was nothing new in Israel's presentation. Even Trump's position is that they haven't violated the actual agreement, and his problem is with stuff outside the agreement's scope. But yeah, the trouble really is: what does the Iran situation say to North Korea, and vice versa? To Iran it says that they should get nukes, then negotiate. To North Korea it says that the US will pull out of its agreements so giving up nukes is a bad idea. People telling Trump how masterful he was over DPRK to boost his ego was a terrible idea, they're at the negotiating table because they already have what they want and see an opportunity to split the US from the south, and everyone knows it except Trump. Here, well, the US has directly threatened to sanction its own allies for following an agreement they signed, with the US as a co signature. That's either treating Europe like a vassal state or as an enemy, and either is a dreadful look to everyone except Bibi, MbS and a section of the US ruling class. If US strategy is about containing Russia and China about the dumbest thing you can do is push them into the same camp together.

What does MCA stand for? A guess as haiku: 'Mister Cool Awesome'

If anyone does want to see my MCA tattoo they have to show they are qualified, and join date and parrots are the most obvious qualifications on the codex. (The codex has a bewildering array of post ratings, parrot is one of them. Likes there- same forum software as here underneath- were renamed 'brofists' and remain a rating option. The admin thought it was funny to have parrots replace brofists in the poster sidebar a yearish ago, as brofists replaced post count earlier.)

Did the Rick and Morty copypasta not make it to Serbia? Good thing it wasn't a navy seal copypasta instead...

... Chris says that _nick is a shill, DU facetiously says he's on Obs' payroll and Chris takes it seriously? lolwut.

Bro, he's persistently and reliably inconsistent- the only thing consistent is the 'in' in front of 'consistent'. Doesn't necessarily mean that he's wrong, but that certainly isn't evidence that he's right. I do wish people would drop the drink accusations though. ... To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand MCA. His posting style is extremely subtle and without a solid grasp of office politics the points will go over a typical reader's head. There's also Chris's nihilus development which is a deftly woven character- his characteristics draws heavily freom Vhilor in PST for example. His fans understand this stuff, they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depth of his commentary, to realise that they're not just well written characters and complaints about management, they say something deep about existence. As a consequnce people who don't believe Chris truly are idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate the accuracy in Chris's existential catchphrase "tinynickinyourmouth", which is itself a cryptic reference to the guy's username. I'm smirking right now imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as MCA's genius wit unfolds itself on the Codex. What fools, how I pity them. Any yes, by the way, I do have an MCA tattoo. And no, you cannot see it, it's for Codexer's eyes only- and even then they'd have to demonstrate that they're within 2 years of my join date (preferably older) beforehand and have at least 10k parrots received. Nothing personnel, vals.

You do know that trailer is fake, right? And near literally every actor with a half way appropriate look and physicality has been linked to playing Geralt.

The main criticism of Chris as a writer is being too verbose and reusing character archetypes, but since the words are quality and the archetypes interesting that's a very mild criticism. The main criticism as a designer... I don't really have any specific ones. I guess it would be that all of PST/ K2 and AP shared some similar flaws indicating that he may not have learned from mistakes, but then I'd also accept that they shared other factors such as the same management in oversight; and, in the end I loved them all despite their flaws. As for the TechRaptor article, I suspect it's fishing for comment from Obsidian rather than being unfair/ unethical- I would point out their other article on the issue specifically says they did ask for comment from Obs- and I'm sure they'd leap at a rebuttal if one was offered. Any reporting done is going to run into the general issue of how to handle someone making comments such as Chris's and the other party plain not replying, as it's also unjournalistic to allow someone to control what articles are written by deliberately not providing the balance in fair and balanced.

Iran Deal decision coming soon. Poor old Saad Hariri looks to have lost the Lebanese elections rather badly, his party lost 1/3 of its members and the Amal/ Hezbollah alliance has a majority now in prelim results. Who would have thought that kidnapping the guy and forcing him to resign would have had negative political consequences instead of positive ones. Not Mohammed bin Salman, political genius, apparently. To compound things Hariri isn't even a billionaire any more since MbS apparently seized the Saudi assets of his construction company.

