Zoraptor

That's actually what I disliked about Sword Coast Stratagems as Baldur's Gate mods- with it every encounter was designed as if the mob was there only to fight that encounter. I don't really enjoy gaming the system as a player, it's doubly annoying when the enemy is doing it to you because it makes cheesey tactics mandatory. Which reminds me of the boss fights. They seem to start with a mandatory first turn to the boss, and the boss seems to have above maximum AP as well. If you're forced to start close due to being in a building or via a dialogue they can do an insane amount of damage and there's nothing (well, little) you can do about it. If you've got more space you have more options, but they're scarcely dairy free options. eg with the first boss fight

It's tradition on a first play through to have Ian armed with a nice shiny automatic SMG though. Especially if you're amused by nerd rage.

People can have more than one go during a round via Fane's (and I guess potentially others) source power at least. Never noticed it happen otherwise though the system definitely has quirks. Unlike in the first game initiative is pretty useless because no matter how much you have you're going to alternate turns with the enemy, and have trouble applying status effects if you go first anyway due to the new ray and particle shields. Indeed, so much of effective character progression now is gear/ force field based that I could easily imagine a dual lone wolf set up being easier than a full party. My level 13 party still has people wearing occasional level 6 (!) gear as there hasn't been enough replacement stuff for all of them, and it really tells. Thing is, they've introduced the initiative, AP and shields for balance and the game isn't balanced all that well anyway. Summoners are massively overpowered. Even crap summons like those totems do extra damage and most importantly take half a turn to destroy which isn't being spent taking out a 'proper' enemy.

He uses several french idioms and sings a Frere Jacque rather than Brother John. But it is somewhat downplayed, I imagine mostly because of Sir Patrick's lack of skill in French. I've literally never heard anyone sing anything other than the french version of Frére Jacques. It's easy to translate of course, but I'm 99% sure I learn the french rather than english words way back in primary school. I'd imagine that Patrick Stewart could wing french even if he isn't fluent, on the other hand if a scriptwriter cannot write french then there's nothing french in the script to wing. Plenty of actors 'speak' entirely foreign languages (albeit sometimes hilariously, if you know the language) by doing them phonetically.

I used one source, provided by you as being the basis for the data in the chart and supporting it. Your other cites provided no useful information- unsurprisingly. It's OECD data you're arguing against, you're supporting Random Website. Normally that might be an appeal to authority, but Random Website is a worthless confused mess of conflicting and inconsistent data with no set method and which hasn't got any clue of such utterly basic things as which countries are in the EU and not- and cannot even manage to consistently apply their incorrect list. While the OECD is the fricking Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, one of the premier sources for data with rigorous established methods and a source list. To summarise: Your website has no clue who is in the EU and who isn't. Couldn't spare the 10s Google search? Didn't want to? Garbage either way. has shonky methodology apart from that no sovereignty attacks, yet includes ISIS includes deaths and injuries wholesale from attacks involving suicide bombings, thus they don't even apply their definition of 'mass shootings' properly doesn't know how to use confidence intervals conflicts with the reputable OECD data such that Europe's death go up, but US deaths somehow go down; oh so very conveniently provides no checkable, verifiable sources and that's off the top of my head. It's politically motivated guff for gullible morons who are incapable of checking facts for themselves and think just because Random Website says it it must be true.

lol, I didn't cut anything off- I used your citation which was supposed to support your data. The 130 extra deaths, all of them, still don't get the death rate even above the US rate. Note also that on your cited website the US had two extra years and... minus 30 deaths with those 2 extra years compared to the OECD data. Either is wrong. But, in any case, direct from your cited website: "There were 55% more casualties per capita from mass public shootings in EU than US from 2009-15". Really though, the person who made the chart doesn't even have a clue of such basic facts as who is in the EU. As I said, they've included Norway and Switzerland in the EU figure, the obvious hint being that the difference between their aggregate for Europe (343) and for the EU (297, sic*) is less than the 67 killed at Uttoya alone. The figure for the EU is actually 228. And as above, the US somehow has managed -30 deaths despite having two years longer, compared to the OECD data which is from a reputable source and follows proper methodology. *yeah, they've still got it wrong even when including Switzerland and Norway in the EU as they've also included one attack in Russia somehow. They're utter, irredeemable garbage. Incompetence or malfeasance, who knows, but it manages to have negative worth either way.

Averaged EU rate = total number of deaths/ 100k population over the whole EU- that's method 2 in my example. Call it aggregate or EU wide rate if you prefer, makes no difference. It's still the only measurement that is relevant when you're talking about the EU as a whole. Let's go by the OECD numbers. As that's the only link that provides relevant data, and was indeed the source of the misleading chart with all the zero countries tripped from Last Time. Handily that means I can reuse the maths. US rate is 0.72; 227 deaths from ~320 million people European rate is ~0.33; total Euro population for provided countries is ~480 million, total deaths, 162. In order to get up to the claimed 55% more than the US you'd need (1) literally no more deaths in the US, and (2) an extra ~320 deaths in Europe, over the missing data period. That seems... unlikely. Indeed, it certainly didn't happen. EU rate? Without Uttoya the total deaths is 85, minus Switzerland and Iceland it's 79. And that removes about 14 million people only. I'll be generous and call the new rate 0.2 and, very generously, 1/3 of the US rate. So you'd need the small matter of 400 (!) extra deaths in the EU in 2 years to reach 1.55x the US rate. TLDR, your site is garbage and cannot into maths.

That site is rubbish, so bad it's almost impossible to critique it effectively as you have to go back to 5th form maths to do so and write a text book. In this case it has nothing to do with anomalous data, since Breivik is excluded by simple dint of not being in an EU country. In this case he wouldn't make enough of a difference anyway. Problems are 10 fold difference in confidence interval renders it irrelevant as the 'true' figure is anything from 3x the US to 1/4 of it. Sample size is too small. They've screwed up the maths anyway, so it's doubly irrelevant. They also claim to exclude sovereignty based issues yet include ISIS attacks which are all about establishing the sovereignty of the Caliphate. About the least of their problems, to be fair. Their claimed rate is wrong whether just using the chart or not The averaged EU rate comes out about half that of the US, even when including the ISIS stuff, and is far lower when not. No sources provided for data used Data which is shown is inconsistent with conclusions and descriptions in text (EU only or Europe and EU? who knows, certainly not the author) To illustrate the mistake they've made (so far as I can tell, it's so bad it's impossible to be sure), the rate of a theoretical Norway/ Germany union is not the ~1 you get from adding 1.88 and 0.02 together and dividing by 2, because Germany has 15 times Norway's population; thus the combined rate is a bit less than 0.2 and not 1. So far as I can tell they've used the first method with a mix of EU and non EU countries- again it's impossible to tell since they don't provide what data they've actually used- but in any case they clearly haven't used the second method, for either EU countries or Europe as a whole, as they should have. Ironically, if you do method 1 for the EU you still end up with a lower rate than the US, you have to both use method 1 and include non EU Norway to get it above.

Source, for those wondering. It's utter irredeemable garbage- you can get a good idea of why from that chart and without checking the website though. eg 55% more deaths in the EU per capita than the US from mass shootings is claimed. From that chart, 5 countries out of 28 EU ones have a higher rate than the US (NOR, SRB, FYROM, ALB, SWZ aren't in the EU) representing about 1/4 of the EU's population- and unsurprisingly countries with zero are left off the chart, again. Even just using the chart's data we can see the 55% claim is rubbish*, since the combined pops of ENGGERITY is far more than those 5 countries, and their rate is a quarter that of the US's which more than counters France having a high rate. Always depends on what you want to look at of course, but that site doesn't stand up to even cursory scrutiny and is pure PR/ fake news. It doesn't even consistently follow a skewed methodology, it's a Fox News 'opinion' piece. *while I won't check I'm fairly sure they've just added together all the rates- including Norway etc despite them not being EU- then divided by X countries to get the 55% claim. They should have added EU populations and incidences together to get the rate, not added the per capita rates directly- which gives a result significantly lower than the US's pre capita death rate, by a quick estimate about 50% less.

Throwing out outliers usually only makes sense when you don't clamp the findings to just post 9/11 either. Islamic terrorism goes back at least to the early 80's. Even then outliers get amortized over such a long period that it's typically best to leave them in when discerning averages. Next, you don't just pull older numbers. After 2001 the next deadliest years of terror attacks is 2014, 2015, and 2016. Then when talking about the US alone, you don't just cite low numbers of attacks when more than anything our surveillance programs have been setup to mitigate attacks in the first place. Trouble is, if you decide to include 9/11 to be inclusive then where do you draw the line? It's definitely a massive outlier since not even a tenth of the number of deaths there have occurred due to islamic terrorism over the whole history of the US (might get close if you included Afghanistan and Iraq, but they probably shouldn't since the targets are military and terrorism technically still requires civilian targets). OK, so include 2001, and we'll take it back to 1776 as well because we want to be inclusive and include all context- and you end up with a similar number as if you exclude 9/11 and have stats done for a decade prior to 2014. Going back to 1776 is the only fully inclusive and fair methodology, after all, it just achieves the same result by adding in 200 odd 0 death years that would otherwise be arbitrarily excluded. Islamic terrorism is a lot older than the 1980s, it just didn't have the 'terrorism' moniker because that hadn't been invented yet. Same way as people wouldn't label the Crusades as genocide/ ethnic cleansing/ christian terrorism or 30 Years War as sustained Protestant/ Catholic 'ethnic' cleansing/ terrorism when both clearly were in the modern context. That's always been the case with statistics, hence the famous "lies, damn lies, and statistics" quote and various others. Indeed, you can get paid a great deal of money to produce statistics that help whichever argument your paymaster wants to make. But if you're honest about things then you have an exclude outliers that give wrong impressions; the expectation is not that 300 odd americans die per year in internal islamic terrorism and it isn't that Norway can expect a per capita >9/11 level event due to Nazis every decade just because of Breivik being recent.