Extra twist: it's that account he's upset about losing most, not the dev one. There's evidence that some of his criticisms are accurate in the macro sense at least. I don't think anyone believes that the management of Obsidian has not had issues for example- the K2 extension not being in writing being the most glaringly obvious example. There's essentially no way to confirm any of the anecdotal stuff though, by its nature, and you'd have to assume that the other parties involved would have different recollections. The first part, sure, that I can see. If you're happy you usually don't vent your spleen over stuff that happened up to decades ago, and tend to just let it go rather than have it fester. The rest... nah, and personally I find the speculation over it distasteful in much the same as speculation from the 'other side' on motivations for actions. All it requires for him to be commenting is an axe to grind and him finally finding a grindstone, it doesn't require anything else. Sure, on large influential websites. It's always amusing when someone accuses people who disagree with them of being shills on a niche website though, as 99.99% of the time it's just a defence mechanism against stuff that hurts their feeling or they cannot effectively counter- I'm not wrong, because... you're a shill! is a pathetic argument. If _Nick was a day old account, OK, but he's a decently term member at the Codex. Questioning someone is not shilling, and since Chris was not involved in Indiana and left at this point years ago it's perfectly reasonable to question whether he really has the Good Oil or not. Plus of course, it's unfortunate to fly off the handle when your argument relies on everyone else being the problem- one of the reasons why it's better for Chris himself not to be commenting so much, entertaining as it is. For all we know Feargus et al may have done what Chris says (within limits)- but we now have Chris publicly calling someone a shill and a colossal asterisk in public- and that's just more evidence for the Chris being a sensitive snowflake who couldn't handle criticism and took everything personally side of the argument. If he's going to take something as trivial as random codexer questioning his cred talking about a project he never worked on from a company he left 2 years ago personally then he'd obviously be more likely to take things like Durance/ GM being trimmed to size personally instead of it being nothing personal but a necessity for the game. Doubt it. 'I have a huge nick' is a pretty obvious play on words. And there's no 'stalker' gimmick despite L having a codex account and posting there.

Chris doesn't have to be making stuff up, he just has to be selective in his recollection and unfair or inconsistent in his conclusions to be 'wrong'; and he's clearly being Fox News 'fair and balanced' at best- an approach which seldom involves outright lies, just truth told from a certain point of view. That's always a risk when you talk a lot and freely, of course, but inconsistencies are usually a sign of there being an axe to grind instead of it being disinterested scientific analysis of the situation. If Feargus had caved to MS's demands we'd just as likely still have Chris complaining now, just about how Feargus didn't stand up to them. If he'd fired his sister he'd complain about Feargus doing work like filing or typing outside his job description which detracted from running the company, or having a developer manning the desk or whatever. That's the thing about retrospectives, if you're determined to prove that someone is incompetent or malign you can always come up with an interpretation that makes them so; that is after all essentially what I'm doing to Chris, and I freely acknowledge that. Then again, I'm also doing it from a position of disinterest, not as an interested party. If you want to do the criticism thing as objectively as possible then the best approach is always to use the person's own words, and for Chris that simply doesn't paint a consistent picture- off the very top of my head we have him (1) telling others never to slag off former employers, doing so himself (2) wanting set hierarchies and methods then complaining about his characters being cut down to meet them (3) complaining about private arguments with publishers while he made them public (4) complaining about people being overly critical, then about them being under critical (5) complaints about folding to publisher demands then about them resisting publisher demands (6) complaining about low morale in the writers room then wanting to parachute an external into a lead writer role as if that wouldn't be a message of no confidence... And that's off the top of my head. Some can be interpreted a lot more charitably than that- bad publisher demands should be resisted and reasonable ones adapted to, for example- but that works from both directions of the argument, not just his. If MS really wanted to turn Stormlands into a quasi MMO or whatever the big demand was- and since Chris doesn't dispute that, I'll assume it's more or less accurate except for the description hyperbole- that wasn't a minor change, it was absolutely fundamental and miles outside Obsidian's previous experience plus likely to leave a lot of prior development on the cutting room floor, it was not something that could trivially be accepted. Indeed, what would be Chris's 'middle ground' for that? 100,000 man raid instead of million man raid? A DAI/ Andromeda type system which is both kludgey and (presumably) not what MS or Obs wanted? And when it failed because they had no prior experience would Chris be there saying "I knew this would happen, why didn't you reject those changes?" instead of "I knew that would happen, why didn't you accept those changes?"

Did you ever hear the tragedy of Chris Avellone, the Obsidian owner? If you wanted to attribute deliberate malice to it, he could use things like glassdoor reviews as a basis for complaints to make them more believable. The problem with refuting these sort of accusations is that there's always an obvious counter to it- any refutation provided can be dismissed with "well, they would say that, wouldn't they". We've already seen what happened when EricF decided to try refuting things, he got a "no u, and what about this then!!!" response. For as much as there's no refutation there's also very little confirmation, at least from anyone other than Chris. By their nature accusations have to be regarded as unproven, doubly so when there's a single source. The fundamental problem is one of proving anything in he said/ she said situations. To go back to Eric since he did make a public comment, his counter accusation was basically that Chris made his job difficult by going wildly out of spec for Durance/ GM- and that at least has some obvious support since we know from Chris that he overdid K2 and PST, his contributions to FNV were... wordy etc. OTOH, saying that Eric wouldn't talk to JohnG may be true, but we have no way to check it. The default position should be that you don't involve other people in this sort of thing unless you've cleared it with them- if nothing else it's simply impolite to. The basic assumption has to be that others don't want to be involved. If Chris says something that they disagree with they have limited options and none of them good- they can disagree as Eric did, in which case they may also get the same style response he got, or let it slide. Unless the conversation went something more like, “we just got our feet back under us and to pay them back right now would put us in jeopardy again. We never promised to pay them back and we can’t afford to do it at the moment” Which is almost always the case in this sort of situation- all the qualifications tend to get dropped in the recollection. I'd suspect it was probably closer to "we never said when we would pay them back" since that only needs to miss out one word ("when") to change its meaning and implication completely. On a more fundamental level that is the way it pretty much has to be with unsecured creditors, they get paid back last because they're unsecured, banks and the like get paid back first because they are secured and you plain cannot function without computers, premises, bank accounts and the like and cannot get credit (or get it only at inflated rates) if you need it later. Apart from secured creditors staff are absolutely who should get paid back first though. It should probably also be noted that Chris was very public about voluntarily not being paid andor lending money (he seems to use the terms interchangeably but they are functionally the same thing anyway) himself, so he was not exactly a disinterested party. No criticism of him implied there, he'd have been well within his rights to not go without and it was very much a favour to do so.

Yeah, and again it doesn't quite fit narratively with what we've seen as provable actions. Who publicly complained here about LucasArts re K2? Chris Avellone, not Feargus. Who publicly complained about the metacritic issue re FNV/ Bethesda? Chris Avellone, not Feargus. Who tried to clean up both issues? Probably not Chris, one suspects. It's one thing to (allegedly) yell at someone in private, it's another to do so publicly. Whether LA or Beth had problems with Feargus or not we don't know because if it happened it was kept private by both sides, but an owner airing dirty laundry publicly is a whole level worse than doing so privately. And, once again, it illustrates why people might think Chris needed an NDA and is inconsistent with Chris complaining about Feargus not getting upset enough over the metacritic issue when it was brought up. And again again, he needs to pick one consistent position. If Feargus were yelling at, say, Beth in private about the metacritic situation but was too sanguine about it in public for Chris's tastes then that's far far better in terms of getting repeat business than the reverse position Chris seemingly wanted and adopted of yelling publicly, but being sanguine in private. Practically, LA were out of 3rd party developed games anyway and Beth were intent on insourcing* titles as well, so it's likely neither outburst had real effect- then again, under those circumstances it was also impossible for Feargus to get repeat projects whether he was managerial Timur or managerial Gandhi. *Hmm, someone should ask Chris on the Codex if the rumours of Beth putting in an offer for Obsidian is true.