The 'Beefy' vs 'Seconds' options in the dlc preferences question does imply that difference since the two options are both for large expansions which take a lot of time but the 'Seconds' one is specifically for standalone type expansions. In context that presumably means an 'add on' MOTB type rather than an 'add in' type. Typically a roguelike would imply a randomised world (not necessarily fully randomised) and permanent death.

Yes, but most honest people would include 9/11. Generally you exclude highly unusual events as being misleading, otherwise you end up with Norway being a Nazi deathtrap due to Breivik or 100% of international terrorism related deaths in New Zealand being due to the French equivalent of the CIA attacking Greenpeace. Doesn't have much to do with honesty anyway, last time people brought up statistics about terrorism we had a chart that excluded every developed country that had zero terrorist related deaths to try and prove how bad the problem was- unsurprisingly there were more with zero deaths than there were with deaths; and Norway was worst per capita due solely to Breivik.

The Orville is pretty good, and I was fully prepared to hate it. Pretty derivative, though derivative of things that worked, and some of the humour (and the space combat last ep) feels like there was a Fox Exec looking over their shoulders to make sure a quota was maintained but otherwise even their stunt casting has been on point. It feels more like TNG than anything including Trek has since. Haven't seen Star Trek Discovery yet but I have seen a million and one jokes about its acronym.

Fascist state, maybe. After all, the logo of the Guarda Civil has literal fasces, and (iirc) somewhat bizarrely it was changed to that after Generalissimo Fransisco Franco had died. Hard to think of a dumber response from Madrid, they managed to turn a referendum that would have had the double negative of a low turn out and (at best) tepid support for secession- and which could thus be easily ignored- into a matter of pride where a low turn out can be blamed on repression and voting against Madrid is a matter of pride and resistance. And it's an issue that will be repeatedly revisited now and has exposed the still festering wounds of the Civil War. Utterly moronic. It's not like a referendum would have put the issue fully to bed, but continually seeking to reiterate the issue after a vote has not been great electorally, per the SNP and the Bloc.

Yep. It's actually pretty realistic, sadly. Nothing like doing a three year degree with associated debt to find that there's no demand for it in the workforce at the end. Here at least the stereotypical job for a humanities degree is a McDonalds burger flipper. It has knock on effects as well, we have far too many humanities secondary school teachers and far too few science teachers here as the teacher wage is great for attracting humanities students but awful for attracting science graduates which there are a shortage of- and because of the demand from humanities graduates the MBAs in the Education Department won't offer higher wages for science teachers as they'd have to pay the humanities teachers more as well and attract even more of them (though it's now so bad on the science side that they are bringing back some non wage inducements, when I was at uni they offered $10k and no fees for science teachers). Their waiter very likely has a better degree than the one being celebrated- but he's still working as a waiter. It's more irony funny than haha funny.

Because it's a mess. In no particular order: 1) The referendum was a threat which provided leverage on Turkey and Iraq, the reality actually removes that leverage rather than enhances it 2) Upsets Turkey and Iraq 3) The ruling KDP is deeply unpopular with everyone now, including other Kurdish groups and their prior friend Erdogan 3a) They barely had a quorum for the referendum decision due to boycotts in their parliament 3b) There haven't been elections in the KRG for ages, hence the boycott 3c) Masoud Barzani is well past his mandate and shows no signs of either leaving or holding an election. He's been around ages and has literally no integrity at all- he was even Saddam's Uncle Tom in the north when Saddam was gassing Kurds (after all, he was gassing the PUK Kurds who Barzani was fighting a civil war with at the time). 3d) They were (technically still are) actively blockading (!) the Syrian Kurds, the US's only effective ally in Syria 4) The Peshmerga have actually done very little to fight ISIS, and that has annoyed some in the US military a great deal. 4a) They disarmed the Yazidis then ran away back to Irbil so the Yazidis were genocided- and were rescued by the PKK and Syrian Kurds, not the Peshmerga- now they want Sinjar and other Yazidi areas to be part of their country which will be actively resisted 4b) In terms of fighting ISIS they're behind every other major player, by miles and despite their press attention. They've stuck to the borders they want and that's been it. 5) There's no realistic path to being a viable state without agreement of their neighbours since they're landlocked and surrounded. 5a) If Turkey turns off their oil then they're bankrupt in near literally a week. 6) If they try and keep Kirkuk, which they need for that oil, there will be war with Iraq over it, no doubt at all. 7) Crimea, and its referendum. The objection to that was that the vote was illegal/ unconstitutional (since no one actually believes the vote didn't represent the population's wish) so they cannot easily support another referendum of the same style. The US loves the status quo because it's stable- ish- and provides lots of lovely leverage against basically everyone in the region. A threat that remains a threat can be used as said leverage indefinitely, but a threat once delivered upon leads to... consequences. Support for the Kurds means that Iraq is in Iran's sphere irreversibly, and short of a continuous military intervention- problematic if both Iraq and Turkey refuse access to airspace, which they will- there will be war over Kirkuk. There's no practical advantage between an autonomous KRG and an independent one for the US, only disadvantages.

Square Enix as well.

well, he is still elected and Russia is more like oligarchy? Not sure, not expert on Russia There isn't much doubt at all that Putin would have won all his elections without potential shenanigans (most of which were favour currying from people like Kadyrov). The disputation is about how fair the elections were, plus some fairly blatant propaganda. Answer being that the elections were not particularly fair, but Putin would have won anyway and even if he didn't win outright he would have been running off against either ossified commie Zyuganov or fascist clown Zhirinovsky. The western liberal candidates lost their chance when western liberal approved Yeltsin asterisked their country 20 years ago.

Eh, that's consistent with what GD has said. If it were say WoD's list, then it would be inconsistent since he has a rather more "it's OK when my side does it" approach to certain things. I do feel vaguely compelled to point out that it's 'Eminent Domain' rather than 'imminent domain' though. But if I cannot bask in the achievements of the mighty All Blacks® then I might have to look at my own personal achievements instead...

Yeah, the current Atari is Infogrammes with a 'new' label stuck on them. They sold off the only profitable part of the business to Namco Bandai nearly a decade ago and tried to sell all their IP a couple of years ago; they're basically a joke financially*. No surprise they're looking at crowd funding to capitalise (hoho) on people's nostalgia, and no surprise if it's actually someone else manufacturing the boxes and using their name rather than them themselves. Without MS/ Sony's money you'd be looking at an AMD APU in a box, so basically laptop type performance and you don't get much laptop performance for 300USD. At least in 2018 it's likely to be Zen/ Vega combo instead of an ancient Bulldozer based one. As long as Vega doesn't set the wood casing on fire, at least. *Near Interplay levels- their shares are like 40euroc or something, and I don't think they're even indexed on a major sharemarket any more.

The armour penetration skills can be very useful against low hp enemies who are either shield wielders or have Fortify applied since you can then bypass their recharged shields to finish them off. That's a rather limited utility though, and it is 'artificial', for want of a better word.

Worse than silly, it's a stupid 'balance' fixing something that wasn't broken in the first game. Case in point, archers' special arrows are now almost completely useless. Either the enemies have bloated base hit points anyway so the special effects do little damage andor- the fundamental problem when combining the new armour system and archers- their special effects are blocked by magical armour while the arrows do physical damage. Meaning that there's almost always no point using them due to the system encouraging stacking damage types on single enemies and, per below, your characters typically having far less armour than the enemy. Single (?) exception is knockdown arrows as they are a physical effect, and to a single target rather than an area. At least magic users typically have spells that stack magical damage and magical effects rather than mixing the two. The overall effect of the system is that it's a handicap against the player since you'll be vulnerable to such status effects an order of magnitude (or maybe it just seems like it) more often that the enemy will, and they can thus use them willy nilly while you either cannot or there's just no point to using them.

Still stomping around the first island. Up to lvl 6 now. Enjoyable, but I think tactician mode may have been a mistake for a first play since it's kind of like playing a King's Bounty game on that difficulty- you have to find the specific fights you can win and fight all of them until next level up, then go back and fight the ones you avoided earlier. I've had it freeze for up to thirty seconds or so when reading crafting manuals- mouse was still responsive but no input worked. The 30s case was a manual with 26 recipes (!), so quite an extreme case. Otherwise there hasn't been any noticeable slowdown at all and no proper bugs, only journal ones.

Yeah, vast majority seemed to actually be anti both, and if they voted for one it was mostly a vote against the other. If it had been an Obsidian board election it probably would have been a close race between the Vermont Commie and Mr What's a lepo? for the winner. I can only think of two pro Trump US people as well- WoD (and even he wavered) and Valsuelm (who has since disowned him).